Why I'm A Libertarian

When I’m asked about my political views, I tend to come back to the same several points about my philosophy and principles. I’ve documented some of it on my about page, but I’d like to expound on it a bit here.

You won’t find anything particularly mind-blowing or original - that’s not what I’m going for. Just a place to jot down my typical talking points.

Start With Negative Rights

Our fundamental negative rights are life, liberty, and property. Where those things aren’t upheld, you can’t have a society that prospers. Free market capitalism, or free exchange, is how we achieve human flourishing the fastest, through innovation, cooperation, and mutual benefit. Market forces, left unfettered by tyrannical intervention, will naturally dictate the flow of supply and demand, and competition drives products and services to increasingly become better for everyone.

Libertarians often are accused of inventing an untenable, hypothetical utopia towards which we can never truly aspire. I challenge that assumption - if your alternative solution is a government-run nanny state, or if you even think “small” government is necessary, consider the following comparison.

Everyone Is Greedy, Not Just Large Corporations

All humans are fundamentally self-interested, and we respond to incentives. We all naturally prioritize ourselves, our families, and our lives above others’ and will consistently make decisions that incentivize us to allow those things to flourish. The accusation of greed is an accurate one across all of humanity. Capitalism and free markets are the only mechanism I’m aware of that leverages this self-interest and incentives to help improve the lives of others.

Your objection might be something related to some large, greedy corporation taking advantage of people or trying to become a monopoly. Everyone has an inherent desire and incentive to push someone down to prop ourselves up. And for every example you could provide, I’d like to offer Exhibit A, the most greedy, bloated, behemoth and single largest monopoly in the world: the United States government.

If everyone’s greedy, then that doesn’t make a large corporation particularly special in that respect. It’s just bigger and prone to corruption as a result. If that’s the case, I hope you are aware of how wildly corrupt nearly every single form of government is, from the federal side, to state, city, local, and even the uber-local like a given neighborhood’s Home Owners Association.

Competition Is the Key Difference

Let’s compare them directly; consider a business and a government. One has competition, and an actual risk of going out of business, and one does not. The U.S. government, for example, is “too big to fail” by design. We’re in trillions and trillions in debt, and they just keep printing money as if nothing is wrong. If you have a business providing a service, and you don’t like it, you can stop using it and use a competitor instead. If you don’t like the roads, the laws, or other publicly-owned assets, you don’t have an alternative. You have no choice.

Everyone wants the government contract, because it’s easy money. Government jobs can be incredibly difficult or impossible to be fired from. Government systems and services are notoriously behind compared to the private sector, considerably worse in quality, and unimaginably unintuitive, to the point of parody.

Why are government solutions so wildly dysfunctional and ineffective? Well, because they have no incentive to do a good job. A business, on the other hand, has quite a large incentive to do at least decently for two main reasons: the risk of losing out to the competition, or the risk of going out of business. This lights the fire underneath them to continue to provide better services, at a lower price, and at a faster rate than the other options you might have.

The First Two Amendments

Free speech and the right to bear arms are important, because they are the two main resources we have to combat a government that eventually becomes too tyrannical. Because of how naturally corrupt-prone governing bodies are, it’s a miracle we even managed to get to free speech to begin with. Unfortunately, you could argue we’re starting to lose some of our free speech, and if we care about our freedoms and way of life, we need to push hard to hold onto the first and second amendments.

Incrementalism

Because the private sector demonstrably provides a better service for everyone, if I could snap my fingers, I’d abolish public schools, privatize roads, and overhaul our police and military. In practice, that isn’t practical, so I am an advocate for incrementalism - gradually moving away from where we are now to something closer to a future of freer markets, liberty, and choice.

Many may balk at the thought of abolishing public schools, for example. It initially seems like, if we were to do that, we’d remove the “free choice” and force families to pay for something they couldn’t afford. However, that’s silly when you consider that everyone pays for public schools out of property taxes. If you don’t directly, and you’re a tenant, the landlord who pays those is charging you extra for rent. So, no - everyone pays for public schools, even single adults, couples who have no children, or parents whose kids don’t go to public school. And despite how gratuitous the volume of money we pay these institutions, they consistently fail and underperform national and global averages.¹

An example of feasible incrementalism away from public schools is to embrace school choice. Don’t lock someone into a school because of the zip code they happen to fall into. Embrace more charter schools, homeschooling, and private schooling, for those who can afford it. Promote merit-based scholarships to ease the burden. Over time, parents will be more engaged, students more excited to attend school, schools paying teachers more, and more scholarships available for everyone. Teachers, school buildings, and resources won’t magically go away with this change, they’d be reallocated and reenergized by market forces and competition to which they were never before subject.

Who Spends Your Dollar Best?

Imagine an incentive structure for roads. Instead of roads getting filled with potholes, construction taking an eternity, and no new roads expanding for decades, an owned road would receive more care and improvement than we could have ever conceived.

The lesson can be summed up like this: who spends your dollar the best? You do, not someone else. When we fall into the trap of taxes (which yes, are ultimately extortion), we can get lazy. A sense of “it’s out of my hands” and lack of clear transparency mean we don’t always know where our money really goes. Which government programs, or parks, or public transportation, or schools are we really funding? Why do we need to be taxed on something we already bought and paid for?

Charity Beats the Welfare State

Instead of the welfare state, churches and charities should be empowered to pick up the slack. Those are run by men and women with conviction, who would remove the accountability problem from the current system where everyone takes advantage of a poorly run system. It’s the tragedy of the commons - a widely-available resource depletes when everyone has access to it. If we had more careful auditing, gatekeeping, and checks in place, more families would get better financial support, access to food and water, and shelter, compared to what we have now.

One example - Network Tacoma, an organization that specializes in housing homeless families and connecting them with jobs, boasts a 70%-80% success rate, which far exceeds any related government program in the area. Many of these families end up getting into permanent careers and renting their own apartments or buying homes of their own. Imagine if just a portion of the funds we currently waste on ineffective government programs went to them instead, how much more good they could do with their proven record of success.

The Invisible Hand Is Better Than Any Formal Regulator

When the Affordable Care Act took effect, it was an utter disaster and has destroyed our health care system. No one kept their plans. Everything got more expensive. And that’s because government-run healthcare is crap, simply put. And whenever public services are forced into an otherwise free market, artificial market signals pervert an otherwise natural supply-and-demand flow. It makes us lazier, stagnates innovation, and affords everyone involved worse outcomes overall.

Another aspect of relying on government to handle things to make us lazier is thinking about buying groceries. When you see the “organic” label on a product, do you believe it? Or how about “all-natural” (whatever that means). There’s no doubt companies are incentivized to entice, even manipulate you into buying their products or services. And a healthy skepticism is good to not take everything an org says at their word, so why do we extend that privilege to regulatory bodies? Seeing a list of nutrition facts on the back - do we trust it? What’s the story behind this? What options for even better transparency are we giving up to settle for this?

This is probably one of my out-there comparisons, but imagine buying eggs, wanting to know exactly what conditions they were in before they were packaged and sent to the grocery store. Then getting on-demand access to an entire documentary following the birth and raising of the chicken that eventually laid it, getting the exact date, time, and location of when and where that egg was laid.

The hypothetical scenario above seems over the top, but this level of detail isn’t unfounded in other ways - consider online reviews. Before Amazon or ecommerce, you went to your local store, settled for the limited inventory choices you had, and relied on a salesperson to recommend the best option for you. In reality, especially if they were operating on commission, the incentive was perverse - he or she is thinking about how he can make as much money off of you as possible, not necessarily whether or not the product is the right product for you or not as the consumer. Peer reviews, on the other hand - are far more reliable, and made shoppers much savvier, to the point where in-person stores have had to genuinely compete with online marketplaces.

Consider also trading cards. There’s a tremendously sophisticated method of card grading that takes place when you enter the world of high-cost, especially rare trading cards. Various companies provide a service that will give cards a rating, based on their quality and condition. These are all independent private organizations, and this method is perfect for auditing a product in the marketplace, and gives peace of mind to the buyer. Imagine if such a system were in place for the products in our grocery stores, or health grade inspectors for restaurants. Instead of avoiding or dreading it, restaurants would be eager to be graded by a hypothetical org of high repute. These restaurant grading services would be incentivized to grade accurately to avoid a hit on their reputation. If they remain in good standing, they will be paid by more food service owners who want more business. And the customers get more transparency and peace of mind, and ultimately better service. Everyone wins.

I’m an optimistic futurist, and believe with more technology, the more transparency we’ll get, and thus less room for shady business practices. Government regulation gets in the way of this technological progress, and thus gets in the way of this better future for everyone. Luckily, because government is so incompetent by design, and innovators and entrepreneurs are incentivized to out-perform the competition, I think the inventions of the free market will beat the slow efforts of a centralized government, as long as it doesn’t get too powerful.

The Axis That Actually Matters

That’s what I’m worried about, though - so much of political discourse is concerned with a discussion around seemingly arbitrary “right” vs. “left” policies. Democrats seem to want progressivism for its own sake, and Republicans are just Democrats from 10 years ago. Neither operates on true principles in any serious sense. And all the while, we are drifting increasingly in a negative direction on the axis that really matters - not left and right, but up and down. Closer to authoritarianism, and away from libertarianism.

Every single time we’ve carried the “government should handle more” idea further, the results have been disastrous. Whether it’s Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, or China - it has led to devastating outcomes that cost millions of lives and unspeakable hardship.²

Where I Sit

So in conclusion, based on my principles of liberty, obvious economic realities, and the stories of history, I am a libertarian. I don’t know how much exactly I lean into full-blown anarcho-capitalism yet, but it sounds more appealing to me every day. I do not at all claim to be an expert, and I fully expect to change my mind from where I am now, but currently this is where I sit.

Thanks for reading!

Footnotes

1. Reason Foundation, K-12 Education Spending Spotlight 2025. Inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending in US public schools rose from $14,969 in 2002 to $20,322 in 2023, nearly $1 trillion nationally, while NAEP scores declined, with 2024 outcomes worse than the 2003 baseline. Figures drawn from U.S. Census Bureau and National Center for Education Statistics data. ↩

2. Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Harvard University Press, 1999). The editors estimate communist regimes were responsible for roughly 85 to 100 million deaths across the twentieth century, spanning the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and North Korea. ↩