CeleryKills

A few days ago, I posted a meme on Facebook with the simple caption:

“One month out… Vote!”

The image was deliberately blunt. On one side sat a grinning donkey labeled “Democratic Platform,” beneath a list of tangible policy areas: healthcare, labor rights, Social Security, public education, environmental protection, voting rights, consumer protection, and infrastructure. On the other side stood an elephant labeled “Republican Platform,” beneath a familiar torrent of culture-war labels: woke, Marxist, communist, socialist, radical left, deep state, groomers, Antifa.

Whether one agreed with the meme or not, people clearly had opinions. Across three different groups it accumulated more than 350 reactions, generated extensive discussion, and attracted exactly the kind of responses that election season always seems to produce. Some agreed wholeheartedly. Some objected to the framing. Some wanted to debate individual policy positions. Others pursued the modern tradition of arguing with a meme by proving the meme’s point.

Then Anthony arrived with a comment that, in many ways, was more interesting than the meme itself:

“Both blue and red have ran this country directly into the ground and separate people based on beliefs that really arent something that should be public issues. Between the race baiting democrats and the loophole using rich get richer republicans no one wins…

Im telling you Libertarian is the only way forward out of this mess.”

What caught my attention was not that Anthony was frustrated with Democrats and Republicans. Frankly, that sentiment has become almost universal. Finding Americans dissatisfied with the two major parties today is about as difficult as finding rain in Seattle.

What interested me was the solution.

Libertarianism has always occupied a peculiar place in American politics. It is often presented as the escape hatch, the emergency exit, the political philosophy for people who are exhausted by partisan warfare and increasingly distrustful of institutions. And on the surface, the sales pitch is remarkably effective.

• Who doesn’t like freedom?
• Who doesn’t like privacy?
• Who doesn’t like free speech?
• Who doesn’t like personal responsibility?
• Who doesn’t like government surveillance less than they currently have it?
• Who doesn’t like the idea of ending unnecessary wars, reducing bureaucracy, protecting civil liberties, reforming the criminal justice system, or limiting state power?

The opening chapters of libertarianism read like an advertisement written by someone who carefully studied every frustration Americans have accumulated over the last half-century.

That is part of why the ideology continues to attract thoughtful people.

There are legitimate libertarian critiques. Civil asset forfeiture is an abuse. Excessive surveillance is an abuse. Qualified immunity deserves scrutiny. Occupational licensing frequently becomes protectionism. Foreign intervention has often produced disappointing and destructive outcomes. On these issues, libertarians have frequently raised questions that deserve serious consideration.

The trouble begins when the discussion moves from identifying problems to constructing a governing society.

That is where libertarianism stops being a criticism and starts becoming a blueprint.

And blueprints can be examined.

The question is not whether Democrats deserve criticism.

They do.

The question is not whether Republicans deserve criticism.

They certainly do.

The question is whether libertarianism represents a genuine alternative or simply a different route toward many of the same concentrations of power it claims to oppose.

Because when I looked at Anthony’s comment, I wasn’t really seeing a defense of libertarianism.

I was seeing something far more common.

I was seeing political exhaustion.

And political exhaustion has a long history of making radical simplifications sound like solutions.

That is where the story of libertarianism becomes much more interesting than the slogan. The philosophy promises a world liberated from concentrated power. History raises a more uncomfortable possibility: that reducing one form of power often clears the way for another.

The problem begins when libertarianism transitions from critique to governance.

That is where the theory repeatedly collides with history.

The Promise

Modern American libertarianism presents itself as the alternative to both major parties. It argues that government is the primary source of coercion, inefficiency, corruption, and inequality. Remove government restrictions and individuals will freely cooperate, markets will efficiently allocate resources, and society will become more prosperous and more free.

At first glance, that sounds reasonable.

But notice the assumption hiding underneath the framework.

It assumes that power primarily exists in government.

History suggests otherwise.

Power exists wherever large concentrations of wealth, resources, information, or institutional influence exist. Governments can wield power. Corporations can wield power. Monopolies can wield power. Media conglomerates can wield power. Financial systems can wield power. The question is not whether power exists. It is who exercises it and what constraints exist upon it.

Libertarianism often treats government regulation as the problem while overlooking the fact that many regulations arose precisely because private actors abused power in the first place (Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 1955).

The Historical Roots

Despite frequent claims of being an independent alternative, American libertarianism shares much of its intellectual lineage with modern conservatism.

The movement emerged from postwar free-market activism, opposition to the New Deal, hostility toward labor movements, and concerns about government regulation of business (Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 2009).

Many of the major institutions promoting libertarian ideas have historically worked alongside conservative organizations, donors, think tanks, and political coalitions (MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 2017).

This helps explain an odd recurring pattern.

When libertarians gain political influence, they rarely function as a distinct governing force. They typically support Republican candidates, Republican judicial appointments, Republican tax policies, Republican deregulatory agendas, and Republican economic priorities.

If libertarianism is supposedly the great alternative to conservatism, why does it almost always end up voting with conservatism when actual legislation appears?

That question deserves more attention than it typically receives.

“The Market Will Fix It”

Perhaps the most important assumption in the Libertarian Party platform is that markets can successfully regulate themselves.

Environmental protection? Property rights and lawsuits.

Healthcare? Markets.

Education? Markets.

Retirement? Markets.

Banking? Markets.

Consumer protection? Markets.

Labor relations? Markets.

Energy policy? Markets.

Housing? Markets.

The market becomes a universal solvent.

But what does history actually show?

The late nineteenth century United States operated under conditions far closer to libertarian ideals than the modern United States. The result was not a golden age of freedom. The period produced monopolies, trusts, company towns, child labor, dangerous workplaces, political corruption, and extraordinary concentrations of wealth and economic power (Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1980; Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 1955).

Why were antitrust laws created?

Why was the FDA created?

Why were labor protections created?

Why were environmental regulations created?

Why was workplace safety regulation created?

None of these emerged because markets consistently solved the problems themselves.

They emerged because markets often failed to do so.

Some of the most significant failures in modern history emerged precisely because market incentives rewarded behavior that imposed costs on everyone else. The financial crisis of 2008 is an obvious example. Mortgage originators, ratings agencies, investment banks, and financial institutions all had strong incentives to maximize short-term profits while pushing systemic risks onto the broader economy. Individually, many firms behaved rationally according to market incentives. Collectively, the result was a global financial collapse, trillions of dollars in economic losses, widespread unemployment, and massive public intervention to prevent a complete breakdown of the financial system. The market did not correct the problem before the damage occurred. In many respects, it amplified it.

Environmental degradation provides an even longer-running example. A factory that dumps waste into a river, a company that releases pollutants into the atmosphere, or an industry that depletes shared resources often profits by shifting costs onto people who never consented to bear them. Economists refer to these as externalities. The market price captures the company’s benefits while obscuring much of the social cost. Left unchecked, this dynamic helped produce heavily polluted rivers, urban smog, toxic waste sites, fisheries collapses, and numerous public health crises throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many of the environmental protections libertarians now criticize were created because market actors had repeatedly demonstrated that maximizing profit does not automatically maximize public welfare (Oreskes & Conway, The Big Myth, 2023; Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 1955).

More fundamentally, some problems are not merely unsolved by markets. They are created by successful market competition itself. Monopoly formation is perhaps the clearest example. Firms are rewarded for expanding market share, eliminating competitors, acquiring rivals, creating barriers to entry, and consolidating control. From Standard Oil to modern technology platforms, market success often creates incentives to reduce the very competition markets are supposed to depend upon. Antitrust laws did not emerge because competition was working perfectly. They emerged because market participants repeatedly discovered that controlling a market is usually more profitable than competing within one (Wu, The Curse of Bigness, 2018; Teachout, Break ‘Em Up, 2020).

The Taxation Problem

The Libertarian Party calls for the eventual repeal of taxation and the abolition of the IRS.

This sounds appealing until one follows the logic.

Who builds interstate highways?

Who funds air traffic control systems?

Who funds large-scale scientific research?

Who funds public health infrastructure?

Who funds ports, flood control systems, weather forecasting networks, food inspection systems, disaster response, courts, and national defense?

The answer is usually some variation of voluntary funding.

Historically, however, large modern industrial societies have not relied primarily on voluntary funding to provide essential public goods (Acemoglu & Robinson, Why Nations Fail, 2012).

The problem is that voluntary funding has historically been excellent at supporting causes people find emotionally compelling and remarkably poor at supporting systems that are invisible until they fail. Donations flow easily toward a local hospital wing, a disaster relief fund, or a beloved museum. They do not flow nearly as reliably toward maintaining stormwater infrastructure, inspecting food processing plants, funding epidemiological surveillance, dredging shipping channels, operating air traffic control systems, updating electrical transmission networks, or monitoring water quality across an entire watershed. The things that make modern societies function are often the very things most people never think about until they stop functioning.

History offers countless examples. Before the expansion of publicly funded sanitation systems, cities struggled with chronic outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other waterborne diseases because the benefits of sanitation were broadly shared while the costs were concentrated (McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 1976). Likewise, private charities and local relief organizations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided valuable assistance but were incapable of addressing mass unemployment, widespread poverty, large-scale infrastructure needs, or systemic economic crises during periods such as the Great Depression (Kennedy, Freedom From Fear, 1999). Voluntary giving is episodic and selective. Public goods require continuous funding regardless of whether they are currently capturing public attention.

More fundamentally, many essential services suffer from the classic free-rider problem. Everyone benefits when bridges are maintained, diseases are monitored, flood-control systems function, and national defense exists, but each individual has an incentive to let someone else pay for them. The result is that voluntary systems tend to underfund precisely those large-scale institutions upon which modern economies depend (Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, 1965). A society can certainly privatize many services, but it does not follow that voluntary contributions alone can sustain the broad network of public goods that industrial civilization requires.

One of the recurring themes of libertarian economics is assuming that because a service can theoretically be privatized, it therefore should be privatized.

That doesn’t follow.

Healthcare

The platform advocates a completely free-market healthcare system.

This raises an uncomfortable question.

What consumer market behaves less like a normal consumer market than healthcare?

When someone is experiencing a heart attack, they are not comparison shopping.

When someone is unconscious, they do not negotiate prices.

When a medication is essential for survival, demand ceases to function normally.

The assumptions that make markets efficient often break down under precisely the circumstances healthcare exists to address.

That is one reason every developed nation ultimately operates some form of public involvement in healthcare systems.

The details vary enormously.

The pattern does not.

Healthcare provides one of the clearest examples of where market mechanisms struggle because the assumptions required for efficient markets often do not exist. Patients rarely have complete information, cannot easily compare products, and frequently make decisions during emergencies when normal consumer behavior becomes impossible. Before the creation of Medicare, Medicaid, EMTALA emergency treatment requirements, and various public health programs, millions of Americans either lacked access to care or delayed treatment until illnesses became far more serious and expensive. The market did not naturally solve the problem of covering those least able to pay because serving them was often unprofitable.

Markets have also created some of the very problems modern healthcare systems attempt to manage. Pharmaceutical pricing provides a useful example. Companies are rewarded for maximizing return on investment, not necessarily for maximizing public access. This can produce situations where life-saving medicines remain available but financially inaccessible to many of the people who need them. The insulin market became a particularly visible illustration of this dynamic, with prices rising dramatically over decades despite the drug being discovered more than a century ago (Greene, The Insulin Question, 2021). Similarly, fee-for-service payment structures can incentivize higher volumes of procedures and treatments regardless of whether they produce better outcomes, creating a system where profitability and public health objectives do not always align (Relman, A Second Opinion, 2007).

More broadly, healthcare markets are prone to consolidation. Hospitals merge, insurers acquire competitors, pharmaceutical companies utilize patent protections, and provider networks expand their market power. The result is often less competition rather than more. Patients may find themselves choosing among only a handful of insurers, hospital systems, or specialists despite operating within a supposedly competitive market. In practice, many healthcare markets have a tendency to evolve toward regional dominance rather than robust competition, allowing prices to rise without corresponding improvements in quality or access (Gaynor, Ho, & Town, The Industrial Organization of Health-Care Markets, 2015). This is one reason virtually every developed nation, regardless of political orientation, relies on some combination of market activity, public regulation, public financing, or direct public provision. The details differ significantly. The recognition that healthcare does not behave like a normal consumer market does not.

Environmental Protection

One of the most curious sections of the platform is environmental policy.

The basic idea is that property rights and litigation can protect ecosystems.

That sounds plausible until you think about pollution.

How do you establish property rights over the atmosphere?

How does a private landowner sue climate change?

Who owns migrating fish populations?

Who owns ocean ecosystems?

Who owns groundwater aquifers crossing state lines?

Environmental problems frequently involve diffuse harms distributed across millions of people and decades of time. Those are exactly the kinds of problems that markets and individual litigation struggle to address.

Climate change provides perhaps the clearest modern example of a problem that markets have failed to solve despite decades of warning. Every individual company benefits from using inexpensive fossil fuels while distributing a portion of the resulting environmental costs across billions of people, future generations, and entire ecosystems. From the perspective of any individual market participant, emitting greenhouse gases can be rational. From the perspective of society, the cumulative result is rising temperatures, more frequent extreme weather events, shifting precipitation patterns, sea-level rise, ecosystem disruption, agricultural challenges, and increasing economic damages. No private property system, voluntary contract structure, or collection of individual lawsuits has demonstrated an ability to address this problem at the scale required because the affected parties are dispersed across continents and across time. The people bearing many of the costs are often not the same people receiving the benefits.

More importantly, climate change is not merely a problem markets have failed to solve. It is a problem created by successful market activity. The Industrial Revolution, modern transportation networks, global manufacturing systems, intensive agriculture, and fossil-fuel-powered economic growth generated enormous prosperity while simultaneously producing an environmental externality of unprecedented scale. The market rewarded efficiency, production, consumption, and growth, but largely ignored the atmospheric consequences because those costs were not reflected in market prices. The atmosphere effectively became a free waste repository. In this sense, climate change represents one of the largest disconnects between private incentives and public welfare ever observed. The market did exactly what it was designed to do: maximize economic activity. The resulting environmental consequences emerged not because market actors behaved irrationally, but because they behaved rationally within a system that failed to incorporate the full costs of their actions (Stern, The Economics of Climate Change, 2007; IPCC, AR6 Synthesis Report, 2023).

The same pattern appears repeatedly at smaller scales. Rivers that caught fire from industrial pollution, widespread acid rain, ozone depletion, deforestation, collapsing fisheries, and toxic waste contamination did not emerge because environmental protections were too strong. They emerged because market participants could profit from imposing costs on resources that nobody effectively owned and few institutions adequately protected. Many of the environmental regulations that exist today were enacted only after decades of evidence demonstrated that waiting for voluntary market corrections often meant waiting until after the damage was already done (Oreskes & Conway, The Big Myth, 2023; McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 2000).

The Oligarchy Problem

This is where libertarianism repeatedly runs aground.

The ideology views government power as dangerous but often treats private power as largely benign.

History offers little support for that distinction.

Standard Oil was not a government agency.

The East India Company was not a government agency.

Many company towns were not government agencies.

Modern monopolistic behavior is not primarily governmental behavior.

When regulations disappear, barriers to concentration often disappear as well.

The likely outcome is not a society free of power.

It is a society where wealth exercises power with fewer constraints.

The irony is difficult to miss.

A philosophy created to oppose centralized authority can easily create conditions favorable to private oligarchy.

The oligarchy problem is not merely a theoretical concern. It is one of the most persistent outcomes observed when economic power is allowed to accumulate faster than the institutions capable of constraining it. History repeatedly shows that concentrated wealth tends to convert itself into concentrated political influence, preferential access to lawmakers, control over information channels, influence over regulatory bodies, and the ability to shape the rules under which competition itself occurs. In practice, large fortunes rarely remain confined to markets. They inevitably spill into politics, media, education, lobbying, philanthropy, and public discourse. A society may formally preserve equal legal rights while simultaneously developing profound inequalities in practical influence. The result is often government that remains democratic in theory but increasingly responsive to those possessing the greatest economic leverage.

The late nineteenth-century Gilded Age offers a particularly instructive example. Industrial consolidation created immense fortunes and unprecedented economic growth, but also produced railroad monopolies, political patronage systems, cartel behavior, labor exploitation, and extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power. Figures such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, and their corporate networks did not merely participate in markets. They shaped the conditions under which markets operated. The eventual emergence of antitrust laws, campaign finance reforms, labor protections, and regulatory agencies was not a rejection of markets themselves. It was a recognition that unconstrained markets had produced concentrations of power substantial enough to threaten competition, public accountability, and democratic governance (Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 1955; Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism, 1963).

More importantly, oligarchy is a problem markets can actively create through their normal operation. Success in a competitive marketplace often generates resources that can be used to reduce future competition. Dominant firms acquire competitors, lobby for favorable regulations, secure exclusive contracts, influence legislation, shape public narratives, and create barriers to entry that smaller rivals cannot overcome. Ironically, the very competitive process libertarians celebrate can produce actors powerful enough to undermine competition itself. The market rewards efficiency, innovation, and growth, but it also rewards consolidation. Without effective countervailing institutions, economic winners frequently acquire the ability to influence the rules of the game rather than merely play by them (Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, 2012; Hacker & Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, 2010).

This is the paradox at the center of libertarianism. A philosophy intended to disperse power may, if taken far enough, remove many of the mechanisms designed to prevent power from reconcentrating elsewhere. The likely destination is not a society without rulers. It is a society in which wealth increasingly functions as a form of governance. The question is not whether power will exist. History strongly suggests that it always will. The real question is whether that power remains accountable to the public or becomes concentrated in institutions the public never elected and cannot meaningfully remove.

The Missing Success Story

Perhaps the most revealing question is the simplest one.

Where has libertarianism succeeded on a large scale?

Not where has it influenced policy.

Not where some libertarian ideas were adopted.

Where has a substantially libertarian government produced long-term prosperity, stable institutions, strong public infrastructure, broad economic mobility, robust civil liberties, and high quality of life?

The examples are remarkably scarce.

Modern first-world countries differ greatly from one another.

Yet successful nations almost universally combine markets with regulation, private enterprise with public goods, individual freedom with institutional oversight, and economic competition with rules that prevent concentrations of power from becoming politically dominant (Acemoglu & Robinson, Why Nations Fail, 2012).

If the success stories are difficult to identify, the cautionary examples are considerably easier to find. Wherever strongly libertarian ideas have been implemented beyond the level of abstract theory, the results frequently reveal the same pattern: public institutions weaken faster than markets solve the problems those institutions previously managed. Kansas’s tax experiment under Sam Brownback was not pure libertarianism, but it was heavily influenced by libertarian and supply-side assumptions that tax cuts, deregulation, and reduced government activity would generate rapid economic growth. Instead, the state experienced significant budget shortfalls, pressure on schools and infrastructure, repeated credit downgrades, and economic performance that failed to meet the promised expectations (Frank, Kansas City Star, 2017; Cockburn, Harper’s, 2018). The lesson was not that markets stopped functioning. The lesson was that reducing state capacity did not automatically produce the prosperity advocates predicted.

Similar patterns appear in smaller-scale libertarian experiments. The Free State Project’s influence in Grafton, New Hampshire became famous after extensive reductions in local governance and public services coincided with growing civic dysfunction, infrastructure problems, and even unexpected consequences like increased human-bear conflicts as collective management systems eroded (MacLean, The New Yorker, 2022). While libertarians rightly point out that no example perfectly reflects their ideal vision, that observation cuts both ways. If the ideology’s successes remain largely hypothetical while its real-world applications repeatedly encounter familiar governance problems, that is a fact worth examining.

More broadly, the recurring failure is not economic collapse but institutional erosion. Libertarian policies often succeed at removing constraints while struggling to replace the functions those constraints performed. The result can be weaker regulatory oversight, weaker public investment, weaker labor protections, weaker environmental safeguards, and weaker consumer protections without a corresponding increase in individual liberty for most people. In practice, reducing public power frequently increases the relative power of those who already possess wealth, market share, legal resources, or political influence. The promised destination is a society of independent individuals. The historical tendency is often movement toward a society where increasingly powerful private actors face fewer checks on their ability to shape economic and political outcomes (Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, 2012; Hacker & Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, 2010).

This is an important distinction because libertarianism is often evaluated against the failures of existing governments. A fairer comparison is whether libertarian policies have produced superior outcomes when actually attempted. The record is considerably less persuasive. Governments can certainly fail. Markets can certainly succeed. The question is whether systematically weakening institutions that constrain private power has historically produced more freedom for ordinary people. The evidence suggests the answer is far less obvious than libertarian rhetoric often implies.

That pattern should not be ignored.

A Question for Readers

When you think about your own future, ask yourself a few uncomfortable questions.

Do you genuinely want retirement security determined almost entirely by market outcomes?

Do you want healthcare governed primarily by purchasing power?

Do you want environmental protection enforced only after damages occur?

Do you want billionaires and multinational corporations operating with dramatically less oversight?

Do you believe private concentrations of power are inherently less threatening than governmental ones?

And perhaps most importantly:

When has removing guardrails historically produced a safer road?

The strongest critique of libertarianism is not that it values liberty.

Liberty is worth valuing.

The strongest critique is that it often assumes liberty exists in a vacuum, independent of economic power, institutional power, and resource disparities.

History suggests otherwise.

Power does not disappear when government shrinks.

It simply finds a new address.

References

• Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. (2012). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.
• Cockburn, A. (2018). Kansas Blew It. Harper’s Magazine.
• Frank, T. (2017). Coverage of the Kansas tax experiment and its aftermath. Kansas City Star.
• Gaynor, M., Ho, K., & Town, R. (2015). The Industrial Organization of Health-Care Markets. Journal of Economic Literature.
• Greene, J. A. (2021). The Insulin Question.
• Hacker, J. S., & Pierson, P. (2010). Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.
• Hofstadter, R. (1955). The Age of Reform.
• IPCC. (2023). AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023.
• Kennedy, D. M. (1999). Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.
• Kolko, G. (1963). The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916.
• MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.
• MacLean, N. (2022). Reporting on the Free State Project and Grafton, New Hampshire. The New Yorker.
• McNeill, J. R. (2000). Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World.
• McNeill, W. H. (1976). Plagues and Peoples.
• Olson, M. (1965). The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups.
• Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2023). The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.
• Phillips-Fein, K. (2009). Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal.
• Relman, A. S. (2007). A Second Opinion: Rescuing America’s Health Care.
• Stern, N. (2007). The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review.
• Stiglitz, J. E. (2012). The Price of Inequality.
• Teachout, Z. (2020). Break ‘Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money.
• Wu, T. (2018). The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.
• Zinn, H. (1980). A People’s History of the United States.