// The Loveatarian Blog
A publication exploring individual liberty, mutual trust, and cultural empathy. Thoughts on how we build a free society from the ground up.
// Latest Posts
The fear that machines will destroy all the jobs is as old as the machines themselves. It has been wrong every time, in aggregate, while being right about specific jobs and specific workers during specific transitions. The honest task is to separate the aggregate story from the distributional one, because they lead to very different policy conclusions.
Read Post →The United States spends approximately $181 billion per year in direct federal subsidies, grants, tax expenditures, and other financial support for private corporations, according to analyses by the Cato Institute and others. State and local governments add another $40 to $50 billion annually in economic development incentives, tax abatements, and targeted subsidies. These figures do not include the value of regulatory advantages, loan guarantees, and other indirect benefits that government confers on specific industries and companies.
Read Post →Liberty is not self-sustaining. It depends on a cultural substructure: people who trust each other enough to cooperate without coercion, who are willing to tolerate difference without demanding that the government suppress it, and who can forgive enough to give second chances rather than building carceral systems that warehouse human beings.
Read Post →The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from taking private property except for "public use" and only with "just compensation." These two requirements were meant to be real limitations on government power. Through a century of court decisions, particularly the Supreme Court's 2005 ruling in Kelo v. City of New London, the "public use" requirement has been interpreted so broadly that it has become nearly meaningless. Governments can and do seize private property and transfer it directly to other private parties whenever they can argue that the transfer will produce economic development, tax revenue, or jobs.
Read Post →The United States spends $14,885 per person on healthcare annually, more than double the average of comparable wealthy countries, and ranks last among those countries in overall health system performance. The problem is not that Americans get more or better care; they get fewer doctor visits and shorter hospital stays than citizens of most peer nations. The problem is structural: the US system has the worst features of both heavy government intervention and opaque private markets simultaneously.
Read Post →The immigration debate in the United States produces more heat than light because both sides argue from selective evidence while the system itself is broken in ways that harm everyone: the people trying to come legally, the workers who compete with those who cannot, the communities trying to absorb rapid change, and the country that needs both labor and the rule of law to function.
Read Post →The current crisis with Iran is not an isolated event. It is the latest chapter of a seventy-year story in which American covert and military interventions, each made by people who believed they knew better, produced consequences far worse than the problems they were meant to solve.
Read Post →Libertarians are not anti-environment. The standard accusation that a commitment to limited government means indifference to ecological destruction gets both the philosophy and the evidence backwards. The deeper libertarian critique is that the government is often the primary driver of environmental harm, through subsidies, land mismanagement, and the capture of regulatory agencies by the industries they are supposed to regulate.
Read Post →In 1950, roughly 5 percent of American workers needed a government-issued license to do their jobs. Today that number exceeds 25 percent, representing more than 40 million workers across more than 1,000 occupations that require government permission to practice. The jobs affected are not limited to brain surgeons and airline pilots. They include hair braiders, interior designers, florists, tour guides, teeth whiteners, tree trimmers, horse massagers, and hundreds of other low-risk occupations whose connection to public health and safety is marginal at best.
Read Post →Libertarianism is not about the absence of rules. Rules are what make cooperation, commerce, and community possible. Games teach us this: a game with no rules is not freedom, it is chaos without fun.
Read Post →Social Security is facing a documented, actuarially certain fiscal shortfall. The Social Security Board of Trustees projects that the combined trust funds will be depleted by 2034, at which point incoming payroll tax revenue will cover only about 77 percent of scheduled benefits. This is not a rumor or a partisan talking point. It is the Social Security Administration's own projection.
Read Post →A tariff is a tax. Not on foreign governments, not on foreign corporations, but on American consumers and businesses that buy imported goods. Two hundred years of American history confirm this every time the experiment is tried.
Read Post →The United States has spent over one trillion dollars and imprisoned millions of people in a fifty-year campaign to eliminate drug use. Drug use has not been eliminated. Overdose deaths have reached record highs. The primary measurable effects of the War on Drugs are: the construction of a system of mass incarceration that falls hardest on Black and brown communities despite similar drug use rates across racial lines; the creation and empowerment of violent criminal organizations that control the drug supply in the absence of legal markets; the erosion of Fourth Amendment protections through warrantless searches, civil asset forfeiture, and the militarization of police; and the deaths of users who would have survived with access to quality-controlled, regulated supply.
Read Post →American agricultural policy is one of the most consequential and least examined sets of government programs affecting the economy, the environment, and the food supply. The Farm Bill, renewed roughly every five years and covering nearly $1 trillion in spending per authorization, is routinely described as a lifeline for American farmers. The record suggests something different: it is primarily a transfer mechanism to the largest agribusiness operations, a market-distorting instrument that suppresses commodity prices and accelerates the disappearance of independent family farms, and an international dumping program that undercuts farmers in some of the world's poorest countries.
Read Post →The Federal Reserve does not print money in the literal sense. It creates bank reserves by purchasing financial assets from commercial banks, expanding the money supply through the banking system. When it does this faster than the economy's productive capacity grows, more money chases the same amount of goods and services: that is inflation. The Fed has done this aggressively since 2008, expanding its balance sheet from approximately $900 billion before the financial crisis to a peak of over $9 trillion in 2022.
Read Post →The gig economy is not a new development in American labor. Self-employment, contract work, and piece-rate compensation have characterized significant portions of the American workforce throughout its history. What is new is the scale, the coordination enabled by platform technology, and the legal controversy that has erupted when courts and legislatures have tried to apply employment law written for the industrial era of the 1930s to labor arrangements that operate on fundamentally different terms.
Read Post →The United States is in the middle of a genuine housing affordability crisis, and the primary cause is government policy at every level: zoning codes that outlaw the most naturally affordable housing types, permitting systems that inflate costs and delay construction for years, rent control ordinances that reduce supply while protecting incumbents, and federal tax policy that rewards homeownership speculation over renting. This is not a market failure. It is a policy failure that the market would correct if given the chance.
Read Post →The case for a freer world is usually made in the language of constitutions, economics, and policy. This article makes it in a different register: the language of psychology, because the liberty we are capable of building collectively is capped by the liberty we are capable of sustaining internally. A person who is governed by unexamined fear, chronic resentment, or the tribal compulsion to see the world sorted into enemies and allies will, when given political power, use that power coercively. This is not a hypothesis. It is the most consistent pattern in political history.
Read Post →The minimum wage debate has been dominated by two oversimplified positions: the conservative view that any wage floor above the market rate must destroy jobs, and the progressive view that it does not matter what the wage floor is set at because raising it always helps workers. Both positions are wrong. The evidence is more nuanced, more context-dependent, and more interesting than either side acknowledges.
Read Post →Prohibition is a policy argument that crosses every political line, applied at one point or another by progressives, conservatives, and everyone in between. It is also a policy that produces the same results regardless of which side of the political spectrum applies it: black markets, increased violence, degraded safety, eroded civil liberties, and enriched criminal intermediaries.
Read Post →American higher education has become extraordinarily expensive, and the primary mechanism driving that expense is the federal student loan program itself. By guaranteeing loans to any student enrolled at any accredited institution regardless of the likelihood of repayment or the economic value of the credential, the federal government created an incentive for universities to raise tuition as fast as the loan program would accommodate. Universities spent the proceeds on administrative expansion, amenities, and competitive programs that attract students rather than on improving the quality of instruction. Students who borrowed the most for the least economically valuable credentials are the ones suffering the most.
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