While watching this just-released, kid-targeted film on May Day — a day which socialists since 1886 have celebrated as “International Workers Day” — I knew already from promotional material that it would “flip the script” on George Orwell’s 1945 satirical allegorical novella. The approach was soft-pedaled by the movie’s distributor, Angel Studios (founded by Mormons in 2014), a Utah-based firm specializing in faith-based, Christian-themed content. Perhaps Angel Studios hopes parents will take the revised theme on sheer faith.

This movie recklessly inverts Orwell’s original theme even beyond the public relations billing. Like his more famous, later work — the novel 1984 (which appeared in 1948) — Animal Farm is anti-authoritarian. It vilifies not capitalists, but communists. This movie effectively reverses Orwell’s moral framework and vilifies not communists (or even collectivists) but capitalists.

When the animals arrive on the farm, they first sense fun upon seeing signage that reads “Laughterhouse,” but they soon realize the full sign reads “Slaughterhouse.” The antagonist is not the cruel and corrupt Napoleon, but a greedy billionaire and a corporation intent on shutting down the farm. It is a clever but not-too-subtle hint — carried throughout the film — that these animals, like workers, will not merely be corralled but exploited. Filmmaker Andy Serkis appears to view this as a good and peaceful message for kids.

Not only is the original (anti-communist) theme of Animal Farm clear to anyone who bothers to read it, but Orwell himself was clearer still in his 1947 preface to the Ukrainian version, that “its various episodes are taken from the actual history of the Russian Revolution.” Orwell also knew, of course, that the 1917 revolt in Russia was not of workers against capitalists but of Bolsheviks and disgruntled (because unpaid) soldiers against the royalist-Czarist regime. Although Bolsheviks were inspired by Marxism and Marx was anti-capitalist, it didn’t follow that the Bolshevik Revolution was an overturning of capitalism. Russia in 1917 was more feudal-agrarian than it was capitalist-industrial.

Other accounts of Animal Farm are clear about its meaning. Per Britannica, it’s a “political fable based on the events of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin. The book concerns a group of barnyard animals who overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own, based on the founding principle “All animals are equal.” Eventually, the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution. Concluding that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,’ the pigs form a dictatorship even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters.”

In his essay for the Times of London in 2023 — “Animal Farm is Still Horribly Relevant Today” — A.N. Wilson described the novella as an “incomparable masterpiece” that still “resonates today” and “not just as a terrible indictment of left-wing idealism and Communist tyranny” — as it illustrates “exactly what Lenin, and then Stalin, did to the population of the USSR” at the beginning of the last century — but because like many people still today, the characters exhibit “a pathetic weakness to believe political mantras.” Again, it’s an obvious indictment of socialism, not capitalism.

Orwell (a lifelong Englishman, born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903) said he was apolitical in his youth, then saw poverty and became a democratic socialist. This committed him to being anti-fascist, but he was also candid enough to criticize non-democratic, oppressive forms of socialism. His mistake was to believe that mere voting could soften socialism’s blows. In the 1930s German voters elected the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) and soon got years of tyranny. Conveniently, Orwell blamed that not on the democratic or socialist part of the mix but the nationalist part. In 1998 (and a few times thereafter), Venezuelan voters elected democratic socialists and before long, also got tyranny. They still suffer it. What would Orwell say about that? Probably something close to what’s now said by the Democratic Socialists of America: Venezuela isn’t “genuine” socialism. As New York City mayor and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani has said, an ideal, “genuine” socialism remains the goal, such that America must “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Orwell warned of the “excesses” of collectivism, but being socialist surely undermined his message. 

Returning to Orwell’s preface to the 1947 Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, we learn that he did, in fact, initially envision the novella as a parable about the evils of capitalism. He recalls that the “details of the story did not come to me for some time, until one day (I was then living in a small village) I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength, we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.” How then did Animal Farm become instead a parable not about capitalist “exploitation” but about socialism gone awry? As mentioned, Orwell says the novella’s episodes were taken from the Russian Revolution and its disastrous aftermath. “Up to 1930, I did not look upon myself as a Socialist,” he recounts, as he had “no clearly defined political views.” He says he “became pro-Socialist more out of disgust with the way the poorer section of the industrial workers were oppressed and neglected than out of any theoretical admiration for a planned society.”

In 1936, Orwell raced to Spain to fight in its civil war — against the fascist regime and on the side of Trotskyites, who opposed Stalin for his “impure” (brutal) form of socialism. Then Orwell heard about Stalin’s gruesome, murderous purges of top military officials in 1936-38. “To experience all this was a valuable object lesson,” he recalled (in the 1947 preface), for “it taught me how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries. I saw innocent people being thrown into prison merely because they were suspected of unorthodoxy.” “I understood, more clearly than ever, the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the Western Socialist movement.” Notice how he refused to critique socialism per se. He insisted that its authoritarian versions should not be counted as genuine versions. Socialists have made this unsubstantiated assertion repeatedly since 1917. For some odd reason, Orwell didn’t consider such brazen, defensive, apologetic whitewashing as part of what he labeled “totalitarian propaganda to control opinion.”

It may be said that Orwell’s two main books weren’t really warnings about the dangers of socialism but rather attempts to salvage its terrible reputation, which he somehow presumed was unearned. In the 1930s, per Orwell, “it was of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was. Since 1930 I had seen little evidence that the U.S.S.R. was progressing towards anything that one could truly call Socialism. On the contrary, I was struck by clear signs of its transformation into a hierarchical society, in which the rulers have no more reason to give up their power than any other ruling class.” Nevertheless, he recalled, “even if I had the power, I would not wish to interfere in Soviet domestic affairs” and “would not condemn Stalin and his associates merely for their barbaric and undemocratic methods. It is quite possible that, even with the best intentions, they could not have acted otherwise under the conditions prevailing there.”

The above passage is quite an ugly admission by Orwell. He “would not condemn barbaric and undemocratic methods” — even as a supposed democratic socialist — nor would he condemn socialism as necessitating such methods, especially given Marx’s distinctive expectation that revolution would launch with a mass expropriation of private property and a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” These were two crucial aspects of the original idea of socialism and they were actually instituted by Lenin and Stalin — socialism by revolution and bullets, not evolution and ballots. Orwell insisted that “nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.” But Orwell did excuse those acts. He told us he “would not condemn barbaric and undemocratic” acts. 

It’s fair to conclude that Orwell’s self-admitted motivation for writing his two anti-authoritarian books in 1945 and 1948 was a worry that socialism wouldn’t advance in his native Britain, where he lived from 1928 onward, as long as Stalin’s Soviet Union was seen as the role model. Again, from the 1947 preface, we find him declaring that “for the past ten years (1938-47) I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.” What is the “Soviet myth”? That the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” (USSR) was real socialism. 

How does Andy Serkis, the producer of the new animated film, explain his desecration of the classic satire? In a recent episode of the Reason Interview, “What Orwell Understood About Tyranny,” libertarian host Nick Gillespie praises him and lightly questions but doesn’t criticize him for bizarrely transforming the bad guys from socialists into capitalists. Serkis says it’s an innocent “adaptation” of the original story and claims he got approval from the Orwell Estate. Serkis insists that his version’s theme isn’t different from the original novella but merely “broader,” as it’s about the “corrupting nature of power.” What does he mean by “power?” As is common among socialists — Orwell included — Serkis improperly conflates opposites: economic power (the power to produce) and political power (the power to coerce). In effect, Henry Ford and Joseph Stalin are both deemed dangerous because “powerful.” If you can so easily conflate opposites, you can also easily invert story plots and characters, switch the good guys and bad guys. Serkis does both. On his account, capitalism is no less “dangerous” than socialism. Why then prefer the latter over the former? Each is supposedly constrained by democracy, by a majority vote of whoever for whatever. Anything goes. In fact, history teaches that unlimited democracy, devoid of any real protection of genuine rights (especially property rights), degrades capitalism’s inherent safety, security, and prosperity, while it also enables the rise and spread of socialism. Of course, that’s the aim of “democratic socialists.” Democracy for them is a way to get socialism, not confine it. They know the cocktail is both possible and dangerous.

For those interested in accuracy and fidelity to the original source material of Animal Farm, the only visual alternatives to the current film are the British-American animated version of 1954 and the live-action film from 1999, using the puppetry of the late, great Jim Henson.

When my eldest daughter, now 23, was five years old, she delivered her first “out of the mouths of babes” moment. When walking into our local supermarket shortly before Memorial Day, displays were predictably decked in red-white-and-blue bunting. She asked me why, and I replied, “It’s because Memorial Day is next weekend.” She then retorted, “Oh! Is that the day we celebrate the wars?!” 

Her question stopped me in my tracks. Pausing to gather my best dad-on-the spot response, I explained, “No, sweetie. We don’t celebrate wars. It’s supposed to be a sad day. We need to remember how awful war is and to think about and pray for our friends and family that have been hurt or killed in wars.” 

In an instant, my young daughter revealed the message delivered to American children: War is too far removed to lament. Rather, the full appreciation of the sacrifices associated with military conflicts is held at a great distance. Whether those sacrifices were made willingly or unwillingly, lamenting them is largely absent from this culture’s consciousness. Our children know it, and if we’re honest, so do the rest of us.

This essay isn’t intended to rail against Memorial Day sales, consumerism, barbecues, and furniture discounts that have come to define the extended weekend. Rather, it reflects on how this culture lost its ability to mourn the losses of war since the original “Decoration Day.”

The Origins of Memorial Day

The origin of the holiday revolves around the close of the Civil War, so the controversy over its origins comes as no surprise. The earliest grave decoration appeared in October 1864, when three women of Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, decorated the graves of the fallen. Whether Union soldiers’ graves were exclusively commemorated remains unclear. Another account from Charleston, South Carolina, explicitly honored northern casualties alone on May 1 of the same year. 

Two springs later, the secretary of the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus, Georgia, Mary Ann Williams wrote a letter to the editor calling for officials to “set apart a certain day to be observed…and be handed down through time as a religious custom of the country, to wreathe the graves of our martyred dead with flowers.” 

Two weeks later, both Columbus, Georgia, and Columbus, Mississippi, held events one day apart, and the latter was immortalized in the Francis Miles Finch poem The Blue and the Gray. 

With sectional rivalries still at a fever pitch during the Reconstruction era, General Orders No. 11 was issued by General John A. Logan. He was reportedly inspired by his wife, Mary, after she witnessed the practice of grave decoration in Virginia. She remarked to her husband that it was “not too late for the Union men of the nation to follow the example of the people of the South in perpetuating the memory of their friends.” In response, Logan ordered military personnel to set aside May 30, 1868, as a national day of Decoration. While not yet a national holiday, it served as an informal day of remembrance for the armed services and others who sought to honor the war dead. With the shadow of the Civil War still hanging over the country, the solemnity of the occasion would not have been lost.

In the decades following, greater emphasis was placed on the day. It wasn’t until May 11, 1950, that Congress passed a joint resolution, requesting that President Truman “issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe each Memorial Day as a day of prayer for permanent peace and designating a period during each such day when the people of the United States might unite in such supplication.” Finally, the date was officially moved from May 30 to the last Monday of the month in 1971, while the nation was still in the throes of the Vietnam War.

War as an ‘Economic Good’

The call to prayer for “permanent peace” has given way to the post–World War II era of near-constant foreign conflict. The inescapable irony is that, during this age of frequent military engagement and deployment, the lived experience of war is more distant from American culture than at any point in recent memory. So much so that the costs of war are often described in terms of “pain” at the gas pump, rather than the bodies, hearts, and minds of Americans on extended deployment and in harm’s way. To be sure, supply shocks and higher living costs are real burdens felt by ordinary Americans in the midst of unnecessary conflict. But they pale in comparison to the losses borne by those in active war zones.

This distancing reflects a cultural transformation with deep and complex roots. Still, two plausible contributors are worth considering.

First, the economics of war finance since World War II has, at least temporarily, insulated the public from the costs of war. Military expenditures have been funded less through direct taxation or the mass sale of war bonds and more through deficit spending. The Federal Reserve and its commercial bank partners continue to absorb much of this debt. As a result, the costs are largely obscured from public view and are felt only later, when policymakers can deflect blame for the resulting loss of purchasing power onto familiar scapegoats.

Second, many Americans still operate under the assumption that war is “good for the economy.” They point to the federal government as a demand-driver in the GDP calculation, and to new technologies and industries that emerge from the military-industrial complex. Military contractors have cleverly spread the benefits of their subcontractors throughout the fifty states. For instance, the F-35 fighter jet has significant employment attached to it in 45 states. Moreover, the “Camo Economy” involved vast economic benefits to subcontractors, rather than to the Pentagon directly. In 2019, contractors in Afghanistan outnumbered military personnel by more than 50 percent and “an estimated 8,000 US contractors died, in addition to around 7,000 US troops.” Some honest commenters who claim that war benefits the overall economy at least acknowledge that without massive military expenditures “taxes would have been lower, inflation would have been lower, there would have been higher consumption and investment and certainly lower budget deficits.”

Through these two channels, inflation-financed warmaking and government-driven excess expenditures, the costs of war appear to be far removed, and even, dare we say it, beneficial. 

‘The Great Severance’

This cultural insulation brings me back to my daughter’s early impressions of Memorial Day. If the true costs of war are cast far from us in terms of economic pain, and even painted as economically beneficial, then it is no wonder that a child might think that in America, we celebrate war. This powerfully illustrates what Catherine Pakaluk has called, albeit in another context, “the great severance.”

Wherever we see economic policies that shield people from the social, cultural, and economic consequences of policymakers’ choices, the true human toll remains hidden from view, although only temporarily. But sometimes, even a child’s eyes can see straight through the ruse.

When a state starts floating an exit tax, it is telling you something more important than any campaign slogan: the people running the place know their model is not working. 

They may not say it that way. They will call it fairness, responsibility, or making the wealthy “pay what they owe.” But the meaning is the same. 

If families, entrepreneurs, and investors are leaving, the state can either ask why its policies are pushing them out, or it can try to tax them for escaping. An exit tax chooses punishment over reform. 

I understand why these proposals resonate with some people. If you are watching wealthy residents relocate while governments still face bills for schools, roads, pensions, and other commitments, it is easy to feel like the people with the most mobility are ducking the tab. 

That frustration is real. It deserves a serious answer. But an exit tax is not a serious answer. It is a confession that lawmakers would rather cling to a failing fiscal model than fix the spending, regulation, and tax policies that made people want to leave in the first place. 

That is why the current trend is so revealing. In California, proposals have centered on taxing billionaire net worth, including wealth that often exists on paper rather than in cash. In New York, the push has extended to a new surcharge on high-value second homes in New York City.

In Washington, lawmakers have already enacted a “millionaires’ tax.” These policies differ in form, but not in spirit. They all send the same message: if government has made your state too expensive, too hostile, or too unpredictable, it may still try to claim part of your future anyway. 

The economics are worse than the politics. Supporters talk as if wealth is a pile of idle cash sitting in a vault, just waiting to be skimmed. It is not. Wealth is usually tied up in businesses, shares, property, and future earnings. 

Taxing net worth or unrealized gains means taxing value that often has not been sold, realized, or converted into cash. That can force asset sales, dilute business ownership, weaken investment, and change behavior long before the tax collector ever gets a check.

 A Hoover Institution analysis of California’s proposal found that once likely migration responses are considered, the measure could leave the state with a negative net present value of about $25 billion. That is the real lesson: politicians score the tax statically, but the economy does not sit still. 

And that is before you get to the broader evidence. The OECD has noted that recurring net wealth taxes have become much less common across advanced economies because they tend to raise less revenue than promised while creating large compliance costs, avoidance incentives, and economic distortions. Countries tried them. Many backed away. 

A recent NBER study on Scandinavian wealth taxation found that higher top wealth-tax rates reduced the number of wealthy taxpayers and that many of those taxpayers were business owners whose departure reduced investment, employment, and value-added. 

That is the part too often ignored in political talking points. When a state drives out a founder, investor, or employer, it is not just losing one tax return. It is losing future jobs, future capital formation, and future opportunity for everybody else too. 

Defenders of exit taxes still fall back on one argument that sounds morally satisfying: these taxpayers benefited from state infrastructure, legal protections, and markets while they lived there, so the state deserves one final cut

But that argument quietly rewrites the relationship between citizen and government. It turns moving into a taxable offense. It says the state retains a lingering claim on your success because you once lived under its jurisdiction. That is a dangerous principle in a federal system built on mobility and competition.

 Even in the international arena, exit taxes are controversial, complex, and tied to specific movements of assets or functions across borders. Importing that logic into state tax policy is not modernization. It is escalation. 

The problem is not just that these taxes are bad economics. It is that they usually do not stay narrow. Politicians sell them as a tool aimed only at billionaires or luxury homeowners — policy aimed at an applause line. But when the revenue falls short, the scope expands. 

One-time wealth taxes become annual property surcharges. “Billionaire” thresholds are expanded to target millionaires and eventually the middle class. “Temporary” taxes become permanent fiscal architecture. New York’s pied-à-terre proposal is a good example of how quickly the logic expands once the principle is accepted. 

Frédéric Bastiat warned us to look not just at what is seen, but at what is unseen. We see the tax revenues. That’s a small, visible victory compared to the investment that never happens, the entrepreneur who builds elsewhere, jobs that never arrive — the unseen costs compound. 

Exit taxes are built on ignoring all of that. 

Claiming an exit tax frames mobility as theft, when it is often a rational response to bad governance. They do not restore prosperity. They steal the opportunity to prosper by doubling down on the very policies that made growth harder in the first place. 

If lawmakers want to deter departures, the answer is not a fiscal trap door. It is better policy: lower taxes, lighter regulation, spending restraint, and a serious effort to make their states places where productive people want to stay.

Real economic renewal is more difficult than yet more taxation, but it is also the only approach that works. Exit taxes will not save failing states. They only confirm why people wanted to leave. 

On Friday, Kevin Warsh will be sworn in as the seventeenth Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, after being confirmed by the Senate in a tight 54-45 vote last week. After a politically contentious end to former Chair Jerome Powell’s term, Warsh must find the just-right policy path to balance economic data favoring monetary cooling and political pressure to turn up the heat.

Since serving on the Board during the financial crisis, Warsh has been known as an inflation hawk. But his tune changed to secure the nod from President Trump, who has not been sheepish about where he wants interest rates: lower. The data make that a difficult deliverable for the newly minted Fed chair. 

Inflation remains persistently above the Fed’s two-percent target. According to the latest Consumer Price Index, inflation is 3.3 percent higher than a year ago. Taking out food and piping-hot energy prices due to the Iran conflict still puts inflation at 2.8 percent. And the Producer Price Index, what businesses along the supply chain pay before price pressures hit consumers and show up in CPI, came in at sizzling six percent — the highest since December 2022. 

Taken with the recent positive jobs report, the price data has markets thinking rate hikes are more likely by year’s end than cuts. What’s a Warsh Fed to do? 

Warsh’s hope had been that a productivity boom from AI would spur enough economic growth to absorb the inflation in the system and allow for the president’s desired interest rate cuts. But there are several complicating factors. 

First, the energy price shock and tariffs continue to put pressure on prices. Even if the Fed should look through these supply shocks, the calculus changes when those shocks start changing people’s expectations on the demand side. 

Second, price pressures are coming from the demand side. This can be seen in two places. Consumer services prices — which are largely driven by items not directly impacted by tariffs or energy, like shelter, medical services, and auto insurance — are up 3.3 percent. And overall spending in the economy, a good proxy for aggregate demand, is exceeding its neutral level. For both gauges of demand-side pressure, the culprit here is the Fed’s rate cuts in late 2024 and late 2025 — not the latest supply shocks. 

Between the Middle East conflict pushing up energy prices, tariff prices being passed on to consumers, and the Fed having pumped more money into the economy, it’s no surprise that inflation and inflation expectations are on the rise.

Importantly, as inflation rises, real interest rates will passively loosen monetary policy — without the Fed doing a thing. 

Since real interest rates are equal to nominal interest rates minus inflation, as inflation gets higher and nominal rates stay the same, real rates decrease and ease monetary conditions. For example, if you take the nominal federal funds rate of 3.63 percent and subtract inflation of 3.5 percent (using the Fed’s preferred PCE metric), real rates are a mere 0.13 percent. That’s more than 50 basis points lower than in January. As it stands, the Fed may need to tighten just to stay neutral. 

It’s a tough environment for Warsh to be selling rate cuts in, to be sure. It’s an even tougher pitch to convince the President that rate hikes are needed to offset growing price pressures.

Warsh is in a bit of a muddle. But he could turn it to his advantage. The Fed has multiple tools to make monetary policy less easy. Its interest rate target is only one. Another is its balance sheet. 

The Fed’s large balance sheet has long been a bugbear to Warsh. He has been critical of the Fed for not having reduced it sufficiently post-financial crisis and giving the Fed an outsized credit footprint in the economy. In an environment where tightening is called for but rate hikes are politically unpalatable, the Fed can shrink its balance sheet. It can do so gradually by resuming its passive quantitative tightening — letting maturing assets roll off, or by selling. 

On a spectrum of palatability, selling assets is probably even more sour than hiking rates to both Trump and financial markets. But choosing a passive runoff may be just the solution for an economy in need of monetary tempering, while a president demands low rates and financial markets worry. 

If his first monetary decision is between a passive balance sheet runoff or deliberate interest rate hikes, Warsh will be in much less hot water if he chooses the balance sheet path. 

Can Warsh convince other Fed officials to come along? Several Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) voting members already wanted to remove the easing bias in the FOMC statement. With new data showing a steady labor market, inflation starting to scald, a resilient consumer, and strong economic growth, those members may support some tempering using the balance sheet.

At a minimum, as soon as the next FOMC meeting in June, the easing language in the Fed’s statement will likely come out. Signaling a passive balance sheet runoff next would be the simplest step back toward a neutral monetary policy stance and show that Warsh is already delivering on (some) of his promises.

On the other hand, if a Warsh Fed continues the Powell Fed’s “wait and see” approach, it risks repeating the Fed’s late-to-the-inflation-party performance post-pandemic. We already know that the monetary punch is hot. While the president and financial markets might complain that rate hikes are too cold, the Fed should at least water things down by letting the balance sheet run off. If it waits, the alternative will be a bucket of ice in massive rate hikes like Powell dumped in 2022. Warsh should prefer to cool the punch bowl down now before he’s forced to whisk it away.

Is libertarianism cracking up? Pick almost any contested political issue of the moment, and you’ll find prominent self-identified libertarians on opposite sides of it. On immigration, the Cato Institute’s Ilya Somin has spent the last several years arguing that libertarian principles require something close to open borders. Lew Rockwell, founder of the Mises Institute, has spent the same years arguing that they require the opposite. On Israel and Gaza, Walter Block has been an unabashed defender of Israel’s military operations on libertarian grounds; Dave Smith, working from what he takes to be the same principles, has been an equally vocal critic.

On the larger question of whether libertarianism should renew its old fusionist alliance with cultural conservatism, Reason‘s Stephanie Slade has made a careful and sympathetic case for fusionism — including in a forthcoming book of that name; her colleague Elizabeth Nolan Brown has been a consistent voice for the more “libertine,” socially liberal version of the tradition. None of these disputes is between a “real” libertarian and an impostor. Each is between recognized, self-identified libertarians who reach opposite conclusions about what libertarian principles require. Are these still the same movement?

The instinctive answer, in each of these disputes, is to say no — that whichever side has reached the unfamiliar conclusion has stopped being libertarian in any meaningful sense. Each camp accuses the other of having abandoned the tradition’s true principles, each is sure it knows what those principles require, and each writes the other out of the family. I want to suggest a less satisfying but more honest answer: that the disputants on both sides of these arguments are continuous with the libertarian tradition, and the reason none of these disputes admit of clean resolution is that the tradition was never as philosophically coherent as libertarians have tended to assume.

Coalitions and Competing Creeds

The most useful lens I’ve found for thinking about this comes from a recent book by Hyrum and Verlan Lewis called The Myth of Left and Right. The Lewis brothers argue that “left” and “right” aren’t coherent ideologies. They’re tribes — coalitions whose positions shift across time and place because the tribes come first and the philosophies get reverse-engineered to fit. Conservatives went from being free traders to protectionists, hawks on Russia to doves, opponents of federal power to its champions, and the shifts only look puzzling if you assume there’s a fixed essence underneath the label. There isn’t. The Lewis brothers aren’t writing about libertarianism. But their framework predicts exactly the kind of fracturing libertarianism is now visibly going through.

As John Tomasi and I document in The Individualists, the history of the libertarian intellectual tradition bears this out. The term “libertarian” first emerged in the 1850s as a self-description for a French anarcho-communist who thought private property and the state were two sides of the same coin. By 1913, Charles Sprading was using it to describe a tent that included Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Single-Taxers, Anarchists, and Women’s Rights advocates. By the mid-twentieth century, under the influence of Leonard Read and the Foundation for Economic Education, it had narrowed to mean support for free markets and limited government. By the 1970s, the Nozick-Rand-Rothbard synthesis had narrowed it further still — to a particular form of rationalist, rights-based, free-market absolutism. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, the label fragmented again. Bleeding-heart libertarians, left-libertarians, paleolibertarians, neoreactionaries — all under the same tent, none in agreement about what the tent contains. The current crackup isn’t an aberration. It’s what libertarianism has always done.

This wouldn’t be possible if libertarian principles really did the work of generating definite political conclusions. They don’t. Consider property rights, the closest thing libertarianism has to a settled core. Libertarians who all claim to be defending property rights have disagreed radically about what those rights require. Spencer and Spooner thought intellectual property was a straightforward extension of property rights; Benjamin Tucker thought it was an affront to them. Henry George thought land was categorically different from other property, justly owned by the community; Rothbard called that view “intellectually and morally beneath contempt.” Benjamin Tucker thought legitimate property in land required ongoing occupancy and use; Nozick thought original appropriation generated permanent rights. The principles do some real work — they rule out, for example, the more extreme forms of state socialism. But they aren’t powerful enough to settle the contested questions of our politics. A commitment to property rights doesn’t tell you what property is, how it gets acquired, whether it’s inheritable, or what to do when property-based claims conflict.

A Faustian Bargain?

This indeterminacy is on vivid display in the live debate now consuming much of the libertarian world: whether libertarians can legitimately make use of illiberal means to advance liberal ends. One wing of the movement has rallied behind the administration’s assault on the administrative state. Randy Barnett — the constitutional scholar who led the legal challenge to Obamacare — has urged libertarians to take the methods on display seriously rather than dismiss them. On a February 2025 Reason podcast that posed the question directly — should libertarians celebrate or be concerned about DOGE? — Barnett’s answer was substantially the former: that the regulatory state has grown so insulated from democratic accountability that breaking it open by executive action is constitutionally defensible and strategically welcome. In a New York Times op-ed with Ilan Wurman the same month, he argued that Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of unlawful immigrants has “the better of the constitutional argument.” Behind these specific positions lies what Barnett has elsewhere called the need for a libertarian “theory of the second best” — a libertarianism better fitted to a nonideal world of competing nations and entrenched institutions, willing to take the imperfect openings that real politics offers rather than insist on a first-best that isn’t on the menu.

The other wing has reached the opposite conclusion. In a February 2026 New York Times op-ed titled “Libertarians: We Told You So,” Reason editor Katherine Mangu-Ward argued that Trump-era governance has “vindicated libertarian warnings about executive power, civil liberties, and the risks of trading principle for partisan advantage.” The accusation cuts both ways: the wing that has cheered DOGE has, in her telling, sold the libertarian commitment to limited and accountable government for a temporary regulatory victory. Writing in The Bulwark, UnPopulist editor Shikha Dalmia put it more bluntly. Libertarians, she argued, “have abdicated just when they were most needed” — and the movement is “becoming a zombie ideology, unable to draw fresh moral sustenance even as it uses up its existing reserves.”

Similar fault lines have opened up over tariffs, deportation, and the administration’s treatment of universities and law firms. Reason senior editor Brian Doherty wrote that Trump’s first year had been “a libertarian nightmare.” Jack Hunter, writing in AIER’s own Fusion, called the same year “a libertarian triumph.” Both sides cite libertarian principles. Both believe themselves to be the legitimate heirs of the tradition. The dispute isn’t a disagreement about whether liberty matters; it’s a disagreement about institutional pathways, empirical bets, and which sociological anchors a libertarian’s instincts should track.

That’s the live form of the indeterminacy. It can’t be resolved by appealing to first principles, because the first principles are exactly what both sides claim to be defending. It can only be resolved — to the extent it can be resolved — by careful argument about particular questions: what executive power actually does to constitutional order over time, what immigration restrictions actually do to economic and political freedom, what alliances with the cultural right actually do to the prospects of liberty in the long run. Those are empirical and prudential questions. They aren’t axiomatic ones, and treating them as if they were is what gives the current crackup its bitter, unproductive character.

The Case for Intellectual Humility

What does all this mean for those of us who still call ourselves libertarians? Not, I think, that we should give up the label. The libertarian tradition contains real philosophical insights and remains a powerful corrective to the centralizing instincts of modern politics.

It does mean, however, that we should hold our libertarian views in a somewhat different spirit — less as conclusions deduced from a single axiom, more as provisional positions arrived at through careful thinking about particular issues, with libertarian principles as one important input among others. On some questions that thinking will yield confident conclusions. On many it will yield humility. That, I’ve come to believe, is the stance that actually follows from taking libertarian principles seriously, once you see that they were never powerful enough to do the work that ideological certainty requires of them.

High school history curricula often portray feudalism as a quaint medieval relic — a cautionary archetype of concentrated power, conditional rights, and extractive hierarchies that suppressed human flourishing for centuries. As ever, though, the deeper lesson of history is its recurring nature: when property rights erode and rent-seeking supplants open competition, societies reliably drift back toward feudal arrangements. 

American medicine today offers a vivid illustration of this pattern, as government-created barriers sustain local monopolies, nonprofit hospital systems function as modern lords, and physicians relinquish professional autonomy in exchange for the illusory security of salaried fiefdoms. The result is contemporary serfs in white coats serving within tax-exempt citadels.

A Primer On Feudalism

In the medieval manor, a lord granted a vassal a fief — a plot of land — in exchange for loyalty, military service, and a share of the harvest. Serfs tilled the soil with little claim to its fruits. The system was rigid, hierarchical, and extractive. Today, a parallel structure has emerged in American healthcare, not through sword and oath but through certificates of need, Medicare payment rules, and tax-exempt status amidst the backdrop of massive mergers and acquisitions.

Non-profit hospital systems function as modern feudal lords. Physicians have become their vassals, granted small fiefdoms — department chairs, service-line leadership roles, or simply in employed practices — in return for allegiance to the system’s revenue machine. This is the neofeudalism of medicine, born out of crony capitalism and regulatory capture.

Feudalism’s formal titles — king, duke, baron, knight, vassal, serf — reflected a chain of reciprocal obligations rooted in land tenure. Lords owned the means of production; vassals administered justice and defense; serfs provided labor. The system endured for centuries because property rights were conditional and fragmented. Allodial title — true private ownership free of feudal dues — was rare. Markets were stifled. Innovation lagged. The decline of feudalism accelerated in the late Middle Ages and early modern period precisely because secure private property rights emerged. The rise of towns, the enclosure movement, and the commercialization of agriculture allowed individuals to own, improve, and trade land outright. Money economies replaced barter and service. The bourgeoisie accumulated capital. Centralized monarchies and later liberal states enforced contracts and reduced arbitrary exactions. As Douglass North and other institutional economists have shown, well-defined, transferable property rights unleashed entrepreneurship and growth. Serfdom withered not because of royal decree alone, but because free exchange proved more productive. Feudal ties dissolved when individuals could keep the full fruits of their labor.

Medicine’s Drift to Neo-Feudalism

Medicine once mirrored this liberalizing trend. Post-World War II, most physicians owned or partnered in independent practices. They controlled their schedules, negotiated directly with patients and insurers, and bore the risks and rewards of their craft. Private property in medical practice — autonomy over one’s office, staff, and patient relationships — fostered competition and innovation. That world is vanishing. Today, nearly 78 percent of US physicians are employees of hospitals, health systems, or corporate entities. Private practice has collapsed into a shrinking remnant.

The new lords are sprawling tax-exempt “non-profit” health systems. These entities enjoy at least $37 billion  annually in federal and state tax breaks — property, income, and sales tax exemptions — while operating with margins and executive compensation packages that rival for-profit corporations. Many run massive investment portfolios and for-profit subsidiaries. Their community-benefit spending often falls short of the value of their exemptions when measured rigorously; some profitable systems deliver minimal charity care relative to their tax windfall. 

Government policy supplies the moat around these castles. Rule after rule and regulation after regulation favors the big conglomerates. The regulatory reach adds to the lords’ dominion.

Certificate-of-need (CON) laws are still on the books in about 35 states plus DC, requiring regulatory approval before new hospitals, surgery centers, or even MRI machines can open. Incumbent systems predictably oppose competitors’ applications, turning state boards into tools of rent-seeking protection. Without CON, independent physicians and ambulatory centers could challenge hospital dominance. With it, local monopolies flourish.

Once entrenched, these systems wield two powerful economic weapons: the 340B Drug Pricing Program and site-of-service payment differentials. Enacted in 1992 to help safety-net providers serve low-income patients, 340B allows qualifying hospitals to purchase outpatient drugs at steep discounts — often 20-50 percent or more — then bill insurers or Medicare at full list price. In 2024, covered entities purchased $81.4 billion in 340B drugs. But studies and reports show the windfall frequently funds facility expansion, acquisitions, and executive pay rather than expanded charity care for the intended populations. Contract pharmacies amplify the arbitrage. The program has become a hidden tax on patients, employers, and manufacturers, with limited transparency on how savings reach the vulnerable.

Site-of-service differentials complete the trap. Medicare — and many commercial payers — reimburse the identical service at dramatically higher rates when performed in a hospital outpatient department (HOPD) instead of a physician’s independent office. A clinic visit, imaging study, or minor procedure in an HOPD can command 125 to 300 percent more reimbursement. Hospitals therefore acquire physician practices, rebrand them as HOPDs, and capture the facility-fee markup. Patients are sometimes seeing the same doctor in the same building but for twice as much.

Physicians are increasingly likely to be employed by these healthcare entities — not because they want to, but because the structure and rules are tilted that way.

The physician receives a salary or production bonus but loses ownership. The patient pays higher coinsurance. Independent practices cannot compete on price because the payment rules themselves favor the hospital flag. Vertical integration explodes. Horizontal mergers compound the effect. Markets once served by several competing hospitals see them consolidate into single dominant systems: one or two health systems control the entire market for inpatient care in half of American cities. Research consistently shows that such mergers raise prices five to 20 percent or more — with little or no improvement, and sometimes deterioration, in quality. Cross-market mergers demonstrate similar price effects after several years.

The physician-vassal’s daily reality reflects the bargain. A neurosurgeon or cardiologist may receive a competitive base salary, malpractice coverage, and administrative relief from his affiliation with a hospital. In return, the doctor must (directly or indirectly) refer patients only within the system, meet RVU targets that prioritize volume over value, and accept corporate dictates on electronic health records and formulary restrictions. They must accept care pathways optimized for margins, rather than patient outcomes. Dissent risks contract non-renewal, often triggering noncompete clauses. 

True entrepreneurship — opening an ambulatory surgery center or cash-pay spine clinic —  requires profound courage and near-inevitable litigation within the framework of CON. The independent doctor who once embodied the free professional has become a salaried cog in a revenue-extracting machine.

A Freer Alternative

Reversing neofeudalism in medicine demands restoring property rights and competition — the very forces that ended medieval feudalism. Policymakers should repeal CON laws nationwide, as several states already have with measurable price reductions and new market players. Implement full site-neutral Medicare payment for outpatient services, leveling the field so independent practices can survive. Reform 340B with transparency mandates, patient-definition tightening, and caps on windfall profits unrelated to charity care. Stop the unnecessary ban on physician-owned hospitals that provide better care at cheaper costs. Antitrust enforcement must scrutinize both horizontal and vertical mergers with renewed vigor. Tax-exempt status for hospitals should be performance-based, tied to verifiable charity care and community benefit exceeding the exemption’s dollar value.

Physicians are not serfs by nature; they are highly trained entrepreneurs stifled by regulation. Patients deserve choice, not tribute to the local castle. The same free market principles that dismantled feudalism can dismantle this one — if policymakers have the courage to let property rights and competition do their work. The alternative is a healthcare system where lords grow richer, vassals grow compliant, and everyone else pays the price.

Judging by the headlines, Ted Turner, who died earlier this month at age 87, will be remembered as an adventurer and visionary: creator of CNN, and with it the 24-hour news cycle, the inventor of the satellite-supported national TV superstation, a distinguished sailor, a generous conservationist, and a reputed playboy. He adored women so much that he produced five children with them, incidentally breaking faith with one of his core values: population control.  

When Turner was born on the eve of the Second World War, just over two billion people inhabited the earth. That number increased three-fold by 2000. For Turner, who had internalized the cataclysmic “overpopulation” fears of the Cold War, such growth in living, breathing souls was not a success, but a looming catastrophe. His goal was to first “stabilize the population,” then ideally reduce it to around two billion.  

Toward his vision of a world with fewer children, Turner was a generous donor to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Planned Parenthood, and the Guttmacher Institute. In 2004, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America presented him with the Margaret Sanger Award, which recognizes “leadership, excellence, and outstanding contributions to the reproductive health and rights movement.” 

Turner wasn’t the only billionaire philanthropist pouring money into population control. In 2009, he met privately in New York City with Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, George Soros, Warren Buffett, and others to discuss how they could use their wealth to curb overpopulation and fight climate change. They were known as the “Good Club,” The Guardian reported, and they wanted to “save the world.” 

Despite their anxieties about other people’s fecundity, the neo-Malthusian billionaires in attendance had, like Turner, been quite fruitful in their own reproductive behavior: Rockefeller had six children; Soros had five; and Gates and Buffett each had three. While sources described Gates as the “most impressive” speaker, Turner was the most outspoken and attempted to “dominate” the meeting.

His outspoken rhetoric certainly wasn’t limited to elite secret gatherings. At a climate luncheon in 2010, he urged world leaders to adopt China’s one-child policy, insisting that, “If we’re going to be here [as a species] 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with seven billion people.” 

While lauded as an optimist, Turner believed humans were headed for a nightmare future unless they took drastic action against alleged overpopulation and climate change. He predicted a doomsday scenario of civilizational collapse, with famine, death, cannibalism, and very few survivors living in a “failed state like Somalia or Sudan.” The earth’s temperature is rising, he claimed, because “too many people are using too much stuff.”  

Meanwhile, as an adventurer, he afforded himself a lavish and abundant lifestyle, flying his Bombardier Challenger 300 private jet a distance of nearly 80,000 miles in 2022 alone. His aircraft that year surpassed the combined emissions of 34 average Americans.

Turner’s hypocritical and apocalyptic mindset reflected the zero-sum ideology of twentieth-century neo-Malthusians such as Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, co-author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, which boldly asserted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s due to overpopulation. Turner admired Ehrlich and derived his two-billion world population ideal from Ehrlich’s estimation of earth’s “carrying capacity.”   

This outlook received bipartisan support in Washington throughout the 1960s and 1970s among “Rockefeller Republicans” like Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger as well as environmentalist Democrats like Jimmy Carter. Neo-Malthusian ideas were institutionalized within the State Department and USAID, operating under the misguided assumption that rapid population growth inhibited economic development and constituted a threat to US national security and economic interests. Food aid was even conditioned on developing countries’ willingness to implement population control policies.  

The neo-Malthusian consensus wasn’t shattered until the Reagan administration declared rapid population growth a “neutral phenomenon” rather than a barrier to development at the UN’s 1984 World Population Conference in Mexico City. Economist Julian Simon, who argued that “the ultimate resource is people,” was instrumental in shaping the Reagan administration’s renewed approach to population policy.  

In 1990, Simon triumphed over Paul Ehrlich in a ten-year wager on the prices of five metals. Ehrlich, betting that population pressures would diminish resources and spike commodity prices, lost to Simon’s more optimistic view that human knowledge, innovation, and resource substitution would produce greater abundance and lower prices over time.  

Simon is no less correct today than he was in 1980 when his wager against Ehrlich began. The “time prices” of basic commodities — denoting the amount of time someone must work to earn enough money to purchase a given item — have continued to shrink, owing much to population growth and the expansion of the rule of law, property rights, and economic freedom.  

Contrary to the assumptions of Turner and the neo-Malthusians, population growth hasn’t exacerbated famine, poverty, and disease. Nor has it necessarily hastened global warming. As economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso documented in their 2025 book After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, no theoretical or historical relationship exists between population size and particulate air pollution. Whether the human population stabilizes or declines, global warming is forecast to proceed. “Billions of lives lived would make a small difference to this big problem,” they said.  

Addressing and overcoming challenges like climate change requires sustained technological progress, which is enabled by more free minds, not fewer. Turner wanted to limit both human numbers and human freedom, but his Malthusian views embodied a discredited consensus that applied a yeast-in-a-petri-dish model to the study of human population.  

This dismal perspective, which assumes people will breed themselves into oblivion, doesn’t take into account the better angels of our nature: our rationality, ingenuity, and adaptability unparalleled by any other species. But it reveals a lot about how Malthusians think about their fellow humans — not as sovereign individuals possessing inherent rights and dignity, but rather as an infestation requiring systemic control. As Julian Simon pointed out, this worldview isn’t predicated on scientific facts but on “value judgments about the worth of human life.”  

Simon’s intellectual archnemesis, Paul Ehrlich, preceded Turner in death by less than two months. These two Malthusian giants departed our resourceful earth at a time when roughly two-thirds of people live in countries with sub-replacement fertility rates, meaning the average woman is having fewer than 2.1 children. The depopulation they so fervently sought — and funded — has at last become a reality. 

But it comes at a price. Countries are not only facing spiraling debt and deficits spurred by population aging and worker shortages, but also a dearth of love, care, and support for the elderly. In countries like Japan, those who fulfilled Turner’s wish and had only one child — or perhaps none — are increasingly dying alone and undiscovered for days, weeks, or even months. It’s a sad and overlooked outcome of depopulation, but luckily for Turner, who suffered from Lewy body dementia, he had five children, along with billions of dollars, to support him in his final years of decline and dependency.

When Henry Hazlitt wrote in Economics In One Lesson that “Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man” he knew what he was talking about. Economic fallacies abound — and are even popular. What’s worse, economic illiteracy seems to only increase. In part, this is due to economists trying too hard to be scientific and help policymakers engineer the economy.

Many consider the well-known words of Lord Kelvin obvious, that “when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.” That sentiment has been taken to heart by many in the sciences, both natural and social, and also in economics. 

After all, without the ability and use of mathematics and statistical data analysis, science would not be able to contribute much knowledge at all. Yet there are limits to the usefulness of measures, as Goodhart’s Law suggests: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

It is actually even worse in economics, where the use of measures can arguably be a cause of widespread economic illiteracy.

An example of this is the frequent references to inflation in the business press. Experts eagerly note how anything from weakening demand to supply shocks and trade policy will change the inflation rate. The same can be claimed about economic growth, which apparently can not only be generated by economic policy but where government spending “causes” or is essential for economic growth — regardless of how the money is spent.

Both are examples of how economic understanding suffers from what Charles Goodhart recognizes. Inflation is real and so is economic growth, but both are economic concepts with real meaning. In order to investigate them, economists invented statistical constructs — the CPI and GDP, respectively — to simulate approximate measures of the concepts. But both are imperfect. 

Inflation used to be understood by economists as the general rise in prices due to the dilution of money. Hence Milton Friedman’s claim that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” Prices always fluctuate, but that is just the market’s price mechanism. Inflation was distinct: the effect on prices overall from meddling with money (basically, counterfeiting).

Economic growth explains the increase in the wealth of a nation, which economists understand as the productive capacity. When this capacity increases, the economy can more easily satisfy consumers’ wants. We are richer as a result. 

In both cases, the measures are fundamentally flawed but provide some insight into change over time. The CPI captures some of the general rise in prices, but looks at the outcome without recognizing the cause. This has misled people, experts and laymen alike, to believe that increasing prices means inflation. But rising prices can have many causes, often entirely normal upstream effects. A sad result of attempting to measure the outcome is that, for example, a war that affects production “creates inflation.” But higher oil prices are not inflation. This is something that no reasonable economist would have even considered, but now it is presented as a supposed “insight.” 

Similarly, the GDP gives an indication of an economy’s productive capacity, but also includes government spending on supposed public goods that are heavily subsidized or provided “for free.” In other words, it appears as if government spending, regardless of what the money is spent on, “creates growth” because it increases GDP. Such spending does not need to actually increase productive capacity — it can even harm productivity — yet still be interpreted as “economic growth” because of its effect on statistics.

Both are examples of how Goodhart’s Law applies — and in fact undermines our economic understanding. This is readily recognizable in how supposed experts claim that price ceilings, or any government effort to control prices (usually by prohibiting high prices), “fights inflation” or that government waste (by virtue of spending) “contributes to economic growth.” They focus entirely on the official statistic, which was originally a poor measurement of a well-understood economic concept, and anything that affects this statistic. But the understanding of the concept is all but lost. And, in fact, they run with it and in the process invent new economic fallacies in order to come across as insightful.

Economics thus remains haunted by fallacies. Rather than dispelling the fallacies or informing policy, some economic indicators and their analyses generate economic illiteracy.