The Rise of the “Liberaltarian”

&gt; So their overall approach is unique: Let the markets operate how they should and redistribute income after the fact. Some people have called this new type of political animal the “liberaltarian.”<p>That is, of course, the model that Nordic social democracies have followed for many years now. Denmark is by many measures significantly <i>more</i> free-market than the US; note their absence of minimum wage, mostly privatised fire and ambulance services, enviable ranking on most indexes of economic freedom (eg, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heritage.org&#x2F;index&#x2F;ranking?version=638" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heritage.org&#x2F;index&#x2F;ranking?version=638</a>), and so forth, and so on.<p>Letting the markets be relatively free to generate money, capturing it via efficient flat taxes (first and foremost, a consumption tax), and using it to fund an effective social safety net targeted at the poor is not a unique idea, it&#x27;s what some parts of Northern Europe has been doing for the past 40 years.<p>Maybe they meant &quot;unique in the US political debate&quot;.

The low-regulation approach seem great until you find out how far businesses will go to cut their costs and increase profits: you end up with situations like flammable cladding installed on high-rise towers, horse meat sold as beef, or bleach sold as a cure for Covid-19 (one of these may be fictional). The line between legitimate business and scam becomes impossible to define.

It&#x27;s been odd to see my own reaction and that of my friends to the move of the left towards solely social justice issues in the last few weeks. I&#x27;ve been talking to friends and we all dislike the inane focus on &quot;white fragility&quot;, wokeness and performative activism in the form of posting your reading on Instagram. The democratic party&#x27;s lack of interest in doing anything meaningful is pushing people away - Hopefully liberaltarians form a new party of some sort and break the logjam of the two party system. It&#x27;s what we sorely need right now.

<i>As founders and CEOs, couldn’t their antipathy to government regulation simply be explained by self-interest?<p>Broockman: I’m sure that at least some of their political views have to do with self-interest.</i><p>I&#x27;m pro-Left everything, except when it effects my huge revenue stream.<p>Go figure.

Isn’t it kind of ridiculous when you have to make up such words ‘cause you insist describing people’s complex preference and belief system on a single damn dimension?!<p>I am both left and right, depending what issue we are talking about. And sometime I am center as well. Yet when it’s time to vote... I have exactly 2 real choices.

This raises an interesting follow up question. Do those surveyed consider themselves to be the wealthy? Or do they expect someone else to be making do with less to make the redistributive policies work?

In most of the world, the political compass is described in 2 dimensions. So, &quot;liberaltarian&quot; would just be lib left

Aka &quot;bleeding-heart libertarianism&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neoclassical_liberalism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neoclassical_liberalism</a>

Maybe it’s that I have very weird friends, but pretty much no libertarian I’ve met has defended zero redistribution.<p>They all hate <i>the way</i> it’s done now, and favor other arrangements like a negative income tax or UBI (as a substitute for government-run services).<p>I haven’t seen all the questionnaire, but the questions shown in the article could be read both ways.

This is by no means a new political stance: liberaltarians used to be known as &quot;left-wing libertarians&quot; or, somewhat jocularly, &quot;bleeding-heart libertarians&quot; but the gist was pretty much the same.

My relationship with politics and economics is complicated like it should be.<p>I &quot;stay in the center of the circle&quot; as Tao Te Ching advises, but I also cannot deny the superiority of the Free Market. (Not to be confused with whatever the United States does for healthcare).<p>We have countless examples of competitive markets performing best, and a handful of government controlled markets that are horrible (healthcare, education, real estate, banking)<p>Some people call this inevitable in capitalism, that government will be used to create inequality. But at least this is not intended, whereas other economic policies make this a feature.<p>Anyway, can&#x27;t vote for Republicans, they like big government which seems like an obvious bad idea.