Here’s the real threat to personal liberties and free markets

Friends,

Here’s an op-ed by Dana Milbank, an opinion writer for The Washington Post, that ran today in the Post. I hope Milbank continues to write opinion pieces for the Post, because I’ve always found his opinions to be sharp and relevant. But given Jeff Bezos’s blatant attempt to turn the Post into a sycophantic suck-up outlet for Trump, I’m not sure.

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Over the last 48 hours, I’ve been receiving from readers and friends the sort of notes one gets upon losing a loved one, or perhaps receiving a terminal diagnosis.

“So very sorry.”

“Hang in there.”

“Sending you love and strength.”

“With appreciation and sorrow.”

The cause of death? The belief that Post owner Jeff Bezos has just ended the tradition of open debate that has guided this paper’s editorial page for generations. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote on Wednesday morning. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

In its plain language, this is unobjectionable. Personal liberties and free markets are part of the American creed. But many readers I’ve heard from suspect the words are cover for a plan to turn this into a MAGA-friendly outlet.

I don’t yet know for sure. But this much is clear: If we as a newspaper, and we as a country, are to defend his twin pillars, then we must redouble our fight against the single greatest threat to “personal liberties and free markets” in the United States today: President Donald Trump.

The rapidly spreading authoritarianism coming from this administration threatens all of our freedoms. Trump in recent days has declared himself to be a “king.” His Self-Proclaimed Majesty announced, Louis XIV-style, that “we are the federal law.” And he proposed that “we should take over Washington, D.C.” and deny its 700,000 citizens the right of self-governance.

As for liberties, the day before the pillars announcement, the White House ended a century-old precedent and decreed that the government would handpick which news organizations would be allowed to cover and question Trump. “This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” protested the White House Correspondents’ Association, of which I am a member. “In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.” That previously happened in repressive countries such as Russia and Iran. Now, it is happening here.

As for free markets, Trump on Thursday said he is raising tariffs on China an additional 10 percent and that his previously announced tariffs on Canada and Mexico, our largest trading partners, will go into effect on March 4, “as scheduled.” Trump this week also floated a 25 percent tariff on European goods, on top of tariffs he has already placed on steel and aluminum. This is the very antithesis of “free markets” — and the uncertainty the president is injecting into markets is poison for the economy.

Trump hasn’t managed to deport any more illegal migrants than the Biden administration had, but he has dramatically cracked down on legal immigration, undermining a sacred personal liberty. And, as The Post reports, the administration has allegedly been violating the human rights of migrants it has shipped off to Guantánamo Bay, keeping them shackled in cages, deprived of daylight, subjected to strip searches and denied access to lawyers.

At the United Nations this week, the Trump administration sided with Russia and other repressive, authoritarian states in blocking a resolution supporting democratic Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Trump falsely accused Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky of being a “dictator” as Trump continues his betrayal of Ukraine and his appeasement of the actual dictator, Vladimir Putin. Trump appears set to force Ukraine to surrender territory to Russia despite his successful extortion of mineral rights from Ukraine.

Closer to home, Trump accelerated the weaponization of federal law enforcement against his opponents, installing as the FBI’s No. 2 official a partisan podcaster who pushed 2020 election and covid-19 conspiracy theories and whose stated goal is to “own the libs,” whom he also refers to as “the scumbag commie libs.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s former general counsel — no “commie” — warned that the Trump administration “is turning federal law enforcement over to unqualified, unprincipled, partisan henchmen.”

At the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News pundit who now serves as defense secretary, purged the top ranks of generals, ousting the chairman of the Joint Chiefs (who is Black) and the Navy’s chief of operations, a woman, whom Hegseth had branded a “DEI hire.” This restored the hegemony of White men atop the military and, it is feared, leaves the military more vulnerable to Trump’s wishes to use it against domestic protesters who are exercising their personal liberties.

Judges appointed by both parties have taken a score of actions to block Trump’s executive orders and actions. And Trump has tiptoed to the edge of defying some of these court orders — while those around him suggest a purge of the judiciary. “The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” Trump’s ubiquitous sidekick, Elon Musk, posted this week. Trump has invited the world’s richest man to sabotage the federal government and to harass its workforce without any oversight by Congress and without regard to the law — an authority Musk claims is his under the “spoils of battle.”

Those spoils are apparently benefiting Musk’s own businesses. The head of Musk’s X platform allegedly threatened federal antitrust action against a company if it didn’t spend more on X, as the Wall Street Journal reports. Musk’s DOGE squad is probing payments by NASA that could impact Musk’s SpaceX business. The State Department took steps toward ordering $400 million of armored Teslas; and, as The Post reports, the Federal Aviation Administration is close to canceling a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon and instead awarding it to Musk’s Starlink.

Claiming monarchical powers, attacking the free press, starting trade wars, cutting off legal immigration, siding with despots over free countries, politicizing law enforcement and the military, assaulting the judicial system and injecting crony capitalism at the highest levels of government: These are all the very antithesis of “personal liberties and free markets.”

But don’t just take my word for it. The twin pillars of personal liberties and free markets are the hallmarks of the libertarian worldview. So I called a leading voice of that ideology, Ilya Somin, the B. Kenneth Simon chair in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute and a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. I asked him for his assessment of the current administration.

“I think, and many of us (libertarians) think, that the Trump administration is very bad on these metrics of both economic and personal liberty,” he told me. “The massive trade wars that he’s starting right and left go against Econ 101 as well as any libertarian principle. There’s the mass deportation and immigration restrictions, which restrict both economic and personal liberty on a massive scale. There’s his attacks on the freedom of the press, which are also troubling,” as is Trump’s “kissing the rear end of dictators like Vladimir Putin.”

Somin likes some of Trump’s efforts to cut regulations and taxes, but “if you look at the cumulative impact ... the horrible things Trump is doing massively outweigh many times over the good that he might do in a few areas.”

He rattled off a list of Trump’s offenses against personal liberties and free markets. The president, by circumventing Congress’s constitutional spending authority, is making the treasury “essentially the personal piggy bank of one man,” which is “extremely dangerous from the libertarian point of view.” Trump’s attempts to cut federal spending and the workforce, though laudable, “are actually pretty piddling, and some of them may even make the federal budgetary and regulatory situation worse” because of their ham-handed implementation. His takeover of independent federal agencies raises libertarian concerns because it puts massive governmental power “concentrated in the hands of one man.” His attempts to dictate school curriculums under the guise of abolishing DEI, and his discrimination against transgender people also offend libertarian principles. The GOP budget that passed the House this week with Trump’s help “will massively add to the deficit,” Somin pointed out, while doing nothing to stop the major entitlement programs, Medicare and Social Security, from “just handing out money to the nonpoor elderly or even the affluent elderly.”

Somin said the handing over of taxpayers’ personal information to unvetted members of Musk’s team violates personal liberties. Trump’s attacks on media outlets critical of him are classic “weaponization of government,” Somin added, and his packing of the Justice Department and FBI with loyalists is “scary and dangerous.” The presence of “cranks like RFK Jr.” overseeing health policy will reduce access to medicines and vaccines, which is “just a straightforward violation of libertarian principles.” And the president’s crackdown on migration is “a severe restriction on both the economic and personal liberty of native-born Americans. People who want to hire immigrants or engage in social relations with them cannot do that if those people are not allowed to enter the country.”

The professor was heavily critical of the Biden administration, too, most notably for unilaterally forgiving student loans. But “Trump is worse,” Somin said, because “under Biden there was just no equivalent to the massive assault on immigration and trade,” nor Trump’s attempt “to usurp the entire spending power from Congress.” In sum, Trump’s approach is “irreconcilable” with the principles of free markets and personal liberties.

The consequences of Trump’s illiberal actions can already be seen. Inflation has accelerated. Jobless claims jumped more than expected. Consumer confidence has slid. The stock market has been volatile. Trump’s approval numbers have inched downward.

And the backlash has begun. In scenes reminiscent of the start of the tea party movement in 2009, constituents confronted about 20 House Republicans in their districts last week over the GOP budget, which would require cuts of hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid, which provides health coverage for some 40 percent of America’s children. Some Republicans have begun to speak out against the chainsaw-wielding Musk, who has been humiliating federal workers with his extralegal demand that they send him emails justifying their existences. Rep. Troy Balderson (R-Ohio) said the situation was “getting out of control” and Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Georgia), after a run-in with angry constituents, said Musk should show more “compassion.”

The anger will increase as Americans start to feel the consequences of Musk’s lawless sabotage of the federal workforce and his willy-nilly replacement of competent leaders with unqualified hacks: FEMA unable to respond to disasters; the Forest Service unable to fight fires; parks without rangers; federal prisons without guards; rising home prices; slower tax refunds; missed benefit payments; veterans unable to access medical and even burial services; the loss of the government’s counterterrorism, aviation safety and food safety functions; and federal agencies depleted of experts to fight the bird flu.

There’s a strong case for shrinking and reorganizing the federal workforce, but it can’t be done by flagrantly violating the laws and then all but ignoring the courts when they try to put a halt to the illegality. As Somin put it: “If the president manages to essentially exempt the executive branch from being subject to judicial review and judicial orders, that’s a major step towards undermining the Constitution and authoritarianism. And that’s bad from a libertarian point of view, but really, it’s just bad for any kind of liberal democracy.”

It turns out freedom and dictatorship do not mix well.

“I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America,” Bezos wrote. I am, too. And that is why we must fight to keep Trump from destroying them.