Trump threatens personal liberty and free markets

I hope Jeff Bezos lives up to what he's saying he'll do

Jeff Bezos’ announcement that he wants to refocus the Washington Post opinion section on a defense of individual liberties and free market is being near-universally interpreted as an effort on his part to align the paper with the political right and the ascendant power of Donald Trump.

Marty Baron, the Post’s former editor and my former neighbor, slammed the decision as “craven” and said Bezos is “fearful” of Trump.

An alternate version of that theory might be that Bezos is simply angry at Democrats. After all, during Trump’s first term he upheld the editorial independence and integrity of the Post even as Trump made a number of attempts to abuse power in order to target Bezos’ business interests. For his trouble, Joe Biden elevated to a prominent position of power a young legal scholar whose claim to fame was the idea that the US government needed to try to destroy Amazon. I think the Lina Khan FTC did a number of positive things, but the antitrust case against Amazon never made any sense and fetishization of small business in general is dumb. The fact that Khan became a kind of policy celebrity on the basis of these ideas reflected a bad trend, but it wasn’t the most important thing in the world. But if I were literally the founder and owner of Amazon, I think I’d be pretty pissed about this.

Regardless, my instinct when I heard the announcement was to say that we should not leap to assume either interpretation of bad faith on Bezos’ part. Bad faith may be in play here and this may be the launch of a transformation of the opinion section into an arm of the MAGA movement.

But on their face, individual liberty and free markets are not bad causes to defend.

The libertarian magazine, Reason, is more right-wing than I am on many economic issues and also more left-wing than I am on various criminal justice issues. But it’s reliably a good read. And you’ll find there things like stories about how the Trump-appointed Acting US Attorney for DC is menacing free speech rights, how the Trump FTC appears to be contemplating a new era of anti-woke censorship, and about an alarming Montana bill that would criminalize interstate travel for the purposes of seeking an abortion.

And the Trump administration is not exactly a steadfast ally of free markets. Tariffs, or at least tariff-related bluffs, are at the core of his economic vision. Trump is against port automation because he’s buddies with a longshoreman’s union guy.

The case that I would make to Bezos, if he wants to listen to me, is that there are bad, illiberal tendencies on both the left and the right that are worth contesting on the plane of ideas. That the rule of law is an important third leg of the liberal stool, without which individualism and markets cannot stand. And that in the immediate short-term, the biggest threat to the liberal tripod is coming from Donald Trump and his administration since they are both highly illiberal and also wielding power.

The goal of a project in defense of individual liberty and free markets should be to reconstruct the power of a rational liberal center that can check Trump’s abuses while building up the liberal, market-friendly strands in the Democratic Party to avert some of the political and substantive failings of the Biden administration.

Trump is an acute threat to free markets

In a recent Free Press article, Joe Nocera hailed Trump’s tariff politics for inducing Apple to make a splashy announcement about investments in manufacturing facilities in Texas. He noted that a version of this play happened in 2018, when Apple announced domestic investments in coordination with the Trump administration.

Nocera’s explanation of why Apple did this is that “once Trump imposed his tariffs on computer parts, the company requested 15 exemptions. The administration approved 10 of them.”

So far, so good — Nocera and I completely agree. Apple is spending a non-trivial amount of time and energy on thinking about how to curry favor with Donald Trump because they want to get favorable treatment when they seek exemptions from tariffs. The difference is that Nocera, for reasons that are unclear to me, thinks that this is good. His argument is that “the American worker … wins, thanks to jobs and increased manufacturing capacity.” But anyone with a proper appreciation of how free markets work (I will gesture at Bastiat’s “What is Seen and Unseen”) could tell you that there’s no reason to think that one prominent company making a single high-profile investment is increasing the aggregate business investment in the United States.

What’s actually happening, as Michael Strain from the American Enterprise Institute told Alan Rappaport recently, is that “all the uncertainty around trade policy, uncertainty around some of the things that the Department of Government Efficiency is doing, I think will have a chilling effect on investment plans and expansion plans.”

Nocera is looking forward to a world in which all decision-making by major companies is oriented around generating positive press for Trump, and all trade policy is oriented around doing favors for high-profile companies who successfully generate positive press for Trump:

There are Wall Street analysts who are skeptical of the deal, who don’t believe Apple will ever pony up anything close to $500 billion, and it’s simply a ploy to make Trump happy. Maybe. The thing is, Apple is going to have to pony up something—and it will likely be significant. As a result, lots of other companies, with the same urgent need to get on Trump’s good side, will make similar announcements. Will General Motors bring some manufacturing back from Mexico? Will Nike start making some of its Air Jordans in the U.S. instead of China? Will Walmart begin stocking more U.S.-made goods, even if they cost a little more than products made in Vietnam? With Apple leading the way, it all seems possible.

I am less confident than Nocera that this will actually happen. But if it did happen, it would be terrible!

He’s describing a world in which companies are routinely misallocating capital for political reasons. But even worse, he’s describing a world in which the interests of small businesses and startups are systematically neglected because they don’t have the juice to make these deals. And the sign of a craven MAGA turn at the Post would be if they start running columns with this kind of thesis.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of journalists have left-wing anti-market biases that actually blind them to this category of harms. There’s a crop of liberals who see Trump’s flirtations with creating this kind of Nocera-style centrally planned economy and are jealous that Democrats struggle to pull it off.

A principled publication with a firm grounding in the theory and practice of market liberalism would be able to articulate this line of critique and educate the public — including people inside Trump’s coalition and outside of it — on some of the under-discussed dangers of his approach. Jon Chait offered a good version of this critique from the standpoint of a left-liberal deeply worried about Trump’s authoritarianism. But there’s room for more right-liberal versions that critique it on pure economics.

Personal liberty is on the line

The “personal liberty” side of Bezos’ pitch, meanwhile, is the one that aligns much more naturally with mainstream Democratic Party views.

The Trump administration has, so far, tread pretty lightly around the abortion rights issue, but there is clearly a lot of Republican Party enthusiasm for severely curtailing women’s rights.

And this is also incredibly important to the ongoing debates over LGBT issues. I think that there are significant problems with how progressives have handled the question of sex-segregated sports teams. That stems from a misapplication of a personal liberty principle — that people should be allowed to identify and live how they want — to a specific situation that involves the allocation of zero-sum slots in athletic competitions. But on the broader topic, the political right clearly wants to enact significant restrictions on trans people’s personal liberties. The Trump administration’s move to make the passport office less accommodating of trans and non-binary identifications, for example, is about inconveniencing and humiliating people with non-standard identities. It doesn’t further any core function of identifying documents. For the actual function of passports, it’s better for the text of the document to align with people’s external presentation — border security agents visually inspect people, they don’t do DNA tests.

Of course there are areas where the left has overreached on questions of personal liberty, especially in terms of excessive enthusiasm for trying to police “misinformation.” But excesses related to misinformation are symmetrical across both sides in a way that I think really does support the case for a principled defense of free speech.

In the short-term, though, threats to free speech are much more likely to come from the right, because the right is in power and people in power are the ones in a position to trample free speech. Trump mucking around with the White House press corps and trying to coerce us all into changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico are actions that deserve examination.

The liberty lens is also an important one though which to examine some of Trump’s political strong points.

It clearly doesn’t work, electorally or practically, to be so committed to individual liberty as to not have meaningful border security. But if you’re a writer or a billionaire entrepreneur, rather than an elected official, I think you ought to have some mixed feelings about this. The entire population of Venezuela obviously cannot move to the US. But as a lover of human freedom, don’t you feel kind of bad about that? Freedom of movement, for starters, is a genuine freedom. And the United States itself is a much freer society than Venezuela. If you appreciate the virtues of free markets, you’ll understand that labor mobility has potentially enormous economic benefits. The pure opportunism of Trump’s approach doesn’t seem like the right answer, and the demagoguery of his approach is unseemly. This is exactly the kind of thing that responsible elites should push back against, even while trying to avoid the mistakes of Biden’s first three years in office.

The third leg of the stool

Last, but not least, I think a central question of our time is whether things like individual liberty and free markets can be sustained without a commitment to the rule of law.

One of the premises of DOGE seems to be that spending cuts are so desirable that they need to be achieved by any means necessary rather than working through the established legislative process. I do not think that a sober-minded evaluation of the relevant history and political science would support that conclusion. This is especially true because it’s not like we need to wait for “the long term” to see how executive branch unilateralism can undermine the foundations of a free society. We already saw many prosecutors — including solid conservatives — resign their offices rather than see the Department of Justice let Eric Adams off the hook for corruption as part of a political deal.

It’s just very challenging to have a free society without any effort to secure the neutral application of criminal law.

It is true that things seem to work more or less okay in Singapore, which is probably, in part, due to the fact that such a tiny country is very dependent on international trade and migration and wouldn’t really function at all if it weren’t well-run. The relative economic success of the People’s Republic of China also does indicate that authoritarianism can prosper more than many people used to believe. But that is very much not an example of a society that respects individual liberty. Nor is Vladimir Putin’s Russia or other regimes that Trump seems to support, admire, and want to see the United States align with politically.

There are great publications out there, like the Bulwark and the Unpopulist, whose founders originated on the neocon and libertarian strands of the right and are now firmly in the anti-MAGA camp because of Trump’s consistent assaults on the rule of law. There are also publications like The Rebuild trying to push progressives in a more abundance-and-markets direction.

At the same time, I think a lot of mainstream Democrats have maybe been excessively blind to the ways in which some of the Biden administration’s regulatory agencies struck fairly sober-minded businessmen as closer to the Trump model than many of us would like to admit. Trying to bring all these strands together and chart a course to bring more stability to enforcement and policymaking could be a really useful project.

And it would be extremely powerful for a wealthy and successful entrepreneur like Bezos to make a clear statement that living in a stable, law-oriented democracy is ultimately more important than getting a good deal on the corporate tax rate.

Can the center hold?

Maybe all this is wishful thinking. I have zero insight into Bezos’s thought processes or private opinions.

What I do know is that something a little weird seems to be going on with certain tech CEOs. Bezos is rich, and like a lot of rich guys, he has made some large charitable contributions. A rich person has a lot of options for giving away money, and Bezos didn’t opt to build America’s grandest opera house, he started a major conservation organization. A conservation organization that does a lot of good work, but that I think also made some unwise grants to far-left organizations.

Similarly, it’s not just that Mark Zuckerberg took a kind of MAGA pivot after the election. In the very recent past, he was funding politically dicey left-wing criminal justice reform and immigration causes. One of their grants was to train ex-cons to become advocates for soft on crime policies. And I think it’s not just fine, but actually good that some tech industry leaders have reconsidered the wisdom of this kind of approach. But in its post-SJW phase, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s main focus is on scientific research. Surely the people who care a lot about that cause have some opinion about the way the Trump administration is taking a hatchet to scientific research funding.

If Katie Britt can speak up about this, why not Zuckerberg?

This all leads me to worry that some of our top business leaders have decided we’re in an irreparable polarization dynamic, where they must choose between an anti-capitalist left and a fascist right.

And I just don’t think that’s true. It’s true that if you make the case for a humane, prosperous society that features individual liberty and market capitalism and democracy and the rule of law, you’ll get yelled at from diverse quarters. But that’s the individual liberty part of it! Maybe Bezos really has gone full MAGA and all this talk is just cover for it. But I hope that’s wrong. Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to liberal values, broadly construed, and those values could badly use a more vocal defense, including from people who agree with Trump about some stuff.