Three reasons Ezra Klein will not become a libertarian

Over at Cato, Michael Cannon tells us that Ezra Klein will become a libertarian.  As evidence, he cites the following passage by Klein:

The thing I’ve changed my mind most on in politics in recent years is how destructive bad regulations can be and how seriously I take it now when I hear that regulations or rules are ill-constructed.

I think I used to have what in my view is a pretty standard liberal response. I was saying, of course, some regulations could be bad, but look at these studies. We made the air a lot cleaner. We do a cost-benefit analysis. There’s always exceptions to the rule, but I sort of assume most of this stuff works.

And now I don’t. I have followed up, and really dug in, on the details of how enough projects have worked or not worked in government — what happened with California high-speed rail, what it takes to modernize digital government — that I am much more skeptical — not of regulation but of a lot of existing regulations.

My belief about how much stupidity and procedural crust can exist now in government in places for very long periods of time, that people are just laboring under. And it’s not gotten to the point that creates a crisis, but it eventually could. Housing being a good example of this.

I’ve really changed the way I approach that. I think that a lot of liberals, and certainly a lot of the politics I came up in, kind of felt like the Right attacks government and so you have to defend it — and you look for ways to defend it. And it’s not where I am now. And I think I found myself more frustrated and then ultimately quite angry at the way the Democratic Party became just the defenders of institutions — and not the reformers of them — in a way that required not really admitting how badly they were working.

Klein calls himself an “abundance liberal”.  He is a strong believer in innovation and sees the private sector as a critical source of new ideas and new products.  He also believes in government provision of public goods.  When regulation gets in the way of innovation, or government fails to provide public goods, he gets upset, quite understandably in my view (although see an interesting dissent here). 

Nonetheless, I think there are at least three good reasons to take Klein at his word, three reasons to think he will remain an abundance liberal and not become a libertarian in any plausible sense of that word.  These are, in fact, the three reasons most people will not become libertarians.

First, Klein cares about the disadvantaged.  If you care about the disadvantaged, it is very difficult to be a libertarian.  Libertarians in the strict sense (the Nozickian sense) think that the plight of the disadvantaged counts for literally nothing when we are deciding what the government should do.  What matters is that the government respects property and contract rights.  If providing a poor, sick child with health insurance requires us to violate the property rights of some rich people (by taxing them, say), then the poor, sick child is just out of luck.  Klein doesn’t believe that, and there is no reason to think his frustration with the regulatory state will lead him to throw sick children under the libertarian bus.

Second, Klein cares about state capacity.  He wants to make government more effective at doing things that are worth doing, not just prevent it from doing things that are harmful or wasteful.  Doing things well is inconsistent with strict libertarianism, at least when the “doing” involves any infringement of property or contract rights, as strict libertarians understand them.

Of course, not all libertarians are strict libertarians.  Some people are libertarians for pragmatic reasons.  They believe that government tends to make things worse rather than better, and that the most effective way to prevent government from acting in harmful ways is to support a limited role for government.  Some pragmatic libertarians tell us they care about state capacity, the ability of the state to solve important economic problems.  Conceivably, Klein could be a “state capacity libertarian”. 

There are problems with applying even this weaker definition of “libertarian” to Klein.  First, it is not clear why we would call a person who supports government protection for the disadvantaged and effective provision of public goods a “libertarian” in any sense.  This seems like an abuse of language.  Using Klein’s label – calling him an abundance liberal – seems much more consistent with ordinary usage, and thus less likely to cause confusion.

Second, I see little evidence that many self-identified libertarians really care about improving state capacity.  For example, Tyler Cowen, director of the Mercatus Center and the originator of the phrase “state capacity libertarianism” recently linked to some research and advocacy pieces by Mercatus authors that purport to offer useful advice to Elon Musk and his Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE).  I may have missed something, but as far as I can see none of the research and advocacy Cowen points to reflects any concern for state capacity; instead, it’s deregulation and spending cuts all the way down.  Some of the ideas Cowen points to may in fact make sense, but even a pragmatic libertarian like Cowen seems overwhelmingly concerned with limiting government, not with making government more effective.  Klein is not a state capacity libertarian of this sort.

Third, Klein is not willing to be a coalition partner of xenophobes, racists, and nationalist authoritarians.  Libertarianism has never been and has no prospect of becoming a popular political philosophy.  As a result, libertarians need to find political teammates who disagree with them on questions of economic policy.  Libertarians typically seek political power by allying with social reactionaries of various stripes.  Sometimes they do this openly, as Rothbard notoriously did (here); sometimes they claim to disapprove of the fact that so many people on their team have retrograde social views.  But the point is that if you abhor reactionary social movements, being a libertarian in a realist political sense – in the sense of supporting the actual political coalition that is most likely to push for limited government – is going to require you to hold your nose tightly and to swallow very, very hard.  I would be quite surprised if Klein will ever be willing to do this, at least under non-exigent circumstances.