There are corresponding changes in what old age is, and what living older is like. As our lives extend and the quality of our lives continues to improve, there are shifts in our understanding of a normal life cycle: how long we should work, when we should start families, how long individuals can live independently, and what the age thresholds should be for Social Security and Medicare.

As birth rates decline globally, the cost of having children continues to increase, and families wait longer to have children, we will be forced to rethink aging. Our workforce will be grayer, retirements will need to be pushed back, and we will have to accept leaders in all walks of life who are much older than previous generations would have accepted. Since the elderly have more economic power and vote with greater frequency, we can expect our political classes to gray. But this is not a simple transition, because aging still means the prospect of diminished capacity, energy, and ability.

In fact, we just recently had a stark contrast between two widely known, older public figures who served in very prominent leadership roles but with now very different legacies that illustrate some difficult decisions we will be forced to make about the place of the elderly in America. At the ripe old age of 94, Warren Buffett, the greatest investor of all time, recently announced to a stunned audience at the annual shareholder meeting for Berkshire Hathaway that he would be stepping down as CEO. The group sat silently after he told them the news and then erupted in appreciative applause for the billions in wealth he had created for his shareholders and society at large.

Buffett’s long-time partner, Charlie Munger, passed away at 99 just a year before the announcement, and the two of them had overseen an increase in Berkshire’s stock to the tune of 5,502,284 percent from 1960 (when Buffett took control of the company) to today. If you’d invested 100 dollars in the company in 1960, it would now be worth about 5.5 million. Their performance as investors is unmatched in the modern world. While everyone in the audience knew that eventually Buffett would have to step down, no one was clamoring for it. The surprise among the attendees reflected that.

Contrast this with the end of the Biden presidency as seen through the first of several upcoming books about the Weekend at Bernie’s nature of his term in office. Biden entered office as the oldest president ever (until 2024), and while there were vague concerns about his energy level and engagement, those were set aside in the wake of the mishandling of the COVID pandemic by the first Trump administration, and the fact that Biden was able to “campaign” in relative seclusion because of the pandemic policies of lockdowns and isolation. In short, America didn’t get a full picture of Biden physically or mentally, and voted retrospectively to reject Trump.

As more and more information becomes public, it’s increasingly clear that Biden had lost the physical and mental abilities to be president well before the 2024 election. A small group of advisors shielded him from the media and other political leaders. The media itself was complicit in the cover-up. Rather than questioning if the president was up for the job, coverage served to push a narrative of capacity and leadership that simply didn’t reflect reality.

In theory, the Constitution has been amended to deal with instances in which the president is incapacitated or unable to serve. After the assassination of President Kennedy, Congress began work on drafting an amendment to handle such an event. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was passed in 1967, and there are two key elements to it. The first is known as Section 3. This part of the amendment allows the president to delegate his power to the vice president for a temporary period because he believes he will be unable to serve due to a medical procedure. Presidents Reagan, W. Bush, and Biden were among the presidents who have temporarily granted their VPs presidential powers for surgeries. There is also Section 4, which has never been used. Section 4 states that if the VP and Cabinet deem the president unable to serve, they must inform Congress, which must vote within 21 days to potentially strip the sitting president of the office if all agree he cannot adequately serve.

But neither Section 3 nor Section 4 is relevant for the Biden case. He clearly was beyond temporarily incapacitated, but the actions of his staff throughout the second part of his term completely precluded applying Section 4 as well. Would Vice President Harris and the Cabinet have agreed in 2023, after all of them were arguing vociferously that Biden was fit to serve, that in fact they’d been lying all along and he wasn’t? Would two-thirds of Congress, which would have necessitated a number of Democratic votes, have agreed? Absolutely not. Instead, Biden drifted into a gray zone, not unlike an older grandparent one sees at Thanksgiving or Christmas. He was someone who could still occasionally tell a good story, complain about refereeing during the holiday football game, and pleasantly share a meal; however, he certainly wasn’t someone you’d want with the nuclear codes or managing complex policy. 

In short, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a black and white, yes-or-no way to deal with a president in a coma or with an obvious medical condition. Since even Biden’s doctors were claiming he was “fit to serve,” the cause for invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment would have led to a national crisis and partisan war.

Buffett was a fully engaged leader of a company worth more than $355 billion. He was constantly being tested by the challenges that emerged from being in the market. If his acumen and abilities were slipping, his colleagues and investors would have been pressured by market forces to make changes. And certainly, politics is not something that can be phoned in. Presidents have myriad responsibilities, and the job famously grays the hair of the young men who have assumed the office in recent years. And yet if a president loses it mentally while in office, we have no reason to believe we have the institutional means to address it, because we just saw that the available safeguards failed. Those around Biden who were shielding him held onto power and ignored their responsibilities to the American republic, focusing instead on their own self-interest.

The architects of our political and social institutions have focused almost exclusively on preventing individuals who are too young from having a significant influence on policy and politics. The American Founders set a minimum age for being president, for example. Conservative thinkers have long valued experience and wisdom.

Perhaps the best-known example of this was Hayek’s suggestion that there should be an upper chamber of a legislature stocked with older leaders, for an extended term which would insulate it from political pressures. Hayek believed, we can now naively see, that older individuals would be more statesman-like, above the fray of petty political fights with the longer wisdom of age.

How much have our views changed about who is “old” and who isn’t? In Hayek’s three-volume work Law, Legislation and Liberty, he proposes a legislature in which all the entering members would be 45 years old and serve 15 years until they are sixty. The citizens who would elect them would also be 45 years old. The practical effect would be to allow each age cohort to have representation in the congress for 15 years. Hayek believed that after 60, we couldn’t count on legislators to govern effectively. While he didn’t have a maximum age per se, his thinking was that the older generation would pass the torch and stroll gracefully into the sunset.

Consider the number of individuals currently serving in our legislatures who would be disqualified under such a system. The average age of the US Senate today is now 64, and that’s actually down from the past few years, as older Senators have died and left office. Politicians are living longer and holding onto office longer. Chuck Grassley is 91. Would Mitch McConnell really be stepping aside were it not for obvious health issues? How long would Dianne Feinstein have served had the same circumstances forced her to announce her retirement before she died in office? We certainly don’t face a crisis of youth and inexperience in our political leadership. After Biden, the American electorate chose Donald Trump again, who began his term older than Biden was when he entered the Oval Office. Americans are choosing to stick with our geriatric rulers.

Since we don’t see any end to this trend, what are the alternatives? What should liberty-oriented individuals think about this? Many people reflexively point to term limits as a solution, and proposals for them were very popular in the late twentieth century. But as the public increasingly selects older office holders, are such ideas feasible or likely? It seems to me they are not.

I can envision several ideas that might help. The first would be a mandatory neurological assessment for any president, regardless of age. Alzheimer’s symptoms can begin to appear in individuals as young as 50. It seems highly prudent to demand that individuals who command the world’s largest military submit to a regular exam administered by a cross-section of leading physicians to prevent having an obviously compromised leader in the White House again. We also should require that the entirety of the president’s annual physical examination be made public, and presidents should be required to disclose any long-term conditions that might undermine their ability to lead. Finally, we could apply criminal penalties to those hiding those conditions in the White House staff or to the presidents themselves. At first glance, this may seem drastic, but it could also be necessary to prevent another repeat of the debacle of Biden’s family and staff carting him out in public for embarrassing episodes and then vociferously claiming he was vigorous and capable.

At some point, we are very likely to face another administration like the one we just endured, in which a clearly incapable, elderly, mentally compromised individual will be entrusted with the presidency. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment seems designed to deal with a crisis, not a slow decline in the cognitive ability of the president. Short of the above-mentioned institutional changes, we are facing the same questions about our presidents as we do about our aging parents and grandparents. Some of them voluntarily give up their car keys and move into senior living. Others do not. Some can make these choices with reasonable judgment, and some families have to convince their parents to change their lives.

Politicians are not angels, and the Founders knew this. They are ambitious, self-interested people, just like Warren Buffett. We can’t count on them wisely handing over power. We need both a more robust way to assess how our leaders are doing and a way to address when they are not up to the job. Otherwise, we may get another “Weekend at Biden’s” presidency, and the results may be even worse than the ones we are experiencing now.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.

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Military cooperation between Moscow and North Korea dates back to the end of World War II when the Soviets re-armed their comrades in the northern part of the peninsula, which helped precipitate the Korean War. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we now know that Stalin and the Soviets were not only arms suppliers to the North Koreans; they were also encouraging the regime to attack and continue the war, extending its violence and destruction to fit the USSR’s global goals and ends.

So it is not at all a coincidence that North Koreans are now dying for another Russian geographic expansion, but I think that it might be very useful for the West to consider the case of Korea when we think about the conflict in Ukraine. The fallout from the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which are now widely viewed as failures, have tainted the case of American intervention abroad, and of course the shadow of Vietnam still looms large over American foreign policy. But interestingly, Korea is rarely mentioned by hawks or doves, even though it bears a remarkable resemblance to the Ukraine conflict, and offers a different lesson than those widely cited as foreign policy failures.

Similar to the conclusion of the Korean War, in Ukraine it increasingly looks as if both sides will have to accept something neither wanted—a divided country (although one can perhaps argue Russia will get more of what it desired albeit several significant, embarrassing failures along the way). This division will obviously come at an extremely high material, psychological, and existential cost to Ukraine and Ukrainians, but it will end the war. And perhaps most importantly, it will give Ukraine the opportunity to achieve the same economic and political miracle that South Korea accomplished while living side-by-side with a totalitarian regime.

Beginning with Washington’s Farewell Address, there has been a long line of American political thought that argues for a much less active US foreign policy. And certainly our recent experiences in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to steer previously totalitarian, anti-American regimes towards freer and more open societies have much to do with that now increasingly popular view. Those interventions were in countries that lacked the popular will or basic capacity to improve their governance and economic performance. And yet the US is not very much involved in Ukraine, albeit without boots on the ground. If we wish to avoid a similar embarrassment to the one the US experienced as we rushed out of Afghanistan, we might well consider whether there is any hope of making Ukraine a better place in the long term, considering the enormous economic resources we have invested there.

We all bring an ideological lens to these discussions, and if one clips the data from Vietnam to the present, it does look as if the US is unable to do much good by intervening. World War II is one of those cases that still stands the test of time (despite Tucker Carlson’s best efforts). But what exactly are we to make of Korea?

The ground-level contexts look strikingly similar. The Korean peninsula and the Ukraine/Russian frontier and cultures were both historically fluid and without sharp distinctions. Odessa was and is neither Russian nor Ukrainian, and even today, many on both sides of the 38th parallel would like to see a unified Korea; they have essentially shared languages and had long-standing religious and ethnic ties. Pushing the comparison even further, throughout Korea there were many individuals in the south and north who supported the idea of a collective society, just as in Ukraine there was much more sympathy for Russia prior to the invasion.

One side in each conflict had recently gone through an extensive military upgrade and sensed weakness in their targets. The North Koreans had received Soviet armor and aircraft giving them a technological advantage over their cousins to the South. In the lead up to the Ukraine invasion, the Russians had recently completed a very public project of allegedly modernizing their military, which they seemed anxious to display to the world against a target.

Globally, the East and West were both sending very mixed and easily mistaken signals to each other prior to the Korean and Ukraine wars. Recall the various analysts, journalists, and politicians who swore Russia would not invade Ukraine even as troops were massed on the border? Advocates of non-interventionism now claim that the US had been provocative, but many in the US were bewildered to discover that the Russians believed this. Clearly not everyone was on the same page.

The same was true in Korea. The US had internally and publicly spent little time worrying about a communist action on the peninsula and the US was in the midst of winding down its military, although a hawkish wing of the foreign policy establishment was looking for a reason to reverse that stance. They were about to be given a strong argument for rearmament.

Both wars began in a similar fashion with the aggressors enjoying early and seemingly invincible successes. The Russians marched to Kiev and the North Koreans punched past the 38th parallel conquering Seoul and essentially isolating the remnants of the South Korean military and the initial flow of US troops in a tiny area on the southern tip of Korea. In both instances, the conventional wisdom was that the winning side would complete its victory in no time and resistance was both futile and wasteful.

And yet, neither conflict has ended as it began. From the moment President Zelensky in Ukraine (who shares a number of personality traits with former South Korean president Syngman Rhee) uttered his famous line about not needing a ride but a gun and some ammunition, the Russians began to suffer numerous public setbacks. In Korea, the audacity of General MacArthur, along with Western aid and military assistance, eventually stemmed the North Korean advances, along with bravery and tremendous sacrifices by the two nations that were attacked. While the initial resistance of the South Korean military was feeble and futile as the war progressed, they became more professional and stouter. Surprisingly, the South Korean military today is widely viewed as superior to the conventional forces in the North.

Over the past several years, we have seen the Ukrainian military and intelligence forces essentially revolutionize modern warfare. Whether it was their early, wildly successful embrace of drone warfare or their bold strikes into Russia itself, the Ukrainians have shown themselves to be worthy, if outnumbered, adversaries.

While both the Ukrainians and international forces in South Korea would reverse their initial losses and push well into the captured territory and even into the aggressor’s land, both wars have settled into bloody grinds. In the remarkably sad case of Korea, this coincided with a protracted negotiation over prisoner exchanges and the specifics of the settlement to the conflict. That delay cost tens of thousands of lives.

Of course, merely identifying parallels and comparisons doesn’t really tell us much about how the Ukraine conflict will end or how the next several decades will go for its social, political, and economic future. But because of the stunning natural experiment between North and South Korea, we can say a few things.

First, it’s entirely possible that Ukraine can regroup, rebuild, thrive, and prosper. Negotiating for its safety and autonomy will be critical, and either NATO or the US will have to guarantee that security for this to work. That’s no small ask, but the case of Korea shows that it is possible. Korea has grown into a mature, albeit quirky, democracy and a showcase for economic development and cultural success. Ask any young person to name their favorite K-Pop band or K drama and you’ll be surprised by the diversity of the answers. South Korea is an undeniable success in the history of American foreign policy. That should give us hope for Ukraine.

Second, Ukraine may have had a shared and somewhat warm view of Russia throughout its history, but today those feelings are buried in the rubble of destroyed buildings and the blood shed by its people. The war has made Ukraine a more unified nation, and one that needs a chance to recover and see what it can do unburdened by a war against a much larger and more powerful neighbor. While the US may want this war to end, we did lengthen it. I would argue Ukraine has earned the right to at least try to build a freer, democratic, pro-market country under the rule of law. The Ukrainians have sacrificed more than enough for that opportunity.

And while many of us who support liberty are right to be skeptical about the ability of the US and its military to reshape the world, in some instances, it has made things “better.” World War II was catastrophic for Europe and Japan, and yet those two parts of the world have been lynchpins for freedom and the Western way of life. In Korea, the South is clearly a successful experiment, especially when compared to the prison camp on its northern border. Even the former Yugoslavia is now peaceful after the US and UN helped facilitate a complicated, bloody transition.

It’s not clear how well Ukraine will do after this war ends, and how long its current leadership will survive. But with some sort of a security commitment from the West, reconstructing Ukraine might very well work. We’ve seen it work under equally challenging circumstances. Intervention should be a last resort, but we have to accept that US support for regimes fighting off totalitarianism has had some success. Even direct military intervention is not always a messy failure. We shouldn’t ignore all of the evidence merely to satisfy our priors. We do so at the risk of errors and the costs of millions who would otherwise live under tyranny and oppression. That’s an empirical, not a normative statement. Using a more rational approach might help us stem the bloodshed and promote the development of a better regime in Europe. The war should end, but perhaps that really is just the beginning.

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The men who first ventured into space were no mere mortals. The late Tom Wolfe has mostly slipped out of our consciousness, but perhaps no author could better capture and articulate the zeitgeist of the space age. In his first major book, The Right Stuff, he tried to explain the early participants in America’s space program. Virtually all of them began as military test pilots, who had mortality rates that were frankly terrifying. The first few chapters of the novel discuss the experiences of Pete Conrad’s wife, Jane, living with the constant fear of her husband’s death as he pursued a career as a military test pilot.

Wolfe explains to his readers in graphic detail the gruesome, sudden, and frequent deaths that test pilots suffered during this era. He notes that during bad stretches, squadrons of these aviators would sometimes experience more than 20 percent death rates due to crashes and malfunctions as they consciously tried to “push the envelope” of the performance limitations of their new aircraft. They were thrill seekers and socialized exclusively together because virtually no other living people could understand the risks they were taking and the constant looming specter of sudden death. It was so common they had a tradition: when one died the others would don their bridge coats—a heavily decorated, ornate, aristocratic jacket —and wear them to the funerals of their fallen comrades. It was a ritual to honor bravery and sacrifice that few of us are drawn to, but collectively, we all need people to do it.

Those early Apollo astronauts were selected from this group partially because they were deemed to be the best pilots and also because they did not fear the enormous risks associated with strapping oneself on top of a large collection of explosives and doing something humans had scarcely dreamt of doing for millennia—traveling to the stars. It took extraordinary skill, real courage, and a very distinct personality to assume those risks and pursue those goals.

The second theme was that space exploration was a national endeavor, promoted by politicians, funded and researched by governments staffed by those modern-day warriors and demigods whom Wolfe unveiled and made real. Locked in a Cold War and fueled by the excessive military capacity the US still carried after World War II and continued to fund in our armaments race with the USSR, America set its sights on going to the moon to “beat” the Russians and establish our scientific and marshal superiority over our competitors. It was a pursuit of national greatness and pride.

That success in being the first nation to make it to the moon—and again it was not an individual accomplishment but rather the work of a community—galvanized the country around the engineers and scientists at NASA along with the brave, courageous souls who piloted those rockets, including those who died in testing and accidents along the way. It was an adventure that we could share as Americans.

Now, space seems very different, both in terms of the who and the why. While we are not engaged in a hot war directly against Russia, neither government has the interest or capacity to begin another space race. Rather, the two countries still weirdly share some international space goals. Recently, American and Russian astronauts traveled together into space because of problems with America’s new planned space vehicle designed by Boeing, the company that makes airplane doors with minds of their own and engines that mostly work.

While NASA isn’t as controversial as, say, the Department of Education or the CDC, at the moment it is hardly the revered institution that put Americans on the moon. Part of the shine came off NASA when the Challenger exploded after liftoff in 1986, killing its crew, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Then the shuttle Columbia had a heat shield failure in 2003 which killed all seven of its crew. Since those tragedies, the agency has seen its funding cut and its mission meander. Space slipped out of the national consciousness, along with the institutions that took us there. The military seemed to refocus on fighting here on Earth and pilots were replaced by Navy Seals hunting down Osama Bin Laden. The stars lost their luster as the national attention span shifted to more urgent issues.

And then, slowly, the focus began to return to outer space, but it was not the government who pointed us there. Nor was it heroic individuals risking their lives to travel to other planets. No, it was engineers, people of science, and geeks, some of whom had made billions in tech and other businesses. As the private sector replaces government monopolies over communication (remember Ma Bell’s monopoly or the necessity of the USPS?) and people flee public schools for private options and homeschooling, we have seen the same phenomenon in space. The nerdy engineers who can comprehend the challenges of space travel, as well as glimpse the commercial possibilities, are now the driving force behind the next space boom.

Although the engineers still haven’t quite achieved the mythical hero status of the first generation of American astronauts, they are making progress. On October 13, the space exploration company owned by the never-dull Elon Musk performed one of the most remarkable, borderline magical things most of us have ever witnessed, as long as you don’t let your political or personal views of him distort your perception. A tower equipped with mechanical fingers (or chopsticks, claws, or whatever term you prefer) caught a solid rocket booster from a SpaceX launch and placed it safely on the ground, where it could be reconditioned and used again.

Publicly, Musk has said that his substantial investments in space technology are to achieve a plausible human colony on Mars. But he has also invested heavily in this business because he knows he can make money doing it. Shooting satellites into space is something for which both the public and private sectors pay good money. Musk himself has a satellite Internet business that his space business supports in the short term, and the government contracts he can get by serving as a reliable alternative to NASA/Boeing have made the business profitable and highly valued by market analysts who can envision a lucrative future for a company that can reuse rockets and transport increasingly large payloads into orbit.

And Musk is not the only billionaire getting into the space business. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and serial entrepreneur Richard Branson are also developing space travel vehicles. Bezos spoke to Lex Fridman about why he started a space company. His explanation was that he and all of the other tech gazillionaires have made their fortunes on the Internet infrastructure that many tech pioneers in the ’60s and ’70s built through their efforts and investments. At least for himself, that’s his purpose, to make space commercially viable for the next generation of entrepreneurs. Rather than a “Bond villain” model of developing space travel, Bezos believes he’s building the new Internet.

But how quickly costs will come down and allow other small-scale entrepreneurs to take advantage of their groundbreaking work is pure speculation at this point. Compared to NASA during the days of the Apollo moon missions and later the Space Shuttle, costs have dropped from tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram to SpaceX’s costs at about $1,500 per kilogram. The business model emphasizes reusable rockets that are much less expensive to build. While Musk himself has a stated goal of lowering costs to $10 per kilogram, a market analysis by Citibank from 2022 estimates that costs will probably be somewhere between $30 and $300 per kilogram each launch depending on how durable the reusable rockets turn out to be. Nonetheless, that is a remarkable decline in costs.

But is this a good way for billionaires to be using their wealth? Is it preferable to investing their wealth here on Earth in so-called “noble causes”? The critique of private space companies by many on the left is frequently that those billions could be better spent helping the poor or other philanthropic goals. Of course, the Hayekian answer to that question is we don’t know. Predictions about outcomes based on investments are speculative, but there are two points in favor of the space billionaires overusing public money in the pursuit of opening up space. First, the billionaires have track records building successful institutions and seeing market opportunities. That doesn’t mean private sector investment is always right—take the Segway as a good example of that. But they have done it before.

The second reason is that private money is much more agile and responsive than public money. When space exploration is driven by private actors and investors rather than bureaucrats, market signals will be received by people with a vested interest in acting upon them. Bezos, Musk, and Branson have experience with building on successes and ending failures. Bureaucracies rarely die and aren’t nearly as innovative as the private sector.

Where will all this investment in space lead? Can we compare this kind of leap forward to the breakthroughs when railroads could transport goods across countries or ships over the vast oceans? It opens up new, unimaginable possibilities and opportunities for exploration and commercial growth. This isn’t merely about living on Mars, it’s about how to leverage the commercial needs of the Earth with the unknown opportunities that space will almost certainly provide.

Whether you think of Musk as a Bond villain or a hero, he is almost certainly something far more practical and single-minded: he’s a serial entrepreneur. He sees market opportunities and, as his wealth expands, he takes larger risks and pushes boundaries. All of his large bets are still peanuts compared to what Chuck Yeager and John Glenn did. But make no mistake, all of them will be large parts of the histories of space travel that will be written in the future—a future that government agencies could never imagine or nations fully control.

A skeptic might reasonably ask if this new space race will generate anything like the enormous sense of national pride that NASA created during the Apollo days. It’s important to remember that today a significant portion of the population does not view the nation favorably. It might be a lot to ask of private space companies, run by recently active political allies of President Trump, to help unify the nation.

Even though America and its military heroes are no longer leading us into space during some costly competition with a foreign rival, Americans, individually as entrepreneurs and innovators, are leading the way into space instead. While intellectuals, college faculty, and media talking heads may not be proud of the nation or its economic model that has created the wealth to get us here, most Americans still are. Those individuals will view SpaceX and Blue Origin as signs of America’s continuing international leadership. The stunning success of America’s social and economic model has created the conditions for this new space adventure. I think that speaks volumes to what is very much right and better about our country now than it was in the ’60s and ’70s. Our economic growth model has created what promises to be a remarkable future and one that continues to show what wealth creation and imagination can build. The era of national control over space is over. What we and future generations will do in space is a story we will write ourselves.

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Most of the alternatives like radiation and chemotherapy aren’t picnics. The general principle behind both approaches is that killing the cancer means killing a lot of other good cells and tissue along the way. Unless either treatment is applied very carefully by well-trained professionals who know what they are doing, have compassion, and understand the limits and tolerance levels of their patients the medicine can, possibly, be just as bad as the disease.

El Salvador has had a very bad case of social cancer for a while now—namely, it has had a chronic violence and crime problem. Long ranked as the most dangerous country in the Western hemisphere, daily life in El Salvador was dominated by crime gangs. Now the reflexive tendency in Latin America, not without reason, is to assume this involves drugs. And without question, El Salvador has narco trafficking.

But criminals also specialize, much like doctors, and El Salvador’s government and civil society had failed to address a rising tide of criminal gangs who pursued their profits and power the old-fashioned way through extortion, kidnapping, robbery, and violence. It made living in El Salvador very difficult, particularly for working people, so-called “clase trabajador” or the blue-collar working class. Paying off the thug on the corner of your block to simply go to work without being beaten or killed wears on people much like cancer. It forces them to accept harsh medicine that normally they would not consider. But such treatments can sometimes be as bad as the disease.

Misunderstanding Bukele

Nayib Bukele was elected president of El Salvador and began serving in 2019. His background is interesting. His family was in the advertising industry, and they produced election ads for the dominant left-wing party coalition. He was first elected mayor of the nation’s capital, San Salvador, prior to winning the presidency. As mayor, he initiated a series of policies to try to mitigate crime, which was far and away the most salient issue for voters. Some of his opponents and certain members of the US State Department accused him of negotiating with gangs to lower the violence levels to maintain the peace. Whether or not this is true, he pursued policies of placing security cameras and lights throughout the capital. But neither of these developments made much of a dent in the crime situation.

Bukele was a popular mayor and identified as a rising national political star, much to the chagrin of the ruling members of the left-wing coalition to which he belonged. When he expressed some ambition for the presidency, his party responded by attacking him and passing him over for national office. He was eventually ousted from the coalition after a rather public and open conflict with some of his fellow party leaders. Bukele is an opportunist and sensing an opening he created a new political group: “Nuevas Ideas.” The party’s platform was focused on decreasing gang influence, but most of the proposals were relatively tame and conventional. He proposed public works projects for youths to reduce gang participation, increasing government spending on education, and redistributive efforts to reduce inequality. These are the sort of normal prescriptions you’d get from the experts at the international development agencies.

His background in PR and political skills shone in the 2019 presidential campaign. He effectively used his ouster from the party to distance himself from it and the other dominant parties and run an outsider campaign that targeted the corrupt status quo. When he won a majority of the votes, he became the first such “outsider” to win the office since the mid-1980s.

But as president, he pivoted and began more aggressively attacking the gangs. Gangs in El Salvador surprisingly have their roots in the US. Salvadoran immigrants got involved in illegal activities in the US and started to establish criminal enterprises back home. While the US has a fairly robust legal system and law enforcement mechanism, El Salvador and most of Central America do not. Policing is poor, civil society is weak, and rule of law is virtually non-existent. The gangs thrived, like an invasive species.

Bukele began his term by trying to disrupt gang finances and policing well-known areas where the gangs extorted money from locals throughout the country. He also rehashed many of the public works proposals he tried as mayor. None of that solved the problem, so Bukele decided to change to a much more radical and aggressive form of medicine.

He began increasing the armaments of the police and the military and putting the nation’s prisons on lockdown. Prisons are very different in Latin America than they are in the Western world as Brown University economist David Skarbek has very elegantly explained in his book The Puzzle of Prison Order in which he compares the way that different prisons are administered throughout the world. Historically, in countries that lacked the state capacity and resources to have “professional” prisons, incarceration was a sort of co-production good run by the guards but also by the prisoners themselves. Prisoners don’t want to live in chaos, so they actually have an incentive to help organize the institutions. However, that autonomy has natural consequences—prisoners get a lot more space to continue to pursue criminal activities within and outside their cells. Markets emerge within the prisons and revenue streams are created.

Salvador’s prisons were no different, so Bukele decided to attack the cancer of gangs by “locking down” the prisons and limiting visitors and outside contacts to cut off the revenue streams. Additional officers and troops were used to accomplish this, and he continued to divert resources to the armed forces and police to grow their capacity preparing for something bolder if needed. He also began to selectively use emergency declarations. He suspended rules and constitutional protections as treatment for this disease of the gangs. A conflict was brewing, but whatever thin respect for rules, norms, and civil rights was shrinking.

Eventually the gangs had an outburst of violence and Bukele seized the opportunity to round up tens of thousands of suspected gang members in a nationwide sweep led by his military and police. He packed these individuals into a newly built prison that was unlike any other in the region. Stacked on top of one another and essentially deprived of most of their civil liberties, the prisoners have been locked away for several years. However the violence and crime rates in the country, unsurprisingly, have cratered. El Salvador is now one of the safest countries in the hemisphere and Bukele is a rock star in his country. How popular is he?

The Salvadoran constitution prohibits presidents from serving consecutive terms in office. But the country had become accustomed to the idea that Bukele was above the constitution, which was widely viewed as having failed at effectively governing the country. Last year a group of the country’s judges ruled he could run again for president, and he won an overwhelming victory, even in the face of the normal political turbulence for sitting politicians in Latin America. Corruption charges, allegations of negotiations with the gangs, the Covid pandemic, and even the adoption of Bitcoin as the nation’s currency did nothing to dissuade voters from re-electing him in a landslide.

Strong-Man History

Just this week his party, which won a supermajority in the Salvadoran legislature, has voted to allow more rapid changes to the constitution, which will in effect give Bukele more autonomy and power to shape the existing rules of the nation’s political system. It’s not outside the realm of possibility he will amend the constitution to run for president again and stay in power indefinitely.

The great American philosopher Alfred E Neuman was famous for his expression that was summarized by the phrase “What, me worry?” He graced the front page of Mad Magazine posed in various crisis situations. Many Salvadorans, and those of the American right who are currently “fanboys” of Bukele, are undoubtedly thinking the same thing now. Faced with a failed state and social crisis, a heroic political leader seems to have emerged to save his nation despite criticism from international organizations and human rights groups—the very groups that the American right and many Latin Americans ridicule. Bukele seems a perfect solution to a serious challenge facing the region.

But here it’s important to remember the dangers of unmonitored chemotherapy treatments. Latin America has a long history of political oncologists who believed that unshackled from the constraints of constitutions and social convention they could uniquely bring their nations to various endpoints of bliss and success. In many ways, it began with Latin America’s most famous founding father Simon Bolivar who cared little for institutions and law and more for fame and military success. The great man has long been valued over the rule of law. Bolivar’s more recent followers include people like Juan Peron and later the Kirchners in Argentina who have destroyed that nation’s economy and political system. Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela promised a magical rebirth once they were rid of the nation’s political rules and constraints and the country now suffers from higher poverty rates, bulging prison populations, and rampant inflation. In Central America, Daniel Ortega has been in power in Nicaragua for decades on and off with little respect for rules and institutions.

Some on the right might point to Augusto Pinochet as a counter example, but Pinochet was a horrible individual who committed high crimes along with political violence and killing. He may have helped encourage a highly successful conversion to a market economy, but only at a very high price. Is such a price worth it, even when compared to a state run by gangs without effective policing or social order?

Not a Solution to Anything

It’s easy to see why so many on the right have become enamored with Bukele. They too lack basic respect for rules and institutions. They, like him, are largely unanchored by any coherent set of ideas or philosophy. Raw power and faith in “great individuals” seem to be their only consistent views. The rise of contempt for elites and policy experts after the financial crisis and Covid lockdowns have dovetailed with a fear of immigration, crime, and disorder. Bukele looks like a prototype for them, and they are swooning.

But those of us in the reasonable center should be very leery of alternatives such as Bukele. In private conversations with individuals who have connections to the Salvadoran business community, I have heard many stories of Bukele playing favorites and prosecuting his enemies when it comes to the Salvadoran economy. He’s not a free-market fan and certainly believes that a managed economy (one managed by him, at least) is preferable to one in which markets and uncontrolled growth exist. And he appears to be more than happy to apply the same approach to social and economic life that he does to law enforcement—la mano dura, or the strong hand.

Nothing I say here is meant to defend the previous status quo in El Salvador. Individuals I have contacted to discuss the situation are emphatic about how much things have improved. But the long-term risks of this new medicine are painfully clear through an even cursory reading of human history. Salvador was dying of a social cancer, and its new treatment plan seems to have put the disease in remission. But that modern prison bursting at the seams won’t magically disappear. Salvador’s new ruling class seems to like power and enjoy exercising it. It seems more than likely that instead of chemotherapy the people of Salvador were sold snake oil by an increasingly power-hungry salesman.

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Those bureaucratic wars, skillfully crafted by creator Mick Herron, are important in explaining the appeal of the show. All espionage tales have the great inherent attraction of peeking into the shadowy world of cloak and dagger and witnessing the deadly battles between competing systems of governance. But Slow Horses has something else. Intelligence and security agencies are large impersonal bureaucracies just like the DMV. Herron has humanized his characters and placed them in a world where individuals are susceptible to both traitorous temptations and the basic human instincts of self-interest and ambition that play out in the politics of bureaucratic institutions—whether it’s getting the corner office or murdering a loyal agent to cover up a scandal. At a time when the West faces multiple security threats from terrorists, dictators, hackers, and extremists and is also experiencing explosive growth in unchecked bureaucratic autonomy and authority, Herron has made the well-worn spy thriller even more relatable to his audience.

Until the 1960s, scholars modeled individuals in the public sector as public-spirited in their motivations and work. One of the founding fathers of public choice, the irascible Gordon Tullock worked in the US foreign service in China after completing law school. That experience, and his general skepticism about—well—everything, prompted him to turn his attention to the administrative state. Tullock and his Nobel prize-winning co-author James Buchanan built a model of politics that posited politicians and bureaucrats as self-interested rather than public-spirited and rational rather than angelic. They also included the idea that politics is an exchange process, much like a market. Using those two assumptions, they turned the world of political analysis upside down.

Tullock’s career was illustrious and varied. His work on bureaucracies included two important books studying the administrative state that provided fresh ways to analyze the government agencies that all of us caricature from time to time. We know that the public sector can be inefficient and sclerotic. Bureaucrats avoid responsibility and try to claim credit, and without market signals, the quality of their work is difficult to judge. Taking those institutional constraints and assuming individuals are not angels once they are hired by the government, Tullock argued that bureaucrats work for the same reasons all of us do: to make a living, be happy with our work, and gain the esteem and approbation of others. Because metrics to measure “good” work are hard to find in large non-market organizations, promotion is often more about flattery, popularity, and serving your superior’s wishes, which can lead to consensus views and uniformity of opinion, even incorrect ones.

Faulty opinions and unconstrained loyalty loom large in Herron’s world, and he balances realism with a dark humor that’s smart and frequently disarming. I doubt he is familiar with Tullock’s work, but they are kindred spirits in their pursuit of a more realistic way of understanding modern life within large institutions. The premise of the show illustrates another key insight of Tullock: it’s almost impossible to fire incompetent bureaucrats. Slow Horses is based on a fictitious place where MI5 sends those agents who have messed up. Rather than trying to fire them, the flawed agents are sent to a building called “Slough House” run by the aforementioned Jackson Lamb. Lamb is something to behold. He hilariously curses, ridicules, and mocks. But he is also gifted and revered even among the leadership of MI5. Under all of his bluster and cynicism, he helps guide the group in each season through the dangers of spying to endings that might not be “happy” but avoid as much carnage and chaos as possible.

Among the misfit spies are a drug addict, compulsive gambler, recovering alcoholic, and the grandson of a famous service character who infamously “blew up” Stansted Airport in a training exercise. All of them are more interesting for their warts and humanity. Imagine not super spies like James Bond or George Smiley, but rather characters from The Office or Parks and Recreation (if slightly darker) fighting real security threats. It’s an odd mix, but it works beautifully because Herron makes them sympathetic and human. There are spies looking for love after failed marriages and who are too trusting of Russians with a bottle of vodka. The recovering alcoholic has a stunning attention to detail and is gifted at chess. The drug addict has a Bruce Willis-esque irreverence when she isn’t sneaking off to the bathroom to get high.

All of the seasons that have been released so far have many excellent illustrations of the points Tullock articulated, but the third season is the clearest and best. An outside private security agency with ties to a cabinet minister is tipped off by one of the MI5 leaders about weaknesses with security protocols, but the real reason is to reveal a cover-up at the top of the agency. Slough House is used as the weak point in the test and the vulnerabilities of the agency’s security are found. But an idealistic former agent flips the script and brings Lamb and his crew into the action, which culminates in brutal bloodshed and an orgy of automatic weapons fire in an old documents storage facility. It’s a fitting way to end this latest season and one Tullock would have very much enjoyed.

There are four layered games going on. First, there is a struggle for power between MI5’s two most powerful figures, the so-called “first desk” who is ruthlessly self-interested and emotionally frigid even by MI5 standards and played brilliantly by Sophie Okonedo of Hotel Rwanda fame. “Second desk” is played by Kristin Scott Thomas who looks like she is having a ball meddling in operations, verbally sparring with Oldman, and trying to undermine her boss while advancing her own career. First Desk has engaged in an extensive cover-up to protect her position. It’s now spiraled out of control and Scott Thomas’ character is slowly leaking it out to undermine her. At one point the two meet to discuss the situation and Scott Thomas notes sadly that a Slough House agent has been kidnapped. Okonedo shakes her head saying the two of them needed to “limit the collateral damage.” Scott Thomas interprets this as saving their missing agent, but Okonedo corrects her and admits, “I wasn’t meaning her, I was talking about us, but yes I hope she’ll come through unscathed.”

The second game involves a quest for justice by a selfless former agent who is masquerading as a member of a for-profit security group. His love for a fallen comrade pushes him to leave a trail of corpses as he struggles to shine light on the cover-up. Third, there is the material self-interest of a wide range of characters including the ambitious, greedy, delightfully immoral British cabinet minister played by Samuel West, who lacks the guile and cunning of his MI5 counterparts. Chris Riley’s bull in the China shop turn as the head of security follows Okonedo’s bloody illegal orders to promote his own career in exchange for her promises of promotion for loyalty. There are times throughout this season when I almost started referring to Slough House as Tullock House. Eventually, Okonedo ties Scott Thomas to the leaks. From there the two veteran actors play out the remainder of the season in an office trading barbs in a psychological chess match over a gifted bottle of rare single malt scotch as the battle between the goons loyal to First Desk and the Slow Horses rages in a secret MI5 document facility.

Finally, there are the personal struggles of those working at the Slough House. The compulsive gambler and drug addict arrive at the scene of the climactic confrontation literally fighting for their careers. At the same time, the recovering alcoholic, the misanthropic IT whiz, and Lamb evade a hit team sent by Riley to “clear the board.” Lamb tries to tiptoe through the minefields of all four games with his supreme confidence, raucous sarcasm, biting tongue, and finally his often brutal but necessary use of honesty, almost as a weapon. It’s great fun, but there are important lessons here as well.

In the Federalist Papers, Publius argues famously that political power can be constrained in a number of ways, but one of the key limits was that ultimately ambition can be made to counteract ambition if institutions are well constructed. However, Publius could not have anticipated the size and scope of the current administrative state in the West and elsewhere. Can that same principle apply today? Can we have hope that agencies such as MI5, charged with the critical task of protecting “our way of life,” will be successful despite being staffed with “regular” people, immune from electoral accountability, ill-suited to flexibility and adaptability? At the end of season three we see ambition can counteract ambition, but only at tremendous cost.

Tullock emphasized the importance of creating institutional structures to encourage better outcomes based on his assumptions of human behavior. The MI5 we see in Slow Horses certainly does little to deter misguided self-interested behavior. Under Lamb’s highly unorthodox leadership style, he slowly tries to reform the profoundly human agents dumped in his lap and protect the UK. They might never be real-life James Bonds or George Smileys, but the legitimately human and flawed spies from Slough House are surprisingly agile and effective without the overbearing bureaucracy that the “good agents” must endure. Herron’s slow horses aren’t just loveable underdogs, they are more realistic and approachable. And if flesh and blood spies can help protect us from the bad guys unleashed from the tyranny of an overbearing bureaucracy, that gives us a glimmer of unexpected hope for liberty from this razor-sharp series.

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Javier MIlei, who today is being called “far right,” “radical,” and (by the very lazy) a “far-right libertarian,” is now the president-elect of one of the greatest failed states of our lifetimes. It’s hard to fully explain how badly governed Argentina has been by its long line of Peronist governments distinguished for their lavish spending, stunning corruption, autocratic tendencies, and economic nationalism. The economic statistics are mind-boggling. Defaults, regular annual inflation rates in excess of 100%, a resulting enormous welfare state, parasitic public sector unions, and largely complicit “centrist” politicians: all these are now the depressing landscape of the Argentine political economy.

However, if one did not live this reality but were to simply draw conclusions about the election and Milei from the international (particularly American) press, one might think Argentina had fallen into a state of collective delusion, choosing an insane, sideburn-covered Latin American version of Trump without any reason other than some vague references to inflation and debt payments. As the saying goes, the international press has buried the lede.

Milei is trying to address the disastrous situation in Argentina, but outlets such as Reuters described it as “shock therapy” in a not-so-subtle reference to Naomi Klein’s book Shock Doctrine. Klein argues that nature or war can create disasters and give opportunities for “capitalism,” (anthropomorphized through Milton Friedman) to engage in exploitation by establishing extremist policies like private property rights and markets. In this case, however, it’s the legacy of the exact policies that Klein and her ilk support that has created the unmitigated disaster. Money printing, a bloated welfare state, an emphasis on economic “independence” and other prominent leftwing economic prescriptions have made this disaster, but the irony is lost on the folks at Reuters.

Milei’s main, nay fundamental, policy proposals are all in the context of this backdrop. His firm commitment to abolishing Argentine central banking and cutting social spending is straight out of Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, and it is completely appropriate given the circumstances. The only way that an “anarcho-capitalist” could be elected was in a situation of failed governance and welfare statism so dire that he could crack the door open slightly and introduce ideas unknown by the mainstream intelligentsia, let alone the average Argentine on the street.

The language used by the international media, the gigantic “blob” of interests in the World Bank and international aid community, and the mainstream economists who oppose him is designed to delegitimize Milei. They don’t want another success story like Chile in the region. Two nations that adopt “neoliberal” policies that work mean their jobs and narratives are at risk. They are and should be terrified.

The problem is their terms are like insults thrown around in a schoolyard. They are neither coherent nor consistent. Consider the three most prominent politicians to be given the “far right” treatment by the mainstream press, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and now Milei. What do they have in common? Substantively the answer is very little. Bukele is engaged in a crackdown on gangs and crime that involves widespread violations of due process and civil rights, but has led to a plummeting of crime rates. Meloni is known as an anti-immigrant crusader, but she also supports the Ukraine war and like Bukele has sky-high approval ratings. Milei wants to abolish central banking, and while he’s pro-life, he’s also a bachelor who brags about his sex life and argues for open markets and trade with the United States of all places. Yet to a journalist in the legacy media, they are all part of what has become known as the “far right.” Not satisfied that describing politicians as “conservative” or “right” is enough to scare their readers, the network news, national newspapers, and news services have decided to add a qualifier to the term. The growth in the use of the term is yet another example of how intellectual honesty, philosophical consistency, and respect for liberal discourse are completely absent from our public debates.

Having European roots, the terms we use to describe the left and right evolved from the divisions during an era of democratic change and national consolidation. But because the contexts were different across Europe and elsewhere, the terms never applied neatly. In the nineteenth century, the rise of socialism, and later communism, along with debates over the place of liberalism and the nature of conservatism caused considerable shifting of the meaning of the terms. Liberals such as John Stuart Mill were often associated with some form of limits on markets, but they opposed conservatives’ entrenched views on the stability of the economic and social order. Yet Soviet communism and European fascism in the twentieth century provided the sort of superficial contrasts the terms seemed to imply, although neither one provided much of an alternative when it came to liberty and freedom. Both forms of government supported economic planning and limits on individual freedom.

Once fascism was defeated, alternatives to socialism suddenly became lumped into the right, including European liberalism. When liberals and laissez-faire advocates met at the first Mont Pelerin Meeting in Switzerland, the organizer, FA Hayek, was in search of a consensus intellectual view on what a liberal alternative might look like to the overwhelming support for planning across the spectrum. Since fascism was out, the “winners” on the left began to describe pro-market liberals as “conservatives,” particularly in the US.

But when we see the media force these politicians into a two-dimensional straightjacket, it doesn’t just present a problem of categories. It’s also about the limits of elite background and education. As David Brooks’ recent New York Times column rightly noted, the national news media are very much alike in background and education. The educational institutions that produced these figures support consensus views and expert policy creation, which accord with their own preferences. Briefly, that means government solutions to government problems. Those solutions involve hiring policy people to “fix” things. But what about when the consensus is wrong? What if the theory doesn’t fit the reality? What happens when crime runs rampant in El Salvador despite the best intentions of Western policymakers? What happens when Argentina’s central bank drives inflation to unimaginable levels at immense social cost? Unconventional answers emerge and democracy gives it energy.

When policymakers see continuing failed policies and can link those failures with political opportunities, that’s when things get interesting. Bukele, Meloni, and Milei exploited that context.

The press and policy elites cannot address who Milei is or what he’s proposing on the merits because it does not fit their world view. Hyperinflation is not caused by climate change, racism, or opposition to gender displacement. It is not a social construct or a random event, particularly when it happens continuously for almost 80 years and destroys a largely upper-middle-class society. It is the political and economic failure that results from political exploitation and central planning. The Argentine bureaucracy and the chattering classes have failed citizens for decades. We know the cause, and so does Milei. His opponents wanted to make things a little less bad, possibly for a few years until they once again made things much worse. Peronism is the abusive relationship, the addiction, the concept that no responsibility is necessary after years of irresponsibility. Milei is the medicine, and he will not be an easy pill to swallow.

The possibility of Galt’s Gulch in Argentina is basically zero. He faces nearly intractable political challenges in achieving even a small percentage of his legislative agenda. And yet if he can achieve one goal he might allow Argentina to start down a different path. Dollarizing the economy might force the state into fiscal responsibility and end the monetary insanity that currently reigns. It will be painful, but perhaps not as painful as decades more of the numbing effect of more stimulus that ultimately debases the currency.

There are no easy solutions here, which is part of the reason the media and its stale-minded intellectual influences have no solutions to offer. They are left with nothing but vague language, scare tactics, and labeling. What took 80 years to destroy will take decades, perhaps centuries to recreate. Well before he won the first round of voting back in September, Milei was asked what his model for Argentina was. He replied, Ireland. Ireland of course famously cut taxes and regulation, freeing its economy and spurring rapid economic growth. Argentina could do worse than Ireland, but anything different than its current path will be an improvement.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.

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Formula One (F1) differs from the various motorsports we have in the US. American “open wheel” racing, with cars that bear a resemblance to F1 cars but run on oval tracks, features the world’s biggest single-day sporting event, the Indy 500. NASCAR, so-called “stock car” racing with its roots in the liquor bootleggers of the American South, surged to national popularity in the 1990s. However, both American racing circuits remain niche domestic pastimes. Neither NASCAR nor Indy Car racing can compare with the global reach of F1, and now this international invader seems poised to conquer America. Perhaps an enterprising politician could make protecting American racing from foreign competition a campaign plank.

F1 cars are far more advanced than American Indy cars. Their drivers run on tracks and circuits—including the streets of Monaco—that requires far more skill and precision than any of the American oval tracks. The money in F1 is enormous but has actually been slightly curtailed. In 2020 the governing body of the sport imposed a spending cap. Prior to the cap, the top three teams, Mercedes, Red Bull, and Ferrari each had annual budgets of close to half a billion dollars. Now the caps place spending at somewhere closer to just 200 million per year. Both living and racing in Monaco require a lot more cash than Indianapolis.

There are exactly 10 “teams” in F1 and only 20 “seats” available to participate. Each team fields two cars and therefore two full-time drivers for the 23 races scheduled for 2023. Most of the teams are affiliated with “manufacturers” of cars, most notably Ferrari, Aston Martin, and Mercedes. Renault also participates and Audi should be joining at some point. Billionaires and celebrities stroll the track during race day and time trials. Fans watch from around the globe as the grand circus show that is F1 jumps from Melbourne to Bahrain, Baku to Italy, and Singapore to England.

The money, prestige, and international fame of F1 are what drew Netflix to produce the show, no doubt with some nudging from the league itself. The impact of Drive to Survive on the surging global popularity of F1, particularly in the US, is undeniable. The show seems to have what is called a “halo effect” for the sport in which impressions are formed not by a holistic or rational assessment, but rather a single example. Many new converts to F1 were drawn to the sport by the show alone. In a recent poll of 1,900 self-identified F1 American fans, 53% cited the show as the main reason they followed the sport. And that has led to the circuit including several new races on American soil, including ones in Miami and Las Vegas.

So what would have drawn Rand to the whining noise of high-performance engines, the smell of oil and rubber, and the inherent danger of racing frequently at speeds of over 200 mph? The stark, radical individualism of the sport, which is heavily emphasized in the show. Galt’s Gulch wouldn’t have publicly funded an NFL stadium, but they would have proudly accepted a privately owned F1 track

The ten groups that field cars are called teams, but this is a misnomer. Think of them as sports corporations that lower transaction costs like firms. In team sports, multiple players must coordinate their actions to ensure individual and group success. In F1, the level of cooperation is curtailed by the individual incentives drivers face that often conflict with “team” goals. Both drivers and teams compete for positions and ultimately championships each season. However, teams are grouped by their relative competitiveness, so while Mercedes, Red Bull, and Ferrari expect to win races and hopefully championships, most teams are in the middle.

Why would Rand have been drawn to F1? In addition to the hotly contested team competition and the race to win the overall individual driver championship, every single driver faces fierce competition from their own teammates. Each driver is measured most directly by comparison to their teammates because both drivers are given the same equipment. Cars are “set up” the same way on the same “team” and thus F1 drivers make it one of their main focuses to beat their teammates because that is the one-level playing field. Even if you are in a mid-field team and you can’t compete with Mercedes, you can battle your teammate and show others you are faster through your skill and nerve. A good showing on a mid-level team can lead to promotions to wealthier teams. The competition is constant and fierce.

And just as the skilled writing and storytelling of Rand’s novels helped shape many young libertarians, Drive to Survive has helped draw fans to the sport through the craftsmanship of the cinematography and episode construction. Each season follows an F1 season and the ten episodes jump around following drivers and the team “principals” who probably equate closest to head coaches. Unsurprisingly there is a lot of rich material to work with.

Also, much like Rand’s work, the show is completely devoid of any examination of family and personal lives of the drivers, in particular children. As a rough surrogate for families, drivers are always paired with their performance coaches alone, training in isolated settings. As Valtteri Bottas is about to betray his team and teammate Lewis Hamilton prior to the Russian Grand Prix, we are shown scenes of Bottas and his trainer sitting alone, silently staring out over a tranquil Finnish lakeside. In the same episode, we see Hamilton leaving the track in the late evening darkness with his performance coach talking about the long days they put in to succeed. The characteristics needed to succeed are immense at this level and make for antisocial behavior and what the drivers frequently admit is “selfishness.” Even good-natured joking between competitors is ruthless and frequently cutting.

Bottas wins the Russian Grand Prix essentially by disobeying his team’s wishes during qualifying for the race, compromising Mercedes’ ability to “lock” the front row and protect his teammate Hamilton. The starting grid for F1 has 10 rows of two cars each. Locking a row means the team has both of its drivers in one row. This allows the drivers to block and spot attacks from behind. Based on Bottas’ initial qualifying time, he should be second on the grid allowing Mercedes to lock the front row. Instead, during qualifying, Bottas provided a “tow” for Red Bull’s top driver and current reigning champion Max Verstappen. With that help, Verstappen gained the second position to start with Bottas dropping to third. The stage was set for Bottas to undermine Hamilton and win because of the track’s characteristics, which is better for the driver starting third than second. Bottas sacrificed the team to gain an advantage individually. There may be no “I” in team, but there certainly are lots of incentives for “I’s” to pursue goals outside of team objectives. Bottas, like every driver, is used to winning and is extremely competitive. That spirit can’t be suppressed consistently even as Mercedes is battling to win another Constructors Championship. Both the drivers and the teams are ranked by points at the end of the season.

Perhaps the most moving moment of the entire series happens in season 3 and revolves around the star-crossed career and life of Pierre Gasly. Like most drivers, Gasly has been racing since he was a small child supported by his parents who paid for his participation and enabled it. Like many other drivers, his family has been in racing for years. He has won at every level and made “friendships” with many of his fellow racers.

But Gasly is slightly different from other drivers in terms of personality and demeanor. He seems less programmed and robotic. He obviously wants to win, but there are glimpses that he may not be quite as maniacal, borderline psychopathic about winning as some of his competitors. After winning the F2, the main prep league for F1, he began driving for Red Bull’s second team and had a successful season. When he is promoted to Red Bull’s main team in 2019, he struggles with the pressure and expectations of driving for a top team and his performance suffers as does his psyche.

Red Bull demoted him back to the second team and that same week a fellow young French driver and good friend of Gasly’s was tragically killed in a race prior to the Belgian Grand Prix. Gasly performs well despite the adversity and is retained by the team for the following season, but his career and life seem to be at a crossroads.

As season three begins, the pandemic season of 2020, we learn of Lewis Hamilton’s first Mercedes teammate Nico Rosberg, born in Monaco to a privileged family and previous champion of F1 who had surprisingly retired after winning the title in 2006. He and Hamilton had been friends when they raced together in the lower divisions, and Netflix provides the obligatory photos of them together as teenagers smiling and naive. By the time they were together at Mercedes, they had stopped speaking and were openly in conflict as they battled each other to win the title. The pressure and expectations of performing at the highest level of the sport had laid bare to viewers what it takes to get ahead in F1—uncompromising self-interest and a willingness to turn former friends into enemies in the name of winning. Remember, this isn’t a market or any other positive sum game. One person wins in racing and everyone else does not. It’s zero-sum and brutal. It is interesting to ponder that Rand herself once wrote in The Fountainhead that “To say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say ‘I.’” Clearly by the time they had reached F1 both Rosberg and Hamilton understood what Rand meant here and knew, very clearly how to say I.

Gasly has another successful season despite the pandemic, but Red Bull refuses to promote him even though he is outperforming his replacement who seems to be wilting under the same pressure that had affected Gasly the season before. At his return to Belgium, the site of his friend’s death, we see Gasly putting flowers at the site of the accident and looking skyward briefly. He’s still mourning and values that relationship, even as his fellow competitors are willing to throw teammates and friendships aside to win.

As the season is winding down at the Italian Grand Prix, chaos ensues. A red flag brings the field together after an accident and Gasly, who has just pitted prior to it, gains an enormous advantage moving up to second after the leaders are forced to the pits after. The leader, Hamilton, is unsurprisingly penalized for pitting while the pits were closed. Gasly is suddenly, shockingly, in the lead of the race and manages to hold off several cars for his first and only victory. He is redeemed and joyous as he enters the pits and jumps in the arms of his delirious crew, most of whom understand that their role is to train young drivers, not win. It’s borderline miraculous and honestly moving.

And yet, one can’t shake the sense that had Gasly’s friend survived the crash and ascended to F1, their friendship would have eventually perished like most amicable social relationships seem to do in F1. Gasly seems cosmically rewarded for his humanity, but ultimately he is not promoted to the Red Bull top team despite the victory and his considerable improvement in performance. This season he has moved to a different team and is still firmly a mid-level driver. Rand gave us ideal figures like John Galt or Hank Reardon, but they live alone like the Hamiltons of the world. Gasly is somewhat fuller and more human than many of the other drivers in this unrelentingly atomistic world of self-interest. But he’s still not winning. And what it takes to win becomes clearer and darker for viewers. The distance between one of the 20 best and one of the rest is larger than we tend to realize. And perhaps scarier than we can fully comprehend.

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H.W. Wiley was a chemist by training and held a position at Purdue University. And it might surprise people to know that the person most responsible for the founding, development, and expansion of the government’s oversight of foods and drugs was in fact an advocate for sugar consumption, particularly among children. He believed that sugar was a critical part of every person’s diet. He once said that “[c]hildhood without candy would be Heaven without harps.” The person who founded the FDA, the organization that now has control over virtually every aspect of food and medicine safety thought we should be popping M&M’s and chugging Dr. Peppers all day.

Science of course has evolved beyond the view that sugar should play a central role in the diets of most people, just as we no longer believe that miasma theories help us understand the spread of infectious diseases. A reasonable person might very well argue that no matter what the founder of the FDA believed, the important thing is that public health officials today are up to date on the scientific consensus and look out for citizens by applying that knowledge to the health challenges facing the nation.

However, as public choice research reminds us, these same public health officials operate in a bureaucratic framework and are neither omniscient nor benevolent. Nor are they being asked to weigh tradeoffs and relative risk. Those who have spent their careers focusing on infectious diseases will likely focus exclusively on ameliorating those diseases. And our recent experience would suggest that it is naïve to hope that public servants will consider and understand alternatives, trade-offs, and relative costs and benefits.

The Bureaucrat’s Point of View

Furthermore, it is not merely well-intentioned altruism that explains the origins of the government institutions that have exerted stunning dominance over the social and economic aspects of our daily lives during the past 16 months. No matter the relative competence of the experts in their fields and their intentions, they are also people. They have desires and preferences. They operate within frameworks in their jobs and careers. Their actions can never be separated from where they are and the arenas in which they operate.

Entrepreneurs in markets see gaps in what the market provides and step in to start a new business and fill that gap. Gordon Tullock effectively extended that model to bureaucracies, pointing out that politicians and public officials are rewarded for saying “we need a new agency” or “we need more power over policy to protect citizens” and perhaps most importantly, “I’m an expert—I know what’s best for you.” Just like private-sector actors, bureaucrats are ambitious, energetic, dedicated to their jobs, and therefore wish to expand their budgets and power.

Tullock argued that we must analyze public officials as essentially self-interested actors, even though they believe they are acting in the name of the “public good.” Economists believe people wish to maximize their utility within the set of institutional constraints they face in the market. A person may not necessarily prefer to be materially better off, but no matter their preferences, they seek to maximize them. For Tullock, public officials are no different. Their preferences might be described, or perhaps represented, as being public spirited, but that doesn’t change their fallible nature or their focus on maximizing their personal goals and utility. They see themselves as promoting the public’s health, but in many cases, their preferred policies will remove or shape your choices in living according to your preferences.

The key difference is that in markets, individuals have choices. When I buy food, I can purchase it from several different companies. I am voluntarily entering into a contract with a service or goods provider, and if I don’t get satisfaction in that exchange, I can choose another provider the next time around. I make that choice based on the available information from the seller, but also from friends, family, or my own research and preferences. Sellers cannot coerce me, but they can convince me to purchase their products and maintain that relationship through continued quality assurance and consistency.

With the government, I often have no such choice. The government doesn’t convince me with solid evidence, it forces me to follow the rules it sets out. I currently cannot choose to be regulated by another FDA or advised by another CDC. The state has monopolistic power over the things it regulates. When individuals claim to be acting in my best interest, I have to consider their decision-making calculus. We have to examine the underlying motivations and incentives of public officials just as we would someone trying to sell us a car. However, we usually don’t have the choice we do in markets, and frequently government officials do not act in ways that actually promote the public interest.

Taken this way, the current explosive growth in government authority in the arena of public health has to be viewed as just one part of a continually growing and expanding role of the state in virtually all health-related aspects of our lives. From the early establishment of the FDA, we might look favorably upon attempts to regulate meat packing and transportation as a sign of progress in providing Americans with safer food. But we also should know that local butchers lobbied for regulation of large meat processors to limit their competition. We would have to acknowledge that the history of American public health can point to success stories and catastrophic failures such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiments—a horrible violation of the rights and dignity of African Americans.

More recently we have seen government officials tackling other issues that might seem to provide more unequivocal utility. Take for example the work that many public officials did to slowly constrict the use of tobacco among Americans. In particular, consider the legal and regulatory actions governments have taken against tobacco companies, perhaps most notably the limits Mayor Michael Bloomberg imposed on the consumption of tobacco in New York City. These laws violated the freedoms that some smokers enjoyed, but they undoubtedly saved lives and limited the negative externalities associated with secondhand cigarette smoke. We might look at seat belt laws and child seats and cars and reach similar conclusions.

But the record shows a number of notable failures. Soft drink regulation was of course also the brainchild of Bloomberg in New York City and here we have perhaps the best example of how a broad vision of the public good animated by ambitious public officials and politicians can abruptly go from helpful to intrusive and misguided within a short period of time. We can add in various initiatives from the national government, such as the infamous food pyramid that directed Americans to consume a diet based more on the political interests of dairy and grain farmers rather than what was healthy. Public health officials were also behind the “War on Fat,” which incentivized Americans to eat many more carbohydrates and fewer proteins and fats. At the time, science was behind his theory, but the unintended consequences of this policy appear to have included the massive increase in Type 2 diabetes as well as ballooning obesity in the US.

Our Covid Experts

This brings us to the past 15 months and the current dictatorship of the CDC and FDA over Covid policy, testing, and vaccines. The government’s record on these policies is decidedly mixed. Covid tests remain expensive, overly regulated, and still very difficult to obtain. Home testing in many other countries is widely available and has given policymakers in those countries more weapons to battle the virus. While the US has done comparatively better in vaccine distribution, the FDA still delayed the deployment of the various vaccines for months longer than might have been necessary because of bureaucratic regulations and overly cautious concerns about side effects. Rather than simply providing individuals with information about the relative risks and benefits of vaccines, and providing immediate access, the government was paternalistic and slow-moving.

And while the vaccine rollout and the recent approval of a new Alzheimer’s drug might lead to a more optimistic long term view of public health, the CDC’s decision to now recommend the return of mask-wearing even among vaccinated Americans because of the possible risks to the unvaccinated perfectly shows how a myopic focus on disease management cannot take the place of public policymaking that balances goods. It is basing these decisions on information that should be assessed by individuals to fit their risk profiles. Instead, the agency acts as if it knows best, rather than the citizens it supposedly serves.

The return of the mask echoes the earlier, very costly failure of the public health Leviathan in pausing the Johnson & Johnson vaccine rather than allowing individuals to make their own choices based on the evidence. This decision began the process of undermining public confidence in the vaccine and led to a sharp decline in vaccination rates and public trust in the process. The US was perhaps a month away from legitimate freedom from Covid when a highly questionable decision by the CDC put an intense public spotlight on six unfortunate cases of blood clots among millions of individuals who received the vaccine with no reasonable scientific justification.

What is clear is that the expansive reach and power of the health Leviathan is here to stay. Mask-wearing is going to be a conspicuous part of American life for months if not years to come. Dr. Fauci and whoever succeeds him will continue to hold significant sway in the public arena. And the recent pivot to argue that racism is now a public health issue will ensure that health officials will continue to expand the scope of their input into the daily lives of everyone.

H. W. Wiley would undoubtedly be proud of the expansive and intrusive bureaucratic apparatus that he planted and nurtured. It has managed to force its way into the lives of almost everyone today and not always to the benefit of most citizens. Now a potentially permanent pandemic has allowed his creation to establish itself at or near the top of the bureaucratic food chain. It’s just too bad that it doesn’t advocate as much sugar as Wiley used to desire. A spoonful of sugar might help this medicine go down a bit more easily.

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In my quest to achieve a hyper-caffeinated version of being “awake” I am gratified to see the great movement forward has managed to cleanse such critical media outlets as Teen Vogue, the New York Times and children’s literature of racists, homophobes, and fascists. However, it seems to me that we have much bigger fish to fry. My awakened soul has called me to alert my comrades with the pitchforks, torches, and cancellation privileges to a number of unacceptably asleep individuals and historical movements that should be purged, cancelled, removed, and obliterated from our accepted discourse and intellectual lives. Out with discussion, pluralism, and context; in with the perfect amount of tolerance for the demands of purity.

Now, I don’t mean to cast aspersions upon my sleepless comrades who have focused rather narrowly on members of the American Founding, Dr. Seuss, Aristotle, and other unmistakably obvious candidates for expulsion from history, but we must face reality. A number of intellectual giants of the left must go. Karl Marx must be cancelled. This, of course, isn’t a secret to anyone who has actually bothered to read his historical theory, which has large sections focused on racial determinism. But his personal correspondence is littered with derogatory references to blacks, Jews, Slavs, and other people of color. If we are going to get rid of statues of David Hume and Adam Smith, individuals whose public writings never directly addressed questions of race, how can we justify Marx? The answer is we cannot. All of his work must be removed from public discussion and statues and memorials must be taken down. I know this will pain some of my fellow awakened comrades, but at least we won’t have to read Das Capital again.

The same holds true for Rousseau. While Rousseau does argue that “savages” are in fact less tainted by the stain of property and thus closer to his idealized and cherished state of nature, his other writings make the situation much more bleak for the great thinker. In Emile for example, Mercer Cook noted that Rousseau chose a European child as his subject because the brains of those from colder or warmer zones “Negroes and Laplanders do not have the intellect of Europeans”. But, one of the asleep might respond “Rousseau wrote extensively about the horror of slavery! Surely he must be counted as a hero?” Unfortunately, no. He never specifically mentioned black slavery as a problem, didn’t sign any of the abolitionist letters publicly circulating in Paris during his life, and awkwardly his work was cited by Caribbean slave owners as justification for their practices.

Unfortunately both of these famous thinkers happen to be more widely cited, accepted and used by the most sleepless scholars, but no matter. We can purify our thoughts and philosophy by removing these noxious influences from our beliefs. We cannot let our guard down. Tragically the same holds true for many of the revolutionary icons that we, the insomniacs, hold dear. If we turn our gaze towards the long oppressed people of Latin America, we must uncomfortably acknowledge that several of the more well-known figures in the movement to free the Latinx people from their white oppressors include individuals we will have to purge from our history.

It begins with one of the most widely recognized individuals among fashionably sensible awake people, Che Guevara. While Che’s face adorns countless t-shirts at elite universities and awake political gatherings in the understandable spirit of kinship with peasants wearing colorful clothing throughout South and Central America, he, along with his comrade Fidel Castro, also targeted and imprisoned gay people as well as engaged in racist activities in his lifetime. The Argentine author Guillermina Sutter Schneidner rightly describes him as a “Racist, Homophobe and Mass Murderer”. The last time I checked the awake are still opposed to all three of those views even if they make for great fashion. Castro himself believed that homosexuality was incompatible with the “new Revolutionary man” he was trying to craft in Cuba. Regrettably jettisoning the Cuban Revolution to defend the LGBTQ community will be necessary. It’s surprising that this hasn’t happened thus far.

And speaking of anti-gay people ripe for removal from public discourse, another pillar of left-wing thought, Antonio Gramsci, made a fateful and regrettable decision to argue that heterosexual monogamy was essential to achieving Marxist hegemony. Clearly anyone who would argue that heterosexual relations are essential to anything but patriarchy and oppression needs to be removed from reasonable discourse. In the year the world moved past the Trump Presidency, it’s time to stop harming our awakened LGBTQ comrades and remove Gramsci from our civil “conversation.”

But we must not stop by simply canceling and removing individuals from the history books and fashionable stores throughout the developed world. We must also re-examine our theories and the way we think about history. We all know that anytime a white person of the conservative political persuasion discusses the word “federalism” or, even more toxically, the phrase “states rights” he (it’s always men isn’t it?) is referring to slavery and segregation. This is so because, well it is so. Federalism is only not racist when our fellow insomniacs are discussing it.

It is with much regret that I must say that those of us who are awake will now have to purge the idea that organized labor was a laudable force in moving the cause of justice forward. Why, you may ask? Well, it is widely known that the early labor movement was heroic for its attempts to make the relationship between workers and owners of capital more just. What is less well known is that the early labor movement also was actively racist. Paul Moreno is one of many scholars who has shown quite clearly that the earlier labor movement actively viewed former slaves as nothing but strikebreakers and lobbied for legislation to prevent such actions by freed slaves.  The historical literature here is well established, so much so that we can turn easily to literature. Upton Sinclair’s famous book The Jungle describes a confrontation between a young labor union fighting for its workers and a group of African American strikebreakers—described in unfortunately derogatory terms. Much as it pains me, Sinclair must go, but so too must any sympathetic reference to organized labor. If slavery was part of the Founding of the United States and the 1619 Project has accomplished anything, we must likewise jettison any glorification of organized labor and its racist founding.

Which brings us to some of the most painful cuts of all for those of us who are the most caffeinated and awake. These are people who have helped provide the philosophical foundation for postmodern thought, and thus enabled us to crack the door open to reassess all of the hidden hate and racism surrounding us. We must begin with Jean Paul Sartre, who regrettably had quite a bit of sexist language and imagery in his writing. You can’t believe it? Don’t take my word for it—look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry about him which admits as much. The author of the entry does try to make a rather ham-handed defense of him as a feminist, but this runs completely contrary to even what his supporters believe. And then there is Foucault. We all perhaps have been a bit too understanding to the man who during his life signed a petition to legalize sex between adults and minors, and has now been revealed by one of his friends to have paid young Algerian boys to have sex with him in graveyards. These facts make his current status as an insomniac icon awkward at best. Off with his intellectual head!

Finally, I can’t complete this piece without mentioning that great enemy of the awake, Ray Bradbury. Bradbury’s deeply offensive novel Fahrenheit 451 openly mocks the entire concept of awakening. If we cannot literally burn these texts which offend and appall, what is the point of pursuing these ends and exerting all of this effort. If one is to mock the burning of books then we must ultimately ask, is this not a veiled critique of the great goal of being awake? If we plan on canceling that which doesn’t suit our current tastes, don’t we essentially value the right to destroy the physical representations of those offensive ideas? What’s a little book burning amongst the awake? Let’s build some sleepless social capital, collect a bunch of copies of Bradbury’s work, and burn, baby, burn.

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This past summer you were probably one of the millions of Americans whose inbox was full of spam emails from various companies and businesses taking public stands on issues such as police brutality and social justice. I for one was amazed that businesses I patronized such as hotels, coffee manufacturers, online retailers, and others felt the need to tell me what their political views were on such matters. Shockingly, none of them came down in favor of police brutality or racism. Since I don’t choose service providers based on their political views and really don’t trust businesses making any public declarations of virtue, I was more than a little puzzled at this moral grandstanding.

Like many folks who support robust protections for property rights, markets, and liberty, I have long believed that the great Milton Friedman had the last word on whether or not businesses should engage in what he referred to as the “social responsibilities of business” in his famous 1970 New York Times article.

Friedman’s piece was a scathing rebuttal to the idea that companies should stray from their primary goal of maximizing profits. Friedman first noted that responsibility is normally attributed to individuals, not businesses. Therefore we have to turn our attention to the actions of individuals in their roles as executives or employees in the private sector. Friedman noted that individuals in their personal lives were free to believe whatever they wanted and support whatever causes they wished to. But the Nobel-winning economist argued that allowing those beliefs to dictate business practices violated the broader set of responsibilities people have when they are working in a marketplace. People often superficially describe Friedman’s argument as the view that businesses should simply maximize shareholder wealth, but he clearly states that when individuals in their jobs promote “social responsibility” the effects are far reaching:

Insofar as his actions in accord with his “social responsibility” reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers’ money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.

Wages are cut, consumers are forced to pay more, and shareholders receive less, including less to support philanthropic and social causes they support. And, of course, customers may not agree with the causes that businesses support.

Despite Friedman’s powerful argument 50 years ago, today this tendency to believe that companies should be supporting social and political causes has grown far beyond what Friedman was criticizing in the 1970s. Some of this can probably be labeled as “advertising” or “branding.” Take for example the outdoor clothing company North Face, which proudly tells consumers that it devotes a share of its profits to efforts to arrest climate change and protect the Arctic Refuge, works with down feather producers who obtain goose feathers in a “responsible” and sustainable way, and promises to collaborate with REI, Kelty, and Patagonia to fund a foundation called “The Conservation Alliance.” They take their activism even further with their recent “empowerment” efforts, such as supporting climbing wall access for disabled individuals, promoting youth engagement with the outdoors, and in 2020 encouraging more “inclusive” projects to give outdoor opportunities to minorities, no doubt in response to the protests and Black Lives Matters movement.

Outdoors companies are obviously playing this both ways. Their customers are much more likely to be wealthy white liberals living in blue states who support environmental causes and have the means to pay a premium for North Face’s upscale merchandise. However, the appearance of consumers wearing a brand with a reputation for social justice makes conspicuous consumption socially just consumption. If you drive a Subaru (which has long cultivated an image of high-minded social responsibility) to your hiking trip wearing North Face and eating Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, you’re probably a “First World” American. But by using products from companies with just political views you will be displaying the necessary sensitivity to Mother Earth, your fellow Americans of color, and even the poor geese who died so you could wear your coat. Assuaging guilt is part of this new style of branding and it sells. Conversely, conservative Christians are more likely to shop at Hobby Lobby and eat Chick-Fil-A—a restaurant that proudly closes on Sunday for religious reasons.

Which takes us back to Ben and Jerry’s, the ice cream that charges consumers a gigantic premium over regular ice cream for a higher quality product that is aligned with various causes of the left, including opposing jet travel for carbon emissions, supporting Occupy Wall Street, opposing drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and a new podcast discussing the history of racism. Kaepernick, the personification of the Black Lives Matter protest movement, would seem to be a perfect fit for the little hippie ice cream company from liberal Vermont.

And yet pull back the curtain and the Wizard of Social Justice and Responsibility, Ben and Jerry’s, is actually part of the British multinational food company Unilever. Yes, Ben and Jerry’s founders who support Bernie Sanders and oppose gross forms of capitalism cashed out a number of years ago. And Unilever has its own lengthy list of causes it supports including sustainability, empowerment, health and nutrition, and various other high-minded vaguely titled initiatives it fosters in various countries throughout the world.

Unilever has taken all of this a step further because some of its causes and the means of achieving them are much more political in nature. Take for instance their relationship with Oxfam, which is an activist organization that addresses development issues from the left. On its blog, Oxfam has advocated that the winner of the 2020 election pursue the goal of an “intersectional feminist federal government” in its appointed government positions. They also support raising the minimum wage, raising taxes on the wealthy, and generally redistributing wealth through political means. And guess what? Oxfam also publicly ranks companies for being aligned with its positions on matters of policy. Unilever, which partners with and supports Oxfam, gets an extremely high score from the organization—shockingly. Don Draper would be proud.

So, you are probably saying to yourself—well Friedman would simply say that the market would discipline excessive spending on activities unrelated to business. Large shareholders would sell their Unilever stock and choose a company that is less inclined to spend its hard-earned profits on social justice causes. However, it appears as though the disciplining mechanism of the market has been disabled in today’s world of publicly held companies.

At the exact moment we see widespread acceptance among corporate executives for businesses to engage in socially responsible activities, there have also been huge changes in the nature of public ownership of companies. Americans have adopted the practice of purchasing mutual funds, in particular index funds, rather than individual stocks in large numbers. Most, although obviously not all, individual investors don’t buy shares in Apple or Tesla or Alphabet—we buy an index fund that tracks one of the many market indices that are widely available to investors. The old model in which shareholders monitored and demanded a certain type of fiduciary relationship for individual companies is dying. Now huge institutional investors serve an unusual intermediary role between us and the companies we indirectly invest in, but this role is fundamentally different than the one Friedman envisioned.

The heads of these funds, who are far and away the largest shareholders of most major companies, don’t really care if companies have a single-minded focus on profit making. Why? Because these funds simply hold the companies in the index. If a large company decides it’s going to pursue intersectional feminist business practices or vegan dairy products to the detriment of their bottom line, there is no “interest” that motivates BlackRock, Vanguard, or Fidelity in trying to encourage that company from diverting resources from maximizing the bottom line. The fee structure that those institutional investors have doesn’t coincide with company profits. Large index funds charge very low fees to simply mirror a particular index, such as the S&P 500. The fund managers who hold the shares have no clear interest in maximizing profits at the companies as they are not paid more when companies make more money.

Since they are no longer responsible to actually put pressure on companies to pursue profits, the largest shareholders in major companies have turned their attention to supporting socially responsible business models. For example, recently the biggest manager of such assets, BlackRock, has become more visible in at least sounding as if they support socially responsible actions on the part of businesses and investors. The chairman and founder of BlackRock has started issuing public statements supporting socially conscious business goals that are targeted at the CEO’s of the companies his firm owns for their investors.

Whether these public pronouncements are merely PR or truly a shift in the preferences of large institutional investors is still unclear. BlackRock both responds to client preferences but also markets a lot of different investments, including socially conscious investment vehicles, and therefore helps shape those preferences as well. Either way, one thing is clear, there is a growing consensus that such actions are acceptable and required in today’s business environment. Do consumers reward such behavior? Some might very well value it, but clearly not all of them do. Shareholders should only support it with concrete evidence that embracing a socially conscious business model is actually profitable. For North Face and Nike, it may very well be a form of virtue advertising that management believes is necessary. For the vast majority of other businesses, it might not be and shouldn’t be encouraged if it costs investors money and employees raises and jobs. Ask an employee at a Unilever plant in the developing world if she wants to forgo a raise in her wages to support the cause of promoting feminist intersectional White House staffs and promoting Black Lives Matter.

Friedman was concerned that the specific political preferences of managers at publicly traded companies would supersede their fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profits. But his bulwark against moralizing over profit maximization has been weakened, and ironically weakened by a phenomenon that has been widely lauded for increasing market participation and increasing returns to shareholders. His argument still stands—there is no economically justifiable reason for taking money from employees, consumers, and shareholders and giving it to individuals with political and policy agendas that are unrelated to the core business unless those businesses need such virtue signaling to succeed in their markets. But we have passed beyond that point. A particular political agenda is being pushed as just and fair and “correct” by businesses that have no need to play this game. If our elections are any indication, many market participants don’t support BLM or the rights of geese. Consumers don’t need to have their political views confirmed in a market. While consumers might have historically been free to shop around for less political businesses to patronize, the trend towards everyone jumping on the socially conscious bandwagon is real. And somewhere Colin Kaepernick, whether you love him or hate him, is laughing all the way to the bank.

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