Libertarianism Is Losing. What Can We Do?

A conversation on the dire future freedom faces, and what may yet save us.

Ron Paul changed my life. His 2008 presidential run made me a libertarian, sparking my career in political advocacy. Paul was a happy warrior, inspiring me and millions of other young Americans even in what felt like a hopeless time of war and recession.

Yet today, almost two decades later, I’ve never been more pessimistic about a libertarian future.

I voted for Trump. I knew he wasn’t a libertarian, but I expected he’d make the same effort to keep his campaign promises that he did in his first term, many of which catered to us at a historic level. He has not. DOGE was disbanded eight months ahead of schedule after being hindered due to political uproar. Instead, we got the largest debt ceiling increase in history. Tulsi Gabbard, the administration’s foremost non-interventionist voice, has been sidelined. We were promised no new wars. We got the biggest one yet, now costing roughly $28 billion at a burn rate approaching $1 billion a day. Trump campaigned on releasing the Epstein files. Instead, he’s fought to hide them and has directed unparalleled resources into primarying Thomas Massie, the single most libertarian member of the United States government.

And that’s just what this administration is doing. The libertarian movement itself is in shambles, riddled by infighting and with its most prominent organizations increasingly betraying their historic principles. During the Ron Paul years, libertarianism felt like the future. That moment is gone. The youth movement on the Right once dominated by libertarians has turned nationalist and reactionary. I do not see a path where libertarian ideas win the next election, or the one after that, or probably the one after that.

What I do see is a pattern. People don't adopt ideas because the ideas are sound. People adopt the ideas they want to hear, and the conditions of their lives shape what they want to hear. When conditions change, receptivity changes with them—and ideas that were unthinkable a few years earlier suddenly become live political options. Argentina is the clearest recent example. The country had to actually fall apart—runaway debt, runaway inflation, a collapsing economy—before voters were prepared to take Javier Milei seriously. America isn't in that condition and isn't yet close to it. But if things continue as they are, we will get there. When it does, somebody has to have kept the libertarian ideas alive and ready, or there will be nothing to deploy. This is the work a small number of deeply committed believers must do: keep an idea sharp and available for its moment. Albert Jay Nock called this strategy "the remnant," an idea discussed in his essay "Isaiah's Job."

I believe in this strategy. But knowing the most I can do is keep a flame lit while the world crumbles around me makes me feel powerless, and it depresses me.

I help produce the podcast Permissionless Liberty, hosted by my friends Dan Sanchez and Adam Knott. In the midst of this crisis of hope, I was grateful that they asked me to join them as a guest to work through what libertarians ought to be doing in this environment.

The first thing is to change how we frame libertarianism. Libertarians too often pitch the philosophy as a tool for us to gain our own freedom—which is, of course, what we are ultimately trying to do. But that’s not a compelling pitch to anyone who isn’t already one of us. The pitch I believe can actually work is: I want to help you live your life the way you see fit, even when I disagree with how you’ve chosen to live it. Under my libertarianism, the most religiously conservative Christian can form their Christian commune and exclude atheists like me. And that’s fine; I don’t need or want to live there. Socialists can build their worker-run cooperatives and distribute resources among themselves, so long as they don’t use the threat of violence to coerce anyone else into participating. I am free to live in my community; you are free to live in yours. Libertarianism, properly explained, is not a competing side in the culture war. It is the resolution to it.

But marketing only matters if there’s something left to sell. Each year that passes, the state’s ability to monitor our financial transactions, track our communications, identify and deplatform dissenters, and regulate away independent alternatives grows more comprehensive. If the remaining cracks of freedom in our current system are filled in by the time the public is ready to hear our message, it will be too late. I’ve grown much more interested in the tools and practices that keep those cracks open.

The deepest problem is in the incentive structure that has led to the ever-increasing growth of the state. The state is an enormous centralized tool of power, and centralized power attracts every interest group capable of capturing it: industries that want subsidies and regulatory protection, unions that want to cartelize their labor, foreign lobbies that want our military might, activists that want public institutions wielded against their opponents, and so much more. Once an interest has captured part of the state, it does not vote itself back out. Politics cannot solve this problem. The captured interests defining our politics are the problem. To change the system, the incentives must change.

The lever that has actually changed incentive structures at a civilizational scale is not politics. It is technology. The printing press, industrialization, the internet—each reshaped what power could do and what individuals could do in ways no political reform could have produced. We are now in the middle of a battle over who controls the next wave of that lever, especially AI. State-controlled AI, layered onto the surveillance infrastructure already built, terrifies me; it is the path to a level of social control no government in human history has had. Decentralized technology, by contrast, is the most promising arena for actually retaining and growing our freedom.

I do not think the technology that will decide this has been built yet. Bitcoin, Monero, self-hosting tools, local AI—much of what we already have matters, but none of it has been sufficient. What we need will likely not be a single technology but a constellation of decentralized tools that together alter the incentive structure by which people can attain their goals in our society. Our task is not merely to outrun the state’s ability to regulate but to build a free economy that those who currently hold power have more to gain from joining than from destroying. Get that right, and the state is no longer the apex predator in society; it is one institution among many that has to compete for the cooperation of a population it has lost the ability to command. Get it wrong, and the cracks close, the surveillance hardens, and the centralized power becomes forever impossible to dislodge. This is the most important fight for the future of liberty, and we are losing it by default every day we are not building.

I discuss all this and more in my podcast with Adam and Dan. Below the video, you’ll find an edited transcript of what I think are some of the most interesting sections from our conversation.

Why I’m Pessimistic, And What Argentina Shows

Dan:

We talk on this podcast a lot about what Leonard Read calls the methodology of freedom—how to actually achieve freedom. What are your thoughts?

Jake:

Unfortunately, I’m not very optimistic right now. I think we’re in a bad time. The conversation we have as a society evolves based on situations, and so I think the idea of the Remnant is really important: we’re not necessarily going to convince everybody right now, but it’s critical to educate at least a small share of deep believers so that they’re there when people are ready to hear the message.

Look at Argentina. They got into a situation where the socialism went too far, the government debt went too far, the inflation went too far, and the economy was falling apart. People were ready for some radically different answer. Milei was there to give it to them. America isn’t in that place now, and isn’t close to it. But it could get there one day, and hopefully we’ll be here making sense when people need us to make sense.

The most optimistic I can get about the United States right now—and I think this is a long shot—is that the war with Iran, which is a disaster already and likely to become more of one, leads to a reaction that takes some influence away from the people who got this so wrong. More likely, it just creates another opening for the socialist left, and this country goes toward wherever Mamdani is taking New York City. But it’s possible that libertarianism done the right way could take over the right in response to this war. And then if a Mamdani-style socialist takes the country, a libertarian Republican party might become the opposition and eventually come to power that way.

However it happens, it’s going to be a many-years or probably decades-long process until situations unfold in a way that makes people receptive to the message we have to offer. Right now I just see things getting worse.

On If Everyone Can Be a Libertarian

Jake:

Marketing strategy matters a lot. We should focus on telling other people: I want to help you live your life better in the way that you see fit, even though I may totally disagree with it. We should focus on what libertarianism can do for people who aren’t us, rather than just arguing about why everybody else is bad.

But I’m very conflicted about this, because I don’t actually know that everybody can be a libertarian. I don’t think everybody can.

We evolved for tribal society. Look at primate behavior—how chimps struggle for control over each other. We’re better than that. We’re a less violent species and we govern very differently. But when I look at thousands of years of human civilization, and at the tribal warfare that preceded it, I worry that this is just what we are. The black-pilled part of me sees very little hope. I’m not sure we’ll ever fully get out of this pattern. I hope we will.

Adam:

A sentiment of yours I really like is that you want everybody who has a political ideal to be able to achieve it with like-minded people, but you don’t want to be forced to be included. That’s how I keep my humanity. I really truly don’t want to harm a communist or a Christian nationalist’s ideals. I just want my ideals, and to be able to go with my like-minded people and form our own political union. It’s not really anti—it’s trying to get free.

Jake:

Yes, and the challenge there is exactly what your show is named after: permissionless liberty, the idea that the powers that be do not want to give that permission. So how do we break away when they don’t want to do that?

What I Saw in China, and Why We Should Be Like Switzerland

Jake:

What we present ourselves as on the international stage is not how we actually act on it. We are the imperialists. Trump has made this more clear than ever. We don’t like what Venezuela is doing? Put a corrupt crony in place who’ll sell us cheap oil. What we’re trying and failing to do in Iran right now is similar.

Meanwhile, look at countries like China—which we call a horrible international threat. I hate much of what China is doing domestically. But I went there last year and in some ways I was quite impressed. There are a couple of areas in which they’re actually more libertarian than us. Their IP law is one: you can get knockoffs of anything, often quite high quality, and I think that’s actually nice. The ease of starting a business there is much greater than here. Tax rates are comparable to or slightly less than ours.

But there are cameras everywhere, and they’re spying on you all the time. People are rightfully afraid to talk about politics there, because they’ll get in a lot of trouble. You can’t challenge anything about the political apparatus, and that inability is horrific.

On the international stage, though, they’re not going around toppling regimes that won’t sell oil at the price they want. They might invade Taiwan—a country they have a very specific grievance with, dating back decades to when it was once unified territory. I would hate to see that. But other than that, they’re not an expansionist empire. We are. And we’re not a benevolent one.

The libertarian position, I think, is that we should be Switzerland. Switzerland has a great foreign policy. They’re in a very defensible location on top of a mountain. They don’t get involved in other people’s affairs. They try to maintain as much liberty for themselves as they can, and because of that they’re wealthy and happy. We have two oceans on both sides of us. We’re even more defensible than Switzerland. And we’ve spent over ten billion dollars in the first two weeks of the Iran war alone. It’s hard for me to imagine that whatever trade or strategic benefit we extract from being an empire exceeds what we spend being one.

On Power Capture, and Why I Half-Agree with Socialists

Jake:

I’ve become very alert to the nature of power and how power works. The socialists have been talking about it for a long time, and I don’t like their answers, but they’ve caught onto some of the problem. We have this giant source of power in society, the state, and there are wealthy interests—wealthy business people who can spend their money to essentially buy the state, and then it does what they want, in their interests.

Adam:

So you’re describing the left critique of capitalist society—that wealthy people can buy power.

Jake:

Basically, yes. But I don’t agree with it as a critique of capitalism. I agree with it as a critique of power. Power is centralized, and centralized power can be bought. My answer is decentralizing power. The problem is how do you do that. Most socialists don’t actually want to decentralize power either; they want to take over the state so they can run things their way.

Where I extend past their criticism is: yes, wealthy capitalists are one interest group, but there are many others. Unions that want to buy off the state to advantage their members and artificially raise prices for their services. Foreign governments — or, more often, Americans more loyal to another country than this one, like AIPAC, but it’s not exclusively a Jewish-American thing. We’re also seeing it right now with Iranian expatriates who are angry about the Islamic regime in Iran. I agree with their criticisms of that regime fully, but they hate it so much and want it overthrown so badly that they lobby our government into wars that serve their niche interests, not the interests of the majority of Americans, who aren’t affected by what government Iran has.

The incentive structure of that whole system is the actual problem. Maybe we can gain small amounts of freedom to withdraw from it. But it won’t really be permissionless, because once we ever break away in a way that seriously inhibits their pursuit of power, they don’t want to and won’t let us.

Why Withdrawal from the System Won’t Be Allowed

Dan:

The reason the state can afford to assassinate foreign leaders, kidnap sitting presidents, and start wars is that it has us as tax cattle. We could try to persuade it to behave differently—or we could just withdraw our support.

Jake:

But can we? Look at the Civil War. The Civil War was fought over the right to secede. I always have to clarify for people who don’t know my framework: ending slavery was good, probably the most important thing that ever happened. Yes, the South wasn’t fighting for states’ rights per se, they were fighting for states’ rights to practice slavery. But the North wasn’t fighting to free the slaves. That wasn’t even a war goal at the start—it came later. The North was fighting for control, and to prevent the very concept of secession.

When that battle was lost, we got the great good of the end of slavery, but we also got the great bad of the shutdown of exit. So when the withdrawal of our taxes or our participation is ever threatening to the state’s ability to do the things it wants to do, the state is not going to let us withdraw. It has all the power. That’s why I keep coming back to technology as maybe the only real answer—some way where withdrawal can’t be blocked, or where blocking it is no longer in the state’s interest.

On the Surveillance Preventing Financial Freedom

Jake:

I thought I should actually be trying to use cryptocurrency more where I can, so I signed up for a credit card that lets me pay for things in crypto—it converts to cash at the point of sale. Just to get this credit card, just to be able to transact with normal businesses using my cryptocurrency, I had to send them a photo of my ID, a picture of my face from my phone, my Social Security number, all of it.

They already have the entire infrastructure in place to keep us locked down and to prevent these kinds of tools from becoming a threat—to prevent people from having real financial independence or privacy to transact how they want. So this is a speed race. We have to invent these technologies and get adoption for them faster than the state can regulate against them. I don’t know what those technologies are ultimately going to be. I don’t know if they’re even possible. But hopefully they are, and hopefully we can secede from the state through technological tools like these.

On Bitcoin Versus Gold

Adam:

Bitcoin is confiscation-resistant, censorship-resistant, and inflation-resistant. To confiscate it, someone has to physically get hold of the person and basically torture them. To censor it, they have to have the person in physical custody. And it’s transportable anywhere in the world. Self-custodied Bitcoin is the most secure asset an individual can hold.

Jake:

I’m not saying it’s a failed experiment. I wouldn’t be buying it now and trying to get back into it if I thought it was totally worthless. I think it’s the best thing we have available right now. But my pushback would be: well, why not gold? And why not cash? Cash doesn’t have the inflation hedge, but it has all the other things—they can’t know how much you have in your possession, they can’t pull it straight out of your bank account.

The state destroyed gold as our currency already. People can buy gold as a way to withdraw from the system. But I don’t totally buy the store-of-value narrative apart from the ability to transact in it at some level. When gold was the currency, we transacted in gold; our dollars represented gold. You can still buy gold as a store of value, you can melt it down and trade it as coins. Bitcoin is more transactable in some ways—digitally sendable, divisible into micro-units. But neither of these is as effective against the state as their original promise suggested.

Adam:

In the apocalyptic scenario where the system shuts down on a Friday night, you’re in a way better position holding self-custodied Bitcoin than holding stocks or bonds. Stocks and bonds can be shut down with a single phone call.

Jake:

In that apocalyptic scenario—where not just American markets but world markets are going crazy—gold has a very unique value, because you can have it physically on your person and trade it directly. But Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies still ultimately need the internet to validate the blockchain. We’ve already watched Iran shut off the internet to huge parts of its society. If the internet goes down, which states can do very easily, crypto doesn’t work.

Adam:

They’d have to shut it down worldwide. The miners are in all countries. You can shut down the internet in Tehran, but you can’t shut it down worldwide without huge problems—you can’t produce food, you can’t move water through pipes.

Jake:

You don’t have to shut it off worldwide—you just have to shut it off locally. If you and I are in the same room and I want to give you Bitcoin in a way you can trust, the miners might still be operating in some other country, but how do our transactions get over to those miners to be processed?

And in the apocalyptic scenario we’re talking about, where the state is freezing everybody’s assets because it needs the money, I think shutting down access to crypto servers and miners would be one of the first things it did. It doesn’t even have to shut down the whole internet. Given the cooperation it already has with ISPs, it can just shut down our connectability to crypto infrastructure the same way it shuts down access to bank accounts.

On Why AI Is Both the Biggest Hope and the Biggest Fear

Dan:

To end on a positive note: what’s one thing going on in the world right now that gives you the most hope?

Jake:

Artificial intelligence, honestly. It’s a dual-sided thing—I think it’s also the scariest thing. But it’s also the biggest hope.

The economic side of libertarianism, which so fascinated me and brought me into the movement, and which is still very important to me—long-run, I actually think it’s going to become the least important part. I think our society is about to become so productive, and to replace such large parts of human labor, that it’s going to be freeing in a lot of ways. The state may do terrible things with that power. But on the other hand, once there’s a hyperabundance of wealth, the state may also feel less need to fight wars for physical resources. That’s one of those technological innovations that could lead to an extraordinarily bright future, or the opposite. We’ll see.