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Adam Smith turns 300 this week, and the July issue of Reason commemorates his life and legacy with a great set of articles by fantastic economists such as Deirdre McCloskey and Nobel Prizewinner Vernon Smith (no relation!), both of whom are recent guests on this podcast. My favorite piece in the issue, though, was created by today's guest, Peter Bagge, the legendary alternative comics genius behind Hate, Neat Stuff, and graphic biographies of Margaret Sanger, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rose Wilder Lane.

Born in 1957, Peter has been drawing professionally for over 40 years and contributing to Reason for the entirety of the 21st century. I talk with him about Adam Smith, material and moral progress, and what it's like to be an ardent libertarian in a creative space dominated by liberals and left-wingers. An eyewitness to the punk scene in New York in the late 1970s and the grunge scene in Seattle in the late 1980s, we also talk about what might be coming next in politics and culture and why he's optimistic that the future will be better than the past.

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Alt-Comix Legend Peter Bagge: From Adam Smith to Punk to Grunge - Reason

In February, Marjorie Taylor Greene shared a video, on Twitter, of a conservative activist testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee, on which the Georgia congresswoman sits. The activist was speaking about her two sons, who had both died, in 2020, from fentanyl poisoning. In the tweet, Greene proclaimed that the deaths were caused by the Biden administrations refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartels from murdering Americans everyday by Chinese fentanyl. As many people subsequently noted, the womans sons had died when Donald Trump was President. The CNN reporter Daniel Dale asked Greenes office about the misleading statement, and got a response from a staff member named Nick Dyer. Dyer replied, Dale later noted, by saying lots of people have died from drugs under Biden and Do you think they give a fuck about your bullshit fact-checking? Dale followed up to ask about Greenes false insistence that Trump had won the 2020 Presidential election. Fuck off, Dyer answered.

It was a fairly typical performance from Dyer. Hes unusually belligerent, even among flacks for right-wing members, a reporter who has dealt with him and with many other point people in D.C. told me. Other spokesmen will ignore you, try to spin you, give you a No comment or a perfunctory commentor they might even be quite helpful. Dyer is just pure, non-strategic contempt. The reporter added, Even Trumps team is much more polite and professional. (Dyer declined to be interviewed for this story.)

In some respects, at least, the approach has served Dyer well: the day before his exchange with Dale, he had been promoted, by Greene, to the role of deputy chief of staff. The culture on the Hill has just changed completely, Austin Weatherford, who served as the chief of staff to the Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger from 2013 until earlier this year, told me recently. Weatherford attributed the change to members like Greene and the staff they bring on. But people who knew Dyer when he was getting started in politics told me they never thought hed be one of the people bringing that sort of change to Washington. Its possible that Dyers style says less about him than it does about where the conservative movement is headed.

Dyer grew up in Cumby, a tiny blue-collar town an hour northeast of Dallas; a former schoolmate described him as a straitlaced kid, and told me that he never saw him at the pasture parties. After graduation, Dyer enrolled at Texas A.&M., where he studied what he has called bad Keynesian economics, and began watching videos of Ron Paul. He dropped out in 2011, and got a communications internship with Young Americans for Liberty, formerly known as Students for Ron Paul. The libertarian organization is active on hundreds of college campusesover the years, its members have passed out pocket Constitutions, protested the national debt, and opposed COVID-vaccine requirements. Dyer appeared in the groups annual report, along with a quote: YAL convention was one of the best experiences of my life and it literally has changed it, he said, adding, I look forward to changing everything.

Dyer also took courses that year at the Leadership Institute, a nonprofit founded in 1979 by the onetime Republican operative Morton Blackwell. Blackwell, who has said that moral outrage is the most powerful motivating force in politics, was elected by Barry Goldwater as a delegate at the 1964 Republican National Convention, and worked later for Ronald Reagan. He founded the Leadership Institute to teach organizing, fund-raising, and communications to young conservatives. Its students pay only a nominal registration fee; alumni include Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell, and James OKeefe. Among its past faculty is Ted Cruz, who, in 2012, ran for Senate. Dyer went to work for him, doing youth outreach. Eventually, he became Cruzs deputy state field director, helping to manage what he would later call a grassroots army the state has never seen. (A former staffer suggested to me that the job title, which Dyer had repeatedly pushed for, may have overstated his role.)

Despite Dyers training, communications were not his strong suit, according to multiple people who worked with him. Josh Perry, the campaigns digital director, told me that, when Dyer spoke to potential voters, hed get into arguments with them. It was the weirdest back-and-forth. Wed hear it from across the office, drop whatever we were doing, and listen in. A fellow-staffer recorded the audio of one such call, then auto-tuned Dyers voice to a hip-hop beat and looped it over a photoshopped image of Dyer wearing a Ron Paul 2012 Liberty Kid I.D. tag. Government mandates on labelling is not libertarian, Dyer repeats, over the beat from Tygas Rack City. Were in this because we want to advance liberty, and I know that you agree with me. Sounding exasperated, he adds, Maam, I am on the paleo diet. I dont eat corn because Im smart. The video is a little cruel, but Perry chuckled recalling it. Nick was following his own playbook, he said, certainly not the playbook of a campaign that wanted to win.

Cruz won anyway, and Dyer went to D.C. to work for him, sorting mail and working on press briefings. He didnt stick around long: Perry said that Cruz gave Dyer very little face time, and suggested that Dyers lack of a college degree may have limited his prospects with the Texas senator, who, though he frequently rails against the lites hurting America, attended Princeton and Harvard. Dyer also seems to have alienated most of his colleagues. Hed gone on a self-promotion campaign, getting the Leadership Institute blogger to write him up as M.V.P. of the campaign or whatever, the former staffer recalled. Thats when things began to really sour with all of us. They had a going-away party for Dyer, but he didnt show up. Nonetheless, he told a reporter that he was proud to have been a part of a team who came to Washington, as Senator Cruz notes, to kick down the door, tear down the curtains, and auction off the silver.

Toward the end of that summer, Dyer became the political director for an ob-gyn named Greg Brannon, who was running in the Republican primary for Senate in North Carolina against an incumbent, Thom Tillis. Brannon had the backing of the Tea Party and an endorsement from Rand Paul. Not only does Nick bring a great deal of experience and talent to our team but an intense commitment to the core principles of our campaign, Brannon said. At the time, Brannon was facing a civil suit alleging that he misled investors in a tech company he directed; a jury found him liable, and he lost in the primary a few months later. Dyer fell off the map for a bit. He stayed on Twitter, where he would occasionally express his enthusiasm for Rand Paul and for the TV miniseries Sons of Liberty. His bio identified him as a @TedCruz alum. Then Cruz ran for President and was defeated, in humiliating fashion, by Trump. Some time after the election, Dyer changed his bio to WE DID IT! #MAGA Political Operator.

By then, Josh Perry, the digital director for Cruzs 2012 Senate run, had become disillusioned with his old boss and disgusted by Trump; he left politics altogether. Hed largely forgotten about Dyer, he told me, until a former colleague sent him an article about Marjorie Taylor Greene and some weird response from her communications director. I didnt think anything of it at first, then I looked again. And I was, like, Wait, is that the same Nick Dyer? Dyer hadnt been in the job long, but he was already building a reputation as an unusually aggressive aide with a loud contempt for journalists. Perry was taken aback. Hed found his former colleague a little odd and overzealous, but he regarded Dyer as a sincere libertarian who would have been repulsed by the know-nothing opportunism of Greene. I still thought that he believed things that are entirely divergent from what hes become, he said.

Greene and Dyer seem to have little in common. She comes from a wealthy background, and, according to people who knew her when she was a CrossFit coach in the Atlanta area, showed little interest in politics prior to 2017, when she began writing Facebook posts about QAnon. Even so, when she ran for Congress in Georgias Fourteenth District, in 2020, she got support from the far-right Freedom Caucus, and, in the Republican primary, defeated a mild-mannered neurosurgeon named John Cowan. On Election Night, in November, the Floyd County Republican Party held a party at a restaurant in Rome, the districts largest town. A G.O.P. official managed media access to the event. All of a sudden, this guy Nick comes flying up the stairs and says, What the hell is the matter with you letting Al Jazeera in here? the official recalled. Nick got up in my face, hollering, yelling, Youre out of here. He added, If I hadnt been representing the Party, Id have punched him right smack in the face. But Dyers histrionics have come to seem emblematic to the official. Thats the way Marjorie and her staff are, he told me.

Dyer had joined Greenes team as a transition aide. He was connected with her by a political consultant named Isaiah Wartman, whose company, WAMA Strategies, provides digital-strategy-and-marketing services to Greene and other Republicans, including Matt Gaetz and James Comer. Wartman keeps a fairly low profile, though his name surfaced in the press recently when Rolling Stone reported that the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos had used Wartmans credit card to buy a prospective campaign Web site for Kanye West. (Wartman called it gross negligence made by a vendor.) Wartman has also worked as a spokesman for the Illinois Representative Mary Miller, who, in 2021, called the overturning of Roe v. Wade a victory for white life. (Wartman, in his role as spokesperson, said that Miller meant to say right to life.)

We ran in similar circles, Wartman told me of Dyer, adding that hed known him for more than a decade. Hes good at pretty much everything that he does. Hes a good communicator. Hes a good writer. He has a good head on his shoulders. Hes very politically apt. He understands the current terrain of things. Anything you want in a comms-related person.

After Greenes inauguration, Dyer became her communications director. In the new role, he was responsible for contributing to her social media and writing her daily briefings and press releases about her attempts to impeach Joe Biden and her Visits with Pretrial J6 Defendants in Patriot Wing of DC Jail. He also responded to Greenes press inquiries. In January, 2021, the CNN reporter Daniel Dale wrote about Greenes tweeting of election-related misinformation, and asked Dyer whether Greene wished to comment. Heres our comment: CNN is Fake News, Dyer replied. Around the same time, the Politico reporter Michael Kruse was working on a piece about Greenes campaign. He contacted Dyer with a fact-checking query, and got a brief reply: You are a scumbag, Michael.

The former Cruz staffer, who still works in politics, suggested that the approach encouraged by representatives such as Greene makes a job like Dyers easy. Dyer can say something incorrect or inflammatory for no reason, and, if he gets called out, its just bad guys trying to get us, the former staffer said, adding, Nick works for a truly bad person. Hes come quite a ways from the Ron Paul revolution.

Or maybe not so far. Like many Paul supporters, Dyer gravitated toward the Tea Party, whose support both Cruz and Brannon courted. The Pew Research Center has found that Republicans who supported the Tea Party in 2014 were more likely to remain in the G.O.P. through the middle of Trumps first term than those who didnt support it or those who felt ambivalent about it. (The Tea Party still existsexcept now its called Make America Great Again, Trump has said.) If one thinks of the Tea Party as a group mostly concerned with taxes and the size of government, a trajectory like Dyers may seem odd; if one sees it as an essentially reactionary movement that promoted birtherism, among other things, the path from Paul to Greene is perhaps a little less surprising. Wartmans career, like Dyers, is illustrative in this regard: he did mail and digital fund-raising for Ron and Rand Paul before shifting to MAGA clients.

The political world view at the heart of this trajectory seems less related to an economic argument about freedom than to a cultural case for derisionor moral outrage, perhaps, very broadly defined. Lately, Greene has been calling for members of the Biden Administration to be impeached because too many migrants are crossing the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Last month, Dyer appeared in the front row of a press briefing that Greene gave as part of what she was calling Impeachment Week. The congresswoman introduced articles of impeachment against the Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, the F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray, the Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Joe Biden (again). There was no chance that any of these efforts would go anywhere, except on various Web sites, Twitter feeds, and front pages, plus cable news. A few days later, Wartman told me, Nicks impact on conservative politics will have an effect for decades to come.

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The Most Belligerent Flack on Capitol Hill - The New Yorker

Haven't checked in with former libertarian love object Rand Paul for a while. I just assumed he'd moved to a tree house outside Kingston with a lovely view of what's left of the coal slurry tsunami, a tribute to the defeat of big government and its nanny-state regulatin'.

Thus, I missed this episode

While we're on the whole economics thing, the Federal Reserve on Wednesday announced that, no, it would not be hiking interest rates at this time. (It also announced that there will be two rate increases at some vague date in the future.) The announcement blew up the primary talking point that the GOP unlimbered when those glowing employment numbers came out. The GOP fanned out to warn Democrats against gloating and used the expected rise in interest rates to be the scary monster in the hall closet. (This, of course, while they were threatening to send the world economy to the bottom of the sea.) I think the Republicans should tell Horatio Bunce to shut his damn piehole. He's not doing them any favors.

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.

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Actually, Congress Most Certainly Is Allowed to Use Money to Pay ... - Esquire

Foundations are having to fend off pressures to conform to the new philanthropic orthodoxies on race and identity issues.

Earlier this spring, a collection of unlikely bedfellowspublished a statementin theChronicle of Philanthropyin support of what they call Philanthropic Pluralism. The heads of the left-wing Ford Foundation and Doris Duke Foundation, the libertarian group Stand Together, the conservative-leaning Templeton Foundation, as well as the head of the Council on Foundations and the Philanthropy Roundtable stood up in favor of the notion that philanthropy provides the greatest value when donors enable and encourage pluralism by supporting and investing in a wide and diverse range of values, missions, and interests.

As commendable as the sentiment may be, it does not address the most significant problems philanthropists and foundation leaders face when directing funds to programs and organizations that may diverge widely in their underlying principles and goals.

Continue reading the entire piece here at Quillette

_____________________

James Pieresonis a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Naomi Schaefer Riley is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Independent Womens Forum.

Photo by iamnoonmai/iStock

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Philanthropy and Pluralism - Manhattan Institute

In 2001, the libertarian anti-tax activist Grover Norquist gave a memorable interview on NPR about his intentions. He said, I dont want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. Everything about the line was designed to provoke: the selection of a bookish and easily horrified audience, the unapologetic violence of drag and drown, the porcelain specificity of bathtub.

As propaganda, it worked magnificently. When I arrived in Washington, two years later, as a novice political reporter, the image still reverberated; to many it seemed a helpfully blunt depiction of what conservatives in power must really want. Republicans were preparing to privatize Social Security andMedicare, the President had campaigned on expanding school choice, and, everywhere you looked, public services were being reimagined as for-profit ones. Norquist himselfan intense, gleeful, ideologicalfigure with the requisite libertarian beardhad managed to get more than two hundred members of Congress to sign a pledge never to raise taxes, for any reason at all. The Republicans of the George W. Bush era were generally smooth operators, having moved from a boom-time economy to the seat of an empire, confident, at every step, that they had the support of a popular majority. Their broader vision could be a little tricky for reporters to decode. Maybe Norquist was the one guy among them too weird to keep the plans for the revolution a secret.

But, as the Bush Administration unfolded, it became harder to see the Republicans as true believers. Government just didnt seem to be shrinking. On the contrary, all around us in Washingtonin the majestic agency buildings along the Mall and in the rooftop bars crowded with management consultants flown in to aid in outsourcing, and especially in the vast, mirrored, gated complexes along the highway to Dulles, from which the war on terror was being cordinated and suppliedthe government was very obviously growing.

However much the Republicans had wanted to downsize government, they turned out to want other things morelike operating an overseas empire and maintaining a winning political coalition. Bushs proposal for privatizing Medicare was watered down until, in 2003, it became an expensive drug benefit for seniors, evidently meant to help him win relection. After beating John Kerry, in 2004, Bush announced that Social Security reform would be one of his Administrations top priorities (Ive earned capital in this election, and Im going to spend it), but within just a few months that plan had run aground, too. House Republicans saw how terribly the policy was polling and lost their nerve. Meanwhile, more drones and private military contractors and Meals Ready-to-Eat flowed to Iraq and Afghanistan and points beyond. New programs offset cuts to old ones. Norquist was going to need a bigger bathtub.

Self-identified libertarians have always been tiny in numbera handful of economists, political activists, technologists, and true believers. But, in the decades after Ronald Reagan was elected President, they came to exert enormous political influence, in part because their prescription of prosperity through deregulation appeared to be working, and in part because they provided conservatism with a long-term agenda and a vision of a better future. To the usual right-wing mixture of social traditionalism and hierarchical nationalism, the libertarians had added an especially American sort of optimism: if the government would only step back and allow the market to organize society, we would truly flourish. When Bill Clinton pronounced the era of big government over, in his 1996 State of the Union address, it operated as an ideological concession: Democrats would not aggressively defend the welfare state; they would accept that an era of small government had already begun. It almost seemedas in the famous bathtub drowning scene in the movie Les Diaboliquesas if the Democrats and the Republicans had joined together in an effort to dispatch a shared problem.

Had you written a history of the libertarian movement fifteen years ago, it would have been a tale of improbable success. A small cadre of intellectually intense oddballs who inhabited a Manhattanish atmosphere of late-night living-room debates and barbed book reviews had somehow managed to impose their beliefs on a political party, then the country. A sympathetic historian might have emphasized the mass appeal of the ideals of free minds and free markets (as the libertarian writer Brian Doherty did in his comprehensive, still definitive work Radicals for Capitalism, published in 2007), and a skeptical one might have focussed on the convenient way that the ideology advanced the business interests of billionaire backers such as the Koch brothers. But the story would have concerned a thriving idea.

The situation is no longer so simple. At first, the Republican backlash against Bushs heresies (the expensive prescription-drug benefit, the lack of progress against the national debt) cohered into the Tea Party andonce the G.O.P. establishment made its peace with the movementinto Paul Ryans stint as Speaker, with its scolding fixation on debt reduction. But that period scarcely outlasted Ryans Speakership. It was brought to an end by Barack Obamas crafty (and somewhat under-celebrated) relection campaign, in 2012, in which he effectively cast Romney-Ryan libertarianism as a stalking horse for plutocracy, rather than a leg up for small business, as Republicans claimed.

Doctrinal libertarianism hasnt disappeared from the political scene: its easy enough to find right-of-center politicians insisting that government is too big. But, between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, libertarianism has given way to culture war as the rights dominant mode. To some libertariansand liberals friendly to the causethis is a development to lament, because it has stripped the American right of much of its idealism. Documenting the history of the libertarian movement now requires writing in the shadow of Trump, as two new books do. Together, they suggest that, since the end of the Cold War, libertarianism has remade American politics twicefirst through its success and then through its failure.

In The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism (Princeton), Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi argue that things didnt have to turn out this way. Zwolinski, a philosopher at the University of San Diego, and Tomasi, a political theorist at Brown, are both committed libertarians who are appalled at the movements turn toward a harder-edged conservatism. (They are prominent figures in a faction called bleeding-heart libertarianism.) Their book is a deep plunge into the archives, in search of a primordial libertarianism that preceded the Cold War. They contend that the profound skepticism toward government and the political absolutism that characterize libertarians have animated movements across the political spectrum, and have, in the past, sometimes led adherents in progressive directions rather than conservative ones. (In the call to defund the police, for instance, the authors identify a healthy skepticism of too much centralized government.) As they see it, libertarianism once had a left-of-center valenceand could still reclaimit.

If this sounds a little optimistic, it does make for an interesting historical account. The first thinker to self-identify as libertarian, the authors point out, was the French anarcho-communist Joseph Djacque, who argued that private property and the state were simply two different ways in which social relationships could become infused with hierarchy and repression. Better to abolish both. The social Darwinist Herbert Spencer denounced imperialisms deeds of blood and rapine; the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Lysander Spooner condemned slavery as an instance of the governments usurping natural rights. In the history of resistance to the modern state, Zwolinski and Tomasi see libertarians everywhere. This approach can sometimes come off as a land grab; my eyebrows went up when they claimed the abolitionist John Brown as a libertarian hero. Then again, Brown was a fiercely anti-government radical who sought to seize a federal armory to provision slaves for an uprising, so maybe its not much of a stretch.

All this genealogy can seem a little notional, but certain suggestive rhythms recur: Zwolinski and Tomasi show how many thinkers return to personal liberty and the right to private property as bedrocks. That isnt only an American grammarit comes from Locke and Mill, and, as The Individualists stresses, from some French sources, toobut its the one in which the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are written. Why do so many Americans own guns? Probably in part because gun ownership is protected in the Constitution. Such choices by the Founders dont make America a libertarian country, but they do insure that libertarians will be around for as long as the Constitution is.

Zwolinski and Tomasi emphasize the contingencies in libertarianisms history, but the most consequential contingency was the Cold War, which closely followed the publication, in 1944, of a core libertarian text, Friedrich Hayeks The Road to Serfdom. An austere Austrian economist who taught at the London School of Economics, Hayek had become alarmed that so many left-of-center English thinkers were convinced that economic central planning ought to outlast the Second World War, becoming a permanent feature of government. Back in Vienna, Hayek and his mentors had studied central planning, and he believed that the English were being hopelessly nave. His economic insight was that, when it came to information, no government planner, no matter how many studies he commissioned, could hope to match the markets efficiency in determining what people wanted. How much bread was needed, how many tires? Best to let the market work it out. The price system, Hayek wrote, enables entrepreneurs, by watching the movement of comparatively few prices, as an engineer watches the hands of a few dials, to adjust their activities to those of their fellows. He coupled this insight with a warning: Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.

The Road to Serfdom, a text that relied on Austro-Hungarian historical experience to make a point about wartime English policy, was initially rejected by American publishers. But once it saw print, and won a rave in the Times, Hayek became a phenomenon. Anxious and unprepared, he was pushed by his publisher onto the stage at Town Hall, in New York City, to address an eager audience of American industrialists who were sick to death of Roosevelt. An abridged version was published by the Readers Digest in the spring of 1945, and was then made available as a five-cent reprint through the Book-of-the-Month Club, which distributed more than half a million copies.

And heres what one of the worlds greatest songs sounds like when I sing it.

Cartoon by Jon Adams

Hayeks work more or less invented libertarianism in twentieth-century America. As the Cold War wore on, his warnings about the perils of central planning gained urgency. Small libertarian think tanks, newspapers, and philanthropies appeared across the country through the nineteen-fifties.

Hayeks mentor, Ludwig von Mises, arrived in America and began teaching a seminar in Austrian economics, at N.Y.U., underwritten by a businessmans fund. The movement was insular, fractious, New Yorkish. On West Eighty-eighth Street, a late-night salon convened in the apartment of Murray Rothbard, a student of von Misess who had become the chief propagandist of libertarianisms extreme wing. (Robert Nozick, who became libertarianisms most important philosopher, dropped by.) In Murray Hill, Ayn Rand held post-midnight sessions with her own circle, which, at different times, included Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson, who would become a leading domestic-policy adviser to Presidents Nixon and Reagan. Even to ideological allies, the Rand circlein which everyone seemed to be in psychotherapy with the novelists lover, Nathaniel Brandenappeared to be a cult. What if, as so often happens, one didnt like, even couldnt stand, these people? Rothbard asked.

Libertarian thinkers, on the page, tend to be prickly, disputatious, and drawn to absolutes, which is why they make for good copy. Those traits were deepened by an isolation from real power; they lorded over some small-circulation journals and a couple of budding think tanks, but that was basically it. Von Mises, among the crankiest of the originals, was once summoned to a small conference in Switzerland with a handful of libertarian grandeesthe few other people on earth who actually agreed with himand stormed out because they didnt agree with him enough. Youre all a bunch of socialists, he said. When Milton Friedman, the most urbane of the libertarian greats, published a pamphlet, in 1946, denouncing rent control, Rand fumed that he didnt go far enough: Not one word about the inalienable right of landlords and property owners.

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The Long Afterlife of Libertarianism - The New Yorker