Justin Wolfers Recognizes His “Libertarian Friends Were Right” About Government Power

In a recent post, prominent left-liberal economist Justin Wolfers (University of Michigan) concedes that his “libertarian friends” were right about the dangers of government power:

My libertarian-leaning friends have consistently argued against a powerful federal government in favor of individual freedoms. I had — somewhat naively — never taken their views seriously enough. My friends who worked in government were good people, I reasoned, and surely that’s true more broadly.

But I’ve had to admit to my libertarian friends that they were right. Concentration of power can be abused. We’re seeing it happen right now.

Last year, I wrote about similar admissions by two other prominent left-of-center figures: famed legal scholar Cass Sunstein and economic policy commentator Noah Smith. I commend Wolfers and the others for being willing to admit error and learn from it. All too many intellectuals and political commentators never do. I am a longtime fan of Wolfers’ writings, and now am even more of a fan than before.

It is often the case that people become more aware of the dangers of government power when that authority is wielded by their political opponents. Even some libertarians tend to ignore or overlook abuses of power when perpetrated by the side of the political spectrum they identify with. The Trump era has been a particularly significant wake-up call for some on the left, because he has engaged in so many abuses, especially in his second term.

But it is important to recognize that the problems here are systematic, not confined to the misdeeds of any one politician, even one so egregious as Trump. As James Madison famously warned, “[e]nlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Distinctly unenlightened demagogues like Trump all too often reach high political office. That’s in large part because voters often do a poor job of choosing leaders, thanks to widespread political ignorance and bias. Trump’s return to power in 2024 showed that these problems are even more severe than I had previously thought.

Wolfers adds that his newfound appreciation for libertarian concerns have made him “more small-c conservative”:

The old conservative idea was that we have rules of the game that have served us well for generations. We should be slow to change them. Our children should be handed the same set of opportunities we had, if not better ones.

I only partially agree. Where established institutions constrain government power and protect liberty, we should indeed conserve them. But, in too many ways, those safeguards have been eroded over the last 100 years or more, thereby creating the very dangers of abusive government power that Wolfers rightly decries. To fix that, we in some instances need to restructure the current “rules of the game,” and impose much tighter constraints. For example, we should roll back federal power to impose immigration restrictions (which was not part of the original Constitution), and have much stronger enforcement of constitutional constraints on delegation of legislative power to the executive. The growth of delegation and federal immigration powers is at the heart of the many of the worst abuses of the Trump Administration, and creates severe problems even under more conventional administrations.

Similarly, the growth and institutionalization of government control over land use is at the heart of the housing crisis that besets many parts of the US. We should roll that back too, in part by enforcing federal and state constitutional protections for property rights.

Elsewhere, I have explained how these issues and others like them can be the basis of a useful alliance between libertarians and “abundance liberals” (see also my exchange with Matt Yglesias on that subject). I suspect Wolfers may be sympathetic to the abundance liberal movement.

We’re not likely to agree on every issue. But there is enough consensus to enable some useful cooperation between these groups. At the very least, we have common enemies in the form of two prominent political movements that very much don’t appreciate the need for significant constraints on government power: MAGA nationalists on the right, and “democratic socialists” on the left.