Many thanks to Hannah for her beautiful post on George Eliot’s Silas Marner and the evacuation of moral purpose from the Protestant work ethic. That resonates with Hijacked, my latest book, which traces the history of the work ethic from 17th century Puritan theologians, through the economic theory and policy debates of the 18th and 19th centuries, to today. I argue that the work ethic split into two versions during the Industrial Revolution. One–the version Max Weber analyzed–expressed the ideological perspective and interests of capitalists, and ultimately led to what we call neoliberalism–or, in a less institutionally articulated form, a version of libertarianism. The other mostly forgotten version expressed the perspective and interests of workers, and ultimately led to social democracy.
Americans inherited the UK’s capitalist work ethic in colonial times, and (not for the first time) put it on steroids from the mid-1970s to today. Scratch an American libertarian, and most likely you’ll find a believer in the capitalist work ethic underneath. However much libertarians talk about universal freedom, at heart they are advancing a deeply authoritarian doctrine tied to capitalist rule. To see this, it’s helpful to relate current policy proposals to 19th century ones, when capitalist proponents of the work ethic were more open about their aims.
Congress is currently working on the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which gives big tax breaks to the rich. It will massively expand the deficit, which is something the GOP claims to care about. Maybe some of them are just a little nervous about the bond markets?
Anyway, spending cuts must be found to partially offset the tax cuts. So of course, they must be taken out of the hides of the poor. The GOP is trying to achieve this largely through a massive cut to Medicaid.
No, no, says House Speaker Johnson! Any loss of Medicaid eligibility will be entirely the voluntary choice of recipients! Because their loss will be due to their failure to meet the OBBB’s new work requirements. It’s just those lazy poor people who want to live off the public dole without contributing to society who will lose their health care. Given that massive savings are projected from this, Republicans are counting on Medicaid recipients “voluntarily” deciding that they would rather die of illness than work for a living. It’s an old slur. Advocates of slavery claimed that slaves were so lazy that if they were freed, they would quit work and let their dependents starve.
Previous experimentation with Medicaid work requirements in places like Arkansas shows that virtually all the targeted recipients are already working as hard as they are able, once we adjust for their relatively poor health. Loss of Medicaid, far from inducing greater work effort, increases unemployment by denying sick people the health care they need to restore their ability to work. Many recipients lose eligibility not because they are failing to work, but because they can’t meet the additional paperwork requirements and filing deadlines required to prove they are steadily working. Work requirements divert enormous sums from medical care into determining eligibility for recipients who are already working.
This is an old tactic of capitalist work ethic ideologues. The British Treasury used it to administer emergency food aid to Ireland during the Potato Famine. On the work ethic principle that “If a man will not work, neither shall he eat,” (2 Thessalonians 3:10) the government enacted a public works employment scheme–hard labor building roads–for starving men in 1846-7. But the wage wasn’t enough to pay for the increasing cost of food. As Irish workers’ ability to perform hard labor declined from lack of food, the Treasury attributed this to laziness and insisted on paying by the task rather than the day. The enormous expense and time devoted to documenting task completion at the requisite quality for each worker led to long delays in pay and further starvation. Local relief agents kept pleading with the Treasury to relax its work and documentation requirements, explaining how these demands were diverting funds needed to feed people, causing starvation, and not catching cheaters.
Their testimony fell on deaf ears. As I explain in Hijacked, the government viewed the famine as an opportunity, not a calamity. It designed relief policy for a much grander end than relieving the suffering of Irish peasants. Its real objective was to quickly revolutionize the 2-class Irish agricultural system (landlords, peasants) on the 3-class capitalist model (landlords, capitalist farmers, wage laborers) that England had taken 300 years to achieve. This model required the elimination of the peasantry–workers who enjoyed a measure of self-sufficiency because they grew their own food–to be replaced with a much smaller number of agricultural wage laborers.
The potato was so nutritious and yields were so high that an Irish peasant could support a large family on a quarter-acre plot. The work ethic-obsessed English condemned the potato as the “lazy crop” because so little work was needed to grow it. In their imagination, Irish peasants were slacking off the rest of the time, and lazy Irish landlords were colluding with them by renting out tiny plots. These work ethic ideologues conveniently overlooked the fact that the peasants had to pay the rents they owed by working the landlords’ farms. Irish peasants produced enormous agricultural surpluses that England imported to feed its population.
Never mind. Facts don’t matter! For the English also had their eyes trained on the property of those idle Irish landlords, which they thought should be in the hands of purportedly more enterprising English landlords. I’ll skip over the many additional grisly contortions of British welfare policy undertaken to clear the Irish estates of the peasantry and drive their owners into bankruptcy, so the English could buy them at fire-sale prices. Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, captured the spirit of the capitalist work ethic in recalling what economist and government advisor Nassau Senior had told him: that “he feared the famine in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good.”
Is there a similar grand scheme underlying the Republicans’ desire to drastically cut the welfare state? Something more than merely making the extremely rich even richer? I think so. Trump’s base is largely composed of Christian nationalists, who include people like Speaker Mike Johnson and Sen. Joni “We are all going to die” Ernst. Christian nationalists have always hated the welfare state, because they blame it for destroying the Christian patriarchal family, mainly by enabling women with children to support their families without relying on a husband. This, too, was an obsession of 18th and 19th century Christian advocates of the capitalist work ethic. More generally, on that ethic’s presumption that work ethic virtues (industry, frugality, chastity, “personal responsibility”) can be inferred from one’s wealth, many Christians believe that the poor must be lazy, profligate, licentious, and irresponsible. The only way to get them to shape up is to keep them in poverty and precarity until they earn and save their way out by practicing the work ethic.
Never mind that innocent children are the inevitable collateral damage of such a system. As Malthus explained, God is not unjust to “visit the sins of the fathers on the children.” For the laws of the free market are the laws of nature, instituted by God to goad the inferior classes onto the path of virtue as the work ethic defines it. Burke heartily agreed. There’s libertarianism, coming straight out of the capitalist work ethic. And that’s the kind of thinking that makes you so comfortable about making poor children suffer that you will mock other people who are upset at you for doing so.
{ 37 comments }
Ken_L 06.27.25 at 7:34 am
America is a land of opportunity where anybody can work hard and become wealthy enough to have a wedding in Venice with brilliant guests like Jarvanka and Oprah. That’s why communism will always fail in the United States.
engels 06.27.25 at 9:32 am
Interesting post and the book sounds interesting too.
Coincidentally right now Britain’s Labour government is trying to cut an in-work disability benefit, PIP (which many disabled people rely on to access paid work) on the grounds that it discourages work: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
engels 06.27.25 at 9:56 am
In Britain we still live in a semi-feudal society that celebrates and aspires to idleness—in a zombie monarchy, “gentlemanly” finance and over two million petty landlords—so the punitive work ethic the state uses to cudgel the poorest and most vulnerable has a sneering, insincere tone, not unlike the Nazi slogan to which it is often compared.
Lisa H 06.27.25 at 10:12 am
Thanks for this interesting (and depressing, obviously) post. It raises a question about how best to respond to this line of Christian fundamentalism. Many defenders of social justice start from secular premises, but in the US context, I wonder to what extent one would need more targeted messaging that draws on a “social gospel” background – not so much “It’s right to have a welfare state because that’s what justice demands”, but rather “Jesus would have wanted us to have a welfare state.” Are there any voices like this, and do they have an impact?
mw 06.27.25 at 2:14 pm
It seems a little odd for an article purporting to be about libertarianism to then to proceed to complain about Trump and Mike Johnson who are big-government conservative populists rather libertarians of any sort. The tiny half handful of libertarianish Republicans in Congress (specifically Rand Paul and Thomas Massie — what is it about Kentucky?) are two Republicans who’ve been resisting passage of the BBB.
Liz Anderson 06.27.25 at 2:42 pm
There are many Christian voices in favor of a robust welfare state. The Catholic Church has always insisted that economic arrangements must embody justice and charity, and hence has never been enthusiastic about laissez faire capitalism. Pope Francis was consistent on this point, and his successor Leo XIV looks likely to continue this tradition. (Leo XIV may have chosen his name in homage to Leo XIII’s social gospel orientation, expressed in his classic 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.) As an American, Leo XIV may even have a chance to rein in the ultra-reactionary U.S. branch of the Catholic Church, whose clerics are obsessed with abortion, IVF, and LGBT issues in ways that displace attention to economic justice. Among Protestants, the social gospel is alive in several mainline denominations, including the Anglican Church, the Church of Christ, and Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches. These denominations also tend to be relatively welcoming to LGBT people, although not uniformly. But they shed members pretty quickly as Evangelicals rose in the 1970s, so their influence has been waning for a long time. Now it’s the Evangelicals’ turn to decline as their youth are falling away from the church. The Southern Baptist Convention is losing members fast. We should not underestimate the reactionary panic that ensues when an already conservative group perceives that it is facing a crisis of reproduction. The response is to tighten its grip and get more dogmatic, authoritarian, and cult-like, in the sense of demanding that its members not consort with nonmembers, who are regarded as the enemy, Satanic, and proper targets of spiritual warfare. A conspiratorial mindset arises, and an immense sense of grievance over the fact that others reject their beliefs and lifeways. At the same time, there are many humane and decent Evangelicals who are horrified by these developments and who believe the Christian nationalists have lost their way, particularly in their militancy and racism. David French is perhaps the most well-known (to secular American liberals) of the humane Evangelicals, who has been reaching out to the reactionary ones. But in their panicky and grievance-soaked way, they have frozen him out. It is hard to reason with people who think you are an agent of Satan. Ironically, I think Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Delaware), who is an ordained Presbyterian elder, may have a chance to calm down some of the Congressional Christian Republicans enough to open their hearts. McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress, is amazing. Check out her interview on the Ezra Klein Show.
PatinIowa 06.27.25 at 4:18 pm
To paraphrase Dr. Johnson:
[H]ow is it that we hear the loudest yelps for [work ethics] among the drivers of [the immiserated]?
Peter Dorman 06.27.25 at 4:54 pm
From what I’ve read of this history, LA sounds right. But it’s also interesting how the work ethic functions for those on or near the bottom. People who work very hard but get little in return often get emotional satisfaction from their resentment of those beneath them who, for whatever reason, work less or not at all. My amateur sense of working class conservatism in the US is that downward-directed resentment is a driving force, maybe the driving force. If this is true, we should really understand the mechanisms better — why some people feel this way but not others.
I’ll add that I’ve also encountered very down and out folks who subject themselves to their own resentment. They support stern authoritarian politics because they see themselves as failures due to their own lack of work ethic. They want government to punish those who fail the way they have.
Cheez Whiz 06.27.25 at 7:10 pm
The Republican party and the reactionary wing of the Catholic Church share a desire for a smaller but much more devout and loyal membership as a reasonable trade-off to achieve their core goals. Different branches of the Trump administration are pursuing policies to deliver a smaller population, whether purposefully (ICE) or maybe not (Kennedy’s HHS). The Heritage plan to dismantle the federal regulatory and public services state (an old libertarian dream) will assist. The techbros and racists are explicitly in favor, while evangelicals are at most unconcerned with anyone outside their bubble. What this is supposed to accomplish beyond generic totalitarian fear and chaos is a mystery.
notGoodenough 06.27.25 at 7:21 pm
Reading this and Hannah’s excellent post raised in my mind the following (somewhat ill-formed) thought – I wonder if there is some value to drawing a distinction between valuing work as a form of moral endevour (what we might loosely call “Protestant work ethic”) and valuing the fruits of labour as a means to satisfying the creation-impulse (a sort of “gattungswesen” view). After some brief consideration, I think the way I would try to divide this a bit is that the former places the value on “hard work” – that is to say, it is more about the effort than what that work produces (thus seeing work more as something which should be an unpleasant task which should be endured; a form of purification through self0mortification, if you will). The latter, meanwhile, places the value on what is being produced – a rejection of labour in and of itself being a moral endeavour, and instead embracing it as a form valued social necessity and means to cultural satisfaction through the production of useful or desirable commodities (a means to improving material conditions, so to speak). I have a vague and unformed sense that notions of requiring attendence (regardless of whether or not that links to efficiency), “misery taxes” to “prevent idleness” (both within work as well as the benefits system), the value placed on (so-called) job creators, and the proliferation of “bullshit jobs” ties to the PWE, while the gattungswesen view ties more to notions of attributing dignity to the worker rather than the work, fulfilment (through the mode of work, resulting social functions, and meaningful labour effecting changed material conditions), and the value being placed on the worker as a creative force (who should have power over how that force is directed). This is a somewhat underbaked musing, and perhaps makes sense only to me, but I feel there may be something there worth consideration.
Liz Anderson 06.27.25 at 7:22 pm
Peter, yes, 100% correct on both points. Regarding downward resentment, that was built into the conservative work ethic critique of the welfare state from the start: those lazy poor people are living off the dole at the expense of industrious workers just above them. It’s a key theme of Malthus, carried forward by Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner (The Forgotten Man) and many others. That’s the root of the core narrative of right-wing populism today: those horrible “elites,” lifting up the undeserving dregs and deviants of society, above you, the virtuous and deserving middle, the real people. That narrative persuades even people who could benefit from social welfare policies to oppose them, as documented in Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of whiteness: How the politics of racial resentment is killing America’s heartland. Metzl interviews lower-class whites who could be helped by Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, but rejected it because they felt that blacks would benefit more. In Hijacked, I discuss how advocates of the pro-worker or progressive work ethic addressed this critique by calling for the replacement of means-tested welfare programs with universal social insurance. Tom Paine is the hero of this story.
nicopap 06.27.25 at 9:36 pm
I heard this one before!
(from Life and Fate) There are a lot of similarities between Dekulakization and the Irish colonization.
On another note: I had a conversation yesterday with someone saying that social housing in my city brought too many poor people who don’t pay taxes. My courageous friend defended the poor by asking why they weren’t earning enough to pay taxes.
I stood quiet, thinking about the perverse effect of means tested programs. Why give only to the poor? Why not give to everyone and take back from the rich? Progressive taxation is a means-tested program, without the army of people who’s job is to say no, and draining people’s productive time filling those forms.
CHETAN R MURTHY 06.28.25 at 1:31 am
mw @ 5: C’mon man: aside from a vanishing few (like Radley Balko), “libertarian” means “Republican who likes pot”. C’mon.
mw 06.28.25 at 10:33 am
CHETAN MURTHY @13. No, it really doesn’t mean that. And that crusty old quip has never been less apt than in the age of Trump. It’s curious to me how consistently leftists fail basic understanding of libertarianism. I’ve sometimes wondered whether is it a matter of “can’t understand” or “won’t understand”, and I’m still not sure which way I lean on that. ChatGPT does quite a serviceable job in explaining the differences between libertarians and MAGA conservatives (as well as pointing out the few areas of agreement). I wonder how many CT’ers would do even 1/10th as well with the same prompt (“What are the main differences between libertarians and MAGA conservatives and what commonalities do they share??)
engels 06.28.25 at 12:57 pm
“Libertarian” = someone who thinks you can have capitalism without the state machine, war, empire, etc (whether that has anything to do with how much pot they smoke I wouldn’t like to say).
NomadUK 06.28.25 at 3:56 pm
Precisely this. Means testing is only ever the wedge by which the Right begins the process of eliminating government schemes. Under the guise of helping only those who ‘deserve’ it, they gradually make the requirements so onerous that it reduces the recipient base to the point where there is no support left amongst the general population, and it’s easily eradicated.
LFC 06.28.25 at 10:57 pm
In reading Hannah Forsyth’s post on Silas Marner, I vaguely recalled Max Weber’s reference, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, to “worldly asceticism.” Silas Marner doesn’t really seem “worldly” enough to fit into Weber’s category, but perhaps that was part of Forsyth’s point?
Btw, Tocqueville wrote a book called Memoir on Pauperism.How does that fit into the intellectual/political history that Prof. Anderson is telling, or does it?
somebody who remembers the libertarian party abandoned their own candidate to vote for trump 06.28.25 at 11:20 pm
mw @ #14 has been struck with the disease of the crooked timber comment section – a failure to walk outside and look around, and instead to live in a marvelous mind palace constructed by ones self. In theory, naturally, not a single libertarian would support trump after his brutalizing, vicious expansion of the personal power of the president to crush individual freedom in every way he could between 2016 and 2020, especially when he returned and promised more of the same. but instead he went to the libertarian conference and said he would pardon ross ulbricht, an actual drug dealer who was only stopped from hiring assassins to kill rivals by a federal infiltrator, and the entirety of the libertarian party leadership immediately and permanently abandoned their own candidate, and every single actual libertarian in the united states voted for trump eagerly. they didn’t even vote for their own guy this time around because they hated him for being gay and therefore a “leftist infiltrator”. there cannot be a gay libertarian in america because thats WOKE WOKE WOKE WOKE WOKE WOKE WOKE
Austin Loomis 06.29.25 at 2:58 am
[society-wide conformist crouch intensifies]
mw 06.29.25 at 10:03 am
somebody who remembers @18 The Libertarian party is often kind of a clown show (more so in 2024 than usual), but most libertarians are not Libertarian party members. For libertarians generally, it’s not obvious that it’s a good thing that the party continues to exist, especially given that the US lacks proportional representation, so their chances of any actual electoral success is effectively zero. Libertarian/classical liberal ideas have had a lot more influence than the L party.
Bill Benzon 06.29.25 at 10:16 am
Thanks for this (& your book looks interesting). I’ve just published an article in 3 Quarks Daily where I argue that universal basic income (UBI) as relief from AI-induced job displacement is likely to have the unintended consequence of subsidizing the drug industry, whether legal or illegal. Why? Because our institutions have become so tailored to the demands of Homo economicus that many people will be at a loss as to how to use the free-time UBI would afford them. Many of us have become so “broken to harness” that we need the structure provided by work. Hence we see the rise of retirement coaching as a profession. Those who can afford their fees hire retirement coaches to show them how to use their time in retirement.
engels 06.29.25 at 12:29 pm
every single actual libertarian in the united states voted for trump
I’ve occasionally listened to Andrew Napolitano’s podcast (because John Mearsheimer is on it) and while I don’t agree with his politics it’s hard to believe he voted for Trump.
Lee A. Arnold 06.29.25 at 1:46 pm
The change that will be required was described a hundred years ago in Keynes’ short essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.”
somebody who reads the news 06.29.25 at 9:10 pm
mw @ #20 asks us to put aside the evidence of our own eyes and ears. “Well when american libertarians organize themselves to take part in politics they support the police obliterating unarmed 12 year old black kids with machine guns because caliper science says they’d only grow up to be on food stamps anyway, BUT if you look inside the marvelous mind palaces of those that don’t organize themselves to take part in politics, perhaps inside their podcast mind as engels suggests , then you might find differently!” bluntly, who fucking cares? the only thing libertarians do in practice is hand ammunition and infinite amounts of money and power to people who think medicaid is slavery and if you’re disabled you are worthless.
who fucking cares whats in their heads, or on their podcasts, if they can’t even account for what their movement is actually doing in the real world? (and anyway, listening to a guy who was in the front running for a trump appointment to the supreme court, thinks abolitionism was wrong, and believes ENGALAND WIERTAPPED TRUMP TOWAR FOR NOBUMBAR!!!!!!! and saying ‘i bet he didn’t vote for trump’ is fucking hilarious)
engels 06.29.25 at 10:36 pm
bluntly, who fucking cares?
I mostly agree (as someone who first encountered libertarianism via academic political philososophy, I long ago formed the opinion its main purpose is to waste everyone’s time).
Tm 06.30.25 at 8:52 am
There is a work ethic discourse among a fraction of the US left that goes like this:
The “working class” (which has to be understood as “white male workers”) want to do manly hard work of which they are proud, like cutting trees and working in coal mines (which in fact only a tiny fraction of workers still do but never mind). Woke effeminated green leftists want to take their sacred work ethic away from them – i. e. they insist that the work women do is no less valuable and they dare suggest that green jobs are preferable to dirty ones -, and that’s why the “working class” supports fascism.
If you think I’m exaggerating, check this for example:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/05/on-class-and-average-american-values-whatever-they-may-be
Tm 06.30.25 at 8:59 am
This ties into the point made by Peter @8 but I think it’s important to understand the importance of toxic masculinity in this discourse. “People who work very hard but get little in return often get emotional satisfaction from their resentment of those beneath them who, for whatever reason, work less or not at all.” But it matters what counts as “real” work and the resentment isn’t only directed downward, it also works to strengthen anti-intellectualism and anti-feminism, because those pesky eggheads and those urban feminists and the gays etc. don’t really work even if they have well-paid jobs. Otoh billionaires on yachts are never accused of not working enough. Funny how work ethics “works”.
mw 06.30.25 at 9:32 am
somebody who reads the news @ 24
“BUT if you look inside the marvelous mind palaces of those that don’t organize themselves to take part in politics”
That’s the thing — libertarians mostly don’t organize themselves to take part in politics and they shouldn’t. They don’t win any offices, they aren’t coalition partners, and they aren’t rich sources of campaign contributions. But some of the ideas they long promote do ultimately become generally accepted and adopted — gay marriage, drug legalization, and school choice, for example. Right now zoning-reform / YIMBY looks like it has a chance in many places. From a libertarian perspective (heavily influenced by ‘Public Choice’ economics), the ideas is, as Milton Friedman put it, “Getting the wrong people to do the right things for the wrong reasons”. The goal isn’t convincing majorities to vote this way or that way, but to favor this idea and that one. Do that, and politicians will ‘evolve’ (as Obama put it) and follow along with the crowd they’re pretending to lead.
the only thing libertarians do in practice is hand ammunition and infinite amounts of money and power to people who think medicaid is slavery
Libertarians don’t even HAVE ammunition and infinite amounts of money to give to anybody. As billionaires go, the Kochs don’t even make the top 20.
C-S 06.30.25 at 11:26 am
Such as, for example, opposition to the welfare state?
engels 06.30.25 at 12:57 pm
Mw’s comment reminds me that libertarianism is in some ways just an extreme form of Brahmin-leftism: roughly neoliberal economics + plus performative cultural liberalism. The main difference is that mainstream middle class leftists also try to soften the edges of the economic programme a bit.
Dr. Hilarius 06.30.25 at 6:15 pm
I’ve met many libertarians over the past 50 years. Newly minted ones were usually under 21 years who found the simplicity of libertarianism attractive (“no coercion” “freedom of contract”) without giving it serious thought.
The long termers were mostly men who had outsized opinions about their intellect and capabilities and resentment that they were not getting the rewards they felt entitled to. Why were they not rich, famous and desired by all women? Rule and regulations. Suffocated by the liberal nanny state. Disadvantaged by affirmative action. Once the regulatory state is swept aside they know they will rise to the top. Seriously.
Far from having the strong work ethics they endorsed, many dream of being clever enough to profit by signing the unwary up to ruinous contracts (remember the freedom to contract!) or fraudulent schemes. Libertarians might not have an effective party organization but they are an increasingly influential cheering squad for killing the regulatory state.
somebody who remembers libertarians literally turned on their own guy because he was gay and trump was not 06.30.25 at 9:53 pm
mw enters the mind palace and emerges to reveal (with a flourish) that libertarians actually did support same-sex marriage, and therefore, without organizing at all, used their cultivated high IQ minds to invent an idea that people loved! but in reality, libertarians opposed the state guaranteeing equality for same-sex marriage and supported eliminating state registrations of marriage entirely. gay marriage, the modern american libertarian will explain at length, while standing too close to you at the party, was imposed on our nation by the brutal, iron hand of the supreme court! perhaps the gentle, velvet hand of the supreme court can release us from this tyranny of having to pretend the WOKE MARRIAGES are the same as real marriages. again, to understand libertarianism must ignore what they’re saying and what they claim they’re thinking. they’re just lying about it so their liberal friends don’t roll their eyes at them and say “uh huh” in a contemptuous tone!
the proof: simply look at what they’re actually doing, what they’re committing their lives and property to, who they put their arms around and protect and nurture.
the american libertarian supported ice’s current policies when they were cleanly on the ballot in the last election – one of the clearest statements of “we must dramatically increase violent policing” any group has ever voted for. perhaps they did so in hope that after the low-IQ smallbrain ETHNAZOIDS were eliminated from the beautiful white polity that the genie of masked fascist supremacist secret police might be put back into the bottle. that explanation would fit their actual political alliances more than the eyes-closed mystic “actually they must be against what’s happening, if you think about it” conclusion. but even my formulation makes them look more stupid than lying, I guess.
engels 07.01.25 at 9:50 pm
The True History of Libertarianism in America: A Phony Ideology to Promote a Corporate Agenda
https://www.alternet.org/2013/09/true-history-libertarianism-america-phony-ideology-promote-corporate-agenda
mw 07.02.25 at 6:49 pm
I just stumbled across this and thought it might be worth sharing an actual libertarian take on the proposed Medicaid work requirement:
https://reason.com/2025/07/01/medicaid-work-requirements-are-a-short-term-fix-to-a-long-term-problem/
somebody who remembers the comment section 07.03.25 at 7:25 pm
Don’t forget to click on the comment section of the link in mw @ #34 to see what the predominant libertarian feeling is about that position! my favorite is the libertarian who’s on medicare. imagine having lived all the way to medicare age but your brain stopped at age 14. what a nightmare the previous decades must have been for that mind.
engels 07.04.25 at 1:47 pm
Meanwhile in Britain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer burst into tears after she couldn’t throw 250 000 disabled people into poverty (I suppose this is also relevant to the “empathy” post).
https://www.politico.eu/article/pmqs-starmer-torn-apart-welfare-reeves-in-tears/
Tm 07.07.25 at 7:14 am
engels: That Politico article is a great example of how the broken media are covering politics as a game that doesn’t have real life consequcnces. Despicable.
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