Wolfers stands as the latest prominent left-liberal to acknowledge a comparable reality.
In a recent posting, the noted left-leaning economist Justin Wolfers (University of Michigan) concedes that his libertarian-minded friends were correct about the perils posed by centralized state authority:
My libertarian-leaning colleagues have consistently warned against a powerful federal government in favor of individual liberty. I had—perhaps somewhat naively—not given their viewpoints enough weight. The colleagues who served in government struck me as decent people, and I assumed that to be broadly true.
Yet I must tell my libertarian acquaintances that they were right. Concentration of power can be misused. We are witnessing it firsthand.
Last year I wrote about similar acknowledgments by two other prominent figures on the left: renowned legal scholar Cass Sunstein and economic policy commentator Noah Smith. I applaud Wolfers and the others for owning up to mistakes and choosing to learn from them. Too many intellectuals and political pundits never do. I have long admired Wolfers’ writings, and I admire him even more now than before.
It is often the case that people become more aware of the risks of government power when that power is exercised by their political adversaries. Even some libertarians tend to overlook abuses when they are carried out by the side they support. The Trump era has served as a particularly significant wake‑up call for some on the left, given the number of abuses he committed, especially in his second term.
But it is essential to recognize that the problems here are structural, not limited to the misdeeds of any single politician, even someone as egregious as Trump. As James Madison famously warned, “[e]nlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Demagogues lacking in enlightenment like Trump too often reach high political office. This is largely because voters frequently do a poor job of selecting leaders, hampered by widespread political ignorance and bias. Trump’s return to power in 2024 demonstrated that these issues are even more acute than I had previously believed.
Wolfers adds that his renewed regard for libertarian concerns has 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 partly agree. Where established institutions limit government power and safeguard liberty, we should indeed protect them. Yet, in many respects, those protections have eroded over the past century, creating the very dangers of abusive state power Wolfers rightly condemns. To address this, we sometimes need to redesign the current “rules of the game” and impose much tighter constraints. For instance, we should roll back federal authority to restrict immigration (which was not part of the original Constitution) and enforce the constitutional limits on delegating legislative power to the executive with far greater rigor. The growth of delegation and federal immigration powers lies at the heart of many of the worst abuses seen during the Trump era, and poses serious challenges even under more traditional administrations.
Similarly, the expansion and entrenchment of government control over land use lies at the core of the nationwide housing crisis. We should pull back on that too, partly by upholding federal and state constitutional protections for property rights.
Elsewhere, I have explained how these kinds of concerns—and others like them—could form a productive alliance between libertarians and the “abundance liberals” (see also my exchange with Matt Yglesias on that topic). I suspect Wolfers may be sympathetic to the abundance liberal movement.
We are unlikely to agree on every issue. Yet there is enough common ground to enable constructive cooperation between these camps. At minimum, we share common adversaries in two major political movements that show little appreciation for the need to impose meaningful limits on government power: MAGA nationalists on the right, and “democratic socialists” on the left.
