by Thomas R. Eddlem
In the past week, former Libertarian Party candidate for Vice President Mike ter Maat announced he had joined the Republican Liberty Caucus, rejoining the Republican Party after a few years in the Libertarian Party.
I wish him well.
He’s convinced he can get the Republicans to shrink the size and scope of government.
I’m not.
I’ve long watched the Republican Party increase the size and scope of government every single time they elected presidential candidates and won congressional majorities that had pledged to cut government. Trump’s backing of the “Big Beautiful Bill” is only the latest betrayal of Republicans in my life going all the way back to Reagan. I actually thought there was a chance back in the early 2010s Republicans could turn the course of the GOP with the Ron Paul revolution and the election of Justin Amash, Thomas Massie, and Rand Paul. But Amash was driven out of the party, Trump is trying to primary Massie and has locked Rand Paul out of the White House.
Ter Maat, in my view, is being Pollyannaish in believing he can turn the GOP around. Government historically increases faster when Republicans are in the White House and control Congress than when the Democrats are in control. Why? Because when Democrats are in power and say bigger government is good, Republicans say it’s not right, but when Republicans are in power and say bigger government is good, Democrats say it’s not enough.
So are we as small-L libertarians doomed to forever being politically irrelevant in the United States? We’re big-time underdogs, for sure, but I think the Libertarian Party is our one longshot chance at making government smaller. Here’s why:
First, let’s look at the Democratic Party, which hasn’t had a fair presidential primary process since 2012. They stole the primary for Hillary Clinton from Bernie Sanders in 2016, rigged it for Joe Biden in 2020 and were openly anti-democratic through the primary process in 2024. The “super-delegate” system alone ensures a non-establishment candidate could never win their party nomination. That party, which was once Thomas Jefferson’s party and the party of smaller government, is lost forever.
Trump ran a third party campaign inside the GOP in 2016, 2020 and 2024 with his populist insurgency. While the political establishment has learned to live with Trump, the top of their list is to turn the GOP into a procedural copy of the Democrats to ensure a populist insurgency can’t win again. All the energy in Washington is directed at driving out Massie, Paul or anyone else heterodox enough to seek defunding any part of the government’s foreign or domestic empire. The GOP is a closing window.
That leaves us with the Libertarian Party, which is currently in good hands both in Massachusetts and nationally. So, how, you may ask, does the Libertarian Party start to win and actually impact policy? For that, we need to look south to Argentina, where libertarian Javier Milei took his party Libertad Avanza from zero seats in the national assembly to the presidency in just four years.
Milei capitalized on Argentina’s massive economic crisis that included 200% annual inflation and a poverty rate that increased from 30% to 40%. He appealed directly to working people, explaining that inflation was a tax on the working poor and middle class and that the establishment parties planned to continue this punishing tax forever. And the voters took a chance on him in their desperation.
A similar economic storm is coming to America, as we are heading toward a sovereign debt crisis. There’s no appetite for any spending cuts in either party; the Democrats posture for higher taxes on the “rich” which won’t balance the budget and the Republicans posture for modest tax cuts that blow up the deficit further.
As taxes go, I’ve been given to saying inflation is the most regressive tax of all, as it taxes labor but not capital. But that’s not quite accurate. There’s one tax that’s even more regressive: Debt. While inflation taxes the poor laborer who owns nothing but his labor, debt taxes the unborn who doesn’t even own his own labor yet.
Already, we have seen the degrading of the US government’s credit rating from AAA to AA+, and S&P has reported US sovereign debt was in the last two years sunk to trading seven additional notches lower to BBB+ in the derivatives market, just three notches above junk bond status. During the 2008 financial crisis, Lehman Brothers went from a AAA credit rating in early 2007 to full-blown bankruptcy in September 2008, and was trading at A (two notches higher than BBB+) just a few months before the collapse into bankruptcy. They went from AAA to bankruptcy in less 18 months and from investment grade to bankruptcy in just a few weeks. So the credit ratings crash can happen fast.
I’m not predicting this credit collapse will happen in just months, but it is coming, because Republicans are adding more to the national debt and Democrats are saying it’s not enough. America today is run by two children with a credit card competing with each other to buy the most toys before the credit limit is reached.
The Libertarian Party is naturally poised to appeal to working people, the largest voting class, as free markets and restraints on government spending and taxes most closely represent their self-interest.
The other parties, not so much. In 2024, the Democrats offered working people nothing. Nothing at all. “You can have as many pronouns as you want,” they said. And the average working person said, “This is great news! Can I pay my mortgage with pronouns? Can I eat my pronouns?” And the Democrats said “No, you’ll get nothing and like it!,” so working people replied “Well, we have no use for you.”
Donald Trump at least pretended to offer working people a small tax cut in his first term, even if he gave the wealthy a much larger tax cut and blew up the deficit that must be paid by children not yet born. Working people remembered they got a $1,500 tax cut under Trump, even if they later paid $10,000 in higher costs from inflation a few years later as a result of deficit and COVID spending money-printing.
Donald Trump, like Javier Milei, is in some sense also an archetype for what we could build in a future Libertarian Party victory. Sure, Trump’s political views are far from Libertarian. But he ran a third party candidacy within the Republican Party appealing directly to workers’ pocketbook issues.
This is something every Libertarian Party candidate should be doing. Not the running inside the Republican Party part, but the appealing to working people part. Workers are the most numerous voting bloc, far outpacing the entrepreneurs/business owners the Libertarian Party has largely devoted its messaging to in past decades.
This can’t be emphasized or repeated enough, so I’ll write it a third time: Workers are the most numerous voting bloc. There is no path to Libertarian political victory, no Javier Milei moment, without workers joining the liberty movement. Entrepreneurs, even if none of them could be bought off by the Uniparty with government contracts, would never be numerous enough for a winning voting bloc by themselves.
The economic storm of the sovereign debt crisis is coming. No nation can rack up debt indefinitely, and there’s zero interest by either party to cut spending in the slightest. And the Libertarian Party is poised, and getting further prepared, to take advantage of that coming storm.
Join us.
Thomas R. Eddlem is an economist, the William Norman Grigg Fellow at the Libertarian Institute and a member of the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts state committee. He has announced he will be seeking an at-large seat on the Libertarian National Committee at the national convention in Grand Rapids next year. The views expressed above are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts.