I’m delighted to see how many of the anti-Musk, pro-government complainers online have adopted the honest tactic of whining that the federal government needs our $4 trillion per year because otherwise government workers will be laid off. Sometimes they even name specific forest rangers or what have you.
But then, what do the government-defenders care what the imperiled federal workers do and whether their daily activities help or hurt the rest of the population? Government, the left increasingly admits, exists to keep itself in business, like a gigantic, pulsing parasite on the rest of the population—a giant parasite that they worship, that they love. Hearing them defend bureaucracy, secrecy, and inefficiency against Musk et al is much like listening to Democrats become enthusiasts of military spending the moment there’s talk of a base closing in their own district. Sheer self-serving thievery, with some sanctimonious attitude on top.
Have the pro-government predators and their faux-compassionate enablers even tried calculating how many private sector jobs are lost—or never existed—because of the trillions-a-year parasite attached to them? Only about one percent of the U.S. population works for the federal government. We’re the 99% who don’t work for the federal government, and D.O.G.E. is fighting for us, sloppily or not.
It’s the sloppiness that really offends many of government’s current crop of fussy defenders: Musk’s young helpers, his occasional misinterpretation of (often deliberately) obscure line items in the budget, his drugs. But then, to use the horror movie They Live as an analogy, just as one would be stupid to nitpick Rowdy Roddy Piper’s grammar or hygiene if he’s the only guy willing to take up arms against the alien-zombie invasion, one should be willing to tolerate some human failings in those precious few doing the necessary and roughly-speaking-libertarian work of criticizing federal bloat.
I’ve defended a long succession of imperfect freedom fighters over the years, from Goldwater and Reagan to clowns like Howard Stern when he was briefly running for governor of New York on the Libertarian Party ticket in the 1990s. In a modern world anesthetized into thinking all the nice people are left-liberals, it’s unlikely that those who rebel will ever be left-liberals, but that doesn’t make the rebels wrong.
Heck, if George W. Bush had stuck to being the military anti-interventionist and free-marketeer as whom he campaigned, I might even still have kind words for that idiot (“I’d vote for a head of lettuce if it actually cut government spending,” as a libertarian colleague of mine put it back in the day). He didn’t—and the farther he drifts from sounding like a friend of freedom, you’ll notice, the more the left-liberal establishment does its usual softening in tone toward an elder statesman. He’s their buddy now, as long as he hates upstart Trump.
Sometimes, establishment accolades and formal handshaking notwithstanding, a drooling, smelly punk is the only person properly positioned to wake up the music industry. Sometimes a frat bro is the only person drunk enough to break through an oppressive police cordon. Let the snippy and superficially-informed former assistant editors at semi-prestigious newspapers unfriend and unfollow me because they know Musk hasn’t followed precise Department of Energy protocols or whatever the hell it is they’re complaining about today. Are you defending freedom or are you merely defending decorum, pissed-off online intellectual?
With the federal government $37 trillion in debt, now an amount well in excess of the U.S.’s annual gross domestic product, and the 50 state governments in about as much debt of their own to boot, we’ve got far bigger problems as a nation than whether Musk is fighting with Grimes on X or has a friend who did a Hitler salute at a Halloween party. If your biggest worry is that Musk sounds reckless or unseemly, you’re shallow. If amidst all this, by contrast, your biggest worry really is that the government won’t maintain or add spending projects, you’re either insane, ignorant to the point of criminal negligence, or Paul Krugman.
Yet vandals spraypainted a crude swastika on a Tesla in Lower Manhattan, and bizarrely, I see leftists online crowing that this somehow affirms their suspicions that Musk is fascistic. No, it confirms normal people’s suspicions that leftists are just as prone to crime as the Nazis they pretend to be fighting. Elon didn’t spraypaint his own company’s car, imbeciles, nor did his supporters.
Stop doing politics if you think like an eight-year-old hippie, which is more likely the sort of dolt who did the spraypainting. Start thinking instead about why most people greatly dislike property violations like that swastika. Then, picture $4 trillion a year worth of property violations perpetrated against the American population by a big-spending, out-of-control federal government. Good people oppose vandalism, fascism, and trillions in inscrutable spending by the federal leviathan. Let’s end all three.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
