“I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar,” he said. “The currency of this world should be the dollar. And I don’t think we should have all of the Bitcoins of the world out there. I think they should regulate them very, very high. It takes the edge off of the dollar and the importance of the dollar.”
Many opponents of bitcoin express fears that it increases crime because bitcoin payments are untraceable. A story in the June 8, 2021 Wall Street Journal disputes that claim when explaining how the Feds recovered part of the ransom that Colonial Pipeline paid:
According to Joe Biden, delaying the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan from May 1, 2021 to September 11, 2021 has ensured that Afghanistan will never again serve as a “haven” for anti-American terrorists.
…a pro-Trump website argued that libertarians such as myself ought to stop supporting third-party candidates and join their side in an effort to stand up to the Left—something of urgency now that Democrats control the presidency, the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
These days, that’s a non-persuasive argument given that the GOP has embraced many policy positions—and attitudes—that have little to do with advancing human liberty. Throughout my career, conservatives and libertarians have been allies on many issues and at odds on others, but now we’re like residents of different planets.
The Trump era solidified long-brewing changes in the conservative movement, as it moved toward a more European-style approach that wasn’t concerned about limits on government power. Trump wasn’t a political thinker, but a marketing savant who tapped into popular and often-legitimate resentments of the increasingly “woke” Left.
Republican politicians mostly stood by Trump, even as he shattered democratic norms and reshaped conservative policy prescriptions, less out of fear of Trump himself and more out of fear of the conservative grassroots voter. What does it even mean to be a conservative these days?
In 2020, the GOP dispensed with its platform and passed a resolution stating its enthusiast support for the president’s agenda. Party platforms are unenforceable, but they provide the faithful with an opportunity to create a mission statement. Apparently, being a conservative now means supporting whatever the leader happens to believe.
… the concern over the concentrated influence of corporate special interests that Berle and Means articulated (Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Routledge, 2017), 5.) is valid, but not because corporate special interests will prevent economic regulation, but because they consistently agitate for it. Little has changed in the past century. Corporate executives continue to agitate for favorable regulations, contrary to the media narrative, as we see in Big Tech’s support of net neutrality and, most recently, calls from hedge fund managers for government intervention in the stock market after millions of small investors drove up the stock of GameStop. Patrick Newman recently posed the question, “Are we on the cusp of a new Progressive Era?”
