Spencer Schneier
  Technology Editor

As a Libertarian, I often grow tired of the pseudo-intellectual attacks on free market principles that come from the left.

They tend to be weak, hollow and show an uninformed perspective on economic theory. The main argument tossed my way is that Capitalism is exploitative, which is ridiculous considering that the foundation of free market interactions is that they are universally voluntary.

Then I realize that the main exposure people have to capitalism and libertarian ideas is the Republican perversions of them.

One must look no farther than Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, one of which will be the Republican nominee for President (and by one of them, I mean Trump). Both of them propose supposedly small government tax plans, yet both have demonstrated that they are as big government as a Mussolini-level fascist.

They do not desire or propose a free market; they want a libertarian utopia for middle class white Americans, while the rest of the world is subjected to a massive, totalitarian police state.

Marco Rubio, the man who claims to be a true fiscal conservative, wants to increase the national debt by trillions. He wants to slash domestic programs that theoretically help working class and poor Americans but expand the military past its already absurd levels.

No Republican wants to admit that the party is the one that has been the most fiscally irresponsible since Reagan took office, which is incredible given how loose Democrats are about spending.

Donald Trump, who claims, in one of the few policies he shares on his website, that his tax plan is going to involve deep cuts, intends to expand the American police state past its already extraordinary size.

Despite proposing harsh immigration laws and an immigration deportation agency that will forcibly remove people from the U.S., he claims to be a conservative.

Guess what? Wasting billions of dollars to help your friends in the military-industrial complex is not the free market. Fascist police states? Also very much not the free market.

Yet these politicians claim they are free market advocates.

Another perversion of the free market from “conservatives” in the Republican party is how they exploit the notion of deregulation and tax cuts to help their donors.

Ted Cruz, a man who is completely owned by donors, wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service. Surely, this is an example of a principled free market conservative, right?

No, not at all.

Ted Cruz wants to cut the IRS because one of his top donors, Robert Mercer, is currently under investigation by the IRS over billions in evaded taxes. Ted Cruz doesn’t know the first thing about free market principles, because if he did, he would be terrified at how he couldn’t use the federal government to pass discriminatory laws against LGBTQ Americans in a free market.

The foundation of the free market is a simple idea: that all interactions should be entirely voluntary. While one side will always come out better than the other, at the time of any transaction in a free market economy, both sides are getting what they believe to be the better end of the deal.

In our economy, we have many Americans forced into deals without mutual consent.

For example, through taxation, almost all Americans have been forced to line the pockets of large military contractors and pay for a needless war in the Middle East.

In a free market, this war would be considerably harder to organize and finance, as a military would need to convince people to want to fund it.

When there are no weapons of mass destruction and no considerable threat to American interests other than Dick Cheney not getting his private island this year, I doubt one would have much success voluntarily getting people to pay for that disaster.

This isn’t meant to let anyone else off without criticism, but the Republican party is the main culprit of crony capitalism. It is unfortunate that these polities have taken free market ideas and made them a demonized notion, as they were once core the principles of freedom and liberty that defined the liberal ideology.

It is sad that the Republican perversion of the free market is destroying the connection between social liberalism and the free market ideas that used to be so closely tied. It creates a weird political divide when one side wants big government and and medieval social platform, and the other side wants bigger government and social liberalism.

Unfortunately, this is likely because there’s a lot of money to be made in a big government for corporate interests.

Donors and anti-intellectualism own most politicians like Cruz and Hillary Clinton; they have helped create this crony capitalist society that Americans are subjected to today.

Given all of that, I can understand why they don’t like the idea of capitalism.