It’s easy to understand the visceral attraction to Donald Trump’s campaign. My own libertarian heart beats a little stiff when he waves the one finger salute at establishment institutions that crush our freedom, including the Republican Party leadership, the mainstream media and the useless D.C. politicians themselves.
It’s not what Donald Trump is against that bothers me. It’s what he’s for. So much attention has been paid to his immigration stance from a race perspective that no one seems to care how anti-free market his platform is. Trump is running on economic fallacies that have been consistently refuted by free market economists for hundreds of years.
When Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, it wasn’t to refute the “godless socialists” 21st-century Republican voters believe are taking over the world. It was to refute the kinds of protectionist ideas championed by conservatives like Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton in Smith’s day, Abraham Lincoln eighty years later, and Trump today.
Read the rest at The Huffington Post…
Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.