Austin Padgett (LudwigNeverMises)

@ludwignvermises · Twitter · 2026-07-23 19:51 UTC

JD Vance is getting a lot of heat for this video. But all he’s saying is that the private sector and public sector have been melded to a point of being indistinguishable. This is the correct view for example of how Facebook wasn’t “just a private company” when getting instructions from the FBI on what to censor. Defending corporations that are propped up by regulatory capture or controlled by the government as being “free market” is the worst thing you could possibly do to make people appreciate property rights. Zuckerberg was under extreme pressure to moderate his platform to stop Trump and he was testifying in congress begging for broad regulation so he could comply and censor people without losing users to more free platforms. This is supposed to be a key libertarian insight. When you centrally plan an industry through a federal regulatory body run by unaccountable bureaucrats you aren’t protecting consumers from an asymmetry of power with large corporations. You are creating a single access point from which the largest corporations can control the entire market. That is what happened. That’s our current reality. The American Medical Association makes the rules for all doctors, enforced through coordinated state licensing monopolies. And big pharma tells them what to write. Government has an incentive to protect their industry partners from competition. The fewer companies in the industry and the more dependent those companies are on government favors, the easier it is to “force behaviors” as Larry Fink of BlackRock once said. This is why Target and McDonald’s enforced masks mandates but your mom and pop corner shop did not. It’s not fair to accuse JD of being a socialist for pointing this out. In fact anyone who is not mentioning the degree to which our supposed market system is already compromised by central planning is covering for socialism. This admin is making more progress in pushing back on regulatory capture than anyone in 100 years. They’ve massively reduced regulations and fired so many federal bureaucrats we’re back down to 1960’s numbers. But there is still a huge way to go in unwinding a hundred year progressive march through the institutions, and it won’t be easy. Especially while simultaneously managing the fallout of a consequently destroyed culture. If people can’ deal with this problem without getting caught in semantic pitfalls and you compromise the best faith efforts to address it as a result, then you’re gonna end up fulfilling your own prophesy by giving power back to the left and creating the atmosphere for exactly the kind of counter productive reactionary socialist backlash you’re afraid of.