“The Case Against Cronies: Libertarians Must Stand Up to Corporate Greed. It’s time for a free-market corporate social responsibility. Conservatives who rail against government hand-outs should also blast companies who seek shelter from Washington.” Timothy Carney at The Atlantic.

(Note that the old blog post of mine quoted there was a musing question, not a normative answer. )

Also at The Atlantic, see Ta-Nehisi Coates exploring  the ways in which the American state engaged in deliberate impoverishment of African-Americans, and the entanglement of the Jim Crow state with the expanding redistributionist state (with some help from political scientist Ira Katznelson’s important studies Fear Itself and When Affirmative Action Was White.)

Both point to what I consider a crucial reason to lean BHL.  State power is readily captured and used by the powerful.  It is strange to build normative theories on the implicit prediction that, if only state power is expanded, it will probably be used to redress and mitigate rather than entrench and aggravate the inequalities that have developed in the market and society.

(One of my repeated themes since we started around here is that racism and state power have always been entangled in American political development– and that therefore the mixture of a kind of libertarianism with neo-Confederacy or white racism more broadly, the recurring impulse to code “makers” as white and “takers” as black, isn’t just toxic and vicious, it’s also bad libertarianism.)