The great classical liberal Frédéric Bastiat made an astute distinction between the things seen and unseen. A broken window is not a loss but a blessing, it'e not a bug, it's a feature: to quote the introduction of the Sic Million Man: "We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better, stronger, faster."
When I was an assistant professor in Milwaukee, I rented an apartment about a mile off-campus. There was a supplemental rental charge for a parking spot in the building basement. One day I went to my car to find my driver-side window shattered, apparently to steal my nondescript, cheap factory radio (my guess: some drug addict wanted to sell the radio, probably with negligible proceeds in market value. The cost to replace the window dwarfed the radio's value, not to mention the loss of the car radio. As Bastiat points out, the sophists would rejoice in how the Milwaukee economy would benefit from my replacing the window and/or the stolen radio. However, I had lost the utility of the expected residual lifetime utility of that window and radio. (I don't remember replacing the radio; the car window was not an option given Milwaukee's 4-season weather.) I don't think my insurance covered it. I don't recall the cost, but it was in the hundreds of dollars. That was out of my pocket. I was not better off--and neither was the economy. Those wasted hundreds of dollars would have benefited the economy in terms of.other consumption or investment (say, a bank lending money backed by my savings).
Perhaps the purported benefits of military aggression against the enemy's infrastructure is self-serving rationalization of warfare's destruction. But it is no accident why libertarians/classical liberals like myself espouse the nonaggression principle, free trade, etc. We see unnecessary funding of a military footprint beyond legitimate self-defense as theft against taxpayers, money that could be more productively deployed in the real market by earners.
It's not just military intervention that damages the lives and properties of others (and contributing to the motivation for a commensurate blowback response). Domestic economic intervention also impedes market competition and innovation, adversely affecting the standard of living for consumers in general in favor of the concentrated benefits of the few, say a few domestic companies and their workers. Take, for instance, Trump's tariff manipulations in favor of domestic steel and aluminum producers (never mind George W. Bush's ultimately failed precedent to do the same); This is blatantly a politically self-serving attempt for Trump to benefit his blue collar support in western Pennsylvania and elsewhere. But it totally ignores the related increased costs on metal-consuming industries, like automakers and beverage makers, which ultimately are passed onto consumers. Just like the broken window fallacy, consumers who pay more for the same goods are not better off; they are worse off by artificially higher prices, and you won't realize the benefits of their related purchases or savings elsewhere in the economy.
The government is taking ever bigger historically high bites out of the GDP (up to 40% or so); not just that, but the federal government is addicted to unsustainable operational deficits in aggregate nearly the size of the entire economy, and this doesn't even account for an estimated $80-220T funding gap for unfunded senior entitlements. It's not just direct tax costs on the private sector but an estimated $2T in regulatory costs choking the private sector.
From a political perspective, it's all but impossible to roll back taxes and spending. In part, there are vested interests backing every dime of federal spending. and since nearly all net federal taxes and regulatory costs are paid by a minority higher-earning individuals and businesses, it's fairly easy for Democrats to exploit class differences and prejudices, to bribe taxpayers with the seductive promise of new, unpaid-for benefits while arguing real taxpayers haven't paid the costs of their economic "privilege". Government regulations are sold by fear-mongering against the hyped "failures" or unregulated businesses. Never mind the fact of regulatory capture by big businesses which basically exploit the competitive advantages of scale. And as we saw, during the brief stages of nominal one-party control under Bush and Trump, supposedly fiscally conservative Republicans were loathe to impose politically unpopular austerity measures to shrink the deficit.
So what is a libertarian politician to do? Well, one way is to fuse a pro-liberty perspective with a type of populism. Ron Paul provides a sample approach: he preaches against crony capitalists, particularly the military-industrial complex. He links unauthorized immigration to the supposed lure of the morally corrupt welfare state. He links the Federal Reserve to economically ruinous boom-bust policies, even morally hazardous bailouts and/or monetizing the debt and failing its prime directive of stabilizing the currency, an insidious, de facto tax on lower-income people via inflation. (I have some differences with Ron Paul's approach; for instance, we had significant immigration in the nineteenth century, all without a government social welfare net. Second, not only are unauthorized immigrants ineligible for social welfare benefits, even legal immigrants are ineligible for the first several years. Paul's real issue, the morally hazardous social welfare state, should be attacked on its own merits; the preponderance of benefits go to native-born Americans, and Paul lacks the courage to attack them directly. I feel that Ron Paul should be more consistently arguing against government intervention in the labor market and essentially a dysfunctional temporary worker visa program.)
Let's face it: the typical political career is judged by contributing additional entitlements or regulations by the political monopoly, purportedly linked to some public good. We almost never see an intellectually honest discussion of the opportunity costs (i.e., Bastiat's "things unseen''); how can we evaluate the disruptive technologies possible without the burden of government's barriers to entry or costly regulations? How can we compare the heavy costs of the government paying services at twice the cost of the private economy (Friedman's Law)? How do we compare the monopoly, say, of the USPS, a government-protected monopoly, with artificially high union-based labor costs, disallowing the use of cheaper contractor labor, protection of money-losing facilities, etc., even as other democracies have allowed private competition? What about privatization and/or diversification of social security funding vs. the morally hazardous reliance on financing the federal debt?
We have a much heavier burden than the Statists, who think its obvious that the government monopoly is intrinsically more efficient in scale and to control (we find these arguments raised to promote the nationalization of healthcare). It is much easier to argue, say, "the earth is flat", something many people, without a background in science, might think is intuitively obvious. It would require educating people, which often requires more than a pithy Tweet response. I remember responding to a recent clueless "progressive" tweet by responding it would take a number of tweets to debunk his nonsense. What I'll often do is find a relevant post I'll cite in my tweet. I really don't have the time and patience to fight each and every uninformed Twitter user. I'm more likely to respond to an ignorant Trump tweet than one of his minions'.
You have to anticipate that any deregulation (like a recent Trump Administration relaxation of an EPA policy) is going to be portrayed as open season against clean air and waterways, a political concession to polluter political contributions to Trump or the GOP. IT's sort of like being asked if you killed your mother with an ax. So your denial is read as a denial of the ax allegation, and then the follow-up becomes "Then just how did you kill your mother?"
Unfortunately, today's so-called debates encourage this sort of loaded ambush question rubbish. We had a classic example where the disingenuous candidate Castro argued Biden had contradicted what he had said moments earlier, basically a transparent ageist insult. (A subsequent analysis revealed no such contradiction.)
I think libertarians have to be prepared and aggressive in debating Statists; for example, we had post-World War slowdowns where drastic reductions in government spending didn't put the economy into a prolonged recession but set the stage for a resurgent economy. We have to point out tax cuts didn't imply negative effects on revenue (but an inability to restrain spending could widen deficits). We need to put Statists on the defensive, including the fact that any private company engaged in Ponzi scheme entitlements like the government would be prosecuted.
