If New York Times guest essayist Finn Brunton is to be believed, the Federal Reserve Board Building is haunted by the ghosts of crackpots past. Trump’s cozying up to corporate cryptocurrency coiners during his second term, reinforcing “his thirst for money and power, has … embraced the corruption at the heart of digital currencies — a corruption inherited from the libertarian ideals that created them” (“Cryptocurrency Promised Us Freedom — and Brought Tyranny,” October 26).

Brunton’s gloomy portrait of a new-Gilded-Age Grand Old Party recasts it in the image of the Libertarian Party that might have “languished for decades as a clown show” but whose resemblance to the Gathering of the Juggalos conceals something less like the Insane Clown Posse fanbase’s dedication to social self-support and freewheeling fun than a real-life manifestation of their Dark Carnival mythology.  At their most innocent, “quirky, high-minded libertarian intellectuals” or “civil liberties activists [who] wanted anonymous payments for political donations and for financially vulnerable industries” are, like Martin Short’s Stubbs the Clown in We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story, unwitting tools of far more nefarious and exploitative hucksters who employ and envelop them (like the literal dark carnival where Stubbs works).

From the invocation of Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard with their most unsavory alliances implied to be representative, to quoting Robert Heinlein’s mantra that “an armed society is a polite society” to the obligatory mention of Ayn Rand, “libertarians’ favorite novelist” due to glamorizing “rich, brilliant supermen” who “despise everyone else” — but not her nonfictional clarification distinguishing her preferred, ethical egoism from that of those who “are lone wolves (stressing that species’ most predatory characteristics)” — about the only cliché missing is a nod to the Mad Max series more overt than a supposed ideal of “a nerd-warlord society of failed states.”  Yet a fuller and closer reading of the libertarian bookshelf, rather than a glance at placarded slogans, would reveal a wish, not to let loose the likes of Max nemesis Immortan Joe, but rather to prevent concentrations of power from existing for such malefactors to exploit.

To Brunton, the contrasting model of power offered by Scranton Joe Biden is at worst “inconsistent, confusing and cautious.”  Yet it was Rothbard who clued in the coalescing libertarian movement to the work of leftist scholars like Gabriel Kolko, who saw Progressive Era efforts to centralize banking as a broader effort not to bring an oligarchic economy under popular control but to “increase the power of the big national banks to compete with the rapidly growing state banks.” Rather than calling for “removing all checks on the power of the wealthy to do what they want,” Rothbard traced how it came from inside the Jekyll Island Clubhouse where the Fed was conceived.

Rothbard also asked those who “charge that fraud would run rampant” if currency competition was allowed: “if government cannot be trusted to ferret out the occasional villain in the free market in coin, why can government be trusted when it finds itself in a position of total control over money?”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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