There are very few occasions on which I feel genuinely smug about being one of Britain’s handful of libertarians. For the most part, arguing for principled liberalism gets you a lot of stick. We get lambasted from the Left as advocates of corporate oligarchy, Rightists think we want to put Britain’s social fabric through a shredder and sensible centrists see our Overton Window-bashing ideas as ‘a bad look’.
But I always wake up with a spring in my step the morning after a big political debate. These events don’t have much value, but they do demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt just how unqualified politicians are to wield power over us. Last night’s presidential tussle between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris did not disappoint.
The debate contained very little substance. Harris was determined to rattle off pre-rehearsed lines like a nervous GCSE drama student on assessment day, while Trump’s juvenile lack of impulse control ensured that there would be little cogent economic policy from the Right for us to sink our teeth into.
Where we did get some, it was a battle of economic illiteracy. Trump doubled down on his ridiculous claim that import tariffs are paid by the exporting country, rather than American consumers. The theoretical and wide-ranging empirical evidence utterly rejects that claim. According to research from the University of Chicago, tariffs imposed by Trump in 2018 alone raised $82 million for the United States Treasury while causing consumer prices to rise by $1.5 billion. The 1,800 jobs re-shored to the United States as a result cost an average of $817,000 each.
For a simple case study, look at the average price of American washing machines which rose from $750 to $950 between Trump’s levying of tariffs in 2018 and their expiry in 2023 (prices have already fallen by $75 since). Harris hit the nail on the head by describing his plans as a ‘Trump sales tax’.
.
Trump was right to lambast the Biden-Harris administration’s record on the deficit and national debt, which is set to rise by $6-8 trillion over the course of the President’s term. Harris was right to lambast the Trump-Pence administration’s record on the deficit and national debt, which rose by over $8trn over the course of the former President’s term.
Harris attacked Trump’s tax cuts; Trump attacked Biden’s spending. Neither dealt honestly with America’s rapidly worsening fiscal situation which cannot be solved without major reforms to medical and pension entitlements. Both candidates have pledged to maintain them.
For most of the debate, I had to resist the urge to rip out what little remains of my hair but there were a few moments of joy. One came early on, with Harris naming housing as the first policy area to reform to improve American living standards. But even this green shoot of economic sense was quickly uprooted by the knowledge that Harris continues to flirt with a nationwide rent control policy and seeks to extend demand subsidies rather than using the federal government’s limited capabilities to unshackle the nation’s housing market. Like Trump’s tariffs, Harris’ rent controls are overwhelmingly rejected by economic theory and evidence (as some of the IEA’s latest research shows).
The one genuinely positive economic takeaway from the night is that America’s energy boom – one of the key factors keeping America growing while Europe has stagnated – is probably in safe hands. Harris seems to have accepted the clear economic and environmental case that fracking should continue, reversing her prior opposition. Both candidates signalled openness to reducing barriers to building solar infrastructure.
The discussion about healthcare was neatly summed up by Trump’s promise to ‘have concepts of a plan’.
The lack of policy and ideological substance was depressing enough. The culture war and foreign policy exchanges made the whole thing practically unbearable. I’m not going to attempt any both sides-ism here: Trump’s barely intelligible ramblings about immigration, Ukraine and the 2020 election were often frightening.
Once Harris got under his skin about the size of his rallies, any prospect of Trump staying on message was extinguished. From then on, he repeatedly personified the ugly vices that define the American Right and, indeed, much of the Right across the Western world: authoritarianism and abject stupidity.
Anyone who spends too much time on Twitter will have seen how Republican Vice-Presidential nominee JD Vance’s baseless conspiracy about Haitian immigrants terrorising an Ohio town by eating cats spread across the right-wing media sphere. Still, I did not expect Trump to hysterically repeat those claims in front of a national TV audience.
His later claim that Harris wants to perform ‘transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison’ was truly bizarre. That comment (among many) conformed to the unkindest Saturday Night Live portrayal of a brainless American conservative. It was too absurd to even parody.
What made it all the more excruciating was that his lack of self-control stopped him from scoring easy points against Harris. When he made the ludicrous claim that Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Walz supported postnatal abortions, he lied his way out of a reasonable criticism of Walz’s decision to block provisions explicitly outlawing late term abortions in Minnesota.
Trump was so distracted by the ego-bruising bait thrown out to him by Harris that he missed glaring opportunities to make points on issues that played to his strengths, such as the chaos at the Mexican border or the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Trump repeated his conspiratorial claims that the 2020 election was stolen. He declined the chance to express any semblance of regret for the violent attempt to keep him in office illegitimately on January 6 2021.
He refused to pledge support to Ukraine as it continues its defence against Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression. His only pledge was to end the war quickly, which would inevitably mean ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia and emboldening the Kremlin to double down on its expansionism in future.
Worse still, Trump couldn’t even stop himself from once again signposting his admiration for authoritarian leaders. He described Hungary’s communitarian strongman Viktor Orban as ‘well-respected’ in reference to Hungary’s neutrality on the Russia-Ukraine issue. It was revealing that he seemed to use the term strongman as a compliment.
This debate was thoroughly dispiriting. The United States of America is home to 333,000,000 people. It is the mightiest economic and military force known to man. Yet somehow, it whittled its choices for president down to Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Each is economically illiterate in their own way. Neither appears to have the intellectual curiosity or courage to solve America’s most pressing problems.
But make no mistake, from a liberal standpoint, the best choice is obvious. Freer markets and expanded individual liberty are not on the table at this election. The future of America’s liberal democratic institutions and global security very much are.
Harris is not perfect nor even good in these regards, but she is clearly less dangerous than Trump. His authoritarian instincts and the personality cult which he has built make him a unique threat. If nothing else, this debate was a stark reminder of that reality.
Click here to subscribe to our daily briefing – the best pieces from CapX and across the web.
CapX depends on the generosity of its readers. If you value what we do, please consider making a donation.
