The Enemy Is Power, Wherever You Find It

A president takes office in the middle of an economic crisis, claiming a sweeping mandate to act. Almost immediately, the executive branch begins asserting direct control over vast sectors of economic life—setting prices, dictating production levels, and determining who can enter which industries and on what terms. Hundreds of regulatory codes are issued in a matter of months. Businesses that don’t comply face public pressure campaigns and boycotts. The justification is always the same: the emergency demands action, action demands centralized authority, and the old constraints no longer apply.

This was Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, launched in 1933. So sweeping was the NRA in its concentration of economic power that the Supreme Court struck it down unanimously two years later, finding that Congress had impermissibly delegated legislative authority to the president.

I bring this up not to draw facile parallels to our own moment, but because the NRA provoked one of the most searching responses to the problem of concentrated power that the liberal tradition has ever produced. In 1934, a young economist at the University of Chicago named Henry Simons published a pamphlet called A Positive Program for Laissez Faire. The title sounds like a defense of the status quo. It was anything but. Simons argued that the crisis demanded reform, but reform aimed at dispersing power, not concentrating it further. He called for breaking up corporate monopolies, steeply progressive taxation to reduce inequality, the abolition of tariffs, and, where competition was truly impossible, government ownership. He called inequality “evil.” And he organized his entire intellectual project around a single conviction: “A cardinal tenet of libertarians is that no one may be trusted with much power—no leader, no faction, no party, no ‘class,’ no majority, no government, no church, no corporation, no trade association, no labour union, no grange, no professional association, no university, no large organization of any kind.”

Simons was Milton Friedman’s teacher and a founding figure of the Chicago School. If he doesn’t sound like the free-market fundamentalist you’ve been taught to associate with that tradition, I’d suggest that’s worth pausing over. Because the conceptual tools Simons developed—tools for thinking about how power concentrates, why that’s dangerous, and what kinds of institutions prevent it—are precisely the tools we need right now. Not because classical liberals got everything right. But because the problem Simons was grappling with in 1934 is, in its essentials, our problem too.

The left has long understood the dangers of private power, like corporate monopoly, landlord exploitation, financial sector dominance, the translation of concentrated wealth into concentrated political influence. These are real and serious concerns. Some on the post-liberal right have started raising similar worries, in their own idiom.

But the current moment is revealing something else: the dangers of unchecked public power. When an executive branch can impose sweeping tariffs by decree, seize control of federal payment systems, fire inspectors general, and defy court orders, we are watching the power problem in its public form. And the alarm this provokes, the deep conviction that power needs to be checked, that the rules have to mean something independent of who’s in charge, is the animating insight of the classical liberal tradition.

What I want to suggest in this essay is that this tradition offers some genuinely useful conceptual tools for thinking about the problem of power. My hope is that those on the left can see these tools as useful complements to the concerns progressives have long brought to the table. Let me sketch two of the most important.

The first tool is the more familiar. Public choice theory—developed by James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and others—applies economic reasoning to political actors. The core insight is simple: politicians, bureaucrats, and regulators are not philosopher-kings. They are (largely) self-interested agents operating within institutional incentive structures, just like everyone else. They respond to concentrated lobbying, seek to expand their own authority, and design programs that tend to deliver concentrated benefits to organized interest groups while dispersing costs across an inattentive public.

This is not cynicism about government. It is realism about power. And it helps explain something progressives are learning painfully right now: the regulatory infrastructure may have been built to protect consumers, workers, and the environment, but it doesn’t come with a guarantee that it will always be operated by people who share those liberal values. Every grant of discretionary authority to the executive is a tool that can be seized and redirected by the next administration. Institutional design choices—checks, constraints, distributed authority, transparency—matter more than the intentions of whoever happens to hold power at any given moment.

The second tool is deeper, less familiar, and I think more important. It’s the idea that competitive markets can be a form of decentralized countervailing power.

Return to Simons. In 1941, building on the framework of his earlier pamphlet, he wrote an essay called “For a Free-Market Liberalism” that contains what I think is one of the most important and least appreciated passages in the classical liberal tradition. Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, Simons argued, understood that 

There is a lot packed into this passage, so let me unpack it.

First, it frames competitive markets not primarily as engines of efficiency—though they are that—but as political institutions for dispersing power. When economic decisions are spread across millions of actors, no single entity, including the state, can effectually dictate the terms of economic life. The merchant who can take her business elsewhere, the worker who has outside options, the consumer who can choose among suppliers—these people have exit power. And exit power is political power.

Second, the passage gives the state an active role. The government’s job is not to stand back and let markets happen. It’s to maintain the competitive conditions that prevent power from concentrating. This is the opposite of the caricature of classical liberalism as laissez-faire passivity.

Third, notice who the enemy is. Not “government” in the abstract. “Organized minorities” who usurp economic power “against the common interest.” Rent-seekers. Monopolists. Insiders who rig the rules. That should resonate with anyone who has worried about regulatory capture, corporate lobbying, or the revolving door between industry and government.

This insight has deep roots. As the political theorist Eric Schliesser has argued in his work on Adam Smith, the classical liberal tradition from its origins understood commercial society not merely as an engine of wealth but as a structural counterweight to concentrated political authority. Free trade and competitive markets didn’t just produce prosperity. They produced a dispersal of power that made domination harder to sustain. This is also why the current administration’s embrace of tariffs should concern us in ways that go beyond their considerable economic costs. When the executive branch imposes sweeping tariffs by decree, it is re-concentrating millions of dispersed economic decisions into the hands of a single political actor. It is mercantilism reborn—and the classical liberal tradition has been fighting mercantilism since Adam Smith.

Here’s the bridge I want to build: when progressives worry about corporate monopoly, about concentrated wealth translating into political power, about regulatory capture—they’re making a version of this same argument from the other direction. They’re recognizing that when economic power concentrates, it threatens the dispersal on which freedom depends. The classical liberal tradition agrees entirely. The insight cuts both ways: concentration is dangerous wherever it occurs. And competitive markets, properly maintained, are one of the most powerful mechanisms we have for preventing both kinds.

But markets can’t solve everything. And here is what I most want progressives to understand: classical liberals have always known this. This is not a grudging concession. It is a direct implication of the tradition’s own deepest commitments.

Return one last time to Simons. The same thinker who made the case for markets as dispersed power also advocated steeply progressive income taxation—because he believed that extreme inequality is, in his words, something “evil” that should be “tolerated only so far as the dictates of expediency are clear.” He supported government ownership of industries where technology required a scale incompatible with genuine competition. He called for active monetary policy to stabilize the economy. He insisted that “a merely negative, ‘hands-off’ policy of government is not sufficient to maintain the free economic order.” And he acknowledged, remarkably for a founder of Chicago economics, that socialism and libertarianism share their most fundamental concerns: “Modern socialism is avowedly concerned mainly about inequalities of wealth and power and about industrial monopoly—both major concerns of libertarians.”

If your central commitment is the dispersal of power, then you must oppose its concentration wherever you find it. In the state, yes—but also in private monopoly, in financial oligarchy, in any institution that grows powerful enough to dictate terms to those who depend on it. The classical liberal who waves away corporate concentration, or who treats every call for collective action as creeping socialism, is betraying this tradition, not defending it.

So when progressives raise real concerns—about healthcare access, about climate externalities, about people who are suffering right now—the question the classical liberal tradition asks is not whether to act but how: how do we structure collective action so that it addresses the genuine problem without creating new concentrations of power that will be captured, redirected, or abused by the next person who seizes the executive? After the last few years, that should strike progressives not as an evasion but as perhaps the most practical question in politics.

The shared enemy is not “big government” or “the free market.” The shared enemy is concentrated, unchecked power, wherever it lives. Classical liberals bring tools for understanding how power concentrates and how institutions can be designed to prevent it. Progressives bring moral urgency about the people who are harmed when power goes unchecked, and a willingness to act collectively to address real suffering. Neither tradition has the complete picture. But together, they have the resources for a liberalism that is serious about both freedom and justice—which is to say, serious about power.

In future essays, I want to explore what this alliance looks like when it gets concrete—starting with the “abundance agenda” and the ways in which housing deregulation, permitting reform, and occupational licensing reduction represent exactly the kind of power-dispersing, opportunity-expanding policies that both traditions should embrace. For now, I’ll close with Simons, writing in 1934, in the depths of the Depression, when the temptation to centralize was at its strongest:

“The great enemy of democracy is monopoly, in all its forms.”

He was right. And the sooner we recognize that this enemy has no fixed address, the sooner we can start fighting it together.