Adam Smith wrote that 'As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords like all other men love to reap where they never sowed,' expressing skepticism about landlords capturing economic gains they didn't create—a view generally consonant with Marxist critiques.

The Chinese government faces the political and fiscal problem that it cannot let house prices decline significantly without destabilizing the asset values that comprise household wealth and the collateral for local government debt.

Wealthy Donors Won't Fund the Domestic Poor

If the welfare state were abolished it would not be replaced by money from the rich, because the great industrialists historically did not provide charity matching even a minimal welfare state (one reason such states were created), and today's wealthy donors are mostly interested not in the domestic poor or middle class but in global poverty, the environment, and elite cultural and educational institutions that benefit themselves.

Subsidies Create Vicious Political Feedback Loop

Subsidies create a vicious political feedback effect: producers (doctors, universities) raise their prices by the amount of the subsidy, then tell their clients to lobby Congress to increase the subsidy because prices are rising, allowing producers to keep driving up their own prices indefinitely.

Libertarians' Detailed Plans Beat Marxist Vagueness

Libertarians differ from Marxist socialists in that Marxists, asked how they would structure insurance or public utilities after the Revolution, dismissed it as a bourgeois question to be worked out later, whereas libertarians have incredibly detailed plans in advance—which makes their position more plausible and is good marketing.

Vouchers Are Government Programs Not Markets

Introducing an element of choice via vouchers does not make a program a free-market program; a government-funded school voucher is just as much a government program as money going directly to a district school, because you are still taxing people—you are merely routing the taxes through the consumer rather than the producer.

Gilded Age America Was Not Laissez-Faire

The claim that the United States between the 1870s and 1900s was a libertarian paradise is false because it was by no means a laissez faire society—it had high tariffs and a government that intervened to help businesses crush strikers in the railroad and other industries.

Obamacare Will Initially Drive Up Prices

Obamacare will initially tend to drive up prices because of all the new money flowing into the health care system; this can be mitigated with price regulation, but absent it, producers may simply jack up their prices.

Libertarian State Cannot Defend Itself From Neighbors

If you create a libertarian paradise on desirable territory surrounded by militaristic welfare states, your country will not remain sovereign for long unless it can mobilize military resources and population support to defend itself from aggressive non-libertarian neighbors—a real flaw in libertarian theory.

Fraternal Orders Were Insurance Vehicles Not Communities

The decline of fraternal civic organizations like the Elks and Moose Lodges was caused by Social Security and government insurance, because 90% of members joined for economic benefits—health insurance, burial insurance, old folks' homes—not the activity itself, so their decline arguably liberated civil society by leaving only members genuinely interested in the activity.

Government Social Insurance Crowded Out Private Charity

Government social insurance demonstrably crowded out private charitable activity, and federal social insurance crowded out state, county, and local provision—serious private charities fighting hunger and poverty for large groups largely ended with the New Deal and the rise of federal spending; the open question is whether this was a bad thing.

Economics Is Not a Science

Economics is not a science and there is far too much advocacy without certainty on the part of economists; the 'Econ 101' that drives policy is not the textbooks but the oversimplified vision—often with a right-of-center bias—that all activities can be done by for-profit firms in competitive markets, which politicians invoke as if all economists agree.

Compensation Determined by Labor Market Not Credentials

The vast majority of jobs in the US, and most jobs being created, require no higher education beyond high school—nursing aides, janitors, security guards greatly outnumber all scientists, engineers, lawyers and professors combined—so a janitor with a Ph.D. is paid no more than other janitors because the labor market structure of an occupation determines compensation, not credentials.

Free Trade Theory Was Never Win-Win for All

The theory of international trade going back to Ricardo's comparative advantage is never reducible to the simple thesis that in free trade all sides win—no sophisticated economist, including free-trade defenders like Bhagwati, makes that claim—because at any point in time trade produces both winners and people who struggle, but these qualifications get lost in public debate which reduces the argument to a win-win bumper sticker.

Pro-Market Discourse Dominated Elite Talk Since 1980s

Since the 1980s the center-right, more pro-market side has dominated elite public discourse—the way we talk about markets and business—even if not actual public policy, which is why Lind's critique targets pro-market myths now rather than collectivist ones.

Strategic Industries Justify Domestic Subsidy

Certain militarily relevant traded-sector industries—aircraft, automotive—are essential for national defense, so all potential great military powers will sponsor or subsidize their domestic producers rather than buy abroad, because at the end of the day you don't know who will be your ally or who will embargo imports; this does not imply general statism or economic nationalism.

Banking Deregulation Ended Politicians' Independence

Before 1970s-80s banking deregulation, laws against branch banking protected small state and local banks, which let politicians take on Wall Street because they were funded by small-town banks; eliminating those laws made consumer life easier but meant politicians now raise money from the same megabanks, creating a real political problem.

1950s Industrial Policy Model No Longer Fits

The whole 1950s model—social insurance and labor-market institutions premised on a typical unionized industrial wage earner (e.g. auto manufacturing) who, with the bosses, could extract rents from market power and share them via generous pensions and welfare states—was designed for a society where 30%+ of the workforce was in factories, and does not fit a coming society of largely non-automatable, non-offshoreable personal services; Progressives are stuck in this 1950s model because of their union base.

Corporate Funding Silenced Libertarian Think Tanks

Without support from the Koch brothers and self-interested corporations there would be no significant libertarian intellectual or political movement; as the Cato Institute and East Coast libertarians took corporate contributions to become players in the Republican Party, they went silent on crony capitalism and objectionable defense contracts—just as progressive intellectuals sell out to be players in the Democratic Party.

Economy Shifting to Low-Wage Service Sector

Because of technology, the world economy is shifting from a manufacturing base to one where much of the productive sector is robotic and the vast majority of people (already ~86%, perhaps reaching 96%) work in non-traded domestic services that neither robots nor foreign workers can do—jobs like nursing aides, retail, and hospitality that currently pay very little—and neither Left nor Right has a vision for what to do with these people.