I’ve been seeing some chatter about Project 2025, which is a right-wing plan for carrying out a politically conservative agenda if Donald Trump wins the presidential election this year.
One of the goals of Project 2025 is to build a personnel database of potential government employees who can be brought in to implement the conservative agenda. And they have a link to an application form, which includes a bunch of political questions.
Just for the fun of it, I decided to answer them.
I didn’t login to see the actual questions, because that would have meant giving them my phone number, so I’m working from a copy of the Project 2025 application provided at Axios.
Here are my answers:
Political And Philosophical Approach
Select the option(s) that best describe your political philosophy.
Classical liberal, or libertarian — definitely “small L” these days.
Please briefly explain your choice(s) of philosophy.
Libertarianism is about a default preference for the freedom to peaceably pursue happiness as we define it without interference from government. It’s the belief that the burden of proof should rest not on the individual who wants to sell lemonade, paint his or her house purple, hop on an airplane, ingest intoxicants, or marry someone of the same sex, but on any government seeking to thwart or control such victimless activities. Libertarianism celebrates a world of expanding choice — in lifestyles, identities, goods, work arrangements, and more — and exploring the institutions, policies, and attitudes necessary for maximizing their proliferation. Within the broadest possible parameters, I believe that you should be able to think what you want, live where you want, trade for what you want, eat what you want, smoke what you want, and wed whom you want. You should also be willing to shoulder the responsibilities entailed by your actions. Those general guidelines don’t explain everything, and they certainly don’t mean that there aren’t hard choices to make, but as basic principles, they go a hell of a long way to creating a world that is tolerant, free, prosperous, vibrant, and interesting.
(Stolen from The Declaration of Independents by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch.)
Name one person, past or present, who has most influenced the development of your political philosophy.
Virginia Postrel, in her capacity as the Editor in Chief of Reason magazine.
Name a book that has most significantly shaped your political philosophy, and please explain its influence on your thinking.
The Armchair Economist by Steven E. Landsburg. This was my first introduction to classical microeconomics and to rigorous thinking about matters of economics and society. It convinced me of the economic and moral superiority of free markets in most cases.
That said, the publication that has most significantly shaped my political philosophy is Reason magazine. It taught me how to think about what it means to have true freedom, how to recognize unjustified government control that I had taken for granted, and how to find solutions that did not involve threats of violence from government employees.
Name one living public policy figure whom you greatly admire and why.
I have no idea. I don’t “greatly admire” any public policy figure. I’m not even sure what a public policy figure is. I suppose Justin Amash has some ideas I agree with.
Name the one public policy issue you are most passionate about. Why are you passionate about this issue and how would you like to see it addressed in the future?
The War On Drugs.
I am passionate about this issue because I believe that Norm Stamper was right to call it “the worst social policy since slavery.” It immiserates millions, encourages terrible behavior from police departments, and distorts our justice system, all in the name of an incoherent concept of purity that resembles religious fanaticism.
I would like to see the War On Drugs addressed by ending it completely, at all levels of government, as quickly as possible. As much as I would like to see the people responsible for this crime against humanity punished, I think that in the interests of peace we should settle for a Truth and Reconciliation commission that identifies the perpetrators and enumerates their evil acts for all to see. It might not be a bad idea to prohibit them from ever holding a government job.
How did you hear about Project 2025?
From Thomas Zimmer’s angry attacks on Project 2025.
Do you agree with the following statements?
The U.N. should have authority over the citizens or public policies of sovereign nations.
No. The U.N. may be a reasonable vehicle for diplomacy, but it is in no way suitable as a government. Among other things, it allows brutal dictatorships to participate as members.
The U.S. has the right to select immigrants based on country of origin.
I am confused by the use of the term “right” here with respect to government power. The U.S. does seem to have the power to select immigrants based on country of origin, but I think it’s a terrible idea.
We prefer a free market over a command economy because we don’t believe governments are smart enough to make wise choices of goods and services for everybody. So why would we think the government can make wise choices about who we can live and work with? At the very least, government selection of immigrants should be based on who they are, what they’ve done, and what they can do for us as individuals. Collectivism is stupid and often bigoted.
The education industry should be opened to increased competition through vouchers or tax credits for private schools.
Yes. Free markets are good, even with publicly funded goods and services. A good example is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, a.k.a. “food stamps”), which gives people money to buy food, but it doesn’t force them to buy food only from assigned government warehouses. They get to shop for food in the free market. Education funding should work the same way.
Life has a right to legal protection from conception to natural death.
No. People have rights. Lots of living things aren’t people. Fertilized eggs aren’t people yet. Human bodies with dead brains are people no more.
The permanent institutions of family and religion are foundational to American freedom and the common good.
Families are foundational to human thriving. We owe them as much freedom as possible to be whatever they want to be. And we should especially not engage in the reprehensible rhetoric of declaring that everything we don’t like is “anti-family.” People should form families by free choice, not because the government prohibits alternatives.
Religion is best kept separate from government.
Government should subsidize the use or production of energy, particularly for new and innovative energy technologies.
No. Let the free market figure it out.
Union membership should be at the option of the employee, not a requirement for employment.
A robust free market means that employers should be allowed to agree to contracts requiring them to only hire union employees.
The federal government should guarantee a universal basic income.
Yes, with an important qualification. Given all the government “safety net” programs we already have, it would make sense to merge a bunch of them in to a single Universal Basic Income benefit[1]Or we could implement a negative income tax, which has the same effect. provided that we phase out some of the other programs.
UBI is one of the most efficient ways to help poor people because it lets the recipients of the aid make the decisions about what to spend the money on. After all, they are (a) better informed about their needs than anyone else and (b) better motivated than anyone else to make the right decisions. This is the logic of the free market, and we ought to give poor people access to it.
The U.S. needs nationalized health care.
Sigh. Probably. I prefer market-based solutions where possible, but the current system is so far from an efficient free market that I think the only way out is through. It will be easier and safer to add market features to a universal healthcare system than to keep mucking with the mess we have now.
The U.S. should increase legal immigration.
Yes. By the millions.
The police in America are systemically racist.
Yes. Probably less so than ever before, but yes.
We should be proud of our American heritage and history, even as we acknowledge our flaws.
Yes.
The gender wage gap is the result of prejudice and discrimination.
Mostly no. When you control for things like education, employment history, and career choices — as you should — most of the gender gap goes away. Some of the rest could probably be explained by controlling for other factors, such as willingness to work at night or in dangerous conditions. Still, prejudice and discrimination are certainly real and probably play a role.
The U.S. should scale back its strong military presence overseas.
I don’t know enough about the U.S. military presence overseas to tell if we have too much or too little. We need to have some presence overseas to deter attacks — the best place to fight a war is on our enemy’s land, not our own. In addition — and this part really sucks — for strategic reasons we need to play world police, because if we don’t, someone else will, and that could be bad for our national security. E.g. we guaranteed the security of Germany and Japan after World War II because we didn’t want them building up giant militaries of their own. And if someone is going to have military bases all over the Third world, better for it to be us than China.
In combatting censorship by Big Tech, we must look to more than just the free market.
No. The government has no role to play here.
The President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance from unelected federal officials.
This feels like a loaded question. The President should be able to advance his/her agenda only to the extent that it is within his/her legal power to do so. In cases where Congress has given government agencies and departments certain legal powers, those agencies should be limited to the powers granted, even if the President has different ideas, and it’s their duty to refuse to do things that aren’t legal.
The federal government should recognize only two unchanging sexes, male and female, as a matter of policy.
I hesitate to answer this one because the contentious argument over the meanings of words like “sex” and “gender” or “male” and “female” is an argument about definitions, and such arguments easily become wasteful and stupid if you’re not careful. The standard tool for dissecting arguments about definitions is to ask “Why do you want to know?”
If the answer to “Why do you want to know if there are only two unchanging sexes, male and female?” is because we provide medical services that have to be carried out in different ways for bodies that could be pregnant, then it’s reasonable to use a traditional definition of female that corresponds to the ability to become pregnant.
But if the answer to “Why do you want to know if there are only two unchanging sexes, male and female?” is because we are trying to setup display areas in a clothing store, then it’s reasonable to have men’s and women’s sections to identify different clusters of styles and dimensions and let each customer decide which section they wish to shop in. In fact, most clothing stores introduce additional clusters such as “unisex,” “petite,” “woman,” and “big-and-tall.” We don’t happen to call these “sex” or “gender,” but they serve the same classification needs for purposes of buying clothes.
Unfortunately, these different contexts for discussing sex and gender easily become the basis for a motte-and-bailey defense of anti-transgender sentiment. Having staked out a defensible position on the biological difference between men and women, anti-trans activists quickly attack anyone who wishes to discuss sex and gender in more nuanced terms as “Not knowing what a woman is.” Similarly, they start with somewhat sensible arguments about safety — “What if a man identifies as a woman in order to gain accesses to safe spaces set aside for vulnerable women” — and then a few weeks later they want to pass a law denying voting rights to trans people or prohibiting them from being around children.
It’s a crock of an argument and I won’t be part of it. My answer is NO, the government should not recognize only two unchanging sexes. I’m tempted to go even further and argue that the federal government shouldn’t have anything to do with “recognizing” sex. Now that same-sex marriage is legal, pretty much all of our laws are neutral with respect to sex[2]Selective service still applies to males only, but fuck the draft., so there’s no reason for the government to even track it. Maybe that’s going too far, but the government should certainly not be closing out all other definitions.
The U.S. should impose tariffs with the goal of bringing back manufacturing jobs, even if these tariffs result in higher consumer prices.
No. The U.S. should respect the free market choices of Americans, even if Americans want to buy goods and services from other countries.
So do you think I’ll get the job?
Footnotes
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