Peter,

I am writing this in the open because you have never hidden what you think, and what you think deserves an answer longer than a post. I have read you for years, not the caricature but the actual essays. The Education of a Libertarian is the clearest thing you have ever written, and I want to begin by saying the thing almost no one who disagrees with you is willing to say.

You are right.

Not about everything. Right about the specific claim you are most often attacked for. In that essay you wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”(Cato Unbound, 2009a) Then you gave the reason, and the reason is not stupid and it is not cruel. It is a claim about feasibility, and as I understand it, it runs like this: a democracy cannot bind its own future, because the people who benefit from the present can vote to keep it, and the people who would pay for it are not yet born. A franchise creates constituencies, and constituencies vote for transfers. You compressed it into one sentence that has been quoted out of context ever since: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women, two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians, have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”(Cato Unbound, 2009a)

I have read the sentence carefully, and I have also read your own correction, and I am going to hold you to the correction rather than the sentence. In a follow-up essay three weeks later you wrote: “While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.”(Cato Unbound, 2009b) That is a more careful position than the people who call you a suffragist-hating crank allow, and I will take it as your position: not that the wrong people vote, but that voting does not solve the problem you care about.

Fine. I accept the premise. A liberal democracy is badly designed for a project that needs sixty years and cannot survive four-year review. It is slow, it is impatient, it buys off the present with the future’s money, and it will not let a visionary commit the species to a trajectory his grandchildren will have to live inside. You are right about that. Most of the writing on my side of this argument refuses to admit it, and that refusal is why your side keeps winning the intellectual exchange.

Here is where you lose me. You did not merely observe that democracy is an obstacle to your project. You concluded that the obstacle should be removed, and then you spent a quarter of a century building the means to remove it. The observation was about what is; the conclusion is about what ought to be; and the movement between them is the move that has never been argued, only assumed. You have never shown that because democracy cannot deliver your future, your future is the one that should be delivered. You have shown that your future requires a different politics. That is a statement about your preferences, not about the good.

Your future is not my future

So let me say what mine is, because you have been generous in stating yours and it is only fair.

I want to live my remaining years in a liberal democratic republic. Not a managed one, not a temporary one, not one that has been optimized past the point where my neighbors can remove the people who govern them. I want the version with the slow courts and the bad newspapers and the two-year House cycle, the one where a stranger who despises me gets to cancel my vote, and where I get to cancel his back. I want to be governed by people I can fire. That is the whole of it. Everything else in this letter is defense.

I noticed, reading the Atlantic profile, that you have a different name for what we have. “We are not a democracy; we’re a republic,” you told Barton Gellman. “We’re not even a republic; we’re a constitutional republic.”(Gellman, 2023) I understand why a man who has lost interest in a system reaches for a narrower word, and Gellman was right that the move is a dodge: you said you had no wish to change the American form of government, then amended it to “I don’t think it’s realistic for it to be radically changed.” Which is not at all the same thing.

But I want to take the word seriously rather than call it a dodge. A republic is exactly what I am defending. The Constitution that uses the word guarantees it to every state, forbids titles of nobility, and gives the House of Representatives a two-year leash.(National Archives) The point of that design was never that the people are wise. It was that no one, including the wise, should govern without a check. Your word is my destination. I just do not think we mean the same thing by it. When you say republic, I think you mean a state administered well enough that the question of who rules can be taken off the table. When I say it, I mean the only form of government that assumes every ruler is fallible and builds the correction into the machine.

The exit

There is a difference between a theory of escape and a program of escape, and you crossed it. Seasteading was not a metaphor. You gave substantial sums to Patri Friedman to establish the Seasteading Institute, and when you addressed a conference of believers in 2009 you did not frame the project as an experiment worth trying. “The question of whether seasteading is desirable or possible in my mind is not even relevant,” you said. “It is absolutely necessary.”(Gellman, 2023) Six years later you cut off the funding, having concluded that years of talk had produced no practical progress, and the ambition moved ashore, to charter cities on land, where the plan becomes a sovereign jurisdiction with private law sitting inside somebody else’s country. Honduras was the laboratory. Próspera was the city. You were among its backers, through the venture capital firm Pronomos Capital.(Próspera)

Honduras repealed the law that made it possible in April 2022, and the rest is in the arbitration claim, where the project’s operator sued Honduras for up to ten point seven billion dollars, equivalent to about a third of the country’s gross domestic product.(Próspera) I want to be fair to you here, because the reporting credits the investor group rather than you personally, and I am not going to put a number in your name that was filed by somebody else’s lawyers. But the shape of the thing is not ambiguous. The escape project, when it got real, turned out to be a jurisdiction where the residents do not have the franchise that would let them repeal it.

And the Fellowship. I have no quarrel with paying young people two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to build things instead of sitting in a classroom. It is the most defensible thing you have ever funded, and there is real talent behind it.(Thiel Fellowship) I only notice what it selects for. It pays people to leave the institution that produces citizens and to enter the one that produces founders, and it has run long enough now to have produced a generation that shares your priors about which of those two things matters more. You have never needed to win an election. You needed the people who build the next system to agree with you about what the old one is worth.

In the fall of 2025 you told an off-the-record audience in San Francisco that you are “a libertarian, or a classical liberal, who deviates in one minor detail, where I’m worried about the antichrist.”(The Guardian, 2025) I believe you. I think the theology is sincere and the worry is real, and I think it also does something useful: it makes the argument about the end of the world instead of the end of the franchise. Your own framing of the danger is a one-world state that regulates technology, and the remedy you have described is not a stronger parliament. Asked on Hoover’s Uncommon Knowledge about an implicit solution to existential risk, you described it plainly: “lean in to a sort of very non-democratic, one-world state.”(Hoover, 2024) A year earlier, in a moment that I think is the most revealing sentence you have given anyone, you told Tyler Cowen that the United States in the 2020s resembles Weimar in the 1920s, “where liberalism is exhausted,” and then: “One suspects the democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted and that we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window.”(Cowen, 2024)

“Whatever that means.” That is the clause. Everything else in your work is careful, and that clause is where you let the thing you actually believe show. A word for the arrangement by which ordinary people control their government is treated as too vague to define, and a sentence later the questioning moves outside the window that contains it.

I am not going to pretend democracy is working

I would be wasting your time if I answered you with the civics-textbook version. We are not having a disagreement about whether the republic is healthy. It is not.

The best evidence against my side is not philosophical, it is empirical, and it comes from the scholars who study capture. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page tested four theories of American politics against nearly eighteen hundred policy issues and found that economic elites and organized business groups have substantial independent influence on policy, while average citizens have “little or no independent influence.”(Gilens & Page, 2014) That is not a complaint about messaging. It is the measurement of a republic that has partially stopped being one. The Varieties of Democracy project reported in 2025 that the world now has more autocracies than democracies for the first time in more than twenty years, that seventy-two percent of people live under autocracy, and that when autocratization begins inside a democracy, the fatality rate is sixty-seven percent.(V-Dem, 2025) Freedom House has recorded twenty consecutive years of global decline, and counted the United States among the countries that lost ground, on legislative dysfunction, executive dominance, and pressure on expression.(Freedom House, 2026)

That is the world. So when I say I want to live in a liberal democratic republic, I am not claiming that one is functioning at the moment. I am saying that it is worth rebuilding, and that the alternative you propose is capture with the corrective removed.

Your own answer to capture is instructive, because it is the most revealing thing you have said about what you think the problem is. Earlier this year you described working to dismantle the Giving Pledge from within. “I’ve strongly discouraged people from signing it,” you said, “and then I have gently encouraged them to unsign it,” calling the organization an “Epstein-adjacent, fake boomer club.”(Fortune, 2026) I want to be careful here, because a man is entitled to his opinion about what other rich people should do with their money. But consider the shape of the position. Faced with a system in which concentrated wealth already has substantial independent influence over policy, the intervention you chose was to organize the concentrated wealth into a bloc and encourage it to keep more of itself. If you are right that the republic has been captured, you have spent the last several years adding to the capture.

I do not think you are hiding this. I think you believe a captured republic should be replaced rather than repaired, and that the replacement should be run by the sort of people who understand what is at stake.

The check, and the correction

Here is my substantive argument, and it is the only one I have.

Winston Churchill, defending the Parliament Act in 1947, described your position better than you have described it yourself, before you existed to hold it: “All this idea of a group of super men and super-planners, such as we see before us, ‘playing the angel,’ as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, is a violation of democracy.”(Hansard, 1947)

Read the last four words again. Without any check or correction. That is the whole case, and it is not a sentimental one. It is an engineering one.

A techno-monarchist arrangement can be more decisive than a republic. It will be faster, more coherent, and better at committing to a long horizon, and I concede all of it. What it cannot do is correct itself. It has no procedure for being wrong that does not require the wrong man to agree that he is wrong, and no procedure for succession that is not a fight among the people strong enough to take the chair. The monarch’s judgment is the only check on the monarch. Thomas Jefferson named the alternative in his First Inaugural, calling the right of election “a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided.”(Jefferson, 1801) Lincoln made it the definition of the thing itself: a majority “held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism.”(Lincoln, 1861)

The empirical record is not on the monarchist side either. Amartya Sen’s observation is the one I keep returning to, because it is so hard to route around: “in the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred … in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.”(Sen, 1999) The reason is not that democratic leaders are kinder. It is that they can be voted out, so they have to respond when people are starving. Acemoglu and his co-authors found that democratizations raise GDP per capita by about twenty percent over the long run, which is a strange result for a system you have described as incompatible with prosperity and innovation.(Acemoglu et al., 2014)

You would say that the charter city has a press too, and private courts, and that competition among jurisdictions is a check. Maybe. But competition among jurisdictions is a check on the jurisdiction, not on the man who owns it, and the history of the company town is not the history of the franchise. A jurisdiction that can be exited is not a jurisdiction that can be corrected, and I do not want to be a customer of my government. I want to be a citizen of it, which is a smaller and more demanding thing.

What I actually want

I am not asking you to agree with me. I am asking you to see the choice clearly, because I think you have been honest about nearly everything except this.

You want to be governed by a person who is right. I want to be governed by a process that assumes nobody is, including the people I voted for, including me. Yours is the better bet when the ruler is excellent. Mine is the only one that survives him being ordinary, or wrong, or tired, or dead, which are the four states every ruler eventually reaches. You have built a career on identifying what the market is underpricing. I think you have consistently underpriced the value of a mechanism that lets a country fire its leadership without shooting anyone.

And the mechanism is not abstract to me. I am in the last part of my life, and I have grandchildren I want to bring to a country where they will inherit a vote instead of a patron. The republic’s promise to them is not that their rulers will be wise. It is that the rulers will be temporary, and that the way to replace them is a ballot rather than a palace guard. That is worth more than decisive government, and it is worth more than the long horizon, because a society that can correct itself will eventually find the horizon, and a society that cannot will eventually lose it.

I will make you a deal, or at least an offer. Keep building your exit. I am not going to pretend you have no right to spend your money on charter cities and seasteads and a foundation that pays young people to leave school. But I am going to keep building the thing you are leaving: a republic healthy enough that leaving it looks like what it is, a choice rather than a necessity. If we both succeed, you get your city and I get my country, and the people who live in mine will be able to vote on whether they wanted it.

The Stoics had a word for the mistake I think you are making, though I will spare you the lecture. They believed the only thing you truly control is your own judgment, and that the error to guard against is confusing what is up to you with what is not. I am not sure a man can control a civilization by understanding it better than everyone else. I think he can only join one, and be subject to it, and be subject to being outvoted. That is not a failure of the design. It is the design.

So this is what I want to leave you with. You are right that the future you want and the government I want cannot both win. I am willing to say which one I am for, out loud, in my name, with the reasons attached. I am for the slow, infuriating, corrigible republic, where a man with a fortune and a theory has exactly the same vote as the woman who cleans his office, and no more. I expect to spend my last years in it, and I expect to be glad.

Think clearly. Live intentionally. Love deeply.

“In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” — Peter Thiel, The Education of a Libertarian (Cato Unbound, 2009)

He was right about the task. He was wrong about which direction to escape in.

Sincerely,

Philip Huffman

Sources

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman