When the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick dragged his landlord before the Cambridge Rent Control Board, Murray Rothbard, who also lived in a rent-controlled apartment and also did philosophy, argued that there is a moral difference between accepting a subsidy and agitating for one. "One is living your life within a State-created matrix, while trying to work against the system," Rothbard wrote in a 1987 issue of Liberty. "The other is actively using the State to benefit yourself and screw your fellow man, which means initiating and abetting aggression and theft."
Christians might call this being in the world but not of it. Rothbard called it "rationality and good sense" to take a handout you never asked for. In that spirit, I recently set out to learn what federal subsidies my wife and I might be able to collect under the High-Efficiency Electric Homes and Rebates Act, which was tucked into the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a 2022 law that I think is bad.
