Libertarians cheered when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the podium the 2024 Republican National Convention, his voice a rare blast of sanity against the Covid-era madness of lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Here was a man who had refused to bend the knee to Fauci's fear machine. For a movement long starved of allies in the war against authoritarian overreach, RFK seemed like a godsend. And in many ways, he was—on those specific battles.

But as he's settled into his role as Director of Health and Human Services under the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) banner, a troubling pattern has emerged. Kennedy's political principles aren't libertarian; they're progressive through and through. His tenure isn't dismantling the regulatory leviathan—it's entrenching it deeper, turning the FDA from a mere gatekeeper into an even more impenetrable fortress for corporate giants. What libertarians mistook for a wrecking ball is, in fact, a reinforcement rod.

To understand why this matters, we must first dispense with the fairy tale that the regulatory state exists to protect consumers from "unsafe" products. That's just sales talk. As any student of Austrian economics knows, regulations aren't about safety or fairness—they're a protection racket for large corporations. Sold to a gullible public as shields against rapacious capitalists, these laws and agencies primarily serve to erect barriers that crush small competitors who can't afford the compliance costs. Giant firms, with their armies of lawyers and lobbyists, thrive. Mom-and-pop operations? They fold. The result: near monopolies, higher prices, and innovation starved in a cradle of cronyism.

This isn't “conspiracy theory;” it's history. Take the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, the grandfather of the FDA. It was rammed through Congress amid a manufactured panic over "embalmed beef" and filthy slaughterhouses, sparked unwittingly by Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle. Sinclair, a committed socialist, later admitted his aim wasn't food safety but "exposing" the exploitation of immigrant workers in Chicago's meatpacking plants—a clarion call for communist revolution. 

The book painted a hellscape of wage slavery, urging readers toward proletarian uprising. Yet, the reforms it inspired had nothing to do with uplifting the working man. President Theodore Roosevelt, the “trust buster” who only busted Rockefeller firms while ignoring the Morgan empire, signed the Act on June 30, 1906, alongside the Meat Inspection Act. 

As Murray Rothbard’s work on the Progressive Era makes clear, this was because TR's administration was packed with "Morgan men"—loyalists to J.P. Morgan, the robber baron who had sunk millions into an agricultural trust aimed at cornering the beef market. Each foray failed spectacularly, as thousands of small ranchers and packers flooded the market with cheaper alternatives, hammering Morgan's monopoly dreams. 

The 1906 laws changed that. Overnight, federal inspectors, lab tests, and labeling mandates turned meatpacking into a capital-intensive game only the big players could play. Small outfits, lacking the resources for compliance, vanished. Morgan's losses turned to windfalls. Safety? A convenient sideshow. The real win was cartelization under the color of consumer protection.

This template—panic, progressive piety, corporate payoff—has defined every regulatory "reform" since. The FDA itself slouched into existence during the New Deal, that orgy of central planning under Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR's brain trust brimmed with Rockefeller operatives, from economists whispering in his ear to officials steering policy toward Standard Oil's interests. 
 

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? 

 Tom