Ep. 429 Tucker and Charlie Kirk’s Economic Paternalism
Adam Haman returns to help Bob critique two recent Tucker Carlson interviews, featuring Charlie Kirk and Saagar Enjeti. Although the conversations contained much to praise, Adam and Bob focus on the unfortunate economic paternalism in both.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- The YouTube version of this conversation.
- The Tucker interview of Charlie Kirk, and of Saagar Enjeti.
- The HamanNature substack.
- Help support the Bob Murphy Show.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
I truly believe the basic logic and principles of libertarianism are correct and important and that it is extremely dangerous that so many right-wingers are rejecting them. You are not going to stop this by repeating the same platitudes everyone has heard before. There needs to be a different approach.
If people have a right to do what they want without hurting others, then that can include preferring and pursuing certain outcomes for their society. The only question is how to do that without conflict with those who have different preferences. No one is against private voluntary solutions, but in the political realm, there is no need to actively oppose efforts to pursue such outcomes. Instead, you can propose federalism, secession, or otherwise making government more voluntary as ways of resolving conflict, but not as optimal outcomes.
This way, libertarianism can be reduced to simple matters of applying just war principles to every kind of conflict and of governments acting with basic civilized decency towards people, which means allowing some way of opting-out, but not necessarily being restricted to the conventional libertarian position. You do not need to say that restricting gambling or usury is a terrible infringement on freedom.
The problems Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk discuss are real. Whoever offers to solve them will have people’s loyalty. Those leaders will be the ones people will fight, die, and kill for. If their solution is to take from others, then that is the way it will have to be. Libertarians need to offer better solutions or at least stay out of the way and not make people hate them more.
I try to explain what I mean by all this on my Substack page.
https://quineopele.substack.com/