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/
We are offering better solutions. We are creating gambling sites on the dark web that use Monero. Tucker and Charlie can whine all they want about such things, but they cannot be stopped.
Freedom is scary, deal with it.
Hearing the same arguments over and over can seem repetitive when you’ve been in the movement awhile, but being overly-repetitive is not our problem. It’s not that Tucker has heard the Austrians’ arguments over and over and just doesn’t buy it. He has never heard them. Most Americans haven’t, and they never will if we stop saying them because it feels repetitive to us.
It is not about arguments. It is about interests. People have things they want and need. If you do not help people fulfill those wants and needs, you are not their friend. No matter how much they can agree with you in theory, they do not owe you any of their limited time, attention and resources. If you are actively trying to stop people from having what they want and need, then you are their enemy.
Melethron did you see the email I sent you?
Melehtron, to be clear, I have proposed secession; I wrote a book(let) on the topic.
In our crossovers, Adam typically says the obligatory rights argument, and I bring up the caveats like you’re worried about. Did you catch the part where I said in a libertarian society, I don’t think doctors would help patients who wanted to blind themselves? I understand your point, that we need to offer solutions to people who don’t see a problem with the rights infringement, I’m just objecting to your characterization that all we did was say “statists!”
A point I didn’t hear mentioned: The claim is that we need all these government restrictions in order to protect the people who abuse these things, but when the black markets come in, it is the abusers that will use the black market the most. The ONLY people who are stopped by government controls are people who were enjoying the thing responsibly already.