Tucker Carlson, who has recently been identified in The New York Times as “arguably at this point the most significant media figure on the American right,” gave a telling account of his political priorities in his speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in late December.
“All I really care about is that the people in charge care—that they love the people they lead,” he explained from the podium. “That is the first and most important requirement of leadership. A father who loves his children may make mistakes…but if he loves his kids, he’ll do a pretty good job and they’ll do fine.” Likewise, Carlson analogizes, “The president who truly loves his people will, over time, tend to make wiser decisions on their behalf. But the leaders who don’t care at all? They’ll destroy your country, and that is absolutely what we’ve had.”
This was not an anomalous diagnosis from Carlson. He has frequently made that same basic argument, such as when he went on comedian Theo Von’s podcast last month:
“What really matters is the willingness of your leaders to actually die for you as you would for your children. Like, it’s that simple. If they love you, your country will prosper. If they hate you, it will fail. It’s super simple. They don’t like us.”
This repeated analogizing of federal government employees to parental figures on whom we should depend for love could hardly be less accurate or more dangerous. To understand why, a summary of the basic nature of tax-funded governance is warranted. In his seminal 1974 essay Anatomy of the State, economist Murray Rothbard gives a concise summary:
“Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.”
Also helpfully, Rothbard goes further than describing the basic nature of tax-funded institutions. He explains the timeless logic of how such institutions come about in the first place:
“Man is born naked into the world, and needing to use his mind to learn how to take the resources given him by nature, and to transform them (for example, by investment in “capital”) into shapes and forms and places where the resources can be used for the satisfaction of his wants and the advancement of his standard of living. The only way by which man can do this is by the use of his mind and energy to transform resources (“production”) and to exchange these products for products created by others. Man has found that, through the process of voluntary, mutual exchange, the productivity and hence, the living standards of all participants in exchange may increase enormously. The only “natural” course for man to survive and to attain wealth, therefore, is by using his mind and energy to engage in the production-and-exchange process. He does this, first, by finding natural resources, and then by transforming them (by “mixing his labor” with them, as Locke puts it), to make them his individual property, and then by exchanging this property for the similarly obtained property of others. The social path dictated by the requirements of man’s nature, therefore, is the path of “property rights” and the “free market” of gift or exchange of such rights. Through this path, men have learned how to avoid the “jungle” methods of fighting over scarce resources so that A can only acquire them at the expense of B and, instead, to multiply those resources enormously in peaceful and harmonious production and exchange.”
“The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth; one, the above way of production and exchange, he called the ‘economic means.’ The other way is simpler in that it does not require productivity; it is the way of seizure of another’s goods or services by the use of force and violence. This is the method of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the property of others. This is the method which Oppenheimer termed ‘the political means’ to wealth…The ‘political means’ siphons production off to a parasitic and destructive individual or group; and this siphoning not only subtracts from the number producing, but also lowers the producer’s incentive to produce beyond his own subsistence…”
“The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the ‘organization of the political means’; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory.”
Given this context, let’s take Carlson’s familial analogy seriously.
As evolutionary biology teaches us, and as biologist Richard Dawkins elucidates in his renowned 1976 book The Selfish Gene, natural selection tends to favor behavioral dispositions that promote an organism’s “inclusive fitness,” meaning the propagation of its genes through both direct reproduction and genetically related offspring. Because biological parents share a substantial portion of their genes with their children, traits that dispose parents to protect and invest in their offspring are strongly selected for across human evolutionary history. This means that parental interests and children’s interests are far more tightly aligned than the interests of unrelated strangers.
Market economics works similarly. The reason that free markets have typically resulted in so much wealth creation is that they exclude parasitic resource acquisition strategies such as violent seizure of wealth, and therefore they incentivize people to offer each other mutually beneficial transactions that all parties involved willingly agree to. This means that in a market context, people serve their own interests by serving those of others. As the founder of modern economics Adam Smith famously writes in his 1776 masterpiece The Wealth Of Nations:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.”
Therefore, as we can trust our biological father far more than a stranger to look out for our interests, we can trust associates in the private sector far more than federal government employees to look out for our interests. Our father’s biological interests are to a large degree our biological interests, and our voluntary associates’ economic interests are to a large degree our economic interests.
Of course, associates in the private sector will often rip us off and cheat us if they can, but at least they know that if we catch them doing so (or even never catch them but gradually cease to see a benefit from associating with them) we are free to immediately take our business elsewhere and cease to benefit them economically, not to mention spreading the word of their poor service. Federal government employees, conversely, have enslaved us to the coercive and involuntary institutions of taxation and federal regulation. If we don’t like the “products” provided by them, we may have an opportunity years later to lodge a largely impotent vote in the deeply flawed and corrupted electoral system, but we cannot automatically and easily take our business elsewhere like we can in the private sector.
These largely parasitic expropriators of privately earned resources are highly unaccountable compared to voluntary associates in the private sector, such as those who employ you, sell you groceries, and so on. Rather than being compelled to steward resources wisely and benevolently, federal government employees are generally incentivized to enable fraud and loot the treasuries they have temporary access to before the end of their electoral term.
Tucker Carlson’s idea that a more loving leadership class will solve America’s problems is like hoping, while being mugged, that the mugger will start loving you and therefore start serving your interests. Instead of longing to be loved by these coercive parasites, and hoping that they treat us benevolently despite their incentives to the contrary, Carlson and the rest of America’s population would be wise to focus on the love of their families and associates in the private sector, whose interests are much more closely aligned, and who can therefore be relied on in much more robust and valuable relationships.
As for the coercive state, private citizens would be wise to take any opportunity to diminish the influence of these economic parasites over family and market life. If they want to be valued as members of polite society, they should have to stop relying on tax dollars and start creating something of value that people demonstrate a willingness to pay for voluntarily.
