I’m a fan of Tucker Carlson. I don’t like everything he does, but find much of it extremely valuable in defying the corrupt establishment.
But he said something recently that I strongly disagree with.
In an interview with Glenn Greenwald, Carlson said, “I think a lot of people have now awakened to the demonstrable fact that libertarian economics was a scam perpetrated by the beneficiaries of the economic system that they were defending.”
Carlson’s not wrong about the deficiencies of the current system. But he’s not really criticizing “libertarian economics.” More on that later.
Carlson then said, “I think you need to ask: ‘Does this economic system produce a lot of Dollar Stores?‘ And if it does, it’s not a system that you want, because it degrades people—and it makes their lives worse and it increases exponentially the amount of ugliness in your society. And anything that increases ugliness is evil.”
He asked again, “So if it’s such a good system, why do we have all these Dollar Stores?”
That last comment prompted a text from a libertarian friend who shall remain anonymous, who also generally likes Carlson. My friend grew up poor, and expressed that only people who were never raised in poverty – like Carlson – could belittle the access to inexpensive goods.
I do think Carlson’s later points about rural urban sprawl as seen with chain discount stores vs. the often more majestic architecture of Europe, even for the poor, has merit. But so does America not being 1000-years-old – older structures vs. more modern ones – but more importantly….
…poor Americans having access to goods much of the world’s poor could only dream of.
This is not a small thing.
Of course, a Dollar General, the structure, could be described as ugly. But so could not having soap for a bath, toothpaste to brush your teeth or canned vegetables that you can afford. Is it more dignified for a family to do without basic necessities like their ancestors might have a century ago? Would a man be more confident as a man if he were not permitted through the fruit of his own labor to buy his wife a birthday card, or his daughter, a candy bar?
Carlson’s comments are no surprise. He has been open in recent years about essentially agreeing with a new crop of nationalist conservatives who basically believe Republicans should behave as right-wing Democrats. Nationalist conservatives now join the Left in describing America’s current corporate cronyist system as mere “capitalism” or even “libertarian economics,” as if they are one in the same.
If the American Left wants more government and less “capitalism,” the new nationalist Right wants that too.
And we all know there is nothing more beautiful than ever-growing bureaucracy.
How about less government and more actual “libertarian economics?”
Because if socialists on the Left or Right can continue to still credibly claim, and they really can’t, that ‘real socialism has never been tried’ – libertarians can sure as hell make that point too.
Carlson, being favorable to the nationalist Right on economics, is using the same duplicitous logic the Left does when he says that “libertarian theory” had been used to defend the current American economic system, which heavily relies on big business being in bed with big government often at the expense of smaller competitors.
Greenwald even made this distinction in his question to Carlson, framing traditional economic thinking on the Right as, “We should all cheer for the richest people in our society to get richer because a rising tide lifts all boats, and everyone watches Raytheon and Boeing and Blackrock and Amazon get richer and richer and richer and their boats aren’t rising.”
That’s not capitalism. It’s cronyism. He’s specifically talking about neoconservatives who work to enrich the Military-Industrial-Complex.
For the record, neoconservatives generally loathe libertarians.
Greenwald continued, “It led a lot of people who had been capitalists to question, not capitalism as a theory, but capitalism how it manifests in American society.”
Again, he’s not describing actual, free market “libertarian economics.”
Just ask America’s top libertarian.
Ron Paul explained in 2012, “There is a lot of crony capitalism going on in this country and that has to be distinguished from real capitalism, because this occupation stuff on Wall Street (a reference to the leftwing anti-corporatist Occupy Wall Street movement), if you’re going after crony capitalism, I’m all for it,” Ron Paul said in 2012. “Those are the people who benefit from contracts from the government, benefits from the Federal Reserve, benefits from all the bailouts.”
Central economic planning is as crucial to the American Left as it is to the nationalist Right.
We have seen the anti-free market and big government solutions the American Left and now some on the Right now favor in a very old country with plenty of inspiring architecture: Argentina.
Where the first libertarian president in the world, Javier Milei, was just elected.
Carlson knows this because he just interviewed him.
Milei is an Austrian economist, or what one might call an authentic ‘libertarian economist.’ Even in the most impoverished corners of Argentina, the people apparently wanted the candidate who promised true free market economics over the socialism they had long endured, as longtime socialist magazine Jacobin complained.
Whether Javier Milei is successful as a libertarian president remains to be seen but the utter failure of the socialist policies that have wrecked his country, and that some on the US Right are now warm to, do not.
If he can succeed, maybe we can see what an actual ‘libertarian economics’ can do for a country so desperately in need of it.
How beautiful.
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