By David Hynes, Mises Caucus Board Member
In the eighteen months of his second and final term, President Trump has abandoned several key elements of his winning right-wing coalition and many of that coalition’s leading figures are—wisely—planning for a post-Trump landscape.
Tucker Carlson, perhaps the most prominent and thoughtful of those who have moved on from Trump, has stated that America needs a viable party other than Republican or Democrat, and recently published an episode of his show outlining ten things that he believes America should be.
Let’s look at Tucker’s list from a libertarian perspective and then consider the way forward.
1. Fair
Fairness is a concept that can easily be used to justify all sorts of state action, but Tucker defines it in a way consistent with libertarian policy—namely, a return to the rule of law. This would mean laws and regulations are applied to everyone equally: no preferred (or persecuted) societal classes and no cronyism in the economy or in the justice system.
We libertarians of course agree. End all government policies mandating or encouraging affirmative action, DEI, “equality of opportunity,” or any other subsidies or penalties on the basis of identity. Reduce opportunities for corruption and discourage bribery (including the legal kind, i.e. campaign contributions) by drastically cutting the size and scope of government and thus reducing the amount of government contracts, subsidies, tax incentives, etc. on offer.
2. Sovereign
Tucker applies this term not just to the concept of national sovereignty as it relates to the influence of foreign countries and interests, but to the issue of both national and personal debt, which he characterizes as a form of slavery.
The national sovereignty issue is crystal clear for libertarians: Stop meddling in the affairs of other nations, and stop allowing other nations to meddle in ours. This would mean a stark reversal of US policy since at least the Wilson administration, but sentiment for exactly that is obviously growing, at least among Americans born in Generation X or later.
As for national and personal debt, Ron Paul reminded us that the main cause also began in the Wilson Era: the Federal Reserve. Central banking enables Congress to spend and borrow recklessly, and it causes our money to lose value year-by-year, day-by-day while keeping interest rates artificially low. This in turn discourages saving and encourages consumers to spend and borrow today in order to try to maintain the standard of living they enjoyed yesterday.
The brutal credit card interest rates that Tucker is rightly angered by are the byproduct of those artificially low interest rates that the Federal Reserve extends to banks. When money is cheap, banks can afford to extend such risky, high interest loans to so many people. This vicious cycle would be reversed in an economy with a prime interest rate set by the free market, as banks would be more circumspect in lending and consumers would have more incentive to save.
(For more on the essential topic of how central banking and inflation ruin society, see the relevant section of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God that Failed and Murray Rothbard’s What Has Government Done to Our Money?).
3. Productive
A longstanding lament of the right, and of Tucker in particular, has been the economic and social costs of America’s transition toward a service economy and away from the production of tangible, useful goods.
Domestic manufacturing is a complex issue with multiple causes. While many assume low wages are the reason production moves overseas, domestic regulatory burdens and labor unions are also major factors.
Libertarians favor reducing taxes, rolling back excessive regulations, and repealing federal laws that prop up corrupt labor unions while maintaining legitimate enforcement against fraud, nuisance, or violations of property rights. Doing so would go a long way toward reviving manufacturing in America.
4. Beautiful
The decline in American cities over the last few decades has been nothing short of astonishing and tragic. Tucker is not alone among libertarians and conservatives in asserting that the lack of cleanliness in public spaces and the widespread tolerance of disorder and crime is an unacceptable lapse in responsibility that American society must address.
The main challenge here is that American cities are run by neither conservatives nor libertarians, but rather liberals and progressives, who seem highly allergic to common sense when it comes to the topic of personal responsibility and regard for one’s neighbor. Indeed, their ideology when it comes to law and order can be described as anarchotyrrany: allowing criminals who target other persons and property to run rampant while taxing, regulating, and subsidizing everyone and everything else.
One tool libertarians would recommend would be for federal and/or state funding to be withheld from city governments that exhibit anarchotyrranic policies. Libertarians want to cut grants and subsidies anyway; if it is not politically feasible to cut them all, then at least cut them off to the worst municipal politicians who refuse to clean up their act.
5. Healthy
Tucker points out the abysmal state of Americans’ health, especially our dependence on pharmaceuticals for daily life and our dangerous food supply.
While there is absolutely no love lost between libertarians and institutions like HHS, the FDA, etc., it is fairly obvious that it would be better for such an organization to be run by those who are aware of and opposed to cronyism in the medical and agriculture industries than by the cronies of those industries.
Many of us were curious to see what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could accomplish, and, sadly, the answer so far seems to be not much. All the more reason for libertarians to work with conservatives and MAHA groups to oppose these horrendously corrupted industries and work toward true free-market solutions to a very real health crisis.
6. Honest
Tucker advocates for massive declassification of secret material and a reduction in the general habit among the government of hiding everything that it is doing behind a pretense of national security.
In practical terms, given that these institutions are occupied by people who will work with great skill and diligence to avoid accountability, it is likely that it would take a truly massive effort to stream sunlight into these very dark corners of the American Deep State.
Nevertheless, libertarians, as we have been since 9/11, are totally opposed to and are committed to dismantling the national security state. The rising tide of indignation over Flock cameras is rooted in the realization that those in power have every intention of using artificial intelligence and other technology to increase measures of surveillance and control to levels previously unimaginable. It’s now or never for us to face this problem not just as disparate political groups, but as a culture.
7. Optimistic
Tucker also notes in America today a prevailing sense of malaise about the present and pessimism about the future, which in turn contributes to a tendency for people to settle for what they can get today rather than building toward future goals and ideals.
Combine this existential pessimism with the malign influence of central-bank-induced inflation and you get a society in which it’s increasingly difficult to buy a house, have and raise children, and pursue other high-time-preference goals that make life worth living and a society grow great.
Most people with common sense would agree that pursuing the other planks in Tucker’s program would go a long way toward restoring a general sense of optimism in America, but as long as the Federal Reserve drives inflation and Congress (along with fifty state legislatures and hordes of local tyrants) seeks to engineer society along progressive lines, Americans will have a strong incentive to simply not bother with trying to build a future better than the present they’re already stuck in.
8. Wise
No one in 2026 can claim with any seriousness that the education system in the US is an abject failure. To address this, Tucker calls for a return to the practical, a back-to-basics approach that eschews the dozens of trends and ideologies that have been tried and have failed over the last five decades of hyper-federalized K-12 policy.
The libertarian approach of working to separate school from state as swiftly as possible may seem, to most people at least, to be the most radical of our positions, but a look at the history of state-run education and the results it has produced shows us that entrusting government bureaucrats and teacher unions with the minds of our children is in fact the radical, unwise policy.
Start with the immediate abolition of the Department of Education and get the federal government completely out of education as quickly as possible. Abolish all teacher unions. Remove all legal barriers to homeschooling and to private and religious education.
9. Decent
Tucker advocates that the US apologize and pay restitution for killing noncombatants and that it cease supporting and funding allies that commit atrocities. This ought to be the least controversial item on Tucker’s list, but for certain elements who claim to be on the right, it is proof that Tucker is really an America-hating leftist. Such sentiments should be dismissed and derided.
All libertarians want peace, and all Americans ought to want America to be a moral beacon for the world that leads by example and follows a strict policy of non-interventionism as outlined by George Washington and Ron Paul.
10. United
Tucker seeks to create a strong identity for Americans that doesn’t divide along racial lines, but at the same time makes it clear that mass immigration—even immigration per se—disrupts this identity.
He asserts that welfare and subsidy of foreign entrants must stop, and we of course agree, since we oppose anyone, immigrant or native, getting welfare.
As for the concept of political unity, we assert, like our namesake, that it must always be strictly voluntary and that each and every self-identified political unit that wishes to secede from a larger political unit has the inalienable right to do so, on down to the individual.
Where things are headed post-Trump, we don’t know, but we recognize that the present upheaval inside both Republican and Democrat parties could be leading to a major political realignment the kind of which is rare but not unprecedented in our 250-year history.
We in the Mises Caucus believe that the vision Tucker Carlson is describing could bring together new friends and allies willing and able to work together in dismantling the tyrannical empire that the US government has become both home and abroad. The Mises Caucus will not be bystanders in our own history as it unfolds and we urge all Americans who love liberty to join and help shape this new movement while there is still hope.