From the Mouths of Babes
Each
Tuttle Twins book is based on the lessons of a prominent intellectual from the libertarian right, like Friedrich von Hayek, Ayn Rand, or Ludwig von Mises, with a dedication to the figure and a small bio on their work at the end. The author is Connor Boyack, Utah resident, Brigham Young U grad, and president/founder of Libertas Institute, a free market think tank, which is great considering we only have about nine hundred of those. He claims, “In that capacity he has changed a significant number of laws in favor of personal freedom and free markets,” presumably when not writing abominable Ayn Rand propaganda for defenseless kids.
The first book in the series,
The Tuttle Twins Learn About the Law, is based on the work of Frederic Bastiat. The twins themselves are a pair of earnest, curious kids, whose teacher assigns them to “ask a wise person to teach them about something very important,” which as an educator I can tell you is a great pedagogical technique. They go to their neighbor Fred, who takes them to his home library, with an incongruously lovingly rendered bookshelf with many recognizable libertarian titles, from Murray Rothbard to Ron Paul’s
End the Fed to, somehow, Jeremy Scahill’s
Dirty Wars.
Fred gives them Bastiat’s book
The Law and summarizes the highlights, starting with “We have rights,” things we’re allowed to do “and nobody else is allowed to stop me.” “Like playing with my own toys?” asks a twin in incredibly natural dialogue. You can probably see where that’s going—in the minds of libertarians “my own toys” becomes large-scale property, like palm oil plantations and plastics factories. (POP QUIZ: What’s the difference between the relationship of a child to their toys and the relationship of a capitalist to a giant factory? ANSWER: big productive property confers economic
power on its owners, to hire and fire people, and to shape market outcomes. If your toys were sentient beings and you could give them orders, your claim that nobody could tell you what to do with them would seem much less compelling!)
But the twins soon learn that their rights can be violated by “bad guys,” and some of these “bad guys” can be in government, doing things “a lot of people like” but that are bad. Stepping into his tomato garden, Fred observes that it would be wrong for a neighbor to take his tomatoes without asking, and then says it’s just as wrong for the government to take them and give them to the neighbor against Fred’s will, which is illustrated with a masked cop stealing a bag of produce for the poor, providing a valuable window into the feverish libertarian imagination. “Stealing is always wrong,” the kids write in their notebook, letting someone’s raised produce beds stand in for the tens of billions of dollars Mike Bloomberg hoards for vanity presidential campaigns while kids drink lead-tainted water in school and do KickStarters for their insulin. (The way libertarians make their reasoning persuasive is to always use examples that are completely different in scale; so “Would it be wrong for the government to tell you how to run your lemonade stand?” is treated as identical to “Would it be wrong for the government to tell you how to run your giant sulfur mine?” “Property” is used generically to describe both apples and factories, with the buried assumption that there are no relevant qualitative differences between these two types of things that affect the legitimacy of the state regulating them.)
Of course, the right has to recognize that to its regret, a social safety net is widely popular. People don’t wish to live in a society where the weak are left to die. So, as usual, personal charity is invoked as an effective substitute for government aid. We learn that Fred will “make meals for families when the dad loses his job.” How nice! But sadly “the government forces me to help people, too,” as in paying cruel taxes for Social Security and food stamps. Who knows why we’re made to do that! Maybe because the average length of unemployment in the US in January 2020 was 22 weeks,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which comes out to 462 missed meals per person, or 2,772 meals for the depicted family of six. Better get cooking, Fred! Or just pay your fucking taxes.
tuttletwins.com
