Jeffrey Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker

Jeffrey Albert Tucker (born December 19, 1963) is an American economics writer of the Austrian School, an advocate of anarcho-capitalism and Bitcoin, a publisher of libertarian books, a conference speaker, and an internet entrepreneur.

For many years he worked for Ron Paul, the Mises Institute, and Lew Rockwell. With the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) he organized efforts against COVID-19 restrictions beginning in 2020, and he founded the Brownstone Institute think tank in 2021 to continue such efforts.

Quotes

• “Everyone who lives in border areas of the country knows that illegal immigration is a major source of crime and assorted social mayhem.”
• “It is the gay lobby that is attempting to impose its will on bourgeois America by robbing them of their schools, their taxes, and their rights in order to subsidize a sexual preference. And they wonder why they are disliked by ordinary Americans!”
• “The leftist producer may have intended young viewers to prefer the sweaty ethnics on the lower parts of the ship. But the kids evidently did not get the message.”
• “In the dynamic of today’s campus life, anti-racist codes are not really about enforcing a kind of social etiquette, universally applied. They are about power exercised by some over others.”
• “If you are deemed a racist, you must have been one forever; your racism has been unearthed and revealed, not merely spotted in a single incident. Neither is there any hope of rehabilitating you. Your whole life, your whole existence, is stained. It is a Maoist tactic to dehumanize and destroy your opponents.”
• “And then a feminist rose to complain about the marginalization of women in liturgy and leadership in the Catholic church today. The speaker collapsed in fear, and answered her by mouthing a litany of cliches about sexual equality and decrying past Church practices for being insufficiently open to the contributions of women to the faith. His cowering was embarrassing.”
• “Mises believed that feminism was an assertion of equality, a revolt against nature, and therefore akin to socialism; that the family and marital fidelity were essential to civilization; that it was possible to make broad generalizations and perhaps scientific statements about races and ethnic groups; that apparent racial inequalities ought to be studied, although not used to influence state policy; that "Eurocentrism" was the proper outlook; and that one need not be sympathetic to mass culture or the counterculture, as Mises emphatically was not, to support the free market.”
• “A former high school principal accused of being impolite to a mixed-race girl was hired for an administrative job by the school district, over the objections of outsiders demanding ever more minority “rights.””
• “Entering through the double doors, I had to make my way through room after room of African masks and voodoo dolls dating from no particular time, as well as clay pots and things crafted by all sorts of third-world people. I'm happy for these people that they have their ways, though some of it gave me the creeps. But I want to know: why is all this primitive nonsense in a prestigious museum? Even more absurdly, why does it take up the first three rooms in a place that surely lacks sufficient space for exhibits? Clearly the nutty multiculturalists had prevailed here.”
• “Nobody in the Republican Party so unashamedly advocates high and higher government spending, open immigration, monetary inflation, welfare redistribution, quotas, foreign military interventionism, foreign aid, presidential abuse of power, centrally directed demographic reshuffling, global trade treaties, and above all, racial pandering and civil-rights egalitarianism.”
• “Why should conservatives care? We have every interest in seeing rock culture destroyed and crushed.”
• “He lends credibility to the leftist tale about race in America, and gets positively angry if anyone voices complaints about racial social engineering, or even suggests, as Alan Keyes did, that poor blacks need better values.”
• “It’s true that to play the part, to become real swing kids, men must become hypermasculine (“cats”) and the ladies ultrafeminine “dames”). Whereas every development in popular culture for five decades has been an attack on sexual differentiation, and, for that matter, on life and virtue and goodness, the return of swing represents an embrace of the old sexual roles and thereby the beginnings of the old cultural values.”
• “It represents a conscious rejection of the failed experience of the entire boomer generation, one that exalted tackiness above beauty, and sexual freedom above the liturgy of courtship.”
• “There’s a final motive for having a huge family: revenge. Revenge against the family haters, against the environmentalists, against the abortion lobby, against modernity’s corruption.”
• “These trends have given rise to a despairing attitude among those who see the political implications of demographic trends. The best and brightest families-those who will never be on welfare, who are owners and bequestors of capital, who have the willingness to be risk takers and who serve as the political backbone of the ‘free society have been outbred by people who exhibit fewer of these traits. Making matters worse, immigration law has been biased in favor of the latter, not the former, group.”
• “District lines assure that the student population is somewhat homogeneous, and that there can be some schools that create an actual learning environment.”
• “Today’s HUD head Henry Cisneros, whom Kemp praised and endorsed in Senate confirmation hearings in 1993, has used this program to great effect in Baltimore and Dallas, threatening to wreck whole suburbs with an immigration of crime and poverty.”
• “That experiment prefigured today’s rap “artists,” who are entirely dependent on promoters, arrangers, and sound technicians, and create no music themselves.”
• “For any true man of the right, or anyone who would like to see an end to the welfare-warfare state, Kemp should be the last straw.”
• “If the GOP’s “big tent” is destined to collapse, there’s no one better to be standing under it than Kemp. If the party does not collapse-and it elites continue to ignore the views of its grass roots-it will be too left-wing for any true freedom lover to support.”
• ““Eleanor Rigby” is typical of rocks degeneracy, even if the corruption is more buried here than in later efforts.””
• “Churches should be led by men, specifically the leading men who pay the bills.”
• “With any luck, Slipknot will go the way of Cobain.”
• "The primary contribution of government to this world is to elicit, entrench, enable, and finally to codify the most destructive aspects of the human personality."
• "Someone asked me the other day if I believe in conspiracies. Well, sure. Here's one. It is called the political system. It is nothing if not a giant conspiracy to rob, trick and subjugate the population."
• "Anarchy is all around us. Without it, our world would fall apart. All progress is due to it. All order extends from it. All blessed things that rise above the state of nature are owned to it. The human race thrives only because of the lack of control, not because of it. I’m saying that we need ever more absence of control to make the world a more beautiful place. It is a paradox that we must forever explain."
• "Politics is a dirty business, a ruse, an ideological cul-de-sac, a vast looter of intellectual and financial resources, a lie that corrupts, a deceiver, a means of unleashing vast evil in the world of the most unexpected and undetected sort and the greatest diverter of human productivity ever concocted by those who do not believe in authentic social and economic progress."
• "I'm not for pretending that bad stuff doesn't exist, and a passion for justice and truth is a libertarian trait. But the idea of liberty should also reveal new forms of beauty in the world, astonishing evidence of order without dictate, lovely examples of innovation without planning, and other magical things. Surely these deserve some attention too."
• "Liberty is not about class war, income war, race war, national war, a war between the sexes, or any other conflict apart from the core conflict between individuals and those who would seek power and control over the human spirit. Liberty is the dream that we can all work together, in ways of our choosing and of our own human volition, to realize a better life."
• "We really don’t get all the government we pay for, and thank goodness. Lord protect us on the day that we do."
• "Here we have the heart of the difference between Hayek and Keynes: one knew that markets work to give us the best of all possible worlds, while governments create and exacerbate malfunctions; the other imagined that governments were somehow capable of both perceiving and correcting malfunctions by means of the printing press, provided the right technocrats are in charge."
• "Here is a principle to use in all aspects of economics and policy. When you find a good or service that is in huge demand but the supply is so limited to the point that the price goes up and up, look for the regulation that is causing it. This applies regardless of the sector, whether transportation, gas, education, food, beer, or daycare. There is something in the way that is preventing the market from working as it should. If you look carefully enough, you will find the hand of the state making the mess in question."
• "The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy."
• "Free markets are the real people's revolution."
• "Freedom is the foundation for all wonderful things in life."
• "Morals do not come from the state and society. Morality deals with weightier matters that measure our thoughts, words, and deeds against universals that are true regardless of time and place."
• "Now, I’m not saying that we don’t need rules in society. But the question of who makes the rules and on what basis becomes supremely important. Will the rule-making flow from the matrix of voluntary exchange based on the ethic of serving others through private enterprise? Or will the rules be made and enforced by people wearing guns and bulletproof vests with a license to shock or kill based on minor annoyances?"