The ultimate tariff is simply the requirement that goods be made by hand, by humans. In this future America, when we buy clothes, we have to buy them on Etsy—and Etsy’s rules are enforced by the FBI. Every time they capture a floating brick of Temu shirts, dropped by some fleeing speedboat, they display it on a card table for the local news:

“These Chinese junk clothes were trying to take American housewives’ businesses away. Now, Sergeant Hernandez will set them on fire. Look how well they burn—that’s pure polyester. Just the fabric, without a historical-clothing tag, would get you five years for artificial fiber, aggravated. Imagine if we still used that stuff! Why, the shepherd could not afford his bread and cheese, the cotton-picker his energy drink… everywhere, the economic fabric would collapse. It’d be like the late 20th century.”

If the people have an absolute right to choose their government, then anarchy—not democracy—is the only legitimate system.

As the states became more democratic over time, corruption and murder increased. In both Athens and Rome, great men were killed or banished because of jealousy of their popularity and power. One reason for the greater evils of democracy compared to monarchy, Filmer claimed, is because the cruelties of kings tend to be personal vendettas while democratic cruelty results from conflicts between large, opposing factions. The well-being of a king is inherently tied to his subjects because he relies on their health for war and on their wealth for taxes. Therefore, a king’s own selfinterest incentivizes him to care for his people. Democratic rulers understand that what’s best for the nation is not always what’s best for themselves. Their time in office is limited and they are forced to spend energy getting themselves elected. To win they must often serve powerful special interest groups at the expense of the citizenry. And with a larger number of rulers, democratic governments are more bloated than monarchies. Their internal politics become too complex for many of those who are governed to fully grasp.

Both Christians and non-Christians harboring untested faith in democratic principles would benefit from considering the contradictions of liberalism as revealed by Filmer. His arguments can be applied both from a religious standpoint as well as a secular belief in natural rights. And for anyone interested in political theory more generally, Patriarcha serves as a provocative, concise starting point for thinking about the incentive structures implicit in each form of government and their various consequences in the history of nations.