Daily Inspiration Quote by Tom G. Palmer

Palmer’s line pulls off a neat libertarian judo move: it accepts the familiar premise of “obligation” only long enough to flip it back onto the person asserting power. If obedience is baked into someone at birth, then authority can’t be a matter of performance, consent, or competence. It has to be hereditary, metaphysical, or violent. The question exposes how weird that is.

The intent is less to debate policy than to puncture the moral laziness behind default deference. “Born with the obligation to obey” echoes old-world hierarchies - monarchs, castes, patriarchies - but it also fits modern life’s softer scripts: respect your elders, trust institutions, follow the rules because they are the rules. Palmer asks the missing second question that these scripts depend on people not asking. If duty is natural, then power must be natural too. Who, exactly, arrives pre-authorized?

The subtext is a challenge to any politics that smuggles in coercion as destiny. It turns obedience from a virtue into a red flag: if you can’t name the source of a person’s right to command, you’re probably relying on tradition, fear, or an unexamined belief that order justifies itself. As an educator and public intellectual in the liberal tradition, Palmer is arguing for legitimacy as something earned through consent and justification, not assumed by office, uniform, or ancestry. The line works because it’s a trapdoor: once you step onto “obligation,” you drop into the harder problem of “authority.”