Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - A Response To David Friedman
Aired: 2022-08-04
Duration: 01:32:28


=== Rolling Back The State (15:13) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:08]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:10]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:12]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:16]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:22]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:26]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:30]  Here's your host, Dave Smith.
[00:00:33]  All right, what's up, everybody?
[00:00:35]  What's up?
[00:00:35]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:38]  I am Dave Smith.
[00:00:39]  He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
[00:00:41]  How you feeling this evening, my good friend?
[00:00:44]  I'm good.
[00:00:44]  I'm ready for another battle royale.
[00:00:46]  We're taking on everyone on the internet.
[00:00:48]  That's right.
[00:00:49]  That's right.
[00:00:49]  We got another response episode for you today.
[00:00:53]  One that I felt I just felt like I had to do this episode on this topic.
[00:00:58]  Real quick, before we get into that, I do want to say very much looking forward to, I'll be jumping on a plane going down to Orlando from when we're recording this.
[00:01:08]  I think it's a little over 24 hours when you're listening to this, maybe a little bit less than that, but going down to Young Americans for Liberty Revolution 2022 event.
[00:01:17]  Really looking forward to seeing a lot of great people down there.
[00:01:20]  So hope to see some of you guys out there.
[00:01:22]  Rob, I know you're on the road.
[00:01:23]  You got a bunch of stuff going on.
[00:01:25]  Where can people find you?
[00:01:27]  Vegas this Saturday.
[00:01:28]  It's going to be a big old party.
[00:01:29]  Me, PK Chris, Louis J. Gomez, Gomez.
[00:01:32]  I don't know why I started on his last name.
[00:01:37]  He's a young up-and-comer.
[00:01:38]  Keep your eye on that, kid.
[00:01:40]  No, I was trying to forecast whether or not he's going to stick around for live pod, but he's definitely stopping by, doing some stand-up with us.
[00:01:46]  And then rest of the month, I got Michigan, D.C., Maryland, Denver.
[00:01:51]  So we're going big for the home stretch here.
[00:01:54]  Traveling around quite a bit, Rob.
[00:01:56]  Rob in the summertime, he's all over the place.
[00:01:59]  He hibernates like a bear in the winter, but in the summertime, Rob is everywhere you can find him.
[00:02:04]  All right.
[00:02:04]  So today's response is one that makes me almost a little bit uncomfortable, full disclosure.
[00:02:14]  So I recently saw because I was several people sent me this tweet, and it was some other guy who I've had words with on Twitter before, not even important to mention.
[00:02:26]  But he had tweeted these pictures of David Friedman writing about me.
[00:02:35]  And so somewhat interestingly, I was also tagged the same day, or maybe the day before, I was also tagged in a Facebook post that David Friedman went off on this whole thing about me.
[00:02:50]  And anyway, if you don't know who David Friedman is, he's really a brilliant intellectual, anarchist, libertarian economist who's written some like amazing, produced some amazing works.
[00:03:06]  Somebody I very much admire.
[00:03:08]  And there was a big split between Murray Rothbard, who is my, you know, kind of like, you know, libertarian hero.
[00:03:16]  He, him and David Friedman had some strong disagreements.
[00:03:19]  And I felt more, I fall more on the Rothbardian side, but I always had a lot of respect for David Friedman.
[00:03:24]  Still have, I don't mean to say that in the past tense.
[00:03:26]  I have a lot of respect for David Friedman.
[00:03:27]  I've benefited a lot from his work.
[00:03:30]  And so this was a little bit strange to me to see him writing an article and then having this long Facebook post about me.
[00:03:43]  I guess just it's a little bit weird.
[00:03:44]  Like no matter.
[00:03:45]  I think if Milty Jr. wants to throw up the Dukes, we'll have that.
[00:03:49]  Well, yeah.
[00:03:50]  So for people who don't know, David Friedman is the son of Milton Friedman, who's probably, I would say probably the most famous free market advocate to ever live.
[00:04:05]  I mean, like in terms of fame, I think the most famous free market leaning economist ever.
[00:04:12]  He was a Nobel Prize winning economist, but he also was just like very popular.
[00:04:17]  Like he wrote the, you know, he wrote this book called Free to Choose that also had like a documentary companion to it, which by the way is really fantastic.
[00:04:25]  Highly recommend it.
[00:04:27]  He's also his appearances on like Donahue and all types of other like TV shows.
[00:04:32]  He just did a great job really arguing for like the principles of a free society.
[00:04:37]  Again, I fall more on the Rothbardian side than the Milton Friedman side, but somebody who I respect a lot.
[00:04:46]  And David Friedman, I actually think is probably a superior intellectual to his father.
[00:04:54]  But and that's just my opinion.
[00:04:56]  I don't mean that not as a knock on any of them.
[00:04:58]  You could argue the case, but he's anyway.
[00:05:01]  I have a lot of respect for both of them.
[00:05:02]  Now, I guess it's a little bit, no matter how much kind of like, you know, my audience grows or the fact that, you know, my group of people kind of took over the Libertarian Party and there's talks about me running and all of this stuff.
[00:05:16]  I still, I guess I still feel like the guy who just started, you know, obsessively reading libertarian literature back in 2008 or whatever.
[00:05:24]  And it's just like weird.
[00:05:26]  There's something about it that's weird.
[00:05:27]  So like, wait, David Friedman wrote a piece about me?
[00:05:30]  Like, I've never met him or interacted with him.
[00:05:34]  I'm almost it.
[00:05:36]  I'm shocked I'm on his radar.
[00:05:37]  Although I guess it kind of makes sense.
[00:05:39]  And I, you know, he probably writes about a lot of different things.
[00:05:41]  So anyway, but so I saw some of a couple of the excerpts shared.
[00:05:48]  Then I saw a couple people had tweeted the actual link to the article.
[00:05:52]  And I read the article.
[00:05:53]  So I figured, let's do an episode responding to it.
[00:05:56]  It's about open borders and my position of rejecting open borders and trying to make a libertarian argument for rejecting open borders.
[00:06:06]  I don't think open borders are the correct position.
[00:06:09]  I don't think it's possible.
[00:06:10]  I'd like to make my position clear, which is I don't mind open borders.
[00:06:13]  I just don't like Mexicans.
[00:06:15]  So like between us and Canada, or you want to import people from India?
[00:06:19]  I'm okay with all of that.
[00:06:20]  We just need a wall in the south.
[00:06:22]  That's Rob's.
[00:06:23]  That's Rob's position.
[00:06:24]  Rob actually just supports a wall around Mexico.
[00:06:27]  Anyone else in the world can come in.
[00:06:29]  And I'm not even making a joke.
[00:06:30]  I just want to make it absolutely clear so that everyone knows where we're at going into this.
[00:06:35]  All right.
[00:06:35]  There you go.
[00:06:35]  There's Rob's position.
[00:06:37]  I will say, contrary to Rob, contrary to my hateful co-host here, I have really nothing but positive personal experiences with Mexican immigrants into the country, especially Mexican illegal immigrants, many of whom I worked with in shitty jobs that I had when I was a teenager and who I really admired.
[00:06:59]  But that's some good ones.
[00:07:01]  That's what Trump said.
[00:07:03]  Yeah, there are some good ones, but there are no.
[00:07:04]  Trump said some of them, I'm sure, are fine people.
[00:07:07]  Those were Trump's exact words.
[00:07:08]  So anyway, this article, I guess he had watched.
[00:07:12]  I did a debate with Spike Cohen on Lions of Liberty, hosted, moderated by Mark Clare a while ago.
[00:07:19]  I don't even remember how long ago it was, but it was, I don't know, six months, a year ago.
[00:07:23]  I don't remember exactly.
[00:07:24]  But I think it's up there.
[00:07:26]  You could probably go try to find it if you want to.
[00:07:28]  So I guess he came across this recently and he wrote like kind of a response piece to that criticizing my position and Hans Hermann Hoppe's position, who he said that he thinks I have been influenced by, which is not incorrect.
[00:07:43]  I have been influenced by Hans Hermann Hoppe, late Rothbard, Hans Hermann Hoppe, those guys, Lou Rockwell, all of those guys kind of convinced me.
[00:07:51]  Yeah, there you go.
[00:07:54]  So let me just try to like preface this a little bit by laying out my case for how I feel about immigration at this point.
[00:08:02]  I think I did a better job of doing or a fuller job than I will be able to here in that debate.
[00:08:09]  But just to preface kind of this conversation with what my point was on this.
[00:08:15]  And people who listen to this show, who have been listening to the show for a long time, you may know that they're, you know, and if you, if you don't, you know, if you haven't been listening for a long time, you're a newer listener.
[00:08:25]  If you want to go subscribe, go to gasdigitalnetwork.com, use the promo code P-O-T-P.
[00:08:30]  That gives you access.
[00:08:31]  It gives you a discount on the monthly price.
[00:08:33]  You get grandfathered in at that price and you get access to the entire history, the entire archive on demand of all the episodes.
[00:08:40]  So over the years, I have evolved my position on immigration.
[00:08:46]  I was once, I would have said, for open borders.
[00:08:50]  When I first became a libertarian and then an anarcho-capitalist, that just seemed like the logical position to me.
[00:08:58]  It seemed like I would just go like, well, look, what is immigration?
[00:09:06]  That's just kind of like a statist concept.
[00:09:10]  Like, you know, and what is an immigrant?
[00:09:12]  That's just something that the government calls them.
[00:09:14]  Really, all you are is people.
[00:09:16]  And what is a border?
[00:09:18]  That's just an imaginary line, you know, like all immigration really is moving.
[00:09:22]  And so who the hell is the government to tell one person they can't move to wherever they want to move?
[00:09:27]  That was really like where I was at.
[00:09:30]  But then you find God and realize that you hate Mexicans.
[00:09:33]  All right.
[00:09:34]  I found God and God was like, no, David, I need you to reconsider this open borders position.
[00:09:40]  He goes, all of that Austrian economic stuff is pretty sound, but what are you doing, Dave?
[00:09:45]  You don't have a border.
[00:09:46]  You don't have a country.
[00:09:47]  And I was like, really, God?
[00:09:48]  You sound a lot like Trump.
[00:09:50]  Anyway.
[00:09:52]  But no, so what happened was, so I had read a bit of like the late Rothbard and Hans Hermann Hoppe stuff and kind of dismissed it initially.
[00:10:02]  Like I was like, yeah, this seems kind of like a deviation from the pure libertarian stuff that I liked about them.
[00:10:09]  And whatever kind of went on.
[00:10:11]  And I had read that stuff in like 2010, I think, or something like that, 2011, maybe around that time.
[00:10:17]  And then around 2015, 2016, with the rise of Donald Trump and the populist, right, this topic of immigration kind of came up again.
[00:10:28]  You know, it became the main thing.
[00:10:30]  I never, I didn't see that coming, that immigration was going to be the main, you know, topic in a presidential election cycle.
[00:10:39]  And I just, I came, I came and, you know, I was arguing with a bunch of like right-wingers who were making arguments about why we shouldn't have open borders.
[00:10:46]  And a lot of them made really stupid arguments, but some of them made some really solid ones.
[00:10:53]  And then even like, you know, there were just points that were made that I was like, shit, you know, that there is something to that point.
[00:11:00]  And I kind of did notice.
[00:11:01]  And at the same time, there was this massive refugee crisis in Europe.
[00:11:05]  And so this was just like a topic that was that was, you know, a very prominent hot topic.
[00:11:12]  And I kind of went back and reread a lot of the Rothbard and Hoppe stuff.
[00:11:17]  And I ultimately changed my mind.
[00:11:21]  I was convinced by some of the arguments.
[00:11:23]  I think I had kind of brushed some of them aside and not really considered them.
[00:11:28]  And ultimately, and this was a process where if you listen to the show, you could like hear me going through this, where I ultimately kind of really understood the point they were making.
[00:11:37]  And basically, this is how I would lay it out.
[00:11:41]  And this is how I laid it out in the Spike Cohen debate.
[00:11:44]  I said that I think when it comes to, look, the libertarian Theory on the issue of immigration is basically in the range, libertarianism is basically a spectrum between minarchism and anarchism, between a very limited government and no government at all.
[00:12:06]  Now, for no government at all, if you're an anarcho-capitalist, right?
[00:12:11]  You'd say that all property should be private property.
[00:12:15]  Everything should be private.
[00:12:17]  Basically, the anarcho-capitalist position is that monopoly, the monopolies don't work well.
[00:12:23]  And there's no reason to say we have to have a monopoly on laws and courts and police and military, but nothing else.
[00:12:31]  It doesn't work well for anything else.
[00:12:33]  We're basically saying you don't need to have a monopoly based on the monopoly of violence for anything.
[00:12:39]  That's kind of in a nutshell, the anarcho-capitalist position.
[00:12:42]  And if that's the case, and you have private property and private communities and private blocks and even private cities or whatever, then immigration, you wouldn't have open borders.
[00:12:57]  You would have private borders.
[00:12:59]  And private communities could be as open or as closed as they choose to be.
[00:13:04]  It's not like, oh, the position is that anyone should be allowed to move here.
[00:13:08]  The position would be anyone who the property owners want to be allowed to move here should move here.
[00:13:13]  Like that's, it's a different thing than just government running the borders and maintaining them as open.
[00:13:19]  And if you're a minarchist, basically the position is like, well, we don't really think the government should do anything except a few things.
[00:13:30]  And if that's your case, well, I see no argument why in the few things couldn't also be maintaining borders.
[00:13:38]  You know what I mean?
[00:13:39]  Like I just, so that's so this is basically my point.
[00:13:43]  Many libertarians, especially the ones who talk about open borders when they talk about open borders, take it as what I referred to as an unexamined given that government property ought to not have any restrictions on it.
[00:14:00]  Okay.
[00:14:01]  So the idea that it is, you know, you'll hear libertarians who advocate for open borders often saying things that I used to once say, like, look, it's just a man or a woman or whatever walking over an arbitrary line.
[00:14:20]  So what right does some man with a gun have to come and initiate violence on this person, like violently turn them away when they didn't do anything?
[00:14:29]  They're just coming here for a better life.
[00:14:31]  They're just coming over here.
[00:14:33]  Like, what is the problem with this?
[00:14:36]  And I used to say that a lot too.
[00:14:38]  But if you really examine that and you say, well, look, is it really a given that there can be no restrictions on government property?
[00:14:49]  If you believe that, then take it to its logical conclusion.
[00:14:53]  I mean, that would imply that anybody can, these are examples I've used a bunch of times, but that anybody could walk into a public school anytime they wanted to, you know, if some 50-year-old heroin addict was like, I just want to walk into this public school and shoot up in the middle of the third grade classroom.

=== Restrictions On Public Property (05:19) ===

[00:15:14]  You'd go, well, what are you going to do?
[00:15:16]  Are you going to forcefully kick him out?
[00:15:18]  I mean, he didn't violate anyone's, you know, he just crossed over an imaginary line into this building and he's only, he's injecting heroin.
[00:15:26]  I mean, it's his body, right?
[00:15:28]  He has a right to do this.
[00:15:29]  And I think even most libertarians would go, no, I don't think that's okay.
[00:15:35]  I don't think you're allowed to do that.
[00:15:37]  You know, can you, and by the way, I have had libertarians argue with me that you should be allowed to do that.
[00:15:43]  I think those people are insane.
[00:15:45]  And there's just, it's just the most ridiculous argument I've ever heard in my life, not even really worth rebutting because it's so absurd.
[00:15:53]  But, you know, do you think that if there's like a state college that the valedictorian from high school should have no more right to it than somebody who dropped out in the ninth grade?
[00:16:12]  Like, should we not give preference to any of them?
[00:16:15]  If somebody wants to walk into a public library and start shouting obscenities, should they not be allowed to ask them to leave?
[00:16:23]  Like, there's, there's kind of a, I think you get to a point where most libertarians will realize that, yeah, it's really, it's ridiculous to actually say there can be no restrictions on public property.
[00:16:42]  It just, we recognize that in all of these other areas, it would just lead to a disaster.
[00:16:48]  Yet somehow we're supposed to accept that the border, which is completely owned by the government, must be completely open.
[00:16:57]  That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
[00:17:00]  And I think that, you know, like from the libertarian perspective, you go, look, what's really going on when you have government property?
[00:17:14]  Well, if we believe that taxation is theft and that people are, the government is kind of illegitimate and it's illegitimate that they expropriate from the taxpayer and then build these, you know, these commons or take over these areas, which they call commons.
[00:17:31]  Well, why is it like it's very clear that we believe they shouldn't do that?
[00:17:38]  But why is it so clear that we must believe after they do that that they just have no standards for what they do with the government property?
[00:17:49]  So for example, like to take, for example, in Gramercy Park, you know where that is, Rob, of course, in Manhattan.
[00:17:58]  It's this really, it's, I believe actually the most expensive little area of Manhattan, at least it used to be.
[00:18:07]  I don't exactly know right now, but it's one of the most expensive areas in the world.
[00:18:10]  It's this area that is all these like very private, beautiful doorman apartment buildings in New York City.
[00:18:18]  And then there's a big park in the middle of it.
[00:18:20]  And it's private.
[00:18:22]  It's not a public park.
[00:18:24]  And what they do is they, you know, they have a huge gate and they lock it.
[00:18:30]  And you, if you live in one of those buildings, you get like a key or the access code or whatever.
[00:18:36]  But regular people can't come in there.
[00:18:38]  And if there's like a random, you know, like a loiterer, the trespasser, a homeless person, something like that in there, they are removed immediately.
[00:18:46]  That's what keeps the property value up.
[00:18:48]  Now, let's say tomorrow the government came in and seized that park and said, we are collectivizing this.
[00:18:55]  We are making this a public park.
[00:18:57]  And then they just let any homeless drug addict or anyone who wanted to come in there, right?
[00:19:03]  You go, you could say the government, yes, that must be the libertarian position, that they don't maintain this in the same way that it was maintained when it was private, even though we know when it's privatized, one of the benefits of it is that they're not going to let it fall to that, right?
[00:19:18]  So, excuse me.
[00:19:22]  I basically came to the conclusion that the standard can't be that on public property, it belongs to the world and there can be no restrictions.
[00:19:35]  And I think a more reasonable standard is that it is, I'd say that libertarians don't have to believe that there are no restrictions on public property.
[00:19:47]  And instead, we can believe in reasonable restrictions on public property that don't make life miserable for all of us while we still try to advocate toward limiting the size of the government and maybe even eliminating the government and all of that stuff.
[00:20:01]  That's more or less the overview of what my position was.
[00:20:05]  So, is it anything you want to like jump in on that, Rob?
[00:20:07]  Or what do you have to say?
[00:20:09]  The only thing I'd add is: you know, government currently exists and we use it to police for murder.
[00:20:15]  We use it to police for rape.
[00:20:17]  And so, if you don't like the activity of just people coming over the border, so it would make sense to also police for that activity.
[00:20:24]  So, now you got to just question: well, do I want people to be policing the border?
[00:20:28]  The answer is: if we didn't have social benefits, let as many people cross the border as they want.
[00:20:33]  I like it.

=== Healthcare Costs And Borders (03:30) ===

[00:20:34]  It means they show up here, they probably add value and services, they get to voluntarily exchange with other individuals.
[00:20:39]  If they're an asset, they'll probably stick around because they'll get jobs, which means someone wants to employ them.
[00:20:44]  And if there's no opportunities for here because no one wants to voluntarily exchange with them, they'll probably go back.
[00:20:49]  It's a win.
[00:20:49]  But guess what?
[00:20:50]  If you're going to give them goods and services, then it's at a loss to all of us.
[00:20:54]  It's theft.
[00:20:55]  That's what it is.
[00:20:56]  And then, if their kids are going to be able to show up here and vote, it's also a theft because we didn't agree to that.
[00:21:01]  You're now changing the rules of the system that they just get to show up, they get to have their kids, and then they just get to vote.
[00:21:06]  So, like, I don't know.
[00:21:07]  To me, the whole topic, it's nonsense talk.
[00:21:10]  If you're going to let their kids vote or you're going to allow them to have rights where maybe even they can vote, well, then we have to decide about whether or not we all agree that people should just be allowed to cross the wall and vote.
[00:21:20]  And if we don't agree on that, then you got to put up a wall there and you got to use the current system for policing this the same as rape and murder because it's not something that we want.
[00:21:28]  So, you build a wall and the government polices it.
[00:21:30]  I don't understand the other perspective.
[00:21:32]  Right.
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[00:23:52]  That's crowdhealth.com slash P-O-T-P.
[00:23:56]  CrowdHealth is not health insurance.
[00:23:58]  It's a totally different way of paying for healthcare.
[00:24:00]  Terms and conditions may apply.
[00:24:02]  All right, let's get back into the show.

=== Government Deciding Rules (15:52) ===

[00:24:04]  So I'll say this that, and this is a couple other points that I made and just add some, then we'll get into this piece and respond to it.
[00:24:11]  But I just want people to cut, because he's responding to what I said.
[00:24:13]  So I want them to kind of have a little bit of the background in case people don't remember exactly.
[00:24:18]  Because we actually don't talk about immigration that much on the show.
[00:24:21]  It's not like one of our major themes.
[00:24:24]  But I would say that I also, I made the point that typically I don't make arguments about popularity in the country.
[00:24:34]  Obviously, a lot of things that I believe are not overwhelmingly popular.
[00:24:38]  But if what libertarians really believe when it comes to immigration, which really immigration wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the government, well, all that would exist was moving.
[00:24:48]  You know what I mean?
[00:24:49]  But if that's the case, then it would be up to the property owners, right, to decide who can and can't come in.
[00:24:56]  And I go, I make this point go, well, how popular is open borders?
[00:25:01]  How many of the property owners in this country want open borders?
[00:25:05]  And most polls that you can find on this, it's like, I don't know, in the neighborhood of 10%, maybe you could get of people who support this, like the overwhelming majority.
[00:25:15]  And I bet those 10% are disproportionately not property owners, but whatever.
[00:25:18]  That's not, you know, even really, you know, most of them are fucking like liberal college kids or something.
[00:25:23]  And, you know, how many of them are really taking on the responsibility themselves of, you know, bearing the financial burden of this?
[00:25:31]  I would guess not too many.
[00:25:32]  I don't actually know.
[00:25:33]  I'm speaking out of my ass a little bit on that, but that is my assumption.
[00:25:37]  But regardless, it's like, yeah, okay.
[00:25:39]  So if you have a population that doesn't want this, at least enough to the point that like, say, you know, Donald Trump runs on a platform of we're going to build a wall and wins the presidency.
[00:25:50]  Okay, that's not the entire country, but he got like 63 million people to vote for him in 2016.
[00:25:56]  You go, well, that's a whole lot of people who are saying, hey, we don't want this influx of immigration here.
[00:26:01]  And, you know, again, as I've said before, from a strictly libertarian perspective, it's like, look, if somebody, if you invite, you know, let's say you have some property in, you know, and you have, you know, whatever, you have some property and you invite a friend of yours from Mexico to come move onto your property.
[00:26:24]  And a government official or government agent stops them, says, no, you're not allowed to go there.
[00:26:31]  From the libertarian position, that is absolutely a violation of your rights and that person's rights.
[00:26:38]  It's unacceptable from a libertarian point of view.
[00:26:41]  However, when you just have, say, like a caravan of 100,000 people walking over here who nobody invited, nobody said, oh, you have, yes, we'd like you to come here.
[00:26:56]  I don't understand how any libertarian deduces the right to enter onto property that does not belong to you.
[00:27:07]  Like, where does that come from?
[00:27:09]  What right do you have?
[00:27:10]  Like, if five homeless people just show up at my door and they're like, we'd like to come into your house.
[00:27:16]  And I'm like, no, sorry.
[00:27:18]  Like, you can't come in.
[00:27:20]  What right do they have to come here?
[00:27:22]  Like, they don't.
[00:27:23]  And now I understand the country is not my house.
[00:27:25]  I get that for all the people who want to like have these like fucking midwit responses.
[00:27:29]  But like, I'm just saying, if we're talking about the public property, okay, maybe it's not exactly any one Americans, but doesn't it belong to them a little bit more than it belongs to the people who were never robbed to pay for it?
[00:27:42]  Shouldn't we care more?
[00:27:43]  Since there's no libertarian solution here, like obviously, ideally, it would all be privatized, but it's not.
[00:27:49]  And so, right now, if I have to pick between these two options, I'd rather not have what the vast, vast, vast majority of the American people who own property and paid for all this stuff want.
[00:28:02]  Okay.
[00:28:02]  So, that's where I'll start.
[00:28:03]  And let's get into the David Friedman piece here.
[00:28:07]  Okay.
[00:28:08]  It's titled, it was written on June 26th.
[00:28:11]  So, I guess this was last month he wrote this, although I just found it the other day.
[00:28:16]  But he wrote, Open Borders, the Libertarian Argument.
[00:28:20]  So, David Friedman writes, the traditional libertarian position, the position I argued for in my first book, is support for open borders.
[00:28:28]  That was also the traditional American policy.
[00:28:31]  For the first century of the country's history, anyone who could get here was welcome to come.
[00:28:37]  Limits on Chinese immigration were imposed in the late 19th century, but broader restrictions only came in the 1920s and did not at the time apply to immigrants from other parts of the new world.
[00:28:51]  Murray Rothbard switched his position from opposing restrictions on immigration to supporting them as part of his adoption of a paleo-libertarian strategy of alliance with the right, followed by Hans Hermann Hoppe and others.
[00:29:05]  In trying to understand their arguments, I have used two sources, an article by Hoppe and a web debate between Dave Smith and a prominent figure, Dave Smith, a prominent figure in the Libertarian Party and the Mises caucus that currently controls it, and Spike Cohen, the most recent vice presidential nominee of the LP.
[00:29:25]  Cohen supported open borders.
[00:29:26]  Smith opposed them using arguments largely borrowed from Hoppe.
[00:29:32]  Man, you got some sexy ass credentials now.
[00:29:35]  Yeah, I guess I don't, yeah, it's not bad.
[00:29:37]  I guess I'm fine with all that.
[00:29:40]  I mean, look, I would just add that like, you know, arguing that, I mean, look, he's not like really building an argument off this.
[00:29:45]  He just stated kind of as a matter of fact that originally America didn't have immigration restrictions.
[00:29:51]  You know, obviously it's a very different thing, a very different time.
[00:29:55]  And just, you know, we also didn't have free everything in socialism.
[00:29:58]  Right, right.
[00:29:59]  There was none of this, right?
[00:30:00]  And also, you know, I like, I mean, I'm not, I'm not at all saying I support this.
[00:30:05]  So let me just be clear and disclaim this.
[00:30:07]  But it was also a time when like, I don't know, there was probably some pretty strong prejudices against other cultures.
[00:30:15]  Like, I don't know.
[00:30:16]  I just don't think like, you know.
[00:30:18]  Imagine being a black guy and just taking a boat here.
[00:30:21]  Yeah, right.
[00:30:21]  Like, I don't think that like if like a hundred thousand Spanish-speaking brown people just came into the country back then, everyone would have been like, well, I mean, we don't have any immigration restrictions.
[00:30:33]  If they throw potatoes at the Irish, New York.
[00:30:37]  Yeah, it's a little goofy to like, you know, kind of even compare this to what we're talking about today.
[00:30:44]  Yeah, there was no formal policy, but they would yell at you when you came off the boat.
[00:30:48]  Right, right.
[00:30:48]  Again, not saying any of that's good, just saying you're the one who brought it up.
[00:30:52]  Let's, you know, get into it.
[00:30:54]  And to say that my arguments are largely borrowed from Hoppe, I mean, it's, you know, yeah, Rothbard, Hoppe, and Lou Rock.
[00:31:02]  Well, I'll certainly grant that.
[00:31:04]  I'm not like running away from where these arguments come from.
[00:31:06]  And I think they all make really good points.
[00:31:08]  All right.
[00:31:10]  The argument against open borders follows three related lines.
[00:31:14]  The first starts with the idea that the ideal libertarian society, that in the ideal libertarian society, all property would be private and an individual firm or voluntary community would be free to exclude or admit anyone.
[00:31:29]  Since what we actually have is a society in which much property belongs to the government, the nearest we can come to that is having the government control who can come, control who can come.
[00:31:47]  All right.
[00:31:47]  See, I don't exactly agree with that statement because the point that we're trying to make, and this is splitting hairs a little bit, but the point we're trying to make is that open borders is still the government deciding who can come.
[00:31:59]  That's kind of the point, that they're deciding anyone.
[00:32:02]  But deciding anyone isn't not deciding who.
[00:32:07]  It's not like if it's limited, like if the government decides no one can come, the government's deciding who can come.
[00:32:13]  And if the government decides some people can come, the government's deciding who can come.
[00:32:17]  And if the government decides anyone can come, the government's deciding who can come.
[00:32:21]  So it's not as if like only the people who like restrictions are deciding that.
[00:32:27]  You know what I mean?
[00:32:28]  I know Rob wants to make some dumb cum joke.
[00:32:30]  I see it all over your face, but you get, but you get my point, right?
[00:32:34]  It's still, as long as the government controls the borders, then the government's the one making the decisions.
[00:32:41]  And we may not like that.
[00:32:42]  It's just that that is the reality.
[00:32:44]  This is something libertarians have trouble with.
[00:32:46]  And it really bugs me because I don't understand why.
[00:32:50]  And most of the best libertarians don't have an issue with this.
[00:32:53]  But like, man, for people who understand this beautiful fucking philosophy and like spend all of their time on this high theory, let me break this down for you.
[00:33:04]  A can be your ideal and you still think B is preferable to C.
[00:33:11]  Okay.
[00:33:12]  Saying B is preferable to C, like a response to that isn't like, well, it's not A.
[00:33:18]  It's like, yes, I know.
[00:33:20]  I know.
[00:33:21]  We'd all prefer that.
[00:33:22]  All right.
[00:33:23]  Anyway.
[00:33:25]  So.
[00:33:28]  Control.
[00:33:29]  Since Smith argues a considerable majority of the population opposes open borders, the government should restrict immigration on their behalf.
[00:33:38]  Again, that's not exactly my argument.
[00:33:41]  That's not exactly my argument.
[00:33:42]  And it's a really, I think, disingenuous way to present it.
[00:33:47]  You know, I think that I'm sure a considerable majority of people are for making heroin illegal, but I still don't believe heroin should be illegal.
[00:33:58]  There's still lots of things that I don't support.
[00:34:00]  I don't just support it.
[00:34:01]  I'm supporting it because in a libertarian society, it would be the property owners who get to make this decision.
[00:34:08]  And the vast majority of the property owners are clearly telling you they would make a different decision.
[00:34:13]  That's something different, right?
[00:34:16]  We can get into this a little bit more, but it's not just that I'm saying a majority of people are against this, and that's why I oppose it.
[00:34:23]  Okay.
[00:34:24]  The problem with that argument is that with no restrictions on immigrations, individual employees are still free to employ or not employ immigrants.
[00:34:36]  Individual property owners to sell or not to sell to them.
[00:34:40]  Landlords to rent to them or not to rent to them.
[00:34:43]  In the society as it now exists, transactions between current Americans and new immigrants are voluntary, just as they would be in a fully libertarian society.
[00:34:55]  Okay.
[00:34:56]  That is straight up not true.
[00:35:00]  Like, I'm sorry, he just said in the society as it currently exists.
[00:35:04]  That is not true.
[00:35:06]  Let me go through this one more time.
[00:35:08]  Okay.
[00:35:11]  The problem with that argument is that with no restrictions on immigrations, individual employers are still free to employ or not employ immigrants.
[00:35:20]  False, not true.
[00:35:22]  You cannot not employ someone because they're an immigrant.
[00:35:26]  You cannot not give some, you are not free to you do not have the freedom to not hire someone because of their country of origin.
[00:35:38]  That is absolutely not true.
[00:35:40]  Yeah, well, that's for sure.
[00:35:41]  If they're here, you absolutely don't have the right to it.
[00:35:44]  That would be discrimination under the law, and that's illegal.
[00:35:47]  That's like a protected class.
[00:35:49]  You cannot, please, believe me, the lawsuit that you would fucking be looking at if you ever just said, I just don't like Mexicans, and so I'm not going to hire this guy.
[00:35:57]  Now, again, I'm not saying I support someone doing that, but if you're making the argument that they're still free to not hire to them, no, I'm sorry.
[00:36:07]  That is not true.
[00:36:08]  Individual employers are still free to employ or not employ immigrants.
[00:36:13]  Not true.
[00:36:13]  Individual property owners to sell or not to sell to them.
[00:36:17]  Not true.
[00:36:19]  I mean, come on.
[00:36:20]  Landlords to rent or not to rent to them.
[00:36:24]  Landlords don't have the ability to not rent to someone based on the fucking, like where they're from.
[00:36:31]  This would be a humongous lawsuit in today's America.
[00:36:37]  So it's absolutely not true.
[00:36:38]  You do not have the right to discriminate in America in 2022.
[00:36:44]  This is just like a factual error.
[00:36:46]  In the society as it now exists, transactions between current Americans and new immigrants are voluntary, just as they would be in a fully libertarian society.
[00:36:57]  I don't know what to say about this, but like, no, you have one of the major reasons, right, why people have problems with this is that you'll have communities where people have been paying, let's say, like public schools, for an example, right?
[00:37:18]  Where people have usually property taxes are what pay for the public schools.
[00:37:23]  Now, not all public schools are 100%, you know, supported by property taxes.
[00:37:28]  And there is some federal money that goes to them and stuff.
[00:37:30]  So there's other taxes that go to them.
[00:37:32]  But like you have a community of people who have been paying property taxes for 20 years, you know, and they've been paying money to this school the whole time.
[00:37:40]  And all of the sudden, you know, very quickly, especially in some of these border towns, the demographics are drastically changing.
[00:37:48]  And now all of a sudden, a whole bunch of the kids who go there, English, they don't even speak English or English as their second language or something like that.
[00:37:55]  And I don't know.
[00:37:57]  Now, you, you know, I know this, this comes off fucked up to a lot of people.
[00:38:01]  And they'll be like, oh, you're being prejudiced or you're standing up for the right of people to discriminate.
[00:38:05]  And like, yes, I am.
[00:38:06]  I believe in people's rights to discriminate.
[00:38:10]  I'm not saying that like it's always a great thing to do.
[00:38:12]  In some situations, it makes a lot of sense.
[00:38:14]  In some, it doesn't.
[00:38:15]  But this is one of the things that like having kids kind of like opens, it changes your perspective on some of this stuff.
[00:38:25]  If you are sending your kids to a public school and you've been paying for this, not by choice, but being forced to pay for this for a long time.
[00:38:34]  And all of the sudden, a huge percentage of the kids going to your kids' school were raised in a third world country with a very different, much more violent culture than we're used to and don't speak the language.
[00:38:51]  That might be something you don't support.
[00:38:54]  You don't really support your kids being in school with those kids.
[00:38:58]  And that is not voluntary.
[00:39:00]  It's not like, oh, if they come here, then, well, that's voluntary.
[00:39:03]  Well, no, those other people who were forced to pay for the schools have no say.
[00:39:09]  They have no say in what these admitted to that public school.
[00:39:14]  And by the way, the public school has no say.
[00:39:16]  They have absolutely no say in this.
[00:39:18]  If you're in their district, they have to accept you.
[00:39:21]  So it's just not true that, oh, this is as long as you have open borders, then every other interaction is basically the same as it would be in a libertarian society.
[00:39:29]  It's not true, factually speaking.
[00:39:30]  That's not true.
[00:39:32]  Now, I don't know exactly in every district.
[00:39:33]  I know in New York City, it was over 20, it's over $20,000 per student per year that the public schools get in money.
[00:39:44]  $20,000 per student per year.
[00:39:47]  So you come in with three kids, that's $60,000 a year in tax money.
[00:39:54]  Is that voluntary?

=== Socialized Education Expenses (15:02) ===

[00:39:56]  Is that voluntary that all of the people who have been putting this money in is now just gets to be extracted by someone who just got here, who hasn't been contributing to this pool?
[00:40:06]  I don't seem fair to me.
[00:40:10]  And this is for whether they immigrated legally or illegally.
[00:40:14]  That's just again, to say this is all voluntary is just not true.
[00:40:18]  All right.
[00:40:21]  Government restrictions on immigrations do what private restrictions in a stateless society could not do, prevent other people from interacting with immigrants.
[00:40:31]  Well, that is a true statement.
[00:40:34]  That is a true statement that government restrictions do what private restrictions could not do.
[00:40:40]  Absolutely, completely agreed.
[00:40:43]  But government opening into a state of society also does what private opening could not do, right?
[00:40:53]  That's the point.
[00:40:54]  That also, like, if you were in a private school in a private community and the private owners decided to open this, the private customers could choose to pull their money out.
[00:41:08]  So you also, it also wouldn't be forced on them the same way.
[00:41:13]  So this is like what he's just not getting.
[00:41:15]  Yes, no one's arguing that obviously government restrictions, if anything, are not the perfect libertarian answer.
[00:41:22]  The point is that government-compelled opening of society is also not what any private actor could do.
[00:41:30]  Does that make sense?
[00:41:33]  Makes sense to me.
[00:41:34]  Okay.
[00:41:35]  So that brings us to the second line of argument: that in America, as it now is, some of the interactions with immigrants will be involuntary.
[00:41:46]  Immigrants will collect welfare payments and send their children to public schools paid for by the taxpayer.
[00:41:52]  Anti-discrimination law might force employers to hire immigrants, landlords to rent to them, even if they did not want to.
[00:42:00]  Immigrant voters, if there were enough of them, could vote to tax other people and spend money on themselves.
[00:42:08]  So I don't understand exactly because he just said in the previous paragraph that, and let me quote this: in the society as it now exists, transactions between current Americans and new immigrants are voluntary.
[00:42:24]  And then in this next paragraph, lays out why they are not.
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[00:43:38]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:43:39]  So let's keep reading.
[00:43:41]  Open borders do not imply instant citizenship.
[00:43:45]  While there were no restrictions on immigrations in the early history of the U.S., there were restrictions on naturalization.
[00:43:52]  Such restrictions could be retained in an open borders system.
[00:43:57]  Libertarian theory does not imply that everyone who comes can vote.
[00:44:01]  Citizenship is not a protected category under current non-discrimination law.
[00:44:06]  So those laws would not prevent employers or landlords who wanted to refuse transactions with some or all immigrants from doing so.
[00:44:16]  Pretty sure nationality is.
[00:44:18]  And I think that that would be.
[00:44:21]  I just don't think it's, I think that any landlord or business who just said we're not going to hire immigrants, like you, you might say about illegal immigrants, I suppose, but you're not talking about illegal.
[00:44:34]  You may say they're not citizens, but as soon as you're saying open borders, then there's nothing illegal about them.
[00:44:39]  And I just don't think this is correct.
[00:44:42]  I don't think it's correct that you could just discriminate against someone because they're from some other, because then it's nationality, which is protected.
[00:44:49]  Even though the term immigrant, I guess, technically isn't.
[00:44:55]  And so carrying the argument.
[00:44:57]  Also, even with the, I guess, I can volunteer to work with this individual.
[00:45:03]  It still could be like, yeah, it's great.
[00:45:05]  I get to work with this guy.
[00:45:06]  He's willing to work for a lot cheaper.
[00:45:08]  But my working with him also affords his ability to live here, which then creates socialized costs for everyone else who's going to have to pay for their health care, have to pay for their kids, or any fact that they're not maybe either saying emissions, more of it's off the books.
[00:45:23]  So it's not just a clear-cut voluntary decision between two individuals.
[00:45:27]  That's exactly right.
[00:45:28]  So if you go, okay, like in today's system, where he's saying this, if you go, oh, well, I'm hiring this illegal immigrant because I can pay him way less than I pay these other guys.
[00:45:39]  It's like, okay.
[00:45:41]  And then he sends his kids to public school and he goes to the emergency room with his whole family whenever they're sick.
[00:45:49]  And all of this is passed on to the tax, the taxpayer.
[00:45:52]  It's like, okay, but why shouldn't the taxpayer then get some say over this?
[00:45:57]  Like, why doesn't he, why, why is that?
[00:46:00]  Why is that violation of that person's rights not considered at all in this?
[00:46:04]  And I know, I know, libertarians can say, yeah, but it's not actually the immigrant who's violating his rights.
[00:46:10]  It's the government.
[00:46:12]  Okay, agreed.
[00:46:14]  The ideal solution is that the government doesn't do that.
[00:46:20]  That's better.
[00:46:21]  However, right, A is the ideal.
[00:46:26]  Then you have B and C. Which one is preferable over B and C?
[00:46:31]  Why is it so clear that it's preferable that that guy gets screwed and it's just like, yep, taxpayer has to pay for your health care, your education, your roads, your, you know, like all of these things.
[00:46:44]  Why is that so clearly preferable to no, he doesn't.
[00:46:48]  He doesn't have to pay for all of that.
[00:46:51]  That's where the argument comes in.
[00:46:53]  Also, just to state it a little bit differently, it's like when government enacts laws, then there's like other things that have to come with it.
[00:47:00]  So, if they say, hey, we're going to have socialized benefits here, well, then you're going to have to have at least walls.
[00:47:06]  I mean, is that going to be for the entire global population?
[00:47:09]  I mean, if you're going to focus like socialize things for the American citizens, well, then you're at least going to have to do it for American citizens.
[00:47:16]  So then you're going to have to put up a wall and not just let anyone make use of that, right?
[00:47:21]  Or if you're telling me that you're not allowed to discriminate against American citizens, well, then you're going to need a category of, well, then is there another category of person that's not American citizen that I can discriminate against?
[00:47:32]  Right.
[00:47:33]  And so if you're telling me that I'm both not allowed to have voluntary association and there's going to be forced wealth redistribution, so then there can't be just an open border.
[00:47:43]  You got to kind of pick what you want.
[00:47:45]  I'd rather, hey, let's not have the socialized benefits and let's have an open border.
[00:47:49]  That works better for me.
[00:47:51]  But if you make the socialized benefit decision, then the immediate counter decision you have to make is, well, then we can't have the open border thing.
[00:47:59]  It's one or the other.
[00:48:00]  I don't, I, if, if you wanted to have, um, if you abolished the welfare state and abolished, you know, um, the kind of like, like privatized all of the hospitals and abolished all of the kind of like laws and regulations around that and abolished fucking public schools and abolished like, all this and that and that and abolished anti-discrimination laws and all of this like.
[00:48:22]  Okay fine, i'm not arguing with you anymore about immigration, but that's pretty goddamn far off from where we are.
[00:48:30]  So dealing with the real world is a little bit different than that.
[00:48:33]  Okay um, non-discrimination laws.
[00:48:36]  A little bit further.
[00:48:38]  So far, so far as the public schools are concerned, libertarians at least the same ones who argue for immigration restrictions support decentralization.
[00:48:48]  A legal regime with open borders could give every school district the option of serving or not serving non-citizen immigrants.
[00:48:57]  Yeah okay right, they could.
[00:48:59]  I, I suppose again, justice suggests that if a school district rejects the children of non-citizens, the taxes that fund the schools, including property taxes on property they occupy, should not be owed to the parents or the landlords.
[00:49:16]  That would come as a close to mimicking, as close to mimicking what would happen in a stateless society where all schools were private uh, as is practical in the existing system.
[00:49:29]  So yeah I, I again.
[00:49:32]  it's kind of like to go look you could have open borders and ensure that every you know non-citizen doesn't get welfare and ensure that every non-citizen doesn't vote and ensure that every non-citizen does isn't able to go to public school and ensure that every non-citizen can be discriminated against and ensure that like okay that to me seems way more far-fetched than
[00:50:02]  just saying until we like okay, how about this?
[00:50:07]  Until we like get those reforms you're talking about, we don't have the open borders.
[00:50:13]  Because you're saying, open borders with all of these reforms okay, i'd like to see those reforms.
[00:50:18]  Yes, in theory, it's possible.
[00:50:20]  Like I, I don't disagree with that.
[00:50:22]  However, why is it that?
[00:50:25]  Why is it that libertarians must advocate for open borders under current situations?
[00:50:30]  Why is it then, if you're gonna go, if you have to like kind of, do all these mental gymnastics not mental gymnastics I shouldn't even say that if you have to say that in theory it's possible for xyz, and then You know, a would work.
[00:50:50]  Why can't I go?
[00:50:52]  Okay, I'm not advocating for A until you've achieved XYZ.
[00:50:57]  But you know what's so about this?
[00:50:59]  Like, things are out of sight out of mind.
[00:51:02]  Let's be honest.
[00:51:03]  If people living in another country, I don't see the news footage of them.
[00:51:06]  I don't know what their lifestyle looks like.
[00:51:09]  You bring all those people from South America here.
[00:51:11]  You say there's going to be a legal open border, but we don't have to educate them.
[00:51:16]  If all of a sudden there were a thousand kids, literally six-year-olds living on the street of my town, you don't think everyone's going to go, all right, they're here.
[00:51:24]  We have to figure out how to help them out.
[00:51:26]  Of course, no, am I saying that it's more, it's nicer to put up a wall and tell them that they just can't come here so that I don't have to confront them?
[00:51:34]  No, it's not more moral, but I'm just saying it's more practical.
[00:51:37]  Like, if they're coming in here, we're going to have to help them out.
[00:51:39]  And with what resources, like, I don't know, there's just something childishly stupid about like, like, I like it.
[00:51:45]  If you got rid of the social benefits, have open borders, then you force countries to operate like companies.
[00:51:50]  You know, if Mexico at some point would have to change what they're doing to kind of retain some of their citizens, I think it's good.
[00:51:56]  I think it's good for humanity.
[00:51:57]  Have open borders, let people go where there's opportunity for them.
[00:52:00]  I think they'd have a good natural flow.
[00:52:02]  It'd be all good.
[00:52:03]  But without the other freedoms, I don't know.
[00:52:05]  It's like building more floors without a foundation.
[00:52:08]  It makes no sense.
[00:52:09]  Like, you don't have what could make it work.
[00:52:12]  So you're just going to flood more people in.
[00:52:15]  I just don't get it.
[00:52:16]  Yeah, I think it's just a case of like kind of living in theory rather than in the real world.
[00:52:27]  And going like, again, like I said before, okay, I'm not saying it's theoretically impossible to come up with all of these situations, but what this ends up translating to is libertarians going, you have to advocate for open borders right now.
[00:52:43]  And in the actual existing world, right?
[00:52:46]  Not in the theory, in the actual existing world, illegal immigrants are voting.
[00:52:53]  Now, what the numbers are on that exactly is unclear.
[00:52:57]  Nobody exactly knows where there's been actual audits of this.
[00:53:00]  It's been shockingly higher than most people think.
[00:53:04]  The reality is that illegal immigrants, as well as illegal immigrants, are receiving welfare.
[00:53:09]  They are using government roads.
[00:53:11]  They are using government schools.
[00:53:12]  They are using hospitals and emergency rooms.
[00:53:15]  They are doing all of these things.
[00:53:16]  And they are, there isn't like freedom of association and all of these.
[00:53:21]  Like, that's the real world that we live in.
[00:53:24]  Okay.
[00:53:26]  And then I figure out how many are currently.
[00:53:28]  I mean, how many people, Brian, maybe you can look up the number, but how many people are coming in monthly?
[00:53:34]  And then forecast if they all lived in Texas.
[00:53:36]  You don't even know.
[00:53:37]  Let me tell you now.
[00:53:37]  Let me tell you right now.
[00:53:39]  We don't know how many people are coming in monthly.
[00:53:41]  But I'm just saying since Biden, I just let me just make this clear.
[00:53:45]  We don't know how many people are coming in monthly.
[00:53:47]  We know how many border apprehensions there are monthly.
[00:53:50]  For a while, there it was in the hundreds of thousands.
[00:53:53]  And yet they still say, oh, there's 12 million illegal immigrants, the same number they've been using for fucking like 20 years.
[00:54:00]  And you know, they don't know at all.
[00:54:02]  They don't know.
[00:54:03]  Look, there's been, you go read, there's been a lot written on this, but there's been different like estimates that range between 12 million and 50 million.
[00:54:11]  No one exactly knows.
[00:54:13]  Is it really crazy?
[00:54:14]  Is that annual or no, no, no, total illegal immigrants?
[00:54:17]  Like people don't know.
[00:54:18]  It's somewhere in that ballpark.
[00:54:21]  And it's crazy that in a country of 330 million people to not even know, we don't even know.
[00:54:27]  And like, again, I don't even care.
[00:54:29]  I don't care about knowing if it wasn't for all of these other statist issues.
[00:54:33]  That's really the fucking problem.
[00:54:34]  Well, it's bullshit that they don't know because they know every single time I'm five miles over the speed limit in front of a school.
[00:54:40]  They know every single time I go into New York and I come back from Connecticut.
[00:54:43]  They knew every single person that was inside of a building.
[00:54:45]  The idea that the government doesn't know how many non-American phones are near the border on a daily basis is it's just not true.
[00:54:53]  But to speak to my other point, go with a very conservative number.
[00:54:56]  Let's say there's a million people coming in illegally every year.

=== Who Bears The Cost (06:29) ===

[00:54:59]  Let's just, let's just throw that out there.
[00:55:01]  And let's say each of these people only has one kid.
[00:55:04]  I don't know if you're talking about in 20 years from now that no Republican ever gets elected.
[00:55:09]  Like, you know what I mean?
[00:55:10]  You're not really, especially.
[00:55:11]  Well, I don't even know.
[00:55:12]  That's let me tell you something.
[00:55:14]  The interesting dynamic there is actually that the fucking Latino vote has been growing for Republicans.
[00:55:19]  So I don't know if that's necessarily a foregone conclusion, but it's still enough.
[00:55:24]  It's still reason enough for somebody to go like, who actually gets the say on that?
[00:55:30]  Why is it a given that it should just be like, well, we just have to accept that that's what's going to happen.
[00:55:36]  And however it goes, it goes.
[00:55:37]  I mean, look, none of this is correct.
[00:55:40]  This is the problem, right?
[00:55:41]  From libertarians have to understand.
[00:55:42]  Once you have government intervention into any of these areas, none of this is a libertarian solution.
[00:55:51]  And so again, like, look, if you have like, if you have government property where there are a bunch of homeless people camped out and just living there, that is not a libertarian solution.
[00:56:05]  It is not libertarian at all to say that, like, okay, if everybody, if I live on like a nice block, like I used to, you know, on the upper west side, if I live on like a real nice block with, you know, people who fucking everybody on that block who has apartments in that, in that block, everybody goes to work, makes a good fucking living, everybody works hard, everybody pays taxes and all of that.
[00:56:29]  The government steals this money from you, and then they build fucking this sidewalk with it.
[00:56:35]  And then some homeless guy decides he's not paying anything.
[00:56:38]  He's going to sit there and just fucking camp out.
[00:56:41]  And the government doesn't remove him.
[00:56:44]  That's not a libertarian solution.
[00:56:46]  It's like, man, if this was private and we all owned this, we would have that guy removed.
[00:56:52]  Now, if the government does remove him, that's also not a libertarian solution.
[00:56:56]  None of it's libertarian.
[00:56:58]  The only libertarian solution is for it to actually be privatized.
[00:57:03]  But if there's two non-libertarian solutions, I pick the solution where my daughter doesn't walk by some human being fucking shooting up heroin on the street.
[00:57:16]  Out of two non-libertarian solutions, I pick the one that I think is better than the other one.
[00:57:21]  I don't understand why this is so hard for so many libertarians to fucking just accept.
[00:57:27]  I also think while there's socialism and we've got all these social benefits that we cannot afford, healthcare, social security, go down the list.
[00:57:35]  We're running a giant deficit.
[00:57:36]  We can't afford any of this.
[00:57:38]  An open border is fuel on a fire.
[00:57:40]  You got a forest fire here of something that we cannot sustain.
[00:57:44]  And you're like, well, let's have more costs.
[00:57:47]  Or you want another example.
[00:57:48]  We got a sinking boat.
[00:57:49]  There's a hole in it.
[00:57:50]  And someone wants to bring a hose on with more water coming on.
[00:57:52]  It's not going to work.
[00:57:53]  We literally can't afford what we're currently doing.
[00:57:56]  And now you want more people that are going to cost us more money.
[00:57:58]  How does that work?
[00:58:00]  Yep.
[00:58:00]  Yep.
[00:58:01]  There you go.
[00:58:02]  All right.
[00:58:03]  So back to the article.
[00:58:04]  Hoppe's proposal along these lines was that any immigrant should be allowed in if a citizen is willing to sponsor him, where the sponsor would then be responsible for any costs the immigrant imposed on others, paying fines for any crimes he committed, damage payments for any torts, presumably also paying the cost of sending the immigrants' children to a public school.
[00:58:29]  The argument presumably is that the sponsor by letting the immigrant in is an indirect cause of all such costs.
[00:58:38]  Okay, so look, what Hoppe's saying here is not presuming that he's the cause of all such costs.
[00:58:46]  That's not at all what Hoppe is saying.
[00:58:49]  What Hoppe is saying is that the reality is there will be these costs.
[00:58:54]  It's a very important distinction.
[00:58:56]  So he says that Hoppe's like proposal, basically, which I kind of think that short of anarcho-capitalism is the best libertarian simulation you could have, is that anyone can come who is invited and sponsored by a citizen, that that should be our immigration policy under a status paradigm.
[00:59:17]  So basically, you can invite anyone you want to, but you got to basically vouch for them.
[00:59:22]  So like if that person ends up being a criminal, you're on the hook for their costs.
[00:59:28]  If that person goes on welfare, you're on the hook for those costs.
[00:59:31]  If that person goes, whatever, you know, like you're on the hook.
[00:59:35]  And then what Friedman here says is that presumably, excuse me, the argument presumably is presumably is doing a lot of heavy lifting here because Hoppe's never said this.
[00:59:49]  The argument presumably is that the sponsor by letting the immigrant in is an indirect cause of all such costs.
[00:59:58]  It's not saying that the immigrant is the cause of these costs.
[01:00:01]  We all recognize that the government is the cause of these costs.
[01:00:05]  What Hoppe is recognizing, not assuming, just recognizing is that these costs will be imposed on someone else.
[01:00:16]  And so why should they be imposed on the person who's not making the choice?
[01:00:22]  Shouldn't they be if you're really choosing?
[01:00:24]  Look, if you're inviting someone in, but then the costs are imposed on someone else, then your invitation means nothing.
[01:00:31]  I want to hear from the person who the costs are imposed on, right?
[01:00:35]  So if you're going to invite them in and it actually is meaningful, then you'd have to invite them in and say, no, I'm inviting them and I'll assume the costs.
[01:00:43]  Now, what this would automatically do is create an incentive for people to only invite in people who they were somewhat upstanding, who they could trust to some degree, who they were willing to like, okay, I'll put my neck out for this guy.
[01:00:58]  You know, that's the thing.
[01:00:59]  It's literally just going like, if you were, you know, if me and you were roommates and whatever.
[01:01:07]  I mean, I guess in this example, I'm even making it voluntary in my example, which isn't good.
[01:01:12]  But like, if me and you were roommates and we had some collective pool, like we had, you know, we had a refrigerator, but we both buy groceries every month and put all of our groceries in the refrigerator and in the cabinets.
[01:01:25]  And we go, this is like a commons here.

=== Quit Smoking With Fume (03:15) ===

[01:01:28]  Okay.
[01:01:28]  Now, if you want to invite someone in, you agree that you're responsible for whatever they eat, right?
[01:01:35]  So that the costs aren't imposed on me and vice versa.
[01:01:39]  Now, if you want to like take it to another level, it's like, actually, there's some fucking criminal who forces us to fucking robs from us and then buys all this stuff and puts it in there and go, hey, if you're inviting someone in, it's like, hey, man, if you, if they're coming in and taking all that shit, then they're in effect robbing me.
[01:01:56]  Now, they're not guilty of robbing from me.
[01:01:58]  They didn't do it.
[01:01:59]  They just ate the shit that was there.
[01:02:00]  But still, it's like, yeah, it's more, it's a better simulation of what's fair for you to have to cover the costs of the person you invited in.
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=== Government Control Of Use (12:38) ===

[01:04:43]  It's not an absurd argument, right?
[01:04:46]  Stephen Friedman, but the notion of indirect liability that it depends on his implications that I do not think that it depends on has implications that I do not think either Hoppe or his supporters would accept.
[01:05:02]  If I sell you a gun, I am an indirect cause of any crimes you would commit with it.
[01:05:11]  Should I be permitted to do so only if I agree to be liable for the costs of such crimes?
[01:05:18]  If I sell you a car, the normal legal rule in a free society is that individuals are responsible for their own offenses.
[01:05:25]  There is no obvious reason why the rule for immigration should be different.
[01:05:31]  And okay, this is, no, there is an obvious reason because we exist in a society where we are under a status paradigm.
[01:05:42]  And there are these obvious costs imposed.
[01:05:45]  So, like, yes, if you sell an object to another private person and they take that object, it is not clear.
[01:05:53]  They're not bringing them into a system where there is like all of these laws about how your gun must be cleaned at taxpayer expense and must be stored at taxpayer expense and all of these things.
[01:06:08]  And if there were, then maybe this analogy wouldn't be so ridiculous.
[01:06:13]  But no, it's not like it's a completely different thing to say that, like, I sell a piece of property to another individual and therefore I'm responsible for everything they do.
[01:06:23]  You're talking about bringing someone else into a system where there is going to be this burden on the population.
[01:06:32]  That's a very different situation.
[01:06:35]  That's again, it's like you're it's as if David Friedman, who's very brilliant, but it's as if he's just not recognizing what the point is.
[01:06:43]  The point is that what we are as libertarians are objecting to is the imposition on other people, the involuntary imposition on other people who are going to have to pay for all of this.
[01:06:58]  That's kind of the issue.
[01:07:01]  That it's not a voluntary transaction.
[01:07:03]  Selling someone a gun is a strictly private, voluntary transaction.
[01:07:08]  Inviting someone into the country saying that you will pay them a wage and then they will drive on public roads and go to public schools and go to emergency rooms and all of this.
[01:07:18]  That's not a strictly private, voluntary interaction.
[01:07:22]  That's the possibility.
[01:07:24]  If someone were to walk into a gun store and say, hey, looking to shoot up that school down the block, what do you recommend?
[01:07:30]  What's good?
[01:07:31]  What can I jam a door with?
[01:07:32]  You shouldn't sell that guy a gun.
[01:07:35]  Yes, then you kind of maybe have to.
[01:07:37]  Same with the car.
[01:07:38]  Same with the car example.
[01:07:39]  If someone goes, hey, I'm looking to run over a bunch of people.
[01:07:41]  I want to drive this into, you know, drive this into the wrong side of traffic.
[01:07:45]  How can I take out the most cars?
[01:07:47]  So to me, the immigration example, like we know they're going to be using, it's what you were saying.
[01:07:52]  We know they're going to be using public utilities.
[01:07:54]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:07:56]  Okay.
[01:07:56]  Hoppe's proposal makes little sense in other ways.
[01:07:59]  Unless he intends immigrants to function like slaves or indentured servants, working for a single employer or those he lends them out to, they will be engaged like other people in multitudes of voluntary transactions with lots of different people.
[01:08:17]  It makes no sense for all of those transactions to hinge on the permission of a single sponsor who could presumably withdraw the permission anytime he chooses, or if he cannot, is liable for acts over which he has no control.
[01:08:34]  I don't think any of that is any part of Hoppe's proposal.
[01:08:37]  The proposal is just that if you invite someone into a state of society, you're kind of on the hook for whatever, you know, costs they impose on the taxpayer.
[01:08:46]  I don't think it implies at all that they're going to work for one single employer.
[01:08:50]  In fact, in Hoppe's proposal, it didn't even have to be an employer who was bringing them in.
[01:08:54]  It was just a set aside.
[01:08:55]  That's a nice way of showcasing that there's real demand for it.
[01:08:58]  So if you go back to his gun example, if they made it that I guess someone had to sign off on it, like think about it.
[01:09:05]  There's enough demand for guns.
[01:09:07]  The NRA would probably come up with the system where they're pre-screening you and then basically signing off on it.
[01:09:11]  And then you'd have like an insurance fund for the liability.
[01:09:14]  Same with cars.
[01:09:15]  Imagine if someone needed to sign off on your ability to have a car.
[01:09:18]  Well, that would suck because then we'd all work jobs where your employer essentially would sign off on that.
[01:09:23]  So it would kind of filter the same thing for immigration that if there was such demand, like you're saying it's voluntary.
[01:09:29]  So yeah, if there was such voluntary demand that people wanted immigrants in here, they probably would be willing to sign off on that.
[01:09:36]  And it's not like one person would have to assume the cost.
[01:09:40]  You'd probably end up with an insurance fund for it.
[01:09:42]  Yeah.
[01:09:44]  That's that's quite possible.
[01:09:45]  Um, I just think that it's not, I don't know.
[01:09:49]  I just think this whole paragraph was kind of goofy.
[01:09:52]  I don't think it implies at all.
[01:09:54]  If you were like sponsoring somebody as a, as a company, even let's say that's the only example he's really thinking about here, not as an individual, right?
[01:10:01]  But as a company, if you were sponsoring somebody and you were willing to, you know, like say, okay, I will sponsor this guy because you now are incentivized to have to be that confident that he's going to not impose costs on the taxpayer.
[01:10:18]  I don't think it is you can deduce from that that therefore they will only ever be working for you forever.
[01:10:26]  I just don't think that's clear.
[01:10:27]  It might just be like, oh no, this guy's going to bring a lot of value to my company, and I'm fairly confident that he's an upstanding member of society.
[01:10:35]  And it's a bet, just like businesses make all the time.
[01:10:38]  Like, I don't know, this guy's valuable to me, and therefore, I'm willing to take the risk that he's like, you know, I'm fairly confident that he's not like a violent criminal and that he can pay his own way through his kids' education and his healthcare and things like that.
[01:10:53]  That's that's all that I think is implied.
[01:10:55]  Um, okay, the third line of argument is that as long as some property is owned by the government, the government is entitled to uh to control its use.
[01:11:09]  Um, I just don't know exactly that I would put it that way.
[01:11:14]  Uh, as long as some property is owned by the government, the government is entitled to control its use.
[01:11:21]  My argument would be: as long as some property is owned by the government, the government does control its use.
[01:11:30]  Not that it's entitled to, that it does, that that's the reality of the situation.
[01:11:36]  You know, like in other words, if you own a house and you say there's no rules in this house, that is, in fact, a rule.
[01:11:49]  Does that make sense?
[01:11:50]  Yeah, sure.
[01:11:51]  Actually, it's a rule.
[01:11:52]  Who owns the house?
[01:11:53]  Do I own the house?
[01:11:54]  In which case, yeah, exactly.
[01:11:56]  Right, exactly.
[01:11:57]  It's awesome if it's not your house.
[01:11:58]  It's not so awesome if it's your house, right?
[01:12:00]  But if you say that, that is a rule.
[01:12:02]  The rule is that there's no rules, right?
[01:12:05]  Because, like, anyone who actually owns a house has rules in their house.
[01:12:08]  So it's not that you're entitled to.
[01:12:11]  I'm just saying that it is.
[01:12:13]  It's not that I think you ought to be allowed to do it or that you, you know what I'm saying?
[01:12:17]  Like, is that distinction clear?
[01:12:19]  I'm not saying you're they're entitled to.
[01:12:21]  I'm not saying the government is entitled to set rules about what you can do on public property.
[01:12:28]  I'm saying no matter what they do, they are, as long as there is public property, they are doing that.
[01:12:34]  Okay.
[01:12:35]  So, as Dave Smith points out, an adult man does not have the right to go into the girls' room of a public school, government property is not and should not be a commons.
[01:12:48]  Hence, the government may, if it chooses, refuse to allow immigrants it has not approved to use public property.
[01:12:56]  Since public property includes almost the entire highway system, that makes it hard for an immigrant not approved by the government to do anything in the country much beyond employment in a farm or the border.
[01:13:12]  Okay, I don't exactly get what he's saying here.
[01:13:14]  I mean, I don't understand the system where the government lets an immigrant in, but then doesn't let them use the highway system.
[01:13:24]  Okay.
[01:13:25]  Here again, the argument proves too much.
[01:13:28]  The government's control of the public school is accepted because it is for the purpose of school, the same purpose it would have if private.
[01:13:45]  The government's control of public school is accepted.
[01:13:49]  I don't know if it's accepted.
[01:13:51]  It's forced.
[01:13:53]  You have no choice.
[01:13:55]  No one really accepted it.
[01:13:57]  I mean, I suppose you could say they accepted the force, but no, it's not exactly accepted.
[01:14:03]  And it's not accepted because it is for the purpose of the school, the same purpose it would have if private.
[01:14:10]  Well, okay.
[01:14:11]  I mean, even if you're going to say that, which I don't exactly agree with, but you know, then, okay, the purpose of the border is to keep people out.
[01:14:19]  The same purpose it would have if privatized.
[01:14:22]  What are the points?
[01:14:22]  What is the purpose of private borders?
[01:14:25]  What are the purpose of the like a fence that you put up around your house?
[01:14:30]  What's the purpose of that?
[01:14:31]  It's to keep people out, right?
[01:14:34]  So, okay, I mean, you can make the same argument for borders.
[01:14:37]  Most people, almost certainly most libertarians, would be outraged if the school announced that the girls' room was only available to girls whose parents promised not to own firearms or not to publicly criticize the mayor or not to do something else that were legally in that they were legally entitled to do.
[01:14:57]  In that case, the control over public property would be being used not for the purpose of that property, but as a way of coercing people.
[01:15:09]  All right.
[01:15:10]  So there's a couple of things to say about this, right?
[01:15:13]  So number one is that this argument of what the purpose of the fucking thing is, this is like, this is just goofy and so removed from reality and it falls apart right away.
[01:15:26]  So number one, what do you mean by the purpose of that property?
[01:15:31]  Do you mean the stated purpose or what the real purpose is?
[01:15:36]  Because that's a very different argument altogether.
[01:15:41]  So you could say that the purpose of public schools is like to educate children, but maybe the purpose is really to indoctrinate children into the state, right?
[01:15:52]  So like, what are we going with?
[01:15:53]  Like what the purpose, the stated purpose is, what the real purpose might be, or what in effect the purpose, in effect, what this does, right?
[01:16:04]  So like I would argue that the status, the stated purpose is to educate children.
[01:16:12]  The real purpose might well just be to indoctrinate a generation of young, you know, malleable minds.
[01:16:26]  And the effect is certainly the latter.
[01:16:31]  But even if you're going with the stated purpose, well, what's the stated purpose of the border?
[01:16:37]  I mean, you know what?
[01:16:38]  What politician has ever won office promising open borders and zero immigration restrictions?
[01:16:45]  Like any major office ever?
[01:16:48]  Ever?
[01:16:50]  Even Joe Biden is like telling people, don't come.
[01:16:53]  Barack Obama was talking about how we need, look at what Bill Clinton said on immigration or any of them.
[01:16:58]  I mean, like, what, what does this mean?
[01:17:00]  Well, well, you're deciding that the purpose of public schools is really some noble thing.
[01:17:06]  And then, of course, I guess what's even more important than that is this, like, this idea that he goes like, so I'm making the point in my central argument, as I, as I stated at the beginning, right?

=== Zero Restrictions Myth (13:25) ===

[01:17:22]  That the idea that libertarians have to believe that all public property should have zero restrictions on it does not follow from libertarian ideology, right?
[01:17:37]  Like it does not follow if you believe in self-ownership and the non-aggression principle and private property rights, whether you agree with that from a moral perspective or a consequentialist perspective, either one.
[01:17:51]  If that's what you believe, it does not follow from that, that then if somebody aggresses on you, robs your money and creates something with it, that should then be unrestricted and belong to everybody.
[01:18:05]  That does not follow.
[01:18:07]  In the same sense that like, if I rob you, okay, if I, if I mug you, Rob, and I take your wallet and I run down the street, it does not follow now that that wallet belongs to the world equally.
[01:18:24]  Like the correct answer from a libertarian perspective is that that is rightfully yours and should be returned to you.
[01:18:32]  So in the same sense, if the domestic population is robbed regularly to build something, it does not follow from that that that thing that was built now belongs to the world or is now the commons.
[01:18:45]  Okay, that doesn't follow.
[01:18:46]  That's my point.
[01:18:47]  That is not the libertarian position that the government property ought to have zero restrictions on it.
[01:18:55]  Now, for David Friedman to, I don't know if he thinks this is clever or something, to go, well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:19:03]  But what if there were restrictions that were really horrible that you didn't like?
[01:19:09]  Okay, well, what if they were to say that once you're saying that here, let me read this again so I can really get into most people, almost certainly most libertarians, would be outraged if the school announced that the girls' room was only available to girls whose parents promised not to own firearms or not to publicly criticize the mayor or say, okay, yeah,
[01:19:34]  I'm not arguing that what follows from someone robbing you of your money is that now they can make, like, if I argue someone mugs you, I'm saying it's not deduced from libertarian principles that your wallet belongs to the world.
[01:19:54]  I'm also not saying that it's now deduced from that, that it belongs to whoever specifically the mugger says it does.
[01:20:03]  Like, yes, I'm not saying because I argue that zero restrictions on public property are not the correct libertarian position, that doesn't mean that I'm arguing that any restrictions are great.
[01:20:16]  Yes, those restrictions are insane and would be very, very bad, right?
[01:20:22]  Like this, it makes no sense to make this argument.
[01:20:26]  And it's very weird to see such a brilliant intellectual like David Friedman making this point.
[01:20:32]  Yeah, of course, of course, there could be restrictions that were terrible.
[01:20:36]  There could be rules on public property that we would all be opposed to.
[01:20:41]  It doesn't follow from saying that there should be, that we don't have to support there being no rules on public property, that, well, we must support any rules that the government comes up with.
[01:20:53]  Of course.
[01:20:54]  Yeah, I mean, you could come up with a million of these examples that we would all completely oppose.
[01:20:59]  Oh, yeah.
[01:21:00]  Like, you know, this is like, you'll see some libertarians will take this.
[01:21:05]  It's a very binary way of thinking that they'll go, well, this line of thinking could justify any type of status policy.
[01:21:13]  And it's like, well, okay.
[01:21:16]  But, you know, to the flip side, the extreme, if there's no restrictions on government property, what could that justify?
[01:21:24]  That could justify, like I said, people shooting heroin up in the middle of a third grade classroom.
[01:21:30]  Okay, so that's not practical.
[01:21:32]  And obviously the other extreme isn't practical.
[01:21:34]  So what can libertarians support in the meantime?
[01:21:37]  While we fight to eliminate all public government property, okay, we can support what we think are reasonable rules that are more closely simulated to what a free society ought to look like.
[01:21:51]  That's where you end up.
[01:21:52]  If you reject both of those extremes, that's where you end up with a common ground.
[01:21:57]  We don't think government should exist at all.
[01:21:59]  We don't think taxation should exist at all.
[01:22:01]  But while it does, let's try to do this in the least bad way possible.
[01:22:09]  I don't get what's crazy about that.
[01:22:11]  And this idea that it's like, yeah, okay, sure.
[01:22:13]  Like if you say that A homeless guy, you know, can't run into a library and start jerking off and smoking crack in front of anyone.
[01:22:26]  Well, if the government could say that, they could also say that, you know, black people can't read in the library.
[01:22:34]  Like, okay, yes, I guess one restriction.
[01:22:38]  If you justify one restriction, well, do they have the right to another restriction?
[01:22:41]  It's like, okay, well, I'm for the first one and against the second one.
[01:22:45]  So, how about that?
[01:22:47]  What do you want me to say?
[01:22:49]  Neither of these situations are libertarian.
[01:22:51]  I'm just going to pick with which one I think is better for society.
[01:22:55]  I don't like, I don't think this is, I don't know.
[01:22:58]  I find it very weird that this is David Friedman's response.
[01:23:02]  Okay.
[01:23:03]  Similarly, here, if roads were private, their owners might require some form of a driver's license in order to make their roads safer.
[01:23:12]  If the roads are public, it is not unreasonable for them to require a driver's license and refuse to allow an immigrant without one to drive.
[01:23:20]  But that does not justify forbidding a legal driver from carrying the immigrant.
[01:23:25]  What Smith's argument is proposing is that government using its control over public property not to serve the purposes of that property, but to prevent voluntary transactions between its citizens and foreigners.
[01:23:40]  No, I'm not.
[01:23:41]  I'm not arguing that they should prevent voluntary transactions.
[01:23:45]  I'm trying to prevent involuntary transactions.
[01:23:49]  That's the whole fucking point that David Friedman, this brilliant guy, seems to have completely missed.
[01:23:57]  And this is the whole point of Hoppe.
[01:23:58]  The whole point is to prevent the involuntary transactions.
[01:24:03]  Suppose we accept the argument: a private owner is entitled to refuse to allow anyone not vaccinated onto his property.
[01:24:12]  Hence, the government is entitled to impose a vaccine mandate enforced by forbidding anyone not vaccinated from using public property.
[01:24:21]  It is entitled to effectively lock urban residents into their homes by forbidding them from using the public roads or sidewalks.
[01:24:30]  It is entitled to ban drug use, prostitution, very nearly any of the activities libertarians believe it is not entitled to ban by denying the people who do those things access to public property.
[01:24:43]  The exception swallows the rule.
[01:24:46]  I conclude that libertarians ought to support open borders.
[01:24:49]  They may want to qualify that by including the condition that immigrants not receive all the rights of citizens, such as the right to vote or to receive government benefits until they have been naturalized.
[01:25:02]  Okay.
[01:25:03]  So I guess in conclusion, what David Friedman builds up to to this whole time is this argument, which really sucks.
[01:25:13]  The argument is just so fucking weak.
[01:25:16]  And again, I say to somebody, a tremendous amount of respect for David Friedman and the work he's done over the years.
[01:25:23]  But the argument that, well, if you don't accept that there's zero restrictions on government property, then you have to accept any restrictions on government property just doesn't make sense.
[01:25:39]  And it's an incredible, like it's real binary thinking for such a brilliant guy.
[01:25:44]  No, I can say that zero restrictions make no sense.
[01:25:50]  And lots of restrictions would be unreasonable and make no sense.
[01:25:55]  And as a libertarian, and David Friedman is an anarchist, right?
[01:25:58]  So as a libertarian who doesn't think government property should exist to begin with, it's very easy to say, ideally, there would be no government property.
[01:26:08]  Since there is government property, I can prefer this use of it to this use of it.
[01:26:15]  There's no logical contradiction with that.
[01:26:17]  So I can say that, yeah, I would, for example, some of the ones that I've used before that piss some people off.
[01:26:27]  I think if there is a government, like if there's a public playground for little kids, I don't think drug users should be allowed there.
[01:26:37]  I think if someone's using drugs there, they should be kicked off.
[01:26:39]  By the way, I think if someone goes to a fucking playground that's a public playground and they don't have a kid there, There's just some strange guy sitting on the bench watching all the kids.
[01:26:49]  I have no problem with him being asked to leave.
[01:26:52]  I also think that if they were to then say, well, we want, I don't know, anyone unvaccinated to leave, I'd be like, no, I'm against that.
[01:27:00]  I'm for that restriction, against that restriction, against no restrictions.
[01:27:05]  There's nothing in that that contradicts libertarianism because the only libertarian answer is that this should be privatized.
[01:27:13]  That's the only actual libertarian answer.
[01:27:15]  It does not follow at all that because I think it should be privatized, I must believe there should be no restrictions, or if I don't believe there should be no restrictions, I must support any restrictions.
[01:27:25]  That's stupid.
[01:27:28]  I'm sorry.
[01:27:29]  David Friedman is brilliant.
[01:27:31]  That argument is stupid.
[01:27:33]  That's the truth.
[01:27:37]  He made one note.
[01:27:38]  That's the end of the article.
[01:27:41]  But he made one note, which doesn't help at all.
[01:27:45]  Dave Smith responded to the argument about using controls of government property against drug users raised by Spike Cohen in their debate by saying that it was legitimate to forbid addicts from shooting up on government property.
[01:27:59]  He did not consider that the same argument would justify forbidding anyone who shut up anywhere, including his own property, from ever using government property.
[01:28:11]  It's just the same dumb argument.
[01:28:14]  I'm saying that here's basically the point.
[01:28:19]  Zero restrictions on government property are not reasonable.
[01:28:27]  Lots of other restrictions on government property are not reasonable.
[01:28:32]  I'm fine with supporting reasonable restrictions on government property.
[01:28:36]  And what are reasonable restrictions?
[01:28:40]  Okay.
[01:28:41]  I understand it's not as black and white as lots of libertarian theory is.
[01:28:47]  But while me or you, Rob, might think it's horrible for heroin to be illegal, right?
[01:28:54]  Like that's, that's a horrible thing.
[01:28:56]  It's a horrible thing to take someone who's like a heroin addict and then say, well, our solution to this is we're going to lock you in a cage for 20 years.
[01:29:04]  It's awful.
[01:29:05]  It's like on the level of slavery, immoral and barbaric and just horrible for society.
[01:29:10]  But it's completely reasonable as long as we have a government building for them to say, you can't shoot up heroin in this building.
[01:29:17]  You know what I mean?
[01:29:18]  Like we're going to ask you to leave if you shoot up heroin here.
[01:29:20]  And that much better simulates what we'd likely think would happen in a free private society.
[01:29:28]  Yeah, you know, I couldn't like ruin your life forever and lock you in a cage, but I could tell you you got to leave my property.
[01:29:35]  Okay.
[01:29:36]  Now, Friedman can say, well, by that logic, if they could do that, they could ban you.
[01:29:41]  They could also ban anyone who's ever shot up heroin on their private property from ever using public property.
[01:29:48]  It's like, yeah, okay, yes.
[01:29:51]  If your point was to say that Dave makes the point that it's unreasonable to have zero restrictions on public property, but aha, he's probably never thought of the fact that there could be unreasonable restrictions on public property.
[01:30:07]  All right, you got me.
[01:30:09]  I mean, like, yeah, no, obviously, that's so obvious that maybe I never stated it in the debate.
[01:30:14]  I think I might have, but actually, I think I did.
[01:30:17]  But regardless, that should just be so obvious to anyone.
[01:30:21]  Yeah, of course.
[01:30:22]  In the same sense that people go, and I've heard this before from people, they go, oh, so you're not for open borders.
[01:30:27]  So you're for closed borders.
[01:30:29]  You're for zero immigration.
[01:30:31]  Like as if those are your only two choices.
[01:30:34]  I have to be for unlimited immigration or zero or not.
[01:30:39]  I mean, for hot chicks, the new green cards.
[01:30:42]  Yeah, there you go.
[01:30:43]  There's your middle ground.
[01:30:45]  Rob Bernstein just found your middle ground.

=== Finding Libertarian Middle Ground (01:40) ===

[01:30:47]  Anyway, I don't know what else to say about this, but I'm like, like I said at the very beginning, I'm, I understand.
[01:30:55]  I've risen to, you know, whatever.
[01:30:57]  We, this is probably the biggest libertarian podcast like in that that's out there.
[01:31:03]  I don't know.
[01:31:03]  I guess it depends on how you define libertarianism.
[01:31:06]  I know that I am like, there's a lot of people like pushing me to be the presidential candidate in 2024 and that the Mises caucus, which I was a big part of, just took over the party.
[01:31:15]  And, you know, oh, okay, I get that.
[01:31:18]  It's still, I'm still, Dave.
[01:31:20]  I'm still just like in my mind, like a soldier in the Ron Paul army, you know, whatever.
[01:31:26]  And like a comic, like that's, but so it's weird to me to see Milton Friedman's kid like writing a piece about me.
[01:31:35]  What's even weirder is to see this such a bad fucking argument, like just such a pathetically weak argument, like as this binary thing that he closes on.
[01:31:50]  I don't know.
[01:31:51]  Just kind of bizarre to me.
[01:31:52]  Look, I said before, I'd be happy to have a conversation with David Friedman.
[01:31:58]  I'd be happy to go back and forth with him about this stuff.
[01:32:00]  I just thought like this kind of needed to be addressed.
[01:32:03]  And so that was the show today.
[01:32:05]  Still really admire David Friedman and think so much of his work is incredible.
[01:32:09]  Highly recommend people go look him up and read his stuff.
[01:32:13]  But this was not this one, ain't it?
[01:32:16]  All right.
[01:32:17]  Okay.
[01:32:18]  That's our episode for today.
[01:32:19]  Thank you, everybody, for watching.
[01:32:21]  And we'll be back.
[01:32:23]  We'll be back real soon, breaking down all the craziness that's going on.
[01:32:27]  All right.
[01:32:28]  Peace.