March 24, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I'm pretty sure you all know that I'm a small government guy. | ||
| What small government means to me, at least economically, is that you should keep most of what you earn and that you yourself are the best arbiter to decide where your money goes. | ||
| Whether the money you earn goes to fixing your house or buying a new car or to funding Planned Parenthood and supporting Lincoln Center, I believe that should be up to you. | ||
| You've worked hard for your money, I assume, and I believe that you're a better judge of how to spend it rather than giving it to a wasteful government which will often spend it on programs you don't even care about. | ||
| At the same time, being for small government isn't only about taxes and economics. | ||
| At its root, being for small government is also about being for the individual. | ||
| I believe that your faculty to understand how you want to live is far better than anyone else's faculty on how you should live your life. | ||
| At the same time, I understand the need for the government is different depending on whether you live in a rural area or an urban center, for example. | ||
| In a rural area with less people, there is most likely less of a need for regulation than there is in an urban area. | ||
| Take something as simple as a noise ordinance. | ||
| If you live in a remote rural area in the middle of the country, there is most likely no need for a law to stop people from doing construction in the middle of the night or blasting their music too loudly. | ||
| But if you live in an urban center, say New York City, where people live in small apartments on top of one another, a noise ordinance might be important to you. | ||
| You can't have construction people knocking down walls at all hours of the night and you might not want your neighbor blasting music at 3am. | ||
| The next piece of the limited government puzzle is whether or not the government needs to be involved in so many facets of our lives at all. | ||
| Even in the case of New York City with its cramped conditions and tiny living spaces, is it the government who has to tell companies not to do construction in the middle of the night This is where an interesting discussion can happen. | ||
| Is it the job of the government, as laid out by the Constitution, to regulate these interpersonal issues? | ||
| Or is it the job of individuals to deal with these issues themselves? | ||
| Should a building in New York City have a policy about noise instead of leaving it to the government? | ||
| Should it be incumbent on you to talk to your neighbor about the volume of their music rather than leaving it to the government? | ||
| Can issues we think of traditionally being dealt with by the government actually be dealt with in the private sector, or is the government already too deep into controlling us that we could never scale it back without burning down the system? | ||
| While noise ordinances aren't the most pressing issue out there, obviously, I use it as a simple example of the battle between the private and the public, and how sometimes we assign power to the government when perhaps There could be a better option based in our own capacity to | ||
| reason for ourselves. | ||
| With all this in mind, we're continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty this week and | ||
| joining me is best-selling author and economist at George Mason University, Brian Kaplan. | ||
| Brian is an anarcho-capitalist which in simple terms is an extreme libertarian who wants | ||
| government pretty much out of everything. | ||
| We'll talk about taxes, health care, rent control and much more and see if there are | ||
| places that the private sector can do a better job than what the public has been able to | ||
| do. | ||
| Now, according to US Penal Code 429 pursuant to the laws of the state in which you are | ||
| governed you are hereby ordered to click like and comment down below. | ||
|
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| (upbeat music) | ||
| We're continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty this week, and joining me today is a professor of economics at George Mason University, an author, an anarcho-capitalist, and a pacifist, Brian Kaplan. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks a lot for having me. | ||
| A lot of good buzzwords in there, and we're gonna get to all of them, but first... | ||
| What's it like being a professor on a campus these days that doesn't identify as a progressive? | ||
| Is that tough? | ||
| Are you getting rocks thrown at you every day? | ||
| How's that going? | ||
| My life is perfectly fine. | ||
| Nothing bad has ever happened to me. | ||
| I don't even know I've ever gotten a negative comment on a student evaluation. | ||
| To be fair, I'm in the economics department at George Mason University, which is a very unusual place. | ||
| There's a lot of libertarian and free market oriented people there, but Also, what I'd say is that the stories that you hear in the media, while generally true, you have to remember how many people are on campus, how many professors there are. | ||
| So if every week you see some horrible thing happens to one professor, that still leaves 99.99% of all professors who had a perfectly fine week. | ||
| 99% of all professors who had a perfectly fine week. | ||
| And so far, so good for me. | ||
| Yeah, and you make a point of saying you're in the economics department, | ||
| which is probably insulated from some of this stuff. | ||
| 'Cause you have to work with facts and figures and numbers. | ||
| These are sort of outside of the realm of where social justice can hit, right? | ||
| Right, and also just, you know, economics has a long history of a field where you can say really controversial and shocking things, and people are curious and want to talk about it in a civilized way rather than get really mad at you. | ||
| So, you know, I'd say at least half of the controversial ideas in academia have come out of economics. | ||
| And economists get Nobel Prizes for these ideas. | ||
| It's Gary Becker, Milton Friedman. | ||
| It's not like people are waiting around for you to say the wrong thing and jump on you. | ||
| To me, the real difference is just people who are very dull. | ||
| There are economists who are very boring, but it's not like they're angry at people for doing other stuff. | ||
| They're just not doing really exciting work. | ||
| But there's plenty of room in economics for people to say almost anything, really, and not only get away with it, but to succeed. | ||
| I've long been telling people, if you really want to be a professor, try to figure out how to repackage what you want to do as economics, and then just get a PhD in economics, you'll make more money, you'll get tenure, you'll get a job easily, and you'll be in a very supportive atmosphere where you can say what you want. | ||
| Yeah, I can tell you truly believe in the free market, because you're welcoming people to take your job right now. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| Well, I do have tenure, so it's not that worried in that way. | ||
| And also remember that the more people, in order to become an investor, you first have to become one of my customers and go to grad school, so it's not as unselfinterested as it might seem. | ||
| Do you find that professors of economics, either at George Mason, or you were just mentioning a debate you're doing in a couple days, That generally professors of economics from whatever pathology they believe in are able to debate and it doesn't get personal and it can really stick on the issues and that kind of thing? | ||
| So in general I'd say yes. | ||
| Again the main problem is just people who are not interested in bigger ideas and only want to focus on narrow research topics. | ||
| So people like that are not touchy, they're not hostile, they're just apathetic. | ||
| Or they sometimes love the idea of, you know, what you are doing is not science, and I don't really care about that, and you don't belong here, but it's not that they disagree with what you're saying as they disagree with people taking on bigger questions of any kind. | ||
| So that, I mean, that's sort of what I've dealt with in my time in academia is just, I want to do big, exciting ideas, and a lot of economists frown on that, not because they disagree with the content, but because they disagree with anything big and exciting. | ||
| Yeah, so before we get into some of your big and exciting ideas, do you find that generally, outside of the universities, that just the American populace really doesn't understand anything about economics? | ||
| Because this is what I see all the time. | ||
| I can only garner so much information from social media, but I see people saying things about trade all the time, and immigration all the time, and all these things that are tied back into economics, and I'm like, you don't really seem to know much about anything. | ||
| Yeah, so I have a whole book on this called The Myth of the Rational Voter, Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. | ||
| In the book I just go over all the evidence on what does the public actually believe about economics compared to what anyone who can explain the textbook thinks. | ||
| And yeah, it's terrible. | ||
| The way I think about it is, right now, we're in L.A., I grew up here, so I will say that until I was 17, I never heard any argument against the minimum wage. | ||
| I never heard any argument against regulation of pharmaceuticals. | ||
| I don't think I ever heard any argument against the welfare state, ever! | ||
| And again, I was not growing up in Berkeley or some left-wing haven. | ||
| I was just growing up in a normal, boring, middle-class suburb here in Los Angeles, but The kinds of arguments that economists make and are aware of are just not even on people's radar. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that's an important distinction, what you just said there, that you didn't grow up in Berkeley. | ||
| You grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles that's somewhat blue-collar. | ||
| It was very middle class. | ||
| Middle class, middle class. | ||
| It was probably, could easily have been half Republican in those days. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And still, I'd never heard any of the very basic economic arguments critiquing standard popular regulations. | ||
| I remember talking to my parents about rent control, and they didn't understand anything about the economists' critique of rent control and how it causes a shortage of housing. | ||
| For them, it's just like, well, we own a rental property, so we're against it. | ||
| That's sort of all they could come up with. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this is very standard for not just the American public, but the global public and throughout history. | ||
| It's just like the very basic ideas of economics that are in every textbook are not known. | ||
| And when they're heard, this is the striking thing. | ||
| So it's one thing to never heard them, but the normal reaction is just anger. | ||
| Because they're so insulated from any other idea, basically. | ||
| Right, and also, why are you saying this? | ||
| We have the minimum wage, it's a program to go and help poor people, and then an economist comes along and says, there's a downside, this could cause unemployment, and people's reaction is, how could you say something like that? | ||
| That's so terrible. | ||
| Do you hate poor people? | ||
| And again, this seems like a parody, but I have experienced this firsthand plenty of times. | ||
| What do you do with that? | ||
| What do you do with that? | ||
| When you try to lay out something and you say, well, here's data to support it, but it's so emotional to somebody else, something like minimum wage or rent control. | ||
| Usually I try to connect it to firsthand experience, because any time I talk about the data, then someone could say, well, it's your data, how do I know there must be plenty of other people with other data? | ||
| So try to say, well, look, when you fill out a job application, you get to the line on salary requirements, do you put a million dollars an hour? | ||
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unidentified
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No. | |
| Why not? | ||
| Well, because I think if I put too much money then I'm less likely to get the job. | ||
| Aha! | ||
| So it's not just me that believes that if wages are too high that unemployment will result. | ||
| You believe it too. | ||
| It's just that you don't want to connect what you know from your own experience to the world of policy because it doesn't sound good. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's interesting what you said about your parents. | ||
| They had a rental property, so they didn't like rent control, because obviously you don't want it if you're the owner of the property. | ||
| And how we all apply our own life might be separate from what our philosophical principles are. | ||
| Because I lived in New York City for about 12 years in an apartment that was rent-stabilized, so it's slightly different than rent-controlled. | ||
| But they could only increase my rent, I think something like You know, it would change every few years, but about 2% a year, which for me, as the tenant, was great, and they, you know, over the course of 12 years, my rent went, I think, started at $1,650 for a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West, and I think it maxed out at about $2,000. | ||
| So, as the tenant, on my side, that's pretty great. | ||
| Make the argument why I'm wrong about that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So, in terms of your own self-interest, you know, you might be perfectly right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there, I mean, I would say, well, there are some downsides. | ||
| Things like quality tends to go down with rent control. | ||
| So, you know, like the heating breaks down and you can't get a landlord to come and fix things. | ||
| So, there is that. | ||
| So, you know, this is just, you know, a very standard result with any kind of price controls. | ||
| If you can't adjust on the price, then you can adjust on all these other ways to adjust on quality. | ||
| But, or you can try charging people for extras, things like that. | ||
| But yeah, so there's always going to be people who do benefit from the policies, and if you happen to be that person, then it's very, again, like you might say, what's hard to convince them? | ||
| The saving grace is that, in general, people are not comfortable arguing for policies on self-interested grounds. | ||
| So you're saying, look, this is very bad for society. | ||
| People normally want to dispute that it's bad for society. | ||
| They don't want to say, well, sure, it's bad for society, but I'm one of the minority of people that's benefiting from this, so I like it and we should have it. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's interesting. | ||
| I think the point that you make there about, well, they're going to have to cut in other ways if they can't raise your rent. | ||
| So, for example, in my building, in the winter, every winter, there would literally be If we were in the middle of a storm, there would be three or four days in a row where we would not have heat. | ||
| It was an old steam heat, you know, four-story building. | ||
| And there was a couple days when I was single back then that I literally was under the covers with my dog because I didn't want her to freeze either. | ||
| And I went to the management building, which is a couple blocks away, and I was basically reaming them out. | ||
| And I remember the woman was sitting behind bulletproof glass. | ||
| And I thought, this is what's wrong with this system. | ||
| This woman, she works for a big company, they own 500 buildings, we're stuck under this. | ||
| I never fully connected that to rent control or rent stabilization. | ||
| And yet you were not inclined to move out to a full price place that had good heat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that does show how we all sort of negotiate these strange things. | ||
| So let's talk about anarcho-capitalism. | ||
| Because I haven't done much on it. | ||
| I think I've had one anarcho-capitalist, my friend ThatGuyT on YouTube, who you should check out if you don't know him. | ||
| Great guy in Atlanta. | ||
| What is anarcho-capitalism? | ||
| So, Enerocapitalism is the idea that the so-called minimal functions of the state are actually more than you really need, and it is not only imaginable, but it really could work to privatize the last lingering functions of government, like police, courts, and the law itself. | ||
| Yeah, this is an idea that sounds really crazy. | ||
| So the way that I usually like to explain it is, well, right now people may say, well, government clearly has to have a monopoly over police, monopoly over courts, monopoly over law. | ||
| And I say, government has a monopoly over these things right now. | ||
| Right now, there's actually more private security guards than police. | ||
| Is that really? | ||
| That's true. | ||
| There are more people hired by business and communities to go and do policing than there are police in the official sense. | ||
| For courts, there is a huge area of private adjudication. | ||
| There's arbitration. | ||
| Anytime you have a problem with your credit card, do you sue the company that's involved? | ||
| No, you call the credit card company and they have their own Internal adjudication system for handling things like this. | ||
| Facebook, if you have problems on Facebook, do you go and sue Facebook? | ||
| No, you go and you complain with them and they do something about it. | ||
| I'm not sure they really do something about it in the case of Facebook, but maybe. | ||
| Well, at the minimum, they give you a bunch of options to solve your own problem. | ||
| You can block someone, you can unfriend them, you can make sure they never contact you again. | ||
| So, they give you a bunch of remedies that you have, which they have worked out exactly what it is they want to do about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then similarly for law itself, there are many private organizations that have their own rules that they apply. | ||
| So again, mentioning private arbitration, one of the main reasons people use private arbitration is that they don't use regular laws. | ||
| They use their own laws, which are designed to work better than the government's laws, so you can get your issue resolved in a few days instead of weeks or years. | ||
| So usually with private arbitration, they have the arbitrator actually be someone who knows what he's doing. | ||
| So they have someone who is in fact an expert on this area of business, rather than giving it to a generalist and 12 people who were too dumb to get out of jury duty. | ||
| So just sort of beginning realizing, wow, so there's a lot of private alternatives that already exist right now to government providing these services that, at first glance, a lot of people just have the reaction of society would just burn in flames if there were private police or private courts or private law. | ||
| Look around, it's not burning now and there's already a very large role for the private sector. | ||
| When I think about Energo Capitalism, I always just say, let's start with what we got. | ||
| You realize that that is not going to lead to anything bad and there's very good reasons why people are using these private alternatives right now, which is they're better. | ||
| They're worth the money. | ||
| You actually get better quality, not only for a lower price, but remember, these are private companies competing with free government services and they're still carving out a big market niche for themselves because so many people are so dissatisfied with the services they get provided free by the government. | ||
| And then just think about how much further can we take these? | ||
| So, you know, very easy with private arbitration. | ||
| Right now, one of the big limits on private arbitration is that even if you sign a so-called binding arbitration clause, in fact, if a person doesn't like how the binding arbitration turns out, they can go and sue you. | ||
| They can take you to court. | ||
| Yes, they can take you to court. | ||
| So, for example, if you sign binding arbitration saying, in the event of any employment dispute, this will be handled by private arbitration, That contract in general, while it might get enforced, there's no confidence that it would be. | ||
| And again, if you think about it, well, suppose that you could sign this binding arbitration. | ||
| I could get my brother-in-law to go and be the arbitrator. | ||
| He always rules in my favor. | ||
| You could use this to get around a great many government laws so you can understand why government doesn't want to do this. | ||
| And yet, Clearly you could go and allow a lot more room for private arbitration and actually it is likely that there is immense pent-up demand for private arbitration that is right now being stifled by regulation. | ||
| And then once you start thinking about how could there be even more? | ||
| One obvious one to me is if you go to government courts and they say, well, actually if this is a private contract, You just have to have an arbitration clause, and it's not our problem. | ||
| So if you want adjudication, put an arbitration clause, and all we do, if there's a dispute, is show us the contract, it says this is the arbitrator, rubber stamp, that's it. | ||
| So maybe as an intermediate step, you would keep criminal stuff in the public system, and remove some of this stuff that's purely legally based. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Then when you just start thinking about all the things that you can hand over to the private sector, it is much larger than what it occurs at first. | ||
| And then the anarcho-capitalist idea is really, once we have privatized all the things that at first it seemed like you couldn't, but we just keep going further and further and further, in the end you're left with almost nothing. | ||
| And then the question is, could you just get rid of that last bit? | ||
| Yeah, so let's pause on the last bit for a second, because you mentioned a few different areas there. | ||
| So I think the arbitration one's really interesting. | ||
| I'm wondering, when you see cases of arbitration now, it must self-select a certain type of person to go ahead and do that. | ||
| What type of things are being fought in arbitration? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I guess you'd probably have to have a certain amount of money. | ||
| You would want to maybe know that the person across the table from you is in a similar situation, or has similar views, that they'd be willing to accept it, because you just said, at the end, they could probably figure out a way to get this back into the courts. | ||
| I mean, it's fairly common, actually, just to add it in as boilerplate into a contract, saying it will be arbitrated, but the people who really want it, I think, are people who've been burned by lawsuits in the past, people who've seen business deals just collapse before their eyes because the dispute came up, And they didn't work it out, and then it took years for them to go and resolve it, and by then the business was bankrupt. | ||
| Or, of course, if you've been sued by an employee and you think it was bogus. | ||
| That's the kind of thing. | ||
| I'd never want that to happen again. | ||
| So these are some obvious cases of putting it in, but of course, no employer is thrilled about the idea of getting sued. | ||
| So if it were the kind of thing that you could really rely on, Yeah. | ||
| and I think it's very likely that it would be totally standard to put in private arbitration | ||
| and just to avoid all the hassles that are involved with hiring people right now. | ||
| Again, of course, if you think these laws are good, then this is very distressing to | ||
| you. | ||
| On the other hand, to someone like me, the fact that almost everyone would probably happily | ||
| sign away the right to sue their employer shows there's something very bad about the | ||
| system we have. | ||
| The right to sue your employer is the kind of right that people will sign away for a small amount of money, which means that it's probably not a very valuable right to begin with. | ||
| It's the kind of thing that you're stuck with, and in many ways it's a burden because then you have to convince an employer, I'm not going to sue you, I'm cool. | ||
| Well, isn't it also that the average person who works for even a small company, not just a giant corporation, we don't have lawyers on retainer. | ||
| So I work for myself now, which is a pretty beautiful thing, but I've worked at plenty of companies where the day I got hired, I had to sign some crazy book of all these, and of course I didn't read all that stuff. | ||
| So it's like, I'm not walking around with a lawyer, and most people aren't. | ||
| So most people are just signing stuff without even knowing what Right, which I would say is thank goodness for that, because if people were actually taking it more seriously, and right now I think firms are taking advantage of that to go and dilute it as much as the law will allow. | ||
| And again, since I think the regulations are bad in the first place, I'm all for people diluting the regulations as much as possible. | ||
| So there's an old saying, thank God we don't get as much government as we pay for. | ||
| Thank God we don't sue people to anywhere near the extent that we legally could, because it would be a hellish world. | ||
| Yeah, this may sound like a very amateur question, but when people go into arbitration, are you bringing a lawyer with you, or is it just that the arbitrator is just looking at what was signed and deciding? | ||
| Like, is there an actual argument that's taken place? | ||
| Right, so I think it varies a lot, so sometimes you might bring a lawyer, so it may actually depend upon the rules of the arbitration. | ||
| But I think a lot of the idea is just to cut the expenses down, so a lot of times you don't have a lawyer, you just have an arbitrator there who generally is well-versed in the industry that you're working in, so he actually knows what you're talking about. | ||
| And then of course, part of what they're doing, so there's something more moderate called mediation, | ||
| where the arbitrator doesn't, where the person doesn't really get to decide anything, | ||
| but just tries to get the two people to talk. | ||
| It's kind of like counseling. | ||
| And then arbitration is stronger where he listens to both sides, | ||
| and then he tells you what's gonna be. | ||
| Is there always a set time frame on how long that lasts? | ||
| No, no, no, well, so certainly not always. | ||
| Since this is private, there's a wide range, there's a beautiful rainbow of all possibilities, which are all done. | ||
| Sometimes there's an arbitrator who just says, look, we meet tomorrow, that's it, end of story, here's what's going to happen. | ||
| Part of the beauty of that is once you get the dispute resolved, a lot of times you can go back to working with each other. | ||
| You may not be that happy about it, but there's no longer an ongoing dispute, and so it's settled, and then you can get back to business. | ||
| Right, and you haven't paid an insane amount to lawyers. | ||
| So I assume lawyers aren't thrilled with these ideas. | ||
| Yeah, probably not. | ||
| So of course there's some who are entrepreneurial enough to see, well this is an opportunity for me to branch out. | ||
| But yeah, I think it would be very bad for lawyers in the long run. | ||
| And of course, for litigators particularly, which is a small minority of lawyers in the first place. | ||
| For a contract lawyer, this might be awesome because then there'd be a bunch of people who wanna rewrite all their contracts to go and putting binding arbitration that's truly and utterly binding. | ||
| So you mentioned earlier that even policing could be privatized. | ||
| But what would happen, so I can understand that in a place like Beverly Hills. | ||
| People have got a lot of money, we're gonna privatize the Beverly Hills Police Department, Beverly Hills Cop, okay, I saw the movie. | ||
| That wasn't what the movie was about, but I had to get that in there somehow. | ||
| But what about in a place where the economics are terrible, where people have no money, where probably crime is the highest? | ||
| Who's gonna put in money? | ||
| How are you gonna make a profit off that? | ||
| Yeah, so the key thing to realize, places where crime is terrible are ones where the current police already don't work very well. | ||
| So we're just worth stepping back and realizing the current system is quite crummy to begin with. | ||
| Now, who would pay for it otherwise? | ||
| So the obvious places to start are people who actually are landlords. | ||
| So like in a more suburban area, you're talking about homeowner associations are some of the obvious people to pay for it. | ||
| But even now in bad areas, it's very common for landlords to pay for some kind of security and if they know that it's their job to do it. | ||
| So like in a high crime area, even someone who is poor values their life, values protection. | ||
| So sort of like an economist joke has been, you see a lot of really expensive sneakers in bad areas of town. | ||
| Why is this? | ||
| Well, when it's a priority, people will come up with the money in order to pay for things that they really care about. | ||
| The other thing about policing is, I think it's also better to think about it in a broader category of just enforcement of all kinds. | ||
| There's many kinds of enforcement besides actual police. | ||
| One that's become very common with the internet is all kinds of reputational incentives. | ||
| So just like bad reviews, things like this. | ||
| These work far better than the FDA. | ||
| So imagine you get a bad meal. | ||
| Do you go and call up the FDA and complain about it or something like that? | ||
| Or local meat inspectors? | ||
| No, much more likely to go and put in a bad Yelp review. | ||
| And this is the way that we are probably getting most of our actual enforcement. | ||
| What is protecting you from food poisoning? | ||
| Is it the government? | ||
| No, the government's hardly doing anything about it. | ||
| what's really protecting you from food poisoning is word of mouth, which is now amplified | ||
| because now it is word of the internet, one complaint. | ||
| So you're like, my dad runs an internet business, like one disgruntled customer is terrible for you | ||
| and is really a much more effective enforcement mechanism than anything the government is doing about it. | ||
| So is some of it that it just, the messaging has to be clearer, | ||
| because that concept seems very obvious to me in a day of the internet, where you're right, | ||
| people care now more about what a Yelp review of a restaurant says than what either a written review | ||
| in the LA Times says or what it says at the restaurant, what they're telling you themselves. | ||
| So this is really about messaging in a way more than economics, because I think people can get there economically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then again, also just thinking about ways that you can get a contract between people that you don't ordinarily think of as a contractual relationship. | ||
| So right now, if you get in an accident with someone, you don't have a contract with the person you got in an accident with, But if you both have insurance, your insurance company has | ||
| a relationship with their insurance company. So, of course, most auto accidents never go to | ||
| trial. The insurance companies have a system that they work out where they negotiate with each other. | ||
| They've got standards. So, again, that's already going on. And then just think about anytime | ||
| you're in a public place, anytime you're in a mall. So, right now, of course, if there's a dispute | ||
| there, the police will handle it. But it is very easy to visualize a world where when you go to | ||
| the mall, there's actually a sign saying, like, you know, so when you enter this, you come under the | ||
| jurisdiction of this arbitration company and then any dispute that happens in a mall then is no | ||
| longer actually needs to be handled by the police. | ||
| Uh, so, you know, so, you know, and, and again, of course, people say, well, I mean, they're just rent-a-cops, you know, they don't even have, a lot of them don't really have guns. | ||
| I mean, of course, if the taxpayers will pay for someone to be shot at, then companies are not gonna pay, are not gonna pay the extra amount to have their employees shot at. | ||
| Right, so the whole system of economics would sort of flip if we, if we changed it. | ||
| Yeah, so the amazing thing about all of the kinds of private law that we see right now | ||
| isn't that how little it does, but how much it does given that the government provides these services | ||
| free of charge, and people still will take money out of their own pockets to go, | ||
| rather than go and get the free stuff, which yeah, all right, so of course, | ||
| it's always, in a sense it's not free 'cause you have to pay taxes, | ||
| but in another sense it is free, namely you can use it without any additional charge, | ||
| so that's the sense in which the stuff is free. | ||
| I mean, sometimes you'll get charged for a false alarm, although that's pretty unusual, | ||
| but I think fire departments sometimes, if you call them for no reason, | ||
| they'll give you a bill, say like, "Why did you go and waste valuable services?" | ||
| But normally, that's not how it works. | ||
| You mentioned car insurance. | ||
| Where does health insurance fall on this? | ||
| Because health insurance right now is making everyone completely insane. | ||
| No matter what side you're on, everyone is crazy about this. | ||
| So what is, then, the answer for health insurance in your view? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well... I guess that's probably the last question I'll ask you for the interview. | ||
| Health insurance. | ||
| I have the extreme view that there's no reason for government to be involved in this area at all. | ||
| And what's very striking is that while most economists officially say I would disagree, but when I've actually got to argue with them, usually when they argue for regulation, they're arguing for regulations to fix other regulations. | ||
| And when I say, well, what if we just didn't have the first regulations you're trying to fix? | ||
| Then the reaction is kind of like, well, I never really thought about it that much. | ||
| So just for example, the whole idea of Obamacare is that, alright, well, first we're going to have a regulation saying that you can't turn people down for insurance. | ||
| And secondly, we're going to have a regulation saying that you can't charge them higher prices. | ||
| And then people normally realize, wait a second, in a system like that, then a lot of people just wait around until they're sick. | ||
| And so then we're going to require people to buy insurance to avoid the problems created by the first two regulations. | ||
| And then there's people too poor to afford it. | ||
| So then we're going to subsidize those people to deal with the other three regulations. | ||
| All right, so my view is there's really no reason why you couldn't have scrapped all the regulations and just said, look, here's your incentive by insurance. | ||
| If you wait until you're sick, you won't be able to afford it. | ||
| But then what do you do for those people? | ||
| So I get that, but isn't then what happens as a result of that is that X amount of people, and it's gonna be a lot of people, simply will not do it because they'd rather spend their money elsewhere and hope that they'll be healthy. | ||
| Or they'll just get a broken leg playing basketball, or something else, or whatever. | ||
| And then we still end up paying for them, right? | ||
| Don't the rest of us automatically end up paying for them? | ||
| Not automatically. | ||
| Again, if you get rid of all those regulations, then you have to rely on charity. | ||
| And okay, so-- - Of course, charity includes family, includes everybody else | ||
| that might wanna help you, but, then you say, well, that's terrible, | ||
| I wouldn't wanna have to deal with that. | ||
| Yes, that's why you buy insurance in advance, is because you don't wanna be put in that position. | ||
| Right, so I-- - Now, of course, then you start thinking about the horrible cases, | ||
| like what about a child born to irresponsible parents, and the child has a lifelong congenital disease. | ||
| I say that's the kind of thing that charities are going to be very well equipped to handle. | ||
| They're probably not going to be so equipped to handle someone who's 25 and was earning a middle class income but didn't feel like buying insurance and then they come down with a horrible problem. | ||
| Those are ones where I think you're likely to be very low in priority in this world. | ||
| You're an adult and it was your responsibility to take care of yourself. | ||
| But sort of in the background is the issue of, like, how can you just be so callous as to say, if you went and did something really dumb, that it's just your own tough luck? | ||
| And, you know, so I have this old blog post called Tough Luck, where I say, you know what? | ||
| Every political philosophy ultimately says tough luck to people. | ||
| It's just a question of where they draw the line. | ||
| So, you know, there's the, well, what if there's a conservative government of power, and they conscript my son, and he's sent to another country, and he dies? | ||
| What happens then? | ||
| And of course the conservative answer is ultimately, well, tough luck. | ||
| That's the system. | ||
| Like in my system, you can be conscripted if I don't, or you don't want to, and sometimes when that happens you get put into a lethal area and you die. | ||
| And like, well my life has been ruined and what are you going to do about it? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| I'll give you a plaque. | ||
| Or similarly, even someone who is the firmest supporter in the world of socialized medicine. | ||
| So what if a person goes and cuts off their own legs? | ||
| And then whenever you go and send someone to help them, they throw things at them. | ||
| What are you going to do then? | ||
| Well, then I guess tough luck! | ||
| That person is just going to be alone and be suffering because they wouldn't go along with the system. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, so given that every single philosophy ultimately says tough luck, I don't see why people who believe in the free market should feel especially embarrassed to say, well, yeah, my system, this is where we draw the line, and if you have failed to do all of these things, then it's your problem. | ||
| Because there is no perfect system, basically. | ||
| That's the argument. | ||
| Yes, there's no perfect system, and again, would it be a perfect system if someone could be completely irresponsible 100 times in a row and would still get treated like everybody else? | ||
| Have they done any studies that you know of where they've shown where, in cases that the government pulls back, that charity does take care of this stuff so that in the case, which I think is a legitimate, like, philosophically, I fully get what you're saying there, that if we just pulled back a little bit, that people would give more. | ||
| Is there evidence of that? | ||
| Because I suspect there is. | ||
| Yeah, so it's almost all the evidence is the other way around, | ||
| where it's there used to be private charity, and then government started doing it, | ||
| and then people measure what happened to the charity that was involved. | ||
| So this is called crowding out. | ||
| There's a whole field, economics and charity, where they study this. | ||
| And this is a totally standard result that there are many areas that private charity | ||
| used to take care of, like helping out the poor, and now, and as government expanded its role, | ||
| the role of private charity shrank down, and eventually private charity moved into other areas. | ||
| the government wasn't doing very much about. | ||
| So yeah, so like in the 30s, The 30s is sort of when there was a big transition because there were many private organizations, things called fraternal clubs and organizations that were private clubs that did a lot of things that the modern welfare state does. | ||
| So if you lost your job, they'd take care of you. | ||
| If there was sickness, they'd go and take care of you. | ||
| The 30s was such a protracted depression that partly started breaking down then, but again, a lot of it was government took over. | ||
| And once government took over, there really wasn't much point to belong to the organizations anymore, except to go and put on funny hats and have a party once a month. | ||
| But you know, a lot of these groups that you remember your grandfather being part of, like the Elks or the Odd Fellows, these actually provided these welfare state functions privately in the past. | ||
| So do you think that something like, you know, government-funded Planned Parenthood, which I'm sure, regardless of your feelings on abortion, I'm sure you're not for the government funding that. | ||
| I can accept that part. | ||
| So for myself, I'm pro-choice, but when I see all these people talking about public funding of all these things, it does seem to me that if the government stopped funding these things, not made them illegal, not made abortion illegal, but stopped funding, that this seems like a case where so many people are so passionate about All these people in Hollywood who are constantly tweeting about this and screaming at it, that they would start funding these things. | ||
| So is that a great example of this? | ||
| I think it is a great example. | ||
| Here's the main thing that is troubling about the economics of charity is there's a bunch of causes that people really care about, and those I'm not worried about. | ||
| Those, there's gonna be plenty of money for them. | ||
| There's a bunch of other terrible things happening in the world that private charity manifestly hasn't solved. | ||
| It hasn't gone and solved international refugee problems. | ||
| doing something, but there's still terrible things going on. | ||
| It hasn't solved hunger in other countries. The thing is, these are problems that | ||
| taxpayers don't care much about and that charitable givers don't care very much about. So, not, you | ||
| know, say, we can like, you know, Bill Gates cares, and, you know, he's making a single-handedly | ||
| making a noticeable dent in the problem. But, I mean, so, you know, sort of like the issues | ||
| that people are really concerned about, the ones that have a lot of support for taxpayers to do | ||
| something about it, about them, are also very plausibly ones where private donors would | ||
| care a lot as well. | ||
| Is there any situation where you think regulation is necessary? | ||
| I'm sure someone watching this is gonna comment, well what about the rivers? | ||
| They're gonna pollute all the rivers or anything. | ||
| Is there any instance where you see it as necessary? | ||
| What I would say is, I don't know. | ||
| I would say. | ||
| So there's a lot of areas where, given the current setup, it's very hard to see how either a for-profit or even a charitable response to it. | ||
| Again, the question in my mind is always, if we imagine going and privatizing things the government now does, then what's left? | ||
| And then what's left the charity can't handle? | ||
| So, to me, part of being an anarcho-capitalist is at least saying, well, let's privatize and see, before saying there's no way that private action is going to handle this problem. | ||
| Let's go and take a look. | ||
| Of course, private solutions may take a while to emerge, but then again, there are many problems the government has dealt with very poorly so far, so I don't think it's fair to say After a year, the private sector hasn't solved this yet, so therefore clearly government's necessary. | ||
| We'll maybe give it some more time. | ||
| But again, the ones that I think are the clearest cases are air pollution. | ||
| So that's one where it's very hard to exactly see how the private, like how for-profit sector would handle it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's one where... Because air pollution moves across state borders. | |
| Yes, air pollution moves, like you're not walking around in a bubble. | ||
| Again, it's one where, well again, suppose that government didn't do anything about it, but there's private charity involved. | ||
| Right, private charity to go and say subsidize lower polluting technologies or offer prizes for lower polluting technologies and then give away the patent so that the new technologies are really cheap. | ||
| Again, so like us two, like how well that would work? | ||
| I honestly would have to say it's so far from where we are. | ||
| I don't know, but I think we should give it a try. | ||
| Yeah, so most people watching us know that I'm a limited government guy. | ||
| I believe in states' rights. | ||
| I would always rather be governed by my mayor and my local representative than federal people. | ||
| Rather be governed by the mayor of Los Angeles! | ||
| Wow, all right, so... You know, he lives a little closer to me than the people in D.C., let's put it that way, regardless of my feelings of the mayor of Los Angeles. | ||
| But generally speaking, I believe in local Local control. | ||
| So are there instances where local control has done this better? | ||
| Like, is there a town you can point to? | ||
| Or is there a state, maybe, that's doing some of this a little bit better? | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| So, given that there's so many states and so many localities, I'm sure that there are. | ||
| I don't know off the top of my head which ones they are. | ||
| Is that partly just because the feds now have so much control over everything, it's hard for states to do things? | ||
| There is, but again, states do manage an enormous amount. | ||
| I'd say the main issue actually is just that the federal government provides so much of the money for state governments that a lot of the competitive pressure that you think would be operating has really been neutered by the fact that states just receive a bag of money from the federal government for certain purposes and they aren't allowed to go and use it for other purposes. | ||
| And so they have very little incentive to try to figure out a way of saving taxpayers money on it. | ||
| And often the money, of course, comes with a lot of strings attached. | ||
| If you don't want the strings, then you have to give back all the money. | ||
| So very few places wanna do that. | ||
| Yeah, so what would you do in a case when, you know, when we hear about federal money being used | ||
| and everyone says, okay, it's good. | ||
| So for example, Hurricane Sandy hits New Jersey, the Jersey Shore is destroyed, and then Obama, that was probably hundreds of millions of dollars, I don't know off the top of my head. | ||
| Or Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. | ||
| Again, this would be the same thing, I think. | ||
| Yeah, I mean so like private insurance, there's no reason that you couldn't have private disaster insurance and of course there is a lot of private disaster insurance sold. | ||
| Normally the feds get in where there's an area that's so high risk that the insurance would be really expensive and people with beach homes don't feel like having to pay for it and so either the feds take care of it or they subsidize it. | ||
| Again, especially to me, the idea that someone with a beach house should get some subsidized insurance because it's a high disaster area. | ||
| I like the disaster. | ||
| I'm always baffled by that idea. | ||
| They're living in a beach house! | ||
| Why can't a person in a beach house be expected to buy their own insurance? | ||
| Well, a lot of them do have insurance, but then I guess this is over and above. | ||
| But to pay full market price for the insurance. | ||
| So ultimately, in a case like that, would people then be forced to move from a place like New Orleans? | ||
| Well, you wouldn't really be forced to move until the value of your home falls to nothing. | ||
| Not forcibly, but eventually they would self-select out. | ||
| Really what would happen, given that beach homes normally are very valuable, is that those homes would just be worthless. | ||
| Because people realize, if I move into this home, I'm going to have to buy some really expensive insurance, so that doesn't sound very good. | ||
| So ultimately, subsidizing disaster insurance is a subsidy to people who develop in high and disaster-prone areas. | ||
| Especially people who own land in those areas are ultimately the people who really benefit from it, because it raises the value of that real estate. | ||
| I guess I never really thought about it in those specific terms, but I drive by Malibu here, which is gorgeous, and all these rich people living on these cliffs right on the water, and at the end of the day, if something horrible happened, which of course would be horrific, the government would be then giving money to people who chose to live there in a high-risk thing, because their insurance didn't go above and beyond whatever the necessary government requirements are. | ||
| Yeah, so my family lives in this area, so we're just a couple miles from the Northridge earthquake back in 1994, and I know relatives who were just calling up FEMA and saying, give me money, give me money, and they got money. | ||
| It didn't matter how rich you are, or what you had done, or whether you had built your home safely, just the squeaky wheel got the grease. | ||
| Really all you had to do was pick up a phone. | ||
| So is that the real problem with all of this, that ultimately, by doing all of this regulation, that you punish people who do the right thing? | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| In a case like this, so someone who built their house earthquake safe, blah blah, invested their own money in all of that, maybe had some damage, maybe didn't, Northridge was a massive earthquake, but then they're not getting government money because they did the right thing and put their own money in it. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| It's not fair, it's not just. | ||
| Economists would also point out it's highly inefficient because you're giving people incentives to not do the right things. | ||
| The final point that's worth making is, I'm the kind of person who defends radical and extreme views. | ||
| But I never want to alienate people who are a little bit less radical, a little bit less extreme. | ||
| In all these cases, I would still say, look, if you're very concerned about a small minority of very poor people who really couldn't afford insurance during this time, then all right, fine. | ||
| have a government program that subsidizes or provides insurance for orphan children, | ||
| for kids who have terrible diseases, for people who are very poor | ||
| but happen to be struck by disaster. | ||
| You could have a program that costs 5% as much as what we're currently doing. | ||
| We could get rid of 95% without really bumping into any of the complaints that normal people have. | ||
| Saying like, well, what about the poor? | ||
| What about kids? | ||
| What about people with irresponsible parents? | ||
| and still you could go 95% of the way to the libertarian policy. | ||
| And again, so I'm the kind of person who says, what about the last 5%? | ||
| But I don't want to go and lose people who were willing to go the first 95%. | ||
| So it's worth saying, look, with health insurance, all right, well, maybe government could still subsidize it for kids of poor parents, for people that were born with a terrible congenital disease. | ||
| a few exceptions and then stop making the exceptions. | ||
| So like this small area, this is where it's so terrible, government's gonna pay for it out of taxpayer money. | ||
| Everyone else though, sink or swim, you're an adult, you should take care of yourself. | ||
| Yeah, you must bang your head on the wall every time people in public demand | ||
| that the government throw more money at things, right? | ||
| 'Cause this is like, it's always the easy answer It feels right to people. | ||
| Throw more money at education. | ||
| Throw more money... And especially the throwing is a great image because it suggests a lack of accuracy, a lack of interest in actually targeting any specific problem. | ||
| So I've just wrapped up a book on education called The Case Against Education, where I argue for defunding education. | ||
| Right, so yes, isn't that bad for you? | ||
| Well, yeah, it would be bad for me if people listened, but still, my conscience says this is the right thing to do. | ||
| Okay, so sell me on that. | ||
| I went to a public elementary school, public junior high, public high school. | ||
| I went to State University of New York at Binghamton, which was hugely subsidized by the government. | ||
| I think it was around $9,000 a year, and I got a great education. | ||
| Why am I wrong on that? | ||
| I went to public schools right in this neighborhood, actually. | ||
| The heart of my case is something called the signaling model of education. | ||
| This is a fancy term for a common sense idea. | ||
| It just says that a lot of the reason why education pays is not that it's teaching useful job skills, but rather you're jumping through hoops to show off for employers. | ||
| All right, so just think about all the classes that you ever had to take and then how few of them are actually relevant to the job that you do. | ||
| You actually probably have a job where you do use more of what you study. | ||
| I was a political science major, so there you go. | ||
| But just think about all the classes that were required where you would not have been allowed to graduate without going through all of them. | ||
| I mean I always have this example, imagine you're like one Aristotle class short of college graduation and yet you want to finish that class. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because you're going to use the Nicomachean ethics and on the job? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| Rather because you want that diploma and employers are like, well many employers will just throw your application right in the trash unless you have that diploma. | ||
| But do you lose something doing it your way because of just a certain breadth of knowledge? | ||
| Now I'm not saying that every class should be mandated and of course they stick you in things that shouldn't be necessary, but just that in terms of college specifically, that's where you should get a broad sense of knowledge. | ||
| Would that be at risk then? | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
| It's not at risk because almost no one gets it now. | ||
| So that is the harsh truth, is that if you just go and look at what graduates of the current system know, it is next to nothing. | ||
| So there have been some great nationally representative surveys of what American adults know about government, about history, about economics, and the answer is they know next to nothing. | ||
| So if you were to defend the system saying that people need breadth of knowledge, well it's not a defense of the current system because the current system has not given it to them. | ||
| The way that I like to think about it is that a typical American college graduate is lucky to maybe answer half of the most basic questions you can imagine on civics. | ||
| Now, you might say, well, then that was still worthwhile. | ||
| It's not worthwhile, because what do you call someone who knows half their letters? | ||
| What do you call someone who knows half their letters? | ||
| An idiot? | ||
| Illiterate. | ||
| If you know half your letters, you are illiterate. | ||
| You're not half literate if you know half your letters. | ||
| You are illiterate because you cannot read. | ||
| Somebody might say, if you know half the basic facts about US history or about American government, you don't know half what you need to know. | ||
| You just don't know it at all. | ||
| You don't have a clue. | ||
| If you think there are one and a half branches of government, we're in a lot of trouble. | ||
| You just don't have a clue about what's going on. | ||
| And that's what the current system has given us. | ||
| So, when people say, like, wouldn't this be a disaster? | ||
| I say, well, you might say the current system is a disaster, but what I'm proposing wouldn't be worse. | ||
| Now, there's always the question, well, but why not go and redouble our efforts so that people really do learn this stuff? | ||
| The main thing I'd say is, the resources that it would take are so vast In fact, I don't know of any actual sign that it could be done. | ||
| But also, I do have a way cheaper alternative to the current system for actually getting people to learn this stuff. | ||
| This is one of my most reformist proposals. | ||
| It does involve government money, but it's still, I'd say, a way better use of the government money than what we're doing right now. | ||
| So here's the proposal. | ||
| Every year, there is a government test of your knowledge of civics, and if you get a good score, you get some money. | ||
| The end. | ||
| Alright, now what's the point of this? | ||
| Well, two points. | ||
| First of all, it gives people an incentive to actually learn the material in whatever means actually works best. | ||
| So you learn and you get something tangible, too. | ||
| Yes, so you could learn it on the internet. | ||
| You could just read a book. | ||
| You could learn it in school. | ||
| Any possible method of learning the material. | ||
| is equally rewarded, so it doesn't go and throw money to high school civics teachers | ||
| who have manifestly failed to actually generate a knowledgeable public. | ||
| Instead, it just opens it up to say there's a war for knowing stuff. | ||
| However you learn it is fine. | ||
| But the other reason why you do it every year is because there's enormous evidence in educational | ||
| psychology that people generally forget what they learn very quickly. | ||
| So on test day, actually, I believe that most of the students in the civics class probably | ||
| actually kind of knew their stuff. | ||
| But what psychologists call fade-out is so enormous. | ||
| Just like in one year, out the next, if you don't keep testing it, you don't keep using it, you lose it. | ||
| So if you have the test every year, this would actually lead to retention of knowledge over time, where people would not immediately forget the material as soon as they learned it, because like, wow, I need to know it next year, and the year after that, every year I can get another hundred bucks off of showing that I know my stuff. | ||
| And you don't think there's a way to privatize that, then, too? | ||
| So, you know, you could do it with charity. | ||
| I mean, like, this is legal and no charity has done it, so I'm not too optimistic about it happening. | ||
| But yeah, like, if some donor right now is interested in doing this, this would be great. | ||
| But anyway, this would be so much cheaper than all the high school social sciences classes that we offer right now. | ||
| Whenever he throws a test, people often start freaking out, who's gonna write the test? | ||
| And I say, well, look, Right now, a key part of civics is knowing the answers the teacher wants to hear. | ||
| As long as you know that there's a certain bias on the official civics test, you just fake it. | ||
| In order to do well on it, you still have to learn a bunch of stuff. | ||
| I had so many college classes where I disagreed with the professor. | ||
| I learned what the answers they wanted to hear, but I also learned the material at the same time. | ||
| There's no reason why you couldn't apply the same thing. | ||
| So I don't see that it's really such a terrible deal. | ||
| Yeah, I'd love to see the fade out rate for kids the day after the SATs, | ||
| 'cause I remember studying for that thing, and I had a tutor with a little group of friends, | ||
| but I remember thinking, man, when I'm done with this thing, I am gonna let go of all this. | ||
| And if I had taken the test probably a week later, I probably got a half the score or something. | ||
| I mean, this is some of the most interesting research in psychology. | ||
| So, there's a lot of research on fade-out in school, where you go and you teach the kid something, and then you go and measure it one or two years later in school. | ||
| But the really scary fade-out is from school to adulthood. | ||
| Because the kids in school, at least they kind of know, I'm gonna have to learn this again, I might get tested on it again. | ||
| But once you finally graduate, that's it, that's the end. | ||
| So there's a fantastic study of retention of higher mathematics throughout life. | ||
| And like, algebra and geometry, like within a couple decades, | ||
| most people took those classes, just know, or back to where they were | ||
| before they even actually started the classes. | ||
| The only people who remember their algebra and geometry are people who go all the way up to calculus. | ||
| So you go all the way to calculus, then you go and retain algebra and geometry | ||
| for the rest of your life. | ||
| But you have to go way beyond a subject to actually retain the basics. | ||
| And this all fits with, like, use it or lose it, or Tiger Mom Amy Chu has a great slogan, like, every day you don't practice is the day you get worse. | ||
| So this does go with why bother teaching people things they're just going to forget anyway. | ||
| This is part of my critique of what's wrong with throwing so much money at education. | ||
| Of course, none of this denies that schools do teach some useful material. | ||
| But again, my view is, all right, again, so for the useful material, most people can pay for it, | ||
| most people's parents can pay for it. And then if there's going to be any role for government, | ||
| let it be for the small minority of kids whose parents are not able to take care of them or | ||
| charity's not taking care of them. And then for just that last sliver of people, | ||
| if there's going to be a role for government, let it be that. So don't throw money at a problem. | ||
| There's going to be money, let it be narrowly targeted. Be mindful that you are taking money | ||
| from taxpayers without their consent. And a minimum, you owe them a responsibility to spend | ||
| the money well. I think that seems like a really basic thing. - I think we've given up that. | ||
| It's one thing to say, look, this is so important that you have to pay whether you like it or not, too bad, but then go and spend that money heedlessly? | ||
| That seems like a true human rights abuse to take someone for money at gunpoint and then just blow it. | ||
| Like without saying, "Well, maybe this will do something, who knows?" | ||
| Maybe if that's your attitude, you shouldn't have taken my money. | ||
| Maybe you should have asked me, but you shouldn't have made me if that's all you've got. | ||
| All right, let's shift slightly from economics, which by the way, I want to tell you that I think most of my audience I think is classically liberal or libertarian, I think is the big chunk of it. | ||
| They're gonna be with you on a lot of this. | ||
| So let's get to some stuff that I think that they may not be with you as much. | ||
| So let's talk about borders and immigration for a second, or for a couple minutes at least. | ||
| You're an open borders guy. | ||
| I am, yes. | ||
| So with everything going on in the world right now, give me your best pitch for open borders, which I am not. | ||
| Alright, with everything going on in the world. | ||
| So, first step is to say the stuff you see on the news is so statistically rare that no sensible person would even worry about it very much. | ||
| So, terrorism. | ||
| Like, on the news all the time, it is one of the smallest problems on earth. | ||
| So, if you just go and look at the data, and you will see, alright, so, deaths from murder is like under 1% of all deaths, and terrorist murders under 1% of all murders. | ||
| So why is it that people are so worried about it and we have spent over a trillion dollars in the war on terror? | ||
| Because it is vivid. | ||
| Because it is emotionally affecting. | ||
| So I'd say, like, the first thing that we have to do is calm down and apply numeracy. | ||
| And just, like, say, like, here's a problem. | ||
| Everyone's worried about it. | ||
| Is it really a serious problem that we should be concerned about or not? | ||
| And I say like terrorism is probably the strongest, most emotional critique people have of immigration. | ||
| And yet it is not actually a sensible thing to be worried about. | ||
| But how much of it is because what we're doing is actually working? | ||
| So that we know we're keeping out a certain amount of people who would love to come in here | ||
| and blow things up and murder people. | ||
| So what I'd say is there's a lot of ways that we could go and test whether the stuff that we have is working. | ||
| So there's a great political scientist, John Mueller, has a book called Overblown going over all of it. | ||
| So one thing we can do is just look at a word called near misses. | ||
| So you can go and see how many terrorist plots are that failed, which gives us an idea how much is what we're currently doing actually working. | ||
| So like the shoe bomber, for example. | ||
| Yeah, things like that. | ||
| So when you go and expand the sample to all the failed cases, and especially when you go and look carefully, not just at things that the government classifies as terrorism so they can go and do a photo op, but things that actually, when you really look, it was an actual terrorist plot where they had done something more than say, we should have a terrorist plot. | ||
| Again, it still remains incredibly rare. | ||
| Now, another test, this is actually one of my favorite ones, is for all the people who think that it's really easy to get in from Mexico, it should mean that it's really easy for a terrorist to get in from Mexico. | ||
| And yet, the actual number that have done this is extremely small. | ||
| In fact, I'm not sure there's been any case of any terrorist crossing from Mexico and doing anything. | ||
| So again, if you were someone who thinks that the border is poorly guarded right now, Then it doesn't make a lot of sense to think that current anti-terrorist policies are preventing a lot just because it's so easy for them to do this. | ||
| Now, I would say that, or actually our border is guarded very well in the sense that people pay about $4,000 to get smuggled across. | ||
| So for the kind of people who are smugglers, who are coming across the border, that's several years income. | ||
| It's a big deal. | ||
| It's a big deal for a rural Mexican farm worker, but it's not a big deal for a serious terrorist. | ||
| If you're a serious terrorist and you can't come up with $5,000 for your plot, then you're a joke. | ||
| I think the idea that there really is a serious problem, or that we have done much about it, is I think just wrong. | ||
| There's stuff on the news that some people really care about. | ||
| What is the case in favor of open borders? | ||
| It's the kind of thing that you almost never see on the news. | ||
| There's the economic case and the human rights case. | ||
| The economic case is very simple. | ||
| It just says that the The very best way that we know of increasing the production of mankind is to move people from poor countries to rich countries. | ||
| It is almost like magic. | ||
| You take a Haitian who's making a dollar a day in Port-au-Prince, move to Miami, and suddenly he's making $40 a day. | ||
| All right, so, like, his productivity increases by a factor of 40, and you're like, how is that possible? | ||
| Right, Neil? | ||
| So he probably doesn't even speak English at first, he just speaks French. | ||
| And, you know, the answer is his labor is extremely unproductive in Haiti and extremely productive in the United States. | ||
| Even very unskilled workers produce far more in rich countries than they do in poor countries. | ||
| Poor countries are screwed up in so many ways. | ||
| So, this is one of the most amazing things that you can do about poverty, is to move people from poor countries to rich countries, and then overnight, what they can accomplish multiplies, and not by like 10% or 20%, by 5 times, 10 times, 20 times. | ||
| It is amazing. | ||
| And of course, if you understand the basics of trade, this doesn't just benefit the immigrant, it benefits everyone who's consuming that product. | ||
| It benefits all the stuff that the immigrants make. | ||
| I mean, right now Haiti is pretty much irrelevant to the global economy. | ||
| If you were to move those Haitians to Florida, suddenly the global economy would be richer by a very large amount. | ||
| And again, a lot of the actual production would be consumed not just by the Haitians, but would be consumed by the people that are eating in Haitian restaurants, by the people that are hiring Haitian nannies, or Haitian gardeners. | ||
| All these things that right now currently are not happening. | ||
| Now, when economists have just tried to get an estimate, like how much are we losing from these border restrictions, from trapping all this valuable labor in poor countries, a pretty common estimate is that immigration restrictions are halving the production of the world. | ||
| We would be, the world would be twice as rich if anyone could take a job anywhere. | ||
| And again, it's thinking like, what could you accomplish in Haiti? | ||
| So you are actually, you might be able to reset up the Riverport in Haiti. | ||
| I could do a whole other show in Haiti. | ||
| Yes, although you'd have trouble getting your guests. | ||
| But my mortgage would be so cheap I could fly them in, I guess. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| But in general, most people, when you picture what could I do in Haiti, it's very little. | ||
| The main difference between So between Haitians and Americans is that Haitians are stuck in Haiti. | ||
| And yes, so it's true that their skills are low by American standards, but they can do so much more here than they can do back at home. | ||
| So what does, when people say open borders, what does that actually mean? | ||
| You mean that, could people just wander in from Canada and Mexico all the time? | ||
| I mean, literally, are we shutting down the places that they walk through? | ||
| Well, so I would say that means, I would call that no borders. | ||
| I'd be willing to defend that too, but that's not my main pitch. | ||
| My main pitch is Open Borders, where the way I think about it is, unless someone belongs in jail, he can move to any country he wants, he can live there, and he can work there. | ||
| What does that mean though? | ||
| So you're a Canadian, you want to come to the United States, you walk through the sanctioned border, even though you said you'd potentially be for the other thing, but you walk through, are you a citizen that day? | ||
| So again, I said, so you can live there, you can work there. | ||
| It doesn't make you a citizen. | ||
| So maybe you're never, so again, to me, the heart of open borders isn't citizenship, it's the right to live and the right to work. | ||
| I'm not against that, but I'm also not strongly for that. | ||
| You're gonna do this for an unlimited amount of time because then in effect, | ||
| you're probably gonna get all the rights of a citizen at some point. | ||
| You might, but so again, I'm not against that, but again, that is not, | ||
| but I'm also not strongly for that. | ||
| What I'm strongly for is the right of any human being who doesn't belong in jail to live and work | ||
| in any country that he wants. | ||
| So again, I already mentioned the economic case. | ||
| I mean, to me, the human rights case is basically, look, this is a human being. | ||
| There's someone who wants to rent him an apartment right here. | ||
| There's someone who wants to hire him here. | ||
| What business does any stranger have saying no? | ||
| So I have compared immigration laws to Jim Crow laws. | ||
| I said the main difference is that immigration laws are worse. | ||
| Jim Crow law said that there are some areas where blacks couldn't live in the United States. | ||
| There are some jobs blacks couldn't take. | ||
| What our immigration laws say is that if you are a Mexican citizen, there is no place in the country you can legally live, and no job in the country you can legally work. | ||
| That seems way worse than Jim Crow. | ||
| And again, what's the difference? | ||
| Well, you have to become a citizen, and then you can do those things. | ||
| But becoming a citizen is almost impossible for someone who's born a Mexican citizen, unless, of course, you have a close-blood relative. | ||
| You are generally out of luck. | ||
| I mean, sort of the idea of, why don't they just go and get in line? | ||
| The answer is, for most people on Earth who want to come, the line lasts hundreds of years. | ||
| They could never legally come. | ||
| The conditions for legal immigration, if you were a low skilled worker, it's pretty much limited to having a close blood relative already in the U.S. | ||
| or marriage. | ||
| There's a couple other ways of doing it, but those are extraordinarily rare. | ||
| So for most people in the third world right now, there is no possibility they will ever | ||
| be admitted no matter what. | ||
| And again, to me, it's like, well, why is it that because the person chose the wrong | ||
| parents, they were born in the wrong country, that they have to be stuck living in Haiti | ||
| their whole life? | ||
| So people can very easily see the injustice saying because someone is born black, you | ||
| are stuck living in black areas of the United States, and you can only be a janitor, you | ||
| can only go and we're and we're And you can only work as a porter on a train or something like that. | ||
| And it's like, why is it that he has to be treated differently just because he chose the wrong parents? | ||
| And to me, this argument is a very powerful one in saying, well, how is that different from choosing to have Haitian parents? | ||
| Of course, the point is, no one chooses parents. | ||
| It's something that happened before you're born. | ||
| Why is it that a person, if you can go and find a willing landlord, find a willing employer, why can't he say yes to those jobs and come and live here and work here? | ||
| So would there be an inherent problem that if, okay, you let all these people in, now they're not citizens per se, so they don't have the right to vote, but they're here, they're using our economy, they're contributing to our economy, all that, all the good stuff that you said, that eventually we could get a situation where you might have parity of the amount of people that are voting and the people that are living here. | ||
| That seems like it could become a problem. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Again, I would say it's not clear why that's a problem. | ||
| One of the main things about immigrants is they tend to be apolitical. | ||
| When you move to a new country, normally your concerns are, I've got to find a good place to live, I've got to go and get a job, take care of my kids. | ||
| Getting involved in the politics of the country is usually the last thing on people's minds when they first come. | ||
| One of the strangest complaints about immigrants to me is that they have low voting rates. | ||
| I mean, I've heard people say, well, first they vote the wrong way, and second of all, they don't vote. | ||
| It's like, well, you pick one of the two complaints, at least. | ||
| In terms of what their kids will do, so again, under current U.S. | ||
| law, there's birthright citizenship, so their kids would be, and what I would say there is the United States has a long tradition of assimilating the children of immigrants. | ||
| It's worked very well for American history. | ||
| And people often think, well, yeah, it worked back then, back when we really tried to assimilate them, | ||
| but it doesn't work anymore. | ||
| What I can say is for the things that we measure, things are as good now as they were in the Ellis Island | ||
|
unidentified
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days. | |
| So especially for language competence, it was never true that-- | ||
| But do we have something special here in America that they don't have in Europe? | ||
| So for example, I agree with you that there, and I think there's a lot of evidence of it, | ||
| that people still do assimilate more here. | ||
| But where Europe is having a problem with assimilation, which is a culture problem, and that's different, right? | ||
| Right, so two things. | ||
| First thing is I'd say that a lot of the problems that people talk about are primarily problems on television. | ||
| So there's an enormous amount of assimilation going in Europe, but that's not TV. | ||
| You don't go and have a TV show saying, you know, an enormous number of Pakistanis now like soccer and root for Manchester United and speak with British accents and have British jobs and do regular stuff. | ||
| That's not a story. | ||
| Whereas, here's a neighborhood, it's a no-go area where the regular British police dare not travel for fear of what might happen to them. | ||
| Sharia law might come at any moment. | ||
| The scimitar might come out. | ||
| That's a story. | ||
| All right, so first step is always to separate scary stories from statistical reality. | ||
| And what I say is it is true that Europe does a worse job of getting assimilation than the U.S. | ||
| They still have a lot of assimilation. | ||
| I remember like the last time I was in Paris, I was amazed at all the assimilation that I saw. | ||
| Just walking downtown and seeing people from all over the world, but they're looking and acting French. | ||
| You know, they're smoking cigarettes in a French way. | ||
| It was like, wow. | ||
| Eating cheese. | ||
| It's like, wow, that guy looks like he's from Chad or something like that, but he has the turtleneck. | ||
| You actually see a lot of assimilation. | ||
| It's true they have less assimilation, but there, you're saying, is there something special that we have? | ||
| See, there's something special we have is a more restrictive welfare state. | ||
| So again, it varies a lot by country. | ||
| It's important to realize that. | ||
| But European countries in general do have much more expensive welfare states, especially that make it easier to be on welfare for your entire life. | ||
| And I think this does great harm to their assimilation because one of the best ways of assimilating | ||
| is to go to a job and to go interact with people that aren't from your culture. | ||
| Of course, a lot of the workers won't be, even if all the workers, | ||
| if you go and work in a Chadian restaurant, even then a lot of your customers won't be from Chad | ||
| and so you will get to know them, you'll interact with them. | ||
| Of course, you need to go and learn the language, but also you get to know people. | ||
| And this is the kind of assimilation that has been greatly undermined | ||
| by European welfare states. | ||
| Again, it's important to realize, so there's actually two kinds of things going on. | ||
| One of them is a lot of free government money. | ||
| Another one is labor market regulations that raise the price of labor, that make it hard to get a job. | ||
| And you put those two things together, that's when you have a recipe for people living their whole life on it. | ||
| So you'd say, well, maybe they might like to get a job, but if it's really hard to get a job because of regulation, and you get enough money to stay alive, That's where you are likely to say, fine, screw it, I'm just gonna go and live in my ghetto and I'll never even learn French and I'm just gonna stay here and I'm gonna be bitter. | ||
| So people think that those things are at odds with each other, open borders and a welfare state in a way, but basically you're saying if you open the border and you took away the welfare state at the same time, you actually force assimilation. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| So, you know, not literally forced. | ||
| That's not forced advice. | ||
| You create conditions. | ||
| Yeah, but the current system, especially in Europe, is heavily subsidizing non-assimilation, right? | ||
| And I think that's a mistake. | ||
| And again, I think it's a case where people so naturally scapegoat immigrants for the problem when, you know, like you say, well, we have some really crummy laws, which actually would lead a lot of people to go. | ||
| And of course, plenty of people who are native-born, French, who go back, who have their ancestors were Gauls. | ||
| Plenty of people like this are also in France, sitting around, being supported by the welfare state for their entire life. | ||
| Which again, so important to remember, it's not just people being lazy, it's also being very discouraged that the regulations make it so hard to get a job. | ||
| Yeah, so I get your point about the forcing, once people are here, and then we put them on this, and then they're sort of stuck, and that creates resentment, and then people resent them for that, and all that stuff. | ||
| What about the culture part of it? | ||
| We do have to acknowledge that cultures are different. | ||
| That they respect different things. | ||
| They honor different things. | ||
| Not every culture is tolerant. | ||
| And that we could eventually start bringing in people who are intolerant of our freedoms. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Regardless of whether that's overblown on the news or not. | ||
| I get your point. | ||
| I think it is overblown. | ||
| Theoretically possible, yes. | ||
| But here's the striking thing. | ||
| All over the world, in the most repressive countries, what is it that they feel about culture? | ||
| They feel like America is destroying their culture. | ||
| In Iran, they've long had this word they call West Toxification. | ||
| West toxification. | ||
| It's the idea that there's all these horrible Western ideas flooding into Iran, alienating our children, destroying Islam. | ||
| And here's what I say. | ||
| They're right. | ||
| Because Western culture is awesome. | ||
| People around the world love it, especially young people. | ||
| And if governments around the world want to stop it, they have to resort to extreme measures in order to keep it out. | ||
| And what does immigration do? | ||
| It brings people Straight to the Western culture, where their governments can no longer get between them and the culture. | ||
| And the main thing that happens is that people go native, right? | ||
| So again, there's always some people on the news who are refusing to do it, but there's a much larger group of people who move to the West and they may pay lip service to their home culture, but they actually go and assimilate to the new culture. | ||
| Here's my favorite test. | ||
| If you want to go and find out how much assimilation is there, talk to any immigrant parent. | ||
| And what will they tell you? | ||
| Do immigrant parents say, oh yeah, my kid just loves Romanian culture. | ||
| All he thinks about is Romania, Romania, Romania all day. | ||
| Being Romanian is so central to his life. | ||
| No. | ||
| My wife is from Romania, so the normal thing for a Romanian immigrant parent, just like almost any immigrant parent, It's to say, I thought we could preserve our culture, but my kid just doesn't care about it. | ||
| I talked to my kid in Romanian, and they'd answer me back in English. | ||
| My grandkids don't speak a word of Romanian. | ||
| They have no interest in this stuff. | ||
| So basically Americanism or Westernism will actually win. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| So I have a blog post called Western Civilization is a Hardy Weed. | ||
| And he says, look, I believe in Western civilization much more than most of the people who say they defend it. | ||
| Because I think we are winning right now, and I think with open borders we will win sooner. | ||
| This is the kind of thing where someone watching it in Iran might say, aha, I knew Kaplan had a plot! | ||
| Yes, and this is my plot. | ||
| So I do think that Western Civilization is the better civilization in most ways. | ||
| I'm always happy to learn from other cultures and to have a cosmopolitan combination of all the best things. | ||
| But nevertheless, I think that when we compile all the best things in the world, I think 80% of the stuff is going to come from Western Civilization. | ||
| So maybe we'll pick up the work ethic from China or something like that. | ||
| We'll revitalize the work ethic. | ||
| So I think they've got something to offer there. | ||
| But my plan is to go and spread Western civilization more quickly and effectively through immigration. | ||
| I'd say it is working right here, right now. | ||
| Even in Los Angeles, where people look around and say, I don't see people assimilating. | ||
| Always look at, well, what is the generation of the immigrant? | ||
| If it's a first generation immigrant, then sure they haven't assimilated. | ||
| They never did. | ||
| It was never true that first generation immigrants became fluent in English if they arrived in their 20s. | ||
| They always had trouble, they always stuck to the old ways. | ||
| Assimilation has always worked on the second generation. | ||
| If you go and talk to a second generation Mexican immigrant in L.A., the odds that he'll speak fluent English are 90%. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And even kids who are first generation, as long as they came when they were young, so fluent English, by far the norm. | ||
| So again, I've just been going over this data. | ||
| So again, the main reason why we feel like Hispanic immigrants aren't assimilating is just because in the past it was normal to have one generation wave of Germans and then it stopped. | ||
| One generation wave of Swedes or Italians and then it stopped. | ||
| So then in a couple generations there's no longer any Italians in America who don't speak English. | ||
| But it's not because the first generation learned English. | ||
| It's because the first generation died and Italians stopped coming. | ||
| So, again, I don't see that when you understand what assimilation is about, it's about changing the second generation. | ||
| It's still going on at enormous levels. | ||
| So we are anglicizing Latin America right now. | ||
| Yeah, the wave part of this is interesting, because I think when people talk about the Ellis Island thing, and they think of, you know, like the Lower East Side of Brooklyn, you know, in New York City, and then in Brooklyn, you know, from 60 years ago, when all these Irish and German and Jews and all these other people came, that yeah, it was that first generation that worked incredibly hard, barely spoke the language, lived more sheltered, and then the rest of what you said basically happened, and they moved throughout the thing. | ||
| All right, let's do one more thing before I let you go. | ||
| Pacifism! | ||
| All right. | ||
| Now my policy on this, by the way, did not look at the notes once, which is a good interview. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So you've already done well, pacifism. | ||
| My particular policy on this is that I believe in a strong defense, basically so that we don't have to use it. | ||
| I don't want a nation build, I don't think we should be all over the place creating empires and all that, but I do believe you need a strong defense so that people won't mess with you. | ||
| How do you like that? | ||
| Yeah, well, so if you want peace, prepare for war. | ||
| Ancient Rome was saying, So, I just want to step back and say, so what is pacifism and then what is the argument for it? | ||
| So again, by pacifism I don't mean never resisting violence. | ||
| So I don't mean that if someone is coming at you with an axe you shouldn't fight back or anything like that. | ||
| Rather what I mean by pacifism is opposition to war. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so you have violence organized by governments. | ||
| So how exactly is that different? | ||
| The answer is that war is actually almost never defensive. | ||
| In the sense that war almost always involves either deliberately murdering or recklessly killing innocent people. | ||
| Right, so isn't it theoretically possible that it wouldn't be that way? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But in practice, any time you fight any kind of a serious war, you either wind up deliberately murdering a whole bunch of civilians, or you wind up recklessly endangering them, where you go and you drop a bomb in the general vicinity of a whole bunch of civilians and you kill them. | ||
| It's collateral damage, what's the big deal? | ||
| If the police fought crime the same way that the U.S. | ||
| government wages war, this would be way bigger protest than anything that we're getting right now. | ||
| You need to go and do so. | ||
| I'd say you're now so I mean like so lately a minimum just seems to me like there is some moral problem with war so which again is glossed over by the idea well it's we're just defending ourselves well normally you're defending yourself by as well as by murdering a bunch of innocent people So, you know, at first glance this seems like it's a problem. | ||
| People often want to say, no, there's no innocents on the other side. | ||
| It's like, there's no innocent babies in the other country. | ||
| There's no one who's never done anything. | ||
| Seems like this is a pretty flimsy defense. | ||
| And then there's also the, well, anyone we kill is totally on the hands of the bad guys that we're fighting against. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So what if you went and bombed people in the neighboring country? | ||
| Would that be on the hands of the bad guys, too? | ||
| Is there some limit to what you can blame on the bad guys? | ||
| I mean, it's one thing if you've got someone holding a hostage right there and they're shooting. | ||
| But again, what if, say, there's a school next to a criminal? | ||
| Can you go and bomb the school because, well, that's on him. | ||
| The fact that we killed all the kids in that school, that's sad, but we were just trying to get that one murderer. | ||
| It seems like a very flimsy defense. | ||
| Now again, I am actually never an absolutist. | ||
| So I'm always willing to say, maybe we have to do this terrible thing for the greater good. | ||
| So I always want to be open to that argument. | ||
| But that's where I say, let's actually go and carefully look at how great is this good and how certain can you really be that you got it. | ||
| So, just to back up, the argument for Vestman's first step is just accepting the harsh reality that war is not really defensive. | ||
| It does involve actually going and murdering or at least manslaughtering a whole lot of innocent people. | ||
| And no matter, the nicest country that wages war, the most careful one, does this. | ||
| With modern weaponry, it would be hard to do otherwise. | ||
| Can that be in and of itself moral, though? | ||
| So in the case of World War II, where we weren't our homeland, well, Pearl Harbor, but our homeland wasn't threatened by the Nazis, per se. | ||
| We killed a lot of people, and the Allies firebombed Dresden and all that, but we also then saved a lot of lives. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So again, that's the next step. | ||
| The first step is just accepting that the United States government murdered a lot of innocent people. | ||
| The United States government murdered children. | ||
| They did the kind of thing that we attack terrorists for, which is murdering a bunch of innocent people because you think it's for the greater good. | ||
| Normally, when we say terrorists are terrible people for this, we don't have some big factual argument about how what they're doing isn't really for the greater good. | ||
| It's like, you murdered innocent people. | ||
| That's a terrible thing to do. | ||
| There's at least a moral presumption against this, which maybe can be overcome, again, for the greater good. | ||
| But that's where I say that there's this great philosophical example involving a doctor who's got five patients who each need a different organ donation. | ||
| And then a guy walks by, who happens to be perfectly healthy, and the doctor thinks, maybe I should go and murder that guy, and harvests his organs, and then he searches it, he has no family, no one's really going to miss this guy, I can save five lives by murdering one person, seems like a good idea. | ||
| Alright, now, people's normal reaction to this is that's horrible, and if you start ramping up the number... I want to know a little more about the guy. | ||
| You start ramping up the numbers. | ||
| Maybe it's a million people. | ||
| All right. | ||
| But anyway, at least that 5 to 1 ratio seems to really bother people and say, no, you can't go and deliberately murder a person to save five other people. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So it is this premise that I bring in in my case against war saying, look, all right now, maybe that there's a war for the greater good, but are you actually getting something like this 5 to 1 ratio? | ||
| Right? | ||
| And furthermore, how confident can you really be? | ||
| And that's where I bring in the last body of evidence, which is that people's predictions about the results of war are terrible. | ||
| So again, the whole idea of prediction is you have to say what you think is going to happen before it happens, and then you look at what occurs and see how accurate your prediction was. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| All right, so there is a fantastic political psychologist named Phil Tetlock who ran a big experiment along these lines. | ||
| So in the 1980s, he went and asked a bunch of foreign policy experts their predictions, and then 20 years later came back and weighed their predictions against the actual results, and they did really badly. | ||
| Right, and so this is experimental evidence on people's ability to forecast the actual long-run benefits of war are very poor. | ||
| Of course, we don't really need to do experiments. | ||
| We can just go to the views about what would have happened in World War I where all sides are saying, out of the trenches by Christmas. | ||
| No one is saying, I think this will end in communist revolution. | ||
| And certainly no one was saying, well, I think the long run result of this will be a communist regime in North Korea, a country that doesn't even exist right now. | ||
| And yet, if you know your history, that is the key event in why there's communism in North Korea. | ||
| So now if you snap these pieces together, so moral presumption against war, 5 to 1 ratio, something like that minimum in order for it to be justified, and then finally great uncertainty about what the effects of war are. | ||
| That's where I get my case for pacifism. | ||
| It's like anytime there is a war, anytime there is someone proposing a war, my actions are right. | ||
| So like first of all, so is it Is it even plausible that you are going to save five times as many lives as you are gonna murder here? | ||
| And is it reasonable to be that confident, given how bad most people's track records are? | ||
| And if you put that together, then I say that for almost any actual war, it's really hard to make the case in its favor. | ||
| So let's say there were some terrorists in Tijuana firing rockets into San Diego, where you're going in a couple of days. | ||
| And they keep firing these rockets, or they're sending people in to shoot people in San Diego or something. | ||
| You would be for doing something about that. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Taking police action, absolutely. | ||
| Like normal police action, not bombing Tijuana. | ||
| I mean, I think that's a case where as long as they were Muslim terrorists in Tijuana, I don't think most Americans would favor bombing Tijuana. | ||
| Even if the Mexicans were floundering around and couldn't figure out what to do, I don't think so. | ||
| As long as the Mexicans said, you can go and send in American troops to deal with this, but don't go bombing us. | ||
| Don't go machine gunning whole villages of people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I have no objection to anything like that, but anytime someone starts talking about waging war with modern weaponry, where you're going to start murdering, inevitably murder or manslaughter, right? | ||
| Of course to murder you have to be trying to kill them. | ||
| Manslaughter is just when you recklessly endanger them. | ||
| But anytime you're talking about something like that, that's where my pacifist scruples get in the way. | ||
| This is another case where when someone fights a war and it ends really badly, then it's like, well, what can you do? | ||
| But if someone opposes a war and it ends really badly, it's like, ah-ha, pacifism is a terrible idea. | ||
| People like you have caused all these problems. | ||
| Yes, so I would say it is a fair historical point to say almost every historian or anyone who knows any facts about World War I would say, look, it just would have been better if any one of the major powers had just surrendered. | ||
| If any one of the major powers in World War I had just said, look, we give in, you win, we'll do what you want, and that would have prevented so many terrible things, most obviously World War II. | ||
| And yet people will say, well, look, pacifism would have led to disaster in World War II. | ||
| Well, if we'd been pacifists, there wouldn't have been a World War I, so maybe we should get credit for that. | ||
| It's almost like actions lead to other actions. | ||
| Actions lead to other actions. | ||
| Now again, notice I'm not claiming that we have no clue at all about what a war will do. | ||
| So the uncertainty by itself doesn't really argue for or against war. | ||
| It's the uncertainty combined with this high threshold. | ||
| I'm saying you've got to actually know that you're saving five times as many lives as you're killing before we should even be talking about this. | ||
| And that's where the uncertainty is hard, because it is a barrier to war. | ||
| Because, you know, like saying it's a close call, well, like saying a pacifist says, all close calls go to peace. | ||
| Don't fight if it's a close call. | ||
| Because you're murdering innocent people, so there's a very high threshold of responsibility. | ||
| So, higher even than the one of if you're spending taxpayer money, you ought to know you're really doing something good with it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I have thoroughly enjoyed this. | ||
| We barely got into half of what I was gonna talk about, but we're gonna do this again. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| All right, awesome. | ||
| Yeah, sounds great. | ||
| Yeah, I really enjoyed this, and I hope you guys did, too. |
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