Tyler Cowen, a George Mason University professor and author of Stubborn Attachments, joins Dave Rubin to discuss his "small L libertarian" philosophy, advocating for freer markets, social liberalism, and deregulated professions like barbing while opposing aggressive foreign policy. Cowen critiques Universal Basic Income in favor of targeted support, supports nuclear energy to combat climate change, and proposes open borders with Canada alongside tech visa expansions for undocumented immigrants. He argues that Democrats' focus on taxing the rich inadvertently aids Republicans, suggesting a centrist future where innovation outpaces regulation and technology mobilizes global talent. Ultimately, the conversation envisions a prosperous society driven by individual liberty, secular values, and gratitude rather than state overreach or ideological duopolies. [Automatically generated summary]
Joining me today is a professor of economics at George Mason University, the host of Conversations with Tyler podcast, and the author of Stubborn Attachments, a Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals.
Now, I did your podcast once, and I believe that the first question you asked me was, do I like being on the interviewing side or in the interview side?
I spent the first half of my life being interviewed, the last fifth of my life being the interviewer for 58 segments, and now I'm being interviewed, so for me... So we come full circle and then around, halfway around again or something?
There's less preparation when you're being interviewed, so that's easier.
There's enough of the NBA, especially with the internet and YouTube.
And it's a way of thinking about talent evaluation, rules of the game, technical innovations, conceptual breakthroughs, how to get a group of people to cooperate.
How do you figure out where the right spot for government to do some things is?
Because I'm sure there's libertarians that maybe are big L libertarians that are going, all right, well, even if the anti-smoking thing worked, it's not the purview of government to do such things.
I don't think people should ever go to jail for smoking pot, say, and we're moving in that direction.
I never expected that, say, 15 years ago.
Gay rights, gay marriage, again, it wasn't clear a while ago that would happen.
That's great.
In those areas, people have been very protective and fought hard for good changes, but when it comes to economics, I see too much resentment and too much shrillness, and just a belief that most, say, billionaires out there somehow didn't earn their wealth, and it's our job to take it from them.
You know, he got a yacht, and she doesn't seem to understand that a lot of people were employed to build that yacht and all the resources that went into that yacht, but she thinks she has a moral right.
That seems to be coming out of the left a lot these days.
Cortez is doing this, that there's a moral right to take people's money who have too much.
Do you think that, like when Elizabeth Warren or one of these people that always want to tax more and more and more, Do you think they actually believe it's the right thing to do, or that they believe it's a cold, calculating political move, even though your argument is that it doesn't make sense politically?
Like, I don't imagine them doing things that are against what they believe will work politically.
I think you're probably right that it doesn't work, but it's hard to know if they know that it doesn't work.
The liberal Republicans of an earlier time, perhaps.
So, pro-immigration, definitely pro-free trade, which is running against a lot of the Republicans right now.
Other than, say, climate change issues, I would deregulate most of our economy.
I would have much more freedom to build in San Francisco or Manhattan.
I would have radical reforms to K-12 education with much greater choice, just a lot more experimentation.
I would never send people to jail.
for doing drugs, unless they're selling drugs to minors.
I'm not sure all drugs should be totally legal, but just kind of in a safe space off to the side.
And I would welcome a not-so-polarized America where there's tolerance and a very strong center and some real belief about the importance of America's role in the world, but more about building alliances than being aggressive.
Yeah, I mean, I'm there on everything you just said.
And I do think that empty center that you just referenced is actually starting to get filled up with people that have had it with both sides, which is, I guess, heartening, but we've got our work cut out for us.
I write for Bloomberg, so I'm reluctant to say Mike Bloomberg of the Democrats, but he is, in fact, my favorite, with the caveat that I write for Bloomberg.
There's much about Donald Trump I disagree with, but he was effective because he decided not doing the Reform Party bid from the late 90s, but he would work through one of the two major parties.
So on most of the issues that you talked about, in terms of regulation and freeing the economy and things like that, you've got to be pretty pleased with Trump.
Is there a way, because our system is so huge and our federal government is so big, is there really a way to do a lot of this?
I think people sort of hear the idea of let's roll back regulation, let's, you know, drain the swamp, all of these phrases that sound good, but then they get in office and they realize that this giant federal monster that is just sucking money and employing all sorts of people that probably it shouldn't and all this, that it just doesn't change.
I'm glad we let Facebook and Uber happen and that no one had to ask permission.
Do this company sometimes make mistakes?
Yes.
Are they perfect?
No.
Are we better off having them?
Absolutely.
If Uber had had to ask permission, imagine that.
Oh, like 10 years from now we'll do a pilot plan where like maybe a fifth of the drivers in Seattle do ride-sharing and most cities say no, and they just did it.
Right, and it always becomes a giant government boondoggle anyway.
If you look at New York City taxis, it used to cost about a million bucks just to get one of those medallions, and then it's like there's no competition.
So what would you say to the person who would say, well, wait a minute, what if I go to get my hair cut and this person hasn't been licensed by the state and now they stab me in the head with a scissor?
So, okay, so you talked a little bit about the tech side of this.
Why is it that it seems to me that the people that I know that are up in Silicon Valley and the tech world in general is very, very privately libertarian.
These people want to innovate.
They want competition.
They want to do exactly what you're saying, stay ahead of the regulators and figure out new ways to do all sorts of things.
But outwardly, these companies seem extremely left and extremely controlling and centralized.
A lot of highly educated California employees are very left-wing.
Those employees pressure their companies.
Also, a lot of tech companies have big contracts with the government, which puts them in somewhat of an awkward position.
And the ideal stance for many companies, tech or not, is just not to be in politics.
And I think most people in business would rather compete as a business or get a favor from the government.
But the tech companies, one of the miraculous things about them is, defense contracting aside, their core model has been to supply better products to users and not to curry favor with the state.
or if I look at Twitter I think they have supported far more freedom of
speech than they have hindered and if you even ask like which set of views
have been helped the most by YouTube and Twitter I suspect on average it's a mix
of like the right and some part of the radical left.
But I don't think overall right-wing ideas, and that's not even the correct way to put it, but I don't think they've been harmed by these media, quite the contrary.
So I'm not as worked up about that issue as some of my friends are.
I think the notion that a platform is not liable, say, for everything that platform is used for, as we set out in law in the 1990s, was a fantastic idea.
It helped the Internet grow as quickly as it did.
That equity capital could fund new ventures without being obsessed with liability issues.
No one even knew at the time what a smart thing that was to do.
So I was on your website this morning, MarginalRevolution.com, which first off, I love the name, but I want to get the tagline totally right here, small steps towards a much better world.
Well, I think the presidency of Trump shows how little influence a president has.
Trump is, in most ways, a weak president.
Most of his policy agenda has not happened.
The courts have overruled him.
Our Congress won't act.
Now the Democrats control the House.
So for me, the key is for ideas in broader society to change, to try to be like a personal role model for what you believe in, and just to have, like, your guy as president, your woman as president.
There's no such thing.
And if I were very happy about an election, I just wouldn't feel that good about it.
And it's the way you take people down and insult people.
So just the simple rule of how you treat people to their face, or talk to them to their face, that politics should be done by all those same rules.
And just being genteel, I get that doesn't solve our national problems, but it stops some things from getting worse, and that's slipping away right now.
Well, different people have different roles, right?
So maybe some people, it is their role to be a kind of Paul Revere of sorts.
But other people, you know, are role models and they should conduct civil intelligent conversations.
And that is catching.
I see that on the Internet.
So if you look at the best material on the internet, how smart it is, including a lot of podcasts and YouTube shows, compared to what people thought was possible in the age of network television, it's just astonishing, the intellectual level.
So I see right now, even sort of within my crew of intellectual dark web people, whatever this thing is, that there's sort of a split happening where there's a certain amount of people that think we have to, the institutions are changing, say academia and the media and New York Times and everybody else, that they're going through these massive changes and we're watching all sorts of layoffs all over journalism right now.
And there's a split where it's like some people are just like, let it burn, it deserves to burn, it's time for it to burn.
And there's another version that's like, well, if we don't prop these things up, you know, who the hell knows what's going to come on the other side?
It's that I believe that usually the things that I'm talking about here are the right set of ideas, and I don't mind having a difference of opinion, obviously, with guests, but trying to keep it relatively civil.
I'm worse at it on Twitter than I am in here.
Hopefully people can start thinking for themselves.
You know, one of the themes in my book, Stubborn Attachments, is on most issues, yes, you should do what you think is best, but the chance that you are exactly right is actually pretty low.
If you take a time period of like about a hundred years, and you had the American economy grow one percentage point lower over that time period, we would today have the national wealth of Mexico, not the United States.
So in any given year, a percentage point of growth, like maybe it's not that big a deal, but over time as it compounds, it's the difference between Riches and poverty, the ability to have a job where you're somewhat in control, the ability to have more scope for creative action in your life, the near certainty your children will not die when they're very young, to take care of your parents better, to have access to the best medicines, to be able to travel the world, all of these things.
And people want different things.
But wealthier societies do a much better job at giving us those things, including sustaining democracy.
So economic growth, in my view, is centrally important.
Why do you think so many people believe that that has not occurred here?
Or something like, people don't want to accept, I see this at colleges all the time when I go to talk to colleges, and these kids think that they're oppressed and that something horrible is happening in the United States right now.
And the only way that I've been able to break through to them, I always ask the same question.
And I've had nobody argue with me.
I say, does anyone in this room have it worse than their grandparents?
And it has yet to happen where someone raises their hand.
And now I'm sure it has happened where somebody's grandparents were super wealthy and lost it, but that would also be an argument sort of against leftist economics because it would show that you can lose a lot of wealth, which they would want because they don't want wealth to be accumulated.
But why do you think this idea that somehow things haven't gotten consistently so much better, which there is so much empirical evidence of, why do you think that hasn't taken root, say, with younger people?
Some of it, of course, is that younger people have not been on this earth for very long.
Some of it is we have taught too much egalitarianism.
Some of it is, I think, our society perhaps... Can you explain what you mean by that?
Egalitarianism is the notion that if one person has something and the other doesn't, That maybe that's automatically wrong, even if the other person's pretty well off or well off by world historical standards.
And I think that's very often a harmful ideology.
I would do more to teach like win-win plus economic growth types of thinking.
That America is a more secular society.
I think it just creates a vacuum.
I'm not myself religious, but I think religion plays an important role in giving us a framework, and when that framework is taken away, a lot of ideas enter the vacuum that can be harmful.
So is that what's happening, that they've sort of traded Religious thought or, you know, an unmoved mover or some sort of beginning of this whole thing.
They've traded it in for a series of ideas that are just about, I mean it sounds cliche, but how they feel now.
Because if you, I mean, I think you know, well, I know you know, you know a bit about my political evolution.
I mean, if you would have asked me five years ago that most of the people that I agree with would be libertarians and conservatives, or at the very least, even though I'm still It's a reason to be optimistic.
some of them are thrilled with gay marriage and I'm against the death penalty
and a whole bunch of other things, that these people would be extremely open
to always sitting down with me and on the other side, there's almost nothing left.
And we're reorganizing discourse around the internet.
Which is a good thing and will be a very good thing, but it's extremely painful for many people.
I think that's one of the big changes going on.
I actually think America is depolarizing.
I'm not saying that's a pleasant process, but if you go to someone in Congress, like, what do you think about free trade?
And you hear their opinion, right now you can't necessarily tell if they're a Republican or a Democrat.
Or someone who wants to increase, you know, Social Security, government spending.
They could be a Republican or a Democrat.
And that wasn't the case in, you know, 2011 or 2013.
So what people are calling polarization is the stakes are higher, what is possible through politics is becoming greater and grander, so there's more hatred, more mutual recrimination.
But people are just all over the map in terms of what they believe.
Some sense of personal mission in the old standard American Protestant sense, even if you're totally secular, to take that notion of a personal mission upon yourself and go and do it, to me, is just critically important.
Yeah, but also understand we have some origins as a Puritan nation.
I'm not saying be a Puritan, not at all.
But that has given America a cultural strength and ability to support people who do this in terms of openness and resources and the culture surrounding you, how much encouragement you will find, how big an audience you can build.
So early things like blogging, now podcasting, just how American those are, we take for granted.
But it's a deep, fundamentally important truth.
That Americans, or sometimes Canadians, Jordan Peterson, have been the leaders in this area.
I think Australia and Canada, as countries, are in pretty good shape.
Not with respect to political liberty, but in many areas.
I'm a fan of Singapore.
They have done economic policy very very well, and they have become overall freer than they used to be.
You know, Western Europe in some ways has a wonderful lifestyle, but for me it's somewhat deadening and not that innovative.
But for cultivating like quality of consumption and how to enjoy leisure, Not really my thing in many ways, but they're definitely ahead of us, and we should value that and learn something from it.
So if you're disabled, I believe you should receive a significant baseline.
If you need assistance, I think for the most part we should pay people to work, not pay them not to work.
So we have the earned income tax credit.
If you work and you're poor, the government pays you extra money.
I think that has worked quite well.
It attracts a better quality of immigrant when you pay people to work rather than paying them not to work.
Too much of Western Europe pays people not to work.
So, the forms of aid we give, they are cultural symbols, and they are potent.
And the idea that it is automatic and eternal, that you just get cash, it's telling people the main thing of importance in life is cash, and you will get it no matter what.
So climate change, do you think this could be... I see a movement now, coming from the right actually, where there are people saying there are ways to tackle this that could be done through private enterprise and not purely through the government.
Now I know you said you want some regulation.
That is a place where you see the government doing something related to the environment, right?
But do you see some sort of partnership there perhaps?
For nuclear power to operate, I do think nuclear plant operators need a special kind of liability insurance, which we've provided under the Price-Anderson Act, and that has a role for government, and I'm fine by that.
I think it's much better than dealing with all of the secondary costs of higher air pollution.
So I don't think it can be laissez-faire, but also you have to free up the market so entrepreneurs can do this, right?
Do you like, like I've sat down here with a couple ANCAP people that really just want to, you know, disassemble the government altogether and enter their Mad Max phase.
I really like the idea intellectually, like I like seeing how far you can take an intellectual argument and how much government could disappear.
Do you like entertaining those ideas just purely for Just purely for your mind, if not for practicality?
should just come in and something like Social Security You may not have designed it from scratch the way we have it, but I'm not sure there's a way to back out and undo it all, because you're caught in a cycle where people have been promised payments, right?
Crazy, but it doesn't mean you can fix it quickly just by having crypto now.
There's a whole system built that way, with payments companies and government bureaus, and your personal data is encoded with your social security number, your tax returns.
Even if crypto is the answer there, it would be such an awkward roundabout route.
Just like for cars to be a big deal, well, you needed roads, you needed service stations, you needed spare parts.
That took about 40 years for us to put together like the network of cars to revolutionize the world.
So I think a lot of people are over promising crypto in the short run.
And there is a very real chance it just dies out and doesn't work.
But I don't think it's all some fraud or bubble.
There's real potential there.
We don't yet know if it can work.
The rest of the infrastructure is not in place.
Probably in the short run it will fail, but I still hold out hope.
I have to say, there's a certain pleasantness to everything you're talking about, because you're sort of just telling people to take a breath for a second, right?
I mean, that sort of economically, but personally, everything else, just kind of slow down a little bit.
Do you think as an interviewer that That you actually do learn every week.
I think one of the things I'm most, I have most gratitude for is that I genuinely learn every week, and I forget that the average person doesn't get to learn every week, or maybe doesn't take time to learn every week.
You could learn every week, but I mean, I sit across incredible people all the time, and it's like, wow, I learned something, or at least I sat with someone who knows something that I don't know.
It's incredible.
I mean, you get that same opportunity.
We've had many of the same guests on over the years.
Emily Wilson, she just re-translated Homer's Odyssey.
I'll have read that three times, and she did Seneca's plays, and she wrote a biography of Seneca, and wrote a book on over-living, and a book about the death of Socrates, and I'll read all of those and re-read some of the underlying texts.
and her sister wrote a book on the history of the fork, which I've already read,
Yeah, so that's an interesting segue, actually, to college campuses, because you're teaching economics.
First off, has economics, at least from your position, been infected by a lot of what we're seeing in the wider sense on college campuses related to free speech, shouting down speakers?
Because even if, I find this all the time, if people will come up to me after events and they'll say, you know, I want to tell my boss or something, or my spouse, that I'm for low taxes.
But if I say that, they're going to say I'm racist.
I mean, really crazy stuff.
So as someone that takes the small L libertarian approach on this, Do you find that some of these ideas are infecting?
What would you say is the best way to deal, then, with what's going on on campuses, even if you're not getting it and maybe it's not happening directly in economics departments right now?
I mean, we're seeing it leak into biology departments when we're talking about gender and all sorts of other things.
What do you think the best way to push against this sort of corroding of academic freedom?
I think that if you have a plausible graduate degree from a real institution, including from most other nations, you should be able to get a green card here.
I think we should have completely free immigration from Canada.
I would say we should have open borders with any country that has a more generous welfare state than we do.
Because then those people will not be coming for welfare.
They'll be coming here to work.
And I get you need to transition to that over time, and then I would still let in people from poorer countries.
You need some of what is called unskilled labor.
It's not actually unskilled, in fact, but the more skilled people you have, they need to work with people who can ease the burden of their time.
So you have working women and they want nannies or That's fine.
So I think we could increase both skilled and unskilled immigration in this country.
We've done a pretty good job assimilating immigrants.
And if the restrictionists, you know, want more wall for that, it's actually a deal I would do.
I'm opposed to the wall.
But, you know, the wall will not stop people.
Most people who come, come by overstaying their visas.
The net flow from Mexico has actually been negative by a small amount for a few years.
I think Central America is a problem.
The notion that you can be safe from Honduras and simply by virtue of the fact that you made it to the border claim refugee status because, you know, there's a drug gang in your pueblo.
I think that's a bad system.
I do favor some version of refugee status.
My wife was a refugee from Soviet Union, so I appreciate this.
But just because, you know, things are bad in my country, I'm a refugee because I'm close to the U.S.
and I made it to the border.
I think it's a very bad system.
It's very bad incentives, and it's overwhelming our court system.
So some of what Trump says about that is true.
Again, my goal is to find a way of taking more of those people in an orderly manner, but to encourage just rushing for the border.
Yeah, well, that's why it really does seem we have a match made in hell right now, because you've got Trump wanting, okay, he wants a wall, and I don't think a wall is, I actually pretty much agree with what you said, I don't think a wall is inherently racist.
It may not actually work, and maybe there's all sorts of other ways to deal with it, but if the option, if the other option that people see is that you've got people screaming for open borders, then I don't blame all the people that want the wall.
So when you say cut a deal on the people here, so if let's say you're throwing the Republicans the idea that you're gonna get some more of a wall or something, what's the deal on the other side?
The dreamers get to stay, and we adjust the quotas upward, and say tech companies can hire more skilled people on work visas, and we also redo NAFTA so Canadians have the right to simply come here.
You might want to limit their ability to claim welfare.
I'm fine with that.
And over time, think about with what other countries can we have free movement.
The European Union has done this.
Within the European Union, I get that there's a political backlash.
I'm not sure we should have open borders with Bulgaria and Romania.
Well, work rights, but we have a rapid path to citizenship, which I favor.
It's one of the things that makes us good at assimilation.
And, you know, both political parties at different points in the past, they always go crazy, like, oh, all these people are going to come, they're going to vote for the other party.
I don't think we really know, 20 years from now, what immigrants are going to vote for or why.
So, you know, Asian-Americans, will they remain as heavily democratic as they are right now?
The question of how to find more talent in the world.
So I think there's a relative surfeit of capital relative to talented laborers.
My view of the world is if you have an incredibly talented person who is good at execution, that person can get so much done, The world as a whole is underexplored from this point of view.
So you go to Nigeria, how many talented people are there?
Well, they're about as talented as the United States.
They just don't have the opportunities.
Look at how much talent has come from India in the last 20 years, right?
China, phenomenal amount.
And so 40, 50 years, people like that didn't really have a chance.
So how is it, say you were to go to Nigeria and try to mobilize Nigerian talent, what should you look for?
What should you do?
What kind of cultural training is needed?
What ought to change in Nigeria?
How can we recruit that talent?
That's maybe the biggest question in the world today, and we're not good at it, and we don't really know what we're doing.
So you go to a random place in Africa, or I was just in rural Ecuador, a guy was driving me around, and I asked him, do you listen to YouTube?
He's a Quechua-speaking fellow.
I asked him in Spanish.
He's like, of course.
I went to my Ethiopian travel guide in Lalibela.
I asked him, do you listen to YouTube?
He's like, of course.
I say, what do you listen to?
He said, I'm a big fan of Armenian church history, and he can speak articulately about movements in the Armenian Christian Church in medieval times, because that's what he does on YouTube.