1. I have many hundreds of vivid, detailed memories about my childhood, starting from around the age of 3. The earliest memory: Pleading with my mom to let me skip preschool. “Why?” she asked. “Because of the mean kids!” I whimpered. She still made me go.

2. When I got satellite television around 1997, I routinely pressed the “Info” button to learn the release year of every movie I watched. During the next ten years, I memorized the release years of about a thousand movies. During my childhood, the only reliable way to see a movie was to watch it during its original theatrical release. Since I also have vivid, detailed memories about most of the movies I saw in theaters during my childhood (and adulthood, too), I often use movie release years to organize careful chronologies of my life. For example, I saw WarGames (1983) with my brother at the theater on Parthenia Street the same day that my best friend suffered a horrible family tragedy. So that happened sometime during the summer between grades 6 and 7.

3. I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t extraordinarily arrogant by disposition. Even when I was five years old, I felt like my mom was making glaring mistakes and should take orders from me. And I bluntly told her so! When I started collecting minor accomplishments, my inner sense of self-satisfaction grew stronger and stronger. Now it’s sky high.

4. My main saving grace: I eventually acquired a good sense of humor about my deep-set megalomania. I know how ludicrously inflated my self-image is. But in all candor, self-love is the Wagnerian leitmotiv of my life. I feel totally incapable of feeling any other way. My secondary saving grace, according to my best friend from Princeton: I have absolute megalomania rather than relative megalomania, so I’m also delighted by the company of other ludicrously arrogant people. Primarily if, like me, they have a sense of humor about it.

5. In high school, I clearly had the lowest IQ of my four closest friends. Two were math prodigies of local legend. Another could almost immediately do detailed volume problems in calculus in his head. (“You just have to think about it,” he unhelpfully told me). In contrast, I have never been smart enough to “figure out” complex math on my own. To get A’s on high school math (and a 5 on Calculus BC), I had to spend about two hours on homework every weeknight year after year.

6. If I wasn’t even the smartest kid in my high school, why do I feel so intellectually awesome? The deepest reason is probably pure personality psychology. I am built to feel like a genius even if the facts don’t support that judgment. But in my own mind, my truly superlative intellectual trait is not my intelligence, but my creativity. All self-serving bias aside, I am the most creative person I have ever met. Original ideas constantly pop into my head, far more than I could ever write up. Google and AI routinely confirm that, whatever their merits, most of my “original ideas” in economics, philosophy, political science, history, and psychology are indeed novel to me. And when I decided to write my first graphic novel, I really did manage to recruit my favorite world-famous artist for the job, and the book really was a New York Times bestseller. Is it risible that I have this superlative self-assessment for a trait with no well-accepted standardized test? Absolutely, but I struggle to believe anything else.

   

7. In junior high, I created a vast fictional universe for my Dungeons and Dragons game, where I served as the Dungeon Master for all three years. (Notice the map behind me in most of my podcasts? I made that in junior high). My D&D universe (Endalagon) was admittedly highly derivative of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, but the adventures in my high school game (every Saturday evening, prom night included) were all Caplan originals, never canned modules. In the 21st century, I’ve written about seventy original role-playing game scenarios in almost every genre of fiction to play with my kids and friends: fantasy of course, but also historical, horror, sci-fi, Western, action, absurdist, conspiracy, espionage, crime, and even Japanese baseball manga. I am not confident that I can write dialogue at a professional level, but I think my current skill at plotting stories is well above the median of top novelists and screenwriters.

8. I have wanted to be a professor since junior high, but until the summer after high school graduation (when I went to the Mises University summer seminar at Stanford), I personally knew zero professors. What did I want to be a professor of? The subject shifted dramatically over time. English literature was my first imagined field. I kid you not. I loved the classics, and daydreamed about being a latter-day Mark Twain or Edgar Allan Poe. But even in my youth, I knew that becoming a successful novelist was a long shot, and — knowing nothing about academia — assumed that being an English professor was a safe fallback. I didn’t drop my English professor plan until 12th grade, when I discovered both philosophy and economics via Ayn Rand.

9. I’ve never even tried to learn an instrument, but I’ve enjoyed music since the age of 11, when I started listening to L.A.’s KIIS FM. My 7th-grade music appreciation class alerted me to the existence of classical and opera, but it wasn’t until high school that I embraced them. Around 11th grade, I started obsessively consuming classical and opera. I started my CD collection in 1988, when my parents gave me a CD player for Christmas. Now I own about 4000 CDs, with roughly three-quarters in classical and opera. I listen to music 6-8 hours per day, and actually have trouble focusing without it. Part of the reason I studied German in college was to follow German libretti in the original language. (The other reason is that I falsely believed that I needed a foreign language for a Ph.D., but I caught that mistake before starting German 1). While classical and opera are the cornerstones of my music consumption (I’m coincidentally listening to Wagner’s Siegfried on my retro Sony 200-CD jukebox right now), I keep exploring new genres. For the last few years, I’ve mostly been listening to heavy metal, punk, and emo (assuming My Chemical Romance counts as emo).

10. Ayn Rand all but killed my sense of humor when I was 17-19. While I wasn’t especially comedic in my childhood, her stoic heroic style inspired me. Over the next few years, however, my sense of humor re-emerged, much stronger than before. By the time I was in my late-20s, daily life started seeming hilarious to me, and still does. When I go to the movies, I am often the only person in the theater laughing hysterically at top volume, usually at lines that no one else even chuckles at. While I’m clearly subpar for a professional comedian, I was pleased that when I performed alongside eight professional comedians at the Comedy Cellar, I was not obviously the worst.

11. During college at UC Berkeley, I vacillated between wanting to be a philosophy professor and wanting to be an economics professor. When one field started to disappoint me, I switched to imagining my future in the other. In the end, I had an epiphany that led me to swear myself to econ. The epiphany: While I cared more about the big questions of philosophy than the big questions of economics, I cared more about the small questions of economics than the small questions of philosophy. Since, my epiphany continued, professors are largely limited to small questions, econ was the discipline for me. Ironically, I drastically underestimated the latitude that professors enjoy, so I’ve been able to work on the big questions of both economics and philosophy ad libitum for decades, while drawing an economist’s salary rather than a philosopher’s.

12. I have never been drunk. Unless you count NyQuil, I have barely even tried alcohol. And to this day, I am not sure I have ever smelled marijuana. Apparently I give off a strong narc vibe, because no one even tried to get me to try drugs until 2020 when some of my friends in Austin pushed psychedelic mushrooms on me. (“All smart people do mushrooms, Bryan.”) Why not try these fabled substances? For one thing, because I’m already highly uninhibited, and worry about what I would do if I became any less inhibited.

13. When I was in college, I wasn’t sure I even wanted kids. What changed my mind? Besides growing up: meeting Sheldon Richman and reading Julian Simon. Once I actually became a father, however, my first-hand experience mattered most of all. Being a dad (x4) really is the most meaningful thing I have done with my life, the key life choice where I feel zero ambivalence. Honestly, I think that the average kid just has a much better personality than the average adult.

14. I have one best friend per school I’ve been at. K-9: Matt Mayers. High school: Kevin Hatanaka. UC Berkeley: Fabio Rojas. Princeton: Jim Schneider. GMU: Robin Hanson. I had a girlfriend in kindergarten. I went on roughly three arguable dates with three different girls in high school and college. But the sole woman that I ever unambiguously dated is my wife, Corina Caplan (nee Mateescu). We had our first date in December of 1990, and got married in June of 1994.

15. I’ve known that being a U.S. professor is a sweet gig since the summer after high school. But only after becoming a professor did I realize how absurdly plush these sinecures are. Yes, a tenured professorship is literally a dream job for life. Economists in particular earn a lower-upper (not “upper-middle”!) class income in exchange for about 30 weeks of actual work per year. And during those weeks, you only have to spend about 5 hours in the classroom! To fully capitalize on this opportunity, to be clear, extreme non-conformism is a must. Otherwise, you’ll keep researching topics that bore you because “that’s what serious scholars are supposed to do,” assigning and grading essays because “that’s what dedicated teachers are supposed to do,” and toiling on silly committees because “that’s what decent colleagues are supposed to do.”

16. Selfishly speaking, the most important trait any human can have is “being good at lunch.” People who are good at lunch are bursting with ideas and enthusiasm. If they don’t present their own ideas, they at least eagerly engage the ideas of others. High intelligence is necessary but far from sufficient. In fact, my go-to negative verdict on other scholars is “smart but useless.” Smart but useless thinkers excel on standardized tests and academic publishing, but are low in creativity, agency, and non-conformity, so they waste their lives applying their mighty intellects to questions that barely matter.

P.S. If anything I’ve said here makes you like me less, I’m sorry to let you down. But this is the real me.

P.P.S. I also love showtunes, including…

Subscribers will get a link around 4:29 PM, and we’ll strive to save time for your live questions!

P.S. If there are serious sound problems, please let me know immediately. Sound in the final videos always sounds good to me, but some listeners have problems with the live transmissions. If the problems are insuperable, we’ll switch to zoom.

• The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics turned out to be a nightmarish totalitarian despotism, a dystopia of mass slavery and mass murder.

• The USSR, by conquest and imitation, spawned dozens of additional nightmarish totalitarian despotisms.

• These despotisms included the jaw-dropping hellscape of Maoist China, the world’s most populous country at the time.

Yet as long as Nazi Germany was not socialist or even anti-socialist, the socialist can find solace in the fact that the Soviet Union was the primary agent in the defeat of an even more nightmarish totalitarian despotism. While there’s some dispute over whether the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany had the higher body count, Nazi Germany definitely had a higher annual murder rate for territory under its control. As long as you charitably interpret the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as “Stalin was just buying time to prepare for the inevitable war,” you can tell yourself that socialism saved civilization despite its Dorian Gray-level transmogrification.

On the other hand, suppose that not just Nazism, but fascism generally, was a Marxist heresy. Suppose you accept, as A. James Gregor argues in Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism, that Mussolini was the Lenin of Italy until he was excommunicated from the Italian Socialist Party in 1914. Suppose, as Paul Johnson claims in Modern Times, that socialists proverbially “can’t handle the truth” about fascism:

By the mid-1920s there were fascist movements all over Europe. One thing they all had in common was anti-Communism of the most active kind. They fought revolution with revolutionary means and met the Communists on the streets with their own weapons. As early as 1923 the Bulgarian peasant regime of Aleksandr Stamboliski, which practised “agrarian Communism,” was ousted by a fascist putsch. The Comintern, the new international bureau created by the Soviet government to spread and co-ordinate Communist activities, called on the “workers of the world” to protest against the “victorious Bulgarian fascist clique,” thus for the first time recognizing fascism as an international phenomenon. But what exactly was it? There was nothing specific about it in Marx. It had developed too late for Lenin to verbalize it into his march of History. It was unthinkable to recognize it for what it actually was—a Marxist heresy, indeed a modification of the Leninist heresy itself.

From this perspective, socialism looks truly beyond redemption. Even if the Soviet Union “saved civilization,” this is only a case of one terrible socialist regime saving civilization from an even worse socialist regime. None of which would have been necessary if socialism had never existed in the first place! Verily, you could just tweak the title of David Benatar’s anti-natalist Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence and turn it into Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Socialism’s Coming into Existence.

Once you accept that Nazi Germany was socialist, how could you even escape this Benatarian evaluation of socialism? “Socialism also inspired the modern welfare state, which is better than laissez-faire capitalism” is probably your best way out. But for this defense to work, you’d have to commit to, “The welfare state is so awesome that it was worth World War II, the Holocaust, the Russian Civil War, Lenin’s famine, Stalinism, dekulakization, Stalin’s famines, the Chinese Civil War, Mao’s mass-murderous Land Reform Movement, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge, and much, much more.” Which is crazy even if you think that the welfare state rescues the poorest 10% of the First World from Third World poverty.

Yes, socialists could fairly protest that the “better never to have been” verdict is so gratifying for anti-socialists that they would gladly twist the facts to reach it. Fair enough, but that cuts both ways. This verdict is also so soul-crushing for socialists that they would gladly twist the facts to deny it. The specter of motivated reasoning looms over us all. But if you have no dog in this fight, and calmly read what I’ve been writing about this, I think you’ll end up concluding that Nazi Germany was, livid socialist protests notwithstanding, deeply socialist in both theory and practice. Which in turn leads straight to the philosophy of history I now place before you.

ChatGPT’s default political output is best described as center-left to left-libertarian / culturally progressive, especially on environment, civil rights, immigration/diversity, inequality, and gender/sexuality issues. It is not best described as Marxist, party-loyal Democratic, or consistently economically socialist.

Given this orientation, I wondered how many questions I’d have to ask to get the model to reach what I consider the correct interpretation of the historical facts. It’s like the classic ‘80s question, “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?” The answer, for both ChatGPT questions and Tootsie Pop licks, turns out to be exactly... three.

BC: What does this suggest about the debate on whether National Socialism was indeed socialist?

GPT: It suggests a limited but important pro-“yes” point: National Socialism was plainly anti–free-market, anti-liberal, and highly collectivist/statist. My estimated EFW trajectory would make Nazi Germany fall from merely unfree in 1933–35 to below the bottom of the modern EFW distribution by the late 1930s, mainly because the regime crushed sound money, trade freedom, legal security, and economic regulation scores.

But it does not by itself prove that Nazism was “socialist” in the orthodox Marxist or social-democratic sense… So the fairest conclusion is:

National Socialism was not laissez-faire capitalism; it was not orthodox Marxian socialism; it was a racially nationalist command-and-control economy with private titles often left in place but private economic decision-making heavily subordinated to state objectives.

In the debate, the EFW-style reconstruction supports the claim that the Nazis were economically collectivist and anti-market. It weakens the common rebuttal that “they were just capitalists with racist politics.” But it also supports the historian’s caveat: they generally preferred state direction over state ownership, which makes “socialist” a defensible but potentially misleading label unless carefully defined.

BC: Don’t most modern socialists prefer state direction over state ownership? It seems like the Nazis deserve the name socialist at least as much as they do.

GPT: Yes, that is a strong point. The argument “the Nazis weren’t socialist because they usually left private title in place” is too crude. Socialism has often meant social or state control, not necessarily 100% state ownership. Britannica’s current definition explicitly says socialism involves major productive property being “owned or controlled” by the state, and adds that socialists have long disagreed over how much must be publicly owned and how control should be exercised…

My bottom line: Nazism deserves the “socialist” label about as much as many state-direction versions of socialism if the criterion is extensive political control over economic life. It deserves it much less if the criterion is worker ownership, egalitarianism, internationalism, or democratic control. The cleanest label remains something like racial-nationalist state socialism or fascist command capitalism, depending on which feature one wants to emphasize.

BC: But then modern socialists would have to deny that Marxism-Leninism was ever socialist, right?

GPT: Yes. That is the basic inconsistency.

A modern socialist can coherently say:

“Marxism-Leninism was not democratic socialism.”

But it is much harder for him to say:

“Marxism-Leninism was not socialism at all.”

Why? Because Marxism-Leninism checks nearly every conventional economic box for socialism: public/state ownership of the means of production, central planning, suppression of private capital, anti-profit ideology, collectivized agriculture, and one-party rule justified in the name of the proletariat. Britannica’s broad definition of socialism is public rather than private “ownership or control” of productive property, and the Stanford Encyclopedia describes socialism as centrally involving social ownership of the means of production. Soviet law made public ownership of the means of production a key feature, and the 1936 Soviet constitution explicitly called the USSR a “socialist state of workers and peasants.”

So if the anti-Nazi argument is:

“Nazism was not socialist because it was dictatorial, nationalist, anti-egalitarian, anti-worker, and not genuinely democratic,”

then the same test would also exclude Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, etc. That is a very high-purity definition of socialism. It may be morally attractive to socialists, but it is not how most historians, political scientists, or ordinary language use the term.

The better distinction is:

Socialism as an institutional family: yes, Marxism-Leninism is socialist; Nazism has some socialist/statist features but is less centrally socialist because it preserved more private ownership and was not oriented toward class abolition.

Socialism as a moral ideal of democratic worker control: Marxism-Leninism and Nazism both fail, though Marxism-Leninism at least claimed continuity with that ideal while Nazism explicitly rejected egalitarian Marxism and class internationalism.

Socialism as state control over economic life: Marxism-Leninism clearly qualifies, and Nazi Germany comes much closer than anti-Nazi semantic defenses usually admit.

This is why the “Nazis weren’t socialist because they weren’t democratic/egalitarian/worker-controlled” move proves too much. It protects socialism from Nazism only by also protecting it from most real-world socialist regimes.

Since the end of World War II, mainstream culture had energetically covered Nazi crimes, but largely gave the Soviet bloc a pass. Yet in the late 80s and early 90s, a long list of long-forgotten Soviet crimes loudly entered the Western conversation: Lenin’s coup against Russia’s first democratic government; Stalin’s agricultural collectivization; the Gulag; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; the Katyn massacre; mass deportations to Siberia; and more. Once there was widespread recognition that self-righteous Soviet socialists had committed many Nazi-level crimes, the etymology of “Nazi means ‘National Socialist’” intrigued me. If the world’s most famous brand of socialists turned out to be total monsters, could the world’s most famous brand of monsters turn out to be total socialists?

Most responses to this question were, as usual, driven by ideology. Conservatives and libertarians gleefully underscored the etymology: “I keep telling you, ‘Nazi’ means ‘National Socialist’!” Liberals and socialists scoffed at the childish naivete of the question: “Of course the Nazis called themselves ‘socialists.’ They were a bunch of liars!”

Even as a teen, I knew enough socialist history to scoff at such scoffing. After all, socialists have a long history of denying that other socialists are socialists. In the late 1920s, for example, the Comintern started insisting that so-called “social democracy” was actually “social fascism,” the “moderate wing of fascism.”* Democratic socialists, for their part, routinely retroactively strip revolutionary socialists of their socialist credentials once things turn ugly enough. Stalin wasn’t really socialist, Mao wasn’t really socialist, and neither is North Korea.

Upshot: Even if the Nazis were the sincerest of socialists, mainstream socialists would almost certainly deny them the label regardless of the facts.

During the 90s, I tracked down some major economic histories of Nazism, especially Hitler’s Social Revolution by David Schoenbaum and Nazi Economics by Avraham Barkai. Both books seemed to strongly confirm that the Nazis were indeed highly socialist in both theory and practice. Unlike Marxist-Leninists, the Nazis had enough common sense to refrain from general expropriation. But the same goes for Germany’s non-Leninist Marxists during the Weimar Republic. Indeed, Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) remained officially Marxist until 1959, and still claims to be “socialist” to this day. At least according to Schoenbaum and Barkai, Nazi economic policy implemented a much more draconian system of state economic control than the SPD ever had.

Still, I felt lingering doubts. Qualitative history lends itself to confirmation bias. Even when you have some quantitative measures of economic policy, it’s easy to put extra weight on the measures that deliver the answer you’re looking for. I’m not immune to motivated reasoning. I loathe and despise both socialism and Nazism, so it’s pleasant for me to equate them. I freely admit it.

What to do? I could spend a year reading more about this topic. I could even spend a few years getting to the research frontier so I could credibly publish on the question, “How socialist was Germany under National Socialism?” But while this is a fascinating issue, the opportunity cost of seriously deepening my understanding is just too high.

Or to be more precise, the opportunity cost was too high. AI has drastically slashed the costs of quantification — and simultaneously drastically increased the credibility of quick quantification. So instead of spending years on this topic only to be dismissed as ideologically biased, I asked ChatGPT to score Germany from 1910-1960 using the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World index. I further asked: If Nazi Germany existed today, where would it rank compared to the 165 countries currently in the sample?

Here’s the output.

What do we see? Germany had fairly high economic freedom before World War I. This collapsed during World War I and the subsequent hyperinflation. By modern standards, Germany 1916-1923 would be virtually the most socialist country on Earth — though remember that due to lack of credible data, Fraser doesn’t score Cuba, Eritrea, or North Korea.

After the end of the hyperinflation, German economic freedom briefly recovers, peaking at 6.6 right before the Great Depression. Then there’s a total collapse. When the Nazis take over in 1933, Germany is already down at 4.1. If it were a modern country, that would be just freer than Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela.

Measured in rank order, Nazi Germany keeps falling, hitting rock bottom — #166 out of 166 — by 1936. But in absolute score, Nazi Germany falls every single year, from 3.6 in 1934 to 0.7 in 1945. What’s going on? Here’s ChatGPT:

Germany’s 1931 crisis brought extensive capital controls, bilateral clearing, and official exchange-rate management, hurting the trade/capital-mobility area. The Nazi Four-Year Plan centralized labor mobilization, restricted imports, imposed wage and price controls, allocated raw materials, and systematized expropriation of Jews, which crushes Fraser’s legal/property, trade, money, and regulation areas. The 1948 rebound reflects the Deutsche Mark reform and the broad elimination of price controls in the western zones.

It’s tempting to blame total warfare: “Any country fighting a major war will get rock-bottom Fraser scores.” But Germany’s average economic freedom score during World War I (4.3) exceeds its peacetime score under Nazi rule (3.1). The Nazis were not “forced” to accept socialism to fight World War II. They embraced extreme socialist policies as soon as they gained power.

What if we look at the breakdown by Fraser subscore? Again, the Nazis do terribly on five out of five, a pentafecta: Size of Government, Legal System & Property Rights, Sound Money, Freedom to Trade Internationally, and Regulation.

Most objections to these results will be thinly-veiled sectarian dogma. Most notably:

1. “The Nazis didn’t nationalize everything, so they weren’t socialists.” By that standard, even Stalinism wasn’t socialist, because Stalin allowed private agricultural plots. The sensible synthesis is that capitalism versus socialism is, per the Fraser index, a continuum. The Nazis were very close to the pure socialist pole of that continuum. If Nazi Germany doesn’t qualify, then almost no self-styled socialist regime would.

2. “The Nazis weren’t democratic and egalitarian, so they weren’t socialists.” This excludes history’s leading self-styled socialist regimes, all of which were inegalitarian dictatorships. While plenty of modern socialists are only too happy to bite this bullet, they’re not just rewriting history; they’re rewriting socialist intellectual history. As Kristian Niemietz explains in Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Dies, democratic socialists have a long-standing habit of accepting and apologizing for dictatorial socialist regimes for years or decades. Seriously, if “dictatorial socialism” is a contradiction in terms, why bother even coining the redundant phrase “democratic socialism”?

The best objection to the ChatGPT scores, honestly, is an unrelated dilemma: “The Nazis had years of stunning military success. So either socialism is actually a tolerably productive economic system, or the Nazis weren’t socialists. Choose one.” My response: While socialism is terrible for consumer welfare, it’s pretty good for military success. Why? Because total government control is the only feasible way to maximize the production of “guns” over “butter.” It’s a crude system well-suited to the crude goals of conquest, slavery, and mass murder.

War Socialism was especially effective when combined with the famed conscientiousness of the German people. Most nationalities under socialism would have been far more prone to slacking, cheating, and corruption, especially in the absence of Soviet-style terror. But the Germans were deeply obedient and loyal to their regime. Only in the last half of World War II did the Nazis start executing thousands (and, by 1945, tens of thousands) of ethnic Germans per year to maintain discipline. Mark this under the “dark side of trust.”

If anyone wants to re-do my questions using other LLMs, I’ll happily post your results. But given the quality of modern models, I strongly expect my findings to replicate. When mainstream socialists deny that the Nazis were socialist, we should take that as seriously as Catholics denying that Protestants are Christian. To a true believer, these marginal theological differences mean the world. To a reasonable person, however, such hypersensitivity is yet another symptom of true believers’ petulant fanaticism.

* In 1935, the Comintern added that fascism was “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” implying that democratic socialists are actually the moderate wing of the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.

1. The students at UATX are academically fantastic, a great package of high IQ, sky-high curiosity, and intellectual engagement. The only school I’ve taught at that’s in the same league is the University of Chicago, especially Agnes Callard’s Night Owls program.

2. UATX spurns holistic admissions, automatically admitting students with a 1460+ SAT, 33+ ACT, or 105+ CLT. But by my lights, their students had much better personalities than top schools that officially put high weight on personality! Curiosity and intellectual engagement aside, UATX students were strikingly cheerful, gregarious, agentic, and enthusiastic. Attendance at my on-campus game nights and karaoke parties was high — and since quite a few of my students are based in Northern Virginia, you’ll probably get to meet a few at Capla-Con 2026.

3. As a GMU professor, I’m used to low student attendance. At UATX, attendance is mandatory, enforced with preset grade penalties. Even so, absenteeism was fairly common. But strikingly, students with poor attendance were still highly engaged wherever they chose to show up. Why? UATX students skip classes not because they’re lazy, but because they literally have something better to do. One student was busy running a start-up. Other students were rehearsing for Hamlet. Good for them!

4. While we’re on the subject of Hamlet, the UATX drama club’s performance was profoundly moving. Overall, I preferred Ian McKellen’s (Gandalf/Magneto) live 2022 production, where the famed octogenarian played the title role. But as I told the UATX cast, they were all — McKellen aside — better than their counterparts in my favorite Hamlet production. My epiphany during the play: Contrary to many English teachers, Hamlet is not a tragic hero. He is a full-fledged anti-hero. Remember, after he manslaughters Polonius, Hamlet shows no regret. Instead, he sadistically hides the body from his heirs!

5. While I met scores of students, I only closely interacted with two of UATX’s full-time workers. Not coincidentally, both are my metaphorical brothers, men I’ve called close friends for many years. The first brother at UATX is the new president, Carlos Carvalho. I’ve been very close with Carlos since Covid, and I enthusiastically attest to his stellar IQ, lovable personality, and steely integrity. I’m thrilled to associate with any institution that would put Carlos at the helm. The second brother at UATX is Tim Kane, dean of social sciences. I’ve known Tim for twenty years; I even made this short comic book about our friendship origin story. Tim is a classic economist, adept at making the unseen seen, and even more positive about life than I am. A role model for students, colleagues, and all who know him. Also, it’s very fun to call him Dean Kane.

   

6. Students gave me lots of inside information on how UATX is doing. Even the relatively disgruntled students are quite chipper compared to normal, lazy, apathetic undergrads. I repeatedly urged my students to sit in on a few classes across town at the University of Texas to encounter ordinary college students, because at UATX, ordinary is virtually non-existent. UATX students often openly asked, “How can we make UATX better?” A great question… that few normal college students would bother to pose, because they’re both incurious and resigned.

7. The UATX humanities students are the happiest, because UATX delivers exactly what they want: a totally retro boot camp of reading, discussing, and writing about the Great Books, our Western canon. The entrepreneurship students are the least happy. They clearly care far more about our dizzying economic future than our glorious literary past, yet they’re still academically obliged to spend many precious hours on the Great Books. Still, compared to normal business and STEM majors, UATX entrepreneurship students get ample face time with uber-successful entrepreneurs.

8. Isn’t single-minded dedication to the Great Books a bizarre fetish in the age of AI? I’m definitely inclined to say so, but even I think the Western canon is awesome enough to keep training a few hundred new enthusiasts per planet every year. Given today’s top universities’ low interest in our Western canon, it makes sense for UATX to pick up the slack.

9. What will UATX’s humanities majors do after graduation? I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them ended up working for top UATX donors like Jeff Yass and Joe Lonsdale. I can also see some of them partnering with friends over in entrepreneurship to start businesses. Most college students fail to gain valuable human capital, useful career connections, or intellectual joy. At least UATX humanities students get the latter two.

10. I wouldn’t be surprised if more than one unicorn company came out of UATX, though I wouldn’t bet on it.

11. Critics have decried UATX as hypocritical, politicized, and otherwise terrible. After three-and-a-half weeks at UATX, I really have no idea what they’re talking about. Or to be more precise, I think the critics have impossibly high (double) standards and are hungry to find fault. And as usual, almost all of the shocking anecdotes reported in the mainstream media are, according to my knowledgeable and trusted insiders, deeply misleading.

    

12. Does UATX invite some speakers who are deeply in error? Sure. Does UATX invite some speakers that are not merely wrong, but intellectually weak? Sure. But the average quality of their speakers far outshines top mainstream colleges. At least they’re not totally boring and irrelevant. Ahem.

13. Are there MAGAs at UATX? Almost surely, but they weren’t vocal. MAGAs are about 20% of the U.S. adult population, so even if you think their views are uniquely awful, it would be pretty weird if they were entirely absent. As a professor at a normal woke university, I’m totally comfortable with being on the same campus as people with deplorable views. And even amicably conversing with them, if they’re so inclined.

14. My litmus test of the intellectual openness of UATX: I didn’t just write Open Borders. I assigned the book to my students, and debated in favor of open borders before the whole school. And not only did they joyfully hire me; they made me feel supremely welcome during my stay. This is what “right-wing counterculture” ought to be.

I’ve got multiple post-debate commentary essays in my queue, so for now I’ll just say that the overall debate quality was at the 60th percentile of my expectations. Enjoy!

I’ll do separate posts on my favorite questions, and try to answer the others directly in the comments.  If there’s overlap, I may just answer one version, and leave the rest to your imagination.

P.S. For your convenience, I’m putting links to the whole prior discussion below the fold.

Chapter 1: The Libertarian Heritage: The American Revolution and Classical Liberalism

Chapter 2: Property and Exchange

Chapter 3: The State

Chapter 4: The Problems

Chapter 5: Involuntary Servitude

Chapter 6: Personal Liberty

Chapter 7: Education

Chapter 8: Welfare and the Welfare State

Chapter 9: Inflation and the Business Cycle: The Collapse of the Keynesian Paradigm

Chapter 10: The Public Sector, I: Government in Business

Chapter 11: The Public Sector, II: Streets and Roads

Chapter 12: The Public Sector, III: Police, Law, and the Courts

Chapter 13: Conversation, Ecology, and Growth

Chapter 14: War and Foreign Policy

Chapter 15: A Strategy for Liberty

The post appeared first on Econlib.

Camp #1: Critics who think that Richard, per Rihanna, “is only sorry he got caught.” On this view, Richard is merely pretending to have changed his mind. I told the interviewer that this is a reasonable presumption. If I didn’t personally know Richard well, I would, though mindful of his pre-expose pro-immigration pieces, still wonder about his sincerity. But since I do know Richard well, my response was, “If he’s faking, give him an Academy Award.” While I sadly lack telepathy, I’d be amazed if straight-talking Richard could keep up a multi-year facade.

Camp #2: Critics who think that Richard is still blatantly and by definition racist because he believes in racial differences in IQ, personality, criminality, and beyond. For some critics, even looking at the numbers is suspect. To ponder the possibility that the differences are anything other than a natural response to white racism is practically satanic. While I was tempted to dismiss these critics as crazed fanatics, the conversation made me realize that the issue is more subtle. True, simply believing in racial differences — even large genetic racial differences — is never racist. Expressing these views, however, often is a strong symptom of racism.

The most blatant example in my mind: Whenever someone broaches the subject of sub-Saharan African IQ, they often start casually advocating horrific human rights violations. As I explained a decade ago:

In my experience, if a stranger brings up low IQ in Africa, there’s about a 50/50 chance he casually transitions to forced sterilization or mass murder of hundreds of millions of human beings as an intriguing response. You can protest that they’re just trolling, but these folks seemed frighteningly sincere to me.

Given this high psychotic base rate, the correct Bayesian inference is that broaching the subject of low sub-Saharan IQ sharply raises the probability that you are racist in the worst sense, even if the speaker never personally advocates forced sterilization or mass murder. After all, for every ten people who broach the subject and immediately voice openness to human rights violations, there must be a few people who broach the subject while glossing over their openness to such violations.

More generally, expressing belief in racial differences becomes a strong symptom of racism in two common conditions.

Condition #1: Misanthropic tone. If a low-IQ student is failing a class, you can regretfully but candidly tell him, “Given your test scores, I’m afraid you’re never going to become a mathematician or a scientist.” Or you can gloat, “You, a scientist?! But you’re a freakin’ moron!” The same goes for racial differences. You can regretfully but candidly acknowledge them: “Blacks commit murder at about 7.5 times the white rate, so high black incarceration rates for murder are just what you should expect.” Or you can gloat, “Blacks?! They’re all a bunch of murderous thugs!” The key point: Unless you are in fact a racist, there’s nothing funny about these gruesome facts. And unless you’re a racist, it’s easy to grasp why you ought not gratuitously lump the vast majority of non-murderous blacks in with the merely relatively large murderous minority.

Condition #2: Time and place. If a low-IQ student is failing in school, his teacher could talk to him privately about realistic career options: “Do you know how much money skilled craftsmen make?” Or he could humiliate him in front of his peers: “After graduation, Johnny’s gonna be pumping gas for the rest of you.” The same goes for racial differences. If you’re giving a lecture on racial discrimination in Econ 321, racial IQ differences are fair game. The classroom is a forum for well-reasoned discussion of statistical reality, and IQ is in fact a major cause of racial earnings disparities. But if you decide to raise the same topic at a mixed-race wedding, your motive is clearly to humiliate and antagonize. It’s like loudly speculating about the couple’s probability of divorce. People are at the wedding to celebrate, and you’re going out of your way to tarnish attendees’ experience. If you weren’t a racist, why dredge up this topic in this situation?

Granted, inferring motives from words is a struggle. Misunderstandings abound. That’s what makes Curb Your Enthusiasm such a deep show. Larry David repeatedly makes misanthropic remarks at the wrong time and place, leading others to judge him an even worse person than we, the all-seeing viewers, know Larry to be. But inferring motives from words is a two-front struggle. You have to infer neither too much nor too little from what people say, how they say it, when they say it, and where they say it.

What does all this mean for Hanania? Long-form writing is the ideal forum for well-reasoned discussion of racial differences. And his long-form tone for the last decade, though occasionally acerbic, is almost never misanthropic. On the contrary, Richard strives to nudge readers into being better people. Since I read almost every word he writes, I confidently exonerate him of racism for anything he says in essays or books.

His Twitter/X posts, by his own admission, are in contrast often calculated trolling for clicks. While you could argue that Twitter/X isn’t meant to be taken seriously, I see why some of Hanania’s bon mots raise red flags of racism for readers. Since I know him personally, I discount these flags. But yes, if Hanania wanted to allay all rational suspicion of his racism, he would have curated his social media more closely, especially pre-2024.

I have a dream. I dream of a world where well-informed people calmly and candidly discuss society’s ugliest statistical realities. I dream of a world where no one stigmatizes those who participate in these discussions as “racist” (or “sexist,” “homophobic,” “xenophobic,” “anti-Semitic,” or “Islamophobic”). I dream of a world where everyone in these discussions speaks respectfully about all of the groups under consideration. I dream of a world where the point of these discussions is to help craft humane tailored policy responses, not rationalize collective punishment or bless the status quo. Above all, I dream of a world where all participants are mindful that individual exceptions to statistical rules are ubiquitous. The hashtag #NotAllX is never far from the thoughts of any intellectually honest person.

How can I say such a thing? This is the basic economics of crime. Solving and prosecuting all murders would be astronomically expensive. Some murders virtually solve themselves, others require the proverbial 48 hours, others require years of police work, and others might remain unsolved even if the entire NYPD indefinitely focused 100% of its attention on the crime. About 70% of murders committed in NYC currently end in a conviction, but the NYPD couldn’t get to 100% even if they had 100% of the city’s GDP to deploy.

Astronomical expense aside, however, stricter enforcement means more false positives. The easiest way to punish every murderer is to lower the burden of proof. But the lower the burden, the more innocent people you end up punishing. Bukele offers a clean demonstration: He got El Salvador’s murder rate below 2 per 100,000 by treating facial tattoos as a sufficient reason for indefinite imprisonment. He could probably get it down to .2 per 100,000 by imprisoning every male between 15 and 40 years old. But if he wanted to imprison every murderer, even that crazy policy would not suffice.

Deporting all illegal aliens currently residing in the United States has exactly the same insuperable problems. The cost would be astronomically high, probably exceeding total GDP because the goal is impossible to achieve. And even if it could be achieved, there would be massive collateral damage along the way. You can also think about it like this: To deport every illegal alien, you would have to deport everyone with a 50%, a 10%, or even a 1% chance of being an illegal alien. Otherwise, you will miss some.

Once you accept these two obvious-once-you-think-about-them facts, you really are obliged to vote nay. You’re obliged to vote for me even if you think that an illegal immigrant is as bad as a murderer! But since I have ten minutes left, I’m going to add a bunch of extra arguments to reinforce the conclusion. And along the way, I’m going to tell you exactly what I really think.

To start: Murderers are obviously worse than illegal immigrants. Much worse. Draconian tactics that might be justified against the heinous crime of murder are definitely not justified against people who peacefully live and work in the U.S. without proper paperwork. Everyone here has failed to obtain proper paperwork on occasion. Remember Covid? If it’s perfectly fine to do something with paperwork, it can’t be very bad to do the same thing without paperwork.

I know that many people reply, “The law is the law.” This is obviously a bizarre position for libertarians, who routinely cheer scofflaws — and are often scofflaws themselves. But on reflection, “Always follow the law” is a bizarre position from almost any point of view. If a law is totally evil, then it’s fine to break it and wrong to enforce it. I suspect my opponent agrees, but we’ll find out soon enough.

What’s more striking: Normal human beings don’t just guiltlessly break totally evil laws. They also guiltlessly break laws that are merely mildly stupid. Unless you’ve never driven a car, you’ve broken the speed limit. And unless you never drive again, you’re going to break the speed limit again. When you mail order from other states, you’ve almost certainly failed to pay use tax. And unless you never mail order again, you’re going to fail to pay use tax again. This isn’t mere hypocrisy, because you don’t condemn others who break the same mildly stupid laws that you do.

So what? Well, a law that forbids a person from living in the United States and having a job is, at minimum, mildly stupid. Why should anyone on Earth need permission from the U.S. government to wash dishes, clean toilets, or take care of kids? Work is good. Production is good. No one should need the permission of any government to work, to produce. If you think it’s OK to break a law against driving 56 mph in the desert, you should think that it’s OK to break a law against mowing grass for money.

On further reflection, though, laws against foreigners living and working here without government permission are worse than mildly stupid. Even unreasonably strict speed limits are only a minor inconvenience. Immigration laws, in contrast, are a terrible burden on everyone without the good fortune to be born a citizen of the First World. Standard estimates say that moving from the Third World to the First World multiplies migrants’ incomes by a factor of 5x, 10x, or 15x. The flip side is that successfully enforcing immigration laws divides migrants’ incomes by a factor of 5x, 10x, or 15x. That is a terrible thing to do to another human being just for doing a normal job without proper paperwork. Imagine if the U.S. government passed a law that divided your income by a factor of 10. It would be a massive harm, and almost everyone — not just libertarians — would demonize not people who broke this law, but those who enforced it.

I previously debated immigration at LibertyCon right after the release of Ross Ulbricht. The attendees were overjoyed that the founder of the Silk Road was out on the street. So was I, but I understand the other side. So what? Simple: It’s very odd to support an American’s right to sell narcotics and weapons on the dark web, but not a foreigner’s right to wash dishes and pick vegetables on a U.S. farm.

I know that some libertarians view illegal immigration as trespassing, so it’s a serious offense after all: “You can’t live in my house without my permission, so you can’t come to the U.S. without the U.S. government’s permission.” But this only makes sense if you accept the socialist view that U.S. government is the true owner of the whole country. Otherwise, all that matters is that the immigrant’s employer and landlord welcome him, which they naturally do. And if you’re still tempted by the parallels between private and public property, note that you also aren’t allowed to set up a business, open a church, or have a baby in a house without the owner’s permission either. Truly, this so-called “libertarian” argument logically opens the door to full-blown totalitarianism.

I am well aware that people have many complaints about immigration in general, and illegal immigration in particular. But none of these arguments remotely justify deporting people who are merely living and working here without government permission. If they’re actually committing violent or property crimes, punish them like anyone else. If you’re worried about welfare state dependence, take comfort in the fact that illegal immigrants are not only ineligible for most benefits, but have already paid hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes using invalid Social Security numbers on which they will never collect. This is why Milton Friedman, despite his famous quote about the impossibility of open borders in a welfare state, specifically praised illegal immigration.

What should be done about illegal immigration? Simple: We should make it legal. A massive apology would also be nice, but I don’t ask for miracles. What about all of the problems caused by mass immigration? They’re minor compared to the massive gains of moving hundreds of millions of workers from countries where their productivity is low to countries where it is high. If you’re still worried, then adopt the massively successful immigration policies of countries like the United Arab Emirates, almost 90% foreign-born, which welcomes immigrants of all skill levels to live and work, but not to receive government benefits or participate in politics. Statists call this slavery, but that’s utter nonsense. People around the world voluntarily move to the Emirates by the millions, because they make five times as much money in the UAE as they do at home.

But to repeat, even if you disagree with every favorable thing I’ve said about immigration, you have to vote for me. Why? Because my opponent agreed to defend an indefensible resolution. Even if you think illegal immigration is as bad as murder, trying to deport all illegal immigrants is doubly absurd. Achieving 100% deportations would be unbelievably expensive. In fact, it would take more resources than exist on Earth. And to get to 100%, you would have to accept sky-high levels of false positives. To repeat: You can’t deport every illegal immigrant unless you’re willing to deport everyone with a greater than 0% chance of being an illegal immigrant. That’s not pro-immigration advocacy. It’s basic logic.

On one point there can scarcely be disagreement: a prime and necessary condition for libertarian victory (or, indeed, for victory for any social movement, from Buddhism to vegetarianism) is education: the persuasion and conversion of large numbers of people to the cause.

Rothbard then advises libertarian strategists to absorb the Marxist distinction between “left-wing sectarianism” and “right-wing opportunism.”  Both are grave errors.  Left-wing sectarians refuse even to discuss moderate pro-liberty moves, leading to severe intellectual isolation; right-wing opportunists lose sight of the final goal of liberty, and end up abandoning libertarian principles.

When Rothbard gets more specific, many readers may be tempted to say that he is one of the left-wing sectarians that he criticizes.  His two guiding rules:

(1) that, whatever the transitional demands, the ultimate end of liberty be always held aloft as the desired goal; and (2) that no steps or means ever explicitly or implicitly contradict the ultimate goal.

Example:

The libertarian looks forward to eventual abolition of taxes. It is perfectly legitimate for him, as a strategic measure in that desired direction, to push for a drastic reduction or repeal of the income tax. But the libertarian must never support any new tax or tax increase. For example, he must not, while advocating a large cut in income taxes, also call for its replacement by a sales or other form of tax.

Rothbard then fleshes out his educational strategy.  Statist elites – including most big businessmen – are a lost cause; as he memorably asks, “How much likelihood is there that the President of the United States will read this book, or any other piece of libertarian literature, and then exclaim: ‘They’re right. I’ve been wrong. I resign.’?”  But almost everyone else has potential, especially campus youth, the media (!), “Middle America,” and small businessmen.

Next, Rothbard argues that libertarianism is going to win “in a remarkably short period of time.”  Why?  Because “only freedom and a free market can run an industrial economy,” and “the masses [will] not permit such a drastic reversal of their expectations for a rising standard of living.”  Even “the Communists themselves have increasingly perceived that socialist central planning simply does not work for an industrial economy,” so they’re rapidly moving in a free-market direction.

The book concludes with a remarkable feat of political eloquence, with words that make converts and sustain them for a lifetime of activism:

The enormous success of Karl Marx and Marxism has been due not to the validity of his ideas — all of which, indeed, are fallacious — but to the fact that he dared to weave socialist theory into a mighty system. Liberty cannot succeed without an equivalent and contrasting systematic theory; and until the last few years, despite our great heritage of economic and political thought and practice, we have not had a fully integrated and consistent theory of liberty. We now have that systematic theory; we come, fully armed with our knowledge, prepared to bring our message and to capture the imagination of all groups and strands in the population… Liberty has never been fully tried in the modern world; libertarians now propose to fulfill the American dream and the world dream of liberty and prosperity for all mankind.

Critical Comments
If you know much about the history of Marxism, it’s striking that Rothbard so eagerly adopts the Marxist “left-sectarian/right-opportunist” distinction.   As you can see in e.g. Franz Borkenau‘s World Communism, this distinction was the foundation for Marxists’ ceaseless witch-hunting and sudden Orwellian strategy shifts:  “Oh no, we’ve got to root out left sectarianism!  Wait, now we’ve got to smash opportunism!  Uh oh, the sectarians are back — get ’em!” 

If you read Raimondo’s highly sympathetic biography of Rothbard, you can see decades of analogous gyrations — an endless series of failed alliances and broken friendships.  If that doesn’t convince you that the strategic “insights” of the Marxists aren’t worth learning, I don’t know what will.

My alternative strategy: Personal integrity plus a big friendly tent.  If you think that a compromise is wrong, oppose it.  Try to change other libertarians’ minds about it.  But when people in broad agreement with you aren’t convinced, don’t purge them.  It’s foolish and wrong.  Indeed, it’s usually foolish and wrong to purge people even if they aren’t in broad agreement with you.  Friendliness not only makes you more persuasive; it keeps you honest, because people won’t be afraid to tell you why you’re mistaken.

In other news, Rothbard’s argument for the imminent triumph of libertarianism is far weaker than it appears.  Yes, Communism collapsed — but the collapse was political, not economic.  In any case, though, social democracy and a modern industrial economy can clearly co-exist.  Indeed, social democracy isn’t even bad enough to prevent moderate economic growth.  Contrary to Mises, the “reserve fund” that allows governments to pursue inefficient policies hasn’t been “exhausted.”  It’s bigger now than ever, because we’re richer now than ever.

I’d like to believe that liberty is coming in my lifetime.  There are important cases where I think it will.  China is going to be much freer in 30 years — I’ll bet on it.  Unfortunately, though, I don’t see any reason to expect Western social democracies — including the U.S. — to get freer anytime soon.  Economics gives us strong reasons to expect the world to keep getting richer.  But political economy does not give us comparable reasons to expect the world to keep getting freer.

Still, I admire Rothbard’s optimism.  To make optimism intellectually respectable, though, we need to transform it from a prediction to an attitude.  Counting your blessings is good; imagining blessings that aren’t going to happen isn’t.  When I look at the modern political landscape, for example, I don’t despair.  Instead, I weigh contemporary problems against e.g. the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and reasonably say, “The world is still far freer than any sensible person would have expected in 1985.  Yay!”  Similarly, when I look at the statism of public opinion, I often breathe a sigh of relief that democracy hasn’t destroyed modern civilization.  By historical standards the world is amazingly free, rich, and creative.  Why shouldn’t I be optimistic about that?

The post appeared first on Econlib.

Dear Professor Caplan,

My wife and I are long-term residents of Japan on renewable visas. We typically renew every one to three years. Until now, the fee has been roughly $40 USD (¥6,000), which was modest. However, the administrative hassle and uncertainty involved have always been significant.

The Japanese government recently passed a law that will dramatically raise these renewal fees — by roughly 5 to 7 times for most people. The new fees are expected to range from around $200 to $600 USD depending on visa length and category, with some cases potentially going even higher.

As someone who has written extensively about immigration policy, I thought this development might interest you. Japan has traditionally been very restrictive on immigration, and this large, sudden cost increase on existing legal residents could serve as a revealing real-world test case. It will be interesting to observe its effects on skilled workers, family formation, economic contributions, and public attitudes toward immigration.

I greatly appreciate your clear and principled work on open borders and immigration economics. Thank you for everything you do.

Best regards, [redacted]

To which I replied:

Even $600 is a rounding error compared to the earnings a janitor makes in Japan versus the Philippines, no?

Which led to a rather fascinating response, which I run in its entirety with the sender’s kind permission.

Totally a rounding error. My wife is from the Philippines and I’ve lived there for 2 years a couple of time. I’ll include two wonderful pictures of us at the end of this email. My wife went to nurse assistant school in the Philippines with 3 lady friends. Her friends work hard 10-12 hour shifts and make about 450 pesos per day, that would be about $7 for a long hard day as a nurse assistant. When my wife got here I emailed her resume to all the hospitals within 1km, two got back to me right away and she was hired within a week despite speaking no Japanese.

Also we lived way outside Tokyo so this is not just like some sort of zero cost of integrating into the system thing. It was a huge amount of extra work mentally on everyone to get her into the job and working smoothly. But she was undoubtedly productive at that hospital and worked there until all the lockdowns and stuff, of course. She made the starting salary of 1400 yen per hour which is about $8.50 an hour. My math shows she started off making about 10 times the salary for doing the same job and everyone was happy. Little bit of stress on everyone to integrate her into the hospital but it was fine.

The numbers add up to exactly what you cite in larger studies. It matches my real-world experience living away from the cultural zoo enclosure that most country capitals tend to be. I guess it’s just one more huzzah for the generally exactly correct thing that you say all the time in your writings. I appreciate that.

My hope is a bright side of the increased cost of the visa will be there isn’t so much damn stress about if it gets approved. Our life is always on a damned knife edge because we would have to totally give up our lives if we suddenly had to move back because of our visas not being renewed. That aspect of this whole thing is never brought up enough in my opinion.

Have a wonderful day. If you get to Japan again I’ll happily buy you and your boys some Yoshinoya in Kawasaki.

The plight of young lonely singles (particularly single men) is once again in the news. Back in 2022, I wrote a Facebook post about how people seeking relationships, but failing at it, can improve what might be called their dating strategy. I was inspired to do so by Bryan Caplan’s discussion of Scott Alexander’s “rationalist” approach to dating. I recently reupped the post, and Bryan Caplan asked if he could reprint it on this substack. What follows is a modestly revised version of what I wrote, which I hope might be helpful to people in the same situation that I once found myself in.

I will start by noting I am not an academic expert on dating and relationships, nor am I any kind of professional dating guru. Far from it. But what I learned may be useful to some people, in part for those very reasons. If I could make this strategy work, the same may be true for others.

It so happens that, like Scott Alexander, I too didn’t get married till I was 37, and I too needed a “rationalist” approach. I was a near-total failure with the opposite sex until I decided to take exactly that approach to the issue when I was around 27. It took time to work. But it fundamentally transformed this aspect of my life - culminating in the good fortune of meeting my future wife (Alison Somin) in 2008.

I studied both the academic literature on dating, and the popular/self-help literature. Both had useful insights that I implemented. Yes, I know, it’s an unromantic, nerdy way of proceeding. But, for those lacking in natural social skills and charisma, it can be a lot better than the alternative.

Friends sometimes say I should write a book about this topic. It would probably sell better than my actual books, but no such work is in the offing. Still, here are a few things I learned that may be of value to others in the same boat where I was back then:

1. Think carefully about exactly what you want, and what qualities are essential in a partner, and which ones less so. Are you looking for a short-term relationship, or a more permanent one? Is it essential that the other person share your religion and/or your political views, have various common interests, and so on? If you’re looking to get married, do you want kids, and how many? It’s best to ask these kinds of questions in advance. If you know what you’re looking for, you’re more likely to find it, and less likely to waste time, or end up in a dysfunctional situation.

2. Scott Alexander is right that dating is a numbers game. The more opportunities you take to meet people and ask them out, the more likely you are to succeed. Plus, doing these things repeatedly improves your skills! You may be surprised at how much. On-line dating apps, social events, events related to your interests, and much else are all opportunities to increase your odds, and improve those skills. I met my future wife at a party sponsored by an academic organization we had both won fellowships from. I went to that event in large part because I thought it would be another opportunity to increase the odds of meeting the right person. And so it was!

3. As a corollary to point 2, you have to get used to dealing with rejection. Unless you’re a famous athlete, actor, rock star, or other type of celebrity (maybe even if you are), some people you ask out are going to say “no,” or just ignore you. Move on and keep trying. One success more than offsets numerous setbacks. Plus, each setback can help improve your skills. Rejection at online dating websites should be particularly easy to accept. Don’t set too much store by what a person who’s never met you or seen you decides. Plus, they might reject or ignore you for reasons having little or nothing to do with you, such as they aren’t monitoring their account on that site, they recently started a relationship with another person, and other such things.

4. Social science research shows that women, particularly highly educated ones, care a lot about the education credentials of men they might potentially date. Friends had advised me that I should not put down on dating site profiles that I have degrees from Harvard and Yale (it would look pretentious, they said). After I read the research, I ignored my friends’ advice and put this stuff in the profiles - modesty be damned. Right away, the number of favorable responses on those sites increased! You can argue women are being superficial here. I actually think this kind of selectivity can be rational behavior, given constrained information. Regardless, it’s worth taking account of. Read up on what women want (or men, if that’s who you’re focusing on), and then make sure people know you have it. When you do, that is - I’m not advocating deception!

5. On average, women prefer men who are self-confident and know what they are doing, or at least seem to. Don’t act shy and apologetic when starting a conversation and/or asking someone out - even if that’s how you feel (it’s certainly how I often felt!). As they say in sports, “act like you’ve been there before.” Don’t take this to the point of being an arrogant jerk, which is both bad in itself, and tactically unwise. But even coming off as a jerk is less likely to sink your chances than coming off as a loser who believes he’s unworthy of the other person’s attention.

6. Related to point 5, if the woman says “yes” to a date, be prepared with a plan for what to do! Being a “man with a plan” is better than putting the onus on the woman to come up with one, and helps further convey the message that you are confident and know what you’re doing. You can say this relies on sexist assumptions. Why shouldn’t women have to do an equal share of date planning? I don’t disagree, in theory. But, at least in my experience (and self-help experts say the same), having a plan works better than asking the other person to come up with one, and certainly better than giving her a lecture on how feminist theory requires her to do the planning. But if the woman says no to your plan and suggests her own instead, by all means do it (within reason)! This happened only a few times in my experience, and saying “yes” was the best approach every time.

There’s much more to be said. A book could indeed be written about it. I actually did expound on these issues in a bit more detail in a 2023 Strangers on the Internet podcast, with legal scholar Irina Manta and psychologist Michelle Lange (they invited me after reading my original 2022 post).

But the above is at least a potentially helpful start. I will add that none of this advice will turn you into Casanova. The point is not to come up with a fool-proof strategy for success, but to give yourself a fighting chance.

Finally, I recognize some of the above points are mainly useful to men seeking women rather than vice versa. Obviously, I know more about the former than the latter. But there’s a lot of info out there on both scenarios (and on dating strategy for gays and lesbians, too). “Rationalism” can work for you regardless of gender and sexual orientation! That said, I do warn that the academic literature on what men (on average) look for in women probably won’t make your view of human nature more optimistic.

To understand Jones’ twin projects, you must first understand the incredible potential upside of open borders — a world where anyone can legally take a job anywhere. Fact: If a rich country like the United States allows a low-skilled foreigner from a Third World country to move here and work, his earnings almost instantly multiply by a factor of 5x, 10x, or even 15x. This is easy to visually verify, and the best statistical analysis confirms the obvious: any maid, gardener, or janitor from Haiti or Nigeria will leap from earning one or two thousand dollars a year to earning $15,000 or $30,000 a year. The reason, as usual in labor markets, is not employer charity, but worker productivity. Almost everyone is vastly more productive in the First World than in the Third World: The same farmer grows much more food, the same factory worker produces many more products, the same service sector worker saves much more valuable time.

The only intellectually challenging question is not whether immigration vastly multiplies an individual’s productivity, but whether this multiplication is scalable. Sure, handing out one work permit to one more person dramatically enriches humanity, and the same goes if we hand out 100 or 1000 work permits. But what if we hand out a million? Ten million? A hundred million? If this multiplication is fully scalable, simple math says that open borders would roughly double humanity’s Gross World Product. And while the critics of economics have long faulted us for reducing everything to GDP, economists have long had a mighty response: Virtually everything good — health, longevity, safety, leisure, civility, peace, culture, and more — goes hand-in-hand with GDP. To use Michael Clemens’ slogan, scalable mass migration looks like “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk” — an incredible opportunity that Western democracies stubbornly refuse to pick up.

Scalability is therefore the key question. The lazy objection is to summarily dismiss this as silly Ivory Tower theory. But Gulf monarchies like United Arab Emirates, which have gone from medieval poverty to futuristic opulence in a single lifetime, show that the potential gains of mass migration are totally real. Yes, the Gulf monarchies were rich in mineral wealth, but it was only by the power of sky-high migration — UAE is now almost 90% foreign-born — that they were able to take advantage of this opportunity.

The better objection is that the open borders also brings big cultural and political costs. Benevolent dictatorships may be able to defuse these downsides, but Western democracies somehow can’t. The subset of social scientists who recognize the incredible upside of immigration yet fear open borders normally appeal to these cultural and political costs. The problem is that the gains of immigration are so astronomical that we should happily endure big cultural and political costs to capture these gains.

The reason that Garett Jones towers above the other critics of immigration is that he tries to show that these cultural and political costs are not just big, but even more astronomical than the benefits. In Hive Mind, he shows that people from poor countries have low average IQ, and that average national IQ has a massive effect on nations’ GDPs. This effect is much larger for nations than for individuals, plausibly because low IQ does indirect cultural and political harm as well as direct economic harm. Estimated magnitude: If everyone on Earth moves to the United States, average IQ falls from 98 to 87, reducing U.S. GDP per-capita by 49%. But on closer examination, this does not show that the immigration is a net negative! On these assumptions, total Gross World Product still rises by 81%, roughly the same as the Clemens calculation that open borders would double the production of humanity.

What would this mean in practice? Specialization and trade between higher- and lower-IQ people. Higher-IQ people — disproportionately current citizens of the First World — would specialize in high-skilled work, especially management and entrepreneurship. Lower-IQ people — disproportionately current citizens of the Third World — would specialize in low-skilled work, especially basic services. This is the same logic as any well-run business: Google doesn’t hire college grads as janitors — but it has plenty of janitors.

Jones replied to this critique. He accepts my math, and objects simply that incomes will be too equal for current citizens of the First World to profit. As a result, foreigners reap more than 100% of the massive gains. But this is a bizarre position on many levels. General problem: In all of economic history, it is basically impossible to find any time large productivity gains were not widely shared. The Industrial Revolution did not just enrich factory owners, and the internet did not just enrich programmers. Specific problem: Jones’ reply assumes that the private payoff for intelligence stays the same even if the relative supply of high intelligence crashes. This is deeply implausible and contradicts the facts from countries where IQ inequality is high.

And even if my whole reply to Jones’ critique is wrong, Hive Mind strongly implies that the U.S. should eagerly welcome any migrant with an IQ of 98 or higher, which is well over a billion people worldwide.

Moving on: Jones’ more recent book, The Culture Transplant, presents another mechanism for the indirect costs of immigration to be massive enough to exceed immigration’s direct benefits. This “ancestry” or “SAT” (state history, agriculture, and technology) story is much harder to swiftly explain than his IQ story, so I’ll leave that task to him. Instead, I’ll point out the main issues with this work:

First, Jones doesn’t show that ancestry is an additional problem on top of IQ. And if you look at his data, this is a massive oversight. Why? Because the East Asian countries that famously grew rich despite some mediocre ancestry scores (specifically for his “Tech in 1500” measure) are all high IQ.

Second, if you repeat my previous thought experiment of moving the whole planet to the U.S., Jones’ estimates imply that GWP will more than double. Why? Because the ancestry scores of the United States are mediocre.

Third, contrary to Jones, immigrant assimilation is obviously high. Anyone who personally knows first-generation immigrants and their children sees this with their own eyes. American culture is so globally dominant that much of the world has already pre-assimilated to our language and way of life without ever setting foot in the country.

Last, Jones’ The Culture Transplant strongly implies that we should welcome all migrants with ancestry scores exceeding our own. Which, by most of his measures, turns out to be over two billion people.

There’s no time to respond to the countless other complaints about immigration, but here’s my general approach. I dismiss all vivid anecdotes as demagogic distractions. If you hear a story so juicy you’re dying to repeat it to “prove your point,” don’t. In contrast, if you’ve got ugly numbers, I’m happy to hear them. But before we act on these numbers, we should always remember the truly massive economic gains of immigration. Immigrant crime, welfare dependence, and so on are sometimes notable problems, but they’re rounding errors compared to the gains. There’s more to life than GDP? Sure, but GDP and almost everything else good go hand in hand.

Closing point: Since I’m at UATX, I fear that many listeners will dismiss pro-immigration views as “woke.” I have zero sympathy for woke philosophy; in fact, I’m the sole professor at my university who was willing to criticize the theory and practice of wokeness before our Board of Visitors. Still, even a woke clock is right twice a day, and I’m grateful that woke activists have loudly pushed back against recent anti-immigration policies.

That said, there are two night-and-day differences between immigration and every other notable woke cause. First, free immigration and meritocracy go hand in hand. You don’t have to pass laws to scare employers to hire and promote immigrants; in fact, you have to pass laws to scare employers to not hire and promote them. Second, immigration enforcement is the opposite of a “microaggression.” Governments around the world really do treat immigrants like criminals simply for trying to live and work without the right paperwork — paperwork that is almost impossible to obtain. If the critics of wokeness really stand for meritocracy and against brutal violations of basic human rights, they should be as pro-immigration as I am.

Pending the dissolution of States, libertarians desire to limit, to whittle down, the area of government power in all directions and as much as possible… In foreign affairs, the goal is the same: to keep government from interfering in the affairs of other governments or other countries. Political “isolationism” and peaceful coexistence–refraining from acting upon other countries–is, then, the libertarian counterpart to agitating for laissez-faire policies at home. The idea is to shackle government from acting abroad just as we try to shackle government at home. Isolationism or peaceful coexistence is the foreign policy counterpart of severely limiting government at home.

But couldn’t one government’s military actions increase human freedom?  Not in a morally permissible way.  Suppose, he asks, that the imaginary nation of Walldavia tries to defend the freedom of Belgravia against an invasion from Graustark?  It’s still wrong:

[W]hen Walldavia, or any other States, leap into the fray [they] are themselves expanding and compounding the extent of the aggression, because they are (1) unjustly slaughtering masses of Graustarkian civilians, and (2) increasing tax-coercion over Walldavian citizens. Furthermore, (3) in this age when States and subjects are closely identifiable, Walldavia is thereby leaving Walldavian civilians open to retaliation by Graustarkian bombers or missiles. Thus, entry into the war by the Walldavian government puts into jeopardy the very lives and properties of Walldavian citizens which the government is supposed to be protecting. Finally, (4) conscription-enslavement of Walldavian citizens will usually intensify.

After laying out this hard-line, Rothbard defies Cold War orthodoxy.  The U.S. is no hero: “empirically, taking the twentieth century as a whole, the single most warlike, most interventionist, most imperialist government has been the United States.”  And despite its monstrous domestic policies, Rothbard argues that the Soviet Union’s foreign policies haven’t been all that bad.  Lenin pioneered the theory of “peaceful coexistence,” and…

As time went on, furthermore, this policy was reinforced by a “conservatism” that comes upon all movements after they have acquired and retained power for any length of time, in which the interests of keeping power over one’s nation-state begins to take more and more precedence over the initial ideal of world revolution. This increasing conservatism under Stalin and his successors strengthened and reinforced the nonaggressive, “peaceful coexistence” policy.

What about the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Red Army’s later occupation of Eastern Europe?  Rothbard’s unimpressed.  The Nazi-Soviet pact was merely an attempt to restore Russia’s pre-WWI borders, and its post-war expansion was just a byproduct of the Soviets’ defensive war against the Nazis:

[I]n order to defeat the invaders, it was obviously necessary for the Russians to roll back the invading armies and conquer Germany and the other warring countries of Eastern Europe. It is easier to make a case for the United States being expansionist for conquering and occupying Italy and part of Germany than it is for Russia’s actions–after all, the United States was never directly attacked by the Germans.

While he condemns the later Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Rothbard insists that the broader world should not feel threatened by them:

Their only use of troops has been to defend their territory in the Communist bloc, rather than to extend it further. Thus, when Hungary threatened to leave the Soviet bloc in 1956, or Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviets intervened with troops–reprehensibly, to be sure, but still acting in a conservative and defensive rather than expansionist manner.

Rothbard closes the chapter with a defense of multilateral disarmament:

Not only should there be joint disarmament of nuclear weapons, but also of all weapons capable of being fired massively across national borders; in particular bombers. It is precisely such weapons of mass destruction as the missile and the bomber which can never be pinpoint-targeted to avoid their use against innocent civilians…If it is illegitimate for government ever to employ such weapons, why should they be allowed to remain, fully loaded, in their none-too-clean hands?

Critical Comments
Rothbard’s deduction of isolationism from libertarianism is basically correct.  The main slippage is his insistence that libertarians focus on limiting the crimes of their own government.  What if your own government is relatively benign, and another government is murdering millions?  Mightn’t it make more sense for libertarians to focus their protests on the greater evil, even if it is further away?

In purely consequentialist terms, too, isolationism deserves a lot more credit than it gets.  WWII, widely seen as the proof of the necessity of an active foreign policy, left half of Europe under Soviet rule, and put Mao Zedong, the century’s greatest murderer, on the Chinese throne.  Is that what counts as “American success”?  In a similar vein, it seems likely that the U.S. wouldn’t have to worry about terrorism if it had simply stayed out of the Middle East altogether.

When it comes to his Cold War revisionism, though, Rothbard let his hatred of the U.S. government blind him to the relative benevolence of U.S. foreign policy and the absolute malevolence of the Soviet Union. 

When I was eighteen years old, I met Rothbard and challenged him on these questions.  He basically told me to go read some actual history.  I followed his advice, reading most of his favorite New Left historians.  I wasn’t impressed.  Furthermore, the more I read about the history of the Communist movement, the more I realized that Lenin and Stalin really did command an international totalitarian conspiracy of unthinkable proportions.  I particularly recommend Franz Borkenau‘s World Communism and Burnett Bolloten’s The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution.

The most absurd omission in Rothbard’s U.S.-U.S.S.R. comparison, though, is that he pays zero attention to how the two countries acted in victory.   Doesn’t that have anything to do with who deserves to be named the century’s biggest imperialist?

While it’s true that the U.S. can be a truly barbarous combatant, abject surrender to American occupation leads to amazingly good results.  The American occupation of Germany and Japan clearly paved the way for the most libertarian policies these countries had ever known, not to mention peace and prosperity.

On the other hand, Soviet occupation almost invariably led to mass murder, mass deportations, wide-scale slave labor, collectivization, famine, and other horrors.  Abject surrender was no protection, as the citizens of the Baltics learned in 1940-1.  To say that sovietizing Eastern Europe was all part and parcel of rolling back Hitler’s invasion is absurd.  The creation of the Soviet bloc may have been opportunistic, but it was still a clear-cut case of an “expansionist” foreign policy.

To be blunt, the main thing decent people around the world have had to fear from the U.S. is that they’ll get killed in the crossfire if their government or fellow citizens resist.   The main thing decent people around the world had to fear from the U.S.S.R., in contrast, was that they would experience the standard treatment the Soviets dealt to everyone under their control.

The post appeared first on Econlib.

1. I last debated Garett Jones on immigration in 2015. A lot has happened in the interim: global and national politics aside, I published my Open Borders, and Jones published his Hive Mind and The Culture Transplant. This Friday, UATX is hosting a rematch, open to the public. Start time: 12:45 PM, at the UATX campus: Scarbrough Building, 522 N Congress Ave STE 300, Austin, TX 78701. Coleman Hughes will be moderating.

2. Other UATX events: the last game night will be on campus on Thursday at 6 PM. The last karaoke night will be on campus on Friday at 6 PM.

3. Want to get lunch or dinner with me in Austin before I depart on June 5? Email me.

4. On June 8, I’ll be in New York City to debate Heritage’s Simon Hankinson for the Soho Forum on “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should complete its mandate to deport all illegal aliens currently residing in the United States.” Doors open at 6 PM. Address: The Sheen Center, 18 Bleecker St, New York, NY 10012. If you’ve previously heard me debate immigration, I promise to open with a totally different argument than I’ve ever publicly made before. An argument so undeniable that in a just world I’d get 100% of the vote.

5. Earlier that day, I’m hosting a meet-up at Da Nico restaurant in Little Italy. My flight lands around 12:30, so the tentative start time is 2 PM. Please RSVP in the comments, and I’ll post an update if I’m arriving late. Address: 164 Mulberry St, New York, NY 10013.

6. The dates for Capla-Con 2026 are still up in the air. It may be in early July, but failing that, mid-August. Feel free to post your preferences in the comments, which matter at the margin.

   

Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.

Then Rothbard gets down to business.  He defends the benefits of economic growth and technology against radical Greens, and takes a proto-Simonian position on natural resource scarcity.  He then explains how private property gives incentives for conservation and discovery.  A corollary is that expanding the scope of private property would solve many environmental problems.  His chief example is aquaculture:

[I]f anyone tried to farm the sea and to increase the productivity of the fisheries by fertilizers, he would immediately be deprived of the fruits of his efforts because he could not keep other fishermen from rushing in and seizing the fish… Furthermore, there is no economic incentive–in fact, there is every disincentive–for anyone to engage in technological research in the ways and means of improving the productivity of the fisheries, or in extracting the mineral resources of the oceans. There will only be such incentive when property rights in parts of the ocean are as fully allowed as property rights in the land.

Finally, Rothbard turns to pollution.  Here he departs from almost every other environmental economist, left and right, by calling for outright bans on air and noise (!) pollution. 

The remedy is simply for the courts to return to their function of defending person and property rights against invasion, and therefore to enjoin anyone from injecting pollutants into the air…

The argument that such an injunctive prohibition against pollution would add to the costs of industrial production is as reprehensible as the pre-Civil War argument that the abolition of slavery would add to the costs of growing cotton, and that therefore abolition, however morally correct, was “impractical.”

Rothbard then attacks Friedmanite proposals for pollution taxes or tradeable permits, and suggests that technological progress could cope with a total pollution ban:

Mufflers can be installed on noisy machines that emit sound waves precisely contra-cyclical to the waves of the machines, and thereby can cancel out these racking sounds. Air wastes can even now be recaptured as they leave the chimney and be recycled to yield products useful to industry. Thus, sulfur dioxide, a major noxious air pollutant, can be captured and recycled to produce economically valuable sulfuric acid. The highly polluting spark ignition engine will either have to be “cured” by new devices or replaced altogether by such nonpolluting engines as diesel, gas turbine, or steam, or by an electric car.

Critical Comments
There’s a lot to like in this chapter.  The opening ridicule is priceless.  His early defense of free-market environmentalism and resource optimism are also very good. 

The problems arise in the section on pollution.  A total ban may sound good, but doesn’t it imply that breathing and speaking are impermissible acts of aggression?  After all, you don’t get other people’s consent to emit carbon dioxide on them, or bombard their ears with sound waves.

Rothbard might reply that spraying me with small amounts of carbon dioxide is too minimal to deserve to be called “aggression.”  But then couldn’t a polluting factory owner argue the same thing?  In the end, both the individual and the factory owner wind up arguing that their emissions are “reasonable,” and there’s no clean way for libertarian principle to adjudicate their claims.  Under the circumstances, what’s so awful about e.g. tradeable pollution rights? 

In Hard Heads, Soft Hearts, Alan Blinder tells us that, “A pollution-free society is unattainable, both physically and economically.  To think otherwise is not to think.”  In For a New Liberty, Rothbard seems to stubbornly deny Blinder’s truism.  It is interesting, then, that Rothbard later wrote “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution,” an article that – for practical purposes – completely vitiated his hard-line position. 

How so?  In this article, Rothbard continues to insist on an absolute right to not be polluted upon, but he also insists upon stringent hurdles to prosecution.  A victim is entitled to an injunction against pollution provided that:

(a) the polluter has not previously established a homestead easement; (b) while visible pollutants or noxious odors are per se aggression, in the case of invisible and insensible pollutants the plaintiff must prove actual harm; (c) the burden of proof of such aggression rests upon the plaintiff; (d) the plaintiff must prove strict causality from the actions of the defendant to the victimization of the plaintiff; (e) the plaintiff must prove such causality and aggression beyond a reasonable doubt; and (f) there is no vicarious liability, but only liability for those who actually commit the deed.

Unfortunately, if a million people simultaneously pollute, it will be impossible to prove that any one person caused any one injury, so despite Rothbard’s “ban all pollution” position, people will be able to pollute with impunity. 

The lesson I draw: When right and wrong are black and white – and they often are – Rothbard does better than mainstream thinkers.  Pollution, however, is an intrinsically gray issue – and when such questions arise, Rothbard winds up awkwardly vacillating between two unsatisfactory extreme positions.

The post appeared first on Econlib.

P.S. Games and karaoke continue at UATX this week! Games tonight (Thurs) at 6 PM, karaoke tomorrow (Fri) at 6 PM. Someone will be in the UATX lobby at 6 PM to admit you.

Given all this insanity, you might expect Spain to be an economic wasteland. But it’s obviously not. I’ve been to almost every major region of Spain, and wherever I go, the country is bursting with high-quality commerce. Apologists for the status quo could jubilantly declare, “See, making businesses wait years to open is actually good!”

But that’s absurd, so what’s really afoot? Simple: Businesses have an unsung superpower. They aren’t just awesome at producing and marketing goods and services. They are also awesome at coping with government stupidity — rule by people that my good friend Scott Aaronson aptly describes as “blankfaces”:

What exactly is a blankface? He or she is often a mid-level bureaucrat, but not every bureaucrat is a blankface, and not every blankface is a bureaucrat. A blankface is anyone who enjoys wielding the power entrusted in them to make others miserable by acting like a cog in a broken machine, rather than like a human being with courage, judgment, and responsibility for their actions. A blankface meets every appeal to facts, logic, and plain compassion with the same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare—a blank stare that, more often than not, conceals a contemptuous smile.

Suppose you know that opening a new grocery store requires three years of bureaucratic hell. A mediocre entrepreneur will start filling out the paperwork on the day that consumer demand makes a new store profitable. A good entrepreneur, in contrast, will start filling out the paperwork three years before consumer demand makes a new store profitable, so the doors can open on the first day there’s money to be made.

Thanks to competition, consumers ultimately pay the price of wasteful government policies. This is Econ 1: As long as prices remain free, government stupidity reduces supply and raises prices, allowing businesses to remain profitable despite their hostile economic environment.

Crucially, however, the process of complying with sheer idiocy is itself competitive! Suppose firms can figure out how to streamline the compliance process. There’s learning by doing, or economies of scale in compliance. Then thanks to competition, businesses ultimately pass these compliance savings on to consumers.

Imagine, for example, that Spanish licensing requirements raise business costs by an average of 20%. You might think that prices would have to rise 20% to pay for these burdens. But in reality, some firms will be much better at coping with licensing requirements than others. Their costs “only” rise by, say, 10%. What happens? “Average” firms go out of business, and get replaced by firms with superior coping skills. Firms that contemplate the blankfaces and quietly tell themselves, “Here’s how we’ll handle these morons” rather than “Poor me, this is hopeless.”

If you have a deontological objection to negligent coercion — as you should — you might consider my superpower story to be bad news. After all, if government stupidity had devastating economic effects, governments would be under a lot of pressure to avoid stupidity. But whatever your meta-ethics, the fact remains: In a business environment with lots of stupid government policies, businesses that survive tend to be very good at coping with government stupidity.

Some stupidity, granted, is so egregious that no one can figure out how to cheaply defuse it: See immigration restrictions and housing regulation. Some countries are so short on entrepreneurial talent — and so hostile to multinational business — that government stupidity keeps them mired in poverty. But in most industries and most countries, businesses merrily chug along despite rule by blankfaces. If your business leaders are smart enough, massive government stupidity could be quite livable. And if you travel the EU — or California for that matter — I must confess that this is largely what you see.