This reminiscing always puzzles me, because I vividly remember the second half of the second half of the 20th century. Except for a brief window of roughly 1988-1991, my first-hand experience is that America’s national mood has been relentlessly bad. While I’ve known plenty of American optimists, and count myself among them, “American optimism” is a will-o’-the-wisp. It appears so fleetingly that you have to wonder if it was ever there at all.

A quick chronology of my first-hand experience with 1976-2000:

1976-1981 - Americans are miserable about inflation, defeat in Vietnam, and the Iranian hostage crisis.

1982-1987 - Americans are miserable about inflation, nuclear war, and Soviet advances around the globe. And despite Reagan’s two landslide victories, journalists and other intellectuals are vocally miserable about “massive” cuts in the welfare state, Reagan’s stance on Nicaragua and El Salvador, and the Iran-Contra scandal.

1988-1991 - As the Soviet bloc collapses, mainstream journalists rejoice. They favorably discuss “free-market reforms” on a regular basis. I kid you not. There’s a brief jolt of negativity before the Gulf War, but easy U.S. victory leaves Americans feeling pleased with themselves.

1992 - Despite near-bloodless total triumph in the Cold War, plus the boost from the Iraq War, a mild recession unleashes severe discontent against “12 years of Republican neglect.” Bizarrely given the size of today’s national debt, both Clinton and Perot run as deficit hawks, warning of future fiscal disaster.

1993-1997 - Malcontent with “shock therapy” in the former Soviet bloc squelches lingering optimism about Communism’s collapse. Republican House victory in the 1994 elections sparks widespread mutual recrimination and hysteria.

1998-2000 - The Lewinsky scandal and its political fallout almost totally drown out any optimism about the roaring economy or the rise of the Internet and e-commerce.

To be clear: I don’t claim that the typical American was personally unhappy from 1976-2000. But the reason was that most Americans, like most human beings, are politically apathetic. But when Americans were thinking about “the state of America,” their thoughts were normally dominated by sheer disgust.

The good feelings of 1988-1991 weren’t just a total fluke. They dissolved like cotton candy. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine a greater failure of the retrospective voting model. America’s long-term archrival, the Evil Empire, peacefully disintegrated the year before the 1992 election. At the 1992 Republican national convention, Jack Kemp remarked:

Ladies and gentlemen, communism didn't fall. It was pushed. It was our ideas that did the pushing and our Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, that helped change the world.

If there was a 5% chance that Kemp was correct, retrospective voters would have rewarded Bush with a second term. But instead, Clinton triumphed with the insipid mantra: “It’s the economy, stupid.” The simplest explanation is that even at the pinnacle of America’s improbable peaceful geopolitical ascendancy, only a small minority of Americans felt deeply good about it.

What my first-hand experience can’t rule out is that America had a great national mood from 1946-1975 or so. But I seriously doubt the national mood was very optimistic then, either. Throughout my youth, none of my elders ever waxed rhapsodic about how great America was doing in the 50s, 60s, or early 70s.* One or two of my teachers were nostalgic for the student protests of the 60s. But I can’t recall anyone who lived through 1946-1975 reaching out to share their memories of a unified, self-confident America.

Sure, you could protest, “But tons of wonderful historic improvements happened throughout this era.” So true, yet so irrelevant. In politics, subjective attitude and objective performance are barely related. This was true in the past, and it’s true today.

So what’s going on? The proximate cause is the endless doom-saying of the media. But if most potential viewers were like me, doom-saying media would have gone bankrupt long ago. The ultimate cause, rather, is that human nature — or to be more precise, human political nature — is broken. Politics is a bizarre combination of childish wishful thinking and monstrous misanthropy. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Politics is cruelty. And while there’s little you can do about it, at least there’s some karmic relief. (Pun intended). Namely: People who revel in the cruelty of politics spend most of their lives wallowing in bitterness. Before long, their hangover perpetually overshadows their intoxication.

If you earnestly want an optimistic mood, you must psychologically detach yourself from your society. Sure, know Our World in Data forwards and backwards, so you never lose sight of humanity’s glorious economic and technological accomplishments. But the real key to an optimistic mood is focusing on outcomes you personally control. Make friends, find true love, get meaningful work, earn money, play games, see the wonders of the world, have kids, and appreciate the cornucopia of consumer goods available at the click of a button. Instead of finding meaning in your society, be a model of meaning for your society. Your fellow citizens probably won’t heed your example, but that’s on them.

* I did have one teacher who glowingly told us that he volunteered to fight in World War II when he was underage.

Time: Wednesday, July 22, 8 PM

Location: Steve’s Korean BBQ, 2521 Durant Ave F, Berkeley, CA 94704

All are welcome. Please RSVP in the comments.

1. Los Angeles Meet-up on July 23 at 7 PM. Venue: Hook’d Fish Grill, 10176 Reseda Blvd, Northridge, CA 91324. Please RSVP in the comments.

2. Capla-Con 2026 on August 15-16, noon-midnight both days. Venue: Carow Hall at GMU Fairfax. Please RSPV here.

3. I’m speaking at the Affordable Housing Crisis Symposium at Xavier University in Cincinnati alongside Mayor Aftab Purevalon September 17, 8:30 AM-1:30 PM. Please register here.

4. Garett Jones and I will be having a Heterodox Conversation on immigration at the University of Wyoming in Laramie on October 15. Registration not yet ready. I’ll be touring Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons the week before. Let me know in the comments if you’ll be in the neighborhood.

P.S. If you had any sound issues with the livestream, I don’t hear any problems on this recording.

Professor Caplan,

Fair question. I am a very real person, but I did use an AI tool to polish my drafts.

I'm an attorney by day and this framework is a solo hobby of mine. Because I don't have a research staff and was drafting these in my spare time, I used AI as an editor to clean up my prose.

But the ideas, the policy research, the concessions, and the genuine shift in my thinking were entirely mine. I reached out because I wanted my framework stress-tested by the person most likely to break it. Your math did exactly that, and your point about immigration sequencing completely changed my outlook.

I'm glad the exchange was worth publishing, even if the prose was a little too clean for its own good.

Now, here’s the original exchange.

After receiving this email from an anonymous reader, I was pleasantly surprised by how productive our dialogue became. If most aspiring politicians were this numerate, the Great Political Stagnation would already be over.

Here is the whole exchange, reprinted anonymously with the sender’s permission.

Reader

Professor Caplan,

I'm a practicing attorney in [redacted], and I want you to tell me where my plan stops being libertarian.

I've been developing a comprehensive policy framework for a libertarian president whose sole objective is maximizing well-being for the bottom 50th percentile of Americans. Six executive orders, six bills. The libertarian mechanisms are real: deregulation, occupational licensing reform, housing supply deregulation, drug decriminalization, civil asset forfeiture moratorium, FDA reciprocal approval, criminal record expungement. These are standard libertarian policies that happen to disproportionately benefit the poor because government-imposed barriers fall hardest on those with the fewest resources to navigate them.

But the framework also includes a UBI ($12,000/year, consolidating seven programs, phasing out at 20 cents per dollar above $50,000), an expanded EITC, a payroll tax exemption funded by lifting the payroll cap, a 36% APR cap on payday lending for FDIC-insured institutions, postal banking, and federal spending conditions on local zoning reform. A purist would say at least three of those cross the line from libertarian reform to progressive redistribution with a liberty label.

You've written books on three of the plan's domains (Open Borders, Build Baby Build, The Case Against Education). You're the person who follows the logic to its conclusion regardless of political palatability. So I'm asking directly: is a framework that combines genuine deregulation with a UBI, a payday lending cap, and federal zoning spending conditions still libertarian in any meaningful sense? Or is it liberaltarianism (Lindsey's term), which is to say, progressive policy that borrows libertarian rhetoric?

The libertarian case I make is that every dollar currently flowing through the welfare bureaucracy that reaches a recipient as unrestricted cash is a net increase in individual autonomy, even if the cash itself is a transfer payment. Is that coherent, or am I defining libertarianism down until it means nothing?

Me:

That UBI will probably end up dwarfing the cost of the seven programs you're abolishing, so it's not even really liberaltarian. Think about the math. Under your plan, a family of 4 would pay no taxes at all until it's earning $290k ($48k/.2 + $50k).

Reader:

Professor Caplan,

The math is right and I hadn't run it to the end. A family of four receiving benefits until $290K isn't a safety net. It's a universal entitlement that costs multiples of what it replaces.

The design trap I walked into: a 20% phase-out avoids the poverty trap (which was the whole point) but extends benefits so far up the distribution that the program becomes unaffordable. Steepen the phase-out to 50% and you solve the cost problem but recreate the marginal rate problem the plan was designed to eliminate. The poverty trap and the cost problem are the same variable viewed from opposite ends.

Is there a phase-out design that keeps marginal rates below the current 60-80% implicit rate without extending benefits to the 95th percentile? Or is the honest answer that a UBI generous enough to replace the programs it consolidates and gradual enough to avoid poverty traps is inherently more expensive than the programs it replaces, which means the "consolidation saves money" claim is false?

Me:

My compliments for listening! I’ve been reviewing this math for over a decade without getting UBI proponents to take it seriously.

The truth is that the only way to make a UBI affordable is to make it very small. See this and this for starters.

Reader:

Professor Caplan,

Read both. Dolan’s $4,452 ceiling settles it. If that’s what consolidation can fund, then $12,000 isn’t a consolidation. It’s a new entitlement three times the size of what it replaces, and the entire premise of Bill 1 is false.

Your thesis 9 (welfare states provide the rationale for immigration restriction) is the one I hadn’t connected. Cutting the welfare state and opening immigration aren’t separate proposals. Each makes the other politically sustainable. That changes how I sequence the framework.

Thank you for being the person who made me run the numbers to the end.

Which is the rational position.

Murdering and enslaving fellow human beings really are evil, and you don’t have to be a moral visionary to realize it. Even kindergarteners can grasp the moral challenge, “Would it be alright if someone did that to you?” Sure, you can add, “People who pioneer a massive expansion of murder and slavery are morally even worse than people who merely accept a pre-existing way of life based on murder and slavery.” But the latter is still terrible. And yes, Columbus, like Hitler, really was a pioneer of murder and slavery.

Sadly, wokeness aggressively refuses to universalize its own universalism. If we should hold people in the past to universal moral standards, we should also hold people in the present to universal moral standards, not credulously accept lame, lawyerly excuses like, “In their culture, this is normal” or “Given their life story, we mustn’t blame them.”

Most obviously, if one group has much higher murder rates than another, it is ridiculous to forgive their murderers on account of poverty or poor education or “racism.” If you’ve got actual evidence that the murder rate gap is driven by piles of false convictions, by all means share your evidence. But if “He would have been a gentle soul in a world free of racism” is all you’ve got, spare us.

The same goes for economic and educational success. If you’ve got actual evidence that racial or gender earnings gaps are driven by sheer bigotry, by all means share the evidence. If you’ve got actual evidence that grade or test score gaps are driven by sheer bigotry, by all means share your evidence. But if “She would have founded a unicorn company in a world free of racism and sexism” or “Racism reduced his SAT score by 300 points” is all you’ve got, spare us.

Yes, you can always try to shift moral responsibility to strangers. Instead of blaming murderers, you can blame “society” for failing to teach them not to murder. Instead of blaming the homeless, you can blame “society” for failing to teach them not to live prudently. But these are absurdly high standards. And if you take these high standards seriously, why not use them to excuse Columbus or Hitler? Hitler did have a pretty bad childhood, after all. Maybe he wouldn’t have turned to genocide if the Jews had funded after-school programs for at-risk anti-Semitic youth.

The stronger critique of my position is that I’m giving the woke too much credit. They don’t actually hold people in the past to universal moral standards. Instead, they hold historical Western societies to strict standards while holding the rest of the world blameless for its horrors. Fair enough, but morally condemning a large fraction of the murderers and slavers of the past is still a lot closer to moral truth than giving all of history’s murderers and slavers a pass. To quote the timeless Western words of Lord Acton:

I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong. The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual.

Location: Carow Hall on GMU’s Fairfax campus

Time: August 15-16, noon-midnight both days. Open house format: Show up whenever you like, and stay for as long (or as little) as you like.

As usual, we’ll have all kinds of games, conversation, minor celebrities, karaoke, and abundant food. A few attendees even find true love! If you want to play a time-intensive RPG with me, email me and I’ll give you a menu of options.

Please RSVP in the comments on the Capla-Con Substack! That’s where all further discussion of this event will be housed.

P.S. As the time nears, I’ll post separate threads for game organizers and carpooling.

P.P.S. If you feel the urge to reciprocate for all the value you get from Capla-Con, consider becoming a paid subscriber. ;-)

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.