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2026-02-20T08:56:42.199-06:00

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Richman, Liebowitz & Immigration

2026-02-13T13:13:08.369-06:00

TGIF: Immigration vs. Settler Colonialism

2026-02-13T04:59:00.002-06:00

The people performing those mind-boggling contortions to justify, on libertarian grounds, state violence against migrants without papers—restrictatarians, I call them—cite a 1994 article by Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) in support of their double-jointed acrobatics. Rothbard was correct about many things, but a position is not correct merely because Rothbard held it. I expect no disagreement over that.

As a general matter, Rothbard's importance to the shaping of the modern libertarian movement needs no documentation. He was accomplished in economics, social theory, and history. In his time, he was known as Mr. Libertarian, the guardian of the plumb line. (He was also my friend and, informally, my teacher.) His words carry much weight for people who love liberty. It's therefore appropriate to show why, in this case, in 1994, Rothbard was stunningly wrong about immigration, or the freedom to move.

The article is "Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation-State" (Journal of Libertarian Studies, Fall 1994). In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Rothbard wrote:

The question of open borders, or free immigration, has become an accelerating problem for classical liberals. This is first, because the welfare state increasingly subsidizes immigrants to enter and receive permanent assistance, and second, because cultural boundaries have become increasingly swamped. I began to rethink my views on immigration when, as the Soviet Union collapsed, it became clear that ethnic Russians had been encouraged to flood into Estonia and Latvia in order to destroy the cultures and languages of these peoples. Previously, it had been easy to dismiss as unrealistic Jean Raspail's anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints, in which virtually the entire population of India decides to move, in small boats, into France, and the French, infected by liberal ideology, cannot summon the will to prevent economic and cultural national destruction. As cultural and welfare-state problems have intensified, it became impossible to dismiss Raspail's concerns any longer.

What might Rothbard be saying here? Note this: "I began to rethink my views on immigration when, as the Soviet Union collapsed, it became clear that ethnic Russians had been encouraged to flood into Estonia and Latvia in order to destroy the cultures and languages of these peoples." This has been quoted many times. Sometime in the past, Rothbard explained, a horde of ethnic Russians was sent into the Baltic states with bad intent. We must conclude that unrestricted immigration is bad. QED. Really?

Rothbard further wrote that the fact of Baltic Russification became clear to him as—meaning not until?—the Soviet Union was falling apart in the late '80s and early '90s. But that cannot be. Rothbard was a student of Russian and Soviet history, so he must have been aware of the past episodes of Russification under the czars and Stalin's Soviet regime long before the Soviet Union's disintegration. Furthermore, he must have known that one of its primary objectives was cultural transformation. None of this could have been news to Rothbard when he wrote his article.

So why would Rothbard lead us to believe that he did not know about Russification until the early '90s? I hate to say this, but perhaps at that moment, he needed a respectable-sounding excuse for announcing his change of mind about free immigration.

Here is how Gemini replied to my question about Rothbard's statement (emphasis added):

The mass migration of ethnic Russians into the Baltic states occurred during the Soviet occupation (1944–1990), not after they gained independence in 1991.... After regaining independence, the Baltic states experienced a net outflow of ethnic Russians, not a "flood" into them. Many ethnic Russians left the Baltic states to return to the Russian Federation in the early 1990s.

Gemini added that the "intensive" Soviet Russification of the Baltics "became a major international and internal issue from the 1950s through the 1980s." (For scholarly treatments of Stalin's Russification of the Baltics, see, for example, this and this. On the outflow of Russians from the Baltic states after independence, see this.)

The Soviet Union occupied the Baltic states, including Lithuania, in 1940 under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Ribbentrop-Molotov ~~Cocktail~~ Treaty. Stalin lost control of those states to the Nazis, but reoccupied them when the Nazis were defeated.

ChatGPT agreed with Gemini and added details:

After annexing the Baltic states in 1940 and again after the Nazi occupation (1941–1944), the Soviet authorities encouraged large-scale migration of ethnic Russians and other Soviet citizens into the Baltic republics.
This migration was part of broader industrialization and urbanization policies. Factories and military installations were established, and workers were brought in from other parts of the USSR to fill labor shortages.
Though Soviet leaders often justified this as economic modernization, historians widely recognize that it also served political aims—to integrate the Baltic states more tightly into the USSR and dilute local national identities.

In other words, the episode that Rothbard referred to had nothing to do with free immigration or open borders at all. It was Soviet settler colonialism. The Baltic states did not become captives of the Soviet Union after an influx of subversive ethnic Russian immigrants. On the contrary, the influx of ethnic Russians was made possible by the Soviet annexation. Stalin exiled Baltic people to Siberia to make room and open jobs for the Russians. Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania could not have closed their borders to the ethnic Russians between 1940 and 1990 because those countries, as captive nations, could have had no policies independent of the Soviet Union.

Again, that was classic settler colonialism, a threat that Americans do not face. How in the world did Soviet settler colonialism in the 1940s prompt Rothbard, in 1994, to change his mind about free immigration? It had nothing to do with immigration. Zip. Zilch. Bupkis. As Rothbard might have put it, his case against freedom is a floperoo.

Even though Rothbard's history is incorrect, a takeaway could run as follows: a hostile state might send a significant portion of its population, armed and dangerous, into a neighboring state for some malign purpose. Such an influx of belligerents, of course, would resemble a military invasion and should be treated accordingly. That's not immigration. That's war.

However, what if an overwhelming mass of migrants just wanted to find jobs, rent apartments, buy homes, engage in all other sorts of trade, and so on? As the economist and my friend Gene Epstein points out, that's too unlikely a scenario to be taken seriously.

Here's why. The migrants would want to know that the host country had ample job openings and affordable rents. They wouldn't want to leave familiar environs to become jobless, homeless, and hungry in a strange place where they'd have difficulty speaking the language: strangers in a strange land. Remember, many migrants come to America to earn money to send home to their families. Those remittances dwarf foreign aid. As more workers moved, however, conditions could become less and less amenable (unless economic growth from the last wave of immigrants boosted economic growth). As is their wont, new migrants would then write home to tell their friends and family that now was not the time to come: job openings were scarce, wages weren't extraordinary, and the cost of living was high. So-called illegal immigration into the United States has waxed and waned with the job outlook. Thus, the chance of an economically motivated, sudden, overwhelming mass migration is practically nil.

Mightn't they come for the welfare, as Rothbard warned in 1994? Not if they couldn't qualify for several years—as they cannot for the most part in the United States. Moreover, Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute has found that, even if current welfare laws in the U.S. remained on the books, the fiscal effects of immigration on the state are about neutral when we factor in the taxes immigrants pay through their high rates of employment. When we include the value they produce in those jobs—almost entirely in the private sector!—the U.S. economy comes out ahead.

Using the welfare state to justify restricting the liberty of individuals born on the far side of a political boundary is a textbook example of Ludwig von Mises's "critique of interventionism," according to which, the problems that government interference with the free market inevitably creates ostensibly necessitate more government interference. How will we ever get rid of the welfare state if it is sheltered from the predictable stresses and strains?

At any rate, regardless of immigration, the welfare state ought to be abolished. Forcing the productive to support the unproductive is unjust. Help ought to be left to voluntary charity. (Aside: does anyone believe the restrictatarians would change their minds about open borders if the welfare state were abolished?)

A state powerful enough to be prepared for all manner of imagined emergencies, no matter how unlikely, should be too much state for any libertarian's taste.

TGIF: Damn Those Innovators!

2026-02-06T05:00:00.003-06:00

The problem of survival is never "solved," once and for all, with no further thought or motion required. More precisely, the problem of survival is solved, by recognizing that survival demands constant growth and creativeness....

Capitalism, by its nature, entails a constant process of motion, growth and progress. It creates the optimum social conditions for man to respond to the challenges of nature in such a way as to best further his life. It operates to the benefit of all those who choose to be active in the production process, whatever their level of ability. But it is not geared to the demands of stagnation. Neither is reality.

—Nathaniel Branden, "The Divine Right of Stagnation"

Our lives are improved in all sorts of ways by courageous, risk-bearing entrepreneurs, who seek to change the world at a profit. For that reason alone, we should jealously safeguard an environment friendly to entrepreneurship. As the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has shown through indefatigable research, when society is marred by envy of the richer and highly successful, we all suffer. Widespread prosperity soars, McCloskey demonstrates, when a culture in effect erects huge neon signs brightly flashing the message, "You think you have a great idea? Well, give it a go!"

That is not how people have felt through most of history. Envy that bred a fear of pioneers smothered innovation. Thomas Sowell has documented the horrors, including massacres, inflicted on "middleman minorities," such as Jews in Europe, Chinese in Southeast Asia, and Indians and Lebanese in Africa. The economically illiterate masses could not understand why middlemen got rich "doing nothing," never asking themselves why they nevertheless availed themselves of those allegedly unproductive services. That the relatively rich middlemen were usually different ethnically from the majority population made persecuting them with a clear conscience all the easier.

The point is that our lives, health, and comfort depend on innovators and entrepreneurs, and that they need freedom and security of life and property if they are to render their services. I don't think people fully understand that, even today.

In 1952, the great actor Alec Guinness starred in an instructive and humorous movie called The Man in the White Suit. Set in post-World War II England, the story was written by Roger MacDougall, who collaborated on the screenplay with two other men. It's worth watching. (It's been streaming on Tubi.) It is relevant to what I just wrote.

This is the story of the panic that strikes the English textile industry when a visionary Cambridge-educated, mild-mannered, menial mill worker named Sidney Stratton (Guinness), working on his own time in the lab at Birnley's Mill, develops a synthetic fiber that repels dirt and withstands all wear and tear. Think of it: clothing for all that would never need cleaning or replacing. Who could object? Boss Birnley's daughter, Daphne, thinks it's a wonderful idea. She tells Sidney, "Millions of people all over the world, living lives of drudgery, fighting an endless losing battle against shabbiness and dirt. You've won that battle for them. You've set them free. The whole world's going to bless you."

Well, not quite. Although Sidney's boss initially plans to produce the new product, figuring it will give his business a competitive edge, he (apparently fearing a rival's lawsuit) soon joins the other mill owners in the effort to suppress it. "Exploitation of anything new would upset the balance of trade," one owner says.

It is not just the owners who abhor the innovation. The textile workers do too: they fear for their jobs. "Capital and labor are hand in hand in this," an owner tells the workers. Even an old woman who takes in other people's wash is angry: "Why can't you scientists leave things alone?" she asks the naive and perplexed Sidney.

Together, the mill owners offer Sidney a huge fortune for the "world rights" to the fabric. But when they tell him they plan to suppress the innovation, he refuses to sign the contract. An offer to double the purchase price gets the owners nowhere. They then get a woman (Daphne) to seduce him into signing, but that doesn't work. (She actually hoped Sidney would turn her down. She admires idealism and integrity.)

Now the owners turn to the only measure left to them. Not the intervention by the government, which has no role in the story. No, they resort to direct violence. They try to force him to sign, and when he tries to run away, they gang up on him. When he's knocked unconscious by a falling plaque, they lock him in a room. The senior mill owner regrets that Sidney survived the blow to the head. With the help of Daphne, however, he escapes.

But Sidney is not out of the woods. When he encounters his fellow mill workers, who are just as unhappy about the invention as the owners, they also lock him up. Thanks to a little girl, however, he escapes again. All this time, he is wearing the prototype luminescent white suit.

Sidney reckons his only hope is to tell the newspapers the whole story. When he sets out on that mission, an angry mob of owners and workers chases and confronts him. They look as though they will kill him. The only thing that saves him is his suit—it shreds at the touch like tissue. Little did Sidney know that the fabric was unstable. When the mob sees this, the people laugh with joy, concluding that the fabric is no threat to them at all.

With the danger dispelled, Sidney, whom Birnley has fired, is now free to go. As he leaves, his assistant hands him his lab notebook, and Birnley narrates:

"The crisis is over now. The news of Sidney's failure brought relief to the world. It has been a hard and bitter experience for all of us. But we faced the future with confidence. We have seen the last of Sidney Stratton."

As the dispirited Sidney glances at his notebook, he smiles when he understands how to fix the instability. "I see!" he proclaims. He walks on in a jaunty, determined gait. At which point, narrator Birnley adds apprehensively, "At least, I hope we've seen the last of him." The end.

What are we to make of this story? If you look carefully, you see that it is not, as you might have expected from filmmakers, an indictment of capitalism or an endorsement of socialism. It shows complacent businessmen and workers in a negative light: both are willing to use force directly against an innovator to protect their positions.

The position of the workers is particularly interesting. A coworker warns Sidney that, despite what he's been told, their boss will never bring the new product to market. The worker accuses businessmen of suppressing lots of great products, such as "the razor blade that never gets blunt and the car that runs on water with a pinch of something in it." But this worker also opposes the production of the new fabric. Apparently, if a life-enhancing innovation doesn't threaten his job, he's all for it, but if it does threaten his job, then it must be suppressed! So much for worker solidarity. The owners are damned if they suppress an innovation and damned if they don't. (How welcoming to Sidney's job-threatening idea would a democratic worker-owned textile mill be?)

In Sidney Stratton, we behold a visionary individualist opposed by people who fear change. Sidney's antagonists are too myopic to realize that while innovation indeed disrupts in the short run (think of Schumpeter's "creative destruction"), when an innovative product economically satisfies people, that is progress. Even those who are disrupted gain access to improved products and new opportunities, if the market is substantially free. The workers in the movie mostly overlook that:

They are consumers who frequently wear clothes, and
Since people's desire for better lives knows no limit, the potential for productive opportunities will always exist. (That is, if entrepreneurial alertness is left unfettered.)

Think of the alternative to progress: stagnation. If the anti-innovation attitude had prevailed consistently throughout history, we'd still be living in caves, or the few people who could survive would be. Today, because of visionary entrepreneurs, relative freedom, and global trade, most of the world's eight billion people live better and longer than people have ever lived before. Those still lagging lack capitalist institutions. Ironically, the complaint about capitalism these days is that it produces too much and too many new things, not that it suppresses new products. (See Howard Roark's trial speech in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Nathanel Branden's "The Divine Right of Stagnation" in Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness.)

We are only left to ask what would have happened had Sidney sold his formula to the mill owners. Well, obviously, no one else would have known about it or lamented the missed opportunity for clean clothing that lasts forever. If word had leaked, would anyone have proposed that the keepers of the secret be tortured until they divulged it? I don't think so.

We need not lose sleep about such things. The claim that businesses suppress useful technologies has been widely made but never demonstrated. As Ludwig von Mises told us in 1949: "It is absurd to speak of an alleged bias of modern big business against technological improvement. The great corporations spend huge sums in the search for new processes and new devices.... Those alleging suppression of useful innovations do not cite a single instance of such an innovation’s being unused in the countries protecting it by a patent while it is used by the Soviets—no respecters of patent privileges." (H/T Robert P. Murphy)

Speaking of patents, a formidable body of scholarship challenges the very proposition that ideas and their implementation ought to be treated legally like physical property. (See my "Patent Nonsense."). In fact, laws purporting to protect "intellectual property" entail the violation of actual property rights. That means that while one is free not divulge one's thoughts, someone else who comes by them nonaggressively should be free to make and sell products based on them, unmolested by the state. As usual, competition, the universal solvent, is the best protection.

The Man in the White Suit is a timeless and romantic tale of rational individualism, creativity, and the persistent pursuit of values—and those who resent people who live those virtues. The most revealing line is the narrator's: "The news of Sidney's failure brought relief to the world." Really? Ayn Rand could have written this story.

In the Trump-Mamdani era—consisting of narcissistic social-engineering and frigid collectivism—we ought to be especially sensitive to the perils that beset innovation.

Capitalism Can't Be Everything Its Foes Say It Is

2026-02-04T06:18:06.417-06:00

"Nothing is more unpopular today than the free market economy, i.e., capitalism. Everything that is considered unsatisfactory in present-day conditions is charged to capitalism. The atheists make capitalism responsible for the survival of Christianity. But the papal encyclicals blame capitalism for the spread of irreligion and the sins of our contemporaries, and the Protestant churches and sects are no less vigorous in their indictment of capitalist greed. Friends of peace consider our wars as an offshoot of capitalist imperialism. But the adamant nationalist warmongers of Germany and Italy indicted capitalism for its “bourgeois” pacifism, contrary to human nature and to the inescapable laws of history. Sermonizers accuse capitalism of disrupting the family and fostering licentiousness. But the “progressives” blame capitalism for the preservation of allegedly outdated rules of sexual restraint. Almost all men agree that poverty is an outcome of capitalism. On the other hand many deplore the fact that capitalism, in catering lavishly to the wishes of people intent upon getting more amenities and a better living, promotes a crass materialism. These contradictory accusations of capitalism cancel one another. But the fact remains that there are few people left who would not condemn capitalism altogether."

—Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos, 1947

TGIF: The Right to Move

2026-01-30T07:24:00.002-06:00

If people individually own themselves and have a right to be free of aggressive force, then they have a right to change their location in ways consistent with other people's rights. Whether you call this moving around relocating, emigrating, or immigrating, doesn't much matter. The default position is that each individual may rightfully move to somewhere else permanently or temporarily.

Inside the United States, nobody questions this. People freely move from state to state, etc., sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. They need no one's permission.

Why should things be different when we talk about countries rather than smaller jurisdictions and when the individuals who do the moving are not recognized as citizens of the destination country? An opponent of the freedom to move might begin by rejecting self-ownership and nonaggression, so the argument with him would take place at that basic level. But what if the opponent of the freedom to move espouses support for self-ownership and nonaggression? That's a different kettle of fish.

Remarkably, both kinds of opponents make a similar case for why government control of the borders is necessary. Starting from a different basis, they agree on the alleged need for coercive social engineering by politicians and bureaucrats, who might be pursuing agendas that most people would want no part of.

We often hear it said that just as no one has a right to enter your home without your permission, so no one has a right to enter the country without the permission of the purported equivalent of the owner. That owner is said to be "the people," in whose name the government claims to act. The truth of the matter is different.

I can see a collectivist taking this shaky position, but an individualist advocate of self-ownership? A country isn't a home. It's not a country club either. Homes and country clubs are rooted in private property and voluntary contract. But a country is not. The view that a country is owned at all has been the basis of collectivism and tyranny.

A property owner may decide he doesn't want someone or some group to enter his property. Fine. But by what right does he impose his rule on other property owners? It does not matter if a majority of property owners and others like his rules. The dissenting minority -- individuals with rights -- might welcome newcomers as potential employees, employers, tenants, landlords, customers, sellers, friends, romantic partners, or what have you. Majorities shouldn't be able to nullify the rights of dissenters or those of aspiring migrants. (On the "public" property complication, see this and this.)

Relocation in itself violates no rights. If a rights violation occurs, that should be dealt with, not the relocation. We can always imagine dire emergencies -- "Let justice be done though the heavens fall" is a dubious principle -- but this does not justify routine militarized border control, walls and fences, internal checkpoints, employment databases, etc. By definition, dire emergencies are the exception. The words "Show me your papers" should make Americans (and everyone else) cringe.

Open borders are moral and desirable because prohibiting free movement necessarily aggresses against nonaggressors, including Americans; condemns the most wretched people on earth to poverty and tyranny; and keeps us all from getting richer. Strictly speaking, the right at stake is not the right to immigrate. Rather, it’s the right not to be subjected to initiatory force. The right to immigrate, as Roderick Long might put it, is just one of many specific applications of that one right.

People today, as in the past, imagine that they see signs of cultural decline and threats to democracy from foreign-born newcomers. When I hear the latter fear expressed, I want to reply sardonically, "We're capable of growing our own anti-freedom voters, thank you. We need no help from foreigners." Seriously, though, who can be sure how immigrants will vote in the future, especially if their alternatives include a strong freedom party that welcomes newcomers? Meanwhile, let's work on shifting the public's business from the flawed democratic arena to the realm of private property, contract, and social cooperation in the free market.

As for the wish to protect the culture from change, nothing so surely spells tyranny. Imagine what would have to be done to carry out such a plan. Who would you want to run the cultural ministry? It wouldn't work, of course, but trying would be a road to hell. Besides, do you want to live in a place without a constant flow of new restaurants? And why stop at the change that originates outside the country? What about the sometimes radical change that occurs from domestic sources?

The logic of immigration control ought to worry every freedom advocate -- for we can ask, as noted, why stop at national borders? Why not control movement between states, counties, cities, towns, and neighborhoods? (Maybe I shouldn't give anyone ideas.) If you can't accomplish a goal through voluntary exchange, then leave it alone.

That control mentality blinds people. As Bryan Caplan points out, when poor people move to rich places, their productivity skyrockets, so they make not only themselves better off, but also the people around them. Yes, some unskilled high-school dropouts would see some decline in income because of competition from new workers who speak little English. Change -- progress -- always has a relatively small short-term downside for a few people. But even they, and most certainly their children and grandchildren, will be better off: more goods, lower prices, more employees, more employers, and a larger variety of offerings, not to mention fresh energy and cultural stimulation.

Remember the ever-present potential for gains from trade! Despite the impression given by demagogues, we have had nothing resembling open borders, and the problems at the U.S.-Mexican line have been the homemade product of U.S. anti-immigration policy. No libertarian would look at drug-related violence and say, "That's why we can't legalize drugs." They know that the problems come not from drugs, but from the prohibition-spawned black market. By the same token, no libertarian should look at immigrant-related problems and say, "That's why we can't open the borders." They should know that the problems come not from immigrants, but from the closed-border-spawned black market and other restrictions on immigrants' rights.

As Oscar W. Cooley and Paul Poirot wrote in a 1951 Foundation for Economic Education pamphlet, "The Freedom to Move" (abbreviated version here):

Can we hope to explain the blessings of freedom to foreign people while we deny them the freedom to cross our boundaries? To advertise America as the “land of the free,” and to pose as the world champion of freedom in the contest with communism, is hypocritical, if at the same time we deny the freedom of immigration as well as the freedom of trade. And we may be sure that our neighbors overseas are not blind to this hypocrisy.

A community operating on the competitive basis of the free market will welcome any willing newcomer for his potential productivity, whether he brings capital goods or merely a willingness to work. Capital and labor then attract each other, in a kind of growth that spells healthy progress and prosperity in that community. That principle seems to be well recognized and accepted by those who support the activities of a local chamber of commerce. Why do we not dare risk the same attitude as applied to national immigration policy?

Further TGIF reading: "The Trumpian Ice Age: The Frigidity of Collectivism," "Immigration Policy in an Nth-Best World," "Free Movement Increases Wealth," "Static Analysis Clouds Immigration Debate," "More on Immigration and Public Property," "Immigration Control Threatens the Rule of Law," "Immigration and Free Association," "Reverse Scapegoating in the Immigration Debate," "Immigration and Liberty," "No One Has a Right to Make Immigration Policy," "Immigration Foes, What's the Beef?" "Heartless Immigration Restrictions Need Replacing," "Glenn Loury's Collectivist Immigration Policy," "A Refreshing Way to Think about Immigration," "The Logical Flaw in Immigration Law," "Trump & Co.'s Vile Anti-Immigrationism," and "Immigration and Social Engineering."

(A version of this article first appeared on Jan. 5, 2024.)

Recent Writing in Defense of Free Immigration

2026-01-27T10:51:00.005-06:00

"The Trumpian Ice Age: The Frigidity of Collectivism"

"Immigration Policy in an Nth-Best World"

"Free Movement Increases Wealth"

"Static Analysis Clouds Immigration Debate"

"More on Immigration and Public Property"

"Immigration Control Threatens the Rule of Law"

"Immigration and Free Association"

"Reverse Scapegoating in the Immigration Debate"

"Immigration and Liberty"

"No One Has a Right to Make Immigration Policy"

"Immigration Foes, What's the Beef?"

"Heartless Immigration Restrictions Need Replacing"

"Glenn Loury's Collectivist Immigration Policy"

"A Refreshing Way to Think about Immigration"

"The Logical Flaw in Immigration Law"

"Trump & Co.'s Vile Anti-Immigrationism"

"Immigration and Social Engineering"

Report Card

2026-01-27T07:38:40.077-06:00

What's the problem? So far the Trump administration has been Pretti Good.

Parallax Views Podcast: The Government Murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti

2026-01-26T12:02:00.000-06:00

J. G. Michael invited me on his podcast to talk about the U.S. immigration agents' recent murders of two American citizens in Minneapolis.

TGIF: Inept Con Man in the White House

2026-01-23T05:42:00.002-06:00

Trump is hardly the first con man in the White House, but he is by far the most flagrant, and his scale is gargantuan. He's also rather inept. His latest confession came in a recent message to Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.

I've italicized confession. Here is Trump admitting that, in his quest for the Nobel Peace Prize, he prioritized something over "what is good and proper for the United States of America." In year two of his second term, that will change, he warns.

What did he put ahead of America's interest? Peace. There's another confession.

You hear that, MAGA? You got that, America Firsters? Your Dear Leader acknowledges that he has not been an America Firster at all, but a Nobel Peace Prize for Trump Firster. His goal wasn't to Make America Great Again, but to make his White House or Mar-a-Lago mantelpiece great.

Alas, the Nobel committee gave the prize to Venezuela's opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, a deserving recipient. Having lost the prize, presumably out of Norwegian spite, Trump has now reduced the cause of peace to merely one of several concerns.

So much is wrong with what Trump wrote to Store. First, Trump has not been thinking "purely of peace" since Jan. 20, 2025—far from it. He's aided and abetted Israel in its savage battering of the people of the Gaza Strip. His touted ceasefire, which Israel has violated over a thousand times, is a farce. He, along with Israel, attacked Iran while pretending to negotiate with its diplomats. His conduct regarding Russia's war against Ukraine hardly speaks of a person who thinks purely of peace. He invaded Venezuela and kidnapped Maduro. He has bombed boats and executed their crews in the Caribbean. He's bombed Somalia repeatedly, along with several other countries, including Syria. I'm sure I've missed some things.

Don't get me wrong. Trump does not lie. Lying implies one knows the truth and says something else. In contrast, he seems sincerely to believe, or hope, that what he says will shape reality. How can you be lying if your words create the facts? He's the ultimate primacy-of-consciousness subjectivist. As I observed in Trump's first term, the only way to shut him up is to inject him with sodium pentathol, i.e., truth serum.

One may wonder why Trump complained to the Norwegian prime minister. He doesn't pick the Peace Prize winner. Greenland, over which Trump had threatened tariffs against Western Europe, is a territory of Denmark, not Norway (as Trump acknowledged further on). And what does Greenland have to do with the Nobel Peace Prize? At any rate, not winning the prize hardly justified Trump's damaging tantrum, after which he claimed he did not care about the prize, classic sour grapes. Isn't it time he grew up?

Notwithstanding his embarrassing bluster at Davos over Greenland—which he several times called Iceland; could he have meant Graceland?—Trump (for now) has backed down. Europe and the stock market pushed back, and Trump again caved. He says he won't use force. He's cancelled the tariffs, and he claims, vaguely, that he and NATO have worked out a "framework of a future deal" for Arctic security. The top man at NATO says the sovereignty of Greenland, which Trump had insisted was absolutely necessary, was no part of the post-speech discussions.

In other words, Trump antagonized friendly nations and shook the world economy—then settled for the status quo. An open-ended security arrangement with NATO and Denmark has existed in treaty form since 1951! Did no one tell Trump? It must have been a blow to his ego. If he thinks he's saved face, he's pathetically mistaken. He looks like a damned fool, and everybody knows it.

Trump's monomaniacal quest for adoration and gratitude is so warped that he seems oblivious to the harm he does. Noninterventionist libertarians have opposed U.S. membership in NATO since its founding in 1949 because a strictly limited government would not obligate its taxpayers or military to defend other countries. Preparation for war is the health of the state. It's also provocative. So the U.S. should leave NATO. However, gracefully leaving an alliance and nihilistically smashing it on the way out are two different things. While Trump clearly has no intention of leaving NATO, he seems intent on wreaking havoc anyway.

In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson cautioned against "entangling alliances." That was good advice. But Trump is showing that things could be worse than the current alliance system. Presidential pugnacity toward people who bear us no ill will is bad for them and us. Jefferson also called for "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations." Trump must have missed part.

TGIF: The Trumpian ICE Age: The Frigidity of Collectivism

2026-01-16T05:04:00.003-06:00

Welcome to the Trumpian ICE Age, a vivid lesson in the frigidity of collectivism. Take note, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Compared to Trump, you're a piker.

We've got a problem, and it's not just Houston's. It's the lawless, authoritarian, liberty-flouting Trump, who on all fronts grasps at maximum power—constitutional and statutory limits be damned. The fronts, so far, include immigration, drug prohibition, trade, corporate ownership, and everyday matters like oil prices, credit-card interest, pharmaceutical prices, and home sales. Trump is also eyeing medical insurance. Heaven help us. The guy doesn't have a pro-market sinew in his body. (For his "progressive" inclinations, see this.)

Most concerning of all is immigration, in which poorly recruited and poorly trained agents of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) conduct a reign of terror in a few selected "blue" cities, with more to come. Of course, the latest atrocity, as of this writing, took place in Minneapolis last week, where Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was executed—there's no other word—for failing to show respect to armed and masked ICE agents, cheerfully starting to drive away from an ICE checkpoint, where random people were being stopped for "immigration checks." The killer violated ICE's own guidelines in at least two respects: he walked (obviously without fear) in front of Good's car, and he fired at her merely for leaving. Her last words, spoken softly and with a smile, as she began to drive away slowly, were, "I'm not mad at you guys."

“At a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement,” Trump said, characteristically, after ICE man Jonathan Ross fired three shots, in under a second, into her car at close range. (Check the video for yourself.) Before that, Trump and his henchman (VP J.D. Vance) and henchwoman (Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem) had called Good a "domestic terrorist" and a "high-level agitator." The government later said Ross suffered internal bleeding and a bruise, supposedly from being bumped by Good's vehicle, but the video provides good reason to doubt that story. Trump and his people's reputation for veracity is negative. However one views the killing, we can be certain that it would not have happened had it not been for Trump's demagogic crusade to deport millions of people, the vast majority of whom live and work peacefully, because they lack government papers.

This used to be America. With Trump doubling down, we're likely to see more brutal and deadly confrontations ultimately instigated by heavily armed ICE agents whom you would not want in your neighborhood.

Before the horrendous killing, Radley Balko, the veteran chronicler of police misconduct, was already stunned by what he had seen in recent months: "unchecked and unreviewable executive power; crass imperialism; a feverish, 1980s-era approach to illicit drugs (Trump has frequently said that drug dealers should be executed); and xenophobic bigotry, particularly toward the developing world."

From his December New Republic article on the outrageous manhandling of immigrants and citizen protesters, "Trump's Immigration Nightmare: It Is Happening Here," I present some of his observations. (The article contains links galore to back up his assertions.)

"With astonishing speed, Balko writes, "the administration has toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society." That's a dramatic statement. Can he back it up? You judge:

Masked secret police now tear-gas entire city streets, jump out from unmarked vehicles to abduct and detain suspected undocumented people, and demand that foreign-looking people (mostly Latino) produce papers on demand. These deportation forces have been told by the president and his advisers to cast a wide net, that immigrants are “animals,” that the activists defending them are “domestic terrorists,” and that the officers themselves have “immunity” from any form of accountability. Meanwhile, administration lawyers have brazenly lied to federal judges to supplement those deportation forces by deploying U.S. troops to the streets of American cities—seeking to break this country’s healthy antipathy toward domestic use of the military policing that dates back to the founding.

Does it take a libertarian point out that this is alarming? I hope not.

We’ve seen rapid normalization of abuses we once associated with authoritarian regimes or the old Iron Curtain countries. It’s now routine for masked, unidentifiable government agents to sweep people off the street and whisk them away in unmarked vehicles. Some of those arrested have been quickly shuttled off to detention facilities in other parts of the country without any notification to their families or attorneys. Others have been sent to a third country, often a country in the developing world to which they have no connection. Still others have been explicitly targeted for their political opinions, their activism, or their journalism.

Not bad enough? Balko quotes Reneé Hall, president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives: “We’re back to letting police target people because of their skin color. We’re letting them kidnap people and take them to undisclosed locations. They’re barging into homes with no warrant. We saw them zip-tie young Black children—U.S. citizens—in Chicago. We’ve seen them use unnecessary force, slam people on the concrete.”

"The administration has since been caught brazenly lying to federal courts to justify Trump’s military interventions," Balko writes. "In Portland, Oregon, a Trump-appointed Federal District Court judge wrote that Trump and the DOJ’s [Department of Justice] claims that the city was 'war ravaged' and 'under siege' were “simply untethered to the facts.,,, [A federal judge in Chicago] chided the administration for its 'lack of candor,' which, she wrote, 'calls into question their ability to accurately assess the facts,' and noted a 'troubling trend' of DOJ officials 'equating protests with riots.'"

Invoking American history, Balko points out that the "norm against using troops for routine law enforcement is one of America’s most important contributions to democratic governance. It’s a principle we came by honestly, from firsthand experience," namely, from the many abuses of Americans' liberty at the hands of the British king. "[His] soldiers were armed with general warrants that gave them carte blanche to force their way into homes in search of contraband. The abuse of those powers sowed anger and ignited revolutionary fervor."

Are all ostensible fans of the American Revolution outraged by what's going on? Sadly not.

We must fear that things will get worse before they get better (assuming they do). Trump is determined to accelerate his crackdown and has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota. This sets the stage for more clashes between residents and federal agents. Balko: "We ... know from surveillance and cell phone videos that agents have arrested and charged people with assault either on little evidence or for defending themselves when assaulted by police. Add to this prospect the fact that holding federal agents accountable for their misconduct is difficult, if not impossible. Balko explains why.

The immunity problem pervades the chain of command from top to bottom. Thanks to a spate of Supreme Court rulings from the case that all but killed Bivens, to rulings protecting political appointees for policy decisions, to the Supreme Court’s infamous ruling on presidential immunity, everyone is protected, from the Border Patrol officer who abandons a baby in the back seat of a car after detaining his immigrant parents (as happened in a suburb of Chicago) to the Border Patrol commander who tear-gasses elementary schools, to the president who says immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country.”

Moreover, "Trump’s immigration agents are ... specifically targeting journalists who report on their actions...," writes Balko. "In June, the administration arrested an immigrant journalist in Georgia who had been reporting on immigration raids. At his deportation hearing, DOJ lawyers explicitly argued that his journalism was a threat to public safety. He has since been deported." Journalism is a threat? In Trumpworld, apparently.

Like immigrants, American citizens are not safe.

ProPublica published a report documenting 170 cases in which immigration officers had detained U.S. citizens. The publication found 130 cases in which U.S. citizens had been arrested for allegedly interfering with immigration operations or assaulting officers but were often never charged. It found over 20 cases in which U.S. citizens were held for more than a day without being permitted to contact an attorney or their families. “Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents,” the publication wrote. “They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them.

ICE is deadly. "As of this writing, 23 people have died this year in ICE custody. That’s the most since 2005, and more than the previous three years combined," Balko writes. "The conditions faced by those in custody are only likely to get worse as deportation efforts continue to ramp up. At the same time, the administration has hollowed out the offices within DHS and DOJ that oversee detention facilities."

He concludes on a scary note:

[I]t isn’t difficult to envision how an administration with so little regard for law, human life, and due process might make the leap to think it can also carry out extrajudicial executions inside the United States, particularly one run by a president who equates criticism of him with treason, likens immigrants to vermin, and calls his opponents “the enemy within.” This, after all, is an administration already trying to legally define peaceful protesters and their supporters as “terrorists,” the same term it uses to justify those extrajudicial killings.

Meanwhile, Trump—without a sense of irony—has warned the Iranian regime not to harm protesters.

By the way, Trump and his gang have repeatedly said that ICE is scooping up "the worst of the worst" for deportation. Don't believe it. According to David Bier of the Cato Institute, only "5% of people detained by ICE have violent convictions, 73% no convictions."

Libertarians, like other civilized people, will be duly appalled. Right?

TGIF: "We're" All Neocons Now

2026-01-09T04:19:00.001-06:00

Apart from a few details, I never saw much difference between Trump's America First shtick and MAGA's chief foe, the neconservatives. It appeared to be merely a squabble over details, such as whether democracy or strongman rule abroad best served the so-called national interest. No one believes in America Second, Third, or Nth.

Trump's action in Venezuela confirms my impression. Beneath the surface, the contrast between Trumpian America First and neoconservatism disappears. At his news conference after the Venezuela invasion and decapitation, Trump was asked, "Mr. President, why is running a country in South America Ame- -- America first?" To which he replied, "Well, I think it is because we wanna surround ourself with good neighbors. We wanna surround ourself with stability. Uh, we wanna surround ourself with energy. We have tremendous energy in that country. It's very important that we protect it. We need that for ourselves. We need that for the world, and we wanna make sure we can protect it."

How does that differ from the other major faction of American foreign policy? It's the same justification for intervention. We need friends. We need a stable world. We and the world need secure energy. The necons are every bit as America First in their intentions as Trump and his people are. Where's the difference in principle? There is none. Cynics will say that necons are Israel First and don't care about America. That's an accusation. In the absence of evidence, I take the neocons at their word. They are not all Miriam Adelson. Anyway, like many people I have known, they think the two countries' interests coincide. That deserves refutation, not insults.

American alliances have always been justified in terms of American interests. People say, "In a dangerous world, America needs good, strong allies." I'm not saying they are right, only that they say and presumably believe it. Let's not pretend that Trump is different. Don't let a difference in style, campaign rhetoric, and downright vulgarity throw you. They all essentially agree.

It's hard not to notice the throwback to earlier American imperialist presidents, such as Theodore Roosevelt, a favorite of neoconservatives. Notice that Trump said, "We have tremendous energy in that country." We. And: "We need that for ourselves." Ourselves. He's embracing what someone has dubbed the "Donroe Doctrine," but he seems ignorant of James Monroe's original speech of 1823, which stated that the United States would not meddle in Europe (as Trump is doing) and expected the European powers to no longer colonize or otherwise meddle in the Western Hemisphere. Existing European colonies would be left alone, Monroe said. This was when Latin American countries were gaining independence from Spain and recognition from America. Trump seems unaware that the doctrine, written by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams (who said that America "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy"), did not reserve to the U.S. government the right to interfere in Latin America. (Obviously, the doctrine has been routinely violated. Trump is hardly an innovator.)

As for his reference to having good neighbors, contrast Trump's actions with Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy. "Through the diplomacy of [free trader] Secretary of State Cordell Hull," says Britannica.com, "the United States repudiated privileges abhorrent to Latin Americans. The United States renounced its right to unilaterally intervene in the internal affairs of other nations at the Montevideo Conference (December 1933); the Platt Amendment, which sanctioned U.S. intervention in Cuba, was abrogated (1934); and the U.S. Marines were withdrawn from Haiti (August 1934)." Trump's is a Bad Neighbor Policy.

He said at his new conference, "The American armada remains poised in position, and the United States retains all military options until United States demands have been fully met and fully satisfied." He later said that the U.S. government would run Venezuela for more than a year. VP Vance posted that sales of Venezuelan oil must serve U.S. interests, as defined by the Don, of course. That's good old American Gunboat Diplomacy. Trump's threats against Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Denmark over Greenland demonstrate his complete embrace of this dark side of American history.

TGIF: Warm Individualism or Cold Collectivism?

2026-01-02T06:00:00.000-06:00

Newly inaugurated New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani promises to "replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."

Funny that he chose those words.

In Europe, where collectivist anti-fossil-fuels "green" policies have been enacted in the name of combating a conjured-up climate emergency, many people get dangerously cold in the winter. So far, this hasn't happened on a large scale in America, where the climate collectivists have not been as adept in imposing their lethal program as their European counterparts. Freer markets keep people warmer in winter.

Zero-sum thinking, which is at the heart of socialism, also has a knack for creating a frigid attitude toward one's fellow man. When you believe that one person's gain is another's, perhaps your loss, you don't view your successful neighbor with warmth. The victims of Stalin's collectivist famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, some of whom were driven to cannibalism to survive, probably did not regard their neighbors or even their family members benevolently. Envy, suspicion, and hostility were characteristic of other places where ostensibly well-meaning rulers condemned selfishness and imposed various forms of collectivism. The death toll beggars belief. Some remain in denial about it. We can be certain that those catastrophes did not befall those tens of millions of innocent victims because they were deprived of a chance to vote on which clueless bureaucrats would administer society's central plan, as Mamdani and his "democratic" socialist followers suggest.

On the other hand, individualism in ethics and politics fosters benevolence—warmth—among individuals, who, mindful of their own rights and struggles to achieve values, respect the rights and struggles of others. Solidarity among individualists is no more a contradiction than the solidarity of members of a jazz band.

Note that Mamdani uses the adjective rugged. Why? It is part of the ages-old smear campaign against the "selfish" pursuit of happiness. Jefferson's Locke-inspired inclusion of that phrase in the Declaration of Independence did not, unfortunately, admit egoism back into respectability. (It had some respectability in ancient Greece.)

Capitalism's detractors deploy the adjective rugged to suggest a system of myopic and short-sighted persons "greedily" stepping on and over one another in a mad free-for-all grab for material wealth. But aside from a relative few, that's not what typically happens when people are free. They quickly observe the gains from trade, the division of labor, and other market-based social cooperation, such as partnerships and corporations. (Ludwig von Mises nearly titled Human Action, his magnum opus, Social Cooperation.)

The benefits of free exchange to mutual advantage—win-win—were too obvious to ignore. The unprecedented and enduring increase in per-capita wealth that began around 1800 in the West was blindingly clear to all who were not determined to pretend it was not occurring. But what Deirdre McCloskey calls "the Great Enrichment" had another payoff besides hitherto-unknown widespread affluence: the fostering of benevolence. The gains from trade had to foster a goodwill that went beyond "mere" justice. Adam Smith famously pointed out that in the marketplace, one best serves one's own interests by attending to the interests of others. Such attention inevitably fosters warm acquaintanceships, friendships, and much more. (On the relationship between egoism and goodwill, see David Kelley's Unrugged Individualism: The Selfish Basis of Benevolence.)

Capitalism's detractors hate that feature of the marketplace. In effect, they say, "That doesn't count as benevolence because it's done out of self-regard!" How silly. How childish. What could be more worthwhile than a social arrangement in which the interests of diverse individuals—each with his or her own dreams, aspirations, and values— fundamentally align? It's an arrangement in which, unlike in the animal kingdom, the arena of competition is not consumption, but production. Consequently, the limits of nature's scarcity have been progressively loosened to a point where most of the eight billion people alive today live better than the one billion lived in 1800. (The lagging remainder continues to be victimized by collectivism. Liberalism has yet to come to town.)

You have some studying to do, Mr. Mayor. Too bad you didn't do it before embarking on your political career. Lives would have been spared.

TGIF: "Due Process" under Anarcho-Capitalism

2025-12-26T04:22:00.001-06:00

Libertarian advocates of minimal government, such as the late Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974), have feared that individuals in a stateless libertarian society would face corrupt or careless protection firms that used "risky" rights-enforcement procedures to determine guilt or liability. Innocent people might be held responsible for offenses they did not commit, while guilty individuals avoid paying restitution to their victims. Obviously, that would be undesirable.

Without a minimal monopoly state to prohibit such abuse and protect "procedural rights," how could innocent people pursue their happiness securely? Nozick speculated that in an anarcho-capitalist society, a protection agency using reliable procedures would emerge as dominant, properly preempt risky competitors (while compensating them for putting them out of business), and eventually become a monopoly minimal government. All this would happen through a nonaggressive invisible-hand process. Nozick's innovative theory drew critiques from the biggest names in the libertarian anarchist world, especially Murray Rothbard, Roy A. Childs Jr., and Randy Barnett. (See the Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, No. 1, Winter 1977).

The late George H. Smith, one of the premier libertarian philosophers of modern times, also provided an answer to the minarchist's concern about risky procedures in "Justice Entrepreneurship In a Free Market" (Journal of Libertarian Studies 3, No. 4, 1979). This neglected article is well worth examining. (Also see Smith's reply to critics.)

Before consulting Smith, we must first note a peculiarity about so-called procedural rights, such as due process, fair trial, and the presumption of innocence/burden of proof. Libertarians well know that since any good or service requires production, people cannot have a (noncontractual) right to it, for that would constitute the enslavement of the producers or the taxpayers. (This consideration does not apply to the coercive state. There, due process is a matter of limiting government power.)

Fortunately, Smith showed, we don't need procedural rights. We have something better. In responding to Nozick's argument, Smith charged the Harvard philosopher with an error:

The important social relation that generates the whole question of reliable procedures is not that between the Victim and the Invader, but the relationship between the Victim and impartial Third Parties. It is for his own safety, to prevent violent Third Party intervention in his quest for restitution, that the Victim must concern himself with matters of legal procedure. [Emphasis is Smith's unless otherwise stated.]

Smith's objective was "to deduce a theory of juridical procedure without recourse to the phantom of 'procedural rights.' Central to this discussion is the notion of justice entrepreneurship with its two essential ingredients: restitutive risk and the presumption of invasion."

If, as I shall argue, it is possible to derive specific legal procedures from the principle of nonaggression, then ... [it] shall be possible to speak of juridical procedures—methods of ascertaining guilt and innocence—as correct or incorrect, just or unjust. This has important implications for anarchist theory, for it presents to anarchism an objective standard by which to distinguish legitimate agencies from outlaw agencies in a free market.

Moreover, we shall see that the entrepreneurial function of Justice Agencies—the source of profit for such agencies—provides a strong impetus for fairness and impartiality. The idea that there must be a "super-agency"—a state—to oversee lesser agencies is rejected totally. (Who, for instance, shall oversee the super-agency?) Just as consumer response provides a reasonably trustworthy mechanism in a free market to minimize fraud and deception, so potential Third Party response provides a built-in check to minimize deceit and unreliability by Justice Agencies.

Smith begins by noting that "[l]ibertarian justice is primarily a matter of restitution, not of punishment in the conventional sense." The point is to make the victim whole to the extent possible. This would include the cost of obtaining restitution and compensation for suffering.

But, Smith wrote, "Before restitution can be accomplished ... several preliminary issues must be settled. Did a violation of rights occur? If so, who was responsible? And what was the extent of the responsibility? These matters of fact must be decided before the subject of restitution is germane, and they are the first priority of a court of justice.... The onus of proof is on the plaintiff to prove his case with certainty—i.e. 'beyond reasonable doubt'—and the defendant is presumed innocent until proven otherwise. "

Next, Smith contributed original insights to anarcho-capitalist theory:

A satisfactory account of free-market courts of law (hereafter referred to as Justice Agencies) must consider their entrepreneurial function—something that has been largely neglected in previous literature. A Justice Agency is more than a "hired-hand" employed for the efficient prosecution and apprehension of criminals. Much of the Justice Agency's service is entrepreneurial in nature.

What did Smith, who worked within the Austrian economics paradigm, mean?

Specifically, the Agency assumes the burden of risk that accompanies the use or threat of physical force in a free society. A client contracts with a Justice Agency not only because the Agency is more efficient in obtaining restitution, but also because the Agency is more likely to overcome public suspicion that the force used to obtain restitution is of an invasive rather than a restitutive nature. The degree to which an Agency can minimize this risk is a measure of its reliability and, ultimately, the source of its profit. [Emphasis added.]

His focus was on the "Third Party," who observes an Agency using force against an alleged Invader. As a general matter, Third Parties may forcibly intervene to defend Victims; they do not need the consent of an Invader. That's uncontroversial. But a problem arises: when a Third Party sees A using force against B, how does he know if he's observing invasive rather than restitutive violence?

Smith wrote:

If a Third Party observes force or the threat of force, with no evidence that the force is justified, he will rationally conclude that he is witnessing an invasive act in which he has the right to intervene. And ... the Third Party in this circumstance is morally justified in exercising his right of intervention. If an error is made—if a Third Party mistakenly intervenes with a true Victim seeking restitution—the responsibility for error rests with the Victim who failed to identify publicly his violent act as one of restitution.

In other words, if a Victim is going to use force to recover his property from a thief—and he wishes to do so without provoking Third Parties to defend the thief, thinking he's the Victim—the true Victim is responsible for making clear to the public that his action is restitutive and not invasive. It can't be the Third Party's responsibility. Why not? As Smith wrote later in the article, "If a Third Party is required to investigate property titles before he intervenes in defense of the apparent Victim, the violent act will be concluded long before the Third Party reaches first base." Further, since violence is such a serious matter, "If things are not as they seem [if what looks like invasion is in fact restitution], then [the Victim] must show why they are not."

Thus, Smith continued,

From the potential conflict of [the Victim] and the Third Party, there arises a
need for a "public trial" to ascertain [the Invader's] guilt or innocence. This trial is required not because of special "procedural rights" supposedly possessed by [the Invader] (such as the "right to a fair trial"), but because this public demonstration of [the Invader's] guilt is the only way to eradicate or minimize the potential conflict between [the Victim] and a Third Party.

As Smith explained, "Impartial Third Parties are not privy to the special experience of a Victim seeking restitution. Man's knowledge is limited—he is not omniscient—and Individuals must act on the context of knowledge available to them."

So, "If [B] denies the charge of theft, and if [A] fails to substantiate it, then Third Parties are epistemologically obliged to view [A] as an Invader. Given their context of knowledge, there is no other rational option."

Thus, whoever employs unidentified force in a free society is engaging in a high-risk activity because of possible Third Party intervention.... Although a Victim of invasion has the moral right to seek restitution from the Invader, and need not solicit the permission of others to do so, he faces the risk of violent Third Party intervention if he fails to verify his charge publicly.

There is, then, a "presumption of invasion," Smith wrote. "This principle states that the person who is observed to initiate violence, or the threat of violence, is presumed to be the Invader unless there is evidence to the contrary."

In a free society, victims would want to eliminate the chance that onlookers will mistake their restitutive use of force for invasive force. How can they do that? Enter the justice entrepreneur.

The Victim, by hiring a Justice Agency, transfers the risk ... from himself to the Agency. It is the business of an Agency to coordinate the knowledge of the Victim with the knowledge of Third Parties—the public in general—and thereby minimize the likelihood of public condemnation as an Invader when restitutive action is taken.

This transfer of restitutive risk constitutes a major function of a Justice Agency, and this is the aspect that I have described as entrepreneurial.

"The entrepreneurial function of a Justice Agency," Smith concluded, "provides a built-in safeguard to insure fairness and impartiality. It is not out of altruistic concern for the accused that an Agency strives to be scrupulously fair in its proceedings, but out of simple self-interest."

In the remainder of the article, Smith showed "how the entrepreneurial function of Justice Agencies generates objective standards with which to distinguish a legitimate agency from an outlaw agency." Those standards are essentially what we have inherited in the Anglo-American tradition.

"I have tried to show," Smith concluded, "that there are no serious gaps in the libertarian paradigm of natural law and noncoercion such that a monopolistic government must step forward to fill these gaps."

I highly recommend this article to interested readers.

Back on The Rational Egoist

2025-12-24T09:43:00.000-06:00

Michael Liebowitz invited me back to talk about whether we should have a government.

Latest Interview

2025-12-20T05:53:00.004-06:00

I sat down recently with LiquidZulu to talk about anarcho-capitalism, Objectivism, and other things.

TGIF: Notes on Anarcho-Capitalism

2025-12-19T06:05:00.001-06:00

I'm pretty sure I won't be around long enough to see anarcho-capitalism—or what I call market-ordered anarchism—prevail in the United States. I'm just as sure that I won't see government strictly limited to protecting individual rights and never violating them (if that's coherent).

So that's a wash.

But it doesn't follow that discussing individualist, pro-property, free-market alternatives to the current, virtually out-of-control political system in America is time wasted. Far from it! If we want to progress toward liberty, we'd better get a move on. The only proper way to proceed is through discussion. No name-calling—no shouting Statist! or Tyrant! or Fascist! or Oppressor! or Psychopath! or Warmonger! Just discussion. (I almost said "civilized discussion," but that is redundant.) People can be badly wrong with the best of intentions. We all know how the road to hell is paved. Nevertheless, don't insult. Rebut. Refute. Don't go for the jugular. Be patient. You once did not know the case you're making today.

So let's talk. Think of this as sort of a meta-discussion. I won't argue here that anarcho-capitalism satisfies libertarian and other rational criteria (such as efficiency) better than a limited monopoly government does. That's for another time. (Although see my articles, "Limited Government's Bait and Switch" and "The Market for Law?)

Let's begin here: the debate between libertarian anarchists and libertarian minarchists is a debate over whether we need a government to protect our rights. So what else is new?, you'll ask. My point is that it is not a debate over whether we need governance for the sake of rights protection. Aggressors will always exist, thankfully in small numbers. Essentially, we're arguing about means, not ends. Neither side supports chaos or Hobbes's war of all against all. Both sides support liberal culture, with expectations of peaceful relations, without which neither system has a hope of succeeding. Notwithstanding a few disagreements over application, both believe in self-ownership, which entails the right to use and dispose of one's justly acquired things, property—from land to income to the tools, toothbrushes, and ribeye steaks one buys. The classical liberal legal scholar Lon L. Fuller defined law, broadly conceived (as opposed to legislation), as "the enterprise of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules." That need not involve a state.

By definition, libertarians favor rules of (at least) two kinds: 1) rights, which bind independently of consent, and 2) restrictions consented to as conditions of voluntary association. The anarchist-minarchist argument is over how best to establish and enforce the first kind so that people can safely pursue happiness. I want to emphasize that, contrary to what many believe, history discloses considerable examples of such rules being secured through methods other than legislation—bottom up through custom and competing institutions. In the past, legislatures (and even kings) have codified (and often corrupted) rules that sprouted organically from the repeated interactions of self-interested, goal-directed people who realized that violence is an expensive, not to mention dangerous, way to achieve one's ends and resolve disputes.

I regret to say that too many limited-government libertarians argue against anarcho-capitalism as though the notion sprang from late-night college-freshman dorm-room bull sessions, in which inebriated or stoned rookie libertarians, who'd barely read anything, declared, "Who needs the state anyway?" In other words, the critics either do not know or pretend not to know that the modern libertarian movement, dating back to the 1950s and especially since the 1970s, has produced a substantial body of literature arguing for market-ordered anarchism. That literature came from a host of serious scholars, some in academia, some not, who specialized in political and economic history, economics, sociology, anthropology, and other relevant disciplines.

Maybe they were right; maybe they were wrong. But they were not lightweights. Limited-government libertarians must contend with this massive historical and theoretical evidence if they want to be taken seriously. The market anarchist position cannot be lightly and sneerfully tossed aside. To their credit, some limited-government advocates, such as Public Choice school founders James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, did take it seriously and engaged by proffering rebuttals. (See the debate for yourself in Edward P. Stringham's edited works Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice and Anarchy, State, and Public Choice. Also see Anarchism/Minarchism: Is Government Part of a Free Country?, edited by Rodertick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan.)

What I just said should indicate that the case for market anarchism is not the product of narrow rationalism, that is, of the manipulation of concepts detached from reality. On the contrary, the case is broadly empirical, guided by an understanding of human action. Historical episodes are held to yield reasonable generalizations, which may inform our choices. (See, for example, Terry H. Anderson and Peter J. Hill's The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier, or this article based on the book.) Justifying market anarchism is no mere chess game.

Minarchists will argue that history provides no case of a pure market-anarchist society. Perhaps (if we don't count the American West). In the spirit of fairness, they will also acknowledge that no case of a nightwatchman state can be found. But the market anarchist can respond that history strongly suggests that market anarchism is likely to work in an essentially liberal culture. For example, the Law Merchant, which emerged organically from the activities of traders from all over Europe in the Late Middle Ages, demonstrated that just and efficient law and enforcement can emerge peacefully from custom, constant dealings, and the expectations these give rise to. It's important to realize that complex trading relations over long distances did not have to await the formation of a legal code and system. Customary law and the market blossomed together. It wasn't a chicken-or-egg thing. Rather, "light dawn[ed] gradually over the whole," as Wittgenstein put it in another context. (Hat tip: Roderick Long)

The minarchists will reply that the Law Merchant worked only because the state loomed, ready to intervene when needed. The state was indeed there, though hardly consolidated as it would be later. It can't explain widespread compliance by profit-seeking merchants. The incentives that impelled buyers and sellers were powerful inducements for the spontaneous generation of customary law, along with enforcing institutions and procedures that were just and efficient. The modern competitive auto-insurance industry, in which firms routinely settle client disputes through nonstate arbitration and never resort to shoot-outs, is another instructive case. (See Harold J. Berman's pathbreaking and magisterial Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Pay attention to the competition among courts, which Adam Smith wrote about in The Wealth of Nations.)

Alas, some advocates of limited government often engage in what appears to be a rationalist chess game. History has repeatedly shown that governments tend to grow. What better illustration could there be than the United States? Many minarchists are enthusiastic about the U.S. Constitution, albeit with a few reservations. But look at today's U.S. Leviathan. How'd that happen? Lysander Spooner wrote in 1870—that's no typo, 1870!—"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain—that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”

Holding out a hope, after all this time, that somehow the government could be confined to protecting rights suggests a serious case of rationalism. The Public Choice school shows us why we should expect government to grow, confiscate, regulate, intrude, and oppress. Other scholars, such as Anthony de Jasay, have looked in vain for ways to limit the state. The great predator will not be caged for long.

No social system can promise perfection. All people are fallible, and some will seek power. We must not commit what economist Harold Demsetz called the Nirvana Fallacy: comparing a supposed ideal (minimal government) to the messy real world. Apples to apples, please, and reality to reality. No system can guarantee justice, so it's a matter of comparing prospects. For a host of reasons, market anarchism would have better checks and balances aimed at protecting against tyranny than a monopoly on the use of force.

If that's not enough, ask yourself this: if government is indispensable, don't we need a powerful world government to discipline the 200 national governments that exist, with respect to one another, in a state of anarchy? After all, it's not logically impossible that England could go to war with France tomorrow.

Marx Corrected

2025-12-15T08:13:00.003-06:00

From each according to his freely undertaken contribution to the creation of wealth. To each according to the same.

TGIF: Trump Weighs in on Netflix, WBD, and CNN

2025-12-12T06:23:00.003-06:00

The proposed merger of Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) "could be a problem," Donald Trump says, because Netflix has "a very big market share. When they have Warner Bros., that share goes up a lot." He said he would consult "some economists" on the matter, adding, "I’ll be involved in that decision, too."

He went on to say that CNN, which is owned by WBD but is not part of Netflix's offer, should be included in any deal because the cable-news channel's management must be ousted: "I don't think they should be entrusted with running CNN any longer." He also said the "dishonest [people who run CNN] should not be allowed to continue." (Emphasis added.)

I'm tired of the Trump Show. Can we change the channel now? Is there anything else on—something more friendly to free enterprise?

Netflix is prepared to spend more than $80 billion to merge with WBD (including streaming service HBO Max). Meanwhile, Paramount, which recently acquired CBS, is offering Warner stockholders what it calls a better deal (worth $108 billion) as well as a better prospect of regulatory approval. Paramount's owner, David Ellison, has connections to Trump, as well as backing from Saudi Arabia's and other Gulf states' sovereign wealth funds.

I don't want to talk about what this might mean for the movie industry. I will simply point out that before August 1997 Netflix did not exist. Then Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded the DVD-by-mail rental company. Its trend-setting streaming service began in 2007. Before Netflix came along, the giant Blockbuster Video chain ruled the roost. Netflix also produces original programs and has won Oscars and Emmys.

The point of the mini-history is that the free(ish) market is dynamic and unpredictable. If you survey the Fortune 500 over the years, you will see how the market churns. Some companies on the list did not exist a short time ago. Big companies have dropped off. As a former owner of the Philadelphia Phillies once said, "The way to make a small fortune in baseball is to start with a large fortune." That rule applies to more than baseball.

Even in our government-laden market economy, private enterprise—entrepreneurship— is extraordinary. Consumers at all levels are the beneficiaries. How could it be otherwise? If they don't like something, they let the capitalists know, and other capitalists stand ready to take their place. As Ludwig Mises noted, consumers make poor people rich and rich people poor according to what they buy and choose not to buy. Of course, the "poor" in a free-enterprise economy look nothing like the poor in socialist countries.

That the executive branch, thanks to Congress, has the power to approve, reject, or modify mergers and acquisitions is an abomination in a society that calls itself free. That The Maestro—the man who would be king—expects to review Netflix's proposal personally is simply the latest outrage and perfectly consistent with Trump's "philosophy" of governance, or more to the point, his ridiculously expansive view of his coercive power over peaceful exchange, that is, social cooperation. (Constitution? What's that?) He seems to believe that he runs the economy and country, not just a branch of the government.

But let's not put all the blame on Trump and political favoritism. Government control of mergers and acquisitions is bad even when the allegedly objective procedures set out in the law are strictly followed. The case against such control is similar to the case against socialism and lesser government intervention: the overlords cannot know what they need to know to do the job they presume to do. Why can't they know? Because that knowledge—fragmented and scattered among millions, even billions, of people and often unarticulated—can be generated only by the very process with which the overlords interfere. It is rooted in the actions of market participants, in their changing personal preferences, and in their choices to buy or not to buy. No ruler or bureaucracy can get a handle on that.

Unfortunately, most people who are outraged over what Trump is saying about Netflix, WBD, and CNN complain only about the real danger to freedom of the press. But that's not enough. An exception is Ari Melber of MS NOW, who said, "It is a problem for free speech if big government can crush the free market to pick winners and losers." Yes!

Finally, let's not jump to the popular conclusion that because the government routinely impedes freely undertaken market relations, regular people's living standards have stagnated since—well, they can't make up their minds—either the 1970s or the Reagan years, which began in 1981. It ain't so. It is said that the dollar has lost 96 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve opened its doors in 1914. (Boo!) But does that mean we were richer in 1913 than we are today? No way! Except for those services most regulated by the government—medical care and education—Americans have never been richer. As Marian Tupy shows,

Productivity, competition, and innovation have dramatically reduced the “time price” of consumer goods in the United States since 1971. The time required for a blue-collar worker to afford 75 finished goods has fallen dramatically, increasing the personal abundance available to these workers. This trend highlights the power of markets to enhance prosperity far beyond population growth, underscoring the importance of preserving economic freedom.

This even applies to housing, despite zoning and other building and land-use restrictions (which should be repealed). Focusing on time-price allows us to dispense with the need to adjust for inflation. We're not talking about prices. Rather, we're comparing how long nonsupervisory workers have to work to earn enough to buy all kinds of things now compared to the past. The picture is even rosier than it looks because products are better than they used to be. If today you need to work only a few hours to buy something that required weeks of labor 50 years ago, you're getting stuff for free!

As I like to say, "Capitalism takes a licking and keeps on ticking."

Pinker on Peace and the Enlightenment

2025-12-08T06:14:00.000-06:00

"If, despite impressions, the long-term trend, though halting and incomplete, is that violence of all kinds is decreasing, I think that calls for a rehabilitation of the ideals of modernity and progress, and it's a cause for gratitude for the institutions of civilization and enlightenment." --Steven Pinker

TGIF: Defending Israeli Mass Murder Isn't Easy

2025-12-05T05:20:00.002-06:00

Although much has already been said, I can't not comment on Sarah Hurwitz, the former Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama speechwriter, who faults young people (especially young Jews) for applying their power of abstraction in thinking about the Holocaust.

What do I mean by that? Hurwitz thinks (or says she does) that the TikTok generation makes a big mistake by drawing general lessons from the National Socialist regime's mass murder of European Jews last century. She is dismayed that young people have concluded that powerful bad people, no matter who they are, should not harm weak people, no matter who they are.

So what's the problem? According to Hurwitz, they were supposed to learn that killing weak people of a particular ethnicity or religion is horrible only when the victims are Jewish. Moreover, they should have learned that Jews by definition can never constitute the oppressor. Therefore, TikTok'ers are wrong to think of the Holocaust when they see videos of powerful Israeli soldiers harming weak Palestinians in Gaza. Or so Hurwitz believes. See for yourself. (By the way, Ms. Hurwitz, in both cases, the mass murderers did not only harm weak, emaciated victims; they made them weak and emaciated in the first place.)

All this perplexes Hurwitz and others in the American pro-Israel constituency. Young people have drawn broad rather than narrow lessons—and she equates that with antisemitism. Of course, this is buncumbe. Abstracting—drawing generalizations—from real events is a virtue, not a vice. It is quintessentially human. Ayn Rand disparaged persons who refuse to abstract as "concrete-bound." We think in concepts, and we wouldn't be able to do much thinking without them. Concepts are abstractions. We observe reality, note differences and similarities among entities, and integrate similar things into a conceptual hierarchy (for instance, chairs, furniture, manmade things). This facilitates efficient thinking by economizing on mental units. (Rand explained all this.)

Of course, we can make mistakes. We can misclassify things. We're not infallible, which is why logic and reason are indispensable guides. If Hurwitz thinks that certain generalizations drawn from the Holocaust are fallacious, let her argue for her opposing position. However, she can't get away with the libel of attributing those generalizations to "people who don't really love Jews." For one thing, many Jews have drawn those generalizations. At demonstrations protesting Israel's destruction of life and property in Gaza, Jewish participants have held signs reading, "Never Again Is Now." Hurwitz thinks that "Never Again" means only that Jews should not be persecuted or exterminated. Apparently, she also believes that if officials and military forces of the Jewish state seem to be committing those crimes, it can't really be so, no matter how it looks. "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" said Chico Marx.

Only an idiot or a demagogue could draw those conclusions. (I've drawn an additional lesson.)

Hurwitz might have made a stronger—though not valid—argument. She might have said that young people don't know the full story of Gaza because their generation is post-literate and video-oriented. All they know is what they see on TikTok: nonstop images, day in and day out, of Israeli military violence against helpless Palestinians. She does not challenge the authenticity of the videos, but she is frustrated that her pro-Israel arguments stand no chance against those images. (Hillary Clinton—she still shows her face?—shares the same concern.) As Hurwitz put it, "I'm talking through a wall of dead children." Yes, she is.

However, Hurwitz overlooks the fact that many videos from Gaza have been posted by Israeli soldiers—on TikTok—with audio sadistically celebrating their violence. Young viewers may not read, but I'm sure they hear.

Let's concede that an image may not tell the whole story. If you saw a man taking a watch from another man, you would not know by that scene alone whether you were witnessing a robbery or the recovery of stolen property. But that's not what we have with Israel and Gaza. The images of Israeli violence have not only been graphic, but they have poured out in an unending stream since Oct. 7, 2023. Gaza looks like August 1945 Hiroshima. Many tens of thousands of children and old people, as well as other noncombatants, have been killed, maimed, starved, and traumatized. Medical facilities have been destroyed, making the treatment of survivors and other sick Gazans virtually impossible.

Viewers of this material will properly ask, "What could justify such total violence over such a long period?" Viewers may also have heard that many international authorities on genocide and Holocaust studies, including Israelis, believe that Israel is committing genocide as the law defines it. (See this from Omar Bartov and this from Raz Segal.) The burden falls on Hurwitz and her colleagues to do more than repeat official Israeli propaganda, but that's what they have done.

Yes, Hamas and other groups launched a brutal attack on Oct. 7, 2023, inexcusably committing atrocities against Israeli noncombatants and seizing hostages. But it is also true that Hamas, an abhorrent organization judging by its never-repudiated antisemitic charter and record of crimes, did not exist before the late 1980s, long after the wholesale dispossession, expulsion, and subjugation of the Palestinians began. Moreover, Israel encouraged the growth of Hamas, hoping it would weaken the Palestinian cause by becoming a religious rival to the leading faction, Fatah, which is secular. Later, Benjamin Netanyahu permitted Hamas to collect money, since he could use the group's presence as a reason for not allowing a Palestinian state

This history does not excuse the Oct. 7 crimes, but neither do those crimes excuse Israel's indiscriminate destruction of the people and places of Gaza.

The Europe-based Zionist movement has abused the Palestinians for more than one hundred years. Moreover, imperial Britain helped boost Zionism beginning in 1917. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to see Zionism as just another episode in a long-running story of Western imperialism, the solution to which is (presumably) worldwide de-Westernization, or "global intifada." The history of Zionism has too many distinguishing features, including the real persecution of Jews at the hands of Europeans and the real, partially carried out "Final Solution" at the hands of the National Socialists.

Moreover, Jewish supremacy (so identified by Israeli human-rights organization B'Tselem) is not held to be generally applicable. Rather, it is a political device intended to guarantee Israel's existence as a haven for Jews should virulent antisemitism arise elsewhere in the world. Thus goes the argument: in Israel (but not other places), Jews must be legally and politically privileged or else the Jewishness of the state will not be assured.

I don't mean that the Zionist program—punishing Palestinians for what Europeans did—was the correct response to the historical record, only that this episode is importantly distinguishable from other colonial episodes, despite the similarities. The critics of Zionism who target Western civilization per se are attacking a strawman. If anti-Zionism is portrayed as anti-Western, Zionism wins. On the other side, Zionists who reject universalism in favor of blood-and-soil tribalism unwittingly make common cause with antisemites, who also reject universalism in favor of blood-and-soil tribalism.

Bottom line: supporting the individual natural rights of Palestinians—who are individuals before they are members of "a people"—to live where they have lived continuously for millennia is not anti-Western. On the contrary, it is in line with the glorious and, yes, superior liberal Western Enlightenment ideal (still to be fully realized) of individual sovereignty.

(See my Coming to Palestine.)

TGIF: Socialism with a Fig Leaf

2025-11-28T05:18:00.001-06:00

What work does democratic perform in the phrase democratic socialism? It's a fig leaf intended to conceal what would presumably be repugnant to most people: the coercive regimentation inherent in socialism, whether international (Marxist) or national (fascist).

Socialism has a nasty record dating back to 1917, so socialists have felt compelled to clean up its image. Democracy is supposed to do the cleaning up. But does it? Could it?

Before we get to that, we should remind ourselves that no single conception of socialism exists. In one version, socialism denotes central economic planning, the top-down command economy. However, other socialists envision a collection of operations governed locally and democratically by workers, perhaps with input from other so-called stakeholders. That used to be called syndicalism.

These visions do not blend readily. If each firm, factory, and farm is run by its workers, who have seized it from the creator/owner, whence the central plan?

In the market, individual productive entities do not exist in a vacuum. They buy and sell along a vertical structure of production ranging from extraction to retail. For example, a steel processor buys iron ore from a mining company and sells its products to manufacturers of producer and consumer goods. Global supply chains are so complex that no one could grasp the whole. Conditions and prices often change, requiring flexibility, foresight, intuition, improvisation—in a word, entrepreneurship. And don't get me started on transportation. Raw materials and semifinished products must move expeditiously from one place to another, often over long distances, in bad weather as well as good. Business is the original worldwide web. (See Leonard E. Read's "I, Pencil.")

Thus, coordination is indispensable if billions of people with diverse needs and tastes are to have access to the most goods at the lowest possible expenditure. The more that scarce resources are economized, the more stuff we can have. How can the coordination of diverse plans be achieved? Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, along with other sound economists, long ago demonstrated that what permits coordination is the market—that is, the price system and its institutional requirements. Prices are constantly updated guides to producer and consumer action, carrying critical, dispersed, and often unarticulated information about supply and demand. Prices are not magic. They require 1) private property in the factors of production and consumer goods, 2) markets, in which unencumbered trade of private property can take place, and 3) money, a medium of exchange, the less subject to political manipulation the better. Without these things, economic calculation, coordination (mostly with strangers), and general prosperity cannot take place.

That's how it works in a market economy, even a government-hampered one such as ours. How could this seeming miracle be accomplished under socialism, which is hostile to the market and its requirements?

A central planning board, nominally acting on behalf of society, would presumably have the power to issue orders to its personnel; everyone would be a state employee. Well, it could try, but the results would be a disaster, as history shows, because of the aforementioned coordination and knowledge problem (and incentive problem) long documented by economists and economic historians. Getting to vote for the members of the planning board, which wouldn't last long even if it began that way, could not save the system.

What about an "economy" of autonomous democratic plants, offices, and farms? We can imagine an answer. First, at the lowest level, the workers (and perhaps other stakeholders) would vote not only for their managers, but also for representatives to a council of firms at the next level up. In turn, the members of that council would vote for delegates to an ever-higher council, and so on until the pinnacle is reached, where a comprehensive plan would be promulgated and then imposed.

How could it work otherwise? If it sounds rigidly hierarchical, that's because it is. But things could hardly be expected to go smoothly. Where does the information that market prices convey come from under socialism? Moreover, even if everyone in society wants some kind of central plan, the odds of everyone wanting the same plan are precisely zero. And if everything is to be decided by majority rule—we're talking about democracy, right?—there will be no avoiding election campaigns for people and plans, campaign promises, and dubious efforts to convince voters to a point of view. In other words, there will be no escaping "the manufacture of consent," the essence of the democratic procedure, which self-styled dissidents condemn today. Ironic.

Such an arrangement has no prospect of creating or sustaining a modern industrial economy that could properly cater to billions of people worldwide.

That's the economics of the matter. The descriptor democratic before socialism, remember, is to give state regimentation a smiling face. Being able to vote within a socialist system is supposed to make all the difference. But having a mere one vote—when (at best) your whole life is to be subordinated to majority rule—is nothing compared to the sovereignty one has in the unhampered competitive market, or even in today's sea of government intervention. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's signature theme of dignity through pervasive democracy is exposed as so much snake oil.

The idea that the key to dignity and liberty is voting on everything was stripped of its romance by the 19th-century Swiss/French classical liberal Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) in his must-read essay, "The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns (1819)." His title is self-explanatory. Here's how Constant described the modern notion of liberty:

For each [person] it is the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings. It is everyone’s right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they and their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is most compatible with their inclinations or whims. Finally it is everyone’s right to exercise some influence on the administration of the government, either by electing all or particular officials, or through representations, petitions, demands to which the authorities are more or less compelled to pay heed.

Yes, Constant included democratic participation in his description. But note that he put it last. The rights that he lists first, if respected, would limit what the voting public, acting as the state, could do to the individual. (Keeping the system limited is the problem that has proved insurmountable. That's why the state must go.) Democratic socialism could not be expected to observe limits. How could it? It's touted as rational social engineering.

What about the ancient idea of liberty?

[It] consisted in exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty; in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace; in forming alliances with foreign governments; in voting laws, in pronouncing judgments; in examining the accounts, the acts, the stewardship of the magistrates; in calling them to appear in front of the assembled people, in accusing, condemning or absolving them.

Constant emphasized the narrowness of the ancients’ notion of liberty: “[T]hey admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community.... All private actions were submitted to a severe surveillance. No importance was given to individual independence, neither in relation to opinions, nor to labor, nor, above all, to religion.” (Emphasis added.)

Isn't having one vote real power? Constant said no. "Lost in the multitude, the individual can almost never perceive the influence he exercises," he wrote. Can you think of one election whose outcome would have changed had you done something different on election day?

We can see that Zohran Mamdani and his fellow democratic socialists, like the conservative populists, reject liberal modernity and the individual freedom it delivered. They may style themselves "postmodernists," but in fact they are reactionaries.

(For a full discussion of democratic socialism, see Stephen Hicks's Open College podcast, episode 36, "Democratic Socialism for Beginners.")

What's Wrong with Young People?

2025-11-21T09:52:00.005-06:00

A former Obama speechwriter faulted young people for having the faculty of abstraction when thinking about the Holocaust, genocide, Israel, and the Palestinians.

TGIF: The Capitalist-Socialist Asymmetry

2025-11-21T05:16:00.000-06:00

Free-marketeers have long pointed out a particular asymmetry between capitalism and socialism (whether of the international or national variety). While anyone in a capitalist society would have a right to engage in socialism (as anyone can do now in our hampered market economy), the reverse would not hold: under socialism—that is, a centrally planned economy, democratic or not—no one would be free to engage in "capitalist acts between consenting adults" (to use Robert Nozick's phrase from Anarchy, State, and Utopia). It would upset the plan.

In other words, in a fully free society, no legal barriers would prevent people from setting up communes, worker and consumer co-ops, etc., but in a socialist society, money exchanges of land, producer goods, and labor services (and perhaps even consumer goods) would be outlawed. Goodbye, entrepreneurship, free private enterprise, and economic calculation via trade-generated market prices.

That asymmetry speaks volumes, does it not? It ought to end the debate between the proponents and opponents of capitalism. Do you wish to live as a socialist with a clear conscience? Embrace the free market.

But socialists will have none of that. For them, individual choice is unimportant, if not destructive. In their view, voluntary capitalist relations are exploitative regardless of how the participants see them. So they must be forbidden. Socialist planners and their court intellectuals know better. Thus, for their own good, mere people must be controlled.

That is the height of presumptuous and arrogant elitism. The appropriate question for the socialist is that quintessential American retort: "Who asked you?"

How do the socialists know that transactions are exploitative? We can be sure that at the time of the transaction, the parties demonstrably prefer what they give up to what they receive. "No, no!" cry the socialists. One party is weaker because he must eat, work, obtain shelter, etc. What socialists refuse to acknowledge is that market relations are how we cope with a world of natural scarcity, a world in which resources—that is, natural stuff for which human ingenuity has found uses—are finite, costly to obtain, and usable in a variety of ways. (By all means, see this video from Stephen Davies and the Institute of Economic Affairs.) Scarcity is not a capitalist plot. On the contrary, the combination of the division of labor, technology, and trade is the only way to push back the constraints of scarcity. Most of today's eight billion people live much better now than one billion did in 1800.

How do the socialists know that employees are exploited? Apparently, they just do. It has something to do with the market return on goods sold being greater than the wages employees are paid. The "surplus" collected by employers is seen as stolen. That actual employees value their wages more than the effort they expend to earn them is irrelevant as far as the socialists are concerned. But again, who asked them?

Those with only a scant acquaintance with economics often find Marx's exploitation theory plausible. However, they overlook a critical factor: time. When something happens matters to us as much as what happens. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, the second-generation Austrian economist who delved into this matter, put the point rather nicely:

The completely just proposition that the worker is to receive the entire value of his product can be reasonably interpreted to mean either that he is to receive the full present value of his product now or that he is to get the entire future value in the future. But … the socialists interpret it to mean that the worker is to receive the entire future value of his product now.

People value present and future goods differently. Other things equal, we prefer the results of our actions sooner rather than later. Asked if you'd want a dollar today or a dollar in a month, you'll take it today. But asked if you'd want a dollar today or two dollars next month, you may choose to wait if the extra dollar will make the wait worthwhile. If two dollars won't do it, maybe three dollars will. The time element is what explains interest. I'll let you use my money for a period if you promise to compensate me later. It's perfectly legitimate. (For more, see this.)

The employment relationship involves time too. Employees typically don't want to wait until the consumer or producer goods they work on have been sold. Most prefer to be paid regularly, predictably. Nothing wrong with that. But in that case employers who advance (lend) their employees wages out of previous savings will have to wait for the sales—which may not take place if no buyers are interested. Why shouldn't employers be compensated for doing what their employees are unwilling to do: namely, assume the risk and uncertainty of waiting? If socialists don't like it, let them start businesses. (Gene Epstein points out that unions are flush with money from their members' dues. Why don't they start worker-owned firms? Why don't the union members demand it?)

In market-oriented but not fully free economies, we see few if any worker-owned businesses. Why? Probably because most people don't want the risk and responsibility of ownership. So they forgo some money in return for the relative security of employment. That's their right. But employees should not begrudge employers because the latter earn profits (which comprise both interest on the loans to employees and entrepreneurial rewards for spotting price discrepancies that others overlooked).

Socialists who dislike conventional enterprise should stop complaining and set up worker-owned firms. On the other hand, it's easier and less risky to complain about capitalism. Admittedly, in one respect, socialists would not be free to engage in socialism. They could not force anyone to go along.

Orwell on Socialists

2025-11-19T14:11:00.000-06:00

"The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ’we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ’them’, the Lower Orders." —George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937