Here's an Idea

If you can't tell the difference between 2024 America and 1930s Germany, let's not have a conversation, okay? 

TGIF: Spooner versus bin Laden

In his 2002 letter to America justifying the savage 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (himself killed in 2011) wrote after listing his grievances against the U.S. government:

You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake:

(a) This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.

(b) The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq. These tax dollars are given to Israel for it to continue to attack us and penetrate our lands. So the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates....

It's a flawed and evil argument, to say the least, but it is clever. He threw the grandiose claims about democratic rule right back in the faces of hypocritical U.S. leaders. (Remember the panic last  year when young TikTok users read the letter for the first time and as a result news sites took it down?)

There's nothing easier than criticizing bin Laden's crackpot theory of popular responsibility for the U.S. government's crimes. What needs to be better understood, however, is that bin Ladenism was not unique to bin Laden. Look at what's happening in Gaza. Look what happened in Vietnam Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and the many other places I'm forgetting just now. The American and Israeli war planners are bin Ladenists! Those officials routinely kill noncombatants, regarding them as active or tacit guilty parties for not rebelling against their rulers. It's cruel to infer consent and approval from acquiescence. Overthrowing a government is no piece of cake, especially when the government has most of the guns.

But there is a difference between bin Laden and the others. The U.S. and Israeli governments devastate populations that don't even get to go through the motions of voting. Those leaders criticize bin Laden, but they should see him when they look in the mirror.

Bin Laden, like the American and Israeli rulers, never read Lysander Spooner (1808-1887), the libertarian anarchist and political/legal scholar who wrote in his short-lived periodical No Treason (nos. 2 and 6) that voting is no indication that the voters support the government. (If that's true of voters who picked the winners, it's surely true of voters who picked the losers and nonvoters.) Voters can have many reasons for voting that don't entail acceptance of the government's many impositions. Since the government will tax and regiment them whether they vote or not, they might vote to try to lessen the tyranny. It's self-defense. It does not imply acceptance of a candidate's plan for foreign intervention.

As Spooner put in No Treason: The Constitution, no. 2, and repeated in No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, no. 6 (1870):

In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot—which is a mere substitute for a bullet—because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.

Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby meliorating their condition. But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or ever consented to....

So lay off the noncombatants, war-makers of all parties. That means no more massacres of essentially powerless people. Even the unintended consequences are foreseeably horrific. You claim you're smart, so find another way.

Class versus Identity Politics?

Parts of the "left" and "right" often lament that class politics has given way to identity politics. I don't get that. Class was the original modern political identity, and state privilege was part of the cause. Libertarians and classical liberals long warned that lethal and impoverishing social disintegration would result from an ideology -- socialism-- based on Marxist class conflict, which pits business people against working people (as if business people don't work).

We need to abolish politics, not reform it because it's toxic. That won't eliminate classes, or useful social categories. We'll always have people who own businesses, people who manage them, and people employed by them. But those are not and won't be pure categories. Owners work. Managers work. And workers own -- shares in corporations. (Check your retirement account.) Ultimately, in the free market everyone has the same boss: the consumers.

What we must strive for is, to coin a phrase, classes without borders. That is, mobility. To get it we need free markets, which would end: occupational licensure, home-bulding restrictions, business permits, the minimum wage, immigration control, and so much more.

TGIF: Thomas Szasz - Unappreciated Libertarian

R-L: Thomas Szasz, Raico Raico, Me

I maintain that mental illness is a metaphorical disease: that bodily illness stands in the same relation to mental illness as a defective television set stands to a bad television program.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

--Thomas Szasz (1920-2012)

Monday, April 15, was the 104th birthday of Thomas Szasz, the late great debunker of the system of social control perpetrated, in cahoots with the state, by institutional psychiatry, the mental-health establishment. That system has included among its methods lobotomy, electroshock, involuntary "hospitalization" (a "crime against humanity"), outpatient commitment, forced "medication," and other means. For Szasz, who excelled at exposing how scientific language is often used to subjugate, forced hospitalization, treatment, and medication were in fact imprisonment, torture, and poisoning.

Szasz's soft accented voice was powerful because he had credentials: he was a medical doctor, psychiatrist, practicing psychotherapist (for consenting clients only), and professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. He knew from the inside what he was talking about.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, he came to America in 1938 at age 18. He adored America's founding principles, which proclaimed the natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He was a libertarian, favoring private property and free enterprise. He loved autonomy and self-responsibility. As a result, he fought tirelessly against the government-medical complex and its persecution of people who, though perhaps disturbing to others and even themselves, had violated no one's rights.

I knew Tom Szasz. He wrote a column for The Freeman (Foundation for Economic Education) during my 15 years as the editor. Working with him was a great honor, not to mention a great pleasure. He was unique. He was wise.

Szasz (pronounced like the first syllable in Saskatchewan) wrote dozens of books and hundreds of articles and kept writing practically to the end of his long life. He made his first big splash with a radical book, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961), which people should read regardless of their interest in psychiatry. This book and the work that followed got him routinely denounced by the government-medical establishment. Ironically, "experts" said he was crazy and called for his firing from his university. Call it an early attempt at cancellation. Why? Because Szasz disturbed the peace. Later, people acknowledged his contributions, perhaps because he had exposed the worst psychiatric abuses, such as the warehousing called hospitalization. He even won awards. But his view of human behavior has not yet won the day.

By "myth" Szasz meant that mental illness is a metaphor that is unfortunately taken literally. He wrote, "Typhoid fever is a disease. Spring fever is not a disease; it is a figure of speech, a metaphoric disease. All mental diseases are metaphoric diseases...." He did not deny that people can behave oddly, annoyingly, disturbingly, and even threateningly. But he denied that behavior was disease: "In asserting that there is no such thing as mental illness, I do not deny that people have problems coping with life and each other." They may need many things, but physicians and psychiatrists are not among them.

Nor did he deny that people can suffer from brain disease or that currently unknown brain diseases could be discovered in the future. Again, he meant that disapproved or immoral behavior is human action not illness: it has reasons, motives, purposes, and stories -- not causes, as we observe in nature. "There is no psychology," Szasz aphorized. "There is only biography and autobiography." What's more, if all mental illnesses were brain diseases, Szasz asked, why would we need psychiatrists? We have neurologists already.  Moreover, people with real brain diseases, like other physical diseases, are free to reject treatment. Ergo...

He was fond of philosopher Gilbert Ryle's insight about myths in The Concept of Mind: "A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms belonging to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them." That's Tom's approach.

Thus when people asked Szasz if he was saying that no one was crazy, he'd say something like, "I didn't say no one was crazy. I said no one was mentally ill." Of course, if there is no mental illness, then there is no mental health either. Health and illness have historically referred to the body, he said. The "mind," however, is not a literal organ; it's a metaphorical organ. How can it be ill? Pathologists find no mental illnesses when they do autopsies.

By the way, his book The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience is a gem. Spoiler: "Mind is a verb." In other words, mind is not something we have, but something we do. We aren't robots, as some neuroscientists think; we are minders -- conscious and self-conscious beings who mind. We say, "Mind your own business" and "Mind your manners." Szasz taught us to mind our metaphors.

The connection to freedom and libertarianism, if not already obvious, becomes clear when we see that instead of being about controlling disease, psychiatry is about controlling behavior that someone else finds objectionable, for good or bad reasons. Aggression, he said, is properly handled by the criminal justice system. As he wrote in concluding The Myth:

Psychiatrists ... [in] actual practice ... deal with personal, social, and ethical problems in living.... [Emphasis added.]

Human behavior is fundamentally moral behavior. Attempts to describe and alter such behavior without, at the same time, coming to grips with the issue of ethical values are therefore doomed to failure.

Szasz viewed many issues through this lens. He wrote two books defending the freedom to take recreational drugs and to self-medicate without a doctor's permission (prescription): Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers and Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market. Addiction -- although perhaps a bad habit that takes great effort to break -- is not a disease. Nor were any of the other "addictions": gambling, shopping, sex, you name it.  He also published two books on the right to commit suicide.

From the start Szasz opposed psychiatry's regarding homosexuality as a mental illness properly subject to forcible "treatment" and called for full recognition of the individual rights of gay men and lesbians. In the 1970s the American Psychiatric Association board finally voted to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental illness. In real medicine, Szasz pointed out, physicians do not vote on what is and is not an illness. That tells you something.

He also spoke out against the insanity defense in criminal trials. Criminals are human beings, he said, who should be judged morally and held accountable for their actions. 

His life's mission was to battle for liberty and self-responsibility by discrediting what he called the "therapeutic state." He thus fought courageously against the "medicalization of everyday life," that is, the recasting of human freedom, choice, and action as medical, not moral, concerns and in the case of disapproved choices and actions, as diseases. F. A. Hayek, whom Szasz admired, called the misapplication of science to areas outside its province scientism. As Szasz put it, "Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations."

I thought about Szasz often during the pandemic and the government's "science-based" restrictions on liberty. What exactly would he have been saying? I am certain of two things.

First, he would have insisted that physicians and scientists are not qualified to tell us what trade-offs we should make between liberty and health. That's not a medical or scientific issue, but a moral one that should be left to each individual. Advice, if requested, is one thing. Colluding with the state to violate liberty is something else.

Second, he would have condemned all government and scientific attempts to quash public debate about what COVID-19 was, where it came from,  and what to do about it. He loved John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and its plea for freedom of speech.

His magnum opus is Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences, which I recommend. Highly readable and entertaining, it covers much of what he had to say over the years and responds to critics. He also published several collections of wise aphorisms, a form in which he was brilliant. Samples: "The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself." And: "A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong." You will learn from his aphorism alone.

I especially want to draw attention to Szasz's 2004 book, Faith in Freedom: Libertarian Principles and Psychiatric Practices, in which he argued that the freedom philosophy is incompatible with psychiatry as we know it. Besides chapters on that theme, he also has chapters on particular libertarians and civil libertarians: Ludwig von Mises, F. A Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, Julian Simon, Deirdre McCloskey, Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, and the American Civil Liberties Union. His analysis is at times critical because libertarians have too often failed to apply the nonaggression principle (obligation) to those whom state-deputized psychiatrists have declared mentally ill. The chapter "Economics and Psychiatry: Twin Scientisms" is pathbreaking. In the Preface, he wrote:

I believe that involuntary psychiatry [like chattel slavery] is -- regardless of any good in it, real or attributed -- immoral and illegitimate. The proper response to the outrage of psychiatric slavery is abolition, not reform.

I contend that this position is not merely consistent with the basic philosophy of libertarianism but inherent in it. Unfortunately, liberty is something for which everyone regards himself as fit, but most people regard certain other persons or the members of certain groups as unfit. In the past, among the unfit were blacks, women, Jews, and "perverts" such as homosexuals. Today the persons most often considered unfit for liberty are the mentally ill.

Thomas Szasz is definitely someone whom libertarians ought to check out.

In the meantime, see my article "Szasz in One Lesson" and my 2005 video interview with Tom on YouTube. And visit Jeffrey Schaler's Thomas S. Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility for many articles by and about him.

More on Immigration and Public Property

Inspired by scholar Simon Guenzl, it occurred to me that regarding "state-claimed" so-called public property, people have been wronged not primarily as taxpayers but as potential homesteaders. (See Guenzl's "Public Property and the Libertarian Immigration Debate," Libertarian Papers, 2016 vol. 8, no. 1, and listen to his conversation with Bob Murphy's Human Action Podcast.)

Guenzl properly distinguishes between state-claimed land and state-seized land, such as that acquired through eminent domain. In the latter case, government personnel took land from identifiable owners, but state-claimed land never had owners. The state foreclosed homesteading.

Among the people prevented from homesteading are would-be immigrants, people from other parts of the world. In times past, many came to America to stake out parcels on the frontier to make better lives for themselves and their families. They demarcated, cleared, plowed, planted, and harvested it. They built homes with it. They "mixed their labor" with it, Lockean-style, and made it their own.

By foreclosing homesteading to this day of a vast portion of America, the government harms their modern-day counterparts as much as it harms those politically defined as citizens. Libertarians (and others) who would treat citizens from foreigners differently in this matter are obliged to justify that seemingly arbitrary distinction. So far they have failed to do so.

Thomas Szasz: Champion of Freedom

Today is the 104th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Szasz (1920-2012), the great if unappreciated libertarian and defender of individual autonomy and dignity. A psychiatrist by profession, for over 50 years, Szasz was the foremost critic of the social-control system we call institutional psychiatry, or what we could call the government-medical complex. He called it the Therapeutic State. He opposed involuntary mental hospitalization, forced medication, the insanity defense, prescription laws, drug prohibition, laws against suicide, and the psychiatric position (until the 1970s) that homosexuality was a mental illness requiring forced intervention. I am proud to have had him as a friend and also a columnist when I edited The Freeman. He was a delightful man. His books include The Myth of Mental Illness, Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences, Our Right to Drugs, The Manufacture of Madness, and Faith in Freedom. He also published several collections of wonderful aphorisms.

I wrote the following about 20 years ago to summarize a good deal of what Thomas Szasz said in his dozens of books and hundreds of articles. I call it "Szasz in One Lesson":

If neuroscientists discovered that mass murderers and people who claim to be Jesus had different brain chemistries from other people, most everyone would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a mental illness/brain disorder (MI/BD).

If neuroscientists discovered that homosexuals had different brain chemistries from heterosexuals, far fewer people would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a MI/BD.

If neuroscientists discovered that nuns had different brain chemistries from everyone else, very few people would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a MI/BD.

If neuroscientists discovered that married men had different brain chemistries from bachelors, no one would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a MI/BD.

Clearly, a difference in brain chemistry per se is not enough to make people believe that someone has a MI/BD. It takes more. Why, then, would a difference in one case be taken as evidence of MI/BD, while a difference in another case would not be? The obvious answer is that people, including psychiatrists, are willing to attribute behavior to mental illness/brain disorder to the extent that they disapprove of that behavior, and are unwilling to do so to the extent they approve of, or at least are willing to tolerate, that behavior. (Psychiatry once held that homosexuality was a mental illness. That position was changed, but not on the basis of scientific findings. Science had nothing to do with the initial position either.)

In other words, the psychiatric worldview rests, not on science or medicine, as its practitioners would have us believe, but on ethics, politics, and religion. That would be objectionable only intellectually if that were as far as it went. Unfortunately, it goes further, since the practitioners and the legal system they helped shape are empowered:

•  first, to involuntarily “hospitalize” and drug people “diagnosed” as mentally ill and thought possibly to be dangerous to themselves or others, and

•  second, to excuse certain people of responsibility for their actions (for example, via the insanity defense).

Postscript: I'm often asked which one of Thomas Szasz's two dozen books I'd recommend to someone unfamiliar with his work. I suggest Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences. This highly readable book covers most of his views on psychiatry, mental illness, and the Therapeutic State, with responses to his critics along the way. Of course, after that, you'll want to read the rest.

Post postscript: More on Thomas Szasz to come. Meanwhile, see my 2005 interview with Szasz.

TGIF: Why Isn't Antifa Marching for Apple?

I was all ready to don a black mask for the Antifa demonstration when I realized that the self-styled antifascists hadn't planned a demonstration. What are they waiting for?

After all, the national government has just started a new fascistic crusade. You'd expect the guardians against fascism to be out of the gate with great dispatch. But they aren't.

You haven't heard about the latest fascistic crusade? It's the Justice Department's antitrust suit against Apple for "monopolizing" the smartphone market, or maybe it's the "luxury" smartphone market. The government is keeping its options open on this.

The government says Apple's iPhone accounts for 65 percent of the American market, depending on how you define "the market." (Worldwide the iPhone is only 20-30 percent.) That doesn't sound like a monopoly because 40 percent for the competition ain't chopped liver. But let's not be bothered with facts. Apple says its U.S. share is under 50 percent.

Isn't calling the government's action fascistic a stretch? Well, maybe, but it's not a big stretch to say it's another step down the road to serfdom. (Okay, that's not my term. It's Hayek's.) Remember: the word fascist once meant something more than "I hate you."

If you read what the founders of fascism wrote, you'll see that this political philosophy is not at its core racist or anti-Semitic, though it is nationalistic. It is the view that the nation is essentially a single organism with the state as the head. Liberal individualism was declared feeble and inadequate for the 20th century. In contrast to class conflict, fascism preached internal harmony among the big blocs, labor, business, and other corporate entities. This was the touted cooperation of all significant groups -- corporatism ( which didn't mean business corporations ran everything).

In light of that orientation, a free economy, like liberal individualism, could not be tolerated. In its place was dirigisme, which comes from the French for to direct. It's the view that the state, on behalf of the nation, should direct economic activity for the nation's good. Business can remain in private hands and even make a (state-defined) reasonable profit -- but only so long as it serves the people's (state-defined) interest. In other words, "owners" hold their property provisionally, at the pleasure of the wise leader. Otherwise, they're out. That's right: ownership, business, and profit may not serve -- ugh! -- selfish ends. They must serve only (state-defined) public ends. (See my entry on fascism in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.)

That explains other key features of fascism, such as the one-party-rule brutality. As Hayek showed, our wise leaders could not make a plan to harmonize the whole society if anyone were free to make his or her own plans, either alone or in concert with others, as a consumer or producer. How can we have a proper planned society if any individual can disrupt it just by living as he or she wishes?

So where the hell is Antifa? Forget the black masks, and forgo the smashing of windows or harassing of people at outdoor cafes. But make your position clear: you do not want this step toward fascism in America. Justice for Apple and all victims of antitrust oppression!

Specifically, the Justice [!] Department

alleges that Apple illegally maintains a monopoly over smartphones by selectively imposing contractual restrictions on, and withholding critical access points from, developers. Apple undermines apps, products, and services that would otherwise make users less reliant on the iPhone, promote interoperability, and lower costs for consumers and developers. Apple exercises its monopoly power to extract more money from consumers, developers, content creators, artists, publishers, small businesses, and merchants, among others.

Translation: consumers who choose the iPhone over an Android phone because they like its distinctive features don't realize they are being exploited. (Full disclosure: I'm an Android guy.)

The complaint has a lot to do with Apple's app store. Apple exercises closer control over apps than Google does with its competing Android app store. Apple's rebuttal of the government charges is reported here. As Professor Thomas B. Nachbar of the University of Virginia Law School says, "The basic theory of the lawsuit is that Apple is squelching the development of apps – such as so-called 'super apps' that are essentially a gateway to a variety of services or apps – cloud streaming game apps, messaging apps, services (especially financial services, such as digital wallets) and accessories (such as smartwatches) – in order to insulate the iPhone from the rise of potential competitors."

He goes on: "Much of the conduct the government is complaining of in this case are things that Apple says it does to either protect its users or provide them a distinctive customer experience." Apple also says its approach is intended to protect its customers' privacy and let parents limit what their kids can do with their iPhones.

Apple's and Google's different app policies have advantages and disadvantages regarding variety, security, privacy, and user experience. Different users will want different things. Do the antitrust bureaucrats not get that? It's all about trade-offs. Who should decide? Which approach is "best"? That depends on who you are and what you want. That's the great thing about markets and competition, even our less-than-fully-free system laden with patents, copyrights, trade restrictions, etc. Companies can create different bundles of features and then let consumers choose which bundle they like best. All that's necessary is to dismantle legal barriers to market entry.

The antitrust bureaucrats don't like that system. It's too, well, free. (They'd say, Orwell-style, "restricted.")  Besides, they need to earn their high salaries. So they pretend to know how the ideal phone market should look, and they have the power to do something about it. But they'll have to get through the courts, which may yet save consumers from the conformity-imposing bureaucrats. Time might be on our side. As Axios says, "The case is likely to take years to resolve. By the time it's settled, we might be using our smartphones in very different ways."

I don't like fascism, so I don't like antitrust bureaucrats. We should have sent those mini Mussolinis packing long ago. What about it, Antifa? Show you're antifascism after all.

Israel, Zionism, Jews, and Anti-Semitism

"In some quarters anger at Israel's brutal occupation has undoubtedly spilled over to an animus toward Jews generally. But however lamentable, it's hardly cause for wonder... Should it really surprise us if the cruel occupation by a self-declared Jewish state engenders a generalized antipathy to Jews?... [I]f many Jews themselves repudiate any distinction between Israel and world Jewry, indeed, if they denounce such a distinction as itself anti-Semitic; if mainstream Jewish organizations lend uncritical support to every Israeli policy, however, criminal, indeed, abetting the most virulent tendencies inside Israel and muzzling principled dissent outside Israel; if Israel defines itself juridically as the sovereign state of the Jewish people, and Jews abroad label any criticism of Israel anti-Jewish -- the real wonder is that the spillover from antipathy toward Israel to Jews generally hasn't been greater."

--Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: 

On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, 2008

TGIF: Static Analysis Clouds Immigration Debate

Opponents of people's freedom to cross national borders to where the best jobs are, aka open borders, make a rookie error: they engage in static analysis and overlook the dynamism of social processes that freedom produces.

I was recently asked on Facebook: "Are you enjoying Biden open borders?" There's the mistake right there. People who ask that question look at a bad situation, say, the mess at the southern border; imagine one policy change, namely, the removal of restrictions on movement; and stop there. It's as if that policy shift would prompt no changes in how people, including Americans, behave. Because of their static analysis, the opponents of the freedom to move foresee disaster.

But hold on. That's like assuming that a significant change in the tax laws -- in either direction -- wouldn't prompt significant changes in people's tax-related behavior. It assumes that at least some people are not purposeful beings and do not respond to incentives and disincentives. But we know otherwise. For example, since World War II, federal taxes collected have been a fairly consistent percentage of GDP regardless of the changes in the tax rates. Why would that be? You know why. People respond to incentives and disincentives. Elementary to the economic way of thinking.

Pointing out this error is one of the first things a market advocate would tell an interlocutor who committed it. Frédédric Bastiat's wonderful "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen" taught the lesson in reverse: he showed that an obstacle, a broken window, prevented a shopkeeper from acting as he would have acted but for the need to overcome the obstacle, that is, the need to buy a new window. He couldn't use the money to buy books, shoes, or something else. Those who focus on how societies full of actual people work understand this. You can't leave human action out of the picture.

In the real world, decriminalizing foreign workers' freedom to move would represent profit opportunities not only for aspiring immigrants but also for entrepreneurial Americans. Yet the opponents only consider what foreigners would do. How could they have forgotten the Americans? What, they don't like profit?

The southern border is indeed a mess. Many people are assembling there, many of whom are evading the government officers (yay!) and sneaking in or are entering with provisional approval or helpless acquiescence. The government seems overwhelmed. Some governors have cynically shipped the newcomers to other states without their consent, using them cynically as pawns. Shame! Everyone can agree that something has to change.

Freedom-of-movement advocates say the solution is to remove all the restrictions -- not just restrictions on entry but all the restrictions on what people can do once they cross the border. Here's the point: that requires eliminating all the rules on how Americans may deal with the newcomers. Right now, it's illegal to hire and rent to border crossers who lack the "right" government papers. As Chandran Kukathas eloquently reminds us, the government cannot limit the freedom of "outsiders" without also limiting the freedom of "insiders." How easily that is overlooked!

So "open borders" means more than the mere literal dropping of entry restrictions. Laws against American conduct would also necessarily be repealed. Commercial relations between Americans and newcomers would be decriminalized.

Immigrants come here to work (to make better lives and to send money home to their families); they need jobs, housing, medical insurance, and other goods and services. Decriminalization on both sides of the ledger would replace the hazardous black market, with all its dangers of exploitation and worse, with a transparent legal market for labor, tenants, and customers.

Decriminalization, in other words, would invite entrepreneurs to form businesses designed to match newcomers with employers, landlords, etc. Job and housing brokers, or exchanges, would set up shop near the border to offer their services. Other firms might offer transportation to private employment and housing centers. The possibilities are nearly endless. (They'd be even better if the myriad destructive housing restrictions were repealed.) No one can say how exactly it all would look because entrepreneurship consists of discovery. That's its genius.

This open market, by the way, would function as an invitation to workers who want to multiply their incomes 2 to 15 times through increased productivity. That's what happens when people are free to move from poor low-productivity to rich high-productivity countries. It's win-win, as free exchange always is.

There's no excuse for static analysis when it comes to immigration. Dynamic market analysis is not some new thing. It's one of the first points that free-market advocates draw attention to. Unfortunately, even some smart pro-market people overlook dynamism and say dumb things. For example, Thomas Sowell once said, "You can't let everyone come to America because if everyone came to America, it wouldn't be America anymore."

Why I Pick on Israel

People close to me ask why I criticize Israel while ignoring the other bad governments in the world. (I guess they don't count the U.S. government as bad.) I have many reasons, but here's a big one: no other government (besides the U.S. government) claims to act in my name. I object to that. (For the record, years ago I declared my exit from the disparate worldwide collection of people that Israel presumptuously claims to speak for.)

The Logic of Eradicating Hamas

Is genocide logically required by Israel's stated objective of eradicating Hamas? It looks that way. Israel demonstrably believes that to wipe out Hamas, it must use overwhelming and indiscriminate force in the Gaza Strip, killing tens of thousands, wounding and starving so many others, and destroying homes, hospitals, and infrastructure. If that is not, in effect, a massive recruitment campaign for Hamas, what would be?

So what to do? Simple: wipe everyone out so the inevitably traumatized kids won't grow up radicalized and join Hamas to seek vengeance for their dead relatives and miserable childhoods. Is that so hard to understand, Israel and Israel partisans?

I know we're not supposed to mention Hitler, but it might be worth re-learning that the Hitler Youth recruited its members from young people who had suffered under Britain's starvation blockade of Germany during World War I -- a blockade that lasted several months after the armistice. Those kids didn't grow up resisting Nazism.

And Another Thing

One reason I object to Israel's behavior is that it brings anti-Semitic creeps out of the woodwork. Thanks a lot, Israel.

Is Israel Our Ally?

While I was sleeping, did "our representatives" in the U.S. Senate ratify an alliance treaty with Israel, complete with a NATO-style Article 5, obligating us to defend Israel if attacked?

Israel Gives Cover to Anti-Semites

Israel identifies itself as the Jewish state and claims to represent "the Jewish people" everywhere, not only Jewish Israelis. Thus Israel's atrocious treatment of the Muslim and Christian Palestinians at least tacitly encourages the anti-Semites, who are eager to point to anything they can describe as bad acts committed by "the Jewish people." The Jewish state equals the Jewish people -- that's what they've been told. (It's not true.)

In other words, Israel's own definition of itself and its own treatment of the Palestinians ratify the anti-Semites' crazy ideas about the malevolence and collective guilt of all Jewish people. The anti-Semites are encouraged to ignore the super-large number of Jewish people outside of Israel who vociferously oppose both Israel's self-identification and its oppression of the Palestinians.

Israel then makes matters worse by conflating the rotten but fringe anti-Semitism it encourages with sincere anti-Zionism (principled opposition to Israel and by implication any ethno-state). That in turn gives cover to the crazy anti-Semites, who can hide in plain sight among the anti-Zionists, Jews included.

Israel encourages and then protects the anti-Semites!

You'd think that would be a bad thing. And it is. So why do Israel's leaders and supporters make it happen?

TGIF: Israel Humiliated

To more fully understand the ferocity of Israel's massacre of the people of the Gaza Strip, it's perhaps worth considering that on October 7, 2023, the reputedly invincible Israeli Defence Forces and intelligence services were made to look like fools caught sleeping on guard duty. While Hamas's murder, assault, and kidnapping of noncombatants must be strongly condemned, we should be able to see how humiliating that was for the Israeli government, which brags as much about its awesome power as it does about its allegedly unequaled moral stature.

Israel has blockaded Gaza for 20 years, although the "Jewish state" has controlled it since 1967. Even before that, Israel had committed massacres there in 1956 when Egypt controlled it as a result of the 1948 war. The Oct. 7 terrorists were likely too young to have known anything but life without a future in what had become the Gaza open-air prison. Theoretically and officially, Israel regulates all ingress and egress from the strip: people, food, medical supplies, energy, consumer and producer goods, and building materials. The policy is draconian, intended to keep the 2.3 million Palestinians, half of them children, quiet.

Even though long before Oct. 7 Israeli intelligence had evidence that Hamas was up to something, including training videos and a multipage plan of operation (discounted by the experts), the organization managed to blow 10 holes in the fortified fence and send through terrorists who attacked nearby military installations, permissible targets under international law, and impermissibly, kibbutzim and other civilian areas, including a music festival. Some of these locations had likely been the home areas of the grandparents of the fighters. A large percentage of Gazans are descendants of refugees, if not refugees themselves, whom Zionist militias expelled during the 1948 Nakba, or Palestinian catastrophe, an essential part of the program to create a "Jewish state."

As if the attacks of Oct. 7 were not humiliating enough, late-arriving Israeli forces on land and in the air killed some Israelis in vehicles and buildings either by mistake (with autonomous pilots sometimes relying on targeting information from people using WhatsApp) or according to the supposedly abandoned Hannibal Directive, under which the military prefers to kill Israeli hostages along with their abductors rather than have them taken as bargaining chips. Israeli forces also killed many Hamas fighters, but in some cases the Israelis did not know whom they were firing at.

The Israeli media, unlike the American media, has reported extensively on this. For details, see the impressive and fair-minded Al Jazeera documentary October 7. It contains revealing videos from both sides and also covers the Israeli fabrications regarding mass rape and beheaded babies, as though the actual crimes weren't hideous enough.

Israel's mortification on Oct. 7 cannot be exaggerated. Israel has long prided itself not only on its offensive capabilities but on its power to deter attack, although that has been shown on occasion to have been overstated. But Oct. 7 pulverized that reputation. It also wrecked the hope that the Palestinians would acquiesce in being ignored as though they were invisible through the Abraham Accords, started by Trump and carried on by Biden. These are the actual and prospective corrupt deals involving the United States, Israel, and the dictatorial Gulf monarchies, the purpose of which is to buy "stability" in the region through Arab recognition of Israel via bribery, including U.S. weapons contracts and security guarantees. Who thought that would work? 

Israel and its supporters want the world to believe that Jewish people face an existential threat -- another Nazi genocide -- and that Israel is the only insurance against it. Biden believes it; he ridiculously implies that Jews are in danger in America. How wrong that is. Israel is the least safe place for Jewish people, but that's a consequence of how Zionists have treated the Palestinians from the start because they were not Jewish. There's a sick joke in the hollow claims that as tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are being killed, maimed, starved, and dispossessed, the real threat is to Jews, not only in Israel but in America! 

The presence of anti-Semitism is vastly exaggerated and thankfully confined to the fringes, The only thing that could change that is the premeditated conflation of anti-Zionism, entirely legitimate, with anti-Semitism, an effort that serves to innoculate Israel from proper criticism. By doing this, Israel and its supporters have diluted anti-Semitism and, inexcusably, made it seem less bad.

Finally, when Israel's defenders bring up Hamas's execrable anti-Semitic and genocidal charter, they should be reminded that for decades before the 1948 self-declared founding of Israel, Zionist leaders and settlers had talked about reclaiming and sanctifying the "Promised Land" for the "Chosen People"; supported the "transfer," by force if necessary, of the Palestinian Arabs (those non-Jewish people who for generations lived inexplicably in the "land without a people"); treated them with utter contempt to their faces (to the dismay of other Jews); expelled over 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948; massacred hundreds of others and even poisoned their wells; destroyed some 500 villages to make way for Jewish towns, forests, and parks; attacked refugees in Gaza and Jordan, and militarily ruled the remaining Palestinian Arabs for the next two decades. Then came the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights through the 1967 war, with its attendant brutality and humiliation.

All of that preceded Hamas's emergence, which Israel encouraged, in the late 1980s. This does not justify Hamas's terrorism against noncombatants, but perspective advances comprehension -- if comprehension is deemed desirable.

Ban "Ethnic Cleansing"

I propose that we defenders of individual rights stop using the term ethnic cleansing. Why? Because it is the sort of euphemism bad people would use to disguise what they are doing when they expel or annihilate large numbers of people viewed as members of the wrong group. The Nazis used the word hygiene when writing about "purifying" the Aryan "race." That word was meant to soften the truth and dress it in scientific garb. But we all know what it meant. Ethnic cleansing would fit well into that lexicon.

Remember, it was the Nazis who talked like that -- not the victims or outraged onlookers. They wouldn't have called what the Nazis were doing ethnic cleansing. Why sanitize it? Cleansing is usually a good thing, isn't it? They would have called it mass murder or mass deportation.

Why are we talking in Nazi euphemism? 

But Hamas...

When Israel's defenders bring up Hamas's execrable anti-Semitic and genocidal charter, they should be reminded that for decades before the 1948 self-declared founding of Israel, Zionist leaders and settlers had talked about reclaiming and sanctifying the "Promised Land" for the "Chosen People"; supported the "transfer," by force if necessary, of the Palestinian Arabs (those non-Jewish people who for generations lived inexplicably in the "land without a people"); treated them with utter contempt to their faces (to the dismay other Jews); expelled over 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948, the Nakba; massacred hundreds of others and even poisoned their wells; destroyed some 500 villages to make way for Jewish towns, forests, and parks; and militarily ruled the remaining Palestinian Arabs for the next two decades. Then came the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip through the 1967 war with its attendant brutality and humiliation.

All of that preceded Hamas's emergence in the late 1980s. This does not justify Hamas's horrendous violence against noncombatants, but perspective advances comprehension -- if comprehension is deemed desirable.

Netanyahu as Haman

The fable of Purim ends with the slaughter of over 75,000 non-Jewish Persians by the Jewish Persians after one official's (Haman's) plot to kill the Jews is exposed when the king is alerted by his Jewish wife. That's a mighty big conspiracy! God makes no appearance. An inspiring story for sure! The closest thing today to the villain, Haman, is Netanyahu and his team. Boo!

Beware: The Government Is People

Nearly everyone complains about capitalism's defects, or market failures. In fact, those are social failures, not specifically market failures, which show up when many rational individual actions create a social situation that displeases everyone. This means that government dirigisme -- state direction or displacement of the market -- cannot be a remedy because who do you think staffs the government and how do they get there? A big difference between the two systems -- market and state -- is that while the market diminishes social defects, the government magnifies them.

Who's the Real Foreign-Policy Realist?

The establishment debate over foreign policy isn't between realists and whatever their opponents call themselves. It's a debate over who's more realistic. It reminds me of the debate between the Federalists and Antifederalists. No one wanted to be considered against federalism, but the centralizers had beaten the real federalists to the label Federalist.

TGIF: Leave TikTok Alone

This is America, last I checked. Surely, the government would not force the sale of a social-media company or ban its app from the Google and Apple stores. Would it?

Well, yes, it would,  could (perhaps), and might. A bill in Congress, backed by the government's nominal chief executive, could become law. The House of Representatives passed it last week by an overwhelming bipartisan majority -- despite valiant efforts by Rep. Thomas Massie,  R-KY, plus a few others -- and it is now before the Senate.

That bill would establish fuzzy criteria defining a "foreign adversary's" alleged influence through a social media platform. It is aimed, for now, at requiring TikTok, used by 170 million mostly younger Americans, to be sold to a government-approved American buyer within a specified period. If not sold, Americans would be forbidden to get the app. I guess the app would have to be disabled for those who have it already.

In other words, TikTok would be banned from America -- you know, just as China's communist government bans or interferes with social media over there. Knowing how the government works, we must presume that the bill's criteria will be applied to other cases later. It certainly would exist as a standing threat to the uncooperative.

The complaint against TikTok is that it's a subsidiary of ByteDance, a widely owned company subject to Chinese government influence or control, although this is disputed by TikTok's CEO, Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean businessman with substantial roots in -- the United States. But let's assume the worst and see where that leads. After all, the Chinese government is no respecter of individual rights. If the U.S. government is eager to interfere with social media, why not the Chinese government?

TikTok worriers say that China could harvest data on Americans while feeding them self-serving democracy-subverting messages. It has reportedly been caught suppressing unflattering information. Not good, but of course, the U.S. government has done the same thing; a lawsuit about this, Murthy v. Missouri, is now before the Supreme Court. As many critics of the bill have pointed out, the Chinese don't need TikTok to acquire information that users readily give up to other platforms. It's already on the market. Moreover, nobody should expect the news from any one online source to be complete; as one grows, one should learn to consult a variety of sources for a fuller picture.

Matthew Petti of Reason is right: "Competition is the strongest force keeping the internet free. Whenever users find a topic banned on TikTok, they can escape to Twitter or Instagram to discuss the censored content. And when Twitter or Instagram enforce politically motivated censorship on a different topic, users can continue that discussion on TikTok."

Changing ownership or banishing TikTok would create a false sense of security. The problem of myopia would remain.

Moreover, as Matt Taibbi alerts us, the bill would give the executive branch "sweeping powers." He writes: "As written, any 'website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application' that is 'determined by the President to present a significant threat to the National Security of the United States' is covered.'"

Taibbi continues: "A 'foreign adversary controlled application,' in other words, can be any company founded or run by someone living at the wrong foreign address, or containing a small minority ownership stake. Or it can be any company run by someone 'subject to the direction' of either of those entities. Or, it’s anything the president says it is. Vague enough?"

By this time, shouldn't we expect the worst from letting legislators write the rules?

But those are not the only reasons for concern. According to Glenn Greenwald, the bill had been floating around for a few years but had not garnered enough support to get through Congress. That changed recently, according to Greenwald, citing articles in the Wall Street Journal, Economist, and Bari Weiss's Free Press. Why? As Greenwald documents, anxiety about TikTok took a quantum leap beginning on Oct. 7, 2023, the day Hamas killed and kidnapped hundreds of Israeli civilians and Israel began retaliating against the people of the Gaza Strip.

What has this got to do with TikTok? you ask. Good question. Israel's defenders in the United States, such as Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, are upset that TikTok's young users are being exposed to what he calls anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic disinformation. "It's Al Jazeera on steroids," Greenblatt said on MSNBC. During a leaked phone call, he complained, "We have a TikTok problem," by which he means a generational problem. Younger people -- including younger Jewish people -- are appalled at what Israel's military is doing in Gaza. (To complicate things, it looks like TikTok and Instagram have suppressed pro-Palestinian information.)

Would an American-owned TikTok be easier to control? Experience says yes. Have a look at the Twitter Files, which document how American officials, Chinese-style, pressured social media to censor or suppress dissenting views on important matters such as the COVID-19 response and the 2020 election. A federal judge likened the government's efforts to the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Do we want to become more like China?

A final word. Defenders of free speech should not argue that ill-intentioned disinformation and well-intentioned misinformation from any source can cause no harm, broadly defined. Of course, it can. The proper answer to this legitimate concern is that government-produced "safetyism," placing safety above every other value including freedom, will do more harm than good.

Washington, We Have Problem

Centralized power has a problem: the individual. Every person is a potential disrupter of The Plan, and disruption must be forbidden. Otherwise, why have a central plan? This applies regardless of whether the planning is economy-wide or for particular sectors, such as medical services. (See F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.)

How Dare You Vote!

If you have not mastered Frédéric Bastiat's "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen," how dare you vote! How arrogant of you to presume to set rules for everyone else! Do something constructive on election day: stay home and mind your own business.

Yoda on Identity

I find the phrase "identify as" strange. Yoda might say, "No. Be or be not. There is no 'identify as.'"

Trump: Another Special-Interest-Pandering Politician

Trump promises to slam a 100-percent tariff on [Update:] imported cars made in Chinese-owned factories in Mexico. He announced this not to a group of prospective car buyers but to a group of car makers. So what else is new? Car buyers, who outnumber the well-organized car makers but are not themselves organized, would have to pay more for cars they do not want if Trump got his way. That's the point.

This is America first? No, it is not. It is "An Interest Group Whose Votes I Want" First versus everyone else. That's always the case with protectionism. Stopping consumers from buying whatever they want helps some (in the short term) at the expense of the rest. Calling the favored group "America" is self-serving special pleading. Trump's good at that. He thinks he knows better than you.

Trump is just another special-interest-pandering politician. Many people are fine with that because they misunderstand markets and dislike foreigners. But as Adam Smith taught us long ago, the wealth of a nation is determined by the people's free access to the world's products and not by how much they are cut off from those products. We produce to consume. We don't consume to produce.

David Friedman cleverly points out that cars can be produced in two ways: the old-fashioned factory way and by, say, growing grain, loading it on ships headed to, say, Japan, and welcoming the returning car-laden ships. Both production methods are legitimate, and which one prevails should be left to free people making choices in a spontaneously ordered marketplace. Trump obviously never learned about the law of comparative advantage.

TGIF: Reverse Scapegoating in the Immigration Debate

In the controversy over immigration we can spot a phenomenon I call "reverse scapegoating." According to Merriam-Webster, the scapegoat is "one that bears the blame for others." With reverse scapegoating, others bear the blame for one. Both are unjust.

Reverse scapegoating is clear in the demagoguery about "migrant crime," occasioned most recently with the murder Laken Riley. As the Associated Press shouted in a recent headline, "Killing of Laken Riley is now front and center of US immigration debate and 2024 presidential race." The 22-year-old Georgia nursing student's body was found after she had been beaten during a morning run. Very sad indeed.

Based on surveillance-camera footage, the AP reported, the police arrested "Jose Ibarra, 26, a Venezuelan citizen. Immigration officials say Ibarra entered the U.S. illegally and was allowed to stay. He unlawfully crossed into the U.S. in 2022, authorities said." Ibarra faces murder and other major charges.

Opponents of immigration are having a field day, none more than Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate. Even people who would have nothing to do with Trump echo his words. Trump reacted by saying, according to the AP roundup, “Crooked Joe Biden’s Border INVASION is destroying our country and killing our citizens! The horrible murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley at the University of Georgia should have NEVER happened! [Ibarra is] an animal that came in.” Naturally, Trump believes Ibara wouldn't have entered had Trump been in charge of the border.

In other words, the murder of this innocent woman allegedly by a migrant who entered the country without government permission papers proves that what's going on at the Mexican border is an existential threat to America and must be stopped by any means necessary.

The problems here should be obvious. First, it's not an invasion. Everyone knows that the word refers to a foreign military entering a country uninvited -- you know, as the U.S. military did in Iraq and Afghanistan or Russia in Ukraine.

Moreover, why should a horrific act allegedly committed by one person without papers tar others who had nothing to do with the crime? We know that most people who enter the country with or without papers commit no crimes. Rather, they produce value in the marketplace, benefitting us all, and strive for better lives. Why should the U.S. government condemn them to life sentences in the poorest, most war-torn, and least free countries when they could make up to 20 times as much money here? Of course, criminal suspects should not be immune from prosecution because of their immigration status.

Some statistics show that legal and illegal immigrants commit proportionately less crime than native-born Americans. I know many people won't believe it, but it seems to be true. (See, for example, Bryan Caplan's Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, pp. 91-92. And Cato's Alex Nowrasteh's discussion here.)

We all know from historical experience that most immigrants are a net plus to us as they help themselves. A few commit harm, but native-born Americans harm innocent people every day. Some Americans, who freely travel from state to state and city to city without papers, commit horrific crimes. Should we ban or closely monitor interstate migration? How about freedom of reproduction? After all, some couples will produce future criminals. 

A response might be, "If we can save one life...." But they don't mean it because if they did, they'd propose licensing reproduction, restricting domestic travel, reducing the speed limit to 10 miles an hour, and outlawing left turns. Many other intolerable ways of saving lives can be imagined. "But that would be extreme!" someone might say. And sentencing innocent people to lives of poverty, war, and tyranny is not?

As economist Benjamin Powell points out, as long as America is a magnet for those seeking better lives, and as long as legal immigration is virtually ruled out for all but a few, a border problem will exist -- complete with traffickers' vicious exploitation. The source of the problem, however, is not immigration but bad policy. Again, as Powell says, this is like the prohibition of booze and drugs. When people want to do something peaceful that's against the law, they'll find a way to do it -- even if it's with the help of bad people who otherwise never would have gotten involved. Prohibition creates the crisis that politicians and voters are then determined to stop by any means no matter how cruel.

You don't like illegal immigration? Legalize it! End reverse scapegoating!

(For more, watch Bryan Caplan's excellent video presentation of the case for open borders.)

Celebrating the Gaza Onslaught: Is There No Shame?

To Israel's supporters: are you not ashamed when you see the videos that IDF soldiers make to celebrate the death, destruction, and humiliation they're inflicting on the people of Gaza? Some would call those soldiers "my people." We're talking about Abu Ghraib stuff here.

Something to Agree on?

Can't we all at least agree that this was an extremely clumsy sentence from Academy Award-winning Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer that invited misinterpretation?

Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.

I assume he meant that they repudiate (why would this British guy say "refute"?) Israel's hijacking both Judaism and the memory of Hitler's victims in a cause that has produced such horrible consequences for both the Israelis and Palestinians.

Now an Audiobook: What Social Animals Owe to Each Other

My book What Social Animals Owe to Each Other is now an audiobook. It's on YouTube here. And here's an MP3. What? You need an MP4? Okay, here.

HT: Spencer Hayek

TGIF: Is Israel Crazy?

Has Israel gone mad? Or has it always been mad? What is the country thinking?

The collective nouns seem reasonable in light of the widespread support in that country for the Israeli government's appalling military assault on the people of the Gaza Strip for the last five months. How can Israel -- and its outside supporters -- cheer on the bombings (compliments of coerced Americans), the ground attacks, the mass starvation, the terror, and the rest of the crimes that we witness every day? The death toll is pushing 31,000, most of them infants, children, women, and old men, not fighters. So many more have been disabled for life. Gazans -- including newborns -- lack food, good water, medical services and equipment, and drugs, including anesthesia. The humanitarian aid is a small fraction of what they need. So many have been driven from their homes, to which they'll never return because the buildings have been destroyed.

And there's no end in sight! Will it take the murder of the last Gazan for it to stop? For clear-eyed observers watching helplessly from afar, it is heartbreaking. We cannot even stop the Biden administration from sending bombs, bullets, and spare parts to Israel -- without which this could not go on.

Those are human beings in Gaza, for heaven's sake! Stop the carnage!

Coming to Palestine Now an Audiobook!

My book Coming to Palestine is now an audiobook. You can listen to it on YouTube. The audiobook is also here. HT: Jorge Besada.

Guest Appearance on the Bob Murphy Show

Podcaster and economist Bob Murphy and I recently talked about my life as a libertarian, the outlook for liberty, and Israel. Watch it here.

TGIF: Immigration in an Nth-Best World

We live in an nth-best society. It's neither fully libertarian (though libertarians disagree over exactly what that would mean) nor totalitarian like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Maoist China, or North Korea. It's somewhere in between, closer to libertarian than many other places but not close enough.

One challenge for libertarians is knowing which proposals to favor and which to oppose in an nth-best society. Merely reciting the nonaggression obligation is not enough if our goal is to persuade many people that the freedom philosophy is both right and practical.

A mixed economy, the system combining markets with heavy doses of government interference, produces problems that libertarians need to address to be relevant. Many problems concern so-called public property, government-controlled land and buildings, many of which are presumptively open to all U.S. residents. Roads, parks, museums, and courthouses are examples. Libertarians would privatize most or all of it. (Roderick Long notes that nongovernmental publicly owned property can exist and has existed.) However, simply proclaiming the pure libertarian vision based on private property fails to address today's acute problems involving public property, such as the obstruction and defilement of sidewalks and parks by disorderly homeless, jobless, and troubled individuals who prevent civil self-supporting taxpayers from using those facilities as intended.

It is equally unreasonable to address those problems by giving politicians and bureaucrats carte blanche to regulate "the people's" property.

If this sounds relevant to the immigration issue, go and buy yourself a cigar. There's a view floating around social media and elsewhere that free immigration, or open borders, is not a libertarian position because "we the people," the true owners of government-controlled property, have the same right as any private owner to set rules for entry and use. Therefore, non-owners properly could and perhaps should be excluded. This rule-setting presumably would occur through the democratic process, that is, voting.

Right off the bat, that seems odd. The democratic process is majority takes all  -- the bloc of minority "owners" would lose out. If 50 percent minus one welcomes new arrivals to deal with and 50 percent plus one does not, the smaller group loses out simply because it is smaller. If a member of the minority persists, he is punished.

This would seem like Rousseauian "general will" libertarianism, except that's a contradiction in terms.

This position is presented as the grown-up libertarian position in today's world. I disagree.

Bear in mind that this proposal is intended to answer naive, immature, likely new social-media libertarians who believe that in today's mixed economy, the government must not set any rules whatsoever for public property. I'm sure such libertarians exist, but libertarians are not logically or morally obligated to favor the no-rules position. On the other hand, a better version of libertarian theory also does not entail restrictions on people's nonaggressive freedom of movement.

Those who think otherwise prove far too much. If "we" through the democratic process may shut immigrants out by keeping them off "our" public property, why can't we make other rules? How about a rule that says if you hold certain political or social views, you can't drive on the roads or use the courts and libraries? Why the distinction between the native-born and the foreign-born? A country is not a country club.

Making rules for today's public property requires nuance and reasonableness. There is a difference between excluding drunken, unwashed, screaming people without clothing from the DMV and excluding civil people without government permission papers from the roads and sidewalks. Forbidding homeless people from defecating, urinating, and discarding drug paraphernalia in public differs from forbidding Americans to hire, sell to, rent to, or live with, and otherwise associate with any peaceful people they choose regardless of where they were born.

The first instances disrupt taxpayers' peaceful use of public property; the second do not. Is the nondisruption principle a distinctively libertarian standard? Not specifically, but so what? We're in an nth-best society, remember. Culture, convention, and context help determine exactly what constitutes disruption, but the spirit of individual liberty never disappears. We can expect hard cases, but that doesn't make the principle worthless.

Is the principle arbitrary? No. In a partially free society, public property is presumptively open to the public: if someone makes it impossible for others to use it as intended, that person can properly be excluded. (Not by any means, of course.)

Could the nondisruption principle be used to justify any government restriction, such as closed borders? No. The case for any given rule should not rest on hypotheticals or highly unlikely events not intrinsic to a situation. That's why a border wall is different from a stop sign. There is no necessary connection between immigrants freely coming here to look for jobs, sellers, buyers, houses, apartments, friends, lovers, spouses, etc. and the disruption of public property. We can easily imagine the orderly movement of people over the border if residency and work were legal and entrepreneurial Americans were free to create businesses that match newcomers with opportunities. If a specific disruption occurs, law enforcement should be directed at actual disrupters, not at whole classes of people just because they might be disruptive. Americans might be disruptive too.

What about the tax burden, which is a different sort of potential problem from acute disruption? For a full discussion, see Bryan Caplan's graphic nonfiction work, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. Caplan is a libertarian, but more importantly here, a solid social scientist who knows the immigration data as well as anyone. (The Cato Institute also has examined the data closely. For example, here.)

The story revealed by that data is not what most people imagine. Caplan writes: "Free immigration with a U.S.-style welfare state is not a recipe for fiscal disaster. Even under open orders, the burdensome immigrant would be the exception, not the rule.... Most immigrants pull their own weight -- and then some. A few don't [just as with the native-born]. But that's a flimsy reason to ditch the principle of free immigration." (Nor would we ditch the principle of free reproduction because some Americans will produce future net tax-consumers.)

Libertarians would better use their time working to shrink and repeal welfare-state programs than trying to save them from the stresses and strains they're bound to encounter. Despite hard cases in the world as we find it, the presumption should favor liberty for all, even newcomers. How can that not be the libertarian position?

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.

TGIF: What Should I Do on Election Day?

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. --H. L. Mencken

This column was prompted by a conversation I had with a few neighbors, whom I do not know, over the Nextdoor.com platform. I thank them for being unwitting grist for my mill. Of course, the names are withheld to protect the innocent.

A woman was upset about something the state government had done. She took to social media to say that this shows that we all need to vote. Always up to a challenge, I decided to weigh in. I asked what good would her plea do considering that one vote almost never decides an election. The chance of any given voter making a difference is virtually nil. How many tied elections have you heard about? In my longish lifetime, no election would have turned out differently had I acted other than I did. Not one.

Did the Nextdoor.com participants not think about the arithmetic? Why agonize over the "choice" they will face on election day? Why lose a wink of sleep?

You might think that since the woman was addressing an audience larger than one, she might respond that this is about more than one vote. I don't think that works because her audience was too small to make a difference, even assuming everyone she reached votes the way she wants them to -- which is unlikely. 

That aside, you'd have thought I had insulted the participants' religion -- which in a way I did. Democracy is a religion.

My neighbors' responses were predictable. What if everyone felt the same way as you? they asked. One person said that if everyone agreed with me, "nothing would get done." I might have responded, "If I thought everyone was going to stay home, then I might vote if a worthy person were on the ballot. (Not likely.) My candidate would win 1-0. Whoopee! Or: considering what governments do to us, getting nothing done would be a feature, not a bug.

Instead, I asked them: why is voting the only matter about which you ask, "What if everyone thought that way?" The world would be in a sad state if everyone had done what any given person had done over the years. Does an aspiring doctor, lawyer, or plumber ask, "What if everyone chooses what I've chosen"? It's a paralyzing question.

How is the question even relevant? We're not doing philosophy here. It's a practical question. No matter what I do on election day, everyone else is going to do what he or she is going to do. They won't consult me. I guarantee it. So the outcome is going to be the same no matter what I do. In that case, why not do something that makes a difference, like play with the kids, have a conversation, read an article, watch a movie, donate blood, or make some money? In those cases, the means will almost certainly produce the end sought. That's not the case with voting.

Since my neighbors didn't want to face the math, I found little interest in the related point that they had no incentive to become truly informed voters. But this is like ignoring the 800-pound gorilla over there in the corner. One person thought it was enough to get the candidates' position papers and to look at Ballotpedia.com. I said that was hardly adequate. Everything that governments do affects the economy, which means us and our everyday lives. Wouldn't voters need to study economics before properly judging the candidates? I posed a thought experiment: candidate A favors the minimum wage. Candidate B opposes it. Other things equal, whom do you choose and why? No one answered. Someone said that's not what matters.

In fairness, I should concede that people have reasons to vote other than to influence the result. People vote because they see it as a sign of good citizenship, even if few people observe it. I suppose people vote simply to express support for a candidate or cause. It's like applauding at a major league baseball game. Your joining in (or not) doesn't make a difference. Related to this is the sense that voting is a sort of chipping in on behalf of someone you like. For these people, the point about not individually affecting the outcome won't apply. Voting makes them feel good.

I submit that all of this confirms what Bryan Caplan says about why democracies consistently choose socially destructive policies. It's not that special interests control the politicians, who then ignore the voters. That theory overlooks too much, as David Friedman shows in The Machinery of Freedom, chapter 38. (free PDF). He writes:

It seems more reasonable to suppose that there is no ruling class, that we are ruled, rather, by a myriad of quarreling gangs, constantly engaged in stealing from each other to the great impoverishment of their own members as well as the rest of us.

As Caplan argues, the public generally supports destructive policies that harm each member individually. Why? Caplan doesn't think the problem is rational ignorance that comes from the impotence of one vote. Rational ignorance ought to lead to pro-market choices about half the time and anti-market choices the other half. Instead we find systematically anti-market bias. Since you can't affect the election and acquiring information is expensive, you may as well vote according to your biases. It will feel good, and it's cheaper.

Caplan writes, "[C]ompetition impels politicians to heed what voters favor [protectionism, farm subsidies, etc.], not what is best for them." Remember, politicians want to be reelected or achieve a legacy.

I don't tell people what to do, so I don't tell them not to vote. I have no reason to think they'd listen to me anyway.

Keeping Perspective

To put things into perspective, be aware that people with advanced degrees from our best universities say things like, "Since no one, including criminals, has free will and hence is morally responsible for his or her actions, we ought to come up with a more appropriate criminal justice system. Therefore I propose that we hold a conference next spring to discuss this important matter and make recommendations for change. Be sure to save the date."

TGIF: Trump Loves NATO

Trump is either contentedly ignorant of the things he talks about or callously scornful of his adoring fans, whom he sees as rubes eager to swallow whatever he says. He could be both. Above all, Trump is a Trump supremacist.

Does he believe in NATO or not? (Believe in it? Hell, I've seen it!) Trump wants it both ways. He loves the response he gets at rallies when, populist-style, he seems to put NATO down as a freeloader on America. But he doesn't really put it down. He is a devout NATOist.

How can that be? Look at his record. He's called for expanding NATO to the Middle East! (He said it would allow the U.S. government to disengage, but how likely would that be?) During the Trump administration, North Macedonia joined the alliance. (Another country for potential American rescue, thank you very much.) And NATO members near Russia think Trump left the alliance stronger than it was before he took office. Yes, once or twice he threatened to pull the U.S. government out, but that's like the guy who starts to walk out of a car showroom in a bluff to get undercoating and rustproofing included in the price of the car.

So let's not play games. Trump loves NATO. It enables him to be a big cheese on the world stage. His fans say we should take him seriously, not literally. What does that mean? Trump is a shameless snake oil salesman. (That doesn't mean I think the alternative is better.)

Take the latest brouhaha. Trump has upset the usual suspects by saying that if a NATO member government were "delinquent" in paying "its bills," "I" -- he personally? -- would not protect it from an attack by, say, Russia. He even said he would "encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want." He's rather casual about other people's lives.

The first thing to notice is that he would protect members that had paid what he calls their "bills." He believes in NATO's mutual defense commitment. QED.

Under Trump (like any other president), Americans could be forced to fight for and/or materially assist other NATO governments that came into conflict with non-NATO countries. That's the point of NATO! An attack on one is an attack on all. The collective defense commitment under Article 5 -- which has been invoked only once, by the U.S. government after 9/11 -- provides wiggle room with the phrase "such action as [each member government] deems necessary," but still it expresses an intention for mutual defense. And, most importantly, the U.S. government's nuclear arsenal is in the background.

The next thing to understand is that Trump's talk about bills and dues is balderdash. NATO members don't pay dues. What Trump must be confused about is the members' agreement to try to raise their military spending to at least 2 percent of their GDP. That money does not go to NATO; it's part of their government budgets. This agreement is understood as a guideline, not a commitment. Members have no deadline, so they can't be delinquent. According to the Washington Post, using NATO figures, 11 of the 31 members have met the guideline. (Iceland has no armed forces.)

How does Trump know that 2 percent is the magic number? He doesn't. How does he know that striving for 2 percent by raising taxes or cutting other spending wouldn't destabilize one country or another? He doesn't. But the issue gives him another chance to pretend that the United States is the aggrieved party internationally. NATO members are taking advantage of America.

That's been his shtik since he started running for president in 2015. No demagogue would get far by ranting that the United States has bullied other countries long enough and it's time to stop. No, his pitch is that the United States has been trampled on by others long enough. That's how a populist rallies support. The fact is that for decades in foreign affairs, the U.S. foreign-policy elite has called the shots and others have knuckled under or else. As President George H. W. Bush said in 1990, "What we say goes." This power has been waning recently: other people will take only so much pushing around, and other power centers rise up.

One reasonably winces at Trump's invitation to Russia, although Russia is unlikely to be interested in accepting it or even capable of doing so. We wince because when a government, any government, crosses borders, innocent people die. It's not something even to joke about.

To point out Trump's buffoonery, however, is not to defend NATO. Decades ago, libertarians started calling for the U.S. government to leave the alliance and the others. That was during the Cold War. It was motivated by, among other things, an understanding that what looks like defense to you might look like aggressiveness to him. Glancing back and pronouncing NATO a success because World War III did not happen might be a post hoc ergo proper hoc fallacy (after this, therefore because of this). We don't know what would have happened had NATO not existed or if it did, the U.S. government had not participated, especially if free entrepreneurship in security had been allowed to flourish. Maybe we were just lucky over 40-some years, especially concerning nuclear war, which would have ended the world.

Moreover, by what right does the U.S. government commit American individuals to fight or otherwise assist in another government's war? It is not an answer to say: "That's what governments do." That begs the question regarding the state's authority. I suspect Trump wouldn't understand.

TGIF: Tariffs Tax Consumers

We seem to forget that a tariff is a tax. It is formally levied on importers, not on foreigners or things, but since it can usually be passed along, it ends up as an indirect tax on consumers.

The point of tariffs is to protect certain domestic businesses and their employees from formidable foreign competitors by raising import prices and reducing consumer choices. Higher prices! Less choice! Raising import prices gives domestic businesses room to raise their prices -- that's the point. Why have a tariff otherwise? (Tariffs intended to raise revenue rather than protect domestic companies have been imposed in the past, but in those cases, the government wanted people to buy the imports or else no revenue would have been raised.)

To put it mildly, taxes are bad. They are the government's way of taking money from people by force -- stealing -- and preventing them from spending it on their own purposes, activities that would have benefited others through production and trade. In a free society individuals are supposed to be at liberty to set and pursue their own goals. A society in which the government preempts individuals' goals is not fully free.

Even if under some market circumstances importers and foreign exporters have to pay some of a tariff, it's still an indirect tax on other Americans. Diverting money from importers and exporters to the government leaves them fewer dollars to spend or invest here. That's an unseen loss. Was Trump, who promises new anti-China and universal tariffs, daydreaming when he attended the Wharton School all those years ago? What's Biden's excuse? He's left most of Trump's 2017-2020 tariffs in place.

Advocates of tariffs think the taxes will protect American businesses and jobs. But as Milton Friedman liked to remind us, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Even if some jobs are preserved or even restored, it comes at a high price. And, as the radical liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat would say, the price is imposed on a large unseen group of people. That includes people who can least afford it. That's not fair.

Because those forced to foot the bill are not readily identifiable, the overall cost of the tariffs is also unseen and hence unappreciated. Most of us have no sense of the damage the protectionists have done. One study estimated that a single round of Trump anti-China tariffs cost the "typical household" $831 a year. Even when some jobs are saved, the price per job is stupendously expensive. As Donald Boudreaux and Phil Gramm wrote in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), Trump's tariffs to "close the 'washing-machine gap' ... cost $815,000 per job saved, and ... his steel tariffs ... cost ... more than $900,00 per job saved." Think of the opportunities forgone! Think of the opportunities forgone! And remember, for semi-finished goods, some American companies' output is other American companies' input -- meaning higher production costs than foreign companies face. (See "Who Really Pays the Tariffs? U.S. Firms and Consumers, Through Higher Prices.")

Some people will argue that America's astounding economic success in the 19th century is attributable to protective tariffs. The land of the theoretically free certainly had outrageous tariffs from the start. But beware of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (after this, therefore because of this). America had something else besides tariffs: largely free enterprise and low taxes inside a large free-trade zone. That's a much better explanation; it has a solid theory behind it. (See Donald Boudreaux's "Tariffs and Freedom.") Slavery was the worst departure from classical liberal, or libertarian, principles, but there were other, though less monstrous departures. The tariff was one of them.

Slavery and the tariff had something in common. Both prevented people from freely doing what would do the most good for themselves and others. Through private property, free exchange, and the price system, unmolested markets tend to channel workers' efforts and scarce resources to the activities that best accord with consumers' and hence entrepreneurs' most intense demands. Enslaved people, forcibly and cruelly barred from free labor markets, were forbidden to choose what they would have anticipated as their most rewarding work. That was one way in which slaves suffered, but the prohibition also made almost everyone else poorer than they would have been. How so? As Adam Smith showed in 1776, specialization through the division of labor makes us richer. The bigger the market, the better.

We got rid of slavery, thank goodness. When will we finally get rid of that other mark of tyranny: the tariff and other forms of protectionism? And when will we finally stop taking protectionist demagogues seriously?