Bryan Caplan and Me

 I sat down recently for a chat with my old friend Bryan Caplan.

TGIF: Free the Housing Market!

Economist Bryan Caplan has done it again. His latest graphic nonfiction book is Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, illustrated by Ady Branzei and published by the Cato Institute. (His first was Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration.)

Caplan's target is a worthy one: zoning and other (anti-)housing regulations, which damage many people in various ways, some that will surprise you. While he could have written a conventional book, it almost certainly would have been dreadfully dull and accessible to only a few academics and policy wonks. That is no reflection on Caplan, an excellent writer. It's in the nature of the subject. I probably don't need to persuade many people of that statement.

So what's the problem? All state and local governments suppress the supply of houses and apartments throughout the country—and the problem has gotten worse for most of the country. Let's be clear: many more dwellings of all types, including high-rise apartments, would exist and be much cheaper were it not for government prohibitions, requirements, and other cost-boosting impediments.

The housing shortage, then, is not caused by greedy construction executives trying to squeeze buyers and renters into poverty or by immigrants. It's caused by do-gooder politicians and bureaucrats along with members of the public who just don't get it. Construction companies would love to build, sell, and, rent more units, which would drive down the price. Governments won't let them. That's criminal.

Basic economics teaches that market prices result from supply and demand. If government restricts the supply of something people want, whether or not by design, prices will rise. For housing, this is most aggravated in the most desirable parts of the country, where the demand for homes is high because of the many amenities, including high-paying jobs. In a free market, high prices beckon new competitors and increase supply, thereby lowering prices. It's a beautiful process when allowed to work.

Few things are more certain than the relationship between supply and demand on the one hand and price on the other. Yet many people don't get it.

According to Caplan, "Americans spend about 20% of their budget on housing." If builders were free to build, the average price of housing would fall to half of what it is today, he writes. This would raise living standards appreciably for nearly everyone. The effect on lower-income people would be stunning. Many aspects of life would dramatically improve: "the labor market, poverty, social mobility, family formation, long commutes, the environment, and the American dream." (See the book for details.)

The benefits would be so immense that Caplan calls housing deregulation a "panacea": so many problems would be alleviated. This includes not just obvious ones, such as the barrier to job mobility. Under current conditions the higher wage in the big coastal cities is not enough to offset the exorbitant price of houses and apartments. Why would a person relocate if he wouldn't be able to afford a home near his workplace? But it's not only that frustrated person who loses. Locations with higher pay are that way because worker productivity is higher. If regulation locks people out of high-productivity locations, everyone loses because fewer goods will be produced.

Housing deregulation would also relieve problems less obviously connected to housing. For example, with freedom the number of construction jobs would explode all over the country. That would primarily benefit young men without college diplomas, who now have a tough time getting good-paying jobs. Such unemployment or underemployment creates all kinds of problems. Caplan supplies more examples to justify his use of the descriptor panacea.

So who's against housing deregulation? For one, bureaucrats corrupted by the social-engineering mentality. They think they know better than market participants how cities and suburbs ought to look. Many regular people also oppose new housing developments. We usually think that the NIMBY crowd is trying to protect the value of their houses. However, Caplan doesn't believe that narrow economic interest is the best answer. For one thing, renters tend to oppose development too. As he puts it, "Political scientists have long known that objective self-interest poorly predicts voting. Self-interest poorly predicts partisanship. Self-interest poorly predicts issue views."

Then why do so many people oppose housing deregulation? Caplan has three explanations: economic ignorance, innumeracy, and status-quo bias. This adds up to an attitude that minimizes or overlooks the benefits of more housing and exaggerates the downside. Caplan presents reasons why housing-deregulation foes ought to change their mind: namely, they have much to gain that they never thought. For instance, cheaper housing would mean that many people's grown children could move out of their basements, start families, and afford housing close by. Deregulation would also mean that people could enjoy windfalls from the new freedom to subdivide their single-family-home lots for multifamily dwellings. How many people would rank those things over preserving the status quo?

This does not mean new building would have no downside, such as parking problems and road congestion. Caplan responds that these problems can and should be addressed in ways other than suppressing the supply of housing. What other ways? By letting the price system work. Just as there is no such thing as a free lunch, there's no such thing as truly free roads and parking. Congestion and aggravation are costs. Peak market pricing is a better answer than suppressing housing supply. Caplan discusses targeted "keyhole policies" that might be politically necessary to win adherents to the cause of house-building freedom.

In sum, he shows why people who embrace different approaches to social questions—utilitarians, egalitarians, cost-benefit trackers, and libertarians—can unite over housing deregulation.

Caplan is onto something. He demonstrates—graphically—that freedom really works.

 

TGIF: "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us"

The famous line "We have met the enemy and he is us" is from Walt Kelly's comic strip, Pogo. Kelly adapted the line from a U.S. naval commandant who, during the War of 1812 against Great Britain, reported to his superior, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” Kelly did the parody for the first Earth Day in 1970, a pro-state, antimarket, antihuman occasion.

More constructively, we can apply Kelly's slogan to a bigger matter, namely, who's to blame for the bad policies that representative democracy turns out? Is the culprit an elite group of politicians, bureaucrats, and Big Business/Big Labor cronies, that is, a ruling class that conspires against the public interest? Or is the culprit " us," or, more precisely, the voters?

Most libertarians, like most progressives, would reply "ruling class," although David D. Friedman, a leading libertarian free-market anarchist, has been a major exception. (See The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to Radical Capitalism, 3rd ed., ch. 38, free online.) So too is economist and anarcho-capitalist Bryan Caplan.

Two important libertarian thinkers, Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) and Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), also dissented from the common view that democracy is routinely hijacked. "One striking feature of the Bastiat-Mises view," Caplan writes, "is that politicians are actually tightly constrained by public opinion. On their account, democratic competition keeps elected officials in line; if they deviate from majority preferences, they lose elections and their jobs."

In his classic work The Law, Bastiat, the fantastic French classical-liberal political-economic essayist, pointed out that in a democracy with universal suffrage, the main potential threat to liberty and property would come not from a ruling elite but from the voters, who previously had no voice in the government. If voters know nothing about economics and are antimarket to boot, watch out! They will want the politicians to interfere with market relations, not realizing that intervention is harmful because it has significant opportunity costs: all the good things that would have been produced had the government not engaged in "legal plunder." The benefits of free markets are counterintuitive, and understanding requires knowledge, which the voters lack. So they favor import restrictions, business and farm subsidies, regulations, heavy spending, and other apparently free benefits.

Since the politicians want to be elected and reelected, they will cater to the voters' preferences, even if the politicians know that those preferences are harmful. Democracy supplies poison because voters demand poison. The voters' will is not substantially throttled by special interests.

Bastiat wrote:

Up to now, legal plunder has been exercised by the minority over the majority as can be seen in those nations in which the right to pass laws is concentrated in just a few hands. However, it has now become universal and equilibrium is being sought in universal plunder. Instead of the injustice existing in society being rooted out, it has become generalized.

In another place (Selected Essays on Political Economy, chap. 9), he wrote that "public opinion, whether enlightened or misguided, is nonetheless mistress of the world."

And again (Economic Harmonies, chap. 4): “Political power, the law-making ability, the enforcement of the law, have all passed, virtually, if not yet completely in fact, into the hands of the people, along with universal suffrage.”

H. L. Mencken, that keen observer of America in the first half of the 20th century, might have read Bastiat: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

Caplan confirms Bastiat's view. In various writings he explains that while most social scientists, including public-choice economists, believe that special interests do thwart the voters, it is untrue. 

The "point is not that no unpopular policies exist," Caplan and Edward Stringham write after scouring the data (citation below). "But bona fide examples are hard to come by, and quantitatively significant ones are scarcer still." Time delays and "frictions" may put the politicians and voters out of sync—but only temporarily.

Voters can afford to be, in Caplan's words, "rationally irrational." In any election, each person can costlessly vote according to his antimarket biases since no single vote is decisive and the total cost of a candidate's bad policies will be shared by all.  (See The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies and the articles linked below.)

Caplan points out that Ludwig von Mises took a position similar to Bastiat's. In Theory and History, Mises wrote:

A statesman can succeed only insofar as his plans are adjusted to the climate of opinion of his time, that is to the ideas that have got hold of his fellows’ minds. He can become a leader only if he is prepared to guide people along the paths they want to walk and toward the goal they want to attain. A statesman who antagonizes public opinion is doomed to failure… [T]he politician must give the people what they wish to get, very much as a businessman must supply the customers with the things they wish to acquire.

I found that quote, like the Bastiat quotes above, in the first of two Caplan blog posts: Mises and Bastiat on How Democracy Goes Wrong, Part I, and Part II. (For more, see Caplan and Edward Stringham's "Mises, Bastiat, Public Opinion, and Public Choice.")

We might resist the claim that the people, not a ruling class, are to blame. But if we have a ruling class, it must be damned incompetent. The United States has the most progressive income tax in the West. The bottom half of income taxpayers pays only a tiny fraction (2.3 percent) of the national government's revenue from the tax. The top 1 percent pays over 45 percent. Big businesses face myriad regulations, often with exemptions for small firms. New restrictions are proposed almost every day. Antitrust prosecution always looms for the successful. Businesses and farmers get subsidies and other favors, but most people support them as socially beneficial.

Moreover, privileges granted to one industry impose higher costs on others. Tariffs for U.S. steelmakers burden steel-using companies, making them less competitive in the global market. If this ruling class is so fragmented and ineffective, maybe the concept is so imprecise that it is misleading.

When well-connected interests (who include not only business people) influence policy, Caplan writes, it's at the margin and, if anything, waters down what the majority wants. Caplans notes that more-educated people tend to understand economics better than less-educated people. Without "elite" influence, tariffs and minimum wages might be more destructive than they are.

Well, if the state is not "the executive committee of the ruling class," as Marx claimed, what is it? It's a bazaar where candidates offer goodies to blocs of economically illiterate citizens. The currency is the vote. To gain power, politicians need to win a majority—repeatedly. Yes, the people are propagandized, but just as businesses fail when enough consumers exercise skepticism about a product, regardless of advertising, so voters can exercise skepticism about the politicians' claims. People are not robots, and they encounter competing sources of propaganda/information. The joint that connects official propaganda to popular opinion is, to say the least, loose. If people are gullible, who's to blame?

What's the bottom line? No one can triumph in a struggle without first identifying the adversary. If the adversary is a shady, manipulative, nearly omnipotent ruling class, that would require one strategy. But if the adversary is the public's economic illiteracy and, as Mises repeatedly put it, its failure to grasp its "rightly understood (i.e., long-run) interest" in the free market, that's another matter entirely. Since that is indeed the case, freedom advocates should act accordingly.

The battleground is human understanding and nothing else, not even institutions, Mises says. As he wrote in Human Action, using 1930s monetary policy as an example (emphasis added):

"Whatever the constitutional state of affairs may be, no government could embark upon 'raising the price of gold' if public opinion were opposed to such a manipulation. If, on the other hand, public opinion favors such a step, no legal technicalities could check it altogether or even delay it for a short time."

TGIF: Limited Government's Bait and Switch

In a fundamental respect, libertarian minarchism (minimal, or limited, government) and market anarchism (or anarcho-capitalism) have something important in common: neither can guarantee individual rights.

But there's a big difference: unlike market anarchism, minarchism appears to offer a guarantee, which allegedly makes it preferable to market anarchism. Actually, it's a false guarantee, a bait-and-switch. So it's not preferable to market anarchism, at least on those grounds.

However, what market anarchism can do is show how everyday incentives will tend to protect liberty (and already do now). Minarchism can't credibly say the same thing because constitutionally limited representative democracy is riddled with well-known perverse political incentives. That makes market anarchism the better bet.

It's instructive to watch the recent Soho Forum debate on the proposition "Anarcho-capitalism would definitely be a complete disaster for humanity." Yaron Brook, chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, took the affirmative, and Bryan Caplan, libertarian professor of economics at George Mason University, took the negative. I think Caplan demolished Brook's case, which isn't exclusive to Ayn Rand Objectivists. This was a debate between two people starting from similar premises in favor of individual freedom, rational self-interest, and competition.

While what follows may not convince anyone to advocate market anarchism, it should eliminate a big argument against it.

Most limited-government advocates think that only a monopoly government can produce the objective law and fair and peaceful adjudication/enforcement that human beings need to flourish. The problem, as indicated, is that minarchism is all talk. It can't deliver.

Remember the old joke in which a tourist asks a grumpy local how to get somewhere? The local responds, "You can't get there from here." That's the problem. Brook's theory of constitutionally limited government promises to get us to a place we cannot go because it doesn't exist. Why not? As Dr. Seuss might say, because it's people all the way down. Limited-government advocates ignore this obvious fact.

Contrary to its fans, limited government is conceptually impossible. It, not anarchism, is a "floating abstraction." If this standard argument for limited government disappears, what's left?

Any advocate of liberty who knows even a little U.S. political history should see the problem for minarchism. In freedom-loving quarters, the American constitutional system wins kudos  -- the obvious serious contradictions such as slavery excepted. But what about the government's horrendous expansion since 1789? Isn't that a hint that something did not quite work?

Some Americans began complaining about the bigness of the national government at the turn of the 19th century! And let's not forget that the first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, denied the national quasi-government the power to tax and regulate trade. Within a few years, that changed. Wasn't that a bad omen?

Anarcho-libertarian abolitionist and businessman Lysander Spooner's 1870 "The Constitution of No Authority" concluded, "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.”

The Constitution has not guaranteed freedom. Brook himself called today's U.S. government a "gang." So what could have been different, minarchists? A nation full of perfect Objectivists? Good luck with that.

The Soho Forum debate, which I highly recommend, could have been over early when Caplan identified the impossible guarantee. Brook responded that his ideal government would "strive" to make that guarantee. Caplan pointed out that a striven-for guarantee is not a guarantee.

Undeterred, Brook resorted to the catechism "A proper government is the means by which we place retaliatory use of force under objective control and objectively defined laws ... for the purpose of protecting rights."

Caplan called this mere "tautological." You can define the term proper government as an objective and reliable rights-protector. But in the real world, how do you get there from anywhere? It sounds Platonic. It's more like a version of the ontological argument.

Brook also said that the banishment of force from society "doesn't just happen. That's not something you negotiate. That is just something that is." (My emphasis.)

"Just is"? What does that mean? How does it materialize -- immaculate conception? And how would it be maintained? Is the state an infallible Objectivist Mr. Spock? Or Gort, the robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still? (The original movie costarred Patricia Neal, who ironically also played heroine Dominique Francon in the film version of Rand's The Fountainhead.)

Remember, it's people all the way down -- from inception of the government to maintenance. People are fallible. They disagree. They change their minds. They ask for free stuff from politicians. Some will even be corrupt and dishonest when they run for office. And, as Public Choice shows, the ones in government are prone to bias in favor of their careers. No one can reasonably hope to keep a government limited, nonaggressive, and efficient -- a square circle indeed. Is a New Man required? (See my take on someone who long grappled with this question, Anthony de Jasy.)

Pro-market economist Harold Demsetz warned against the "Nirvana fallacy": positing an unachievable "ideal" as an alternative to anything that can be achieved. That's what we have here in limited government. If it isn't on the actual menu, we must determine the best actual alternative.

Caplan repeatedly challenged Brook with this basic objection, but Brook bobbed and weaved. (See the exchange starting here.) He seems not to have read anything but Rand's 1960s essay on the need for government, predicting routine widespread violence under market anarchism. But she was answered many times. Brook casually dismissed the voluminous market-anarchist historical, economic, and ethical scholarship as a mere intellectual exercise.

It was good to hear that Book supports free immigration. Among its many virtues, it would be a potential escape from tyranny. But why shouldn't people be free to "migrate" from one rights-protecting institution to another without changing location? Brook says a location (undefined) must have one law. But Western Europe doesn't have one law. Yet he agreed with Caplan that, unlike in previous eras, a war between, say, France and Germany or Norway and Sweden is unthinkable and will very likely remain so.

Caplan noted that what keeps the big governments in those countries from fighting (which would be made possible by taxation and conscription) is people's general expectation of peaceful dispute resolution. That would apply even more to accountable, reputable, and competitive businesses selling security to free customers.

War isn't impossible in Western Europe and elsewhere, just unlikely in our more pacific era. (See Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.) Yes, Russia and Ukraine are at war. But how many of the almost 200 countries in our anarchist world without a super-government would rather fight costly wars even for the winner than settle disputes diplomatically? (For an analogy, think of what two auto insurance companies routinely do when each has a client in a conflict. The companies already have contracts to deal with each other peacefully. They couldn't afford a Randian war of all against all.)

Well, why does market anarchism, unlike minarchism, inspire reasonable confidence about the chances of protecting liberty? That's a topic for another day, but suffice it to say that, as Caplan argues, rational self-interest, free competition, the need for a good reputation, and today's general expectation of peaceful conflict resolution provide our best chance. This doesn't mean pushing the "anarchist button," which doesn't exist anyway. It means showing people that major alternatives to the state already exist, including arbitration and private security firms.

It is said that freedom isn't free. Protection of freedom certainly isn't free. But we need not be forced to pay monopoly prices for inferior services and even rights violations in order to enjoy our freedom.

More reading

Roderick Long, "Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism."
Sheldon Richman, "The Constitution of Anarchy," in America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited.
David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism, 3d ed.

TGIF: Immigration and Liberty

Forbidding freedom of movement to aspiring migrants strikes at the liberty not only of those individuals but also of citizens and legal residents of the United States. That's the way it is with immigration. Indeed, that's the way it is with freedom. The government can't violate the freedom of some peaceful people without also violating the freedom of others.

Ilya Somin, who teaches law at George Mason University and is a constitutional scholar with the Cato Institute, makes this point in "Three Constitutional Issues Libertarians Should Make Their Own." (The other two issues his title refers to are zoning and racial profiling.) Somin also wrote the book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.

"Immigration restrictions," he writes, "massively restrict liberty and degrade human welfare. By barring entry to hundreds of thousands of people who seek freedom and opportunity in the United States, the federal government massively restricts the liberty of would‐​be immigrants and American citizens alike."

The harm to aspiring migrants is obvious. People seeking to escape crushing poverty and/or oppression are denied the freedom to move to a safer and more productive place. They are condemned to deprivation, misery, and pain at the hands of the government and gangs. (The U.S. war on drug makers and merchants in Latin America is the big reason for this.) By what right are they condemned? "Legal" immigration is more of a theoretical fiction than a real thing. Somin writes:

In theory, they can join the “line” and wait to enter legally. But for most, that line is either decades‐​long or nonexistent. And for the most part, these exclusions are based on arbitrary circumstances of parentage and place of birth, of a kind libertarians and others in the liberal political tradition consistently reject in other contexts.

He goes on: "Less widely appreciated, even by many libertarians, is the massive negative effect of immigration restrictions on the liberty of current American citizens." We don't usually think of immigration this way. (Political philosopher Chandran Kukathas does.) But every person represents an American's opportunity for gains from trade, friendship, and more intimate relationships, all the things that promote flourishing. Immigration controls control Americans too. As Somin writes:

Immigration restrictions bar millions of Americans from engaging in economic and social transactions with potential immigrants. It closes off Americans from hiring immigrant workers, getting jobs at businesses founded by immigrants (who establish such enterprises at higher rates than native-born citizens), renting property to immigrants, and benefiting from scientific and economic innovations to which immigrants also contribute at higher rates than natives.

Those who lament the government-made mess at the border have never understood that constructive responses to the new potential employees, buyers, tenants, etc. would privately and spontaneously arise if border crossing was legal.

Somin adds that "No other current U.S. government policy restricts liberty more than immigration exclusion does—and that’s true even if we focus solely on the liberty of native‐​born citizens, especially economic freedoms."

The prevention of gains from trade has profound and negative consequences for the production of wealth. Somin: "Economists estimate that free migration throughout the world would double global domestic product. That’s an enormous chunk of lost wealth for immigrants and native‐​born citizens alike."

Think of the abundance of goods, the new things, and the low prices that we're all missing out on! (See Bryan Caplan's Open Borders for details.)

Somin also sees constitutional problems with the restrictions that he laments has been neglected by even most libertarian legal scholars (including himself), not to mention others, such as conservatives, who claim to be staunch constitutionalists. "It’s far from clear," he writes, "that the original meaning of the Constitution even gives the federal government a general power to restrict immigration in the first place."

Nothing in the text specifically grants Congress or the president such authority, and leading Founding Fathers—including James Madison—argued that no such power existed. It took more than a century for the Supreme Court to rule—in the 1889 Chinese Exclusion Case—that the federal government does in fact have this unenumerated power. And that decision is based on highly dubious reasoning and tinged with racism.

Somin does not foresee an imminent overturning of the ruling, but he would like to see assaults on "extensions of that ruling that have largely immunized immigration restrictions from constitutional constraints that apply to virtually every type of government policy." For example:

Immigration detention and deportation proceed with far weaker due process protections than other severe deprivations of liberty. Due process is so lacking in the system that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies have detained and sometimes even deported thousands of American citizens before they figured out their error. Such detention with little or no due process would not be tolerated elsewhere.

But do "illegal" immigrants have rights supposedly protected by the Constitution? Somin replies: "A few constitutional rights are explicitly confined to U.S. citizens. But the vast majority are phrased as general constraints on government power, and protect citizens and noncitizens alike." Thus, "[t]he exemption of immigration restrictions from many normal constitutional constraints on government power has no basis in the text or original meaning of the Constitution."

So he wants an end to the many double standards. That "would curtail many of the worst abuses of the current migration regime, and perhaps set the stage for further progress. Even incremental improvement could make the difference between freedom and oppression for many thousands of people."

Hear, hear!

TGIF: Immigration Foes, What's the Beef?

Bryan Caplan

If people are going to hate on immigrants, they should at least get their stories straight. Do immigrants take our jobs or do they sponge off us through welfare? Today, let's talk about jobs.

Recently I was listening to Spiked's Brendan O'Neill interview Batya Ugar-Sargon, the left/right-populist assistant editor at Newsweek, when I heard say: "The elites love low-wage slave labor imported by the cartels to work service industry jobs, that they would rather have cheap labor than have to pay more for it."

This is nutty working-class populism in its most uninhibited form. Ungar-Sargon would have us believe that people who risk life and limb thinking they're choosing to escape political-economic hellholes to achieve better lives for themselves and their families in America are just modern-day Kunta Kintes! They're not people; they're imports! That might come as news to them.

Ungar-Sargon is talking about both legal and so-called illegal immigrants. Interestingly, though, it seems to have escaped her notice that the only immigrants who could potentially be treated like slaves are those branded illegal by the U.S. government. They are vulnerable to abuse precisely because they have to keep themselves out of the clutches of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Legal immigrants can call the cops. Being put on ice has a different meaning these days.

A bit later in the interview she said,

Black Americans have paid a huge price for our essentially open border for the last 40 years. Over and over businesses would much rather hire illegal immigrants than hire black Americans, and so they've literally paid for up to 40 to 50 percent of wages just sacrificed on the altar of progressive pieties about importing people from failed socialist states. They're very angry at that.

That 40-to-50 percent claim astounded me because I've never heard anything like it before. Neither have the two experts I asked, guys who know the immigration-related statistics as well as anybody and better than most. In their view, Ungar-Sargon made it up. She did not tell O'Neill where she got the statistic, and -- shamefully -- he did not ask.

I wonder why Ungar-Sargon singled out black Americans. She claims to reject identity politics in favor of class politics. Is she pandering? Since biology provides no genetic basis for categorizing people by skin tone or other such features -- since the human species does not consist of three to five genetically distinct groups called "races" -- who does Ungar-Sargon or her anonymous source include in the category of "black Americans"? But I digress.

Ungar-Sargon sounds like Bernie Sanders, a strong contender for the least impressive person in American politics, who says he opposes open borders because "the Koch brothers" favor it. That may be a reason, but it's not a good one. What else does he oppose because a rich person favors it? Brushing teeth after meals?

Ungar-Sargon, Sanders, and the others in this camp have their own version of the alt-right's replacement theory, don't they? The "cartels," she tells us, want to bring "slave labor" to America to replace native workers simply to save money. They want the people's (mis)representatives to stop this at all costs. But this is nonsense. Immigrants, especially ones without government papers, do jobs that Americans think are beneath them, particularly when the government supports them.

Make no mistake about what this position says: natives have a superior, if not the only, claim to the opportunities available through voluntary exchange in America. "They take our jobs" is an assertion of a native-only property right in jobs that has no rational basis in morality or economics. It's an ugly "blood and soil" sentiment, which does not suit a free society. Not only that, it cruelly relegates people born elsewhere to lives of misery, poverty, and oppression -- needlessly so because immigration, like every consensual transaction, is win-win. So keeping immigrants out not only hurts them; it also hurts us! Immigrants not only consume; they also produce and even start businesses and hire people, natives included.

True, if an immigrant is hired in America, natives who hoped for that job will be disappointed. But that sort of "negative externality" is a feature of life, not of immigration. People lose jobs in the short run through innovations in technology and business organization, not to mention fickle consumers. Who would outlaw innovation or consumer freedom on that count? The fact is, as history demonstrates, people who are thus harmed will benefit after a brief adjustment to change -- if the government keeps out of the way.

But let's also understand what Ludwig von Mises meant when he wrote in Human Action, in the section he called "The Harmony of the 'Rightly Understood' Interests": "The fact that my fellow man wants to acquire shoes as I do, does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier." In other words, mass markets with their economies of scale and falling costs of production, provide everyone with an ever-greater abundance of affordable goods and services. It was, after all, the emergence of the market order that led to mass production for the first time in history.

What Mises was saying about consumption obviously applies to production too because it's the flip side of the coin. Producers hire workers. The availability of a larger labor force furnishes entrepreneurs with opportunities for new and better enterprises that could not have existed with a smaller workforce. Products and services that were beyond reach yesterday are available today. In a society unencumbered by government intervention (unlike the one we have), the increasing demand for jobs more or less creates its own supply.

As for wages, let's see what a bona fide expert says. George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan (with illustrations by Zach Weinersmith) addresses the matter in their graphic nonfiction work, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration." Opponents of free immigration should hold their tongues until they are prepared to answer Caplan's multidimensional case.

As for wages, Caplan writes:

Even economists who emphasize the negative effects of immigration on native wages report small -- and mixed -- effects. [George] Borjas and [Lawrence] Katz ... estimate that, in the long run, extra Mexican migration from 1980-2000 reduced U.S. native dropouts' wages by a grand total of 4.8%, and college graduates' wages by 0.5%. They also conclude, however, that Mexican immigration increased the wages of native high school graduates by 1.2% and those with some college by 0.7%.

And:

Immigration increased labor demand through two channels --- one obvious, the other subtle. The obvious: More immigrants means more potential customers. The subtle: Since migration increases foreigners' productivity [a very important point! -- SR], they have more resources to offer in the marketplace. As a rule, sellers profit from more and richer customers.

And:

How can native workers possibly profit when labor supply rises? Through specialization and trade. When the supply of low-skilled workers goes up, so does the demand for higher-skilled workers to manage them. When non-English-speaking immigrants increase the supply of cooks and dishwashers, this increases the demand for English-speaking waiters.

"But," Caplan's stick-figure interlocutor asks, "won't all these low-skilled immigrants depress our country's average standard of living?"

Caplan replies: "Almost certainly. But there's no need to worry. Your fears rest on the dreaded ... ARITHMETIC FALLACY!" He illustrates the fallacy by asking us to imagine that a group of little kids enters a room full of NBA players. The average height of the group will shrink, of course, but has anyone actually shrunk? Of course not.

"The lesson: When the makeup of the population is changing, averages are deeply misleading. The average can easily fall, even though everyone is better off!" Understanding basic statistics is necessary simply to protect yourself from number-wielding fraudsters.

So, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bernie Sanders, Brendan O'Neill, et al., stop losing sleep over what will happen to native workers if we respect the universal natural right of everyone, regardless of birthplace, to seek a better life. Beyond the very short run, treedom benefits everyone. To appreciate this point, economist Caplan notes that if people worldwide were free to move to where they would be most productive, world output  "could easily double." He writes, "estimated gains range from 50 to 150% of gross world product." In other words, "economically, open borders is like getting an extra ... seventy-five Manhattans a year."

Respecting everyone's liberty doesn't cost. It pays -- big time!

TGIF: Heartless Immigration Restrictions Need Replacing

Some elements of the right-wing are spreading the fear that Democrats are engineering a take-over of America by replacing white voters with nonwhites through liberal immigration policies. It's come to be known as "the great replacement," and in its ugliest form, it is said to be a Jewish conspiracy. Remember the sickening chant at the 2017 right-wing Charlottesville rally: "Jews will not replace us"?

I wish this fear-mongering could be ignored, but since a few fanatics have committed violence apparently to prevent the "great replacement," it needs to be discussed.

Why would anyone lose even one wink over this alleged plot? For one thing, even if such a plan existed, the Democrats can't possibly know how future citizens will vote or even if they will vote. Why assume they will follow the Democrats' orders, as the right-winders expect? In recent years, some Republicans have done fairly well with Latino voters. As long as conservatives talk about the nonwhite population as though it were a group of obedient children rather than moral agents, they needn't wonder why they don't win more votes in those communities. Just a thought, but maybe people who are energetic and entrepreneurial enough to leave their impoverished homes for a shot at greater opportunity, despite the risks, ought to be wooed, not alienated by political activists who pay lip service to individual enterprise.

Regardless of whether some Democratic politicians and left-wing activists think they can carry out the alleged plot or whether their statements praising America's changing ethnic composition are merely quoted out of context, who cares? True freedom-lovers favor whatever ethnic composition results from the freely chosen actions of sovereign individuals -- both current and aspiring Americans. Freedom's champions also favor progressively shrinking government power so that no one -- regardless of ethnicity -- can impose his or her values on others. (Strictly speaking, one value should be imposed on others, the liberal value summed up by the phrase live and let live. In other words, aggressive physical force is illegitimate.)

It would be nice if someone prominent in American politics would say to the conspiracy theorists: "Who needs replacement conspiracy to explain the need for open borders? We already have a perfectly good reason to open the gates: immigrants not only help themselves by coming here, but they also improve our society and the whole world."

But don't hold your breath. Does a Democrat walk the land who favors unrestricted immigration? Please let me know.

On the contrary, some Democrats have their own replacement conspiracy theory about those who favor free (or at least freer) immigration. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the economically illiterate darling of the left, says he opposes open borders because "the Koch brothers," by which he means anyone who favors freedom of movement (that is, libertarians), want cheap labor to replace more expensive American labor. It never occurs to politicians like Sanders that open-borders advocates might just favor individual liberty. Isn't it interesting how much the right and left have in common?

Tucker Carlson leads the right-wing media in "exposing" the great plot to create a new electorate through immigration. His trope is revealing: "Look, if this was happening in your house, your parents adopted a bunch of new siblings and gave them brand-new bikes, you would say to your siblings, 'You know, I think we're being replaced by kids our parents love more.'"

It doesn't get more ridiculous than that. First of all, would you say that? Second, in what respect do new arrivals get better "bikes" than those who were born here? Third, why does the government give anyone "bikes"?

The most revealing bit is Carlson's analogizing the country to a family with the government as parents. It seems that the godfather of American conservatism isn't Edmund Burke, but Sir Robert Filmer. (John Locke's liberalism was a response to the monarchist Filmer.) According to the Encyclopedia Britannica,

Filmer believed that the state was a family, that the first king was a father, and that submission to patriarchal authority was the key to political obligation. Making a strained interpretation of scripture, typical of his time but ridiculed by Locke, he pronounced that Adam was the first king and that Charles I ruled in England as Adam’s eldest heir. Filmer represented that patriarchal social structure which characterized Europe until the Industrial Revolution.

So let's get serious. Drawing on contemporary data, history, and sound social theory, George Mason University Professor Bryan Caplan shows that every one of the common fears about free immigration --  lower wages, a bigger welfare state, radical cultural change, authoritarianism, etc. -- are either concocted wholesale or outrageously exaggerated. So stop worrying! (See this interview with Caplan and check out his graphic nonfiction book, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration.)

By the way, enacting immigration controls in the name of staving off authoritarianism is a cruel joke because controls on immigration necessarily are controls on whomever the state chooses to define as a citizen.

Instead of favoring heartless restrictions on people's freedom to move, why don't people who worry about immigration instead call for limits on government power so that fewer areas of life are controlled by politicians beholden to blocs of voters? Conservatives must have their own sort of welfare state in mind.

TGIF: VP Tells Guatemalans to Stay in Their Place

Shame on Vice President Kamala Harris.

On her recent trip to Guatemala she said, "I want to be clear to folks in the region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come. I believe if you come to our border, you will be turned back.”

This is what passes for sensitivity to human rights in the post-Trump era. It's the same attitude that marked not only the Trump years but also the pre-Trump era under Barack Obama, the deporter-in-chief, and Joe Biden.

Notice Harris mentioned the "dangerous trek" without acknowledging that the U.S government is a big reason for the danger. If immigrants were welcome, they would have safe ways to travel north to the United States with their children. It's typical of government officials to create a peril and then pose as humanitarians in offering advice about safety.

What's the Biden-Harris solution to the problems that Guatemalans are trying to escape from by migrating to America? Harris promised U.S. help in reforming the government there. "The goal of our work is to help Guatemalans find hope at home,” she said. Her administration has about as much chance of doing that as it has to help Americans find hope at home.

The U.S. government would have a chance to improve conditions in Guatemala and other places, but that would require doing something it has no desire to do, namely, slash its power dramatically. It could start by permitting unconditional free trade and by ending the drug war, which has ravaged Guatemala and Latin America even worse than it has the United States. Do you think Biden-Harris would entertain that truly progressive program? Me neither.

But even if that were to happen and Guatemalans became much freer and safer, many might still want to come to the United States. Yet that would be none of the U.S. government's business. Until someone has been proved to have violated someone else's rights, they should be left unmolested by the state. That's not just a right of Americans; it's a right of all persons. The right to move is a natural individual right that in itself does no harm to others as physical force does. Accepting a job that an American wanted or affecting the culture doesn't count as harm. We benefit from the countless people who have changed the culture over years and from the immigrants who have started businesses, invented products, and achieved great productivity. That some people fear change should not be allowed tilt government policy against immigrants.

All the fear-mongering about free immigration is nothing more than that: baseless attempts to scare Americans essentially into shutting the borders. To see this, one need only consult the heroic work of Bryan Caplan of George Mason University, who demolishes every bogey about open borders in blog posts, journal articles, and graphic nonfiction. Caplan shows that fear of immigrants--about wages, culture, politics, and more--is simply irrational. He also points out how much free movement would increase the wealth of the world, as people in low-productivity countries moved to high-productivity countries like the Unites States. He and others have emphasized that the best global antipoverty program would be open borders.

And as I pointed out recently, a new book emphasizes that restrictions on immigrants and would-be immigrants necessarily constitute restrictions on Americans. Chandran Kukathas writes in Immigration and Freedom: "It is difficult to control outsiders without also controlling insiders, since insiders are all too ready and willing to hire, teach, rent to, trade with, marry, and generally associate with outsiders. Moreover, insiders and outsiders are not readily distinguishable unless there are instruments of control in place to identify one or the other."

Telling Guatemalans or anyone else "Do not come" is no different from telling them to stay in the place where they belong. The long-suffering victims of tyranny, corruption, and government planning are properly resentful of American officials who give them such a condescending admonition.