Like most libertarians, The Brownstone Institute's Jeff Tucker has long been a proponent of open borders. So have I. But we both feel that events of the past few years require a more thoughtful response than the standard anti-state-border rhetoric. Including, perhaps, admissions that we've been wrong all along.
Have we?
Jeff and I explore some of the complexities of the current crisis along the southern border of the US, the Texas standoff, and immigration more generally. What's happening at the border goes well beyond what we generally think of as "immigration", and Jeff and I talk about what's behind that, and the ways in which immigrants are being used to further political agendas and disrupt the democratic process. We also talk about ways in which the post-9-11 tightening of immigration restrictions have exacerbated the problem.
I talk a little about my experience living in Japan – a country with strict immigration controls, and a strong, cohesive culture that I don't think many Americans can relate to. And as much as government management of immigration has created problems and allowed for immigration to be weaponized, it's not entirely clear that a stateless society would have the ability to produce or protect cultural cohesion in this way. (Although, to be fair, in most of the world, the state fails at this too.)
SPOILER: We don't come away with any answers. But we both agree that these are questions that need to be wrestled with, and we will continue to wrestle.
Related: My recent conversation with Bob Murphy has some insights on the stateless society that are relevant to this conversation.
Like most libertarians, The Brownstone Institute's Jeff Tucker has long been a proponent of open borders. So have I. But we both feel that events of the past few years require a more thoughtful response than the standard anti-state-border rhetoric. Including, perhaps, admissions that we've been wrong all along.
Have we?
Jeff and I explore some of the complexities of the current crisis along the southern border of the US, the Texas standoff, and immigration more generally. What's happening at the border goes well beyond what we generally think of as "immigration", and Jeff and I talk about what's behind that, and the ways in which immigrants are being used to further political agendas and disrupt the democratic process. We also talk about ways in which the post-9-11 tightening of immigration restrictions have exacerbated the problem.
I talk a little about my experience living in Japan – a country with strict immigration controls, and a strong, cohesive culture that I don't think many Americans can relate to. And as much as government management of immigration has created problems and allowed for immigration to be weaponized, it's not entirely clear that a stateless society would have the ability to produce or protect cultural cohesion in this way. (Although, to be fair, in most of the world, the state fails at this too.)
SPOILER: We don't come away with any answers. But we both agree that these are questions that need to be wrestled with, and we will continue to wrestle.
Related: My recent conversation with Bob Murphy has some insights on the stateless society that are relevant to this conversation.
Welcome to the podcast. That's all about solutions. If you're tired of complaining about tyranny and you want to take action to create a freer world, this is the place for you. Join us as we ask what then, must we do? All right, I am here today again with Jeffrey Tucker. Jeffrey is the president of the Brownstone Institute. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. I asked you to come on the show today to talk about immigration. I know you've been, like me, a long-time libertarian, advocate of individual rights, enemy of the state, all that. You've recently had a change of heart with regard to immigration. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Speaker 2:Sure, I think this time last year I was on John Stelzel's show on National Television, on Fox, passionately arguing for open borders. In fact, I think I've been for open borders since I was in college. My friend was running for the Texas State Legislature and he was libertarian. He came to me he said I can't possibly support open borders, I would simply never get elected. I said well, that means you're just selling out your principles for power and that's evil in my mind. So we actually had a breakup of our friendship over the issue.
Speaker 2:Just to be clear, and also I've written about the issue for a very long time it seemed to me that the closed borders was connected to protectionism, which was in turn related to xenophobia and racialist policies and the aspiration of the homogeneous state, which is a demographically, religiously, linguistically homogeneous state, which is a liberal, and so on. So I had it all worked out in my mind. I had it all figured out until recently. And then at some point how does it work? I think facts just sort of slammed down in your head to the point that you just can't. You can't dig your way out of it, and this wave of migration that we've seen over the last five years, and I'm not prepared yet to go back in time and understand how long I was wrong, but it's clear that over the last five years, what's happened is the immigration system is being used to manipulate political outcomes, and that is an extremely wicked way to use demographics against the people, and that is exactly what's going on.
Speaker 2:So, in other words, this is another way that the state is attacking us. In the same way, they tax us, inflate the money supply, regulate our businesses, give us stay home orders or whatever, they're also doing this as a way of destabilizing democracy and pillaging the public purse and demoralizing us in the process and dispossessing citizens of the country, the alleged owners of this system. I mean just by way of review. I mean, the idea of government and a free society is that the citizens control. There's some relationship there between the government and the people, that citizens have some impact on the laws under which they live. I mean that's sort of the idea.
Speaker 1:Do you actually believe that, though? I mean, do you really think that's how it operates?
Speaker 2:No, it's not how it operates, but that's the ideal I mean that was. The ideal is that it was hatched out during the Enlightenment, and I still believe. I mean in some broad sense that there's no government that could possibly be legitimate, no system of managing the commons let's get away from the term government the system of managing the commons could possibly be legitimate unless it has the consent of the governed. I mean, so there has to be some relationship there. This, I think, is what the Declaration of Independence says, and I believe in that.
Speaker 2:But when the government turns against the people, it has myriad ways of doing it, and I did not understand that manipulating demographics in this sort of shocking ways could be a part of that. But that's exactly what's going on and it's very cynical and once I saw it I couldn't unsee it. Basically, it's that if the government can identify a population of people that they can cause to migrate and manipulate those people for purposes of doing out of public benefits or for election outcomes, they might use those people as fodder in a political war against the people. And now one response to that is oh, that's ridiculous. You can't possibly say that every Syrian, algerian, zimbabwean, you know, venezuelan who pours across the border illegally is going to be a Biden supporter, and that's true.
Speaker 2:I cannot say that. But these people are very clever and they're dealing with a lot of averages, so it doesn't matter. All they need is a relative certainty that 51% of them are going to vote for their way, and there's no way to deny that. I mean just based on the empirical records here. So this is not disdainful towards minorities. It's not putting down people based on their foreignness or alienness. It's just a matter of alerting people to the fact that the ruling class that's currently managing the administrative state is making a very good bet that by flooding the country with as many immigrants as possible, they're going to be able to affect election outcomes which keep them permanently in power.
Speaker 1:And you could say this. You could make the same argument about those who support welfare policies making use of ghetto populations. There's a population that's now dependent on these policies that you've created. They're now your supporters. They're now going to keep voting for those policies. So what you're saying isn't even necessarily a statement about where you're from. It's more what are your incentives? What do you have incentives to keep supporting these policies? And so you're looking at this as the motivation for basically getting rid of immigration controls at the border. I mean, that's what it is You're saying. The motivation is really elections. It's getting voters. What about other things? I mean some of the things that we've seen in Europe too, like social destabilization. Do you think that's deliberate? Do you think that's something that people are trying to create here?
Speaker 2:Well, I think the answer to that is yes. I don't understand the European situation very well and let me say also this that most normal people are incapable of even conceiving of a deeply malicious aspiration for society, culture and politics. We don't understand the Joker. We watch the movie and we're intrigued by it. We think that is one weird guy, but we don't imagine that the Joker becomes the ruling class and puts together major organizations like the World Economic Forum with tentacles in every administrative state apparatus, and then the Joker-style theory is preached in all the universities and then broadcast out to the mainstream media, and then the administrative state works with tech companies to block people who disagree with the Joker. We can't even imagine that.
Speaker 2:It seems ridiculous. Yeah, it seems ridiculous, and yet I'm sorry to say that it seems like that's basically a good description of what's going on, and I think this is mostly coming about. My theory and anybody can disagree with me and tell me that it goes back to the war of the roses, I don't care, but my theory is that this attitude towards destroying the social order we have came about because of the rise of Boris Johnson in the UK, whose mandate was to implement Brexit, which destroyed, which was a direct attack on the idea of the European Union, forced European Union, the creation of a supernational government in Brussels to manage the whole of Europe. Originally it started as a good aspiration, but a restoration of late medieval styles of unity or whatever. But that's not like this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's also like we talk about accountability and relationship to the people. No accountability there. No, not even democratic process. The most undemocratic institution you can imagine.
Speaker 2:Right and it's really evil because they use a kind of a liberal idea of the European Commonwealth, which definitely existed and say at the end of the religious wars in the 16th and 17th century. And so they use that and invoke that idea to build a supernational state. That's illiberal. And so Boris Johnson comes to power in the UK and says, well, okay, I'm going to give you Brexit and take the England, scotland, wales and Ireland out of the European Union. And that seemed to be a reactionary move. And so there was an attempt to destroy that movement and, despite the people's multiple times voting for Brexit, it's like these people are reactionaries, they're dangerous and they were all smeared as racist and all the usual Romides. And that happened. At the same time.
Speaker 2:Trump came to power here and the rise of Trump in 2016 was, I think, led to a kind of there was an existential crisis for the ruling class and I don't need to qualify here that I'm not a fan of Trump. I mean I wrote a whole book against it. I've been railing against the guy since 2015. I mean I have all people. I mean I had the first English language article explaining that Trump's ideology if he has one is fascistic. But the point is that he was not supposed to be president, that Hillary Clinton was supposed to be president. So they looked at the outcome of that election, said democracy's broken, the people are rotten, everybody's an interactionist, yeah, and we have to get rid of democracy. So one of the strangest things about all this stuff is that you hear now people in major media and the blue state Spokesperson, pr or whatever, complaining that Trump is anti-democratic. That's just projection. I mean, they've turned against democracy because it generated the wrong outcomes. So ever since 2016, we've seen just this barrage of attacks against people that are questioning the ruling class Joker-style agenda. And ever since then, we've seen the rise of DEI and ESG and then try to stick us all in an electric vehicle to give us 15-minute cities and then lock us down. Oh, stay home orders. You can't go to church for two Christmases in a row and your kid can't go to school, and that's all because of the great pestilence which is Trump and Boris Johnson, and so this waves of immigration is just another piece of that. It's not the exception, it is part of the agenda.
Speaker 2:I have to say, I became my first time to become aware of this, and it's weird because once you see it. You can't unsee it. But my first time to become aware of this was when I visited my mother in Texas in the spring of 2021. And I expected everybody in Texas to be all upset about the lockdowns and the school closures and the closing of malls and businesses and everything which there's plenty to be upset about, but I couldn't get anybody to talk about that. All they wanted to talk about was the disastrous state of civilization by virtue of the immigration.
Speaker 2:Well, I was shocked by this because I hadn't really thought of it that way and I didn't think of my mother and her friends and everything as kind of like. These are people I had previously put in a box of status fascists, you know. And yet here I'm hearing normal people in a genuine heartfelt meltdown over something the media was not reporting on at all, and I remember thinking at the time I need to figure this out Like it's not enough just to throw out my you know, hit him on the head with a book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I need to figure this out.
Speaker 2:And so here we are three years later and I finally have just said okay, I'm just not going to go along with this. This is stateism.
Speaker 1:When you talk with your mother and other people in Texas. For the people living there, what's the big deal? Why are they upset?
Speaker 2:Well, part of the problem is that the perception that they're losing control over the rules under which they live. You know that their vote is being taken away from them and you know what's interesting about this, brittany, is that it's technically illegal for undocumented migrants to vote in federal elections or state elections.
Speaker 2:But it's a question of the verification. What is the method by which you're verifying people's identities and their rights to assist in the creation of laws under which we live? And those vary widely from state to state. And there's no question that the dominant goal and this has been, I feel like such an age for not saying this it's been going on for years that the goal of these, of the blue staters and sort of ruling class vogue stares in general, is to water these rules down ever more. I mean, texas passed a law through the legislature that said look, if you're going to vote, you've got to be able to provide identity. Well, there was total hysteria. I mean like everybody's screaming no, this is right, this is evil. And it's like wait, what? I mean? I can't even buy a pack of cigarettes in the convenience store without showing my identity card. What is wrong with you people? It never made any sense. The goal is to water it down to the point that they can manipulate the outcome.
Speaker 2:So, for example, in Arizona I mean, elon Musk has been all over this the standard has been that you can vote in federal elections. You can't vote in state elections without showing verification. You can't vote in federal elections. If you check the box that says you're a US citizen on an absentee ballot, that's what it really requires, just check the box. So now you've got anywhere between 10 and 20 million people we have no idea how many have come over the last four years that are in a position. They don't even have to do it themselves. You see, I mean you can get election workers and non-government organizations and these activists, groups and everything else just to do it for them, just to lean in. And next thing, you know you're flooding red states with blue state ballots, unbeknownst to the migrants. But then you count them up and go well, there's not many people here, there's this many ballots that make sense. And then it's at the point, if you call voter fraud, that everybody says oh, that's disinformation. And now the media's coming after you, and so on.
Speaker 2:So I mean this is real and I guess my point is under pure libertarian theory. We favor a free movement of people, of course, but part of that has to involve certain rules, and one of the rules is that you can't I can't move to Japan, for example, and get on welfare and bring all my friends in and affect the outcome of elections. So that I mean and if you did that you would seriously anger the population, say the least. Right, I mean, there would be a mass movement to elect an authoritarian leader to get rid of me and my friends, and there's no world in which that makes any sense. But that's precisely what's going on here, and let me just back up slightly. I know I'm talking too much. If you just want to cut me off.
Speaker 2:You can cut me off, but.
Speaker 1:Oh no, I don't think.
Speaker 2:FA Hayek's credentials as a good liberal are in question Good libertarian liberal.
Speaker 1:But in I'd argue with that.
Speaker 2:But well, well, when it comes to certain aspects of the comments, that's true. I mean it was one bad chapter in red surf to buy, but just in general. I mean he's you know, and in 1974, he wrote a letter to the London Times over a question of migration, and in this case it was concerned Muslim migration, which is really growing in the UK. And he said he said something interesting. He said there is a danger when there's too much migration coming in that is of a different sort than that doesn't mix well with a history, religion and language of the host territory. And that he says I don't like this, but it does whip people up into anger and it pushes a lot of buttons on the part of the people, and this can lead to disaster, it can lead to authoritarian outcomes. So, in the name of preserving liberty, I would strongly suggest that the UK grow about this as rationally as possible, for fear of repeating disasters from the past. And the disaster that was in his mind in particular was the interwar period in Germany, where he believed that the type of migration that went on during the Weimar period was seemingly meritorious and virtuous and creating sanctuaries for all these people ultimately ended up in triggering the population and scapegoating immigrants for everything bad, unfairly everything that bad was happening in the country. That of course, led to the calamities that we know about. So that was Hayek's view. So reading that kind of struck me. That's interesting, because you're not arguing for barriers that are there At the border. What you're doing is forecasting very likely political outcomes based on your read of history, and that's a very different kind of project.
Speaker 2:Rothbard observed the same thing after 1989 when the Soviet Union fell apart. He took no sense. There's various, too, to observe and, by the way, I don't need to tell you I dismissed all this at the time. I thought, oh, rothbard's selling out, rothbard's doing the same crazy thing. But what he actually observed was that, sporadically over the previous 50 years prior to the whole Soviet experiment falling apart, that Moscow had engaged in a systematic attempt to permanently colonize, with its residents, with Russians proper, all of the territories that it conquered as a way of securing a permanent political control.
Speaker 1:China did the same thing. China did the same thing in minority areas in Tibet. So one big issue for me is putting this in the context of libertarianism, a desire for free societies. Is we talk about what's going on right now as an immigration issue? To me, it's much more than what's happening at the border right now is not immigration. I mean, I've been an immigrant. I've gone to other countries to live and work and never has someone been waiting there for me with a bus ticket or a plane ticket or hotel. Here's your hotel room. We're going to put you up and tell you how to vote and all this stuff. So, as you say, there's a lot more going on. This is not just open borders. This is not just free immigration. This is a whole project of bringing people in, subsidizing them. We're paying for this, A taxpayer expense subsidizing these people to come in and do what impacts demographics, voter voting outcomes, that kind of thing. But I don't think it's fair to say that it's just immigration, that it's just open borders.
Speaker 2:I agree with that, and this is part of the complication we have. The US right now has, in reality, the most restrictive immigration policy we've had in 100 years. If you're Norwegian, swedish, german or Taiwanese or English or Australian, there's almost no way you can get residency in this country. I mean, you can get temporary visas, but then they're going to kick you out and even then they're making you get COVID shots, which even to apply for residency. So it's extremely hard to get an H1B visa, get E3s, to get green cards. It's very, very, very difficult. Quotas are very tight. Trump lowered all these things, and so immigration to this country has been never more difficult. At the same time, you've got federal agents going into Texas and actively and coercively preventing Texas border guards from securing the border against actual having the country sacked. I mean, it's unbelievable and you can go back in history and this is what it means for, like, if you look up, what does it mean for a country to be sacked? This is it.
Speaker 2:So this is not the carrying out.
Speaker 1:They're not coming in and attacking people's homes and vandalizing and pillaging and all that. That's not happening.
Speaker 2:Well in New York they're living in the finest hotels and also many authorities in the city of New York have pleaded with residents to open up their homes and also school.
Speaker 1:That's where New Yorkers are going to say no, I know New Yorkers.
Speaker 2:Public, but schools have been canceled in many parts of the country.
Speaker 1:For that.
Speaker 2:So that the migrants can be housed in the public schools.
Speaker 1:So yeah, it's going away. It's like sacking, but with the active cooperation of the federal government?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's, and I think you're right. Getting back to the Joker analogy, I think it's it's hard for people to recognize when their own government is at war with them. And you know, for those of us who kind of recognize the nature of the state and that what it does, what it does, is kind of always at war with us, because it's always at odds with what free people would be doing, you know, without that coercion. But this is like a really dramatic example of that.
Speaker 2:Very intense and dramatic example. It's so dramatic that I'm I should stop doing my mayor copers, but I'm deeply embarrassed that I went basically a long time without without seeing it. Ironically, I think one of the problems that libertarians have is that they underestimate the evil of the government.
Speaker 1:Yeah, look at how they responded to COVID Absolutely, absolutely underestimate it's all. You know. They're they're, you know it's, it's inefficient, you know they're doing things just a little bit not quite right.
Speaker 2:They need my advice, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they don't. They don't see the, the magnitude of that evil. It's, yeah, it's.
Speaker 2:Let me address something, since you're so indulgent and we're focused on this arcane areas that libertarianism. But my friend Alex Norasta Norasta, norasta at Kato, wrote a big piece the other day on the subject, which generally sided with the Biden administration, and I'm not over the mindset that just dismisses arguments out of hand because they come to the wrong conclusions. I like to dig through intelligent argument and see if it's right or wrong. So I read this piece very carefully and he makes two really important claims. The first one and I would like to take these one at a time the first one is that the reason for the increase in illegalization is illegal immigration, is the shutdown of legal paths. Okay, my thought about that is that there's a grain of truth to that and it goes back to the border response after 9-11.
Speaker 2:So I grew up in a in a border city in Texas, in El Paso, and it was very, you know. There was a constant stream of people from Mexico coming in doing day jobs and then going back at night and it was very cooperative. We didn't have walls, nobody cared about this stuff. It was just, you know, high, just walk through the border, that's it. You know, it was no big deal and everything was fine. There's nothing wrong. But after 9-11, suddenly we cracked down on the border, so it made that impossible, made that sort of day work impossible. And so now you, you create an incentive to break the law, to get a come across and stay. Yeah, okay, if you don't have open borders then you have every. That means it's ironic, but closed borders actually incentivize people to break the law. So there's, there's an element of truth there.
Speaker 2:I don't know how we go back. I mean, why is there such a push to build a wall? We've, we've lived on the border of Mexico, for, you know, since 1834 or whatever it is and whenever Texas declared independence, and never had a wall. Well, why is this going on? Well, I think it all traces to the response of 9-11. We stopped allowing day workers and work permits and free flow of people back and forth in printed relations and suddenly treated everybody on the other side of the borders and enemies. So, so, so, so.
Speaker 2:For 25 years has been going on that people, just you know, find every means to get across and let's get across. They're like, oh, thank God, I'm home, free, and then they stay. So that's new. So some extent Alex's point has a point there, and he's also right that there are legal immigration has never been more difficult. Okay, so I'll concede that. But what that as an explanation misses is the sheer scale. I mean, that's the. Nowhere is coming to terms with the sheer scale, and I'm not talking about as a percentage of the population. That's one way that people say isn't that unusual? Because look back at 1890, you know, you look at the total population relative to the immigrant population. We're much lower now than we were. It's all ridiculous. We've never had 20 million people come across the border undocumented in the span of three years.
Speaker 1:I mean, this is just. Is that a legitimate number? Is it 20 million?
Speaker 2:It depends on how you believe. I mean, like nobody knows for sure, but it's certainly between 10 and 20. Or it could be as high as 22. Those are high. 22 is high number, but five is a excessively low number. So nobody knows the actual numbers. But this we've never seen anything like this. I don't think Alex's point. I think there's a lot of validity to his argument and the abstract but it doesn't address the reality on the ground. Now, the second thing he claims is that everybody who's coming here is coming here to work.
Speaker 2:Doesn't seem to be the case. I don't know. I mean that this painting with a very broad, broad brush, I think everybody could be put to work, but the problem is we have extremely strict rules on employing these people. So, you know, the same thing happened in France and Germany, you know, after the Iraq war, when they faced this gigantic migrant crisis, they had migrants all over the place, but none of them were allowed to work because of the union rules. So you're bringing in these, as they say, fighting age males, billions, and not giving them work opportunities. So, even if they wanted to work, they can't work, yeah, except under the table.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's a whole different thing from the kind of the immigration that you know, that sort of built this country, built the current population, that was, people coming in having to make their own way. This whole thing of just importing a bunch of people and either, you know, in the case of Europe, not allowing them to work or subsidizing them so they don't have to, that's a different thing, you know. You could still argue, I guess, that that's a good thing, but it's not the same thing as just normal immigration.
Speaker 2:It's a very different animal and people have an existential fear of it and that's why it's the number one issue in the country, because they believe and I think rightly so this is going to permanently change the character of the country. It's going to permanently entrench a blue majority and, by the way, one of the reasons this has become such a priority for the Biden administration in particular is that after COVID lockdowns, there's mass wave of exodus from blue states to red, which is giving red states new seats in Congress when the next census is taken and all the reallocations of political power go around. So we've got a huge shift from blue to red in this country.
Speaker 1:I'm one of those people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So how are you going to counter that? I mean, what's your plan to do with gigantic population shifts away from status policies towards freedom policies? If you want to preserve statism, you got to get new people in to counter that and to flood the red zone as much as possible, and that is precisely what's happening. So this is the other policies of Texas and Florida to take the migrants and put them on buses and planes and send them to Martha's Vineyard in New York and Chicago is an attempt to foil that, and it's been interestingly successful in some ways, because that, I mean, I'm sorry, libertarians are totally behind on all this stuff. This war is taking place because Texas knows exactly what the Biden administration is up to and Florida knows exactly what the Biden administration is up to, so they're attempting to there are other people involved in busing migrants too.
Speaker 1:I mean there's like. Ngos and folks, and I don't really understand.
Speaker 2:Well, they're taking them to red zones, right?
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, who's taking them to New York? Who's Is that?
Speaker 2:That's Texas and Florida sending them on buses to, because they're definitely trying to keep them out and with weird rules, like no buses can With undocumented immigrants can come here between this hour and that hour. It's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1:But then who's paying the hotel bills for those people?
Speaker 2:The taxis yeah.
Speaker 1:But I mean, through what Like is it the city of New York saying, okay, they're here now? Well, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So they're putting them up in Nice hotels, very nice hotels. So, and you know, I have to say you know, my views on this have been building for a while and it's like I'm a little stupid, but one thing that is hard for me to ignore are facts. Okay, so Manhattan today is nothing like what it was 10 years ago.
Speaker 1:I'm hearing that yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's unbelievable. We go to midtown. First of all, it's extremely dangerous, especially at night. There's just zombies falling over the streets and the whole thing is like a dystopian movie, because once you get to the Central Park area and above, you get to the Upper East Side and Upper West Side and that kind of thing, you can do safety there. But if you have to make your way out of those areas through to midtown to take a trip or something like that, it's just like going through the jungle. People are increasingly terrified. So New York is to be a city of unrelenting mobility within Manhattan. Yeah, it's no longer, as People are terrified, wow.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:They're communities, that's.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I think we're both anti-state, we're both against the institution of the state. What do you think, what do you imagine that immigration would look like in a world without a state? Yeah, okay, great.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, this gets into a complicated area because I mean, are we saying that there's without a state anywhere? But does that mean without nations? I mean, would the nation disappear without the state? And that's a big question. Meas is himself addressed it in his 1919 book Nation, state and Economy. He makes a distinction between the nation and the state and he theorizes that there is such a thing as a nation because there's a perception that there are features of life that are common to people.
Speaker 1:Okay, so so culturally based.
Speaker 2:Well, there's certain comments in any society that are unavoidable. You can't like, even in a private subdivision there's comments, right? I mean there's sidewalks, there's streets, even if they're private. There's the air you breathe, there's your neighbor across street. There are certain things we have in common and the purpose of nationhood is to somehow regulate those comments, to come to some kind of consensus about how we want to live. I mean, can I defecate in a bucket and throw it out my window on the ground, and what impact does that have on the health of other people? I mean, these questions libertarians don't like to talk about them, but I mean, just like in the real world, things like how we're going to manage our, our common lives really does matter. So the idea of a nation has many pieces, and they involve religion, they involve, yes, race, they involve language, they involve shared histories, shared dynasties, a shared sense of people-ness, which can be independent of race and language. Okay, it can be independent of religion. These are all I mean.
Speaker 2:I think Rana or the French theorists identified five possible things that constitute nationhood. So you're likely you can get rid of one or two or even three. You're not going to get rid of all five. And if you do get rid of all five, then your sense of nationhood disappears. Nationhood is just a reality for all of recorded human history. That sense of rules to regulate our comments, and with that comes a sense of who we are and who we're going to include, and whether that's done through private means or state means, I just don't know. Now we have states now. So the question is, am I suggesting to the state what it should do? And not really, because I don't really know the answers to that and we've had long debates in American history about this and we've had at the original constitution the states themselves would regulate who was admitted to citizenship. It's a reasonable solution. I think States are organic political communities. By the way, mises's view of nationhood is that it's all comes down to language primarily. I think it's a little distorted but it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 2:But the American idea was to decentralize the decision as low as possible, that that was the best possible solution. Well, that went away. And then we got birthright citizenship much, much later. And then, which was designed to right the wrong of the tremendous evil of slavery, right, I mean that was just the great evil of the American experiment. I mean everything was just beautiful about the American founding. And then there's this one horrible thing, yeah, and it had such an impact on what followed. I mean it's just terrifying the extent to which so much of American politics, from the founding all the way through the Civil War and after and even now, revolves around that one great evil. I mean it's unbelievable when you think about just how could such a beautiful experiment be so wrecked.
Speaker 2:But anyway, and after the great immigration of the 1880s and 1890s which was not without problems, by the way, it wasn't just like oh, this is glorious, ireland and Italy and the world comes here and everything's wonderful no, that gave birth to exactly what Hayek predicted, a kind of reaction and movement. And when Darwin's book called the Descentive man came out and he was an earnest thinker and so on, but this book was calamity, because the book said that human beings have to curate themselves to avoid devolution. We need to evolve constantly, which means we need to regulate our breeding patterns. And so that set off a wave of panic that led eventually to eugenics, to racialists thinking. The entire American upper class was converted to extremist, cranky, race-based theories about the future of civilization. So that was one of the costs of that wave of immigration is that it set that in motion.
Speaker 2:By 1923, we had the imposition of the laws Calvin Kuhler signed it. That was very strange and very strict about immigration that basically favored Anglo-Saxons and deprecated Slavs, southern Italians and Jews in particular. Okay, so that was 1923. And, yeah, it was quite catastrophic. That law was quite catastrophic and bound to create a reaction. So when Jews started fleeing during the Great Diaspora, german-occupied territories to try to find safety, they couldn't find it in America because of US immigration law, because in those days Jews weren't white people, they were considered asiatic and foreign and poisonous by the American ruling class. Okay, so after World War II, then there was a reaction to that. And then we got the 1965 immigration bill which picked up the same racial themes, except reverse them in the other direction, which is crazy. That's just as bad as 1965. It was just bad as 1923. It's just that it was the opposite policy which gave rise to a new reactionary movement.
Speaker 2:What are you doing to our country, gradually, over time? So I think both these approaches are wrong. I mean, look again, I'm not advising the state and I don't think the state is open to good advice anyway. But if you had, let's say, a responsible leadership of a nation. It would seek to bring people in who were seeking to work, that were not criminals, that every intuition says we're going to contribute to the national well-being and not annoy residents to the point that they pursue reactionary movements and things like this. You would build a nation based on what is good for the peace and prosperity and domestic tranquility of all. That's what you would do, not with some weird agenda to get rid of the slobs, get rid of the Jews or down with white people. We have way too many of them. You can't use the immigration system for demographic curation of the population. There should be a goal to bring people here who can acculturate and make a contribution to the well-being of all. I mean that seems to be the answer.
Speaker 1:It seems to me, though, that, knowing everything I know about the state and how it operates, it seems to me that there's a fundamental problem with incentives, that any state entity, any monopoly on force, has incentives that are not aligned with the people living under it and not aligned with, if you want to call it, the greater good or the community.
Speaker 1:They're just not aligned. They don't have the same incentives. When I look at, how would you have a nation state that does this? Well, it's hard to imagine that not becoming something like what we're seeing now, where those powers are used to gain power for itself and ultimately harm the people living.
Speaker 2:I agree with that, but the thing is that there are various places around the world and experiences where this seems to have been handled, least temporarily, pretty well Japan, south Korea, sweden. But Sweden gave in At some point. They were just intimidated by all the propaganda and everything and opened up the floodgates. By the way, I can't believe this is me talking.
Speaker 1:That's another thing I wanted to just bring up is the one thing Again, I'm completely anti-state. Yet the one thing that gives me pause is my experience in Japan. I lived there for two years. What you're saying is absolutely right. It's one of the places in the world where the government actually does corrupt it in some ways in that country, of course.
Speaker 1:All governments are corrupt, but as far as the kind of immigration policy you're talking about, they do seem to have done that. What I think is really hard for probably, I'm going to say, any American who hasn't lived overseas what it's really hard to appreciate is the depth and the value of what's preserved there. Japanese culture is cohesive in a way that no subculture in America is. It kind of defies description. But it's like you're in this place and after you get to know it and you understand how things work, you realize that you're surrounded by people who all share the same values and who you leave your camera on a bench in this. Some way Someone's going to make a real effort to bring that back to you. There are just certain things that you can predict that will happen Again.
Speaker 2:I'm basically that's what I said the regulation of the commons. That's what I'm referring to.
Speaker 1:Right, but we haven't had that in this country. We have a much watered-down version of what that is. I think if you haven't experienced how amazing it can be to live in a society that functions well and where the commons are respected by everyone, where everyone kind of respects the common space and respects each other, if you don't know that, then you don't know what you've lost.
Speaker 2:Japan's a unique situation, or maybe it's not unique, it's just. Oh, by the way, let's just look a little further into this because, again, there's a fundamentalist idea within our world to always come up with a clear answer to everything. Let's just explore the question Should political communities aspire to be homogeneous or heterogeneous? Okay, that's kind of an interesting question, and I think the answer is that it all depends on the organic development of the community. So in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, mixed populations have been part of the experience of the region, and that's been true for thousands of years, and nobody can imagine it otherwise than everybody is delighted by it. So people speak three languages Judaism, islam and Christianity have coexisted, not without problems, but largely coexisted, for thousands of years, many thousands of years actually.
Speaker 1:And problems are mostly exacerbated when the state steps in and tries to force.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when one group seeks to become dominant, then it becomes a problem, and dominant and illiberal, yeah, and that's what has happened variously throughout history. But heterogeneity is just part, and Americans are used to heterogeneity too. When the original settlers came over here, they attempted to divide themselves up into tribes, right. So Rhode Island was, or Maryland was weirdly Catholic, virginia was Anglican, and they were very trying to curate the popular, their political communities based on religion, and then that devolved into slave owning versus not slave owning, which is unbelievably wicked. But eventually, over time, there grew to be a very comfortable heterogeneity, and you've lived in New York. You know what that feels like, and most people are fine with that. I mean, it seems to work for us. But there are other political communities that have always been traditionally homogeneous, and that is the essence of what it means for them to live and experience the world that they do.
Speaker 2:So every American is from somewhere, and if you ask anybody in Japan where you're from, they will tell you they're from Japan. It's very simple they're from Japan. Now, americans can't imagine that, right? No, where are your ancestors from Japan, right? I mean, that's it. That's the fun. Americans can't even imagine that. So every experience is different and I think we need to kind of recognize that, that there needs to be some sense of deference to the prevailing organic experiences of the people and how they've come to develop a social order that is peaceful, leads to tranquility and portas artist's blessings on the most possible people at any one time. And what that looks like exactly you cannot say a priori. You really do have to look at the history and the specifics of the circumstances of time and place of a particular area.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I don't have an answer either, especially given my experience in Japan. I can't. I don't have an answer, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with incentives and that things get worse to the extent that you have an entity that is based on force and that is not really accountable to anyone, the more that has an influence in society. I just think, whether it's immigration or anything else, I think things are going to be worse and, as we're seeing right now, immigration policy is being weaponized to attack us.
Speaker 2:That's right. And anytime you impose a exogenously imposed rationalistic construct of demographic ideals on a country where it's not part of its experiences and history, you're engaged in a kind of an act of violence. So, for example, let's just say I dreamed up the idea that there's no way America is going to survive without being ruled by a Spanish monarch. Okay, and I somehow get control of the system of government and make King Maximilian the second of the monarch of America. Now, how sustainable is that? How long is that going to last? Is that actually going to be good for the country? There's no conditions under which that is a good idea.
Speaker 2:Reimposing the monarchy in Brazil might actually have some plausible effect. In a way, the monarchy from England would be itself a kind of an act of violence too, unless it was done. No, at this point I think you're kind of sick of it. Maybe there's no good monarch. Actually there's one good monarch. If they took away the monarchy of Lichtenstein, that would be an act of violence. So there needs to be some deference. And if you're, imposing heterogeneity of politically participating citizens in Japan would be a malicious act that would finally disrupt society. But imposing political equality of access in a homogeneous population in America would itself be an act of violence. So there has to be a way in which the immigration system is deferential to the ways that a political community has learned to organize itself, given its history and understanding of who they are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I also feel like America has this unique problem of it's just too big. I don't think it's legitimate to try and make a country of 350 million people to try and pretend that that's one culture or that's one, even one if you want to call it a nation, isn't it?
Speaker 2:crazy and we've been doing this for 200 years, basically Like when I don't know what year the US made Hawaii a state yeah, I do that 40s or something like that but suddenly all Americans were being taught certain Hawaiian words, like aloha, and learning hula dances and stuff like that. So we have this funny way of incorporating our empire, rolling our empire back into the it's silly, it's silly.
Speaker 2:It's silly. Yeah, the 13 colonies, maybe mutual defense cooperative, but the way the American empire has grown, it's shocking and God knows it's probably unviable. I mean, there's something in all of us that wants her to be a union, an American union. I remember when RFK was asked when he was in New Hampshire at Porfest, where oh, yes, carla asked him about. Yeah, oh, you were there yeah.
Speaker 1:I heard about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you go to a Libertarian meeting, you better prepare yourself because something crazy is going to happen. And so Carla said would you be okay if New Hampshire succeeded? And I had introduced him and I'm aware of who Libertarians are and how kind of delightfully insane they are. But I was mortified. I was like Jesus Christ, Aren't there other responsible questions you could ask? But still it elicited an answer which is basically nostalgic and romantic. It's like you know, I'm not here to break up the union, I'm here to bring us together as a restore, the old American people. And a very lovely answer in some ways.
Speaker 1:It's lovely, I just don't think it's realistic.
Speaker 2:Whether it can happen or not is another matter. Yeah, what bothers me about the RFK candidacy in general? This is an aside. I think it's basically based on nostalgia and his nine is not functionally policy oriented. So, like anytime he has a specific policy, it's not quite right and there's simply wrong with it, but his aspirations and his dreams are glorious. But you know, I mean, that's what we learn from the time.
Speaker 1:He wants to go after the pharma industrial complex by reforming it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He wants to unplug the private interests from government agencies. I mean, I'm against corporatism too, but I tell you, one way to get something even worse than corporatism is to fully eliminate all the corruption and leaving only abstract power-wielding, insanely stupid, disconnected bureaucrats with total power over the population, with no check on them from private industry at all. Actually, the only thing worse than a corrupt FDA that's captured by big pharma is?
Speaker 1:Is it an independent one? Yeah, I mean, let's just get rid of those agencies, let's just yeah, it could be worse. Yeah, it could be worse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:That's a terrible, I mean, and a great coalition.
Speaker 1:I'm not that far from it.
Speaker 2:I mean, no, I'm in a great coalition with a lot of anti-corporatists, as you could imagine in my post lockdown iteration. But yeah, this is this vision of like how to fix the problem is something Beyond the paradigm that we're in.
Speaker 1:I mean, to me the paradigm is the problem. It's this paradigm of state control and coercion. If you can't see beyond that, you're never going to get out of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and one reason I'm appreciative of some of the positions who are the non-libertarians who are critiquing corporatism right now is they've taught me something I was really a little unaware of, which was the extent to which. So, as libertarians, I always think the state is the great evil, but creating these binaries between public and private, and then demonizing one and valorizing the other, can get you only so far when you begin to notice conditions under which the state itself is being manipulated, primarily by private interests, and so that plays with the libertarian mind. We don't know what to do with that, but you see that in the case of pharmaceutical regulation and, for that matter, military and you trust, yeah, military imperialism, I mean, these are all being pushed by wealthy, powerful ruling class elites, whether they're in government or private industry or nonprofit foundations. The evil is present in all of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's all kinds of people who profit from coercion, and I think in the sort of on the left, there's this tendency to think that libertarian means you're defending the corporate entities or you're defending those people, and I think some libertarians fall into that trap too. But that's not it. It's a system. It's a system that we're defending, and the corporate state system benefits a lot of people who aren't in the state, because they know how to use the state to get their goodies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're driving the policy forward. I mean, that's actually one of the weirdest things I've discovered. You know that the tech companies themselves that aspire to have the state censor disinformation, and why? Because they want to destroy the competition. So if you can smear all your competition as spreading disinformation to use state power to go after them, you'll do it. So it's not the case that poor innocent Facebook was having to obey the demands of the CDC. That's not it at all. Facebook is begging the CDC to crush my competition.
Speaker 1:So the board has been calling for speech controls for even before COVID, I think, yeah, we've been calling for that yeah, and the media's got this desperate desire to survive right now, so they'll use, do anything.
Speaker 2:It's not going to work, but they're doing anything possible to get rid of it.
Speaker 1:I need to read you this one quote. You'll laugh at this and then I will let you go. But I don't know if you saw the CNN report on what's going on with that Texas at the beginning. Basically, they're calling it, they're framing it, as the Texas takeover now. So here's the CNN headline the seized part of the US-Mexico border and blocked federal Border Patrol agents and the whole. It's a little video clip and the whole message is the reason Border Patrol can't get in there to do their job is because the Texas authorities have taken over. That's how they're. I just thought you'd get a kick out of that.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's even worse than that. I mean, the newest line is that the US government is trying to stop Texas from permitting children to drown.
Speaker 1:Right, I saw that too. Yeah, they just wanted to get in there and protect them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, protect. Look, there's three drownings. Three kids drowned. For God's sake, texas, what is wrong with you letting kids drown? You know the federal government's here to save these poor people from drowning, so this is just deep state propaganda. But mostly they're not covering it. And we're now 10 days into the depths of the crisis and there is a dearth of reporting on this at all from New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and various messages are being tested at alternative venues like Vox and White, and the message testing is the saving kids from drowning kind of stuff that Texas has kicked out the Border Patrol that's trying to.
Speaker 1:Trying to save the kids?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they're trying to see how stupidly orange yeah, and so this is the way the censorship, industrial media, captured media, complex works is. They're waiting to figure out, because this is a problem, because 100% of the American people are on the side of Texas at this point. It's just ridiculous. So how do you message that you know if you're going to use your captured media to defend the Biden position? Well, first you have to try out messaging. And your other kept places we know what those are now. They're Rolling Stone and Wired and Vox and so on. These are basically Sorry to put it this way, but they're basically CIA operations at this point. So they try out various messaging and once it settles down, they can figure out something that's compelling, and then the New York Times will put it above the fold.
Speaker 1:Right After it's presented.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then NPR will be all over it, and so on. So yeah, once you get the decoder, ring everything makes sense.
Speaker 1:This has been great yeah.
Speaker 2:And I want to thank you for your open-mindedness and your and just so anybody who's listening understands who you are you're highly sophisticated, great-learning, a lifetime of reading and reflection on fundamental issues concerning human rights, liberties and social organization. You are not unsophisticated person in this realm and I appreciate your subtlety of thought, your willingness to grapple sort of truthfully with empirical reality and come to terms with what that means for your life aspiration, which is to live freely and in cooperation with everybody else too. So having me on being willing to have a completely honest discussion, I think says a lot about you, so thank you.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you. I mean, I think it's important, you know, and it can be tough sometimes, like if you're writing about things, it can be tough to take on an issue when you don't have an answer and I'll check. Yeah, I don't have an answer. I don't. I understand.
Speaker 2:Well, let's both keep Stay critically-minded, keep thinking and doing what we can to make the world a better place.
Speaker 1:Awesome, thank you. You've been listening to what, then Must we Do? The podcast. For those who understand that the state is the problem and are seeking solutions For more episodes, go to bretneysubstackcom. I G N E dot substack dot com and subscribe.