Ask Me Anything with Richard Salsman - February 2024

[00:00:00] Speaker A: I'm Scott Schiff with the Outlaw Society, and this is an ask me anything with our senior scholar, Richard Salzman. Richard does these periodically, and we want to invite you to be part of this. So if you have any questions, just raise your hand and we'll bring as many of you up to the stage as possible. In the meantime, I always have some that I like to start off with. Richard, thanks so much for doing this. I guess I'd like to start with the economy. Is the lesson of this economy that there's just now enough government interference in the market and monetary policy that we can't even count on truisms like that an inverted yield curve will lead to a recession? [00:00:47] Speaker B: Well, that's a good question. Some of the listeners may not know what that means, but it is an indicator of past recessions, and that always does come up, that if in the past some indicator of the business cycle has worked, why will it continue to work now? This one particular short term interest rates above long term interest rates, or inversion of the yield curve, which the fed largely causes, it's been actually a perfect indicator of recessions. Now, by perfect I mean eight recessions since 68. And it has no false signals either. I've talked about this before. False signals would be it inverts, but there's no recession. Or a recession comes without inversion, and it has been inverted since October 2022. That's a long time. So I've been forecasting recession starting sometime this year. The principle I think you're naming, Scott, is it different this time? It's a very interesting one from the standpoint of forecasting, and I specialize in forecasting the business cycle and investment performance and things like that. But we know in our own lives we need to forecast how our life is going to go, or we need to forecast what kind of profession we're going to pursue or romance, or even if we're forecasting the future of America. I find the whole field of forecasting so fascinating. But you do have to have some principles as to causation. So the short answer to your question, I don't know if people want to pick up on it more. I'll leave it at that. I don't think the government intervention in the economy is going to negate the power of this particular forecasting mechanism. I do believe that government intervening in the economy does distort a lot of things. But one way of looking at market prices or interest rates or the kind of signals I look at is they incorporate also government craziness. So, for example, if there was no central bank, they might not manipulate interest rates. We might not see in a manipulation of interest rates which would lead to this situation. But now that we have central banking, we've had it for a long time. You can imagine why people might say, wow, we have central banks now. So this signal doesn't work anymore? No, it still works. It just incorporates the craziness. So others will know this, as, for example, when they imposed price controls in the 70s amidst inflation. You get shortages of things, you get gas lines, you get scarcity of things. Right now, you could say that's an irrational policy. It is. But it's like saying the laws of economics can't be conned in some way. The markets will reflect the craziness, and that's in the form of lines and stuff. So you can predict even when the government intervenes, there are ways to predict the good or ill of it. I don't know if that helps. [00:03:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess at least part of it know, just wondering when the Fed was starting with this policy saying, well, why would Biden not at least know screaming at them publicly because of them causing him a recession going into an election year? [00:03:57] Speaker B: Well, part of it would be that it's not necessarily true. And I don't think it is true that the Biden economic advisors know this. They may not know that when the Federal Reserve inverts interest rates like this, that it's almost always a reliable signal of recession. So it just could be marked down to ignorance that they don't know. It's not really a secret. This thing has been documented six ways from Sunday. But another way of looking at it would be if they said to the Fed, do not raise interest rates to, quote unquote, fight inflation, they would have been seen as soft on inflation. So they're very opportunistic. The pragmatists are very myopic. They're only looking very short term ahead. And for now, their view would be, oh, the Fed's raising rates and we can take credit for bringing inflation down. That's not actually how you bring inflation. And almost like they'll say, well, we'll worry later whether there's a recession that hurts our reelection chances. [00:04:59] Speaker A: Sure. Well, I know Lawrence has a question. I have some others, and we want to invite others to join us if you have some. But, Lawrence, go ahead. [00:05:10] Speaker B: Thanks, Scott. Hi, Richard. Hi. [00:05:12] Speaker C: So my question for you is, this may be a bit more of a history question more than anything, but it's along these similar lines to when we look at United States history, there seem to be certain moments that stand out from the rest in which government sort of power and authority really grew by leaps and bounds. We would say, like maybe civil war during the time of FDR. And I was curious if there were any others that maybe are a little bit, maybe more obscure to most people that you would say were also pivotal points. I think maybe like 911 would be another with the Patriot act. But are there other points that maybe people often overlook? [00:05:58] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really good question. If I were to name. I just jotted down some ideas while you were asking if I were to name, like, the top five cases where either some kind of natural catastrophe or something happened and it's either caused by government intervention or government intervention was the result, and more than that, that after the fact, the intervention stuck, in other words, persisted. Now, in this regard, I actually think the first one you named is not a case of it, even though the most serious thing was the civil war. One of the remarkable things about the post civil war, that 50 year period, I tend to name that 50 year period between the end of the civil war and the beginning of World War I, there was a lot of massive deregulation and demobilization and shrinking of government, and we were still on the gold standard, and we were moving toward free trade, and there was still no central bank and there was still no national income tax. We did not have the full fledged regulatory state. Mark Twain famously mocked the period as the Gilded Age. Gilded, though, because he was know rich mansions in Newport and elsewhere, and thought the, you know, they must be living off the back of the workers. So even though that was a tectonic, absolutely consequential event, it definitely liberated the labor market and turned the south from feudalism to put it on the path of capitalism. But here's the big ones I would name in the sense of a negative result, the whole populist, progressive era, which runs reluctantly from 1900 to World War I, terrible World War I, basically, in all, many different ways, ended laissez faire capitalism. And I can name all the reasons we can talk about. But that did bring in the Fed, the federal income tax, a bunch of regulatory agencies, an adulteration of the gold standard, massive government borrowing. So all the kind of things we're used to today. The next big one is definitely FDR and the New Deal in the. None of that has been repealed. The SEC, the FDIC, Social Security was 1935. The next step would be the quote unquote, great society of LBJ, JFK and LBJ, actually. So Medicare, Medicaid, that's all. 1965, Nixon going off the gold standard in 1971 I kind of lump him in together with LBJ. That was a very bad turning point and no fix afterwards. The last one, the regulatory state really took off in the, well, Nixon for example, EPA, that was Nixon. OSHA regulating business, that was Nixon. Nixon was a big regulatory guy and go off the gold standard guy. So he's known for Watergate and stuff, but he did much worse things in political economy. I like your mentioning of 911 because one of the themes of my book called where have all the capitalists gone? Is that the last 20 years of the last century was a very good trend. It was away from of course the cold war ended. That was nice. But even the Democrats were starting to ape reaganomics. So Bill Clinton, we're going to end welfare as we know it. The era of big government is over. The were really great again, not less apair capitalism, but you want to look for the direction and that has definitely reversed in the last 20 years. So the last 20 years of the last century. 1st 20 years of this century, very bad. Whether it's due to 911, whether it's due to a loss of american confidence in its ideals, there's many reasons to name it. But yes, 911 would be part of it. I always used to say that I never thought in retrospect that the sucker punch of 911 was the issue that we should have expected that we might get an attack from 17th century savages. But it is true that the US didn't provide national defense. And and I thought the worst outcome of 911 was the fact that we didn't really do anything about islamic terrorism. We were scared. We appeased them. We engaged in forever wars that were never won. And so the last 20 years have been pretty bad. And I'm just naming foreign policy stuff and you're absolutely right to pick the Patriot Act. I think the concern we have today with the surveillance state, Snowden and Julian Assange and all those guys under attack for exposing the surveillance state where the excuse was we're just trying to fight terrorists here now they're completely out of control. So yeah, 911 is okay as a turning point in the negative sense that you name. Is that too much, Lawrence? [00:11:11] Speaker C: No, I think that's good. I guess the reason I mentioned sort of the civil war at the outset because yeah, I do recall you mentioned sort of the deregulation, but maybe my. [00:11:22] Speaker B: History is a bit out of. [00:11:25] Speaker C: Maybe I need to brush up on it. But I feel like there was also this shift towards internationalism and what we would see around the turn of the century with the whole great white fleet. [00:11:36] Speaker B: That was much more Teddy Roosevelt and the quote unquote progressive era at the end of the century. But it is true. Maybe objectivists should be aware. It is true that there is a debate that's been going on for a long time between libertarians and objectivists. Well, I don't know if objectivists, a lot of objectivists agree with this, but the libertarian complaint is that Lincoln was terrible, that even though slavery ended that the way Lincoln did, it brought us a more invasive federal state. So that gets into the whole neo Confederacy thing, where a lot of libertarians lean in the direction of, I wish we had just remained a jeffersonian agrarian republic, a kind of feudal. There are libertarians who argue that way, and there's some objectivists who feel that way as well. So their hero is Jefferson. Not the line that runs from Washington, Hamilton, the Federalists, Lincoln, Coolidge, Reagan. I think that whole lineage, which I just named, is much more consistent with capitalism because Hamilton, for all his faults, which I don't think are the know, he was the one who really said we should be advocating capitalism, not this agrarian, slavish, feudal, southern. And Ein Rand, of course, is on record saying one of the things she loved about America and the civil war is that the northern capitalist system vanquished the southern, backward, feudal, slavish system. That's a very powerful argument, but it's one that a lot of libertarians are uncomfortable with. I mean, Lincoln did suspend habeas corpus for a while there. He imposed an income tax, but then it was repealed. Afterwards, they went off the gold standard and started issuing greenbacks. The whole greenback movement was like hyperinflation. So there were some nasty things that went on during Lincoln's time. But I'm very impressed with what was done after, I don't want to say after Lincoln was killed, but Lincoln was so important to not only preserving the union, but preserving a country that could be capitalist that I think he's one of the greatest presidents ever. Reconstruction. Remember, the part of the policy was to go down to the south and make sure the south behaved itself after the war. And of course they didn't. You had to come back at this in 1965 with MLK and civil rights movement. It was the Democrats for all that time, resisting the loss of the civil War. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you, Lawrence. Good question. [00:14:23] Speaker A: You mentioned Julian Assange, and I think you posted him about this. The. Against the further imprisoning of him. I've kind of come to the same place. I'm curious if you think that seeing at least the appearance of corruption in our intel or justice institutions, that has maybe made some people reevaluate him. [00:14:45] Speaker B: Yeah, this is an interesting case, and not, I think, an obvious one, because civil libertarians and libertarians themselves will kind of knee jerk, say, let him go. Let him be free, because he's just exposed the state, and the state is terrible, and f the state and that kind of rothbard type stuff. Now, if you go all the way back to the Pentagon papers, where the case is similar, Daniel Ellsberg is at either the CIA or the Pentagon. I forget, and he steals the Pentagon papers and gives them to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Now, ultimately, the Supreme Court of the United States exonerated him, and it came up with a weird principle. But the idea was kind of like what they did with Roe v. Wade. So this is like a 1971 decision. But they said something like, you cannot censor a publication like the New York Times or Washington Post just because they received material that might have been purloined from the Pentagon. Now, it actually was purloined the side of it, where I'm sympathetic to punishing someone who does that is, I do believe a state has a right to keep state secrets. The problem today is it keeps a whole bunch of stuff that really isn't important, isn't really relevant. So they've overclassified and overdone it in that regard. But I'm not the kind of person who says, let any internal state worker steal stuff and distribute it to the public because it could really undermine national security. Now, the Pentagon papers case is interesting, and it relates to Julian Assange, because Ellsberg said, I am looking at documents internally, and he's an analyst, that say we're losing the Vietnam War and that we've been losing it for six or seven years. This is all during the. And in public, they say we're winning it, and more guys are dying and more money's being spent. I mean, you could put yourself in Daniel Ellsberg, who was hated by Nixon, hated by the conservatives, hated by Bill Buckley, but in a way, it was a herculean, courageous thing for him to do. Now, I remember Ellsberg at the time said, if you want to arrest me and put me in prison forever, go ahead. If I have violated something, go ahead. I wish I didn't face that fate, but I'm willing to do it for this reason. And Julian Assange basically said the same thing. He found stuff on Hillary, on other people having to do with the wars in Iraq and the wars in Afghanistan. And look, in retrospect, how interesting, because he's been in jail for ten years. And what has evolved over the last ten years, very similar to the Pentagon papers. A recognition that we were never winning the afghan war or the Iraq war. There was no weapons of mass destruction. Right? So Assange was doing something similar to what Daniel Ellsberg did in the Vietnam war. He was saying, now, he wasn't an insider, but insiders leaked to him papers and documents showing that the Pentagon was not winning the Iraq war, that there was no weapons of mass destruction. That was the pretext. We're going in there, if you remember. Same thing with Afghanistan. We know that after 20 years, Biden disgracefully drew out of there. So Assange has actually not been charged with anything, which is really quite remarkable, but he's been incarcerated for ten years. The news this week was he went before a british court. He is in Britain at Belmarsh prison. I believe he's been there for five years or so. And the issue this week was whether he would be sent to the US. Extradition. The US has been wanting to get him back to the US so they can prosecute him and jail him for leaking us documents. Now, I think Trump has been asked, like, whether if he was president, would he pardon Snowden's another case we can talk about, or Assange. And I think he's waffled on that a little bit. But there are people like Mike Pompeo, who was secretary of state, who said he wanted to kill the guy. I mean, the CIA and the Pentagon really do not want. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but it's apparently straight on record that Mike Pompeo said, we need to kill Julian Assange. She's a threat to national security and exposing all these things. So I lean in the direction of get the evidence, really, Britain and America, neither of you should be incarcerating someone without actually charging them or convicting them. That is like a bare minimum you can't do. And anyway, I'll stop there. There's way more to say about it, but I think that decision is imminent. We will know soon whether Julian Assange, in a british prison, will be sent to the US. And I believe that if he is under biden and under the existing regime, they would jail him and do nasty things to him, which is unfortunate. [00:20:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I've heard they would put him in the supermax with the worst criminals out. [00:20:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And if it's a Jeffrey Epstein type thing, and again, I'm no conspiracy theorist, but if someone is in prison and they know upper ups who are hiding things, that person could be in danger. And my understanding is that one of the reasons Julian Assange went first to the Ecuador consulate in Britain, because he was being chased by. He wanted to have some kind of. So I don't know why he picked Ecuador. And then he was transferred over to Belmarsh, and the US basically pretty much tells Britain what to do. So I would be very surprised if Britain said, no, he's not going to be extradited, but even if so, he would still be stuck in that Belmarsh prison. So I don't know. I almost want him released from Britain and brought here because it would really be a headliner. I think he'd be at risk. But he's withering. His wife says he's withering away and dying anyway at Belmarsh. So I'm actually hoping that the British say, send him to America. He'd be on a plane next week. It would be frontline news. It would be, who is this guy again? And what did he expose? It might be a good thing if public opinion saw. Oh, my God. Are you telling me that he just exposed the fact that you guys were lying about how we were doing in Iraq and Afghanistan? Well, that's all proved to be true. What's wrong with Julian Assange? What are you guys doing anyway? That's too long. [00:22:09] Speaker A: An, uh, just because you brought know that his life could be in danger, that he's withering know. Speculation on possible Putin involvement in Navalny's death. [00:22:23] Speaker B: Oh, Navalny. Yeah. I don't know. I do think people are just jumping to the idea that he did it, but I don't know. So I'm really reluctant to say. I mean, put it this way. You could do an if then. If this is just another case of Vladimir Putin curbing, torturing, killing rivals, it's obviously. It's terrible. I'm not sure that's entirely true here. There's actually rumors going around that maybe Ukraine did it, as Ukraine does have a hit group itself, as Zelensky has his own kind of hit group. It's just as corrupt as most other regimes. And, of course, they would know the high profile case here. Navalny is only 47 years old, and he was apparently just walking around the prison yard and something happened. But, no, you don't have to pretend or defend that Vladimir Putin is a liberal, but there's something very od about the russian people, where, even though I think they're much better off than they were under Stalin and other, they do vote for authoritarians. They tend to like strong men. And it's funny, because Putin has now been elected, I think, four times now people will dispute whether he's fairly and openly elected. By the way, he's up for election again a month from now. So it's going to happen again. And now in America, we have had presidents elected four times. People forget this, but FDR was elected four times. Now, I'm not saying FDR is Putin, but in the long sweep of history, FDR is the most autocratic, authoritarian president we've ever had. And it's so sad because for a stretch there, Americans voted for him four times in a row. So I only say this not to excuse what's going on in Russia, but at some point, we have to say, and I've said this before in other sessions, is it in America's national security interest to care about this at all, to care about a fight between Russia and Ukraine? I believe it's largely sparked by the expansion of NATO eastward toward Russia's border. But that's a debate for another time. The novelny thing, I think, will be interesting from the standpoint of whether it hurts. It'll be interesting to see whether it hurts the vote count that comes out of Russia a month from now or whenever he runs. But no, they're not Stalinists anymore. Thankfully, they're not the USSR anymore. I've been on this theme for a long time. Thankfully, China is not maoist China anymore. But unless you have this history, if you just start your history, like from ten years ago, as most conservatives tend to do, for some reason, they hate Putin and Russia, or the Democrats do as well, or they hate China. And I don't know. I have a longer term perspective that says things have really improved in both of those countries. Does it mean that they're fully embracing capitalism? No, but the difference between stalinist USSR and Putin's Russia is so different. It's in the right direction. And same thing with China. I would say the same. You can hate Xi if you want. They're kind of nasty, but they're not Maoists. They're not collectivists. They're trying to move toward capitalism. I think in both these cases, both these countries, that's going off the rails a little bit, because you're asking me about Navalny. I don't know enough about the case. I have seen the documentary, the Netflix documentary on Navalny. Is fascinating. And I'll just leave one more thing. It's not true. I found that Navalny actually had a political following sufficient to have a political party. And my interest in this was to see whether that's true because they wouldn't let him form a party. And my research shows that that's not true, that he is a dissident, that he is a critic of Putin. But there are many people in Russia, including Putin, but also others who say he's just a Nazi. He said that the only thing he's offering is a kind of russian nationalism that is more nazi like. And you know, that that is an issue that Putin has brought up in Ukraine. He's worried that a big part of Ukraine is. Now, now, I need to back off from this at some point, because listen to what we're talking about. Socialists and Nazis fighting each the. What the we? Why do we care? I kind of care as a spectator, but I don't want american lives and treasure involved in that. And I have to say, I actually feel the same way about Israel and Palestine. I'm rooting for Israel. I think they're more civilized than the palestinian, way more civilized than the Palestinians. I think the Palestinians are aggressors. But I'm looking at both of these as one is a kind of secular socialist versus nazi war, Russia and Ukraine. And then there's this religious war, Jews versus Islam in the Middle east. And from an objectivist standpoint, a pox on all their houses. I don't want any of it. If they would only all embrace reason, egoism and capitalism, they wouldn't be at each other's throats. So I'm looking at this more from the standpoint of, at least from an objectivist perspective, we can explain what's going on here. I just don't get it. When people say, let's stick our nose in it, pick a side, and bleed ourselves to death trying to back a winner. All four of these are losers in the sense of they're not for reason, a jewish state, an islamic state, a socialist state, or a nazi state. These are so far away from objectivism and from capitalism and from americanism that I really oppose us being involved in it. Interested philosophically, politically, yes. But to sacrifice ourselves as both the conservatism and biden regime people want us to do in both affairs is, to me, unconscionable. [00:29:16] Speaker A: Great. Well, we'll open it up if anyone wants to respond to that or has another question. I've got more, but I think Lawrence has another one. Lawrence, go ahead. [00:29:28] Speaker C: Yeah, sure. So I was recently listening to a talk here in Texas, and they were just talking about sort of immigration border, and, well, I'm not really focused on that. It was interesting, the speaker paused before he was giving his case, and he wanted to make it very clear that he was not an anarchist. He wanted to make that very clear. But then he started talking about essentially what was sort of abolition of borders, free movement and traffic. It reminded me a lot of certain arguments I've heard from socialist circles that see, like, you're not a citizen of the world, you freely travel wherever you want. [00:30:11] Speaker B: Right? [00:30:11] Speaker C: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. [00:30:14] Speaker B: That's a really good question. That's a good question. This comes up a lot, and there's a lot of confusion associated with this. It's interesting to me that. Let me just start with this, because it's kind of just interesting. I always want to address a group that interested in nine Rand's ideas in the 19 2021 period. And I'll bring this back to Ayn Rand, because it's so interesting what she said about the nature of a state. In 1920 or so, Max Weber, who was famously known, he was a german sociologist, very erudite, but he was famous for saying that capitalism was made possible by the protestant work ethic. And although we're not religious and wouldn't attribute the rise of capitalism to religion, but rather to the enlightenment, it's still interesting because the protestant work ethic is a real thing in the sense of work hard, be frugal, look long range, take care of your family, save money. But the idea was, do it for the greater glory of God. But still, you can see why those virtues are close to our virtues. Okay, but vapor. It's interesting because he also said he was the first one to define what a state was. It's kind of funny that nobody had done that yet, but the nation state itself. I'd say the nation state as a hyphenated in Europe was unique to the 1870s. It wasn't until, like, the 1870s that Germany, definitely Italy, united in some way. Up to then, they were kind of dispersed and fighting with each other. So imagine, like, it's similar to the United States becoming united after breaking from Britain. So this was happening in Europe in the 1870s or so. So in 1921, Weber very famously says, a state is. I'm paraphrasing now. I don't have it in front of me. A state has a monopoly on the use of a legitimate force in a particular geographic area. It's a little more than that. And Ein Rand basically adopted that. I don't think she knew directly that Weber had said that 1921. But if you know Ayn Rand's definition of the state and her resistance and objection to anarchy, just as she defined capitalism, had to define what a state is. If the state is legitimate, let's hear a definition from Iran. What is a state? And she basically, maybe indirectly adopted that Weber definition. Now, the reason I say all that is, if true, then borders matter. Borders really do matter. And within a country, it's so interesting because fencing and borders within a country signifies something close to the Lockheon principle of private property, not what Hardin called the tragedy of the commons, which is really the tragedy of communism, the tragedy that unless we own private property, we're going to dissipate public property. I do believe that the argument that the borders should be open, anarchical, erased, is totally an anti capitalist. You mentioned the citizen of the world type of thing. But there is definitely within socialism and Marxism, not in Nazism, not in fascism or nationalism generally, the idea that there should be no borders. And I think that is exactly what's driving the policy down south. Now, you could say more cynically, but maybe realistically, that it's also happening in a partisan way because the Democrats think they'll get voters and so let them all in, so they vote for us. That's probably part of their motivation. But I think a deeper motivation is the idea that America would be self. This is their thing. America would be selfish to put up a fence. America would be selfish, know, micromanage the border and have what I've advocated, an Ellis island type model that says, well, we're not going to close the border. We're just going to manage it. We're just going to process people and we'll have certain objective standards, like they can't be carrying a communicable disease. If so, we'll send them to the local hospital or give them an objection. They can't be a criminal or they can't be a terrorist. That's just like basic stuff. But if you say otherwise, yeah, come on in. But we're going to take down your name and send you over to the language office and try to get you assimilated. We don't have any of that now. We have either complete anarchy and open the border and we have no idea who's coming in. That's one side, and the other side is close the border. I don't want to close the border. We might have to escape this place at some point. I don't want to be jumping over barbed wire fences, trying to get out like I'm in East Germany. So I don't know if that helps. But I'm of the view that borders are an essential feature of a legitimate nation state in modern times and all the other reasons I named it. You see this false alternative that's been given, open borders versus closed borders. I've noticed on the Ari side, within objectivism, I won't name names, but they lean in the direction of open borders. Don't ask anyone any questions. It's not quite anarchy, but it's closer to anarchy. I'm not in that camp, but I really don't like walls. I mean, if walls are necessary. Ellis island is a different case because you didn't really need a wall because they had to come over water and a ship and show up at the island. So I don't know, down in Texas, it's what, 700 miles long? Maybe you need a wall, but I think you also need, like, 25 processing stations, too. So they're not swimming over the Rio Grande river or crawling through scrub brushes, have processing centers. It's not that difficult. It's not that costly. Thank you. Legal immigration to the max. I love that. I love that. I love that idea. [00:37:20] Speaker A: Well, we're very pleased to have Atlas Society founder David Kelly joining us. David, do you have a question for Richard? [00:37:30] Speaker D: Not so much a question. Most of the things that Richard's been talking about are kind to. I think I raised my hand when he was talking about Russia and Ukraine and Israel and know I have a different view of foreign policy, and that's a common phenomenon among objectivists, that we start from the same premises and draw different conclusions about international affairs. And, Richard, you and I have been around a few rounds on that, but I don't want to go there. But it seems to me that I've long been in favor of open borders. I've been writing about this. I wrote about it for Baron's magazine back in the think that I just want to endorse the solution or the approach that Richard mentioned, the basic principles. People come to this country with one mouth and two hands and to work and feed. They don't hurt us. They add to. If they come with talent, great. And many do. But even if they don't, if they're willing to work and be productive, that's great. However, we do need to have borders. I agree totally with that. And manage the borders, but it could be so much better done with better immigration law, which apparently is impossible to achieve in our current congress. It wrecked all kinds of things, including support from Ukraine. But leave that aside. [00:39:33] Speaker B: Right. Because they're trying to link the two. Yeah, I see what you mean, David. [00:39:38] Speaker D: Right. That's one strategy. It doesn't seem to be working, but anyway. But here's the thing. Anyone should be welcome to enter the country and assume a place as a citizen eventually, over a period of time, if they're willing to work and be responsible, obey the law, they don't have communicable diseases and so forth. They're not criminals. So all the things that you mentioned. But here's the problem. We have a vast welfare state, which also draws some immigrants anyway. And on top of that, a large number of immigrants in recent years have been fleeing from chaos in central and South America. They're not coming because the US is the least bad choice for them. And so I'm wondering if, here's the question. Is there anything we could do because we want these people. We want the honest, productive, at any level of productive ability. We want them here. But we can only take so many populations. Just like an economy, populations have limits, and it looks like we are exceeding those limits now. Or close to them. Maybe not. That's arguable. I'm not an expert. But in any case, do you think there's any scope for the US government? Let's suppose it first solved the border problem by setting up more admission statements, places, making sure somehow that immigrants don't cross the Rio Grande illegally, but come to the right places and do it honestly. But on top of that, you think there's anything that us should be doing in our foreign policy? Regarding one of the big incentives I understand for people coming here in the. [00:42:30] Speaker B: First. [00:42:34] Speaker D: Know the chaos, the utter horror of life in some of these countries that are fleeing. [00:42:42] Speaker B: Yeah, a couple of things, David, really good stuff. Wow. I should call you offline and 3 hours later we'll figure it out. Stuff you raise is exactly this kind of stuff I worry about and think about a couple of things sometimes. When you said the thing about why can we not get any kind of bipartisan solution philosophically, I've always thought when you hear the phrase we need comprehensive immigration reform, I actually think one of the reasons that doesn't happen is no one thinks comprehensively anymore. David, the word comprehensive means we have to bring in a broader context, and then there's cost benefit. I don't think it's a dastardly thing. I think they're actually incapable of it. I think we're in an epistemological level, legislatively, where they're, like, remembering, didn't we do comprehensive immigration reform in 86? And actually they did it in 86. [00:43:53] Speaker D: That's where I wrote my article. [00:43:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I know, but they don't know. It was this Simpson Mazoli act or something like that. Reagan agreed to it and had to do with amnesty and everything. But, okay, that's just my first point. That's kind of like epistemological knit, that I'm not even sure they're capable anymore of seeing it in this broader context of what you and I are talking about. Namely, you don't want this false dichotomy of close the border or completely leave it open to the anarchy and frankly, the inhumanity carnage that's going on down there, including slavery and selling people into pornography. I mean, it's really just awful down there. The fact that any humanitarian would endorse that. Now, your point about the welfare state is very interesting because Milton Friedman said that one time, he said in the so. And there would be a counter to my theme that the Ellis island model was, anyone can come to me and say, richard, the Ellis island model doesn't apply anymore because Ellis island was 1890, whatever to 1920, and we were not a full fledged welfare state then. That's true. That is actually a good argument. Because if, you know, people do know when they come here what the hell they're looking for. They're not dummies to make that kind of trek, whether it's from Europe or whether it's from South America. These people are very attuned to what's going on in America, what's allowed or what's disallowed. Where can I get the benefits? I mean, some people specializes in advising them. Lawyers are down there and telling them what services they can get. So I do think that's a problem, that now we have a full fledged welfare state, unlike 1920. And then you have to think, are you coming here because you're a parasite, or are you coming here to bomb the world, the freedom center? Or are you here, as most Americans see many Americans, to do productive things and be liberated and free? And we all want that third category. So I do think it makes it difficult, because it's more difficult to see why people are here. But even when you cross borders and go through the airport, when you give them the passport, they ask you something very basic. Are you here on business or pleasure? Everyone has experienced through the check. You go through the checkpoints. Why can't we have, and I know David, you agree with this? Why can't we have checkpoints that are rational, that are we. Apparently, we spend money on everything but something which is basic to what Weber and Iron Rand said, namely border management. Put more money into it, have people processing these people. It takes five minutes to interview someone and ask them, why are you here? Who are you and why are you here? And it doesn't have to be much more than that, other than the checks you named, namely, do you have a disease? Are you a terrorist? We have technology now, right? We should be able to check the background of. Have alliances with Mexico, have alliances with Ecuador. Share your criminal databases with us so we can quickly check whether this person should come in or not. I think all those kind of things could be done. Now, here's another thing. I'm not actually for this asylum approach that says you can only come in if you're fleeing a regime that's trying to prosecute you as a political prisoner. There's a real weird bias at Ins or whatever they call it now, where they won't take you in if you're an economic migrant, like, if you're only coming in because you're poor, because I'm starving here and I want to come in. I want to come in and work in San Diego. I don't think that whole thing. That is very weird. Those people should be able to come in and shouldn't have to prove that you're fleeing. I mean, some of them are fleeing a political regime that's oppressive. This is a very crude one. David, what do you think of this one? I do agree with you that there are these waves that occur, right? Assume we have the processing. I just did a quick calculation. 1% of the american population is 3 million people. I mean, maybe you just have a policy that says we take in 3 million people a year. Now, if only 1 million apply, okay, we're fine. But if 4 million apply, we're going to have to be more scrupulous about who comes in. But that would be one approach. Now, if you look at the numbers currently, the numbers are like, 9 million came in in the past year. Wow. That's crazy. It's eight or 9 million. And under Trump, in the same three and a half year period, a half a million came in. And even under Obama, Obama deported more people than Trump did. So the change under Biden has been enormous and I think unscrupulous, but that would be one way of looking at it. It's interesting if you put, like, a cap on, but it's not a major cap. I mean, 3 million a year is a lot, but they would be fully processed. They would be known as a policy all the world around. Right. You're not saying, hey, everyone in the world come in here, but if America announced our policy, it's kind of arbitrary, but our policy is we're going to take in 1% of our population every year. And now people would be competing for. Well, I'm from Singapore and I have these talents, and I'm from Ecuador and I have these talents, and there would be waves just if there's destabilized governments elsewhere. Yeah. Some years, 5 million people want to come in. Well, we're only taking three other years, everything's fine, and only 1 million people want to come in. I think that's an understandable, semi arbitrary, but I think reasonable way of looking at it. But you would have to build this infrastructure, which apparently we don't have, of processing centers. [00:50:11] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:50:13] Speaker A: Thank you. I wanted to switch gears a little bit here to politics and just get your thoughts on the kind of factionalization within the republicans. You've got the kind of never Trumper moderates, and you've got the populace and the national conservatives. Now, there's a group called the Freedom conservatives. [00:50:40] Speaker B: Yeah. On this one. [00:50:42] Speaker A: What is that telling? [00:50:45] Speaker B: It's a good question. I think we might call it the balkanization of the conservative movement. I actually think, at first, I thought, this is no good. But the more I think about it and the more I read them, the more I think this is a good thing. The ones I can find. This is the conservative movement we're talking about. So it's either the conservatives or the Republicans, however you want to put it. There's not a complete overlap between the two. I understand that, but there's a group that's like nationalists. Close the borders, tariffs against China, keep out muslims. American manufacturing is eroding because jobs are being shipped. You do the whole nationalist thing, you understand, but the nationalism on that side includes things like pull out of NATO, pull out of the UN, pull out of the TPP. We're not going to get involved in international groups. Okay. The other one is populist. The populist idea is, which I think is very understandable, but kind of sad. The elites suck. The swamp is ruining us. Harvard and the poison ivy. I'm using their language, not mine, are leading us down the path of ruin or maybe the road to serfdom. And the people should govern. And outsiders and neophytes and those with no resume, like Trump, no political resume, I mean, a totally accomplished man, but someone who goes to Washington with like, no helpers, no helpers, no think tanks that are going to help him, the quote unquote establishment. And then lastly, the freedom, what we call the freedom conservatives, who I most like. There is a freedom caucus in Congress, by the way. The freedom conservatives are saying, you know what? We haven't over the last 20 years emphasized freedom and liberty. Enough. Duh. The fusionist idea and conservatism under Reagan and pre Reagan was bring the conservatives together with the libertarians. The conservative religionists didn't trust the libertarians. They thought the libertarians were just hedonists who just wanted drugs, sex, drugs and rock and roll. And then the libertarians would look at the conservatives and say, you guys are so religious, you're so strict, you're so puritanical. And yet Reagan fused them. It was called fusionism. The reason I think this is good is I think the conservative movement really needs to revive itself, interrogate itself, question itself, debate within. I love the debate they're going through because they're trying to figure out what their values are. Now here's what's weird. I often say to students when I teach the difference between conservatism, libertarianism, and objectivism, I say to the students, libertarianism, for all its weaknesses, has the word in it. They prize liberty, and objectivism has the word in it. They prize objectivity as well as liberty, but they think liberty should be based on objectivity. I said, the problem with conservatives is there's no principle there. What are they actually conserving? And the students can't answer it. And I'm not sure most conservatives can answer it, because I put it this way, if you're just trying to conserve or preserve something, you realize that everything's changing all the time. So when I think of a conservative, say, in 1900, and someone says to him, how about a central bank, an income tax and trust busting, the conservative would say, no. Why? Because we haven't had that before. We need to stick with what we got, status quo. But if you fast forward to the New Deal, all those things are in place. And now if you ask a conservative like Taft or whatever, he'd say, well, the central bank's okay with me and the income tax is okay with me, but don't put in Social Security and the regulatory state and sec. See, what I'm saying is that they're a moving target. You fast forward to 1965 and a conservative would say, I'm okay with everything that's been instituted up to now, but no Medicare and no Medicaid. Well, if you ask a conservative today to repeal Medicare and Medicaid, he'd say no way they're endorsing Obamacare. I hope you see what I'm saying here. I'm saying something which is very weird because conservatives are often thought of as rock ribbed, stick in the mud, principled, unmoving, reactionary people. And I think the problem actually is they're promiscuous. They'll put up with anything. They're not in the driver's seat. The foes of conservatism, whatever you want to call them, I hate to call them liberals and conservatives because they're illiberal and they're backward looking. But it's like the conservatives are only conserving whatever their foes did for the last 20 years. That's a losing proposition. Hayek said we're on a road to serfdom. I think he wrote that in 1944. David right. And my thinking is the conservative position is put in some speed bumps. We're going down the road to serfdom. We don't really have an off ramp to offer you. We don't have a capitalist freeway to go to. So the conservative mission will be slow down the race to statism. That's terrible. I think that's one of the reasons they're losing. I count them as friends in the sense of I think, you know, you love America, you love the Constitution. You think conservatism means those things. But if they mean those things, then they mean those things. Not conserving the advance of statism that you're seeing before you. By the way, last week I heard Tucker Carlton was being interviewed by Glenn Beck. Do you have two conservatives? And Tucker said something like he said, I don't think I'm that radical, Glenn. I'm just looking for a return to 1993. I remember thinking to myself, first of all, I don't know the importance of 1993. Why 1993? But that's what he said. And I thought to myself, that is a conservative. So if I had Tucker, I sit Tucker down, I'd like, well, the good thing about 1993 is the Cold War is over, but we still have paper money and we still have the welfare state and we still have Social Security. Are you endorsing all those things? He would say yes, and I would say, what are you talking about? So the only thing you're against is what? Obamacare, a couple of bad wars, the Patriot act. You see what I mean? The conservatives have this reputation of being principled and they'll stand up against a thwart history, as Buckley said. That's what I'm worried about. Objectivism can teach them so much that you can be principled and you can be pro, but you're not going to survive by just being anti communist or anti liberal or anti trans. I mean, all those things are okay, but they only go so far because you're in a defensive, truly reactionary. I mean, they're dismissed as reactionaries. Right? What are you, a reactionary? What are you against progress? What are you against the move of history? And they do seem that way, don't you think, David? [00:58:56] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, conservatives, the know from their opponents used to know they believe in me too. And I would just add me too, but not quite yet. [00:59:16] Speaker B: Yeah, don't go so fast. [00:59:19] Speaker A: That's great. [00:59:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Anyway, I wouldn't go so far as to dismiss them as, what's my phrase, Scott? I've used this phrase before. They're convertibles. Certain libertarians and certain conservatives are convertibles, not in the automobile sense, but they're reachable. They could be convinced of some of the stuff we're talking about. Here's the big thing. They know they're losing. If you go to someone and they're losing a fistfight or you go to a football team and they only field a defense and they haven't fielded an offense yet, you go to them and say you're losing. You know you're losing. I have a different game plan for you. Are you willing to listen? And the other thing I've noticed among conservatives and libertarians, and the analogy to football would be something like the coach gets up after the game and they have these press conferences, right? And the football coach says, well, we lost again. And let me tell you all the ways that the other side beat the hell out of us. They had a better run game. They had a better pass game. And the reporters are listening to this and they might be fans of the team and they're thinking, okay, you're just describing how bad things are and how you've totally missed the boat and you're losing. There's a lot of conservative commentary that's like that. There's a lot of libertarian commentary in the next week. Listen closely to both conservative and libertarian commentary and how much of it is them just describing how much they lost. And no one would put up with a coach who's like, coach, why are you still the coach? You're losing every game. Where is your offense? Why are you only fielding a defensive team? You need an offensive team. [01:01:23] Speaker A: It should be its own show. [01:01:25] Speaker B: Honestly, that's what objectivism can provide. It's like going to teams that keep losing and saying, let me tell you why you're losing. It's incomprehensible that when I say this to conservatives and libertarians, you know what they'll say? They'll say, richard, I know your views and your views are so extreme they won't win. They'll say something like, since we're kind of diluting the message to make, it can't. If we're not winning with a diluted message, we can't imagine that you would win with this purist, absolutist message. So you're right, Scott. This could be a whole nother conversation. But you see why they would push back with the idea of you don't have a better plan Salzman, because you're an extremist. [01:02:13] Speaker A: Well, I think Malay helped challenge that notion, at least to some extent. But this has been a fascinating topic. Rom, I'm sorry we ran out of time, but Richard is going to be back on Tuesday of next week on morals and markets, talking about capitalism for and against. You can register for that on atlasociety.org. And also on Wednesday, you'll be back with Stephen Hicks. Is the naturalistic fallacy a fallacy, the case of economics? So that sounds fascinating. I look forward to the two of you talking about that. Want to thank everyone who joined us and listened or participated. And we look forward to seeing you at the next one.