Ep. 412 Evaluating the SoHo Immigration Debate and Malice on Darkhorse
Adam Haman returns, this time for a 2fer. First he and Bob discuss the recent SoHo Forum debate on immigration between Dave Smith and Alex Nowrasteh. Then they discuss Michael Malice’s recent appearance on Bret Weinstein’s DarkHorse podcast to talk about egalitarianism and anarchy.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- The YouTube version of this conversation.
- The SoHo forum debate, and the Michael Malice interview.
- BMS ep 194 on Bob’s views on immigration under anarchy.
- Dave Smith on the Human Action podcast laying out his views on immigration vis-a-vis libertarian theory.
- The HamanNature substack.
- Help support the Bob Murphy Show.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
It’s kind of bizarre for Dave to insist that public schools should get to exclude heroin addicts but then later go on to make the argument that it is the taxpayers who should decide how public resources are used given that we don’t currently have anarchy.
Is Dave not aware that heroin addicts pay taxes but little kids don’t?
It is also a bit sad that Alex couldn’t catch Dave’s false dichotomy about selling off assets to China. It doesn’t matter which of those choices are preferable because those are not the only two possible options, by a long shot. What if the government simply relinquishes all control of the public resource and whoever properly homesteads it first becomes the new owner? What if the government holds totally blind auctions, so that they don’t even know who the buyer is? I’m sure Bob can think of a dozen other things they can do since this is his specialty.
It wasn’t a false dichotomy. The fact that there are lots of ways to privatize is completely besides the point. Dave was using a hypothetical scenario about privatizing a socialist economy to illustrate that the people who were expropriated to build / buy the property have a better claim to it than other private parties, like foreigners. He was trying to refute the premise that public property should be treated as unowned property, which informs some Libertarian open borders arguments.
The parents of school children pay taxes and are the ones who are interested in excluding heroine addicts. Them and basically every other tax-payer except heroine addicts and some leftists.
Though, I agree that appealing to the desires of net tax-payers is a flawed approach. It leads to absurd conclusions in a lot of cases and doesn’t give the opponents of that approach what they want. For example, urban liberal elites surely pay way more taxes than any other group, but I don’t see Hoppe et. al. conceding that their sensibilities should dictate how public property is managed any time soon. Of course, they’ll probably argue that they’re not the most significant NET tax-payers, but this involves so much counterfactual speculation about who would pay what if not for government interventions and subsidies as to not be any kind of metric at all. It’s just a conclusion in search of a justification.
Who owns the coconuts tho?
Does the Constitution give Congress the authority regulate the mailing of coconuts between states?