This is my main presentation at New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Feb. 8, 2019. Recorded on my iPhone. I’ll upload a higher quality version later, if it becomes available.
“What Libertarianism Is”, see esp. n. 25 and accompanying text, regarding tracing title, in a property dispute, back to a common author (ancestor in title).
This is my debate at New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Feb. 7, 2019—really more of a roundtable discussion of immigration policy from a libertarian perspective. The other panelist was Daniel Garza, President of the LIBRE Initiative, and the moderator was Jeremy Kaufman. Some listeners may be surprised at my pro-immigration comments.
Transcript below.
Recorded on my iPhone. I’ll upload a higher quality version later, if it becomes available.
M: … something that we’ll find out through the course of this. Speaking tonight are, on my left-hand side, depicted by the convenient net placard I have in front of me, is Stephan Kinsella. You’re not talking to me, all right. Stephan Kinsella who is a patent attorney and leading libertarian legal theorist, the founder and director of the Center of the Study of Innovative Freedom and the Libertarian Papers. He’s a former adjunct professor at the South Texas College of Law. He’s published numerous articles and books in IP law, international law, and the application of libertarian principles to legal topics. You can give a hand for him if you want.
00:00:46
[clapping]
00:00:52
On my right, your left, Daniel Garza, president of the LIBRE Initiative. I have a very lot to say about him, but he’s asked me not to say all of it. So I will say that he held a couple of important positions for the Bush administration in the early 2000s, has also done important things for the Hispanic community for Televisa and Univision and is currently, as I already said, president of the LIBRE Initiative, lives in Mission, Texas with his wife and three children. Daniel Garza.
00:01:22
[clapping]
00:01:27
Moderating this will be Jeffrey Kaufman. I don’t have a bio written for him. I’m going to let you listen to him talk about himself and then field your questions. There is – for anyone who wants to participate in this, Jeffrey will give you the opportunity to do so. There’s a microphone at the back there, so that the panelists can hear you. Just find me back there, and I will let you speak, and thank you for coming. Thank you everybody. Off to you, Jeff.
00:01:52
[clapping]
00:01:57
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Thank you. And I actually, since I see my purpose as moderator to be facilitating discussion and this has very little to do with me, I’m going to tell you nothing about myself, so we’ll just let that mystery remain. So my purpose is to facilitate these guys talking. This will – if I’m doing my job right, this will be the longest I talk in sequence for the entire night. I do my job to be making sure that they’re answering the questions that are asked. I am going to be trying to find areas of disagreement, so if there’s too much consensus, I’ll hopefully try to rile them up a little bit, and my job is to ask hard questions. There will also be, depending on how good my questions go, either some or a substantial amount of Q&A time from the audience.
00:02:37
So if you – as you’re listening to this, if you have questions, make a mental note of them, and there will be time to ask them at the end. That said, this – while this is a debate, it is not going to be a debate with a fixed resolution, so it’s going to be somewhat of a discussion aspect, although we will be seeking to find the areas of disagreement between our two speakers.
00:03:02
So what I want to start with actually – oh, sorry. One more premise. It’s – when we have these debates, a common tension in libertarian communities is the debate between the pragmatics of what we’re doing today, what we ought to do today in the world we live in today, and sort of what’s compatible with libertarian theory and anarcho-capitalist utopia or whatever you think the world ought to be. And so it’s important both with our speakers when we’re asking questions if you could differentiate between what we think about what should be done today, or are we talking about what should be – how things should be in our ideal world. So I’m going to start just by asking our speakers to just lay out your position on open borders, and we’re going to start with open borders in the world today. So please lay out your position for open borders in the world today, for or against. And we’ll start with Daniel.
00:04:01
DANIEL GARZA: So at the LIBRE Initiative, we take a very pragmatic actually approach to immigration given the realities of the world, given the realities of sometimes the overt statism that we live under. It’s – I think it’s essential to look at the immigration debate in three components. It has to do with family, integration of family and keeping the cohesiveness of families, and it has to do with humanitarian issues that are involved in the integration issues.
00:04:38
In that entire space, there are needs I think that are being driven or being imposed upon us that are humanitarian, and that is, I think, an important factor that can never be lost in this whole debate, things like refugees, people fleeing, economic conditions, political conditions, sometimes things that people have to endure because of – in the criminal space or criminal dimension I think is something that is tragic, and I think America has to be considerate of that.
00:05:19
And then for, I would say, if not most important, it’s probably critical is market demand like for market forces, to address market forces, to their – we believe in sort of a market-based immigration approach, so not so much open borders as much as I think it has to be – and I’m not talking about this sort of [indiscernible_00:05:52] where we decide the quota of – where the market demand is now. But what I’m talking about – and [indiscernible_00:06:02] really important. This whole discussion lately currently that we’re having on merit-based, switching [indiscernible_00:06:09] forward to merit-based. I have issues with that as a person who believes strongly in individual freedom and spontaneous border. Over 200 million immigrants have come to America in – through the arc of history, more than 200 million, and they made America strong, and they made America rich.
00:06:30
W: They made it great one might say.
00:06:32
DANIEL GARZA: I’m sorry?
00:06:33
W: I said it made it great one might say.
00:06:35
DANIEL GARZA: It made it great. Absolutely it did. Immigrants have made America great, and so what was important – an important part of the discussion is immigrants have always known how to fill market demand. They developed any skills that they needed to fill market demand or leverage their own talents, their vast capacities to fill market demand. And central planners didn’t have to tell us how many engineers we needed or how many doctors or mathematicians or whatever, and so I resist that.
00:07:11
So I’m open borders in the sense that I don’t think we should categorize the kind of immigrants that come in. Immigrants are creating wealth for themselves and wealth for Americans, always have, always will. They complement the American labor force, which is the greatest labor force in the world as far as I’m concerned. And I think there’s – that we should honor that with the kind of immigration policies that we have. So I guess what I’m saying is a smart, flexible system that accommodates for flows of – future flows of immigrants that – where we address family connections, humanitarian issues, and then also in market demand, which is smart, smart policy.
00:08:07
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Thank you, Daniel. And Stephan, your position on open borders in the world today [indiscernible_00:08:14].
00:08:15
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Right. So from my point of view, I think the consistent libertarian is a libertarian because we’re against aggression, going back to basics, which means that if you’re consistent, you’re against the state because the state is the agency of institutionalized aggression. So, in other words, you have to be an anarchist libertarian to be a real libertarian, which is what I am, so that’s how I think about these issues.
00:08:48
So when these issues arise, we live in a non-free society. We live in a state-dominated society. So our only question is it’s either one of theory or it’s one of practice. What would the world look like in a free society? And what policies should we support now by the government, which is not libertarian and can’t be libertarian? Everything the state does is a criminal act, so in a sense we real libertarians oppose everything the state does. But the question comes down to what policy should be support now?
00:09:26
But we have to first recognize that that policy is not the ultimate policy because the ultimate policy is for the state to commit suicide or whatever the word in Latin would be for the state to kill itself, to disband. Anything they do short of that is not going to be the optimal solution. Given that the state exists, there will be losers of any state policy.
00:09:51
And this is one thing I think that open borders advocates, which I think I will come around to arguing for in a sense, but open borders advocates among libertarians don’t want to admit this. They don’t want to admit that there’s really a choice, that we’re libertarians. We’re against the state. We’re against aggression against individual people. Therefore, we have to be for open borders. But they don’t want to admit that we live in a second-best world where the government is there, and the government will have a policy, and that policy will – whatever that policy is will harm some people.
00:10:27
So the question is what should the policy be? What would the world look like in a free society? In a free society, the question of immigration would make no sense. There would be no states. There would be no political borders, and everything would be done privately. Everyone who moved, we do so by invitation from an owner or by permission of the owner of a road or something like that. They wouldn’t have the right to vote. They wouldn’t have affirmative action. They wouldn’t have civil liberties such as anti-discrimination rights. They wouldn’t have welfare to apply to. These issues would just disappear. So immigration wouldn’t make sense in a free society, but we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about what our current government should do. In my view, ultimately the question comes down to what can libertarians in their heart favor, and it’s really difficult.
00:11:20
And this is an issue I struggle with, and I’ve written on both sides of this issue. The reason it’s difficult is because we have a state, and the state causes victims and harms people. It makes us choose. Now, in the end, what can we do? Choose something that will be better for liberty on a pragmatic basis, or choose something that’s better for human welfare? In today’s society, we’ve had closed borders among all the major nations of the world to some degree, not closed but not totally open. If we open them up now, there would be a rush of people going to the rich countries taking advantage of affirmative action laws, anti-discrimination law, welfare rights, and so on.
00:12:04
And in the US especially, given the history of slavery, the 14th amendment, and birthright citizenship, they or at least their children would soon have the right to vote, and so then they become part of the polity, so that would affect the political character. The entire motivation behind the Free State Project here in New Hampshire is the idea that it matters who lives in an area and who has political influence. It matters who votes in today’s world. So the entire idea of a free state project is that if we get a critical mass in a certain polity, they can have an effect, and that, I think, is probably true.
00:12:42
But that implies that people immigrating have an effect. If it is the case that immigrants would tend to vote for socialism or different types of policies that we favor, and they have a certain critical mass, it would result or it could – you could believe it could result in substantially less liberty. I’m not saying I’m a consequentialist or that we have to be consequentialists, but consequentialism and the consequences of the laws that we favor have to matter. We’re in favor of all of these principles that we favor because of the consequences of liberty.
00:13:19
If we believe that if Japan or Israel or Switzerland tomorrow lowered their barriers completely, I think we all have an idea that they would be overrun very quickly by lots of outsiders, and things would change very quickly. And those societies where they’re not libertarian utopias, they are relatively liberal and open societies compared to the bottom half of the world or the past. So let’s say the Swiss identity or the Japanese identity are the way of life or freedom itself was wiped out within a generation or two because of mass immigration.
00:13:59
Would we be in favor of it even then, even though that was the right thing to do? I’m not so sure. The problem as a libertarian is we have to recognize that the federal government in America is the steward of the government behind, in a sense, the greatest nation on the Earth. But it’s also the greatest, the most evil, powerful government that’s ever existed because it’s parasitical upon the wealth that the free market in this country produces.
00:14:29
It’s hard to say that any libertarian with a good heart can support the INS. In the end, if forced to choose, I don’t want to lose liberty in this country. I don’t want something to happen that will cause us in 10, 20, 30, 40 years to have lost the liberty that we have and the tenuous grasp on it that we have and the potential that we have.
00:14:57
But in the end, we also can’t support the INS. So I’m left with an uneasy sort of conclusion. I can never support the INS, the goons of the federal government. You just can’t do it. On the other hand, you can make a theoretical case, which we maybe can get to if we have time, for how to analyze this situation and how to view that the best second-best policy that we can hope for, for a state like we have now would be to do something similar to what the effective rulers in a free society would do to try to minimize the harm done to us. So that would be the policy that I would say they should adopt. And to be honest, from having read Mr. Garza’s policies on his website, they seem pretty reasonable.
00:15:48
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: No, we need to disagree. I’m going to – if you have something [indiscernible_00:15:56].
00:15:57
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, I’m not sure if he agrees with me on patent and copyright law, so if we want to get into that, we can.
00:16:03
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: I think Stephan basically gave – so first I actually was going to introduce – but we have a lot of questions. I want to get to questions from the audience. Maybe just sort of tap on the table if I want you to kind of get to the end because we do only have already only 40 more minutes. Stephan kind of answered both of my liberty questions at once, so if you have something more to add I’ll let you, but I’d like to hear from Daniel on if you’re designing the government from scratch, whether you might not be a fully anarcho-capitalist libertarian that Stephan is. Maybe you’re a minarchist. Maybe you believe in a larger state than that. What does immigration look like for you in that society?
00:16:36
DANIEL GARZA: So the primary purpose of the state is to defend its people from foreign aggression. And so let me just say that that’s important because what it does is it defends culture. It’s defends your ways, your principles, your ideas, which is what the Spartans did against the Persians. They defended their people, their ideas, their culture. And what I mean by that is we need to take a step back even further.
00:17:04
In the Americas, I think the greatest irony is, for thousands of years, the Iroquois, the Cherokee, the Seminole, and Maya and Azteca, Inca [indiscernible_00:17:16] all roamed the Americas for thousands of years freely. And at the end, of course, you had Christopher Columbus and [indiscernible_00:17:24] in the Americas, and the non-indigenous came and said to the indigenous here are borders. You stay there. And today, mainly – I think one of the cruelest ironies, as I already said, is that mostly the non-indigenous, for leisure, for business, for whatever they want, get to travel the world.
00:17:44
And mostly it’s the indigenous who are told to – or whose movements are restricted. And it was that way of life that was taken from them. That culture was taken from them where they were told now you have to adapt to a new way of the world order. And the world order that we established can be changed tomorrow here in, I think – if we don’t give it thought and consideration.
00:18:17
My idea is, when it comes to immigration as Americans, we decide who comes into America. And the people that we decide who should come into America are those who are going to be industrious, those who are going to benefit America, those who come to work hard, those who come to generate wealth for themselves and wealth for others just like the 200 million immigrants who have come in the past to America have done so. And we keep out those who would exploit Americans or other immigrants, who would take advantage of our system. And that, I think, is a smart immigration policy that’s pragmatic and practical but also defends our principles or preserves our principles and our ideas or at least allows us to move towards a more libertarian nation.
00:19:09
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Thank you. So I’ll pose a question to both of you. One idea that proponents of open borders support today is something called keyhole solutions. And keyhole solutions is the idea that we can allow people to come here, but we don’t have to grant them the full rights that citizens have. So an extreme version of this and less-extreme versions might look something like all immigrants are welcome. Immigrants aren’t allowed to vote. Their children aren’t allowed to vote. They’re not allowed any welfare programs.
00:19:42
They’re not allowed any state benefits whatsoever. If they want to still come here, they would be welcome to do so, and so some of the – a proponent of open borders today, they might advocate for something like this. And this will be a question to both of you, which is how do you guys feel about a proposal like that or something along those lines? It doesn’t have to be as extreme as the one that I said. Sometimes it’s 10 years or other things like that. Who went first last time? We’ll go with – I’ll just keep bouncing. So Daniel can go [indiscernible_00:20:13].
00:20:14
DANIEL GARZA: I actually loathe that idea. I don’t want to give it too much space. Maybe there are areas where maybe that’s a necessity, people who have work visas with a specialized skill who are temporary by nature come in to do some work maybe for a two- three- four- five-year project. I can see that to accommodate for something like that, but to have it as a long-term, viable solution no, because what we would create is a two-tiered society, the two – I mean a second-class type of resident who – people who come to America or who immigrate to America should really be of the mindset to become American in our values and our principles.
00:21:04
And I think what would happen is when you start separating two kinds of categories, you really do stunt the assimilation process, and in fact, maybe even create conclaves of people very different from us as E. Pluribus Unum—out of many, one. Out of many factions I guess is – what should be our new motto. So I would reject that with the exception of temporary work.
00:21:43
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: So it would seem that you’re concerns then are not purely economic [indiscernible_00:21:46] previous answers have leaned on the productivity, which would be applied when we’re thinking about the costs to the state and things like that. This is now more of a cultural [indiscernible_00:21:57].
00:21:58
DANIEL GARZA: But it’s also – I mean it’s always economic, right? So, for example, when an immigrant learns English in America, they will quadruple their lifetime salaries according to some states. That’s transformative, but that’s also an assimilation that begins to take place where Americans who speak English who have a certain mindset and principles and values and culture, then also are more accepting of others who are more like them in principles and – and if they’re not, then you lose out on economic things. I mean it always comes down to economics.
00:22:28
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Suppose we derive a test or a standard, so it’s not a year. It’s not a permanent thing. It’s once they demonstrate that they’ve adopted the values that you support, is that something that…
00:22:40
DANIEL GARZA: That’s fine. I mean that’s fine. I think – my grandfather came in under the Bracero Program in World War II. When Americans were off to foreign battlefields defending the country, we needed workers in the fields, in the orchards. And my grandfather came as a Bracero, temporary, and continued this pattern of circularity where his would come in and work and then return to his country of origin, Mexico [indiscernible_00:23:07] also my parents are originally from. But this was a temporary work program that allowed for this kind of circularity. I mean I can see that because my grandfather at the time never intended to be fully American, never intended to be fully American. If somebody comes with the intent to be American, then I don’t think we should have that kind of system.
00:23:31
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Thank you. And Stephan, common on keyhole solutions for an open border.
00:23:34
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, I share Mr. Garza’s concerns about having a second tier of society where you have people of different liberties and status, and that’s not America, and that is not stable. I’m skeptical as an anarchist, of course, of the idea that the primary purpose of the state is to protect us. I think the primary purpose of the state is to perpetuate its own power, and I would rather invite immigrants to come here to do productive work than to go become soldiers in our destructive wars, and I don’t think World War II was to defend us either, but that’s a secondary issue.
00:24:12
Look, I think that one problem is we have the 14th amendment, which is the result of slavery, which we shouldn’t have had in the first place. And so you couldn’t even have legally I believe a policy where someone can come here and not have the right to vote because that becomes untenable after a while, and eventually they have children, and they have the right to vote. They become citizens. So any people that come here, they’re going to become productive members of society. They’re going to become part citizens in America at least anyway. I think the most productive way to look at it is to imagine what are the harms done by policies in either way.
00:24:51
When the government prohibits immigration as we do now, there are people coming here that want to work, and there are companies that want to employ people, high-tech workers, etc., and they can’t do it. I think all those people should be allowed because they’re economically valuable, and most of the arguments against immigration by Donald Trump and the idiot Republicans are based upon this kind of economic protectionism. I’m surprised the Democrats don’t loudly agree with them because they’re even stupider in economics than the Republicans even are if that’s possible.
00:25:24
So I actually agree with the idea that, look, if anyone wants to come here and they have some kind of economic potential, some kind of job lined up, let them come. They’re going to do good. The problem as I see it is that Americans want to say – and even libertarians want to say things like, well, as long as we deny the right to welfare or the right to vote or the right to X, Y, and Z government policies to these immigrants, then they can come. Well, first of all, that’s not realistic. We know that the democrats are never going to allow that. Everyone is going to have to come in on the same terms.
00:25:57
And it’s almost a little bit – it has a whiff of this alt-right kind of racialist perspective of some of these European groups now where they say things like, well, if you have a smaller, more racially similar society like Denmark or Sweden or something, then they can have a welfare state as long as they don’t allow too many immigrants in. So they’re basically national socialists. They want to keep socialism alive. I mean my goal is not to keep socialism alive. I don’t think it’s possible to preserve the kind of rickety version of socialism that we have in the US and keep welfare and social security and all these programs going for Americans and deny it to new immigrants.
00:26:46
It’s not feasible anyway, and what’s the point? Why do you want to preserve this in the first place? It is true that some immigrants that come here become a burden because of the public schools, because of the anti-discrimination laws, because of the welfare laws. But the solution is to get rid of those laws. Instead of saying that we can’t allow immigrants because of our welfare system that we want to preserve – I mean we’re libertarians. We don’t want to preserve this welfare system, so let’s not say let’s have a second-tier class of citizens come in who just can’t get all these things.
00:27:25
I mean if these things are a problem to give them to immigrants, why do we give them to Americans? So we need to get rid of anti-discrimination law, affirmative action, even the right to vote in many cases. And them immigrants would do nothing but contribute economically to the country and culturally, and there would be almost no objection to them, so that would be my solution.
00:27:49
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Thank you. I think this question is primarily for Stephan because he’s our only even theoretical supporter of open borders on this panel, although you’re certainly welcome to respond. So my question for Stephan would be in your – we’ve reached your anarcho-cap [indiscernible_00:28:07] anarcho-capitalist. It’s anarchy, right? There’s no state. Is it ever possible, are there scenarios in which immigration would come with externalities that aren’t properly considered? So if you’re generally a libertarian, you’re a believer in market, market forces. Market forces work when the price of something incorporates for cost. Is it possible that certain immigration standards could come with externalities that would still not make open borders possible?
00:28:38
STEPHAN KINSELLA: And this is when it helps to have principles and to be an actual libertarian, to believe in property rights and justice. This is why Ayn Rand and some of the earlier libertarians – their main arguments against proposals like the minimum wage or antitrust law – the main argument was not the Milton Friedman-type, namby-pamby argument that it’s really hard for merchants to collude together. So we don’t really need antitrust laws, or minimum wage laws don’t really do any good. I mean the hardcore principled libertarian argument is that there are rights.
00:29:16
Two businessmen have a right to collude and set prices, yes. Accept it. That’s the world. Yeah, it’s unlikely. Minimum wage laws – people have the right to offer to pay you a penny an hour if you want. In fact, a lot of congressional interns work for zero, which, as far as I know, is less than minimum wage. And during the government shutdown, if I understand it, a lot of people were not being paid minimum wage, so I don’t know why the federal government wasn’t in trouble for that. But the point is we have to stand on principle. So it’s not always about the predictions of the way these things will turn out. I think they will happen to turn out right because I think that consequentialism in a principled case for liberty, they dovetail. They support each other.
00:29:59
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: So as I said, it’s my job to push back here. There’s no ends to this, right? So if you’re – if known rapists or child molesters or murderers want to move next door to you, if the entirety of the Sinaloa Cartel wants to set up shop next door to your house, there’s no externalities imposed on you. You have no rights to technically…
00:30:20
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Right. So the reason I mentioned that preamble was because the externalities question is sort of a Chicago-type question. It’s about this idea of public failure or market failure, and when there are externalities and people do things that impose costs on other people that are not being properly internalized by the free market, that we have an argument for the state to step in, which is the sort of Richard Epstein argument for a limited government or…
00:30:47
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Suppose it’s not about the state. It’s about your moral right as an individual. Do you have a right to [indiscernible_00:30:52]?
00:30:53
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So I think that – so in my view, the concept of externalities is almost incoherent and is never a justification for aggression. So the example you gave of these drug cartels is there wouldn’t be drug cartels in the first place if not for the United States federal government and our drug laws and our treaties imposed on the rest of the world.
00:31:11
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: [indiscernible_00:31:11] hypothetical that I came up with.
00:31:14
STEPHAN KINSELLA: It’s hard to come up with…
00:31:15
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Terrible people still exist in a state-less society. I don’t think that’s your position that terrible people won’t exist.
00:31:20
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Right. So – but that means that what you’re saying is that the risk of living with other human beings on the Earth sometimes comes with bad things, sometimes comes with good things. And if you’re going to call that an externality and if you want to say that will there ever be crime committed by an immigrant? Yes, there will be just like there will be with other humans. I just don’t see a libertarian distinction among these classes of people. They’re all individuals with the same human rights, and I think we should ultimately be libertarians, not Americans.
00:31:49
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: I’m going to start taking some audience questions [indiscernible_00:31:52] but do you have any comments on that? I think it’s a little non-central to your position, but I’m certainly welcome to.
00:32:00
DANIAL GARZA: Well, I mean [indiscernible_00:32:01] some discussion about the welfare issue and the [indiscernible_00:32:04] and look, I don’t know of any immigrant, and I come from an immigrant family and immigrant families who looked at America and said, yeah, I’ve got to get a piece of that welfare system. Whether you had it or you didn’t or Obamacare or not Obamacare, if you kept all that stuff away from immigrants, actually they would thrive in America, and they have.
00:32:29
I talked about the history of American immigrants, and immigration has been good for America. Obviously, our system is not, but immigration has been good for America. My parents came over when they married to California as farm workers, and they would follow crop seasons from California to Nebraska to the state of Washington. They didn’t know English. They didn’t have a driver’s license. They didn’t have a high school diploma, and they didn’t have Obamacare and [indiscernible_00:32:57].
00:32:58
And yet they thrived, and yet they were able to fly. Why did they? Because of our free-market system that allows for that kind of freedom of movement, freedom of – to sell your labor to whoever wants to buy your labor, to save, to accumulate capital, take that capital and then invest it in a business and take risks, fail, and then make it. That’s exactly what my parents did. Now, we can accelerate that process for a lot of immigrants when they move into America, take these basic-skill jobs and then move on and up quickly.
00:33:30
My parents worked in the fields too hard and too long. And in fact [indiscernible_00:33:36] to reduce that time. But still, the point is if people in their position could amass wealth in America and then their child can go and work in the White House, not that that is the sign of success to work for the state, my libertarian friend over here. But it is something to behold, to have in one generation you could – your son could be in the most powerful offices in the world. And it’s a testament to this country and our free-market system and how you can generate wealth. So I’m not afraid of these externalities. I’m not afraid of removing this or adding that. Immigrants are going to do well, always have.
00:34:17
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Thank you. I know we’ve got a couple of individuals here who are really dying to ask a question, so we’re going to get into some audience questions.
00:34:25
JUAN: Okay. Hello everyone. I’m Juan [indiscernible_00:34:29] from South America, libertarian. I’m pretty inspired by [indiscernible_00:34:35] Murray Rothbard but also Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s contribution to libertarianism. And let me put here a point that I’m more pro-closed borders than Stephan Kinsella and even as a Latin American. Why is that? That’s [indiscernible_00:34:55] right? So here’s the thing. My sister married a Norwegian guy, a nurse, and she went through these two-or-three-year process of adapting to the culture because, let me tell you [indiscernible_00:35:11] the streets are dirty. The bus stops are dirty. People don’t treat each other very elegantly so to speak because they are always in a rush or whatever, but the streets are dirty.
00:35:24
People are not punctual. People are not worried about accidents overall. I’m not whatever verb you want to use on my culture so to speak. But let me say this. In Latin America, we have been isolated 10,000 years from the rest of the world of exchanges and commerce and all those things we [indiscernible_00:35:51] which is my point. And at least 500 years from the Spanish site, so the thing is I truly consider, and this puts some real contradictory as a South American, that America should have closed borders and allow people little by little so they can adapt to western values.
00:36:20
Why is it that migrants did so great things over the last decades in the US? Because the migrants that usually came were not after the welfare state benefits, political correctness, equality in the bad sense that you get equal treatment under inequal merit. So I truly believe that you should have a period of adaptation. Of course, that could – it could harm me or benefit me. I don’t really care. But I truly see America as a very exceptional experiment of liberty in [indiscernible_00:37:04].
00:37:05
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: What question do you have?
00:37:06
JUAN: And my question to both [indiscernible_00:37:07] and especially Stephan Kinsella is why not present this [indiscernible_00:37:14] case for closed borders where you actually choose for people that have gone through this very – I don’t know how – let’s just introduce this term [indiscernible_00:37:28] my question, cultural capital prerequisites so that people can come here and actually add, as immigrants of old used to do when they entrepreneurial people came. Now, you will have hordes of people just making a mess of this, and trust me, it will be a mess.
00:37:47
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Let me just answer quickly, and Daniel can have whatever comments he wants. Look, the bottom line is things would improve in my view if we did a few things. Number one, we increase the number – the quotas that people can come here. The guest worker program would be a good idea for seasonal workers. If we started selecting for economic merit in the sense of people that want to come here and do something economically productive. I’m in favor of all that. That would be an improvement because it would reduce the harm done by both of the alternative policies that we have now. Number one, it would reduce the forced integration aspect that Hoppe talks about because if you have people coming for an actual job, they’re not coming to just parasite off the rest of us.
00:38:36
And on the other hand, if people wanted to bring people over as guests or invited workers, they could do that, so it would reduce the forced exclusion aspect of the harm that Hoppe points out. So I would be in favor of expanding the numbers and making them more merit-oriented so that you could say the quality is better. I know exactly how you’d do it, and the problem is that, as Mr. Garza pointed out, we want to have industrious people.
00:39:02
But the real problem is a political problem. The problem is that people that make these standards are politicians who are not industrious people. These are the parasites that rise to the top of society, and they are not free-market-oriented. They are not libertarian, and it’s hard to believe and to expect them to adopt policies that will achieve this. But if they did, I think it would be an improvement.
00:39:28
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Daniel?
00:39:30
DANIEL GARZA: I agree. The IRCA, the Immigration Reform and Control Act that Ronald Reagan advanced absorbed the three million that at the time were here illegally or without authorization. But it didn’t allow for future flows of immigrants, and even just this week during the State of the Union speech, Donald Trump said that he wants to expand our immigration numbers because of the labor demand. So you can see he sees benefit. Now, obviously he doesn’t want to expand on the humanitarian side and the family unification side.
00:40:01
But even he sees that we should expand. Why? Because in restricting legal immigration, then we induce more illegal immigration, and that’s not good for America. I think what has been good again is – has been absorbing the flows of immigrants and those who really want to come to America and be a part and be American. I think that that’s been critical. Now, I would be for sort of a guest worker program as long as it didn’t shut the door to permanence if somebody wanted to pull that trigger, but to keep somebody in a temporary worker program and that’s where you’ll stay, I find unacceptable. But to this gentleman’s point…
00:40:51
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Can you elaborate on why that’s unacceptable?
00:40:54
DANIAL GARZA: On the temporary guest worker program? Because again, you’re creating a two-tiered society. You’re creating two classes of people in America, one citizen that’s fully invested and that takes ownership of America who has a franchise and agency, and one who doesn’t.
00:41:08
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Is that bad for the first class of American citizens or is it [indiscernible_00:41:12]?
00:41:13
DANIEL GARZA: It’s bad for everybody. It’s bad for the entire society. It’s bad for the children. It causes a stigma on them. And people – there’s also, I think, a – I guess you’re treated as a [indiscernible_00:41:28] lesser guy in a sense. And that’s – that can never be good to the psychosis of the person or the ethos of the person. There has to be – look, I – we criminalize everything, and there is an over-criminalization that takes place. And now, I understand that to have security at the border, we need to criminalize the issue of who comes in and who doesn’t, and that [indiscernible_00:41:55]. We even call people illegals as if humanity can be illegal. I find that offensive actually, and I don’t think any human is illegal.
00:42:05
In the 1920s, we passed a law. It was prohibition. And we prohibited the production, the consumption, and the distribution of alcohol. It was a felony, and for want of a beer, Americans were arrested and thrown in jail for want of a beer. And so it turns out it was a bad law, and we changed that law. Here, for want of opportunity, we want to criminalize the people coming and going, for want of opportunity because that’s what they’re coming to America for. They want to contribute. They want a better life for themselves and for their children. They want a shot. And so look, I think we should look for ways to absorb folks who want to do good, who want to create wealth as opposed to criminalizing them.
00:42:56
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: All right, I’m going to take a question from the audience.
00:43:00
M: All right. Some people have invoked an anarcho vision of immigration in which there are no borders. There’s free movement. Anyone can live anywhere. And I want to call into question, based on the ideas of Robert Nozick, is it not the case that in an anarcho society, neighbors would gather together? Neighbors would form associations. They would establish sort of boundaries and levels of requirements for participation in a community.
00:43:31
And then, in establishing that, that would essentially be our immigration law, but in a competitive landscape. So I guess what my question is does a strictly rights-based analysis apply here when the alternative would create a similar system, and should we really be asking the questions that the people in those associations would be asking to include our society and how to immigrate from it?
00:44:04
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I think I understand the question. Let me condense as quickly as possible, and if people want to read up further. Look, your question basic – the idea is this. We have an idea of government distortion in place right now that harms people. What do we do about that? What policies should we have? What should we be moving towards? We have to have an ideal in mind. This is why minarchists and anarchists differ on these things.
00:44:31
In a free society, in a private-law society, as Hoppe calls it, in an anarchist society, and by the way, Nozick was not an anarchist of course. Nozick was a statist. His whole book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, is an argument in defense of the state. It’s a completely flawed argument, but even real anarchists, unlike Nozick, we accept that there will be private property regimes and agreements and contracts and customs. And there would not be totally free movement of people. That’s why the idea like of Hoppe was to say you have anarchy. You have monarchy and democracy, and this idea we have that that was a movement towards prosperity or an improvement in society is not necessarily true, that the move from monarchy to democracy was worse in some ways.
00:45:20
And so the whole idea is that if we want to model what we should be moving towards, maybe the way that a monarchic society would operate is closer to a free society than the democratic society would be. This is how these arguments go. So the whole idea I believe is that the policies that we should adopt would be those that would reduce what I call forced immigration, which is the idea that anyone can move anywhere, be next to each other. They can use public roads, which is public infrastructure paid for by taxpayers. There can’t be any discrimination.
00:45:56
Look, I’m not in favor personally. I’m a cosmopolitan. I’m a libertarian. I’m an individualist, citizen of the world, Montessori, blah, blah, blah. But people do segregate different ways. This is how life works. And if people want to segregate, you better let them do it instead of making it illegal. The government is in no place to do that. So the policy that the government should adopt should be one that does not try to force people to live with each other if they don’t want to.
00:46:24
But it allows free movement of people, and by and large, when people want to hire people to work on their lawns or to work in their factories or to be neighbors in their communities and buy their real estate, these are voluntary transactions. And ultimately, I think a cosmopolitan, individualist attitude will prevail over old-world, old-fashioned kind of racialism and bigotry and segregationism. But to the extent people want to pay for that, they’ve got the right to do it.
00:46:52
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: And Daniel.
00:46:53
DANIEL GARZA: [indiscernible_00:46:55] I’ll repeat [indiscernible_00:46:56] like the gentleman was saying very much in that same spirit. Look, our forefathers, our brothers and sisters and grandfathers and mothers died in foreign battlefields to defend the principle of this country, which is to be a free country, free people, a voluntary exchange to have freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of thought. That we defend those principles to this day I think is important, and if the state does exist, it exists to protect those freedoms and the people who believe in those freedoms. And so if anybody would subvert those, would be an enemy to those values and those principles, I would question their entry into America.
00:47:43
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: I’m going to reserve – use my moderator privilege for the last question, but I don’t think we’re there yet. So I think we can take at least one more audience question.
00:47:52
W: So the question that leads to tribalism, natural people just naturally being tribal animals and the – also with respect to key differences among different groups, and this idea that the indigenous people of any continent really were just roaming freely until Europeans got there. Well, they were fighting with each other before the Europeans got there, and the Europeans brought ideas. So the first – I mean the first voluntarism really [indiscernible_00:48:34] western idea, and I think maybe [indiscernible_00:48:41] should assimilate, but they’re not, and they don’t.
00:48:46
They [indiscernible_00:48:47] from the border, the Mexican border [indiscernible_00:48:49]. I was born there. And they – well, they drive around with flags in their cars. There’s flags. They’re not American flags, flags of other countries, South American countries. And, of course, immigration [indiscernible_00:49:10] as free as anything, and I migrated to New Hampshire. But given the current reality of my hometown in my home state of Arizona and see what’s going on down there, statistically Latinos vote to the left and…
00:49:30
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: I think we’ve got the question, so I think this is primarily for Daniel, which is are – well, they’re not assimilating. You’ve emphasized that assimilation is very important, and the claim or question here is, well, either how can we enforce that or if we’re doing it now, it doesn’t seem like we are.
00:49:51
DANIEL GARZA: Well, you do the hard work. In Texas, we have 30 million residents, 10 million of which are Hispanic. In California, you have exactly the same percentage of Latinos in California. Yet, in Texas, every state [indiscernible_00:50:12] elected official is a Republican, the governor, the lieutenant government, the – I mean all of those. In California, every single one is Democrat. So there’s two different things going on, two dynamics happening in two very big states where half of the Latinos live. And basically is that in Texas they do the hard work. They connect. They – I’ll just – not that this is a – I’m getting into politics here, but quickly because I have to dispel this they’re-not-assimilating thing.
00:50:50
The Latino vote is not baked into the left. If it is anywhere, it’s because one side has allowed it to. In Colorado, Michael Bennett won the Latino vote, 90% of the Latino vote, and 85% of President Barack Obama in his reelection, yet Cory Gardner decided that he wasn’t going to take that vote for granted, and he went and did the hard work and went into the churches, went into the chambers of commerce, and met with Latinos where Latinos were at, earned their vote, and he got 45% of the Latino votes in a state that had just voted 90% for a Democrat. So it’s not baked in, but it requires hard work, and it requires connection.
00:51:35
Now, it also requires that the Latino vote feel a sense of ownership in America, and if we’re going to [indiscernible_00:51:41] with immigration, they probably never will, and that’s a problem. So what we do at the LIBRE Initiative is actually work with the Latino community to engage them on public policy, on issues that are impacting them, work from a libertarian point of view. Now, a more pragmatic libertarian point of view as opposed to an anarchist point of view, which is – anyway, so – but it’s important that you go to where Latinos are at. We’re not going to hurt you. You just have to [indiscernible_00:52:17].
00:52:19
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Thank you. Stephan has kindly skipped an answer to this question, and so I’m just going to give my final question, which is many of us here are [indiscernible_00:52:33], so we do vote. And so let’s talk about pragmatically, if we want to move the world in a more libertarian society today, a freer society today, we’re probably not going to get exactly what we want. What can we get realistically?
00:52:53
DANIEL GARZA: So, for example, we have a current debate that’s happening right now. The president is asking for $5.7 billion for infrastructure and border security measures that will enhance border secure. And the left has a – presumably a priority, which is the DACA community, 700,000 kids, and our argument is we can solve both by actually leveraging one against the other. Why would we go ahead and do a permanent solution for the DACA community with a preferred line path to citizenship and the president gets what he’s asking for?
00:53:25
But does that include the wall somebody will ask? Look, we’re opposed to a wall because we feel that there are other things that we can do. I mean there’s enough wall already along the border. We need to handle migration. We need [indiscernible_00:53:35], a bunch of reasons we’re opposed to the wall. But we’re willing to be pragmatic, to answer your question, on this issue and say, yes, give the president what he’s asking for, which would include some infrastructure in order for us to get this long-term solution and get on with the business of fully assimilating 700,000 kids in America.
00:53:53
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: And Stephan, comment on what’s pragmatically achievable today.
00:53:58
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay, quickly.
00:54:00
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: It’s hot.
00:54:01
STEPHAN KINSELLA: As opposed to comparing anarchy to pragmatism, I mean I think anarchy is pragmatic. The idea that the government can get anything good done is what’s not pragmatic, but that’s my anarchist tendencies. The wall – I mean the wall seems practical in some ways, but the wall would require not only taxation, which I oppose. I don’t want to pay my fair share of that. But it requires theft, eminent domain of thousands of acres of private property. And I don’t even know if it will work because a wall would be on American soil. It can’t be right on the border because that’s not possible because of the river.
00:54:39
So it would be on American soil, so if some of these immigrants cross over the river and they get close to the wall, they’re still on American soil, so then the laws kick in. The whole thing is pointless. As for pragmatism, I believe that the way to achieve liberty is for us to keep evolving towards greater wealth per person, which requires more technology and more liberty and more people because we have the division of labor. And so the only way to achieve liberty in the long run is for us to be wealthy enough that the state becomes irrelevant.
00:55:14
So pragmatically, I think anything that increases liberty and wealth is going to achieve more liberty, and I think immigration, despite some of the flaws given the way the government controls it, gives us more division of labor and more people, more human capital. So I think the way is to let more people come into the country that will do something productive and make us bigger and stronger and freer in the long run.
00:55:41
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: All right, thank you. We’re going to end it here. We’re basically out of time, so a round of applause for our speakers coming [indiscernible_00:55:48]. If you want to plug any – check out the webpage. If someone is very interested in the LIBRE Institute, the next step is to.
00:56:01
DANIEL GARZA: Sure; www.belibre.org, B-E-L-I-B-R-E dot org, or go to Facebook where we have a million followers almost, the LIBRE Initiative, and then on Twitter as well, LIBRE Initiative.
00:56:14
JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Thank you, and Stephan, is there anything that you would like the audience to do in terms of keeping up with your writings or ideas?
00:56:19
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Just my name is all you need. Thanks.
I appeared recently on Peter Mac’s show for the first time in several years. We talked about a variety of topics: education, law school, anarchy, careers, libertarian activism, and so on. This is Part 3 of 3.
I appeared recently on Peter Mac’s show for the first time in several years. We talked about a variety of topics: education, law school, anarchy, careers, libertarian activism, and so on. This is Part 2 of 3.
I appeared recently on Peter Mac’s show for the first time in several years. We talked about a variety of topics: education, law school, anarchy, careers, libertarian activism, and so on. This is Part 1 of 3.
From TomWoods Ep. 1304 How I Got into Harvard. I interviewed Tom about this and related questions since my 15 year old son is nearing college age and I was curious. Transcript below. From Tom’s shownotes:
Stephan Kinsella, the libertarian theorist and author of Against Intellectual Property, asked me the other day about my college admission experience. We are each the parent of a tenth grader, so the topic of college comes up in our households. I didn’t think I had much interesting to say about it, but we decided he would in effect host this episode and ask me questions. The resulting conversation turned out to be great!
the Tom would show episode 1304 prepared a set fire to the index card of
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allowable opinion your daily dose of Liberty education starts here the Tom
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woods show hail you homeschooling parents out there you may be thinking to
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yourselves well it’s too far into the school year for me to change homeschooling programs now so we’ll just
0:24
have to slog through it if that’s how you feel go ahead and Chuck that labor-intensive
0:29
homeschool program you’ve got and join the self-taught Ron Paul curriculum through my link where you get a hundred
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sixty dollars worth of free bonuses check it out at Ron Paul homeschool calm
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everybody Tom was here with Stephan Kinsella you know Stephan as the author
Who is Stephan Kinsella
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of against intellectual property which is an extremely challenging book it’s
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the kind of book whose thesis you almost don’t want to accept when you first start reading it and then by the end of
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it you want to take that book and bash people over the head who don’t accept it so it’s very very well done interesting
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he’s also the author of the forthcoming as in early 2009 international
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investment political risk and dispute resolution a practitioners guide published by Oxford and you can find him
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I pretty sure at Stephan Kinsella comm am i right Stefan that’s all correct
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okay all right well I’m gonna blame you for this episode if it turns out badly and maybe take the credit if it turns
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out well but it was Stefan’s idea the other day we were on facebook Messenger it’s but we have decent we’ll go like a
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week no conversation to three weeks and then it’ll be this incredible flurry of back and forth messages on all kinds of
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things we’re having one of those the other day and you have a son who you tell me is in the I know you have a son
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of course but I didn’t know what grade he was in the tenth grade and so it’s in fact I have a daughter who’s in the tenth grade and so you think about
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college and I know we got people who say you shouldn’t go to college I get that but it’s it’s you know it’s for some
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people it’s the wise thing to do and you got to do it on a case-by-case basis but you’re in that mode you’re thinking once
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again just as you were when you were kid about college and college application
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in the process and so you thought it would be interesting to talk to me about my own experience and I insisted this
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would not be interesting in any way and then you persuaded me more or less that
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there may be people who would find this interesting and so I mean look if I’ve
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done episodes on my stupid musical tastes then probably we can do an episode on this so I thought in this
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episode I might kind of in a way turn the hosts mic over to you in a way yeah
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to let you kind of guide the conversation and ask me things that you think I might be able to help with yeah
The college process
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and I’m a lot of Tom woods completest so I wasn’t sure if you’d talk about this before that’s why I was sort of asking you but yeah I’m in that mode where you
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know tenth grader everyone’s all my friends were thinking about college and yeah most people I know their kids are
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going to college and you know I haven’t let my son know that not going to college is an option okay so he’s going to go right he’s one of these thanks but
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only for also for my own interest I’ve always been you know I went to a big state school and so a lot of us you
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might not know it we have Ivy League Envy right you know we kind of are we’re mystified by the the people to get to go
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to those kind of schools right and especially now that my kids getting to
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this point you know we want better things for our kids and to go to LSU or something like that not to bash LSU but
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and these days given the phd glut yeah almost any school is gonna have a really
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top-flight faculty well and I’m sure you’re noticing to the college process now is apparently totally different than
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we were when we were young or at least southerners when we were young I mean it was you’re raised near a big state
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school you apply there and you go it’s really simple and it was pretty cheap and you did fine so you didn’t have the
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the issue of like oh maybe I’ll go cross-country or maybe I’ll go here or what scholarship process like and how do
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I maximize my AC T scores or SAT scores and by the way has it ever annoyed you
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that people say in especially some Yankees say SATs with a plural like I
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took my SATs instead oh yeah I think I probably say that but I I get why that’s
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annoying yeah I mean it’s it’s it’s not quite as bad as ATM machine no she makes
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me want to commit an atrocity yeah I’m standing on line instead of in line but okay your thing – yeah I know I know
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I don’t know why they say that and anyway so you know it just so you went
How I got into Harvard
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to Harvard and the whole process just I’m always impressed by someone who was able to somehow do that especially and
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so I was just curious how the hell did you do it because you know if you have a kid like all my friends kids we’re all
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we assume that Gale and Harvard these things are sort of how to reach or that it’s really political now it’s extremely
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competitive you know you hear stories about some of the better schools even if you make a perfect SAT you’re not
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guaranteed to get it right so you know I don’t know what it was like or and just
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what the whole experience was like and by the way you and I both spoke at Yale in the last year so which was right for
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me it was a pleasure because I can’t turn down a chance to speak at a place that wouldn’t have allowed me and as an undergrad all right let’s dive it now
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first of all I did notice it’s not the same topic but it’s a related topic that all the way back in episode 239 I have
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an episode called how Tom navigated academia right and and so that was more once I got in right how did I fit in and
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stuff like that that’s kind of a different thing but I’ll link to that on this show notes page as a related thing so how did I do well the thing is I’m
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I’m not entirely sure so let’s just walk through we’ll talk about what I did and apparently it turned out to be enough I
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will say that I went for a campus interview you have to do at least one
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interview you have to have at least the alumni interview and if you happen to live within reasonable distance of
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Cambridge you can also do an on-campus interview that was the way they did it in my day anyway so I lived 45 minutes
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away from campus so I did both interviews even they what they wouldn’t let you do an on-campus interview if you
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didn’t live close oh you could they just didn’t want to disadvantage you like well if you don’t do one here than
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Bennet I just I figured I might as well I thought I made a pretty good impression of people so I might as well do it twice so I went in for that
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interview but what I remember about it is we had somebody in my high school who was a year before me who had just
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everything could ask for scholar athlete he had every credential you could ask for and he was rich ejected from Harvard and so I brought
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that up and I just to say I had a little apprehension because I couldn’t understand how this guy right would not
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have gotten in and they asked the the woman Niner that maybe this was the alumni owner but I don’t report it was
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in Cambridge in fact I bet my life on it actually nothing about and it was the answer that came back was we basically
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frankly said that he was a white man and she said we I’m not kidding you we probably already had enough of those
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right when I was right right well just flat out well let me back up a second though so you came from sort of like
High School
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blue-collar family or lower family and so you didn’t have any legacies or or so
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so we were oh did you go to leave high school or just a regular high school or how does the public public high school
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okay and so I assume you had good grade yeah I was the valedictorian okay so we
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had okay so that’s one explanation I guess between Don elector Ian straight A’s helps but like so you knew you
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wanted to go to college when you were in high school yeah definitely and did you think I can go anywhere in the country
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is it was money concern for you was distance a concern what what were you thinking in terms of what kinds of
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colleges yeah I figured I’d apply and then cross the money bridge when I came to it because a lot of the places I was
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applying to were fairly generous with financial aid right and I remember my dad saying look I’ll make this happen
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one way or the other for you because I want you to to flourish and it okay you you know you should go to the best place
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you can go so that was my thinking so I applied to a bunch of places I don’t remember all of them and I don’t
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remember what my safety school was but I applied for so called early action right Harvey right so by December I already
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knew I’d been accepted I didn’t have to wait till April like everybody else I already got the letter in the mail and it was I when I got the envelope out of
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the mailbox it was a slightly thick envelope so I knew I’d been accepted because what are they gonna send me a
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multiple letter telling multiple page letter telling me all the reasons I’m terrible I assumed that meant I got in
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which a day that I had but when I look back on it I did have some there
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certainly is a major gap in my application from the point of view of the standard applicant and that is I
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know this is gonna come as a a shock to listeners but I wasn’t really an athlete in school and I think people
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thought that you have to be so-called well-rounded if you’re going to be accepted and I didn’t have that aspect
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of it I didn’t know wrestling Tom yeah exactly no no that’s a microphallus
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joke sorry yeah or or an Andy Kaufman joke and no wrestling women either so
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what I did have was a lot was strong academics very strong extracurriculars
9:21
and then I did unusual thing yeah I wasn’t on the football team but I worked really hard on a state Senate campaign
9:28
yeah I know I know I feel silly about that now but but he was a good guy and the the incumbent was a bomb and and so
9:34
in other words I did things that you know showed some initiative and that were unusual for somebody my age to do
9:39
and I think that kind of substituted for the athlete thing they thought well you know this guy’s a little bit different
9:45
they were willing to do that I did have the high test scores I had great I had recommendations from
9:52
my teachers that were like right just out of this world in fact one of my
9:57
teachers what they like is this is also by the way advice people have to write reference letters if you just have
10:02
generic glowing remarks that’s actually not that helpful what they really want to know is give us specifics so we can
10:08
get a real feel for this person and I remember my chemistry teacher I had taken ap chemistry with him and he
10:15
recalled a time when he and I and a couple other students went to UMass for a weekend conference that’s what geeks
10:21
we were went to a conference with our teacher and in the middle of the night I get up because there was some who’s a
10:27
math but I was preparing for a big I was on the math team and I was preparing for some big thing and there was a problem
10:32
that it was driving me crazy in the middle of the night I figured out how to solve it so I got up and I to get over
10:39
to like a part of the room where there’s some light coming through the window I don’t want to disturb anybody and I sat there and I solved it and my teacher
10:46
the next day said did you wake up in the night and I explained to him what was going on and he included that little story in the liner yeah and so that made
10:53
it seem like all right this is a guy who doesn’t just get good grades and then forgets about it like he’s really
10:58
invested in the stuff that he’s studying well so let me into this um was Harvard
Why Harvard
11:03
your goal College had they just always been assume like this is the best country so if I could get in there that’s obvious or was it because of a a
11:10
major or was Yale or in Cambridge and Oxford also like goals of yours or what
11:16
were you thinking about selecting or trying to get into Harvard right I mean there certainly is obviously a certain
11:22
luster to the Harvard name there’s no question about that but then you combine that with the fact that it was drivable
11:28
to my house not that I was gonna live at home but that I I just liked the idea that I was far enough away that I was
11:35
doing my own laundry but not so far away that in a pinch I couldn’t go home for the weekend now as it turns out I think
11:41
I went home for the weekend once in the four years I was there and I was just burned out I just needed to rest away
11:48
from you but otherwise of course I didn’t want to leave this is a paradise where would I want to go it was great so
11:54
so that was the thinking that was top-notch and it was within and I sort of familiar with it I mean I didn’t
12:00
hadn’t lived that far away from it it wasn’t particularly because of a major because I wasn’t super super convinced
12:07
of what my major would be but I figured unless I’m going into engineering and at that time the Harvard engineering
12:13
program was not really very good there’s almost no way I can go wrong right
12:18
so they don’t make you declare a major in the beginning and at the end of the
12:23
first year you have to declare your concentration okay and that was all I needed was one year to really sort out
12:30
that I wanted to go into history which I would never have guessed in a million years and did you did you – did you
Other schools
12:35
consider the other kind of premiere schools on MIT or Oxford or Cambridge or anything overseas or Yale or never
12:42
overseas I’m such a homebody I always feel like a fish out of water when I’m overseas I mean I can stay for a week
12:48
and do sightseeing and enjoy myself but after that I need my bed and my surroundings and people who speak
12:55
English in the accent I’m accustomed to things like that I just need that so definitely on overseas MIT I wouldn’t
13:01
have because I wasn’t committed to anything in math and science I mean even though MIT actually really has great
13:07
historians – right right but I didn’t you know what did I know at that point now I I really felt like you know as you
13:13
say I just wanted to go to the place that I you know I was led to believe was
13:18
the best place I could go to plus it would be a challenge to see could I really with the credentials I had impress them enough to let me in
13:26
given how rigorous the admission process is and so did you get other acceptances
Other acceptances
13:32
or was the other one too early for you even bother well once I got accepted at Harvard I withdrew my applications from
13:38
everywhere else yeah yeah I mean I suppose I could have kept them go but yeah I think it was wrong wrong to make
13:44
them spend effort on that when there’s no real need so yeah I withdrew everywhere else and I officially I wrote
13:50
back and said yep I’ll be there and your parents freaked out when they
13:56
found oh absolutely insane absolutely insane that my father who’s since deceased worked as a forklift operator
14:02
in a food warehouse and my mother called him up and at work and because he worked
14:07
nights and she called and said you know it’s really urgent that he’d come for the phones he races to the phone and she
14:14
says do you think we’ll be able to get tickets to the harvard-yale game he said you got to be well he ain’t say kidding
14:20
me I’ll say then he went around telling everybody and it was very exciting and the whole time I was there because we
14:26
were close by you know he would come over we’d go to like a hockey game against Harvard actually had a decent
14:31
hockey team and we’d go to games together and there was one time we saw Senator John Kerry he was the senator US
14:38
Senator at that time and I mean he was just blown away and my father at that too he got his GED when he was in his
14:44
40s but he hadn’t finished high school he had taken a course of Harvard in bartending and he always used to joke
14:50
about that and I was kind of a legacy because after all he’d gone to Harvard before me well did you have brothers and
14:57
sisters or only time for what no it’s just me yeah all the lung can be showered on the one kid ok so you don’t
15:03
know if you would have had a bunch of smart by me so I assume your father was pretty smart too so you probably got some of your smartness I mean even
15:09
though he didn’t have the formal credentials right he absorbed material so quickly and mastered it to the point
15:16
where nobody really wanted to argue with him well partly because he never shut up but also because he was really good at
Getting into grad school
15:22
it now so I assume is my impression correct that it’s harder to get into like a Harvard for an undergrad than
15:29
they’d like you went into Columbia for a grad school right which is another elite school yeah
15:34
I assume grad school is a little bit different that once you once you’ve got your credentials under your belt it’s probably easier to get into a grad
15:40
school knowing what you want to do right I actually did not find that I had more difficulty getting into grad school and
15:46
it was partly because what I wanted to do it was hard to find quite the right
15:52
match with the the faculty that I wanted like for his right at Harvard at that time was going through turmoil they
15:58
really did not have very many if any tenured twentieth-century professors and I was gonna work in the
16:05
20th century and my my dissertation director was Alan Brinkley the son of the newsman David Brinkley and they had
16:11
passed Alan Brinkley over for tenure now Brinkley is credentialed like you wouldn’t believe there’s no reason
16:17
Brinkley shouldn’t have gotten tenure at Harvard they immediately tenured in Columbia like of course we’re gonna what
16:22
is wrong with these people so I ended up working with him because he was the most
16:27
versatile 20th century person I could find but the thing is you would when you
16:33
apply for graduate school they really want to know about your research interests right I mean partly there’s probably a very slight ideological
16:39
filter that’s going on there but it really is mainly a question of do we have people whose specialty matches up
16:46
with your expectations and if we don’t it doesn’t matter how smart you are you’re just not a good fit for this
16:51
department so that was the issue whereas there’s an undergrad they don’t really have to delve into your particular
16:56
interests because you’re not really going to be pursuing them here you need to get a much broader education yet I
17:02
think you may also be thinking a little bit from the perspective of the liberal arts kind of academia perspective like
17:08
what you’re going to get a PhD the person that you study under matters whereas you’re like from my perspective
17:14
it’s more engineering and practical stuff like sorry and people that are going to have an MBA or something or an
17:19
engineering degree I think they just want to go to a competent quality school like there’s not a name that’s there
17:25
that it really matters by absolutely I are not getting a PhD and so by that time you want to give you a teacher but
17:31
but I’m curious about your Harvard so you get accepted to Harvard and you know because you probably know this a lot of
17:37
parents like that where I’m from especially when you have multiple children and especially when you or the
17:43
parents are well off right there they have good jobs so kind of have the impression that you
17:48
know my kids probably not going to get financial aid and he’s probably not going to be the valedictorian and get a scholarship right so a lot of kids are
17:56
told look you can go to LSU or at Texas A&M you have to go to a state school get in-state tuition or this is how much we
18:01
can afford and nowadays of course if that’s all you can afford then your
18:07
other options to take student loans out I mean by and large it’s not worth breaking $200,000 for the student loans
18:12
to get no no no humanity yes so let me let me tell how I did it first of all Harvard does not have
18:18
academic scholarships period it does not have them the the money they give you is need-based only and so they basically
18:26
look at your family’s income and they come up with a package that works for you and it did involve some loans but
18:32
not an oppressive amount didn’t take long to pay them off right so my parents were pleasantly surprised I mean they
18:39
basically thought they were gonna be you know eating dirt for the next five years you know whoever their lives and never
18:45
going on vacation again or whatever but also I it’s true I did work a bit while I was there a freshman year I had a
18:51
couple of jobs in one semester I worked in a gosh I clean the bathrooms because
18:57
almost all the dorms almost all of them have in room bathrooms ensuite they’re
19:03
not these hideous hallway bathrooms like you’re on the football team or something it’s you have your own bathroom but what
19:09
that also means is they got to make sure you’re being sanitary and you’re not becoming your own health hazard so they
19:15
have people come in and clean the bathrooms well you’re talking to one of them right now I had to do that and I took that because it paid better than
19:22
working in the dining hall well I learned pretty quickly why it paid better working in the dining hall why
19:28
did you so did you do that just have spending money or to make ends meet or what why did you do that yeah I guess I
19:33
really did that yeah I could yeah I’m trying to think about exactly what the plan was my parents sent me money every
19:39
week they sent me money and that more or less supported me so I think the job may
19:45
have been going toward the actual schooling I honestly I don’t remember
19:50
the exact arrangement I do remember that my senior year I had a job as a desk man in an apartment building which was great
19:56
because all you had to do is sit there all day so you were I mean were you like the poor kid at
20:02
Harvard you know what I mean like a lot of your friends have parents and some of them did but honest-to-goodness you in
20:09
almost no case did you really know that I mean I mean it is not the stereotype but people were not going around saying
20:15
well on my dad’s yacht the other day they just did people did not talk like that but I’m just saying there’s got to
Parttime jobs
20:22
be a strong percentage of the people that you were in school with who just didn’t need to work and they didn’t have part-time jobs yeah that’s true but
20:28
that’s true and I only had it for the one year so it couldn’t have been central to the financial aid package but I was mentioning the desk job at the end
20:35
only because the reason I wound up getting that job senior year was that I wanted to go to the John Randolph Club
20:41
meeting out in California and for me you know the the registration fee the area
20:47
hotel there’s to be a lot of money so I actually got a job so that I could earn the money for that that I could go out
20:52
and hang out with Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell so that was mainly mainly that so the nice thing was that they just came up with a good package for us
20:59
that that really worked but let me tell one other quick little story that people who read my emails may remember this one
21:06
there was a time when I was sitting reading a book I was reading 1984 actually and I came across the word
21:14
coercion now I had heard the word coercion but I’d never seen it before and it as far as I know is the only cion
21:22
word in the English language I mean Spanish obviously has a ton of words a tendency ioann but not English
21:28
we have tion and si Owen I’ve never seen a cion word and the reason this alarmed
21:34
me was an on my Harvard application in one of the essays I spelled it with an S and I looked at it and I said oh you’ve
Have mercy on me
21:42
got a kid and I thought well you know they’re not gonna let some idiot who can’t spell in so I went into the
21:48
guidance Department I will never forget the chairman of the department dr. de flummery I’ll never forget this I told
21:55
him the story I said I know for a fact I have a typo that’s it won’t even look like a typo to look it’s clearly a
22:01
spelling mistake on my Harvard application and he paused and I’m not joking he did not say this jokingly he
22:07
said well you you applied to other schools right
22:17
I got in anyway in fact uh in fact it was at one of the interviews I said listen listen I know you guys have me
22:22
dead to rights I know I misspelled coercion but have mercy on me there’s no other word in English that’s spelled
22:28
that way it’s just you know it’s just one of these flukes that is over the course of my life I’d never encountered
22:34
the word I mean have mercy on me and they did folks we’re talking about education today so let me take a quick
Skillshare
22:40
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22:46
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22:51
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23:10
time for these sixteen week classes forget it some of these classes are just half an hour long but they just cut out
23:15
all the fluff and they get right down to the practical skills you need and what an amazing deal it is to you can join
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share calm slash woods to start your two months now that’s skill share calm slash woods so when you show up to Harvard did
Disneyland
23:48
you feel like you’re at Disneyland and when you’re like amazed or did you pretty soon get kind of comfortable and used to the the environment that would
23:55
intimidate a lot of people stepping onto that for the first time right that comes yeah well first of all the thrill of it
24:00
right never I mean really never wore off I mean it was it was an amazing place to
24:07
be even though there were plenty of people who disagreed with me and stuff things weren’t nearly as intense as they
24:12
are now I mean what you know we had our differences and stuff but it wasn’t like you’re our mortal enemy and we can’t
24:19
even be friends with you because you hold the following seven views it was not really like that and I just met such
24:26
people and and you know everybody comes to speak there one time or another so so many great opportunities and stuff but
24:32
yeah it was intimidating because everybody not quite everybody but a lot of people who set foot there think to
24:38
themselves I’m the fluke I’m the guy who got in by mistake so you concentrated in history
Reunions
24:44
though is that right yeah and so these friends you’re saying you make a lot of friends you still have I do yeah I did that’s right and do you go
24:51
to the reunions and all that I do I do I have my next year I have 2019 I have my 25-year reunion okay and so when you go
Celebrity
24:59
now cuz you’re getting you be kind of a minor celebrity outside of libertarian I mean you’re a major celebrity in our circles but you know are you getting
25:06
starting to go people even recognize it and they oh I know about your podcast and all this kind of stuff is not really
25:13
they are in a whole different world but I did see I didn’t say hi to him this
25:18
time but the guy who when when Rand Paul was running for Senate originally in 2010 he ran in the primary against the
25:25
Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson he was in my graduating class class of 94 and I did see him at the last reunion
25:32
but I had been such a you know Rand partisan I got on my way to say hello we
25:39
were not unfriendly in the past but okay so obviously you don’t regret having
No Regrets
25:45
gone to Harvard right in that job no no it was great it was now or going to college right because I know we talked
25:51
about some but in my case given that I’m pushing ideas that I think are hundred
25:58
percent correct but they’re highly unorthodox the academic credentials have helped me correct to fight back against
26:05
people who say I must just be some crank all right well I’m a crank with these degrees and that you know in such a such book and whatever which by the way that
26:11
does not make you not a crank but for the sense of people using that language against me that’s the currency they
26:18
trade in and so the fact that I haven’t gives them a little pause because my so
Is it better to go to an elite school
26:23
my impression and I want to see if you kind of agree is is that by and large in today and by the way I’m thinking from a
26:29
practical like law school or engineering kind of perspective mostly because that’s my field but my impression is
26:35
that most universities in the US are very good now because you can recruit the teachers because everyone wants to be a
26:41
professor because it’s a Chris job and those teaching materials are great and the facilities are great
26:46
so in substance the difference between these schools is probably small a decent-size state school or an elite
26:54
school they all have great programs great learning it may differ a little bit for liking you want to get a PhD in
27:00
a specialty like you did but also nowadays that might be changing in the sense that Yale’s and the Harvard’s are
27:07
becoming so politically correct and so that it’s actually in a way worse for
27:12
the liberal arts of the humanities types in some of these some of these so-called better schools that are kind of resting
27:17
upon their reputation or laurels I mean what do you think about the relative merits of trying to go to one
27:24
of these elite schools now as opposed to twenty twenty thirty that’s a good that’s a good question I mean first of
27:30
all if you are planning to go to graduate school I do think it’s the case that the graduate school you go to tends
27:35
to be what whoever is going to employ you looks at more closely where did you
27:41
get the more specialized training so I think it’s not bad to go to a decent school for undergrad and then really
27:48
really set your sights on the best graduate school you can get into so if you can save yourself the Ivy League
27:53
tuition now as I say I can’t speak for the other IDs but I know that Harvard had need-based assistance so you should
28:01
be okay even there but I don’t think it’s an absolute necessity for your success for you to do it now in terms of
28:06
your question about PC is it worse at the higher tier schools because after all they can just rest on their
28:11
reputations even if they’re terrorizing the kids with the craziness the thing is what I hear the horror stories about PC
28:18
they’re almost always at podunk schools you know so that’s going on I think on all levels the thing about the Ivy’s is
28:24
that despite the PC there’s still I mean I know this might sound naive but
28:30
there’s still a point at which they say to themselves what matters here still is excellence right and now yes it’s true
28:37
that Murray Rothbard was not going to get a job at Harvard no matter what so it’s that’s not perfect but there is
28:43
still this sense that we want people who are going to do the best work period right and they have they feel like
28:49
they’re their brand is invested in that we have to have the top people doing the test work whereas podunk you because
28:56
it’s kind of considered to be interchangeable with other schools well you know they’re just gonna have the typical faculty doing the typical stuff
29:03
but where is it Harvard they and the Ivy’s they really feel like we have to be at the cutting edge of everything to
29:09
justify what we charge so I mean that’s that’s my thinking that you’re still gonna find decent people doing decent
29:16
where I mean how else did I get a PhD at Columbia right I mean I I couldn’t have written on a less fashionable topic from
29:23
a less fashionable point of view and not only did I get it approved by the department I got to publish by Columbia
29:30
University Press as a book now that’s not because they love me or my point of view it’s because I did good work well
Do you see someone go Harvard
29:36
what is this thing where you will typically see a scholar you know or a professor like someone like yourself
29:42
right with advanced PhDs and in humanities or liberal arts and they have their resume is scattered like they’ll
29:48
have one college for undergrad another for grad school like rarely do you see someone go Harvard Harvard Harvard and
29:54
is that do they do that on purpose like they’re trying to have some in other words or you disadvantage if you just
30:00
went to Harvard straight out or just you know one school for all of your degrees instead of I don’t think you’re yeah no
30:07
I don’t think I don’t think it even matters I’m one of my good friends from school went to Harvard for everything
30:12
got his PhD in history at Harvard he teaches at bu now I don’t think it I don’t think it really makes a difference
30:19
okay be nice to have different experiences but yeah and I’m glad I went
30:25
to Columbia because I had a chance to get to know New York and I write I really like New York despite all the
30:30
obvious problems I want to tell a little story if I may about her when I was on the other side of things I volunteered
30:36
to be an alumni interviewer myself so I would interview people in my area who
30:43
were applying and then I would write up a report and send it in to the admissions committee and this is when I
30:48
lived on Long Island and I had an off an academic office and everything and so you know I had some really bright
30:56
students come in and it was very interesting for me to be on the other side I think I’m the one they’re scared
31:01
of now I’m not the one who is scared I’m the scary one and of course the idea of me being scary is a little silly but but
31:07
you could tell they were a little nervous and everything I tried to put them at ease but there was one particular incident where I interviewed
31:14
a young man whose strength was obviously athletics and there is a degree to which
31:20
Harvard will look at athletics because they they do want at least some heft
31:25
to their athletic program so you there are some advantages to be had so okay so we talked and he couldn’t have been less
31:33
intellectually curious about anything I got one-word answers to almost everything he was the most unimpressive
31:40
applicant I had ever seen then around the same time a young lady came into the
31:45
office and she was by far the most qualified high school student I’ve ever
31:53
seen before or since by far and her academics off the charts but then also
31:59
sports off the charts extracurriculars off the charts the things she did it was like she was a Rothbart it was like she
32:06
was four people I could not understand how she could have a record like this and I thought to herself this is clearly
32:11
the most qualified student I’ve ever seen so I wrote up the best report I could possibly write and I submitted
32:18
that the athlete got admitted and she got put on the waitlist and so I resigned I said I’m not forget it I’m
32:25
not now I know obviously there could be many factors I’m not aware of but in this case BS in this case I cannot
32:32
imagine what possessed them to think so she and I actually I wrote to her family and said what happened to you is an
32:38
absolute outrage you know I’ve had students get rejected you know something that I thought should get in okay you
32:44
never know but this was so outrageous I wrote to them and said in protest I have
32:49
refused to do any more alumni interviews over this injustice now I’m sure she’s prospering she went
32:54
to Cornell and she did probably did fine but I don’t even know what the point of that story is other than to say you
33:00
can’t even totally sometimes get what’s going on at these elite schools in their admission decisions it does not mean
33:06
you’re no good if you got put on the wait list or something well I think if I’m not I think I heard an interview
The lawsuit against Harvard
33:12
recently and was about that lawsuit I think it’s against Harvard right by the Asians yes right and from the facts that
33:18
are coming out and it might not have been about Harvard the stats I heard but I thought there’s something like if you’re an athlete your odds of getting
33:25
in or like 10 times higher than even a top-notch academic person just because because it helps their minority
33:32
recruiting – because you know by and large these are probably sore minorities you know so it’s just a disparity and I
33:39
think part of the negotiating they’re trying to do is trying to lower this
33:44
Asian cap basically right and not hurt the minorities too badly but tone down
33:51
legacy and athletic preferences that are given now so they’re trying to adjust all you know someone’s going to hurt
33:56
right you’re going to take away from one and give to the other but I don’t know what you if you have any thoughts about
34:01
the way that is now or the way it used to be in terms of the like you said something if you we have enough white
34:06
male already or something like that like is it even harder now if you’re not a minority do you think to get in to these
34:12
kind of places yeah I don’t know how much things have changed on that particular front I mean the the
34:19
statistics were pretty I mean these schools keep these things under lock and
34:25
key for the most part but occasionally statistics drip out like in the late 80s
34:30
or early 90s over at Dartmouth it came out that minority students who had been admitted under an Express affirmative
34:37
action program dropped out on a two to one level on sober students who’d just been accepted on the regular basis and
34:43
so obviously that’s not good for them and it’s not good for the people who didn’t get to go and all that so that’s
34:49
definitely there on the faculty level I remember my own I’m Alan Brinkley as a
34:55
left liberal in the Hillary Clinton tradition all the way and I remember talking to him about going on the job
35:01
market and applying for jobs and and we were speaking frankly about affirmative action and white men getting jobs in
35:08
academia and he said well look I’ll just be frank with you generally when I sit
35:13
on faculty search committees we almost never see minority candidates applying to be professors at Columbia and when we
35:20
ooh that they’ve generally been very unimpressive so he said I think this is an exaggeration I don’t think you have
35:26
as much to worry about as you think there just aren’t that many who go into academia we’re gonna have terminal degrees period so there’s that aspect
35:34
but on the student level I just don’t know what it’s like but on the other hand on that so think it’s on the boxes
35:41
where you check off your race I think there’s usually a box where you you know you don’t want to indicate your race but
35:46
everybody knows that means white right you’d be an idiot if you’re black why would you not take advantage of
35:51
everything you have coming to you because it’s right put an X in the black box why not but you’re not gonna say I’m not going to tell you right well so so
Taking the SAT
35:59
you’re you’re little younger than me when I when I took the a seat ESET I just took it one time and that was it I figured I took whatever I got I got yeah
36:06
and I didn’t even know there was such a thing as prep courses and all that because it didn’t really matter who I
36:11
was going for but so back when you were applying were you taking it many times trying to maximize your SAT score and
36:17
all that kind of stuff or did you just do well enough and that got you in yeah that was basically in and then in my day
36:23
you also had to take what were called the achievement test I don’t know if you did that but in Massachusetts you have
36:28
to take and they were in different subject matter so the SAT had math and verbal but the achievement tests were
36:33
like chemistry Spanish all these sort of academic topics and they were also great
36:39
in on an 800 scale and I did really well on those and so it I never either retook
36:46
anything or did any training course but also it was because the particular things that the SAT tested happened to
36:53
be where I was already pretty strong there was no reason for me to take an SAT math prep course when I was the
37:00
captain of the math to the mat right ICT math was a joke yeah so there’s no no reason to worry about that but with my
37:06
own kids I may actually encourage them to do that yeah because they don’t have the same facility with math and mathis
37:13
of the SAT math is not that bad it’s more a question of have they forgotten it by then if you just refresh your
37:19
memory on it you could easily probably see if at least a 50 100 point boost yeah but it’s become like an industry
Getting a library card
37:25
now where you you almost have to do this because if you don’t you’re too competitive disadvantage all the parents
37:30
who are so everyone’s using tutors and taking sample tests and you know getting feedback and taking you multiple times
37:36
and trying to optimize and it’s a thing now yeah it is a different ballgame but on the other hand even a kid who just
37:43
goes to the local library and checks out a book on SAT prep is way ahead right of
37:49
the game I mean all you need is that is just a library card you don’t even need the fancy classes and you’ll still have
37:55
an advantage so in fact I remember being on a panel and when I was first a
38:00
professor and there were people talking about exactly what you said it’s saying that this gives white folks a special
38:06
advantage and my answer was almost nobody takes those prep courses I mean when you’re compared to the student
38:11
population it’s basically zero but secondly is there anything stopping you from getting a library card going to a
38:17
library and checking on a book on SAT prep no one had an answer to that yes that is the obvious answer well on that
38:23
achievement test we in Louisiana we did have it but it was like things like how to boil crawfish and how a skeet shoot
38:28
taught how to lay traps for gear things like that I wouldn’t even have done that
38:43
you know you mentioned to you I always think that that’s a great kid should have a summer job in an auto you know
38:49
mechanic stop and also at a sort order cook learn a little cooking and learn a little fix an automobile that’s probably
38:56
two really good skills to have in life not only that good skills but it’s also good to learn to appreciate the people
39:02
who do them yeah because I mean somebody who can fix something saves your life in
39:07
so many cases and I and I don’t want to forget that or have my kids forget it
39:12
and then when it comes to cooking there have been times I mean I’ll confess I have a secret pleasure I do it I do go
39:19
to Waffle House now and again and there have been times when you go into Waffle House there’s nobody there and other
39:25
times that it is hoppin so much that that woman who’s at the register and who’s also waiting tables is losing her
39:33
mind yeah and I remember there was a night where I felt so sorry for her I went up to the register as we were leaving and
39:38
after I paid my bill I just like threw some money at her this is yeah but I mean the fact that
39:47
she I mean I get to work in this climate-controlled splendor talking to
39:52
interesting people all day and you know men she’s gonna really really work hard
39:57
hard hard to make her income and I I wanna I think it’s good to appreciate
40:03
that and and to be in that position sometimes well I ask you about the jobs and whether suspending money because I
40:08
kind of had a feeling it was for spending money and it was but you were spending it to go to an academic conference and Turkey well when I had
40:15
these part-time jobs in college I was trying to save up money to buy big speakers for my car so I could win like
40:21
a crank it up contest it you know down the street so that’s money that’s money by some Rush CDs it wasn’t quite as a
40:27
lofty of goals another key thing I went to Liberty fund which publishes a lot of
40:34
great Liberty books in inexpensive editions they also put on scholarly colloquia and you go there for a weekend
40:41
and in the old days they paid you they pay a little more now but they paid you seven hundred dollars and you would sit
40:46
around with about fifteen scholars and you would all discuss some reading that you had all done and then there would be
40:51
outings and fancy dinners and a fancy hotel and it was just amazing experience
40:57
and as a grad student the idea that I’d be gone a couple of days and earned 700 bucks was just gonna be kid of course
41:02
I’ll do that so I one of the times I did that I got the 700 bucks and when I got back I saw
41:08
that Union Theological Seminary down the street from Columbia was having intensive they were offering a course in
41:15
German for reading knowledge so to this day I have no idea how to hold a conversation in German it’s just how to
41:21
attack a German sentence and understand it right I thought that might be useful might be good to have reading knowledge
41:26
of German so and it cost $700 so I took the money from the thing and I spent and
41:32
everybody else there was a Lutheran theologian that’s why they wanted to read German and there was just me this
41:38
American historian who just thought it’d be neat Dorsey didn’t have a lot of girlfriends in college that’s what
41:44
you’re saying in well I will say what
41:50
was interesting about that chemistry a grad school I really didn’t but as an undergrad what was interesting was that
41:56
a lot of us in school had had the same experience you know we were the nerdy kid who got made fun of by the time I
42:02
get to high school I’d kind of gotten around that but still yeah you know maybe the popular kids thought you were
42:08
okay right you know you’re not coming over whatever but but even that by the end I was kind of fixing that up but
42:14
still we’d all kind of been that kid and now we could all start fresh not only could we start fresh we could start
42:21
fresh with other kids who had been that kid and so all of a sudden everything was alright you know everything was okay
42:27
all your insecurities and stuff you’re okay you know you’re all cuz everything because no matter who you are there’s
42:33
somebody nerdier here no matter who you are there’s always somebody nerdier and even if you’re the nerdiest one well
42:39
wait a next year gonna be another nerdy nerdy or one than you and so I did have a girlfriend for a couple of years there
42:45
then I just feel like if we’d been back in high school would have been completely out of my league that would
42:50
been impossible but because we were on an even level every anything’s possible
42:56
dreams can come true under these circumstances yeah and I had one thing
Honor roll
43:02
like that and that that I went to a Catholic High School in Baton Rouge and and one thing they did that I was always
43:09
impressed by is they give Letterman’s jacket out to the guys that are on Honor Roll too so it’s not just the jocks so
43:15
it’s like a little way of servo trying to trying to say this be smart it’s cool you know it doesn’t always help but it’s
43:21
neat to be in an environment where everyone is like pushing education and smarts it’s got to be liberating and
43:27
refreshing if you’ve sort of kind of had to suffer the shame of it almost right under certain environment right right
43:35
right that we didn’t have to pretend that we weren’t interested in the stuff we were studying and pretend that we’d
43:40
rather do X or Y you could say hey I really like this this is great and look
43:46
I had lunch with my professor and blah blah blah you know that that was fine yeah well I think you satisfied my
43:53
curiosity oh good I’m glad I’m glad well I I actually I hope other people
43:59
listening enjoyed hearing us talk about this because it was actually fun to reminisce about it a little bit
44:05
especially ahead of the 25 year in reunion coming up my kids did come with me to the 20-year
44:11
reunion and we walked around campus and when they saw just the majesty of some of the buildings I remember one of them
44:18
saying I want to live there yeah I did too when I was there they didn’t let me I had to live over here but yeah yeah
44:25
yeah it was Lowell house for anybody who’s ever been on the campus they looked at that and they said yep that’s where I want to live so they have a
44:31
really neat experience for the older kids where they get like a what a day in the life of a student here is like and I
44:38
think my Regina would enjoy that that’s got to be cool and I remember you when
Yale vs Harvard
44:43
you got invited to the Yale thing you and I were talking about it because we were both did at the same year and you were like yeah it’s best for me to go to
44:49
Yale because that’s sort of I guess the arrival for for Harvard right so you know if you let me do and I we could be
44:57
it was funny when I’d go to a Harvard athletic contest I mean whatever the
45:02
game what mean hockey we had a fighting chance but a lot of the time it was pretty pitiful and so the best we could
45:09
do was try to humiliate the other team that was all we had so the chance that we would chant would we would chant
45:14
safety school to the other the other team really not nice or if we would play
45:20
against Brown Brown University the chant was always what’s the color of you know
45:25
and the answer was Brown you know we
45:31
were nerds but we could be we could really really cut you to the quick how’s
Harvard vs Yale
45:36
the Harvard’s how the Harvard campus compared to yield because I’ve never seen Harvard but at the Yale I mean the
45:41
buildings are pretty but the campus to me is not that great it’s just a bunch of city blocks sort of you know what I
45:47
mean the thing is that I’ve really only seen Yale at night and so I can’t really
45:52
say but I will say that when I’ve gone to Princeton Princeton just blows Harvard out of the water okay and I
45:57
think Harvard blows Columbia out of the water got it no I you know it’s a beautiful campus it’s not it’s not super
46:04
big because the undergraduate population is about 6400 it’s not gigantic but the
46:09
graduate schools nearby the Business School actually has I think even a nicer campus than the undergrad but oh I is so
46:15
picturesque I mean every time I would walk through to go from where I live to
46:21
the library it was just an absolute pleasure I just soaked it in it was a beautiful
46:26
Oasis and it doesn’t I think carpet has the biggest like endowment in the world or something for a university right it’s
Free Harvard Fair
46:32
like yeah they suffered a bit during the financial crisis yeah but that’s why um
46:37
I’d once did an episode with a guy named Ron unns and he was doing what he called
46:42
his free Harvard fair Harvard campaign so alright Harvard had a with admissions and free Harvard was look your ad outlet
46:50
generates so much income you don’t even need the tuition money you don’t need it it’s it’s unless you’re just trying to
46:56
prove a point about how much money you can bring in you could actually let people go for free and you wouldn’t even
47:02
feel it so why not do it that was interesting what do they spend the money
47:08
on it did it yeah I don’t know I never bothered to look I don’t know yeah all
47:16
right okay well I’ll link to these couple of episodes that I mentioned that one and my what I did once I got there
47:22
episode at Tom woods calm such 1304 well thanks for being my sort of guest and
47:30
and I think it turned out really well thanks for suggesting it well actually you didn’t really suggest that you were demanding that I answer these questions
47:36
I didn’t think I had anything to say that I said let’s make an episode out of it and it turns out as usual I can talk
47:41
forever I enjoyed it a lot alright thanks a lot alright folks that’s gonna do it for today I want to
47:47
remind you about the other podcast I host I host it with Bob Murphy called contra krugman and we refute Paul
47:53
Krugman every week and we have a ton of fun doing it well bob has a brand new book out and it’s called contra Krugman
47:59
just like the podcast subtitle smashing the errors of America’s most famous keynesian this book is unbelievable it’s
48:07
great and I read the audiobook version I’m the narrator of the audiobook version I had no idea what I was signing
48:14
up for when I told Bob I would do this I didn’t realize how much stuff there was in this book but you can get the book
48:20
for free on audiobook if you’ve never signed up for audible before you can do that through Tom woods audio calm and
48:26
just pick contra Krugman as your free book and you’ll get it for nothing but if you like the paper version your old
48:34
fashioned like me or even the Kindle version check out the details at contra krugman
48:39
book.com i’ll see you tomorrow become a smarter libertarian in just 30
48:46
minutes a day visit Tom woods calm to subscribe to the show for free and we’ll see you next time
I lived in the Philadelphia area from 1994–97 and while there I associated a bit with local libertarian or related groups. For example I spoke a couple of times at the Philadelphia chapter of the Federalist Society. I also attended a few meetings of the Freeman Society of Valley Forge, which was run by my friend and free market economics professor John McGinnis. My recollection is that the Freeman Society was sponsored by or somehow affiliated with the Foundation for Economic Education, which published the magazine The Freeman. [continue reading…]
This is the audio I recorded on my iPhone; video below; line-mic’d audio here. The youtube version (audio here) and the line-mic’d version both truncate about 30 seconds too early. My own iphone version (which is used for this podcast) includes those extra comments, and this is included in the transcript as well, below.
Grok shownotes:
In this 2018 lecture hosted by the Berkeley Federalist Society, libertarian patent attorney Stephan Kinsella presents a compelling case against intellectual property (IP) rights, specifically patents and copyrights, arguing they contradict libertarian principles and free-market dynamics (0:00-4:59). Kinsella begins by outlining the libertarian framework of property rights, rooted in the Austrian School’s emphasis on scarcity, explaining that only physical, rivalrous resources warrant ownership, while ideas, being non-scarce, should remain free to use (5:00-14:59). He critiques the utilitarian justification for IP, asserting that patents and copyrights create artificial monopolies, stifle competition, and redistribute property rights from original owners to state-favored entities, using examples like baking a cake to illustrate how knowledge guides action without needing ownership (15:00-24:59). Kinsella’s argument centers on the free market’s reliance on emulation and learning, which IP laws hinder by imposing artificial scarcity on information.
Kinsella further dismantles IP by examining its historical origins in state-granted monopolies, such as the Statute of Monopolies (1623) and Statute of Anne (1710), which were rooted in privilege and censorship rather than market principles (25:00-34:59). He highlights practical flaws, such as patents encouraging litigation and inhibiting innovation, and refutes the “creation argument” that creators inherently own their ideas, using a marble statue example to show creation transforms owned resources, not ideas (35:00-44:59). In the Q&A, Kinsella addresses audience questions on trade secrets, open-source models, and IP’s impact on innovation, reinforcing that a free market without IP would foster greater creativity and prosperity (45:00-1:01:11). He concludes by urging libertarians to reject IP as a statist intervention, advocating for a world where knowledge flows freely to drive progress (1:01:12-1:01:36). This lecture is a thorough and accessible critique of IP from a libertarian perspective.
One of my favorite interviews to date. We get into rights, property, self ownership and the philosophy behind these things. We then move into “intellectual property” and the case against copyright and patents.
***
This week I feature my interview with the brilliant Stephan Kinsella. We discuss the nature of rights as libertarians view them. We get into property rights, human rights, self ownership and why there is really no such thing as intellectual property. Stephan makes a strong case against copyrights and patents. Stephan’s body of work can be found here: https://stephankinsella.com and here: http://c4sif.org Find us online at www.facebook.com/deathtotyrantspodcast Follow me on Twitter @buckrebel
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