 Hello and welcome to Wrecked, the Michael Wrecked and Walt podcast. This is episode three and I am joined today by Walter Block. Walter is the Harold E. Worth eminent scholar, endowed chair in economics at Loyola University. He's a senior fellow at the Mises Institute and author of numerous books and myriad of articles. Walter Block is a leading Austrian school economist and an international leader of the freedom movement. His earliest work, Defending the Undefendable, first published in 1976 is now more than 30 years later still regarded as a classic of libertarianism. Block's writing was inspired by Henry Haslett, the author of the most widely read economics text economics in one lesson. Block's latest books include the classical liberal case for Israel and the case for privatizing oceans, rivers, lakes and aquifers. I've asked Walter to join me today primarily to discuss the topic that has gained some traction of late and that is reparations but Walter has also agreed to discuss so called shareholder capitalism as well as immigration. Walter I want to begin by just addressing something that's come up today and that is the Ukrainian conflict. Lindsey Graham has just suggested that he's going to issue a resolution in the Senate to have Ukraine admitted into NATO. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yes, I have thoughts on that. I think it's a very, very, very bad idea. When East Germany and West Germany got together with Russia's permission, there was a promise made by NATO in the U.S. that NATO would not move east. And guess what? This was 1991. They moved east. And right now Ukraine is right on the border of Russia. How would we feel if the reverse was occurring? Well, we know how we would feel because the Soviets did that in the Cuban Missile Crisis. They located weapons of mass destruction in Cuba 90 miles away from us and Kennedy was not a happy camper. He in effect engaged in war against them by blockading Cuba. A blockade is an act of war. Now China is thinking of putting some stuff in Cuba and the U.S. does not like it one bit. Well, Ukraine is closer to Russia than Cuba is to Florida. It's 90 miles away, whereas Ukraine is right on the border. Russia is pleaded with and said that this is a threat to their existence. And yet we have this inexorable march eastward of NATO. What is the matter with these people? They have this clock. How close are we to nuclear war? We're as close to nuclear war now as we were in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And this maniac, I'll use the word advisedly, is now saying that Ukraine should be part of NATO. I mean, this is just preposterous. Again, we can't put our eyes in the other guy's eyes and we can't look at their position. I mean, suppose it was reverse. Suppose that the Soviet Union was in the U.S. and the U.S. was in what is now Russia. And the Soviet Union keeps moving eastward. We American Soviets, if I can make that phrase up, would not like that one bit. And the proof of this is we didn't like it when they pulled this stuff in Cuba. This is just crazy and anyone who supports this can't see the other guy's position at all. Yeah, I can't. I couldn't agree with you more. And also this would immediately and officially have the United States at war with Russia because of Article 5 of NATO's own declarations. So this would make us, this would put us at war and this would be, this would basically be World War 3. Yeah. I mean, do we really need World War 3? I mean, the whole thing is preposterous. You have two nuclear-armed countries, very, very powerful. And China is looking upon this with great interest. And I mean, the whole thing is just, I can't, I wish I were more poetic and I could say it better, but this is preposterous. It's horrible. It's awful. And it shouldn't occur. And the people responsible for it should be, I don't know what, voted out or punished in some way because they're pushing us toward a nuclear war. Yeah. I mean, what do you think is behind this? I mean, are they just trying to exact regime change in Russia? Is that the bottom line? Probably. I mean, the U.S. is a bully. The U.S. has 800 military bases in foreign countries. No other country has anything like that. Russia doesn't have that. China doesn't have that. Again, I hate to keep repeating about Cuba, but when they put one foreign military base in Cuba, the U.S. went apoplectic. And yet the U.S. has got military bases all around Russia and has, for many years, 800 military bases in 130 countries, and they call that defense. I mean, we just got finished with basketball season. And the people who watch basketball, they know the difference between offense and defense. The U.S. team has the ball. You yell defense. They can distinguish defense and offense. Well, the U.S. is being offensive, not defensive. Absolutely. It's preposterous and just the most irresponsible and insane policy stance that I've seen in many years, if not all my life. Anyway, that's international geopolitics. Let's turn to something a little closer to home. After two years of intense public hearings, the California Reparations Task Force voted to approve a more than 1,000-page document, including more than 200 recommendations for how to undo centuries of unfair treatment for black Californians, especially the descendants of enslaved peoples. It recommended that California formally apologize for its role in enabling slavery and for the many tentacles of so-called white supremacy in history. It also recommended that the state make cash payments to those whose ancestors were enslaved. Cal Matters Reparation Calculator, this exists, based on economic modeling in the Task Forces report, estimates that an eligible black resident who has lived seven decades in California could be owed up to $1.2 million. So this task force then issued this report on June 29, 2023, and it's now up to the California Senate to decide on what to do with this recommendation and how much money should be given as restitution. You've addressed, I think eloquently in many places, the question of reparations in terms of property rights. Do you mind recounting that argument briefly here, and then we can talk about this specific case? Well, yes, I'd be delighted to do it. It's a very important question. First of all, California was never a slave state. It was not in the Confederacy. So what has California got to do with slavery is an interesting question. There are two people who were mainly associated with the case for reparations. That would be Randall Robinson and Tahishi Coates. And there's one person who is mainly associated against that, and that would be David Horowitz, who is with the Second Thoughts Group. I think both are wrong. I think the proper libertarian view is neither one. What the left wing says is that all whites owe all blacks reparations to slavery. And what the right wing says is that no whites owe anything to any blacks for slavery, and I think both are wrong. Look, suppose I have a wristwatch, and it's got your grandfather's picture in it. And we know that my grandfather stole this watch from your grandfather. And the proof of it is your grandfather's picture is in the watch, and we have a picture of your grandfather wearing the watch before my grandfather stole it from him. Should I have to give you back the watch? Yeah! I mean, assuming that had my grandfather not stolen the watch from your grandfather, your grandfather would have given it to your father, and your father would have given it to you, and you are the rightful owner of it. I'm not guilty of a crime. I'm guilty of holding stolen property. But let's say I'm entirely innocent. I never looked inside the watch. My father gave me the watch from his father, my grandfather, the thief. And I have the watch, and I'm just sort of innocent. And I should give you back the watch. So that would be the case for reparations, but it's a very limited case. But it's certainly not all whites owe all blacks anything, because a lot of whites came to this country. I'm Jewish. My family came in 1905 or so, and nothing to do with slavery. And then there are black people in this country now who came over five years ago, and they might have something to do with slavery in Africa, but they've got nothing to do with slavery here. And then there are black people who actually own slaves. So the whole thing is preposterous. Now another part of libertarianism is possession is nine-tenths of the law, not just libertarianism, but all civilized legal codes would say whatever is is presumed to be just, and the burden of proof is on somebody who wants to prove that the present situation is unjust. So let's suppose there's this black guy in Harlem, and he can prove that his grandfather lived and worked in a plantation in South Carolina, and he's got the proof, and let's say there were 100 slaves there. Now what should have happened in 1865 is we should have had ex post facto law against slavery. We should have said, yes, slavery was legal. The Nuremberg trial certainly established ex post facto law. I mean, the Nazis were saying, what are you doing on our case? So it was perfectly legal under Nazi law to kill Jews and Arab Jews and blacks and gays and any non-Aryan. So I support ex post facto law, and I think we should apply ex post facto law to slavery. And to say slavery, even though it was legal up until 1865 or 1863, is illegal. And the people who were slave owners should be punished. And what should be the punishment? They should be enslaved to the ex slaves, because they were guilty of kidnapping. So they kidnapped them and make them work in the fields or whatever. Now they're long beyond the reach of justice, because this is 150 years later. And what should have happened to their property? What should have happened to their property is not giving it to their children and their grandchildren, and now this guy in South Carolina, a white guy, owns it. It should have gone to the slaves, and if there were 100 slaves, and there was a plantation of, I don't know, 1,000 acres, well then each slave should get 10 acres. Well, now let's get back to this black guy in Harlem who can prove that his great-grandfather worked in this plantation. He should be able to go to court and say, sue the guy in South Carolina who was innocent, but he's the holder of stolen property, namely the plantation, and say I want, you know, one tenth or whatever it is, one one-hundredth of the plantation, and he should be given it. So we should have reparations certainly in the plantation acreage, but that would be very limited, and the burden of proof, I mean you'd have to prove it. And I don't believe in, you know, well it's too late or anything like that. I don't think that we should have a statute of limitations. There is such a thing as a natural statute of limitations, namely the further back you go in history, the harder it is to prove anything, and very few black people now could prove that, but if they could, they are entitled to reparations, and that would be my assessment as to what the proper libertarian position is. Reparations if you can prove that there was stolen property, and we believe in return of stolen property. So this should be adjudicated privately, nothing to do with the state undertaking such measures, right? Well that would be the anarchist view, but if we are limited government libertarians, anarchists, you go to the government court and you say, the black guy says, well you know my grandfather worked here, he is the proof, and I want ten acres, I mean that's where they got this 40 acres and a mule stuff from, because on average it would have been 40 acres, and I think a government court should support this, and if you're taking the anarchist point of view, there shouldn't be any government courts, there shouldn't be any government, then private courts should adjudicate that, but that's a different issue. Right now we're talking about reparations, and it's a separate issue as to who's in charge of courts. So if for some very strange reason you had been invited to be a member of this task force, would you have accepted, and if so, what would your input have consisted of? Well I would have accepted, I mean if they paid me enough, sure, and even if not, this would have been a way of publicizing libertarian theory, I would have accepted even for no money, and I would have made the case that I'm now making, that if there's somebody in California, a black guy in California, or woman, and he can prove that his grandfather was in Texas, or Louisiana, or somewhere, or even in the northern states, they had slavery in the north too, so it's not just a south thing. So I would say that yes, the Californian black person should be able to go to court and sue somebody under these situations. But the thing is about this, these reparations in California, they're not really strictly limited to slavery itself, they want reparations for some of the following issues, racial terror, political disenfranchisement, housing segregation, separate and unequal education, racism in the environment and infrastructure, pathologizing the African American family, control over creative, cultural and intellectual life, stolen labor and hindered opportunity, an unjust legal system, mental and physical harm and neglect and the wealth gap. So they want compensation for all these things and compensation for mass incarceration over policing and the war on drugs, the differential treatment of blacks in the war on drugs, and they estimate the reparations for just that aspect, the war on drugs, that's $115,000 for every person who lived during that time, a black person who lived during that time, and in terms of housing discrimination, the report noted that since 1850, black ownership in California has been disproportionately lower than white ownership. So they're looking for reparations on all of these types of issues, including promoted segregation, all these different disparities, they're saying that basically black should be given payments of more than $100,000 for redlining and things like this. So what do you think of reparations based on these issues? Now we know that the libertarian position about discrimination, but you wouldn't hurt to recount that. What about redressing issues like this? Well, I think you put your finger on one of the most important points, discrimination. Discrimination is a right. People have a right to discriminate. Look, if you're against that, you're going to end up with compulsory bisexuality because male heterosexuals discriminate against half the human race in terms of bed partners' love interests, namely other men. Heterosexual women also are evil because they discriminate against half the human race than the other women. Homosexual men, gay men, are evil because they discriminate against all women. And lesbians are also evil. I'm kidding about that, but that would be a logical implication because they discriminate against all men. Only bisexuals don't discriminate, so we should have compulsory bisexuality. I mean, that's the logic of this. We libertarians believe in the non-aggression principle and private property rights based on homesteading and voluntary trade, and we also believe in free association. Nobody should be compelled to associate with anyone else against as well. That's the problem with rape. The rape victim doesn't want to associate with the rapist and is compelled to do it. That's the problem with slavery. The slaves didn't want to associate with the slave master and they were compelled to do it. So now we're taking the opposite point of view. So I think if there's discrimination or redlining or any of that stuff, it's not a crime, it's a right. So nobody should be compensated for something that isn't untoward. Unequal wealth comes from all sorts of sources. One of the big sources of unequal wealth is the breakdown of the Black family due to welfare of LBJ when he ramped it up. Charles Murray, who is famous for the bell curve, also wrote another very good book, Lose and Ground, where he makes this case. So part of the reason for the wealth imbalance is the welfare system. Another part of it is different people have different talents. Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams have done more good work on this than any other two people I can think of and what they would say is that there are just different talents. I mean, LeBron James makes more money than you and I and he's Black and we're White. So there's nothing intrinsic about pigment that determines wealth. It's just different people have different skills. Now there is one area where I have to sort of agree and that's the drug thing. What happened with the drug thing is that the Black caucus of Congress was insistent that the drugs that the Black people used be penalized even more than the drugs that White people. So if you're going to get any reparations out of that, you should get the reparations out of the Black caucus of the Congress. Yeah. I mean, what about the issues where the state has a direct hand, for example, in seizing property and apparently, differentially, more so for Blacks in terms of eminent domain? What do you think about that? Well, that would be unfair. There should be reparations for that. And it should be not from all Whites, it should be from the people who did that. And this is probably true. Eminent domain is probably used more against poor people than rich people because rich people are better organized and it just so happens that Black people are poorer. So I don't think it's a racist thing. I think it's a wealth thing. But it just so happens that Black people are poorer, so they're more victimized by that. But we libertarians oppose eminent domain. So yes, there should be redress there, but not from all White people, but from the people responsible for the eminent domain. A bunch of politicians and bureaucrats, they should pay for that. Okay. Yeah. How would we go about getting the people responsible to pay? That's a good one. I don't think we'll succeed. But that would be what justice would require. Yeah, absolutely right. Let's move on to another issue that's somewhat related, but not exactly. It's an economic issue which I just wanted to have your take on this because I've been writing about this for quite a while and I wanted to hear your thoughts from a libertarian economist. An Austrian school economist. And so it's this issue of stakeholder capitalism, which the World Economic Forum has been promoting and trying to roll out across the world. They deem it a new economic system. This great reset project is really about making stakeholder capitalism universal. And it replaces so-called shareholder capitalism or what they pejoratively call neoliberalism. Now on page 78 of COVID-19, the great reset, Claude Schwab, who claims to be an economist, by the way, and his co-author, define neoliberalism as, quote, a corpus of ideas and policies that can be loosely defined as favoring competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention, and economic growth over social welfare. That is, stakeholder capitalism favors solidarity, whatever that means, over competition, government intervention over so-called creative destruction, and social welfare over economic growth as if these latter two could be decoupled somehow. Stakeholder capitalism supposedly benefits customers, suppliers, employees, local communities, and the planet. I think it resembles what Milton Friedman opposed in his famous essay, The Social Responsibility of Business, is to increase its profits. Published in the New York Times Magazine in 1971, interestingly, the stakeholder capitalism was floated the very next year by Claude Schwab in one of his books. So I think it was a direct response to Milton Friedman. Stakeholder capitalism uses this environmental, social, and governance index on the stock market and in banking to benefit these so-called stakeholders, but I think the ESG is like a demarcation device in the economy to drive capital toward these approved producers and to drive out non-compliant producers from the market. I think likewise that I think it's a shared monopoly or cartel scheme. The ESG is a pre- or extra-governmental coercion regime, which is then followed up by the state with regulations, sanctions, and subsidies. This is exactly what's going on in the U.S. They're driving this through the corporate world, and then the Biden administration is coming along and passing through executive fiat, all these different measures. Given this characterization, could you comment on what you think about this stakeholder capitalism and does it violate free market principles? Well, it's certainly antithetical to the free enterprise system. The free enterprise system, I think, Milton. I'm not a big fan of Milton Friedman, but I'm a pretty good fan of him. But on this one, he was 100% correct. This is just the answering wedge of socialism. They've tried socialism in so many guises, and they didn't work, and now this is just another guise for taking over private industry. I'm very fond of the idea of reductios ad absurdum, and I tried that with homosexuals and heterosexuals. I'd like to try it now. If it's such a great idea, why do we just impose it on corporations? Why shouldn't we impose it on individuals, on churches, on the government? And if we did, this would be their ruination. I mean, right now, I want to maximize my profits. The reason I'm on this show with you is because I figured that I would make a profit off of it, namely, I benefit more than the cost to me of doing something else. But if we have a stakeholder imposed upon me, well, then maybe I should be mowing my neighbor's lawn, or I don't know, shopping for somebody. Namely, I shouldn't do that, which is in my best interest. And I don't mean me personally, but all of us as individuals, we all try to maximize our welfare by taking this job and not that job. Well, you can't take this job and not that job because maybe these people need you more, even though they're paying you less. So if we impose this on individuals, most individuals would balk at that, and they say, you know, the hell with this, and we could do it on churches. Maybe the Catholic Church should give to Jews because the Jews are now stakeholders, or the temple should give to Muslims or whatever, because they're stakeholders. I mean, stakeholders are a bunch of thieves. They don't own the property and somehow they want part of the property. Well, this is just an attack on private property. They might as well steal my shirt as impose this stuff on me. It's like carjacking. So I think when you look at, and let's do it on government, if we impose stakeholder theory on the US government, well, then the US government should do things for Mexico or I don't know, Bulgaria or some other place that the US government doesn't want to do because the US government is trying to maximize its well-being or its profits. And now we're saying, no, you shouldn't do that. There are stakeholders out here, and now you should change your operation. The US government wouldn't like that. The ESG people wouldn't like that. Now, what's the name of the guy that wrote the book, attacking Milton Friedman? Clark Schwab. Right. We should apply it to him. We should say, OK, Mr. Schwab, where are stakeholders on your property? Give us 100,000 because you're rich and we need the money more than you do. Where are stakeholders? See how he likes being hoist by his own petard, as they would say. Right. Now, what are you supposed to? This is being driven from the top asset managers in the world, like BlackRock Inc. Larry Fink's the CEO, and he said point blank. He said stakeholder capitalism is capitalism. Why do you think these people, from these top asset managers, that company, BlackRock, has $10 trillion of assets under management, and they're driving this thing home, forcing corporations to comply, and threatening them with basically diverting capital away from them, so that they will not buy your stocks, basically a star view of capital investments, if you do not comply. Why do you think these people are doing this? Well, this is part of woke corporatism. I mean, the Chinese had a Cultural Revolution 20 years ago, and they must have killed 10 million people or 100 million people. I mean, we now have a Cultural Revolution. Happily, we're not killing millions of people. But it's sort of, in Yiddish, it's called mishagas craziness. It just sort of takes over people, took over the Chinese, and now happily they're past it. And it's our turn to be crazy. The medical people are now, what is it, medical schools are now going to invoke, what do you call it, affirmative action, and they're going to take doctors, not on the basis of ability to be doctors, but on the basis of pigment or plumbing, internal plumbing, and will have worse doctors than we otherwise would. Do you think they'll even do it with airline pilots? You have to wonder. Probably they will, because they don't go on commercial planes. They're very rich, and they have private planes. So they might say the hell with everyone else. But I mean, if they're going to pull this on doctors and on airline pilots, the craziness knows no bounds. I mean, they're already doing it on air traffic controllers at this time. There you go. I mean, we have to have a female or a black or, I don't know, bald-headed or hair, her suit, traffic controllers. I mean, what you want from a traffic controller or a pilot or a doctor or an engineer or a chemist is talent. I mean, if we want to cure cancer, we need the first team in there. We don't need people who got into chemistry PhDs, not on the basis of ability to do chemistry. Take the NBA. If you're going to apply this, the NBA is, I think, 85% black, way more than 13%, which is their proportion of the population. So here's another result you ought to observe. And if it's such a great idea to have this, let's apply it to the NBA and the NFL, the football league. And now you get some short fact Jewish guys who can't jump and can't run. And it's unfair that we're not in the NBA. But they don't want to apply it to that. But if they were logically consistent, they would say, yes, we've got to kick out all those splendid athletes who happen to be black. Because there are too many blacks in the NBA. We've got to limit them to 13%. That's what Harvard and North Carolina were doing. Hopefully the Supreme Court will stop them. Although what they'll probably do now is say, well, you know, God forbid we pick on the base of race. We're now going to choose on the base of things that are correlated with race. Right, exactly. Like poverty or living in- Lived experience. Yeah. Lived experience or living in Harlem or the town. Another, my favorite one is the top 10% of all high schools. Even though there's some high schools that the Bronx High School of Science, a very, very smart kids. And then there are other high schools where with the top 10%, are probably the lowest of the smart ones. So they'll use that. And hopefully the Supreme Court will be wise enough to say, ah, you can't do that either. But we'll have to wait and see. Okay. I mean, what would you say to those so-called libertarians that would suggest that property owners can create whatever criteria they want for investments? So if they want to create an ESG criteria, they can do so because it's their property or in the case of their assets under management, it's the property that they've been entrusted with by these various shareholders, whether they be states, pensions or whatever. Absolutely. If ESG were private, God bless them. I mean, I wouldn't join them, but they have a right to do it. Jews have a right to boycott Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Gays have a right to boycott Chick-fil-A, I think it's called, because it's owned by people who were, I don't know. Religious, Christian religious, yeah. They're religious and they don't want to, and these people that don't want to bake a cake for gay people, they have a right not to. So ESG, if it was done privately, would be non-problematic from a libertarian point of view. I might not join it, but that's a different issue. But the problem is that the governments now take this up and run with the ball. But the point is that I would tell even private ones, why limit ESG to corporations? Why not to individuals, to churches, to soccer teams or to the NBA? They very well may apply ESG to individuals. So that, for example, if you had a central bank digital currency, for example, and you could limit basically where spending took place, what people could purchase through the Fed, then they could say, you're not meeting your environmental, social and governance index quota. Likewise, you can't buy gasoline or you can't buy a rifle or you can't buy whatever. So they may apply this to individuals, it's very possible. Well, if they do, then the market will solve that. Like right now Nigel Farage in England, his bank told him, you can't bank with us. So he goes through another bank and the other bank says no. And they went to six or seven banks and he all said no. And people who don't understand economics say, well, this shows that capitalism is evil. No. The banking industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries of all industries. If it were not regulated, the Jones Bank or the Smith Bank would say to Nigel Farage, sure, we'll take your custom. So what they do is they take an industry which is heavily regulated and they say, well, that's what capitalism is. No, that's not what capitalism is. So boycotts, anyone should be able to boycott anything as long as it's done privately. Yeah. So with the ESG, I just want to make this distinction. This is being driven privately, but it's these corporate entities trying to get out ahead of legislation, which they know is falling. So if it weren't for the regulations, the regulators, it wouldn't be happening. But it is being driven like an extra governmental or pre-governmental coercion scheme as such. Right. Look, right now, people are free to boycott anything they want. But once the government gets in there, there's compulsion. Whereas if it's non-compulsion, look, I don't like Chinese foods. Well, boycott Chinese food, let's say. Actually, I don't like Chinese food, but I should be free not to go to a Chinese restaurant. And the Chinese restaurant should be free to boycott people like me, say free enterprise economists. They could put up a sign, no free enterprise economists allowed in this store. Now, the odds of them doing it are slim to none because of competition and a whole host of other reasons. But discrimination is a human right. Okay. Well, on that note, I'd like to move over to another topic. And I've been reading some of your work about it. And to be honest, I went into reading your works with a disagreement with you. I must confess up front that I sort of have a tendency or to agree with Hoppa on the question of immigration and his suggestion that goods are invited. And free trade is something that people invite. They invited these goods across the border because they purchased them. With, he says, he distinguishes this from immigration. And he says, you know, these immigrants, especially illegal immigrants so called, are not invited. They weren't given, you know, the okay to cross the border. And they're uninvited and they are infringing. You know, we get into the question of public property. Of course, that's a big conundrum. But they're at least infringing on my right to public property. And this influx of uninvited immigrants is costing me money. So how do you just, I read your distinction. It's pretty convincing, but I find myself still resisting this argument. I've got to be honest with you. I just don't want to have unfettered immigration. And it just seems to me that it is a cost for the citizen who are compelled to basically finance this whole regime. So why do you, first of all, how do you distinguish between, or how do you address this distinction that Hoppe is making between free trade and free influx of immigrants? Well, before I answer, let me just make a comment about Hans, who's a buddy of mine, a friend of mine for many years. I regard Hans not only as one of the most creative and brilliant libertarian thinkers now living, but I regard him as one of the most brilliant, creative, libertarian thinkers who ever lived. He is absolutely magnificent right up there with Murray Rothbard. And you can hardly... In fact, he may be one of the greatest philosophers of our time. And economists. And when I hand out compliments mentioning Murray Rothbard, that's about as high as I can mention. So Hans is brilliant. Secondly, on this point, he's also brilliant. He makes the following point. He says, look, if you have imports of a shirt, there's an importer and exporter. Two people agree. If there's investment, I invest a million dollars in France and in a steel mill. Again, there's an investor and an investee. Two people have to agree. So that's fine. But in the third case, the immigrant just shows up without any buyer leave. And it's a unilateral decision. And what Hans is saying is that, look, just because you favor free trade and free investment doesn't mean you have to favor free open immigration. And he is absolutely right. There is that disanalogy. Now there are two things we have to be concerned about. One is deontology. Is the libertarian, is the immigrant violating rights? And secondly, we have to bad guys. And not only bad guys. Suppose there were a trillion Martians, a quadrillion Martians, and they're all nice guys. Do we really want a quadrillion Martians to come in, live in the United States and vote and, you know, their way and the Martian way, whatever the Martian, don't ask me what the Martian way is. But so there are two considerations that we have to overcome to get the correct view. One is deontology and the other is we've got to keep ourselves safe. And not only from bad guys, but from multitudes. I mean, we don't want a quadrillion people in the United States too many. Okay, so let's do the deontology first. So here's the situation where Hans is wrong. A Martian comes or can be from Africa, India, who knows where. A Martian comes and he starts homesteading in the middle of Alaska or in the middle of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming. And along comes somebody from ICE and he says, you know, wear your papers. What are you doing here? He says, oh, I'm just mixing my labor with the land here. And the guy said, well, you know, you're not a citizen. Go away. And the Martian says, well, wait, I thought you people were libertarians. What libertarian rule am I violating? This is virgin territory. Nobody has ever set foot on this. These hundred acres in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. So go away. Leave me alone. I haven't violated any law. Now Hans's answer to that I think is preposterous. What he says is that the US government really owns that land in trust for all the citizens. And I say, Hans, you're an anarchist, get the government owning anything in trust. And the point is that Hans is not only an anarchist, he's also a Lockean. He believes that the way you get just property is by mixing your labor with virgin territory. Well, nobody ever mixed their labor with virgin territory until this Martian. So he's the rightful owner. And he and Stefan Kinsella have done human work in showing that it's the first guy who mixes labor with the land, not the second guy with the last guy. Because then, you know, the last guy would always be able to kick the predecessors out. So Hans is absolutely wrong when he says that somehow this Martian is violating libertarian law. He's not violating libertarian law. He's acting in accordance with libertarian law. And Hans's attempt to paper this over by saying that the government owns all the land in trust is just nonsense. It's anti-Lockean and he's a profound Lockean. So he's violating his own principles. Okay, I think I've dealt with the deontology. Now let's look at how we can defend ourselves from quadrillion Martians. The way we do it is we privatize every square inch of the country. And if every square inch of the country were privatized, then if somebody comes there a trespasser, and we tell the Martian, hey, this land over here, it's been homesteaded. Now you run into a problem because there is such a thing called sub-marginal land, land in the middle of Alaska or in the middle of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming. It's not economically viable to homestead, mix your labor with it because we have so much land compared to the people. Thank God. The answer to that is voluntary groups that say, hey, we want to privatize every inch, even though it's going to cost you something, let's do it out of charitable or defensive purposes. And that would be the way to do it. And not only every square inch of the land, but every square inch of the water. One of my books is on why we should privatize rivers, lakes, oceans, whatever. We've got to privatize the Mississippi River. Otherwise these Martians will get a boat and sit in the middle of the Mississippi River with a houseboat, and we don't want that either. So I think that the proper libertarian view on deontology, and which will defend us against masses of people, whether they're criminals or not, would be privatized every square inch of the country. And that would be the answer. So the proper answer is open borders. Anyone is welcome here. And if you don't like it, start privatizing land. Now look, we're not in charge. What we're trying to do is just come up with the proper libertarian analysis. And that's the proper libertarian analysis. We can have our cake and eat it. We can have our deontology. And we can protect ourselves against bad guys and masses of people. Okay, but we're not talking about on homesteaded land. We're talking about public space, so-called roads and parks and streets and places where we go to basically meet and travel and so on and so forth. You've argued that immigration control effectively increases state power. I mean, that's one of the arguments you made in your paper on immigration, reply to Hoppe. But on the other hand, does unfettered immigration increase state power as well? For example, it increases state power to address the increased crime, which we refer to. It increases state power to increase social welfare, health benefits to immigrants, et cetera, et cetera. Well, you're right. Those are dangers. But when you say unfettered immigration, I am fettering it. How am I fettering it? By privatizing the roads and the parks. Central Park in New York City should be private. So no immigrant can park in there and say, well, I'm setting up shop here. No immigrant should go to the middle of Alaska, where the next occupant is 200 miles away and start homesteading, because that'll all be owned. So if it's all owned, now look, if you have a welfare system, that would be very bad to have immigrants. So the answer is get rid of the welfare system. Remember, this is a libertarian analysis. So you can't pull welfare on against me, against the position I'm atom braiding, because I would just say, well, let's get rid of welfare. Yeah, agreed. Let's get rid of public schools. Let's get rid of public parks. Let's get rid of public libraries. It should all be privatized. And now, all of a sudden, this situation looks a lot better. Yeah. And then there's the political question. And I think you'd agree with this is that if we do have the current setup that we do, and immigration happens to benefit the political party that's basically gaining the fealty of these immigrants, and likewise, gaining power and the ability to stay in power, because they increase the social welfare to these immigrants, and then these immigrants in some states can vote. And they are being given the right to vote in some states and with the muddled electoral processes we have, even in the federal elections. So it does seem to benefit those parties or party that wants to increase immigration and to allow it to go without any kind of impediments. Yes, they're giving immigrants driver's licenses right away, and they can vote. But that's not the libertarian society. The libertarian society would be total privatization of everything, and now how do they come in? Now they have to be invited, because if they just come in, they're trespassers, and we kick them out. Yeah, but short of the libertarian society, how do we respond? Say in the case of the United States right now and the way things are, we haven't privatized everything, and short of immediate abolition of the state, we're going to have public property per se, and likewise we're going to have this problem. We're going to have the problem of immigrants coming, and especially when you have policies in place that are allowing them to come with basically no restraint, how do we deal with it outside of the ideal libertarian scenario? Well, that's a brilliant argument against me, and I congratulate you for it. You're a good Hans Hoppian. That's very good, but it's a little unfair, because I am giving a libertarian analysis, and if you say, well, forget about libertarianism, what should we do now? I don't know. I mean, I'm a libertarian, so I can only answer the libertarian issue. Let's take an analogy. I oppose the minimum wage law. The minimum wage law is no good, but suppose the situation was such that Bill Gates would give money to, I oppose abuse of create unemployment, but Bill Gates is going to give jobs to anyone who would be unemployed by the minimum wage. What would I then say? What I would then say is my analysis of the minimum wage precludes a Bill Gates, and I would say now that my analysis of immigration precludes the present situation, because I'm a libertarian. I don't want to get mired in the present situation. I don't want to be like Milton Friedman was accused of being an efficiency expert for the state. It would come up with all sorts of ways to make state interventions work better. Well, I don't want to do that. I think it's unfair to ask a libertarian what would you do in a non-libertarian situation, because we libertarians are limited to libertarianism. And if you say, well, given that we don't have libertarianism, what should we now do? Well, all bets are off. The libertarians have nothing to say. I believe in specialization and division of labor. You can't ask a doctor to build a bridge. You can't ask an architect to do heart surgery. Well, you can't ask a libertarian what to do in a non-libertarian situation, except get rid of the non-libertarian situation. Yeah. Didn't Rothbard somewhere say, and correct me if I'm wrong about this, that we could use the state to dismantle it, that the state could be used as an instrument to dismantle the state. And that might be the only way to do it. Well, Murray, in my writing, I call on Rothbard 1 and Rothbard 2, because there was a time when he believed in open immigration. And then there was a time when he didn't, which shows that, I mean, if Murray changed his mind while he's mature, I don't mean when he was 18 or 16 years old, but in his maturity, he changed his mind. This shows that this is a real rough issue. It sort of reminds me of abortion, where you have Ron Paul, who is pro-life, and Murray Rothbard, who is pro-choice, and you can't get two more, what, better leaders of libertarian movement than those two, and yet they're polar opposites. So immigration is a very, very tough, complicated issue. And I think I've analyzed it correctly, but it's vulnerable to your argument, namely, well, what do we do now? And my answer is, what we do now is we make a libertarian society. Okay, that's fair enough. I can't, what can I say to that? I mean, I agree. That's what I'd like to. And last but not least, and certainly I don't want to drive a wedge between you and me, but there's a slight elephant in the room. And that is your recent debate with Safferdine Amos about the Israel question. I just want to give you a chance for some kind of reprisal here, or a kind of rejoinder to what you had to say there. I am not qualified to speak on the issue of Israel and the Palestinian question, so I don't pretend to have that kind of versatility in terms of that issue. But did you have anything you'd like to say following up that debate? Yes. He is a good guy. Safferdine Amos is a Muslim or an Arab, I'm not sure of his background, but I cooperated with him before this debate. This debate was just a couple of weeks ago, or a month or two ago. But two or three years ago, he had me on a show, and I forget what we were talking about, but it was on libertarianism, and we were 100% in agreement with each other, and he is a good libertarian. Just as Hans is a good libertarian, but wrong on this issue, well, Safferdine is a good libertarian, but wrong on this issue. Now you'll remember that the Lockean theory says the first homesteader of the territory is the rightful owner. Well, how old is Muslimism, or Islam? It started in around 700, so it's just 1300 years old. How old is Catholicism? Just 2000 years old, started with Jesus Christ. How old is Judaism? 3800 years old. These new religions are new kids on the block. This is not definitive, but should give you an idea of who was there first, who was building stuff in what used to be Palestine, what now is Israel. Remember, he who homesteaded the land first is the rightful owner of it, and we don't have any time dimension. We go back as far as we can. I would say that the case of the Jews as against the Muslims or the Islamists in Israel is very much in favor of the Jewish side because we were there first. But property isn't collectively owned. It's privately, personally, individually owned. That's interesting. In our book that I did with Allen Fudemann, what we said it was a classical liberal case, not an anarchist case, but a classical liberal case, and we said right off in the first paragraph or the first chapter, Israel is not an anarcho-capitalist, and we said, well, Israel is wrong on this, Israel is wrong on that, but we're not talking about Israel, the government versus private people. We're talking about Israel, the government versus Arab governments, and when you compare the governments or when you can't compare the collectives, you're right. From the strict libertarian point of view, property can only be owned individually. But if you take that position, then you're sort of out of the debate because the debate is between groups. In one of the chapters, we do talk about certain groups, the Cohen's, the Levi's that were individual groups, and we trace it that way. But the argument is not only individual, but it's also group-wise and it's also nationwide. So we're defending Israel, the government. We're defending the Jewish people. We're defending the Israel government versus, say, Egypt or Jordan. We're defending the Jewish people, the collective versus other collectives, and we're also defending individuals. So it's a three-stage thing, like a wedding cake or something, individuals, groups, and nations. And on all three grounds, we say that the Israelis or the Jews have a better case for the ownership of the contested area. It's very much like in South Africa. South Africa was built up not by black people. There were very few black people when the English and the Dutch came there. And what happened is that they had a better economy. So the black people from the contiguous states came in and started working and then started outnumbering them. Well, it was very similar in Israel. What is now Israel? There were virtually no Arabs there. It was swamps or nowadays they call it wetlands. It was swamps and desert. And the Jews made the desert bloom and then Arab people came in as workers. So the Jews were there first. So if you're going to try to figure out who has justice in the contentious areas, I think the Jews were there first. And then the issue is when did the Palestinian people start? In the 1930s and the 1940s, all of the Jewish organizations were called Palestine. The Palestinians were sort of Johnny come lately. Johnny come lately, you know, they came afterward. Well, if you come afterward, your claim to the disputed property is not as good as the people who were there first. So that's sort of the essence of the book and the essence of my side of the debate. But I acknowledge that Amos was a good debating partner. He was intelligent and wise and witty and he did a good job. But I think that the justice was on my side. Okay. I mean, I would push a little bit here. When we talked about immigration, you were saying that, you know, I'm not arguing, I'm arguing as a libertarian. So are you arguing as a libertarian with reference to the, to the Israel-Palestine question? Well, I'm not arguing as an anarcho-capitalist libertarian. I'm arguing as a classical liberal, as a minarchist, as a person that accepts governments because it's the Israeli government versus other governments. So if you say you're all, you see what, and we have a whole chapter on Murray Rothbard in that book. Okay. And Murray is very much on the Palestinian side against the Israeli side. The point that Murray makes, I think he goes back to 1870 and he says, well, there were a lot of Palestinians in there then and we go back 2000 years before that. So we disagree with Murray on that. I mean, we're not a cult. We're not an iron-ran cult. You're allowed to disagree with each other and be friends and be colleagues. You know, Hans and I are co-authors on several occasions and we disagree also. So there's nothing wrong with agreeing and disagreeing. And I would love to co-authors something with Amos Safedin on another issue. I was hoping that the two of us together could solve the problem. Michael, I promised you an hour. We're over an hour, but this was lovely. I really enjoyed. I think this is the first time we met face to face. We've communicated in other ways, but this was just a delight. Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Great. Thanks so much, Walter. Bye-bye. Take care. You're listening to Wrecked with Michael Reckton-Wald. Find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts and get more content like this on Mises.org.