 what would happen if there was, if we just decided, okay, we're gonna have open borders. Liz and I were looking at some of the Gallup polling. They ask migrants worldwide all the time, how, you know, if you could migrate, if you could leave your home country, would you do it? And in 2021, a peak of nearly 900 million worldwide said that they would migrate. If you dig into that, about 18% of them say that they would choose the United States as their top destination. If you do that math, it's about 162 million in a scenario where the U.S. is the only country that's opening its borders. You can imagine that number might be even higher. You know, what do you say to people, Chris, who are concerned that a huge, you know, almost half the U.S. population coming from around the world here would change the culture, change the economics and just kind of sow the seeds for the kind of really scary backlash that Dave is, you know, raising there? Yeah, so actually if I could offer a thought on sort of the previous discussion, I think it's, so I mean, I think it is the case that most immigrants tend to be net contributors and simply because they consume sort of state-funded benefits at one point in time, doesn't mean that they will continue to be a net consumer over time. So like just in my own case, like I presume I was a net consumer for the first 18 years of my life until I entered the labor market and then I became a net contributor. So it's very plausible to me that, you know, immigrants who come here get on their feet, perhaps thanks in part to state-funded benefits will be net contributors over the course of their lifetime, but I can set that aside. On the point about, you know, having hundreds of millions of immigrants coming in, I mean, one thing is expressing a desire to immigrate doesn't necessarily translate into action and especially not immediate action, but to not dodge the question, I mean, I don't know. I would say, what if we institutionalized any sort of radical libertarian proposal tomorrow? So if somebody said, we can put heroin on the shelves of Walgreens tomorrow, that would change the culture pretty rapidly. Or what if we said, you know, we do away with the income tax tomorrow? That would have a lot of radical consequences as well. And so you could just go on down the line. And so I would just sort of make a symmetry point here. Like I could see you go in one of two ways. One is just, I am a purist libertarian and I want heroin on the shelves of Walgreens tomorrow. This is like the libertarian button, I think. Like could you press the libertarian button and make it a libertarian society tomorrow? Do you press the button? You put the heroin in the pharmacies, you get rid of the income tax, you privatize everything overnight. You might say, I'm a purist and I would do that, let justice be done though the heavens may fall. And if that's your view, I say, all right, cool. Then don't worry about immigration. Like it's one and the same. Like it's just part of this package of radical libertarian views. But then you might say, I'm a little more conservative than that. Like maybe we start to criminalizing some stuff and like reduce the income tax over time because we have good Hayekian reasons to not have radical change overnight. I say, that sounds reasonable to me. In which case you say, all right, as per sort of Liz's suggestion, maybe we just sort of ratchet up the number of immigrants permitted in each year and see how it goes. But so here again, like I don't think there's a special problem with immigration. This is a problem with any sort of libertarian position. Like if you do it all overnight, it's gonna have a lot of change really quickly. And if you're fine with that, you should be fine with that in the case of immigration. If you're not fine with that in the case of drugs and taxes and everything else, then I say, okay, like fair enough, I can see the point in that. But then here again, there's no special problem with immigration. But there is, there is a special problem. And I laid this out earlier and I don't think it's been addressed. Look, I would unquestionably press the button to legalize heroin or to abolish the income tax because you're right, it would be a drastic change. But the drastic change would be a radical reduction in violent crime, a radical reduction in OD deaths if you're talking about drugs. And my God, I mean, the radical change from abolishing the income tax would be to make this country enormously more productive, incentivize work. I mean, like I just know like myself, like I would hire three more people if the income taxes were reduced. The amount of jobs that would be created, it would be like this huge boon to the economy and it would be starving the most evil parasitical organization, which is Earth. But the difference with the immigration system, well, number one, I would argue it would be a disaster, an epic disaster if we open the borders tomorrow. But it's also that, look, you have this dynamic where there are uninvited people coming here. They have no right to be here. There is no natural right that says if a caravan of a hundred thousand people who are uninvited come here, they just get to enter property that isn't theirs. And so why, if we were just pushing the button, like say we were just pushing a button to legalize heroin or we were just pushing a button to repeal the income tax, those are the, if we were just pushing a button to open the borders, what you're gonna have is millions of people who were not invited here flooding the country. Why is that a libertarian outcome? What natural right do they have to come here? Play it out for us. Why would opening the borders tomorrow be a disaster? What would that look like? Well, I mean, okay, we've had those record highs under Joe Biden and what so far do you think that looks like? I mean, okay, you've got all the stuff you were just describing in New York City, kids who are in public schools having to make sacrifices. You've had the social safety nets being drained. And by the way, the response to that is not gonna be there for, we abolished the social safety net. The response to that is gonna be there for, we have to increase the social safety net. And you have Donald Trump, if he's not removed by these criminal charges, cruising on his way to reelection. Is that the results anyone likes? Open the borders, you're gonna get something like that times 10. It's gonna be, I mean, the reactions that we're going to get from this are going to be nothing even moving us close to a libertarian direction. In fact, I think it would probably move us much, much further from a free society. Chris, do you agree with that idea of what would happen if we did this tomorrow? If we did it tomorrow. I mean, I don't know. It's an outer vision to offer it. Like if that's Dave's vision for what March 27th looks like. What's your vision? I am more skeptical, I suppose, than Dave is about pressing the libertarian button. So like, I like privatizing not everything, but I like privatizing most things. I like getting rid of the income tax. I like legalizing drugs. I like all those ideas. That doesn't mean if we did it overnight, the consequences would be good tomorrow. I'm Hayekian enough to think that gradual change is probably the best. And so like, it is very hard to predict what's gonna happen as a result of any of those radical changes. Here again, I don't think there's a special problem with immigration. And so I probably wouldn't press the libertarian button for any of those things. And it like, it's just not obvious to me that say if we put heroin on the shelves of Walgreens tomorrow with other things in place, perhaps. So if that's what we're imagining, say, keep everything else in place, but we open up the borders, I could very much imagine an increased fiscal burden resulting from an increase in the number of heroin users, for example. Okay, but let me ask, I guess, Dave kind of laid out his dystopian vision of a future with much freer immigration. Could you lay out your positive vision? Like what, like, it doesn't have to be open borders tomorrow, but let's say we start letting just a lot more peaceful, nonviolent people come here. What do you see as the future for America? I mean, I see it is in many ways the same as the past. Like this is, you know, not to get all sentimental about it, but I think this is a big part of what has made America great is like people can come here from anywhere in the world. They can work here. They can earn far more money. They can contribute to economic growth. They contribute to cultural diversity, all these sorts of things. And so like, I think it has worked extremely well so far, having not completely open borders, but very open borders. I think our culture, I think our economy is stronger as a result of immigration. And I don't see any particular reason to think that that's gonna change. I would certainly agree that certainly in the time period in America, when we didn't have a welfare state or a central bank or an income tax, and we were an industrializing society that I think the policy of very loose immigration worked out very well. So I do agree with you or that. I just think we have a lot of fundamental differences today. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. 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