11/13/15 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey y'all, how's it going?
Good.
Very happy to hear that I'm pretending.
Anyway.
It's Friday.
That means it's time for The Goal is Freedom, the weekly column of our good friend Sheldon Richman at Free Association.
That's the name of his great blog.
Oh yeah, by the way, I should say this all the time when I interview Sheldon Richman.
You donate $100 to this show and one of your choices is you get a Sheldon Richman book, your money or your life against the income tax as your kickback.
Hey, there's terrible background noise there, Sheldon.
What's going on?
I'm walking to a quieter place.
Oh, okay.
That's a good idea.
This is a lot of hustle and bustle going on around here.
Right on.
Hey, how are you doing?
Early this morning out there on the West Coast where I used to live for a little while.
Yeah, 10 o'clock to me is not early.
I've been up at least five hours.
So I'm doing fine.
Great to be with you.
Good.
Very happy to have you here.
Hey man, so let's talk about this new article that you wrote.
It's about Trump.
See, I've got to admit, man, when I see the headline Trump compares Carson to a child molester because, you know, he supposedly did a violent thing one time in his life or whatever crap.
I just laugh my ass off.
I look at the destruction of Jeb Bush, which boy, I mean, he was just going to destroy himself anyway.
But Trump sure has helped.
And I just love it's a riot.
I mean, I hate the guy.
I know he's a fascist.
I know if he was the president, it would be absolute catastrophe.
But I do appreciate him bringing all the rest of the scum in the Republican Party presidential campaign down to his level.
And but then I'm checking myself and I'm realizing that, you know what?
We could laugh our way right into a fascist dictatorship with this guy here.
I better do my part to get Sheldon on to make it just how clear as clear as it could possibly be.
Just how bad of a president this guy could be if we were as Americans were to let him ever get that far.
This article is called Trump's Operation Police State.
And it really is that bad, huh?
Yeah, you know, I almost hesitate to criticize Trump as much as I love to.
And because there's so much to criticize.
But the reason I hesitate is that I don't want to imply that the others are really any better.
I mean, I think my best line on Trump, which I find confirmed almost every day, is that the reason Trump outrages the establishment is that he's a caricature of it.
So he's not really different in kind versus the others.
He just exaggerates it's most, you know, it's false, which is what a caricature does.
Of course, it exaggerates distinguishing characteristics and therefore can be funny.
And then they just keep making it worse, too, because they say he's not fit to be president.
But then he's really not that much different than the rest of them.
So they're kind of admitting that none of them are fit to be the leader of any of us.
Right.
Right.
So with that caveat in mind, let's go ahead and talk about Trump.
I do not mean to imply that I think Bush would be a good president or any of the others on either side of the aisle.
So let's talk about Trump and Trump.
You know, one of the things that struck me about Trump early on and I wrote about this is, is the Mussolini style of him.
Not so much even the exact content, but the very personal cult, almost cult of personality about him.
It's like I am going to make America great.
I am.
I am better than anybody else.
I will make deals.
The others can't do that.
You know, me, me, me.
He thinks the only problem with government is, you know, the wrong person has been at the head of it and he's the right person.
So it's this very personalized thing where he's not really he doesn't really care much about the details, doesn't care much about policy.
So it's just really trust me.
You know, I'm the right guy.
So just trust me no matter what I say.
Unfortunately, there's that is his base believes that I guess the good side is he's not really expanding that base.
So he doesn't seem to be losing it either very much, but but he's not he's not really it's not it's not growing.
So there are no increasing numbers of people who think, yes, let's just put our total trust in him and he'll take good care of us.
So there is something Mussolini and and sort of fascistic about it.
Now, the content is also fascistic.
I mean, on trade.
I know we don't need to talk about trade.
You want to talk more about immigration.
But on trade, you know, he's going to make he's going to make these deals and he has this zero sum approach.
Right.
We're going to win and they're going to lose because up till now we've been losing and they've been winning because we have stupid people making deals.
Well, as a free trader, I don't want anybody making deals except the individual traders who are who are buying and selling things.
They should be making deals for themselves.
But I don't want anybody making a deal on behalf of the country.
He doesn't seem to see that.
Anyway, on immigration, of course, the operation.
The reason I called it Operation Police State is, first of all, I was echoing his his warning of Eisenhower's Operation Wetback.
But putting putting, I think, a better name on the particular plan that or proposals on a plan yet.
But proposal that that Trump has, which is to round up more than 11 million people.
There's no way you can do that without really having an outright police state.
All right.
Now, OK, I want to get back to the whole immigration question.
And the police state is promising and everything on the other side of the break, because we don't have time to really dive into that here.
But it is a good place to backtrack on the trade question there.
Just back to it a little bit there.
I was actually just talking with David Estomado about the TPP.
And it seemed to me like what he was arguing was the Americans, you know, generally speaking, the U.S. government and their their captive special interests, that they're the ones who are winning.
All right.
Just like in the new TPP is a perfect example of it, of shoving American policy, particularly on intellectual property and what have you, down the rest of the world's throat.
But then again, China's not a part of that.
And I don't know enough about these deals.
I've never read a trade deal between China and the United States.
Is it the case?
It seems plausible enough that Bill Clinton and George W.
Bush would have negotiated deals that aren't free trade at all, but actually do give some kind of advantage to the Chinese that would work against the United States.
Everything they do works against the United States.
Right.
So set me straight.
Well, I don't like to talk in terms of for or against the United States, because that's a that's a huge collection of interests which aren't entirely in harmony.
So, you know, you have different people in different groups that have different interests.
So all of them being within the United States, I, first of all, I'm distrustful of trade agreements.
I think we should just have free trade.
These are always, you know, thousands of pages long with lots of technical discussion about exceptions and this and that.
So I don't see how that constitutes free trade.
I really like the analysis of Kevin Carson and Kevin Carson at the Center for a Stateless Society has pointed out over and over again that what these these so-called free trade agreements have done, they've been mainly a way to impose, and you already said this, to impose very draconian intellectual property regimes on foreign countries, which then keeps people there from making stuff that American companies want to have made there, but sell under their own logos at highly inflated prices.
So, you know, Nike wants once Nike wants factories to make Nike's, but they would not want those factory workers to break away, set up their own factory and make stuff that look like Nike's.
So therefore Nike and therefore the US government, which is doing its bidding, imposes a very strict intellectual property copyright trademark and patent laws on those countries.
That's bad for them.
That's also bad for American consumers who have to pay inflated prices because of IP.
So in other words, the big companies, the big multinational companies, they don't care about tariffs and quotas much anymore.
They want, you know, they're not trying to sell manufactured goods in the developing world, the stuff that's made in the US in the developing world.
So they don't want they don't care about that anymore.
What they care about is IP.
And I think that's largely right.
Well, what do you think Trump even has in mind or it's just a slogan anyway?
You know, Trump just sounds like an old style protection is no nothing.
Right.
We're going to take our jobs back as if we own jobs.
We're going to take our jobs.
We're going to get our jobs back.
So, you know, he's he's an old fashioned protectionist.
He doesn't understand the arguments for free trade.
It looks like he's not even the least bit familiar with them.
He just thinks we should have we should protect American companies.
But that is a route to impoverishment because the division of labor is is it makes it makes everybody richer when it's allowed to work.
And as you know, as Adam Smith said, that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.
So we want the market to be as extended as possible without, you know, government, the one doing it.
I don't want government I don't want force being used to open markets.
But I think there's a tendency for to head toward a global market when people are free because they see the benefits of trade.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We're already into the break.
But we'll be right back and get to the immigration question.
It's the great Sheldon Richman.
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I don't know who's more wrong.
The stupid kids saying we demand free college.
Or the stupid Marine going, here's me marching for my free college.
And it's him as a Marine training to kill people.
To be a mercenary for a lousy American college education.
You'd kill a stranger.
Wow, what a burn.
I think I'm on the side of the stupid commie kids.
On that one, compared to the stupid fascist kids.
What a mess.
Anyway, I'm talking with Sheldon Richman.
And he wrote this article about the insane lunatic Donald Trump.
And the insane lunatic American right that loves him.
That can't get enough of him.
And they don't care if he's for partial birth abortions.
And they don't care if he's for gun control.
And they don't care if he's for progressive taxation.
And they don't care if he's liberal, left wing, progressive, whatever they would claim to hate.
If it was anybody else.
And the reason why is because he hates Mexicans.
And they believe him when he says, he promises, he's going to get rid of them for you.
And so, you know, maybe it's not politically correct to hate blacks nowadays.
But you can sure as hell get away with hating Mexicans.
And especially if you're a conservative.
That's their last refuge, I guess.
To save the old America from the way it's becoming now, Sheldon.
And they just love it, man.
And the more he says he's going to create a totalitarian police state to round up and deport 12 million people, the more they love it.
But then again, he doesn't ever say anything about a totalitarian police state.
He always just says, oh, you know, it'll be, I think he would say, it'll be gentle.
It'll be fine.
We'll just get them and tell them to go.
So what do you say?
Yes, he says it'll be humane.
And then he used as a model the 1954 Operation Wetback put in by Dwight Eisenhower.
And he said, remember, I like Ike.
People like Ike.
I like Ike.
Well, that was a campaign slogan.
I wouldn't attach a lot of weight to that.
When people have looked, going back and looked at Operation Wetback, and you can find articles in the Washington Post over the last couple of days and other places about this.
It turns out it wasn't actually humane.
They picked up people and dropped them in the desert near Mexicali, Mexico at 125 degrees Fahrenheit without any provisions.
And then one incident, 88 died of, you know, heat exhaustion.
They put them on ships, which have been described by one historian as like a slave ship or, you know, like it was like hell on these ships.
This was not humane.
Now, he insists it will be humane, will be nice, will give them notice.
He says all this sort of stuff.
But, look, people aren't walking around with patches on their clothing that says undocumented.
And I hesitate to say that because you may think that's a great idea.
Yeah.
And that does remind us of an unfortunate episode in history, European history to be more specific.
You know, these are people who have lived, most of these are people who have lived in the United States for years, many years.
They're part of communities.
They go about their business.
And they're not going to be just turn themselves over to his deportation force, as he calls it.
I think he should have called it rapid deportation force because I think, you know, RP, RPF or RDF would be, you know, that's a snappy, snappy abbreviation.
He didn't use the word rapid, but it is going to be rapid.
He says it will be in two years and has been pointed out by people, and I quote this in my article.
If you try to deport 11 million people in two years, the bureaucracy, which as we know is inept, and I don't care what Trump says, he's not going to make a government bureaucracy efficient.
It's going to swallow up a whole bunch of people who they don't even intend to swallow up, namely a lot of American citizens too, possibly thousands or more of American citizens who will be detained and maybe even deported just because of bureaucratic snafus.
So this is a nightmare.
This will be a nightmare.
It's a nightmare vision.
Imagine this being on the news all over the world what's happening in the United States.
It would be horrendous.
Once the temporary emergency is over, then the Department of Homeland Security will go back to the small, trim, lean, efficient organization that it is now and will leave the rest of us alone, right?
I believe we read that sort of thing.
I'm just a quarter Mexican and pretty damn light skinned.
You've seen me.
I think Robert Higgs would be teaching us that.
Yeah, the government shrinks back with more benign size after the crisis.
Oh, wait, I think I read that wrong.
Okay, so let me pretend to be stupid here for a second.
But they're taking our jobs, man.
And there are a lot of uneducated, working class Americans who just can't compete.
I met a guy who said he had to leave the road crew because he didn't speak Spanish.
And so many people on the road crew were immigrants, illegal and otherwise, that he ended up having to move to a lower skilled, lower wage job, doesn't have a great education, trying to take care of his family.
And he's here first.
And and then the other argument is, hey, the whole damn side of town is all Mexicans.
Now it's a different culture.
It's a different.
Maybe it's not a gun to my head in direct force, but it seems like you're forcing an entirely different way of life on me when you surround me by whatever number of thousands or millions of new people from somewhere else.
Well, on the matter of jobs, I mean, look, you can find anecdotes.
But even as Brian Kaplan, who's an advocate of open borders, points out the the most prominent labor economist who is critical of immigration, says that, you know, the worst damage is a long run decline of about four under five percent in wages for high school dropouts.
Other other groups actually bet will benefit.
This is this again.
This is coming from the most prominent labor economist in the anti-immigrant camp.
So it's there aren't generally horrendous things to fear about immigrants coming in.
Does that mean no one will be displaced?
Of course not.
But as Ben Powell of the Independent Institute likes to point out, and he's just done a book on this, when new people come in, first of all, that they are they're coming to produce.
The second thing is they're moving from capital poor areas to capital rich areas, which means we'll be much more productive here than they would be in a developing economy.
Now, you know, Mexico is not is further along in development than other countries.
But the point is, it's not doesn't have as much capital as the US does.
So when you when you take a worker moving from a capital poor area to a capital rich area, that means more tools, more machinery, which augments human labor.
That's what machines and capital goods do.
So in other words, those people will be more productive than they would have been.
But that means they're producing more things for sale, more stuff for us.
Does that mean no one will have to change jobs?
Of course not.
But that's true anyway.
Technology displaces people all the time, more so than trade does and more so than people coming in from other countries.
So that's just part of life, unfortunately.
You may not like change, but that's the way it is.
Good or bad.
That's the way it is.
As far as culture, I don't see how a person has a right or a group has a right to, quote, protect its culture.
If that means violating the freedom of other people, that that that's besides culture is not never been a static thing anyway.
The culture that we enjoy today, however you may define it, is not something that existed 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 500 years ago.
It was it was, you know, changing all the time because of people coming in.
So all right.
But now the right wing argument is they want to bring in these people and change our culture to one where everybody votes Democrat, because they're all immigrants who've been promised that they can get on the dole one way or the other.
And so it's social engineering, the whole damn society to the left in that sense.
Yeah, but see, but this is this contradiction again.
What do we fear now?
We fear that they're taking our jobs or they're coming on welfare.
I mean, they're not really doing both things.
First of all, you can't go on welfare, I think, for five years after you become a legal immigrant.
So, you know, that's no one's coming here to go on welfare.
Now, as far as rules like every hospital has to take any any comer, regardless of ability to pay.
You know, those are laws that we need to critique and change, but not violate other people's freedom because of.
This is what I don't understand.
Sure.
They're the government.
Lots of bad laws have been passed that compel people to do things against their will and they may not want to.
You can't use those as an argument to violate people's freedom, including and rights don't just belong to Americans.
Even even the Constitution, if you want to go no further than the Constitution.
And I certainly do not want to stop there.
You go no further than the Constitution.
The Constitution talks about persons, not citizens.
So rights belong to people as human beings.
It also doesn't say anything about the national government taking charge of who's allowed inside the borders or not.
And I mean, as far as obviously they have the right to keep foreign armies out, you know, foreign governments out.
But that's it.
Well, that's that's less clear.
If you read the clause that, you know, expired in 18, what was it, 18 or nine?
That seems to suggest that the national government does have say over that.
But, you know, I'm not basing this on the Constitution.
I don't understand why the Constitution allows lots of things that violate freedom, like a minute domain.
So I'm a natural rights guy.
If the Constitution coincide where the Constitution coincides with natural rights.
Great.
But there are a lot of places where it doesn't.
Yeah.
Well, that's certainly true.
All right.
Well, listen.
Oh, one more point to make is we already have a police state on the border.
A ruthless totalitarian one that kills people by the scores every single year.
The jails people by the tens and tens of thousands.
Obama has the world record for two million deportations.
Far more than George W. Bush.
And of course, there's the whole, you know, constitution free zone where they can stop and search anybody on the lower threshold within 100 miles of the international borders of the seas, which is two thirds of the population of the country, of course, live on the coasts or, you know, in the north or the south.
Yeah.
So anyway, that's why I said beefed up the police state, not creative.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, just imagine what it would really be like.
I mean, seriously, imagine and imagine it at night in your scene to, you know, this homeland security state.
In fact, they probably have to hire a bunch of illegals to staff and say they have enough cops to carry out the purge of the rest of them.
But anyway.
Yeah.
One more thing.
He's totally wrong on birthright citizenship.
He says legal scholars say that he's right and that a child born in the United States, even if his parents are citizens, are would not be should not be treated as a citizen.
He's threatening to deport even those kids.
That's totally wrong.
Damon Root has an article at Reason dot com, which blasts at the smithereens.
Great.
That's established in law that if you're born here, you're a citizen.
Unless you're unless you're the child of a of a of a diplomat or, you know, invading army.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Well, in fact, there's one the other day where even veterans who signed up and went and fought and killed people in the Iraq war on the promise they get citizenship out of it are getting kicked right the hell out of the country instead.
Thanks a lot, sucker.
Man, it's it's unbelievable the ruthlessness of the U.S. government.
They just don't give a damn about anybody at all.
You know, they'll put those same people on the pedestal like there are demigods and then throw them in the garbage.
It's just incredible.
Anyway, over time.
Hey, thanks, man.
You're the best, Sheldon.
Anytime, Scott.
Good talking.
All right.
All right, y'all.
That is the great Sheldon Richmond Sheldon.
Free association dot blogspot dot com.
Just Sheldon Richmond dot com.
It'll forward you on there.
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