Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had, you've been took, you've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right you guys, introducing the great Sheldon Richman.
He's the editor of the Libertarian Institute, managing something or other anyway.
My partner there with Jerry LeBel.
Welcome back, how are you doing Sheldon?
Thanks for having me back and always glad to talk to you.
I'm doing fine.
Yeah, and in case y'all missed it, this is going to be our regular thing now, sort of kind of again.
We used to do this unofficially pretty dang regularly, but Sheldon writes every Friday, TGIF, the goal is freedom for the Libertarian Institute and then Counterpunch and Reason, a lot of other places run it too.
So we're going to talk about that.
And this week it's, what does Trump have against children?
I hate the children being taken away.
You're kind of making fun of that quote, Donald Trump and his poor grammar there.
Finally, a tweet we can believe.
So, you know, everybody's got a lot of heated opinions about this one, Sheldon.
And I'll tell you, you know, a friend of a friend, I heard a story about, you know, a son and a mom who are just absolutely hate each other's guts right now, at each other's throats over this.
It's one of those extremely controversial political issues of what's going on at the border right now.
So what is going on at the border?
And of course, with an eye toward what people mistakenly think you think, you know?
Well, I think this begins around sometime in April when Sessions announced, you know, zero tolerance for people coming up from Central America.
I don't think there's so much Mexicans, there may be Mexicans in there, but from some very violent places.
By the way, a lot of that violence has roots in U.S. intervention, but we can leave that aside.
There are articles about that floating around.
Anyway, you had, remember the idea, they kept warning there was a caravan coming, you know, thousands of vehicles allegedly were bringing people here, families, but also some unaccompanied children.
And so the panic set in and Sessions decided, despite all the prosecutorial discretion he has, that there'd be zero tolerance.
Every one of them are going to be criminally charged.
And then they separated the kids from their parents, mothers or fathers, or sometimes it was an aunt, and put them in a facility, Texas, more than one facility, cages, basically.
There are pictures floating around of that and some reporters have gotten in to see them.
So this began, and there's something like 2,400 right now.
So this started getting attention.
And of course, naturally, there was outrage about, well, two things.
Number one, taking the kids away.
And number two, holding them where they're holding them.
There is a court, it's called a settlement from a couple of years, some years ago, Flores, that says the government can't hold kids indefinitely.
I think they gave them about 20 days as the limit.
And they also have to hold them in the least restrictive manner.
So the Trump administration doesn't like that.
They're trying to get that changed.
Well, there was mounting criticism, damaging pictures.
Republicans, and this was, I think, the key thing, Republicans got extremely nervous after all this is a midterm election year.
All of the House is up, one third of the Senate is up.
And a lot of Republicans are very nervous that it just looks really bad, kids being torn away from, and a lot of these are running in districts that go either way, I guess.
But the idea of a baby being taken away from a breastfeeding mother is not a really good thing when you're running for re-election and you're in the president's party.
So he then relented.
But let's actually say he appeared to relent the other day when he signed an executive, well, I should back up a step.
Trump tried to blame the Democrats and especially Obama year Democrats and Obama for this, as if he had to do this.
I wouldn't be doing this if they would just pass, if they would change the law.
Well, that was a lie.
Ilya Soman, who's a very good law professor and blogger of all conspiracy and reason, you can look him up.
And I think I linked to it.
I do link to it.
This just totally destroys this point.
It's not in the law.
It's not required.
There may be some provision in one of the laws that says the administration may do this, but the people defending Trump always fudge that term, right?
May gets conflated with must.
Or so authorized is conflated with required to.
And those are two different things.
He doesn't have to do this.
He's railing against the Democrats for, you know, he's like a kid in a schoolyard.
You know, you made me do it.
It's your fault.
But then all of a sudden, two days ago, he, well, he announces he's going to sign an executive order to stop this.
Well, if it was the law and he can't help it, why is he, how can he sign an executive order?
So clearly he either knew or found out that he was lying about or, you know, that he was speaking inaccurately about this.
Most likely lying, or he doesn't even care, really.
I don't know if it was actually lying.
He may not know.
He doesn't care what the truth is.
I don't know if that's a lie or not.
People figure that out for themselves.
So anyway, announces he's going to sign, stop this by executive order.
But meanwhile, you know, he was holding the kids hostage.
And this was openly admitted to that, to the Democrats saying, and the Republicans, if you want me to stop taking these kids and caging them up, pass a bill that will have the wall, that will cut legal immigration, not just go after illegal immigration, which is bad enough, but cut legal immigration and stop the family migration part of the immigration system where someone who gets in and gets a green card can then bring in family members to keep families together.
And also what he called what's known as the diversity lottery system, where several years ago, whatever it was, Congress passed a bill that there were a bunch of nations, countries that, you know, very few people were getting in from those countries and some of them were poor countries.
So they set up this sort of special thing where people from those countries can put their name in and then those names are put into a lottery.
And then some number is picked from them.
And then they that means they get to then go through the vetting process.
Of course, Trump doesn't understand any of this.
Or if he does, he lies.
He lies about both about both things, both the family migration, which they call chain chain migration, and also the lottery.
So he's been debunked many times on that.
Anyway, he says, I'm going to keep taking these kids unless you fix the law in his view, which means like twenty five billion dollars for his wall and the other things.
Then he announces he's going to sign the the executive order to stop it because the pressure got too great and too many Republicans were on his back.
And I guess they just didn't want that.
It's not clear whether Ivanka was showing him pictures of kids or not.
But anyway, so then he signs the thing.
But it's clear that it's really a fig leaf to help the Republicans in November.
It doesn't really change things.
What he announced they'll do is zero tolerance continues.
Right.
We're going to be tough on the border.
So the border signal, the border will still be tough, as he puts it.
So zero tolerance, criminal prosecution.
By the way, they can charge people under the civil code for so-called illegal entry.
And I'd like to say something about illegal entry.
I hope I remember to get to it because I did a separate blog.
I have it in my notes.
Go ahead.
Yeah, because I think it's a strong point.
Anyway, no civil, because if it's civil, they can't hold them.
Right.
They can just give them a court date.
And if they get found in violation, they get a small fine or something.
Anyway, criminal prosecution, which can be a misdemeanor for the first violation, felony for later violations.
So criminal prosecution, expedite the criminal cases of families as opposed to just individuals who have come up.
But keep the families together, kids and parents together during the processing.
But don't forget, expedite it.
So there's where things are rigged, because if the person's convicted under the criminal statute, at that point, they can take the kids away.
And they want to expedite it.
So they want to speed up the time that the parents are together, the families are together.
And then, which brings us to the point where they can be separated.
Of course, what they've been doing, USA Today has a story about this today.
What they've been doing is fining them a minimal amount.
I think they don't have any money.
So what's the point of hitting them with a big fine, right?
I think it's 10 bucks.
Sentencing them for time served, because I guess they don't have the space to hold them in prison, and then shipping them back with the kids, apparently.
So they're sending them back, which is bad, because they're going back to very violent and dangerous and very poor conditions, where they're possible victims of gang violence and other things.
There's a war on drugs, which, of course, the US pushes on those countries.
And that then stimulates the worst kind of gang warfare, turf fights, and all that stuff.
And that's very dangerous for just bystanders.
So that's how it stands right now.
Apparently, the debate over some Republican bill about immigration, which, again, would cut immigration, I think, like 40%, legal immigration by 40%, has been now, I read, delayed in the House until next week.
So there's delay.
So that's, as I understand it, where things stand right at this moment.
Oh, there's no word about what the exact...
There's no firm word about the 2,400 kids who are being held right now, whether they will be immediately returned or what.
And the other story is the Pentagon is looking at using its military bases to hold up to 20,000 people, families, whatever.
So that's where things stand.
All right.
So now we got to go through this here, first of all.
But Obama also did this.
Well, that's right.
There's a great piece on Reason by Matt Welch about this whataboutism, which is really very good.
I like how people are saying, you know, number one, they ask me, and they ask a lot of libertarians, they probably ask you, where were you when Obama was doing stuff like this?
And I say, where were you?
Because I was writing all about it under Bush and everybody, anti-attack, the anti- immigrationists.
I don't care who they are.
So they just show themselves to be ridiculous.
They asked Reason that, too.
Reason was bashing Obama for record deportations.
But people still tweet, where were you?
Plus, they show pictures.
They say, here are the pictures the media, mainstream media doesn't want you to see.
Where'd they get the pictures?
They were mainstream media pictures from tours of the Obama detention facilities.
So that's crazy, too.
Drudge does this.
Anyway, Obama was not separating families.
He was holding families together indefinitely.
And there was a court ruling that said you can't hold the families together indefinitely.
But there was not separation of kids.
That was an innovation, a discretionary innovation by the Trump people.
And it is really the most kind of hollow argument that Obama doing something now, instead of being proof that it's the worst thing in the world that you could do, the same thing Obama did or would do, now that's proof that it's A-OK, because even Obama did it.
It goes further than that.
It also seems to mean, let's assume somebody didn't criticize Obama for whatever the reason is.
I don't know.
Maybe they like Obama too much.
And they didn't.
I mean, I guess there might have been people, there certainly were people like that.
They didn't criticize him for drones and kill lists and all that either.
So true.
That means they're hypocrites.
But that doesn't mean they can't, they're now forever stopped from criticizing Trump.
Yeah, they should mend their ways and realize this is not a partisan thing.
But it doesn't end the conversation to say, well, you were quiet about Obama.
It just means, oh, you finally woke up.
Good.
Well, let's, yeah, let's join hands and go against this policy.
And let's do it when it's a Democrat, too.
That's the proper thing to say to people like that.
Not, you shut up now.
Which, like you say, gives a pass to the Trump administration.
And, you know, I can see where when people see Laura Bush and Madeleine Albright and the, you know, literally Michael Hayden and John Brennan, and the resistance, you know, latching on to this issue.
That, you know, it's obviously the most cynical thing in the world.
Look at these war criminals who, who separate children from the rest of their own body parts, you know, without the slightest bit of compunction whatsoever, and just wrap themselves in a big flag and a dead American GI to get away with it all.
To see them cry babying about it.
I could see how that makes people cynical.
But, you know, always, it shouldn't be that hard to separate wheat from chaff here and what matters and what doesn't.
We're talking about civilian human beings who, at worst, they're guilty of an offense.
They haven't committed a crime against anybody.
Well, no, you're absolutely right.
It's perfectly proper to go after Madeleine Albright, who helped starve, what is it, 50,000 Iraqi kids.
Yeah, minimum 300,000, between 300 and 500,000.
Between the two Iraq wars, and she famously said on 60 Minutes, it's worth it, because it's going after Saddam Hussein.
She was only UN ambassador at the time.
She then got elevated to Secretary of State by Bill Clinton after that.
So it's perfectly proper to go after her and Hayden and I agree, all those people.
But you can, as killers, not just, not hypocrites.
That's too soft a word.
But you can do that in a way that also condemns the Trump administration.
Not in a way to say, stop criticizing Trump, you people, because you're killers.
No, you criticize them all.
And, of course, Trump is, as I point out in the second part of my article, Trump is mistreating kids, again, nice word, mistreating, euphemism there, is mistreating kids all over the Middle East and beyond, Africa, wherever he's dropping bombs and flying drones and supporting repressive regimes like the Israeli regime.
He's doing worse to kids than simply, you know, separating them from their parents and putting them in cages, which is bad enough.
Peter Van Buren said on Twitter, he says, send the IDF to the Mexican border.
Rachel Maddow, I'll never mention it again.
You know, got that right.
Or just say they're Palestinians.
Yeah, just call them Palestinians.
Yeah, exactly.
Send the IDF.
Just say Palestinians are trading across the Rio Grande.
You know what?
I bet some liberal's going to try that.
No, it's OK.
They're Palestinians.
You can kill as many as you want.
It's always open sea zone, Palestine.
Yeah.
Man, so now here's the thing, too, is they've admitted they've said, hey, we're doing this in order to deter people from coming and bringing their kids, which is collective punishment and whatever you call that.
What do you call it?
One is holding them hostage until Congress gives us our wall and the other things.
And second, it's a deterrence.
So as I think it was a great cartoon that Adam Bates posted on Facebook of a mother in Central America saying, let's see, I can, you know, in the midst of all this violence in Honduras or wherever, saying, well, I can stay here and be killed or we can go to the try to get into the US and my kid will be taken away.
And the cartoon is labeled Sophie's Choice, which I think was a powerful editorial cartoon.
Yeah, they've been put in a horrible situation.
So we want to deter them from trying to escape.
Who can blame them?
Yeah, well, and that was one of the quotes I read, too, was from one of these ladies who just said there is no place in Honduras to go to get away from the drug lord, criminal murderer, warlord dudes there.
It's just absolutely out of control.
There's no force organized to stop them at all.
What's a woman and her child supposed to do?
Sessions announced that just escaping that kind of violence where I guess you're not specifically targeted is no is not grounds for asylum, he says.
Just trying to get out of terrible violence and poverty is no longer grounds for asylum.
So once that word went out, people said, well, I'm going to have to sneak in.
Yeah, I'm not just going to put myself and get turned down.
And then, you know, I love the way these self-styled libertarians say, but the rule of law, why aren't these people obeying the law?
Anyway, you're probably going to cover that point.
Yeah, we'll get back to that nonsense in a minute.
And, you know, Hillary Clinton even said that, yeah, no, these kids, they got to be turned back.
They're not allowed to come here like this.
And, you know, that was just her, you know, twisted psyche, you know, calling out there because she had aided and abetted the coup in Honduras.
Not that the previous guy was great or whatever, but the guy that was overthrown by the military that then she at least ratified after the fact as Obama's secretary of state ushered in, you know, he was basically a right-wing business criminal and made big deals with the drug lords.
And so, on one hand, you have American, USA-enforced hemispheric drug prohibition on the international trade in these substances, creating these criminal gangs in the first place.
And then you have American rubber-stamped coup d'etat, which allows their closest allies to seize power in the country and turn it upside down.
And then, so, you know, it seemed, it's sort of like, well, what to do about all the Syrian refugees?
Well, let them move to Scottsdale, Arizona, Chicago, Illinois, where John McCain and Barack Obama, who did this to them, you know, have to suffer the consequences.
And where their greatest champions, who keep returning them to power and putting them in power, where they're the ones who have to suffer the consequences of what's going on here.
Instead, you know, people just pretend that they don't know that that's what's going on in Mexico.
That, you know, upwards of 50,000 people have been killed in the drug wars there.
Or I don't know about that statistic, but it's certainly massive violence since Bush and Correa and whichever.
I get their names mixed up.
I'm horrible on Mexico stuff.
But the massive military drug wars there and coups and problems.
So that doesn't mean that every economic migrant or violence-fleeing migrant is really all America's fault in the first place.
But we should always ask that.
And a lot of times we'll find out that, yes, in fact, it is the American government's fault that they put these people in this position in the first place.
Yeah, the foreign policy.
This gets not enough attention.
Ted Galen Carpenter has paid a lot of attention to this.
The foreign policy side of the war on drugs is very, very serious.
The consequences are extremely widespread, particularly not well, not only in Latin America, of course, but Asia, Afghanistan.
It's unbelievably important and it does much to disrupt those countries.
And you'll notice any time some Latin American politician or officeholder, typically it's when he's left office, says, you know what, maybe we ought to rethink this drug war, they get slapped down.
The U.S. doubles its efforts, you know, redoubles its efforts there in those countries to say, don't you dare consider legalizing drugs or easing up somehow.
Don't you dare.
And, you know, the U.S. government's like the 800 pound gorilla.
It has means of exerting influence on people, anybody that gets a liberal thought about the drug war.
So it is very serious.
It's got a lot to do.
You know, who can say what percentage, but it's got a lot to do with what's going on.
And I don't like one of the I don't like being one of those people who say, you know, if things were better there, people wouldn't come here because I welcome them to come here.
If they don't want to come here because things are good at home, fine.
But I want them to be able to come here even if they just want a different climate.
I don't care the reasons.
You know, let them in.
As Mel Brooks says in Blazing Saddles, loathsome gain.
You know, let them pass.
Leave them alone.
All right.
But now, so here's the other argument to that is, but what if for economic and or, you know, political violence, maybe there's a massive war in South America and all of Latin America decides they're moving to north of Mexico and and they're just here they come or say there's a movie like this.
There's a movie where there's a nuclear war, a subject of one of the subjects of my previous interview this morning, limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan, where then tens of thousands of Pakistani refugees are allowed into the United States.
And it causes outbreak of war between the states and this kind of thing.
There's got to be a limit or not or what?
Come on.
Well, anybody is really worried about that.
And I can say I never lost a moment of sleep worried that, you know, zillions of people are going to pour into the United States.
Anybody who does worry about that, then ought to really be a committed non-interventionist because the U.S. so like we were just saying so often.
Well, what if they are what if they're what if they're really not hypocrites and they really are paleo anti-war right wingers and they say, don't bomb the world, don't invite the world?
A billion people aren't going to pick up and come here.
That's been written about by various people.
I'm trying to think who I last read that by.
You know, most people never around the world hardly get very far from the village they were born in.
They're great incentives to not move, namely, you know, you want to stay at home, the home you were born, you know, grew up in the family around you're close to the family.
Languages can be a problem.
You know, uprooting yourself and going to a new culture and a new language is not easy, which means the people who do it are the most ambitious and entrepreneurial.
It's just I don't know what to say more than that.
It's a ridiculous fear that, you know, I think the billion is the number that gets thrown around.
Michael Humer has written about this.
A billion people are not waiting to get into the United States.
The other argument people use is, you know, they like to quote Milton Friedman.
As long as we have a welfare state, we can't have free immigration.
Well, I take it the other way around.
Until we have free immigration, we're never going to get rid of the welfare state.
Why do you want to save the welfare state from the natural stresses and strains?
Let people come in and then we can say we shouldn't have a welfare state.
Let welfare be, you know, mutual aid societies, private efforts.
And then it's going to be done the right way.
It's going to be done voluntarily through contract.
And it's going to be, therefore, efficient and well done and moral.
If you coddle the welfare state by making sure no one can come in because you're afraid they're going to sponge off us, you're just saving the welfare state.
So I always thought that argument was completely upside down.
Yeah, well, yeah.
And seriously, obviously, the answer is, well, that's your fault for being a commie in the first place.
Get rid of the thing and stop disincentivizing them if that's really or stop incentivizing them to come if that's really your problem.
It's like saying that the government can, you know, make you wear a helmet on your bicycle because, hey, if you hit your head, the costs are going to be socialized onto the rest of the city.
But why should that be in the first place?
That's the problem, not my lack of a helmet.
Yeah, but generally the people I hear that argument from don't want the welfare state.
So that argument wouldn't work against them.
They don't advocate the welfare state.
They want to get rid of it.
But so they think that means I have to oppose any newcomer because he might possibly, you know, go on welfare, even though you can't go on welfare.
Well, I guess, you know, what they're really saying is, no, just their taxes are going to go up.
It's not going to get the welfare abolished.
It's just going to make their life worse.
Right.
But I just want to point out, you can't say to them, well, if you're so worried about this, let's get rid of the welfare state, therefore all for getting rid of it.
Yeah.
But they just don't seem to understand that that's a bad argument, even for someone who wants to get rid of the welfare state.
Yeah.
I say put all the stress as you can on it, and then it'll break down.
And maybe people get the idea that that's not the way to create a social safety net.
I'm all in favor of social safety net, as long as it's voluntary, contractual and done without coercion.
Yeah.
And by the way, you mentioned this article, and I want to point people to it.
It's at Reason.com, where The Volat Conspiracy now has a place at Reason.
And also, but I got permission from the author to reprint it.
It's on the Libertarian Institute page today as well.
Yeah, it's very good.
It's very thorough.
There's tons of links.
If you'd like to follow links, he links to further reading on just like every major point he makes.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's called Enforcing the Law Doesn't Justify Separating Migrant Children from Their Parents.
And it really is a very thorough and legal and informative analysis there.
And you know, you really got it down pat, too, obviously here, Sheldon.
So as always, very grateful for that.
So now, you mentioned the, I guess I want to mention the Romans 13 thing.
Not for you to systematically debunk it, because come on.
But I do want to mention that Jeff Sessions resorted to that, that basically the Bible says that even if your leader is Pol Pot, you're supposed to do what he says.
Obey the government.
I'm no authority on the New Testament.
Well, you know what?
You are an authority on the U.S. Constitution.
Does it say in there that the U.S. state is ordained by God to exist?
Yeah, it doesn't say that.
In fact, God's name, strangely, didn't even show up in the Constitution.
They asked Hamilton, somebody asked Hamilton afterwards, why is that?
God's not mentioned.
He said, and this is in my book.
He said, we forgot.
Yeah, well, there were human beings.
Their argument was, yeah, their argument was that sovereignty came from the people, collectively, not from God and not from the divine right of a king, but from the divine right of every last schmuck, except, you know, all the excluded people who didn't count.
But you know what I mean?
Right.
If you think about it in many different ways, it should be a repugnant to every American if he says obey the government because the government was placed here by God, was ordained by God.
I mean, just ask yourself, oh, really?
Is that true when it's Barack Obama and Eric Holder?
If your answer is no, then yeah, shut up.
You know, that was one of my bumper stickers was Roman 13 says, you better do what the Republicans say when they're in power.
That's what it says.
I think their explanation, I guess, is on whatever election day that was when Obama got elected, God took the day off.
Yeah, something like that.
He slipped up.
But you're right.
They should be really embarrassed by that.
Even, by the way, as I mentioned, I didn't put links to this, but he was, this whole policy has been heavily criticized by evangelicals, including Franklin Graham.
I'll give him credit for that.
Oh, really?
I didn't know that.
Graham has been a big Trump supporter, has been to the White House and endorsed Trump during the election, during the campaign.
But I saw criticism of his and he said, this is disgraceful.
This, I mean, it was just too much.
Taking these kids away is just too much.
Yeah.
You know, I'm sorry.
I know you got to go, but can we do one more question here?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, sure.
The wall.
Trump said one of these things before he quote unquote gave in, as you said, that that's not all it's cracked up to be anyway.
But he was saying, well, give me my funding for the wall and I'll, you know, maybe I'll stop that kind of thing.
And yet, first of all, you could talk about the libertarian or lack thereof, if you want, and the facts of all of that with the eminent domain and that kind of thing.
But also, isn't that whole thing just a bunch of crackpot BS anyway, in terms of building an actual giant wall down there?
There's no real plan to ever do that, is there?
I don't know.
He sounds pretty serious about it.
Maybe behind their back, they're saying, yeah, that's what the boss says, but we'll just sort of forget about it.
I don't know.
It's a pretty long border.
I think what people need to understand and libertarians ought to not have to be told about this or reminded that would take a major violation of property rights.
Bush already did it when he was building the fence or I don't know if it's a wall or fence over in sections of Texas.
They took people's property.
And in some cases, they separated people's property.
There's a golf course, a private golf course, that's between the Rio Grande and the wall.
In other words, the rest of the United States is on the other side of the wall.
So they can't build a wall in the river.
I mean, there's different reasons, physical, environmental.
They just can't do it.
There's a treaty with Mexico.
You can't put the wall in dead center in the middle of the river.
It's going to be on and you can't put it on Mexican land.
Mexico won't pay for it.
They're certainly not going to give land for it.
So it's got to go through, at least in Texas.
I don't know about the other states.
It's got to go through private property.
Why aren't libertarians screaming that, you know, for no other reason, the wall would be an atrocity.
It would be an offense against liberty.
So that's ridiculous.
But I wanted to say one thing about...
Well, probably to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of people's land being taken away from them.
All right, hang on just one second.
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Yeah, unbelievable.
Farmland, productive land, homes.
Thousands of miles worth of people's property.
For people living on the far side of the wall.
And it's not like there's just a door there that they can come in anytime.
They have to go through some rigmarole.
So it begins to look like the West Bank.
All right.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I was going to say something about illegal entry, because we all use that phrase.
Right.
And this is a separate blog entry on the site at the Institute, too.
Yeah.
And it's linked to my article.
So this is a logical point that has bugged me.
So let's imagine someone who's standing on the Mexican side of the U.S. border across the river there, or just across the line, whether it's a river or not.
Now, at that point, they are not covered by U.S. law, right?
Because the United States, at least at this point, has no jurisdiction in Mexico.
Historically, I guess that's not always been the thinking of Americans.
But at the moment, if you're a Mexican or a Central American who's in Mexico, the U.S. law can't touch you.
You can't obey or disobey U.S. law if you're standing in Mexico.
Let's put it that way.
So to cross into the U.S. from Mexico, you have to start in Mexico.
So the moment you start your crossing, you haven't violated American law because you can neither violate nor observe American law standing in Mexico.
So once you get into the U.S., you've crossed already.
So I maintain, not that I believe I can convince a judge of this, but I maintain that no American law has been broken.
Now, I go on to say, OK, so some clever person will say to that, OK, we'll just quickly rewrite the law to say you can't be here without a paper showing you have government permission.
But now I cry anti-discrimination and on a totally frivolous grounds.
I don't need to have a paper.
I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
I don't need to have a piece of paper either on my person or even in a safe deposit box somewhere or under my mattress.
I don't have a piece of paper saying I have permission to be here.
But let's say somebody standing next to me who was born in, you know, Belize or someplace or Honduras, he he doesn't have a piece of paper either.
But that guy is going to be snatched and taken before a judge and maybe caged up or thrown out.
But I'm not going to be.
On what grounds?
Place of birth, purely place of birth.
That's discrimination.
That's that's unequal protection of the law.
And a liberal value is as long as we have government making laws, equal protection of the law or equality under law.
So I think the whole immigration law is rotten to the core and ought to be just stricken.
All right.
All right.
So then one more thing, then, as long as he's still here.
But what about they say, hey, if we had a private property anarchy, then people would be trespassing to sneak across.
So we need homeland security for the time being until we because.
Oh, and also because immigrants vote Democrat and somehow Democrats are more status than Republicans, I guess.
And so, you know, the answer to those those things, I'm going to leave it to you to plug the book that deals with all this, because I unfortunately don't remember the name of the book.
But say the name right now who wrote the book that's that it refutes the whole all that business.
Yeah, it's David Hathaway.
It's called Immigration Individual versus National Borders.
And it's it's endorsed by myself and by the late Will Grigg, our former partner at the Libertarian Institute here.
And it's a purely Mississian praxeological case against border enforcement.
The United States of America, Texas, Mexico are not in it.
It's simply praxeological, that is logical, first premise type, inductive argument.
And the Mississian fashion.
Let me say something just quick about the question you initially asked.
The premise of people that ask that question, you know, isn't it the case that if we had a totally private property society, you know, somehow this problem would go away?
They seem to assume that everybody's, you know, a I don't know, I'll be blunt, a white supremacist or a northern European supremacist, as they are, and would therefore not want, you know, brown people from Latin America coming there.
So that would that's how they would handle the situation.
I say that's ridiculous.
Most people would would welcome people coming.
They're looking for potential employees, potential renters, potential friends, potential people who will open up restaurants with food that they don't normally have access to.
I mean, all kinds of reasons.
It's like I wrote a couple of weekends ago, weeks ago.
Freedom leads to a greater and greater association.
It takes force to keep people apart.
They naturally are curious about each other.
They want to learn new things.
And they're going to be roads that the owners of which will welcome the traffic of anybody, whether it's to come to the shopping centers or whatever, visit the homeowners, visit, you know, visit friends.
That's it's just ridiculous to think a private property society is going to be somehow a closed society.
That's nonsense.
The country is not going to end up being like one big country club where they have membership committee and you can't get in unless you're a member and strict, strict membership criteria.
That image, which Hans Hoppe has sort of promoted, is complete crap.
And where would all us undesirables go?
We'd have to immigrate to Mexico, I guess.
It's not how it's going to work.
If a couple of property owners who own adjacent property want to say, you know, nobody but us white European stock types can come on the property.
Yeah, they're totally free to do that.
I agree.
Government, if the government exists, it shouldn't stop them.
And there shouldn't be, you know, people shouldn't throw stones through their windows if they want to do that.
Great.
Well, we'll ignore those people.
But that's going to be a minority of people.
And over time, that minority will shrink.
So I'm not worried about that.
Well, and but what about how does it translate to?
So listen, we need I mean, if you buy the first premise that immigration's got to be limited and protected down at the southern border at all, that maybe we're anarchists, even.
But for now, we need homeland security.
Is that all right?
I mean, it seems to me like just on the face of it, that could justify the social security, because after all, in a private property anarchy, we'd have to have some kind of pension system, of course, right?
And for crippled people and retired people and whatever, or, you know, whatever the situation, we would have to have a security force to protect us from invasion by the French or something.
I don't know.
So for now, we need homeland security.
We need the Pentagon and the CIA and the Social Security Administration and everything that we already have.
Because we would have some kind of analogous system in some way if we had a libertarian society anyway.
You know, they commit a fallacy that Noam Chomsky does on the left.
The idea being the way, because Noam Chomsky, you know, officially is an anarchist, right?
But not today.
So the idea is, on both sides now, is the way to get rid of the government is to really beef up the government first.
I don't get that logic.
I mean, my friend Gary Chartier was pointing out this morning, that was Lenin's theory too, right?
Before the state can wither away, it's got to be this totalitarian dictatorship.
Right.
The funny thing is, they don't adopt that logic.
Chomsky calls it, Chomsky says, well, you have to widen the floor of the cage.
So you have to use democracy to limit private power so that, for example, you can join a union where you make enough money that then you can afford to really fight for bigger issues or this kind of thing.
You know, the same people that make that, the same libertarians who make that argument would not accept it in the case of school vouchers, right?
The critical school vouchers.
For the reason that Marshall Fritz, the great, late, great Marshall Fritz pointed out, he was against vouchers on the grounds that he says, because you would hear people say, no, no, once you use tax money to give parents the choice to get out of the public schools, that's going to lead to privatization of schools.
So what Marshall used to say is, yeah, that's the same strategy as bridging a 10 foot chasm with two five foot planks.
In other words, get everybody on the government reservation through the money, because there's always strings with money.
Get everybody on the reservation and that way we'll end up getting rid of the reservation.
He didn't buy that logic.
I didn't buy it.
I don't buy it.
And I don't buy it in the case of this either.
Well, isn't it funny, right?
Is people who are willing to support homeland security are saying, yeah, and once we use homeland security to make this country as basically, I guess they mean as white and middle class as we are, then everyone's going to turn into a libertarian, even though they're supposedly libertarians and even they support homeland security.
The rest of American, you know, middle class white people are right wingers who actually hate freedom and love government, love cops, love soldiers, love the worst parts of the state the most.
So, how the hell are, why are we supposed to believe that they're more libertarian than Mexicans, you know, on any given day, you know, or any given Mexican?
Right.
It's, I don't, I don't get the logic.
They want to grow in the state in order to shrink it.
To me, I mean, maybe I'm simple, but I don't, that doesn't make sense to me.
Well, you know what's funny too?
I'm sure you've had this experience too, is I've convinced communists with that before that like, Hey man, ultimately Mark said, we want a stateless anarchist type thing.
Once everybody's equal, we'll wither the state away.
But I'm just saying, doesn't it make more sense that instead of creating a dictatorship with total power over everything to make everything fair with force first, that actually probably what you want to do would just be to wither the damn thing away.
Right.
And then he says to me, one example I'm thinking of, Hey, yeah, that does make sense.
Yeah, I know.
That's why you should not be a communist.
You should be a libertarian.
Nothing new.
Bakunin, Mikhail Bakunin was telling Marx, you're full of crap.
I mean, a contemporary, I mean, and to their credit, there are, there are anarcho, there are anarcho-socialists or anarcho, they call themselves anarcho-communists, who understand that, that you can't give total control of the government, even if you call it the dictatorship of the proletariat, thinking it's then going to go away at some point.
It's not.
They were implicitly public choice types.
They realized that once those people get power, they're going to give it up.
Right.
Why would they give it up?
Things are good.
It's good to be the king.
Well, it's good to be the commissar.
Yeah.
You know what?
It's good to know people who grew up in the Soviet Union too, because they'll tell you there ain't no freedom in that kind of equality.
You know, you don't want that.
So that's a snare that unfortunately libertarians fall victim to when it comes to immigration.
I'm worried that part of the reason is, you know, those people.
You know, when it comes to those people, then we suddenly, you know, we talked about violating the law.
These are people who would have no hesitation to violate a gun law, or to make a gun in their backyard if the government outlaws manufacture guns.
They would have no hesitation to try to get around the income tax.
You have a whole cottage industry among libertarians and some conservatives about how that's a law that can be ignored.
Suddenly now the rule of law is sacred and we got to have people obeying the law.
Isn't it a little strange who the people who need to obey the law are, even though I've already pointed out the law doesn't apply to them because they're not under U.S. jurisdiction?
But is it a coincidence?
Yeah.
Well, and as you pointed out before that.
They have to take our law seriously and treat it with great reverence.
They don't treat any law seriously when they don't like them.
So I don't, you know, I'm a little suspicious.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, these exact same type of people who are saying, you know, I can't stand the fact that my country is full of people from Honduras and Mexico and Laos and Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan.
And why do these people keep coming here?
And of course, it's a pretty obvious answer if you just actually ask it honestly for a second.
And the answer is, these are countries America's destroyed.
You know, I was reading a thing earlier where Afghanistan's got the most refugees of anybody in the tens of thousands now, and they have nowhere to go.
We've raised their society to the ground.
What George Bush did to Iraq, he didn't just invade Iraq.
He destroyed, he obliterated their society.
They've had a whole other war since then, even.
We could argue it this way, that in a sense, we owe them.
That's the least we can do is let them come in.
Well, and that's the problem.
I don't really like to make that argument.
It's certainly fair to point out that the U.S. government, with most acquiescence of most Americans, yeah, destroyed those societies.
And at the very least, I mean.
They should be able to come anyway, because I don't want to imply that someone who doesn't come from one of those countries shouldn't be allowed in because we don't owe them.
So, you know, I just think people invent arguments.
They strain for arguments they'd never make in another context.
And that makes me wonder, what's the real agenda there?
I mean, I had someone tell me on Facebook, accused me of being fine when the government, how did he put it?
When the government, I'm all for the government when it forces association on him and other people.
And the example he gave was same-sex marriage.
So in other words, if the government finally says, OK, we're not we're no longer going to put impediments in the way, legal impediments and whatnot, in the way of people who same-sex marriages, that guy regards his liberty, his rights and liberty violated by that.
Because he has to know someone who's now in a same-sex marriage?
He now has to live in a society where some same-sex couple is married and they can illegally call it marriage.
That violates his freedom somehow.
These these people turn out much of an argument.
I got to say, these people end up being the very snowflakes, right?
They accuse other people of being they're shattered by the idea that someone across town either is the wrong color or the wrong stock or is involved in a in some sort of relationship that they regard as not normal.
Their liberties violated.
Well, I don't think that person can possibly call himself a libertarian because that has nothing to do with liberty.
And if you don't know that, you know, go back and read some books before you start talking, because that's got nothing to do with liberty.
Your liberty doesn't mean I don't have to have anybody even anywhere near me that does something that I regard as not normal, not violating people's rights, just living in a way peacefully, quietly living in a way I don't approve of.
Your liberty is not violated by that, buddy.
That's crazy.
You know what?
And I'm sorry for beating this dead horse, too.
But if anyone has ever gotten out from behind their computer monitor and gone to the city, you'll see how this is all completely ridiculous.
I don't know how anybody is, what world anybody's living in, where there's some kind of homogeneous society worth preserving here.
Right.
And I think there are surveys that show that people with sort of the worst attitudes about immigration live in areas that they never see an immigrant.
Yeah.
And by the way, you know what?
When it comes to people's fears about the radical right and Nazis and this and that kind of thing, well, the only real I mean, there are some Nazi groups outside of prison, but they all were born in prison.
And they're all really, you know, side effect of the war on drugs and the war on poor people.
And the rest of it that our government's been waging all this time.
So just in the same sense as, I guess, criminal gangs of all descriptions really have their headquarters behind bars sometimes, you know?
Yeah.
And, you know, when people say, you know, all the fears, every fear that people voice about, you know, the immigrants today, that was those were voiced about every previous group.
And so, you know, they don't they don't fit in.
The culture is different, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You know, every every one of them, you know, about the Irish, the Polish, the Jewish people, every single group.
So that's an old song.
And that ought to make people very skeptical about it.
And I love when they say, but I don't speak English.
And my son, Ben, always reminds me of is it Doug Stanhope, who says there's a great bit about him, pro-immigration bit where he says, yeah, you're concerned that people don't speak English.
How about your English speaking next door neighbor that you don't even have eye contact with?
You know, you avoid any contact with him.
He speaks perfect English.
You don't seem to care about that.
Yeah, that's funny.
He also talks about all the people who come into the country every year who are all freeloaders and who don't speak the language and aren't productive.
And all they do is take and never give and this and that.
And of course, he's talking about babies, those freeloaders, you know?
Yeah.
One of the things they one of the things the immigrants take, which is a little inconsistent with the welfare thing is they, quote, take jobs, which is kind of Bernie Sanders side of it.
But they're both taking jobs and taking welfare.
Of course, they can't get on welfare.
You got to be here, you know, quote, legally with a certain with like five years under your belt before you can even apply for anything.
So that's all bogus, too.
I mean, they just invent they'll invent things because they're afraid of of people who originated in a country other than the United States.
And, you know, they might want to talk to the Native Americans about all that.
Maybe they should have had a tough immigration policy back in the early days.
All right.
Well, so what about people, though, who are working on the low end of the wage scale in terms of skills, this and that guys doing construction and remodeling jobs and this and that kind of thing?
Roofing jobs who basically see people who are from another country come and monopolize their part of the construction market, for one example, or in in restaurant kitchens or something where now, well, geez, they don't speak Spanish.
So now they can't even get a job and maybe they couldn't get a job anyway.
Working in a kitchen and, you know, things have changed in this part of town.
And it's because, you know, not in the most ridiculous way, like, you know, two guys are kissing somewhere on the other side of town.
But, you know, my employment has literally they're taking my job.
I can't get a job doing what I do, what I used to do, because now somebody came from somewhere else because a Democrat said it was OK when I never agreed to that.
For one thing, we got massive crops rotting in the field because they can't find enough people to pick them.
Now, I'm not one who says, yeah, bring them in so they can pick crops.
But that's what a lot of unskilled people who don't speak English are perfectly willing to do to make a better life.
And obviously, they think it's a better life or they wouldn't be coming here.
But I'm reading stories about California and other places where crops are rotting in the field.
We're not the food.
Price of food will go up and there will be less available because of that.
As Brian Kaplan likes to point out, who's great on this issue, check it, check his blog and other writings.
The the the most anti-immigrant labor economist, I think he's at Harvard, his study shows that the only group that is even is hurt in that's hurt in the in the in the short run and it's something like, you know, 4 percent lower wages or something are high school dropouts, unskilled high school dropouts.
And, you know, I have a friend who says if if you're if you're a person whose whose ability to live is jeopardized by an unskilled, non-English speaking person from Mexico or Latin America, you've got a bigger problem than immigration.
Maybe you should address it now.
Well, what do they do?
A lot of people have a lot of different circumstances.
You know what Kaplan says you should do?
And here you hear he recommends he's playing sort of second best if this is the only way to do it.
He says keeping people locked into the kind of conditions they're trying to escape the immigrants now that are trying to escape is keeping them locked in as such a serious crime by U.S. policymakers.
And I agree it is a crime.
They're not letting them out.
It's as if you have a well, he wants a wall.
It's like it's as if you were the government on the other side locking them in.
It's the same thing.
So that's so serious that he'd be willing to to this small group of high school dropouts.
He'd be willing to give them some adjustment assistance rather than lock out the immigrants.
And if that's the choice, if that's the only choice, I say yes, I do that.
I would say yes, because I mean, the two things are not comparable.
Now, I don't I don't think you need to do it.
That's not Kaplan's first choice.
You know, we can do other things like, you know, get rid of all the impediments to the people improving themselves and learning some skill and getting getting a better job.
But the answer is not keep out desperately poor people who are threatened by horrible, violent conditions at home.
That's cruel.
That is cruel.
All right.
So one more thing before I let you go.
I think it's a fair way to phrase it.
And it's actually is a YouTube comment on our last interview just came in in my email.
And it was, look, I'm an anarcho this and that, but I'm from Sweden and I favor immigration restrictions because seriously, Sweden is supposed to just become a majority Afghan refugee country now or whatever.
He didn't phrase it exactly that way, but they're supposed to allow some huge percentage of the population of their country to change demographically speaking, when that will change the way that they live in so many ways that maybe you won't be able to say it's a direct hands on coercion.
But it certainly is taking their something, you know, individual rights or individual rights.
And I don't see how you can stop people from moving around here.
This person ought to be in favor of the cops.
I mean, and soldiers.
This person ought to be applauding libertarian efforts to get rid of the immigration restrictions here, because I think a lot of people know no offense to Sweden.
I've never been there.
I'm sure it's a fine place and fine people.
But I think most people would choose to come to the United States.
It's bigger.
It's opener.
You know, it's more in a way it's much more tolerant.
I mean, it's important out there.
One reason we don't see the problems with with Muslim immigrants here is they're not alienated from mainstream life the way they are, say, in France and other places where they're living on the fringes.
They can't get jobs.
The U.S. being much more cosmopolitan and urbane, we don't have those kinds of issues.
Not anywhere near the extent there are.
They are in some places in Europe.
And the reason is it's a much more tolerant, except like you mentioned about the cities, much more tolerant, accepting a place where you're not throttled in trying to make a better life.
Well, and even out in the not necessarily the sticks, but certainly out in the right wing parts of the outskirts of Austin, there are mosques everywhere and women with head thingies on and nobody cares.
You know, everybody's still friends.
It doesn't matter.
And this is the lesson that, you know, if you don't want newcomers to come in and vote for, you know, intrusive rights, violating laws and programs and candidates, then get your act together and take those powers away from the state to begin with.
If you're not going to get rid of the state altogether, at least create an ethic where the idea that what government should do is so limited and, you know, is so small a list of things that people can't just come in and vote for, you know, taxes, take a huge amount of money away and stuff like that.
In other words, the more democracy, the more it encourages a war of all against all.
You know, I read a great thing by John Utley one time about especially always avoid, never let them apply proportional representation because immediately it'll be Catholics and Protestants and black and white and this and that.
And in all of the worst ways, people will subdivide each other in that fashion.
That was the way it's worked in X, Y, Z example countries where it just made everybody hate each other a hundred times worse than having, you know, a kind of coalition, 51% winner take all type system the way we have now, you know?
Yeah, look, the coin of phrase, not the coin of phrase, but the steel of phrase from that novelist who masquerades as a historian, namely Nancy McLean, we do want democracy in chains, right?
As long as there's government, we want what's in the political realm to be as, you know, a shrinking, a small and shrinking number of things, which means other areas of life are left to individual choice and contract and cooperation and voluntary arrangements.
So we want democracy in chains.
She thought that was a terrible thing, but we don't, we shouldn't, no liberty loving person or dignity loving person would want unlimited democracy where the majority gets to determine everything.
So, yeah, we want to put chains on what people collectively can, you know, get the vote for through the political system because of all the problems that come along with that.
The alternative is not some sort of autocracy, but individual sovereignty.
That's the alternative.
It sure makes it hard for us to stop them too, though.
You know, when they've decided that, well, we're going to dominate the Middle East from now on till forever and all the way to China.
There's basically, we don't have a say in that whatsoever, nor whether they put cameras up on our street corners.
They just did that over about 10 years and on every street corner and every town in America.
Nobody asked.
Shouldn't underestimate what private efforts, if the government would get out of this whole immigration business, what private efforts, foundations, religious organizations, just all kinds of voluntary associations can do to welcome and settle newcomers, even large numbers.
There are always people who care about that stuff and they volunteer, they set up organizations, they donate money.
We should not underestimate those efforts.
We see them in other things.
We see them when there's natural disasters.
People give money and they rush to help and we sort of forget that.
Government crowds out a lot of those efforts.
So we forget the power of civil society and we should always, power in the good sense, we should remember that instead of these scare stories about, oh, hordes of people are going to come in and totally change our culture.
Yeah.
I'm with you, man.
All right.
Thank you, Sheldon.
Sure.
Appreciate it.
Okay, Scott.
Great to talk to you.
Talk to you soon.
All right, you guys, that's the great Sheldon Richman from the Libertarian Institute.
TGIF.
The goal is freedom.
That's his article we run every Friday.
He's partnered there with me and Jared LaBelle.
What does Trump have against children?
It's a really great article and it also has a link in there to that.
Oh, it's also on the front page, but it's also linked in here.
Enforcing the law from the Volokh conspiracy.
Enforcing the law doesn't justify separating migrant children from their parents.
Also another very important and informative article there.
And so, yeah, thanks.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
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