Here is the plan:

- 5 minutes -

WELCOME / INTRODUCTION

“Professor Caplan, thank you very much for joining us. Could you begin by introducing yourself and telling us how you became interested in public choice and libertarian political economy?”

- 6 minutes Each -

1) TRADE, PRICE CONTROLS, AND THE POLITICAL APPEAL OF BAD ECONOMICS

“You have consistently defended free trade and opposed policies such as tariffs, minimum wages, rent control, and other price controls even when they are extremely popular with students and voters. Why do these interventions remain so intuitively appealing despite the economic arguments against them, and what trade-offs do you think are most systematically overlooked when people evaluate them?”

⸻

2) PRIVATIZATION, INFRASTRUCTURE, MONOPOLY, AND THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

“Libertarian arguments for markets are often easiest to see in competitive industries but much more controversial in areas such as roads, transit, utilities, and other large-scale infrastructure, where economies of scale and network effects are significant. How far do you think privatization should go in these sectors, how would such systems realistically be financed and governed in practice, and what institutional framework—if any—remains for the state beyond enforcing property rights and contracts? In that context, how do you evaluate concerns about monopoly and predatory pricing in a free market, and under what conditions, if any, is government intervention actually justified?”

⸻

3) WELFARE, REDISTRIBUTION, SCANDINAVIA, AND THE MORAL STATUS OF INEQUALITY

“In discussions of poverty and social policy, many students point to the Scandinavian countries as evidence that large welfare states, free or heavily subsidized healthcare, and free college can work well. From a libertarian perspective, how should we interpret those cases, and do you think the goal of policy should be to reduce wealth inequality itself or primarily to expand opportunity? In that context, should existing welfare programs be eliminated, replaced with something like a Negative Income Tax, converted into vouchers, or maintained in some limited form, and how do you weigh the economic and moral trade-offs involved?”

⸻

4) EDUCATION, SIGNALING, SCHOOL CHOICE, AND THE FUTURE OF K–12

“Your work argues that much of formal education functions more as signaling than as human-capital formation. What does that imply for current education policy and for government involvement in higher education? More broadly, do you think a fully market-based K–12 system—potentially replacing traditional public schools with universal school choice or government-funded vouchers directed to families—would produce better outcomes, and how should students think about their own education in light of the signaling model?”

- 3 minutes -

ADVICE TO STUDENTS

“For students who are seriously interested in economics and public policy but are encountering these arguments for the first time, what is the most important habit of thinking they should develop early?”

- 3 minutes -

Open To Q&A

I’m pleased to report that we covered the whole agenda. Again, see for yourself!

1. When I published this book, I thought of Razib and his amazing personal cultural history. Please share!

2. Razib’s take on cultural evolution versus biological evolution.

3. Does biological evolution lead anywhere? How about cultural evolution?

4. Assimilation: Razib’s story and the general story.

5. Reaction to: Immigrant assimilation is obviously high. My 1-gen story.

6. Razib’s experience with Islam, and his frank assessment. % of good Muslims?

7. Hopelessness of Muslim development? Growth in Bangladesh. UAE?

8. Hopelessness of Muslim immigration? Why Razibs matter.

9. Reaction to: My international adoption evidence

10. Best of Bangladeshi culture?

11. Austin Renaissance. Highlights of 2020-1, when we were hanging out.

12. The 2021 Hanania event. Hanania on Asian culture.

13. Non-obvious Western culture Razib recommends.

P.S. Zoom is definitely less buggy, but I always get more listeners for Substack Live, so I’m torn. One theory was that my lack of headphones somehow messed up Razib’s audio; next time around, I’ll test it. If you actually know something, please share in the comments.

P.P.S. Hope to see you in Spain and Charlotte!

If there are still biological humans running around on the surface of the Earth [on January 1, 2030], it will not have been said to be ended.

For Eliezer, as you’ve probably heard, AI is the expected agent of destruction. And while he’s got legions of disciples, no one else has tried to make the same bet with me.

Until now.

The brave Greg Colburn has just accepted the same terms as Eliezer did back in 2017. I’ve paid him $250, and if the world doesn’t end by January 1, 2030, Colburn will repay me $500 inflation-adjusted.

Since I scoff at the prospect of AI-driven human extinction (Bah!), this is a much better deal for me than the original bet. Instead of doubling my money in 12 years, I’ll double it in less than 4 years. But since AI development since 2017 has been much faster than most people expected, AI doomers should have the opposite opinion: My defeat is even more foreseeable in 2026 than it was in 2017.

P.S. I’ve never met an AI doomer who claimed to be massively borrowing in order to maximally enjoy their final years. But if doomers took their pessimistic view seriously, they obviously would so borrow.

Larry Iannaccone and his co-author Rodney Stark once wrote that the belief that society is getting less religious says “less about empirical fact than it does about secularization faith — a faith that, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, sustains the conviction of many social scientists that religious institutions must soon decay...” In short, belief in secularization is just a religion.

Larry’s critics were, unsurprisingly, not pleased. To tell people that their non-religious beliefs are just a religion is an insult. Why is it an insult? There isn’t any nice way to answer, so I’ll be blunt. It is an insult because the way that people form religious beliefs is so intellectually irresponsible that their conclusions are almost guaranteed to be false. People:

• accept their religious beliefs with little or no evidence

• accept religious beliefs that are contrary to the evidence

• accept religious beliefs without studying competing views

• are certain about religious beliefs that are dubious at best, and

• accept their religious beliefs not because they are intellectually compelling, but because they are emotionally comforting.

Forming non-religious beliefs in a religious way is irrational because forming any beliefs in a religious way is irrational.

Now I am not one of those people who says that modern science has disproven religion. If I said that, it would imply that two thousand years ago, there was not solid evidence against the claims that Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead. But the counter-evidence has always been overwhelming. Everyone else is born of a non-virgin and stays dead. It is absurd to recognize an exception without overwhelming evidence, but all we have is the testimony of a few of his disciples. And yet not only do Christians believe these things; they often claim to know them with certainty, and get angry if you disagree. Christianity has always been irrational, and of course the same goes for Judaism, Islam, Greek mythology, Satanism, and belief in Santa Claus.

Larry has won a great deal of attention for his rational choice theory of religion. But if you look closely, he doesn’t really have a rational choice theory of religion; he has a rational choice theory of group membership. As Larry occasionally admits, virtually everything that he says about religion applies just as well to fraternities, chess clubs, and football teams. Yes, belonging to a fraternity has costs and benefits; yes, competition between fraternities leads to more efficient outcomes. And both religions and fraternities have been known to use what Larry calls “bizarre” rules — such as “You can’t drink any alcohol,” or “You can only drink alcohol,” to exclude half-hearted members.

What Larry’s research strangely neglects — or, to use his word, “sidesteps” — is the differences between religions and fraternities. The most obvious of these, the 800-pound gorilla in the room, is doctrine. Fraternities don’t have much of a doctrine; religions do. To ignore doctrine is to ignore the very thing that makes religion special — and the main reason why critics of religion consider it irrational. Furthermore, to ignore doctrine is to sidestep the deepest objection to Larry’s rational choice view of religion: How can you have a rational choice theory of irrational belief?

Larry’s neglect of irrational beliefs is glaring because in the last decade economists have started to take irrationality seriously. Behavioral economists emphasize, for example, that people overestimate the riskiness of air travel because plane crashes are vivid and memorable. But if that’s irrational, how much more irrational is it to believe that someone rose from the dead because one old book says so? Economists who study religion know enough about irrationality to send Kahneman, Tversky, and Thaler back to the minors. But — presumably out of respect for religion — they refuse to swing their bats.

What would economists learn if they started paying attention to the doctrinal side of religion? Now is my time for shameless self-promotion. In a series of papers on what I call “rational irrationality,” I try to handle the deep objection that Larry sidesteps. I defend a rational choice theory of irrational belief. The gist of my theory is that people persistently hold wildly irrational religious beliefs because the material cost is usually very low. In terms of daily life, what difference does it make if the earth is 6000 years old or 6 billion? So it’s not surprising how readily people shut their eyes to the geological evidence. In contrast, when the cost of irrationality is high, believers conveniently forget the teachings of their religion. Lots of religions promise paradise to martyrs, but adherents eager to die for their beliefs are one-in-a-million.

Is religion rational? In an important sense, NO. The doctrines of every religion are at best extremely improbable, but adherents are still very certain about them. Religious beliefs and standard economic models don’t fit together. However, rather than ignoring or denying this incompatibility, economists should deal with it. If I’m right, it’s not hard. Yes, religious beliefs are irrational, but they are so divorced from reality that they are rarely costly. When they do become costly, a few fanatics lay down their lives, but the overwhelming majority of the faithful open their eyes and face the fact that it’s crazy to bet your life on fairy tales.

Summary
In this eight-page chapter, Rothbard makes a sweeping economic case against “government in business.”  He begins by noting the power of status quo bias:

People tend to fall into habits and into unquestioned ruts, especially in the field of government. On the market, in society in general, we expect and accommodate rapidly to change, to the unending marvels and improvements of our civilization. New products, new life styles, new ideas are often embraced eagerly. But in the area of government we follow blindly in the path of centuries, content to believe that whatever has been must be right.

Our status quo bias is so strong that “an attack on State financing appears to many people as an attack on the service itself.”  To counter this bias, Rothbard presents his Fable of the Shoes, a short masterpiece of political ridicule:

The libertarian who wants to replace government by private enterprises in the above areas is thus treated in the same way as he would be if the government had, for various reasons, been supplying shoes as a tax-financed monopoly from time immemorial.. [H]ow would most of the public treat the libertarian who now came along to advocate that the government get out of the shoe business and throw it open to private enterprise? He would undoubtedly be treated as follows: people would cry, “How could you? You are opposed to the public, and to poor people, wearing shoes! And who would supply shoes to the public if the government got out of the business? Tell us that! Be constructive! It’s easy to be negative and smart-alecky about government; but tell us who would supply shoes? Which people? How many shoe stores would be available in each city and town? How would the shoe firms be capitalized? How many brands would there be? What material would they use? What lasts? What would be the pricing arrangements for shoes? Wouldn’t regulation of the shoe industry be needed to see to it that the product is sound? And who would supply the poor with shoes? Suppose a poor person didn’t have the money to buy a pair?”

After shaking up the reader’s anti-market prejudices, Rothbard then savages the inefficiencies of the public sector.  For-profit business has strong incentives to please the customer in the cheapest possible way; government doesn’t:

On the free market, in short, the consumer is king, and any business firm that wants to make profits and avoid losses tries its best to serve the consumer as efficiently and at as low a cost as possible. In a government operation, in contrast, everything changes. Inherent in all government operation is a grave and fatal split between service and payment, between the providing of a service and the payment for receiving it.

As a corollary, government is unresponsive to demand shifts:

Thus, if consumer demand should increase for the goods or services of any private business, the private firm is delighted; it woos and welcomes the new business and expands its operations eagerly to fill the new orders.  Government, in contrast, generally meets this situation by sourly urging or even ordering consumers to “buy” less, and allows shortages to develop, along with deterioration in the quality of its service.

Rothbard scoffs at bureaucrats’ “standard response to the mounting complaints of poor and inefficient service: ‘The taxpayers must give us more money!'”

The proper counter-argument to the political demand for more tax money is the question: “How is it that private enterprise doesn’t have these problems?” How is it that hi-fi manufacturers or photocopy companies or computer firms or whatever do not have trouble finding capital to expand their output? Why don’t they issue manifestoes denouncing the investing public for not providing them with more money to serve consumer needs? The answer is that consumers pay for the hi-fi sets or the photocopy machines or the computers, and that investors, as a result, know that they can make money by investing in those businesses. On the private market, firms that successfully serve the public find it easy to obtain capital for expansion; inefficient, unsuccessful firms do not, and eventually have to go out of business. But there is no profit-and-loss mechanism in government to induce investment in efficient operations and to penalize and drive the inefficient or obsolete ones out of business.

What about trying to make government “run like a business”?  Rothbard’s not buying it.  First, since government usually outlaws competition, there is little incentive to give the customer a good deal.  Second, capital markets’ usual checks on inefficiency don’t work if bond-holders know that the central government guarantees their investment.  And finally, Rothbard briefly highlights the Austrian “economic calculation” argument, assuring readers (in 1978!) that, “It is because central planning cannot determine prices and costs with any accuracy that the communist countries of Eastern Europe have been moving rapidly away from socialist planning and toward a free-market economy.”

The chapter ends with a blunt declaration of the libertarian position: “The ultimate libertarian program may be summed up in one phrase: the abolition of the public sector, the conversion of all operations and services performed by the government into activities performed voluntarily by the private-enterprise economy.”  That’s why this should have been chapter 4 – it would have beautifully framed the rest of the book.

Critical Comments
In all honesty, I think that these are the best eight pages of economics I’ve ever read.  Every sentence counts, and almost every sentence gleams with truth.  You don’t need to be a libertarian to agree with me: On a good day, I don’t see why Krugman or DeLong couldn’t concede that this is a brilliant, compelling chapter.

Of course, they’d immediately add that chapter 10 ignores every anti-market argument ever made by a serious economist.  Fair enough.  What this chapter shows is that there is a mighty presumption against government that mainstream economists habitually ignore.  Consider: The typical textbook devotes multiple chapters to various kinds of market failures – including many – like adverse selection –  of dubious empirical relevance.  Almost none spends a chapter explaining why government might have higher average costs and lower responsiveness than private enterprise.

Let me add, moreover, that Rothbard’s ridicule of the typical non-economist’s rant against the market is entirely fair.  When I was a teenager attacking the inefficiencies of my public high school, I often faced an hysterical list of questions straight out of the Fable of the Shoes.  When you look at actual government operation, moreover, it seems to be guided far more by the public’s anti-market rants than the sophisticated arguments of left-leaning academic economists.

Much as I love this chapter, I would like to close with two caveats:

1. This chapter paints such a bleak picture of government that it really makes you ask yourself: “Why isn’t government ownership even worse?”  The USPS delivers my mail with 99% reliability – and its price seems far below a monopolist’s profit-maximizing level.  As far as I know, its executives don’t earn multi-million dollar bonuses for customer satisfaction.  So what’s going on?

2. A few countries, most notably Singapore, really do run a lot of government enterprises “like businesses.”  They’re profitable even though they face legal competition by the private sector.  They set up strong performance-based incentives for executives and employees.  And if they keep losing money, they go out of business.  You could still object, “What’s the point of government enterprises if all they do is ‘mimic the market?'”  My point is simply that you don’t have to abolish the public sector to make it work a lot better than it does.

The post appeared first on Econlib.

P.S. I’m away in Florida most of this week.

(1) Why the chronic and accelerating inflation? (2) Why an inflation even during deep depressions? And while we are at it, it would be important to explain, if we could, (3) Why the business cycle at all? Why the seemingly unending round of boom and bust?

He then assures readers that Keynesianism can’t explain answer these questions, but the neglected the Austrian theory of the business cycle (henceforth ABC) can.

Rothbard begins with a lucid analysis of inflation:

The favorite explanation of inflation is that greedy businessmen persist in putting up prices in order to increase their profits. But surely the quotient of business “greed” has not suddenly taken a great leap forward since World War II. Weren’t businesses equally “greedy” in the nineteenth century and up to 1941? So why was there no inflation trend then? Moreover, if businessmen are so avaricious as to jack up prices 10% per year, why do they stop there? Why do they wait; why don’t they raise prices by 50%, or double or triple them immediately? What holds them back?

After considering some flawed explanations, he leads the witness to the right answer:  The crucial factor is consumer demand; consumer demand keeps rising because the money supply keeps rising; and the money supply keeps rising because government keeps printing more money.  Its motive, according to Rothbard, is seigniorage:

Consider what would happen if the government should approach one group of people–say the Jones family–and say to them: “Here we give you the absolute and unlimited power to print dollars, to determine the number of dollars in circulation. And you will have an absolute monopoly power: anyone else who presumes to use such power will be jailed for a long, long time as an evil and subversive counterfeiter. We hope you use this power wisely.” We can pretty well predict what the Jones family will do with this newfound power. At first, it will use the power slowly and carefully, to pay off its debts, perhaps buy itself a few particularly desired items; but then, habituated to the heady wine of being able to print their own currency, they will begin to use the power to the hilt, to buy luxuries, reward their friends, etc. The result will be continuing and even accelerated increases in the money supply, and therefore continuing and accelerated inflation.

But this is precisely what governments–all governments–have done.  Except that instead of granting the monopoly power to counterfeit to the Jones or other families, government has “granted” the power to itself.

After explaining the mechanics of fractional reserves and central banking, Rothbard finally presents the uniquely Austrian part of his story:  Expansionary monetary temporarily reduces interest rates, and business responds by making investments that, due to the reduced interest rates, now appear profitable:

For businessmen, seeing the rate of interest fall, will react as they always must to such a change of market signals: they will invest more in capital goods. Investments, particularly in lengthy and time-consuming projects, which previously looked unprofitable, now seem profitable because of the fall in the interest charge. In short, businessmen react as they would have if savings had genuinely increased: they move to invest those supposed savings.

Unfortunately, businessmen are the victim of an economic illusion.  The interest rate cut is only temporary; when rates return to their natural level, businessmen will suddenly see that they’ve made a terrible mistake.  Why then do booms last for years?  Because central banks keep printing more and more money to hold interest rates down:

Like the repeated doping of a horse, the boom is kept on its way and ahead of its inevitable comeuppance by repeated and accelerating doses of the stimulant of bank credit. It is only when bank credit expansion must finally stop or sharply slow down, either because the banks are getting shaky or because the public is getting restive at the continuing inflation,that retribution finally catches up with the boom.

The solution for inflation and business cycles alike, naturally, is for central banks to stop printing money.

Critical Comments
This chapter is a strange blend of smoke, mirrors, and elegant economic pedagogy.  Rothbard’s analysis of inflation blows every textbook account away.  The one flaw: He fails to point out (or didn’t realize) that seigniorage is a trivial source of revenue for Western democracies.

On the subject of stagflation, he completely neglects the mainstream supply-shock and expectational stories.  Since the book was published in 1978, though, these omissions are forgivable.

When he gets to the uniquely Austrian part of his story, his eloquence remains, but his story is still full of holes.  His implicit assumption is that businessmen believe that short-term interest rates cuts will last forever.  That’s a really stupid thing for businessmen to believe.   And if businessmen are really that stupid, it’s pretty unfair to blame government for the whole business cycle.  The ABC boils down to what Tyler Cowen calls a “banana subsidy story”:*

Let’s say that the government subsidized the price of bananas, you bought so many bananas, put them on your roof, and then the roof collapsed.  Is that government failure or market failure?  The price was distorted, but I still say this is mostly market failure.  No one made you put so many bananas on your roof.

Furthermore, if you’re willing to entertain banana subsidy stories like the ABC, it’s absurd to think businessmen are rational about everything except monetary policy.  Idiots will see false price signals everywhere. 

For example, if the price of pumpkins of goes up by 20% in September, lots of people might conclude that it will keep going up by 20% a month – and start growing pumpkins by the truckload.  Then suddenly on November 1, demand dries up, and we’ve got a Halloween-driven “business cycle.”  If you think businessmen are suckers for temporarily low interest rates, why not temporarily high pumpkin prices?

I admit, of course, that big economy-wide business mistakes occasionally happen.  We’re living through a once-in-a-century “cluster of errors” as I write.  But the mistake that Rothbard rests his whole theory upon is exceptionally bone-headed.  If businessmen were that stupid, the modern economy would never have arisen.

P.S. For more on the ABC, see section 3.4 of “Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist.”

* Walter Block (2001) almost literally embraces the “banana subsidy story,” except he switches from fruits to vegetables:

Let us consider an analogy, far removed from the ABC. Suppose that the proportion of peas to carrots that will satisfy consumer demand is 1:1. The government, however, decrees that the appropriate proportion is 2:1, and begins to subsidize pea production. Third premise of the syllogism: Sophisticated (but not all) investors know that this policy cannot last, that there will be political or other repercussions, and eventually the government will have to pull in its horns and cease its mischievous attempt to reallocate resources.  The question is, will this suffice to set up a peas-and-carrots cycle, given an tendency of government to pursue such policies whenever politically feasible?

And concludes:

Obviously, even far-seeing economic actors would indeed willingly invest in excessive pea production under these conditions, secure in the knowledge that they could better predict the turning point. That is, right before the government stopped its pea subsidy program, while pea resources were still at a high, the far-seeing economic actors would unload peas upon less sophisticated investors. [footnotes omitted]

The post appeared first on Econlib.

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P.P.S. Tomorrow at 10 AM ET, I’m doing a Substack Live with the great Razib Khan on my You Have No Right to Your Culture. All Bet On It subscribers will get an email at start time. What is it like to be a hilarious polymath Bangladeshi-American Texan atheist natalist geneticist social media star? Razib may be the only man alive with first-hand knowledge!

Lactose tolerance is the classic physical example. Human children have always been able to digest milk, but most adults can’t. Thanks to evolved neoteny, however, a sizable minority of grown-ups can now digest milk as if they were kids. Happily, I’m one of them. Not only can I digest milk; I chug it almost every day.

But it’s psychological neoteny that dramatically sets me apart from most people my age. I love silly games, loud music, karaoke, laughing hysterically with friends, animated intellectual discussions, sugary desserts, geological wonders, foreign lands, and the mysteries of archaeology. I have a wild imagination; I’ve written about a hundred playable stories in the genres of fantasy, sci-fi, mystery, horror, what-if history, pulp, K-drama, Bollywood, and beyond. Most of my friends are younger than me, and I love making new friends all over the world. I’d rather talk to random students than random parents. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The average kid is better than the average adult.

The typical person my age is daydreaming about retirement, if they haven’t retired already. But the thought of retirement repulses me. I love dreaming up new projects, and I don’t like to sit still for more than two hours. I crave activity — and as long as I draw breath, I’ll keep doing what I love. The great Walter Williams died in his car a few minutes after he finished teaching the last class of Ph.D. Microeconomics. He never spent a single day waiting helplessly in bed for death. I want to go like Walter, though I hope to far surpass his 84 years. Per Tolkien, hail the victorious dead!

I have enough self-awareness to realize that my mind is more neotenous than my body. I had the worst accident of my life this January. None of my kids wanted to sled with me on the most amazing ice to blanket northern Virginia in twenty years, so I went alone. Ten minutes later, I had a gruesome ear injury — and no one was around to hear me scream or see the blood trail. The next day, for the first time in my life, I got stitches. Over a hundred of them. I’m fully recovered now, but if my accident had gone a little differently, I might be dead already. If I’d acted my age, none of this would have happened. Since I have an incredible bounty to live for, I plan to start being marginally more careful, so my lifetime of fun isn’t cut short. Next time I go sledding, I won’t start at the very top of the hill, especially if there’s a tiny tree at the bottom. But on the next snow day, I’ll still be on the slopes.

Why do I choose neoteny? Honestly, I struggle to imagine why anyone does otherwise. When we’re young, almost all of us are fun-loving and energetic. Why would you want to spend subsequent decades being boring and tired? Because your peers will disrespect you? Because young people won’t accept you? In our modern anonymous society, social pressure is largely a paper tiger. Fine, act your age in exceptional cases where the cost of non-conformity is high. But never forget it’s an act.

When you were a teenager, did you ever look at middle-aged people watching the news and think, “When I grow up, I want to be like them?” Not bloody likely. In contrast, even the stodgiest middle-aged people occasionally muse, “Oh, to be young again.” Being young is just better. And while biological aging is inevitable, psychological aging is largely a choice. I choose neoteny. So should we all.

During my early years in philosophy, I was almost intellectually paralyzed by the subject’s seemingly impossible challenges. Challenges like…

Prove the external world exists. No proof? Then you can’t reject solipsism.

Prove you actually know anything. No proof? Then you can’t reject radical skepticism.

Prove all your memories aren’t fabricated. No proof? Then you can’t reject memory skepticism.

Prove you even exist as a durable mental being. No proof? Then you can’t reject Hume’s dissolution of the self.

Prove any mental states exist. No proof? Then you can’t reject eliminative materialism.

Prove your sense of free will isn’t an illusion. No proof? Then you can’t reject determinism.

Prove you know anything is morally right or wrong. No proof? Then you can’t reject moral nihilism.

The only reason my intellectual paralysis was incomplete was that I quickly discovered Ayn Rand and Aristotle’s notion of axioms. Not arbitrary mathematical axioms, but literally undeniable propositions. Radical skepticism can’t be right, because whoever says “No one can know anything” is claiming knowledge. Indeed, even “Maybe no one can know anything” is claiming knowledge about what’s possible.

Still, it wasn’t until I met Mike Huemer at UC Berkeley that I found my lifelong cure for intellectual paralysis. Huemer called it “intuitionism,” but it’s largely a rebranding of the pre-existing “philosophy of common sense.” The Huemerian response to all of the preceding demands for “proof” boils down to, “It’s obvious! End of story.” The less terse version: “The point of a proof is to move from more obvious propositions to less obvious propositions. So demands for ‘proof’ of the most obvious propositions are confused.” The maximally terse version, though, is a simple: “Bah!” Or as Thomas Reid explained centuries before Huemer:

And when we attempt to prove by direct argument, what is really self-evident, the reasoning will always be inconclusive; for it will either take for granted the thing to be proved, or something not more evident; and so, instead of giving strength to the conclusion, will rather tempt those to doubt of it, who never did so before.

Responding to absurd challenges with a “Bah!” is even more fruitful than it looks, because it doesn’t just allow us to reject glaring falsehoods without further argument. By the power of the contrapositive — “If A, then B; not-B, therefore not-A” — it also allows us to reject any valid argument that implies a glaring falsehood. Or in philosophical jargon, "One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens."

How does the Philosophy of Bah work in practice? Suppose someone demands proof of the existence of the external world. My immediate reply is to stonewall: “It’s obvious” or “Bah.” I often add: “And it’s obvious to you, too, so what are we arguing about?” If the challenger has good-faith arguments to the contrary, I’ll add: “The premises of your argument are much less obvious than the existence of the external world, so at least one of your premises is almost certainly false.” If you really have to choose between “The external world exists” and “I could be dreaming right now,” reject the latter premise, not the former.

Think about it this way: Suppose you’re a juror on a murder trial. A witness testifies that he saw the accused hack the victim to pieces with an ax. When the defense lawyer cross-examines the witness, his only challenges are: “Prove it wasn’t a dream” and “Maybe you’re a brain in a vat.” The correct reaction for the jurors is not to peruse philosophy journals for the latest replies to these classic canards. It is to summarily declare, “Bah.” If that’s your lawyer’s best defense against the charge of murder, the jurors should convict you. If “Bah” seems dogmatic, my response is: “I’m not dogmatic; you’re gullible.” As gullible as a man who stumbles on his wife cheating in flagrante delicto who accepts the explanation, “We were rehearsing a play.”

Can the Philosophy of Bah be abused? Of course; every good idea can be abused. But the fact that someone might “Bah” the disemployment effects of the minimum wage is a terrible reason to refuse to “Bah” solipsism or radical skepticism.

Is the Philosophy of Bah limited to the most fundamental truths? No. It shines for the most fundamental truths, but it’s broadly applicable. The best three-letter summary of Hume’s brilliant “Of Miracles” is, once again, “Bah.” It is absurd to seriously entertain claims about virgin births or demonic possession. Though I also love the long version:

When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it is more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived or that the fact which he relates should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other and, according to the superiority which I discover, I pronounce my decision and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates, then, and not until then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

Much the same goes for claims about secular miracles, like alien visitation or AI annihilation. While they’re not quite as absurd as claims about supernatural miracles, the wise response is not to approach them with an open mind, but with the words of Saint Thomas: “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” (Yes, I am well-aware that the point of the story of Doubting Thomas is that we should have faith, but that’s what every scammer says. Bah!) I’ll believe that aliens are visiting Earth when I hold their super-tech in my own hands and examine it with my own eyes. If you’re excited by the latest UFO evidence, I’m happy to outsource my dismissal to Mike Huemer. But if Huemer didn’t exist, I’d just exclaim “Bah!“

I’m well-aware that stonewalling isn’t very persuasive. But if someone rejects premises as obvious as “The external world exists,” trying to change their mind is a fool’s errand anyway. The point of the Philosophy of Bah is not to convince others of the obvious, but to convince yourself of the obvious. Though the world is benighted, you don’t have to be.

It is no hyperbole to say that the world of ideas overflows with total nonsense. If you’re intellectually apathetic, you won’t be fooled. The more intellectually curious you become, however, the graver the danger that your mind will be totally overwhelmed by total nonsense. If, like me, you are highly curious, the intellectual danger is overwhelming. Fortunately, the Philosophy of Bah allows you to swiftly dismiss mass quantities of nonsense, leaving plenty of time to savor the many genuine accomplishments of the human mind.

Positively, Rothbard unapologetically affirms that the poor are typically poor because of their own short-sighted, impulsive values.  He heaps praise on Harvard’s Edward Banfield – probably because Banfield was one of the few scholars who actually said what middle-class observers of the poor can’t help but think:

[U]pper- and middle-class members tend to be future-oriented, purposeful, rational, and self-disciplined.  Lower-class people… tend to have a strong present-orientation, are capricious, hedonistic, purposeless, and therefore unwilling to pursue a job or a career with any consistency. People with the former values therefore tend to have higher incomes and better jobs, and lower-class people tend to be poor, jobless, or on welfare. In short, the economic fortunes of people tend over the long run to be their own internal responsibility, rather than to be determined — as liberals always insist — by external factors.

Strange as it may seem in our post-Bell Curve age, though, Rothbard does not mention low intelligence as a contributing factor.

Normatively, Rothbard breaks with mainstream critics of the welfare state with his abolitionist stance: The only acceptable form of relief for even the “deserving poor” is private, voluntary charity; as for “the undeserving poor,” they should straighten up and fly right:

The spirit that used to animate the social work profession was a far different–and a libertarian–one. There were two basic principles: (a) that all relief and welfare payments should be voluntary, by private agencies, rather than by the coercive levy of government; and (b) that the object of giving should be to help the recipient become independent and productive as soon as possible. Of course, in ultimate logic, (b) follows from (a), since no private agency is able to tap the virtually unlimited funds that can be mulcted from the long-suffering taxpayer…As a further corollary of the limitation on funds, the social workers also realized that there was no room for aid to malingerers, those who refused to work, or who used the aid as a racket; hence came the concept of the “deserving” as against the “undeserving” poor.

Other highlights: Rothbard celebrates the private welfare system of the Mormons and points out a number of ways that regulation hurts the poor.  He also heaps scorn on – and misrepresents – Friedman’s “negative income tax,” never mentioning that the whole point is to reduce the effective 100% marginal tax rate that welfare recipients typically face.

Critical Comments
I remain a huge fan of this chapter.  While Rothbard neglects the IQ-poverty connection, modern scholars continue to neglect the Conscientiousness-poverty connection.  Frankly, it’s a ridiculous oversight.  It’s intuitively obvious: How could laziness and impulsiveness not lead to poverty?  And you don’t need fancy econometrics to detect it empirically: Kids from low-income areas were bused into my suburban elementary, junior high, and high schools, and all of Rothbard’s claims about “lower-class values” described them to a tee.

I also find his abolitionism refreshing.  Sure, private charity couldn’t maintain anything like the modern welfare state.  But I see no reason why it couldn’t provide a modest safety net for indigent children and the severely handicapped.  Private charity in the U.S. is about $300B annually – 2.2% of GDP.  Admittedly, only a small fraction of that goes to the poor now; but clearly that would change if the welfare state were abolished.  If it seems unrealistic to rely on donations to provide for the poor, consider: Back in the era of established churches, wouldn’t it have seemed equally unrealistic to rely on donations to provide for religion?

My main empirical complaints: Even in the 1970s, Rothbard should have spent more time explaining that the welfare state is primarily about helping the old, not the poor.   And he should have spent more time explaining that by world standards, the American “poor” are already well-off.  Then he could have easily moved on to the most philosophically devastating critique of the welfare state: Our immigration laws are a massive, shameful effort to prevent the free market from lifting millions of foreigners out of absolute poverty.

Of course, if Rothbard had focused on global poverty, he would have had to admit the awkward point that voluntary charity does little to alleviate the truly horrific plight of the world’s bottom billion.  If the U.S. abolished the welfare state, Americans would open their checkbooks to poor children and the handicapped who happen to be American citizens.  But the absence of a world welfare state has manifestly not led to robust private substitutes.  Modern markets are international, but modern charity remains a largely national affair.

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1. I’ll be in Spain on April 24-28. I arrive early on April 24 in Madrid, and I’ll be speaking for Liberty Con Europe that weekend. If you see me around, please say hi, though I will be extremely sleep-deprived the first day!

2. After Liberty Con ends, I’m organizing a side trip via high-speed rail to Valencia. We’ll leave by late afternoon on April 26, and I have to be back in Madrid by the evening of April 28. ¡Cuantos más, mejor!

3. From there, I fly straight to Charlotte, North Carolina. If anyone wants to organize, I’m happy to do an early dinner on April 29. Warning: I will again be sleep-deprived.

4. I am teaching three classes for UATX on May 13-June 5, and will be living in Austin the whole time. My classes: Introduction to Political Science (M/Th, 11:30-12:45), Immigration and Housing (Tu/Th, 10:00-11:15), and Education and the Family (Tu/Th, 3:30-4:45). UATX will allow a few hand-picked students to audit each class. Send me a short email about yourself if you want to give it a go.

5. During my time in Austin, I’ll be organizing multiple social events including a regular game night at UATX, an RPG mini-campaign, karaoke, and more. Want to attend any or all? I can probably get you in.

6. One evening during my stay in Texas, I’ll be speaking on housing for The Civic San Antonio. Date: TBA.

7. On June 8, I’ll be in New York City for another Soho Forum debate. This time I’m debating Simon Hankinson of the Heritage Foundation on: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should complete its mandate to deport all illegal aliens currently residing in the United States.” (Spoiler: No). I’ve actually had one pleasant lunch with Hankinson, so I’m optimistic that we’ll also have a pleasant debate.

We scheduled over a month before the Iran War broke out, but the latest troubles in the Gulf make our conversation all the more exciting.

While we didn’t get to every topic, here is the list of questions I was working with.

1. Intro – how we started talking about the future of the Middle East. Compartmentalization! If immigration will make West more like ME, where is the ME itself heading?

2. Basics – where Gad is from, what are all of the ME countries he’s been to and for how long

3. The (much smaller range) I’ve seen

4. Country by country, how bad is the ME now?

5. How are these countries evolving? Note the extreme variation.

6. Regression to the mean or divergence?

7. Monarchies and the ME

8. Economic, political, religious, social change, factor by factor.

9. Best-case/worst-case/most likely case scenario after Iran War

10. Best case/worst-case/most likely case for 2050. Note that’s almost exactly the time gap between Iraq War and today!

You can watch the whole conversationbelow . Enjoy!

P.S. If you post questions for Gad in the comments, perhaps I can persuade him to respond.

Discarding the idea of further elections, on February 10, 1938, the Romanian king carried out a royal coup against the political system, naming a new ministry under Patriarch Miron Cristea, head of the Romanian Orthodox Church, invested with decree powers. Within a few days it promulgated a new constitution, which in some ways superficially resembled the liberal constitution of 1923 but in fact concentrated power in the hands of the king, creating a situation analogous to the King Alexander regime of Yugoslavia earlier in the decade. The constitution was, however, in other ways comparatively moderate and did set some limits on the government’s authority. It was also accompanied by rigorous new laws on public order that increased the powers of the courts and the police…The king wavered between plans to have Codreanu murdered and renewed attempts to co-opt him politically, but the latter proved totally impossible. The Legionnaire Conducator (Leader) accepted the dictatorship and gave orders to his followers to lie low for the time being until the new arrangement weakened, but Armand Calinescu, the tough new interior minister, was determined to break his power. Codreanu was arrested once more on April 16, and several thousand of his followers were also incarcerated in the days that followed. A military court subsequently sentenced him to ten years of forced labor for subversion.

Acting leadership of the Legion passed to the young lawyer Horia Sima, known more for fanaticism than political judgment. Codreanu realized that the Romanian dictatorship would not hesitate to execute him and ordered Sima to have the Legion desist from violence or other overt actions unless it appeared that his life was in imminent danger. By midautumn Sima seems to have been convinced that the way to deal with this was through a new round of bombings and terrorism that would bring the government to its knees. Codreanu was able to send a dispatch from prison ordering the Legionnaires to desist, but it was too late. On November 30, the “night of the vampires” in Romanian folklore, a detachment of the brutal state Siguranta removed Codreanu and thirteen other top Legionnaires from prison, carrying them off in trucks. They were then strangled with wires, shot, and dumped in a lime pit at a military prison outside Bucharest.

Sima prepared the Legion for a full-scale insurrection against the Carolist dictatorship, hoping to capitalize on sympathies within the military, but found that these were insufficient. The army remained under discipline, and the Legion, like all other fascist movements, was not strong enough to launch an insurrectionary civil war. The plan for revolt on the sixth of January 1939 had to be canceled, and Sima and hundreds of other leaders and activists fled abroad, mainly to Germany. Once more a rightist authoritarian regime had suppressed a popular fascist movement, as earlier in Austria and concurrently in Hungary. The Legion, which despised democracy, the bourgeoisie, and capitalism, required at least a degree of bourgeois democracy to have the opportunity to build greater support and/or to achieve power.

Who cares if a successful politician is a crypto-Communist? Anyone with a hint of sense. Communism is a murderous totalitarian doctrine, and Communist governments largely practice what they preach. Furthermore, once Communists take over a government, getting rid of them is like pulling teeth.

Once you admit the notable prevalence and grave danger of crypto-Communist politicians during a particular era, there is a clear-cut contemporary implication: A notable share of current and would-be leaders who say they aren’t Communists are probably lying. If you’re living through this era, this raises a thorny question: “How do we identify the crypto-Communists before it’s too late?”

Needless to say, you can’t just publicly ask them, because they’ll lie. You could do a thorough background check, but the people who know the most are usually fellow Communists eager to protect their own. So you’re usually left with three admittedly imperfect heuristics.

Heuristic #1: Communist rhetoric. If you habitually voice the views of the Communist Party, it is reasonable to suspect that you’re a Communist. Remember, Communist Parties often strategically moderate their rhetoric, especially when they’re weak.

Heuristic #2: Communist policies. If you habitually push the policies of the Communist Party, it is reasonable to suspect you’re a Communist. Remember, Communist Parties often strategically moderate their policies, especially when they’re weak.

Heuristic #3: Communist ties. If you habitually ally with the Communist Party, or if you have an atypically high share of Communist friends, it is reasonable to suspect you’re a Communist. Remember: While apolitical people could easily have Communist ties by coincidence, ambitious people choose their ties more strategically.

When historians cover the Cold War, they routinely discuss cases where the U.S. supported the overthrow of a democratically elected leader who, in hindsight, definitely wasn’t a Communist. Iran’s Mossadegh, Guatemala’s Árbenz, Chile’s Allende, Congo’s Lumumba, and Indonesia’s Sukarno are the textbook examples.

I’m usually suspicious on both counts: How “democratic” were their elections really, and how confident should we be that the overthrown leaders weren’t crypto-Communists?

But even if we accept both premises, the key point is that it was hard to identify crypto-Communists at the time. Barring a definitive examination of Communist Party archives or damning testimony from Communist Party insiders, contemporary actors had to rely on my three heuristics: If he talks like a Communist, acts like a Communist, and fraternizes with Communists, there’s a good chance he is a Communist.

The crucial question then becomes: How high does the probability that a major national leader is a Communist have to be before drastic action is justified? Back in 2020, for example, I estimated Bernie Sanders’ probability of being a crypto-Communist at 15.8%. Which, to my mind, is disqualifyingly high. American checks and balances will protect you? Probably, but is that good enough?

If you delve deeper into the game theory, you discover the underlying logic of anti-Communist “paranoia.” Ambitious Communists hide their true identity because most people understandably don’t want to be ruled by Communists. This leads people to harshly punish the best predictors of Communist affiliation. Which in turn leads crypto-Communists to avoid displaying these predictors. Which makes any lingering predictors suspicious: Given strong incentives to avoid Communist rhetoric, policies, and ties, why don’t you scrupulously avoid Communist rhetoric, policies, and ties? If you answer, “Communist rhetoric, policies, and ties aren’t so bad; in fact, we have much to learn from them,” it’s time to sound the alarm.

Doesn’t the same logic hold for crypto-Nazis and crypto-fascists? Naturally. The main difference is that since World War II, both of these groups have had much lower quality human capital than Communists. This makes them less of a threat, and easier to depose. But the basic logic of “They won’t admit their true views, so we have to probabilistically infer their true views from their rhetoric, policies, and ties” is ironclad. And yes, the anonymity of the internet reveals that even in Western countries, full-blown Communists and fascists are not rounding errors (though neo-Nazis probably are).

The hardest fact for game theory to explain is that most members of these totalitarian sects aren’t crypto. Especially in a democracy, why admit to being something most people fear and hate? The best explanation, though, is easy: For followers, unlike leaders, politics is almost entirely expressive. The main reason they proclaim their allegiance to Communism or fascism isn’t to win, but to revel in the cruelty of politics.

What’s wrong with vouchers, you ask?

In the first place, the immorality of coerced subsidy for schooling would still continue in force. Secondly, it is inevitable that the power to subsidize brings with it the power to regulate and control… The power of the State over private schools, through its power to certify or not to certify for vouchers, will be even greater than it is now.

Shouldn’t education be free for all?  No way:

“Free” schools, whether current public schools or future vouchered schools, are of course not really free; someone, that is, the taxpayers, must pay for the educational services involved. But with service severed from payment, there tends to be an oversupply of children into the schools (apart from the compulsory attendance laws which have the same effect), and a lack of interest by the child in the educational service for which his family does not have to pay. As a result, a large number of children unsuitable for or uninterested in school who would be better off either at home or working, are dragooned into going to school and into staying there far longer than they should.

Mainstream economists will be puzzled by this chapter, because it ignores all the arguments about educational externalities, credit market imperfections, etc.  Rothbard instead focuses on public education’s historical connection to brainwashing and persecution of minorities, pointing out, for example, that:

[F]or Luther, the State schools were to be an indispensable part of the “war with the devil,” i.e., with Catholics, Jews, infidels, and competing Protestant sects.

This chapter also tries to win over the civil libertarian by analogizing state-controlled education to state-controlled media:

[W]hat then would we think of a proposal for the government, federal or state, to use the taxpayers money to set up a nationwide chain of public magazines or newspapers, and then to compel all people, or all children, to read them? Further, what would we think of the government outlawing all other newspapers and magazines, or at the very least outlawing all newspapers or magazines that do not come up to certain “standards” of what a government commission thinks children ought to read? Such a proposal would surely be regarded with horror throughout the country, yet this is precisely the sort of regime that government has established in the schools.

When Rothbard gets to higher-education, he gleefully points out that it forces the poor to subsidize the rich, and argues that government artificially supports the inefficient dominance of non-profits:

By exempting trustee-run organizations from income taxes and by levying heavy taxes on profit-making institutions, the federal and state governments cripple and repress what could be the most efficient and solvent form of private education…

Trustee governance is, in general, a poor way to run any institution. In the first place, in contrast to profit-making firms, partnerships, or corporations, the trustee-run firm is not fully owned by anyone. The trustees cannot make profits from successful operation of the organiza tion, so there is no incentive to be efficient, or to serve the firm’s customers properly. As long as the college or other organization does not suffer excessive deficits it can peg along at a low level of performance. Since the trustees cannot make profits by bettering their service to customers, they tend to be lax in their operations.

Critical Comments
This chapter is packed full of good material, but ignoring the standard economic arguments for subsidies is a major sin of omission.  Rothbard repeatedly cites E.G. West, but doesn’t mention West’s striking result that 19th-century England achieved high literacy with minimal state subsidies for education.  For a modern audience, isn’t that more relevant that the ravings of Martin Luther?

Since this chapter ignores the standard economic arguments, it also misses the opportunity to reverse them.  While it contains many astute observations about useless education, these barbs are atheoretical.  Rothbard never mentions the signaling model of education, which argues that education actually has negative externalities.  Government subsidizing inefficiency – isn’t that the kind of argument Mr. Libertarian loved?

Rothbard’s attack on educational non-profits is music to my ears.  Tyler Cowen has an old paper that tries to give a functionalist explanation for why most universities are non-profit.   But I think Rothbard’s barking up the right tree here.  To complete the argument, though, you need to appeal to donor irrationality: despite the obvious inefficiencies of the non-profit sector, alumni just keep giving them more money to waste.

P.S. Check out this impressive intellectual shrine to E.G. West.

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Fab and I have been arguing about culture for as long as I can remember. I’m classical, and he’s jazz. But Fab also personally illustrates much of what I’ve been claiming about culture for decades. The son of a Colombian ex-priest and a poor woman from Costa Rica, Fab is nevertheless 90% as American as apple pie.

In this conversation, Fab and I don’t just talk about my new You Have No Right to Your Culture: Essays on the Human Condition. We talk about his truly unique immigrant experience. We talk about global travel. And we talk about assimilation. If you’ve never liked a sociologist before, you’re going to like Fab. And if you’ve never learned from a sociologist before, you’re going to learn from Fab.

Enjoy!

Hard, that is, as long as you call it “the Artificial Intelligence industry.” But all of the top AIs also go by another acronym: LLMs, which of course stands for Large Language Models.* Which makes sense, because the primary output of this industry is just a bunch of words.

So what? While the Supreme Court has given government a virtual carte blanche to regulate the economy for over 80 years, constitutional protection of freedom of expression has probably never been stronger. In 1969, the Supreme Court moved from the classic “clear and present danger” test for permissible regulation of free speech to the even higher “imminent lawless action” test. By eviscerating obscenity law, Miller v. California (1973) even effectively extended full constitutional protection to almost all pornography, allowing the industry to thrive despite its extreme unpopularity. Though more Americans morally condemn pornography than abortion, the Supreme Court stands with porn.

Upshot: Once you acknowledge the truism that AI output is speech, almost all regulation of AI is ipso facto illegal. Government has no more legal right to regulate AI than it has to regulate the New York Times. Even if you’re a convinced doomer, you have to admit that the danger of existing LLMs is not “clear and present,” much less “imminent.” If the Supreme Court has an iota of consistency, the AI industry will be able — barring an anti-AI amendment to the Constitution — to fend off virtually all regulation with ease.

Does the Supreme Court have an iota of consistency? Based on past performance, the jury is still out. When (not if) AI comes before the Supreme Court, I bet SCOTUS will side with the government against the industry. But hopefully I’m wrong.

P.S. Volokh, Lemley, and Henderson, all top legal scholars, basically agree with me.

* Images and videos are the main non-linguistic AI outputs, but these too enjoy the strongest constitutional protections.

Conceivably, you’re a sincere religious fanatic, courting martyrdom so you can meet your 72 virgins. But opportunities for martyrdom are ubiquitous, and only a microscopic share of alleged true believers take advantage of these opportunities. Since actions speak louder than words, we can safely conclude that few top-ranking Iranian politicians genuinely want to die for their beliefs.

The better story is that top-ranking Iranian politicians are playing what economists call a “nested game.” While many, perhaps most, of these figures want to make peace to avoid death, they’re afraid that if they voice this opinion, their own hard-liners will kill them for cowardice. Outsiders see a united fanatical front, but only because dissenting insiders hide their true feelings.

You can see this dynamic clearly at the end of World War II in both Germany and Japan. Plenty of long-time “fanatics” tried to survive the war by hook or by crook. But as war raged, they kept their mouths shut year after year because their domestic “friends” were a much more immediate threat than their foreign enemies.

The logic of nested games even holds for national leaders. When Emperor Hirohito decided to surrender to the Allies, he provoked an attempted military coup. When asked, “Why didn’t Czar Nicholas back down in 1914?” historians’ standard answer is, “Because if he had, Pan-Slavist hawks would have overthrown him.” Even if Nicholas knew that he would lose his throne in 1917, his choices in 1914 were not “Rule in peace for life” or “Fight Germany and lose your throne in 1917.” His choices were “Try to keep the peace and lose your throne right now” or “Fight Germany and lose your throne in 1917.”

Most analysts who take the dilemmas of nested games seriously become fatalistic. Even if a large faction of the leadership of theocratic Iran, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, or Czarist Russia wants to make peace, they probably won’t. Indeed, even if the Supreme Leader wants to make peace, they probably won’t.

My reaction, in contrast, is agentic. If by some miracle, I were the Supreme Leader of any of these countries, I have devised a strategy to make peace with high probability of success — and low risk to myself. It’s not pretty, and once you grasp my strategy, you may think ill of me for publicizing this forbidden knowledge.

Nevertheless, this is a sketch of my master plan for making peace despite internal opposition:

Step 1. Hand-pick a small group of henchmen personally loyal to you. This is nothing out of the ordinary; almost every leader does this, especially in non-democracies.

Step 2. Privately prepare a list of all of the top enemies of peace under your nominal command. Profile the hard-liners, the hawks, the ultra-nationalists, the would-be martyrs, the true believers in revolution.

Step 3. Around midnight, summon your henchmen. Order them to wake up everyone on your list, keep them incommunicado, and bring them to a secret location within the next few hours. Give each top henchman sealed orders, with strict instructions not to open until an hour before dawn.

Step 4. If the leaders ask about the purpose of this meeting, instruct your henchmen to say that it’s “top secret” and “of utmost importance for the fate of the fatherland/motherland.” That’s it.

Step 5. As you may have guessed, the sealed orders say, “The people you have gathered are all guilty of high treason. Kill them NOW without delay. This is an ORDER from your Supreme Leader.”

Obviously this path to peace has a few rough edges. If you’re only number two in the system, it won’t reliably work unless you kill the Supreme Leader first. If you’re number eight, you probably have to simultaneously kill numbers one through seven. (Which, by the way, is approximately what von Stauffenberg tried to do in 1944, though his plans for top Nazis once captured were foolishly ambiguous).

To my knowledge, the closest historical analogue to my strategy happened in Romania on November 30, 1938. The Iron Guard was Romania’s murderous answer to the Nazi Party, and the monarchist government had most of its top leaders in prison, including party leader Corneliu Codreanu. Keeping them in prison was dangerous, and so was letting them go. Faced with this dilemma, the Romanian government saw a third option: It ordered the summary execution of their Iron Guard prisoners — and the order was strictly followed.

Yes, Romania still joined the Axis, and Romania was still a center of horrific atrocities. But rule by the Iron Guard would have been even worse — and the November 30 executions happily took that option off the table.

If my strategy is so great, why is it so rare? First and foremost, because peacemakers are relatively nice, and my strategy is ruthless. Even though Emperor Hirohito had the blood of millions on his hands, he was not personally cruel. Instead, he was weak, a people-pleaser — and the people who surrounded him were hawks (and people pretending to be hawks because they were afraid of the sincere hawks). If I were in Hirohito’s shoes, however, I say there’s an 80% chance that my strategy would have stopped Japan’s war of aggression before it started in 1931. Simultaneously summarily slaughtering your country’s hawks overnight doesn’t just remove them from the equation; it sends a message to the uncommitted that opposing peace is hazardous to your health.

Is my confidence in the efficacy of my strategy misplaced? Key point: In my hypothetical, I’m assuming a high level of crucial country-specific knowledge. When I muse, “If I were in Hirohito’s shoes…” I’m obviously assuming I can speak fluent Japanese. And I’m also assuming that I possess detailed knowledge of contemporary Japan’s institutions and personnel. These are unrealistic assumptions for Bryan Caplan, but totally reasonable assumptions for anyone in a position to try my strategy.

What about morality? Doesn’t killing hawks make you as bad as they are? Hardly. By assumption, they’re conspiring to wage unjustified war, so they deserve draconian punishment. Doesn’t killing the guilty without trial make you a murderer? No. If you genuinely know someone is guilty, trials are a matter of convenience, not morality. Aren’t trials the best way to find out if someone is genuinely guilty? Only sometimes. And if the fate of millions hangs in the balance, you shouldn’t fret about a few false positives. That’s mild deontology in action.

Couldn’t evil people use my strategy to do greater evil? Definitely, because evil people routinely use similar strategies to do greater evil. Fanatical dictatorships often target moderates and peace-makers. Wouldn’t they be even more inclined to do so if my strategy caught on? Maybe, but relatively virtuous leaders would also be more inclined to emulate my strategy if it caught on. The net indirect effect of more attempts and more prevention could easily be pacific.

Suppose I’m right. You could still say “Who cares? No one’s going to listen.” To which I have three replies.

First, even if no one listens, knowledge is valuable for its own sake. If my eccentric thesis about the ugly path to peace is often true, let it be known.

Second, my strategy doesn’t have to be widely accepted to add immense expected value. Indeed, if only one government in the next hundred years successfully uses my strategy to make a lasting peace, this will be my most valuable idea.

Last, if I’m right, there is a shocking moral corollary: Contrary to generations of apologists for “the poor leaders who had no choice but to drown the world in blood,” almost every leader does have a viable last-ditch path to peace: quickly and systematically round up your side’s warmongers and kill them without warning. The fact that so few leaders would even consider this option reinforces my long-standing claim that these “poor leaders” are in fact deeply evil. So evil that they would rather show mercy to a few hundred likely war criminals than protect millions of innocents.