The problem with this is Caplan's unbelievably shallow idea of what culture is. It's not just funny folkways. It's how you see the world, and others.
Take rape. We regard rape as "a special kind of evil" - but that is _not_ a universal thing. Many cultures see rape - at least of the other - as fine. Witness the rape-and-torture gangs of Britain. But, Caplan would say, you can go to the cops! Well, about that.... a) the cops can't unrape you, and b) they are on the rape gangs side, because if they aren't, then people like Caplan wail that hey are horrid waycist anti-immigrant types.
Or what about: working for a living? Yes, sure, low IQ migrants will totally agree to be janitors and whatnot. Or - hear me out - maybe they will leach on welfare and make TikToks about how native Europeans are suckers? There are entire cultures and one religion that sees nothing wrong with that view.
But that's crazy talk! You might as well say that there is a Syrian clanlord with over 30 kids taking in 100K a year from the German taxpayer... Oh. Right. Yeah.
And 'cultural freedom' is a cultural value of _one_ culture. The one Caplan represents. Other cultures are assertive and make no bones about, e.g., yelling at uncovered women and calling them whores or attacking other places of worship and so on.
And so on, and so on. The trouble with Caplan's ideas is that they sound great and shatter on the first contact with reality.
The trouble with Caplan is that he combines a total resistance to contrary evidence with an absolute conviction hat he is, like, the most open-minded guy _evah_.
Ironically, this comment is a great example of the exact pattern Caplan calls out in his second paragraph: skip the work of identifying where you part ways with the argument, and instead emote and swing at a straw man. "Funny folkways" isn't Caplan's view of culture. Go back and reread the piece. He defends speech, religion, family formation, and sexual norms specifically because those are how people see the world and each other. You aren't correcting a shallow reading here; you're supplying one.
On the grooming gangs: Baroness Casey's national audit found that the ethnicity of perpetrators had historically been "shied away from" by the institutions responsible for stopping it (exactly the failure you describe). There is now a statutory national inquiry with an explicit mandate to examine the role ethnicity, religion, and culture played in both the offending and the institutional response. That isn't a fringe claim anymore, so credit where it's due.
But watch the move you make next: jumping from specific, local, contested cases to claiming "many cultures" see rape as acceptable. The national data doesn't back that leap. Where ethnicity has been recorded, the majority of grooming gang suspects nationally have been white, and the Home Office's own review found insufficient evidence to pin this disproportionately on any single ethnic group at a national level. What's real is a set of documented local clusters (genuinely worth investigating, which is why the inquiry exists), not a national or religious pattern. You are doing to the rape gangs what you do a few lines later with the Syrian clan lord: cherry-picking an individual case and dressing it up as "entire cultures." No legal code, religious text, or cultural tradition anywhere formally holds that rape is acceptable. What varies is enforcement (who gets protected, who gets believed), not the nominal moral status of the act. Outgroup-targeted sexual violence tracks dehumanization, which is a general failure mode of tribalism present in every conflict where one group stops seeing another as fully human, including in Western history. Treating it as a special property of "them" rather than a risk everyone is capable of does rhetorical work the evidence simply doesn't support. Caplan's actual position already handles the valid part of your point: punish the crime severely, which is precisely what failed to happen here. That is a failure of law enforcement, not a failure of the freedom principle.
On welfare and work: Caplan has spent years arguing against the welfare state on the exact grounds you raise. If you pay people not to work while subsidizing large families, some people, whether immigrant or native, will take that deal. That is an argument for reforming the transfer system, not for treating free movement as original sin. Similarly, one clan patriarch gaming German benefits law is a policy design failure, not evidence about "entire cultures." It's the same hasty generalization as the rape gang argument, just aimed at a different target. Caplan's actual bar for immigrants is lower than you imply anyway: "well below average and still better than nothing," not "must be a net fiscal contributor in an overgrown welfare state."
Claiming "cultural freedom is just one culture's value" proves too much, and it argues against you. Where an idea comes from doesn't settle whether it is true; that is a genetic fallacy regardless of which idea you apply it to. Apply your own standard consistently: if cultural freedom is disqualified for being "just" one culture's value, so is your objection to rape, to welfare fraud, and to harassing women in the street. Those are also value judgments that plenty of cultures, by your own account, do not universally share. You cannot treat all cultural values as equally parochial and then condemn the ones you dislike as objectively wrong. Either there is a fact of the matter about which norms produce better outcomes (in which case where a norm originated is irrelevant), or there isn't (in which case your own moral judgments here are just as parochial as the ones you attack). Caplan isn't claiming Western cultural freedom wins because the West invented it. He's making an empirical claim: it wins in competition under conditions of free exit and association. Your own examples make his point for him: attacking a place of worship is already a crime, prosecuted the same regardless of who commits it, falling squarely inside his "punish literal violence" line. Yelling insults at women is uglier, but it falls under the obnoxious, protected speech that every free society tolerates, including from its own native bigots. You've sorted your own examples into the exact two buckets Caplan drew. You just haven't noticed it yet.
"Sounds great, shatters on contact with reality" is a mood, not an argument. Caplan gave you a specific, answerable question: soft-core, medium-core, hard-core: where do you get off the train? You haven't answered it. You've simply listed bad outcomes and declared, without touching a single premise, that they refute a position built specifically to survive that exact list.
> "Sounds great, shatters on contact with reality" is a mood, not an argument.
No, it is simple fact. I don't owe Caplan an answer for anything, certainly not on his rigged questions and, especially not since I answered his ludicrous book at great length here:
(Caplan never reads any criticism or any fact that runs counter to his ideas)
Ceuta is an example of what I mean. Caplan writes thousands of words how Open Borders are totally awesome and great. In reality, we see that within a week, an ancient city is transformed into a slum, the streets and beaches are full of trash, girls are being abducted and dragged up to the mountains for gang rape.... and does Capland even acknowledge any of that?
From the dawn of history, people have freely migrated between all shores of the Mediterranean. All the ancient cities rose to greatness with open borders. Ceuta only became a problem recently, and closing the borders caused that.
> No legal code, religious text, or cultural tradition anywhere formally holds that rape is acceptable. What varies is enforcement (who gets protected, who gets believed),
Yes, exactly. Yslam is totally against rape - unless the victim isn't a believer, and even if she is a believer, only if she can get 4 witnesses. Else, she's an adulteress, and faces death. Do you understand how _weak_ your comment is?
23:5–6, 4:24 et cetera explicitly sanction and demand sex slavery.
*sighs* Reading your comment is like seeing myself - twenty years ago. I know how hard it is to give up on the dream of universal cosmopolitanism, the dream that these values - because they are so obviously right - will be held by everyone.
Try this experiment, would you? Name the countries you would be happy to live in. To build a life in. Go see what the majority has in common. Then go to your bookshelf. Take a look at the authors you like to read. Really, _really_ look. What do the majority have in common? Keep this experiment going for a week, in every permutation you can think of. It is very hard to look directly at reality and not at what you think you have to think.
You _think_ these values are universal because they are... to you. You don't see that there are other ways of seeing and living. There is no rule that your values have to win.
> Outgroup-targeted sexual violence tracks dehumanization, which is a general failure mode of tribalism present in every conflict where one group stops seeing another as fully human
BY GEORGE I THINK HE'S GOT IT! You got it. _We_ are the exception. We are the rare exception in this world, what we have, in fact, in reality, right now. If it goes, do you think that it will ever come back?
That is why I want to defend it.
> Your own examples make his point for him: attacking a place of worship is already a crime, prosecuted the same regardless of who commits it, falling squarely inside his "punish literal violence" line.
Yeah? Who is going to punish it? We already see what happens in the UK. How do you expect to punish it when more and more reject the cultural value of tolerance and think that blasphemy is way worse than murder?
This is the bottom line: this isn't whether you can have some clever, clever argument about 'universal standards' or whatever. It is whether or not you, you yourself, are willing to live in an Yslamic or African society. And if you aren't... what do you propose to do about it?
Are you really willing to watch all the good stuff in Western society - science, progress, prosperity, rights of women, art, literature and so on - go out the window? Never to be reclaimed? And if not, what do you propose to do about it?
Not going to tackle the entire argument, but I’m pretty sure there is a world of difference between allowing people to enter an area, and the British government’s insane two tier justice system.
You mention welfare being an issue? I agree, immigrants should not be incentivized with welfare. (No one should) The obvious short term fix would be to prevent immigrants from getting welfare, as a condition of entry, not banning them entirely.
Your accusation that Caplan would defend rape gangs because of “racism” is quite insane and makes me question if you have any idea what he believes.
It is evil that the British state is so caught up in self hatred that it is failing to punish actual criminals. But you are making a massive equivocation between criminals and immigrants.
Pretty much all of your criticisms stem from an issue of the British government failing to properly enforce property rights. The solution is not to have it violate more of them. If the UK is capable of banning immigration, surely it would also be capable of actually solving crimes instead.
I did not say that he defended the rape gangs. I said that people like him squeal when the subject is raised.
Caplan doesn't _advocate_ for the rape gangs, the crime wave, the stabbings, the mosques that openly scream for Shariah, and all the rest of it. He just... doesn't talk about it. He blocks any and all contrary evidence from his mind.
It's the way here he talks about "illiberal cultures" as... Eastern Europeans and Asians. That's right, he wants you to believe because Russians and Chinese can assimilate and become productive members of society, there is no problem with an unlimited number of Somalis and Afghan Muslims.
> The obvious short term fix would be to prevent immigrants from getting welfare, as a condition of entry, not banning them entirely.
Oh, and how are you going to do that? There's plenty of votes in that. How are you going to kick them off welfare once they are in?
> If the UK is capable of banning immigration, surely it would also be capable of actually solving crimes instead.
Cute line. Doesn't work in practice. Who IS the UK here? Who, exactly, is going to go around solving these crimes in the modern UK? We already know why the rape-and-torture gangs get given free pass: ethnic lobbying.
Could I ask one thing, please? I go into detail why he's not just wrong but dishonest. Please read this:
"Who is the UK here? Who, exactly, is going to go around solving these crimes in the modern UK?"
Same argument works against you. Who exactly is going to go around banning immigration and deporting these immigrants?
If they were capable (and willing) of doing this, there is no clear evidence why they would not be able to fight the rape-and-torture gangs, and solve other crimes.
Social conservatives believe that certain norms are good for society. Libertarians believe that the use of state coercion to enforce norms is bad for society. These two beliefs are not contradictory.
Conservatives believe that the state is ordained of God (Russell Kirk). The libertarian belief that the state is, at best, a necessary evil, is irreconcilable.
"In recent years, I’ve had the same experience with libertarians becoming culturally conservative. While immigration is almost always the wedge issue, once libertarians turn against immigration, they commonly move on to a bunch of other culturally conservative views."
Professor Caplan, I'm a libertarian and an economist and, whilst I have become more sympathetic towards some level/some types of immigration regulation, I don't think its become about "cultural conservatism" in either my case, or the case of many libertarians who shifted similarly.
A lot of us are becoming more amenable to immigration regulation precisely because we want to AVOID cultural conservatism. This is most obvious when discussing Islamic immigration. The average Muslim seeking to immigrate to the West (and may I emphasize, this is just an average, of course there is a minority of liberal Muslims) is at least as culturally conservative as a George W Bush era Christian fundamentalist (and is arguably much moreso). The views they (often, not always) hold about sexual minorities and women (and rock music, and religious freedom, and offensive speech...) are hardly liberal in any way.
Couple this with the fact our society practices electoral democracy, and that certain demographics are literally being imported by opportunistic politicians as a form of gerrymandering (bringing with them all their illiberalism and political/economic ignorance - a subject you've extensively written about). Yes, I think that we need more constraints on elected representatives too, but if that is not politically feasible, we need to look at other alternative courses of action.
We already have enough illiberals among domestic Western populations (and they vote). Do we really want to bring more in? You already are painfully aware of just how rare genuine libertarian or classically-liberal inclinations are among the population broadly. Indiscriminately importing large numbers of people from highly illiberal demographics only makes this situation worse.
To clarify, I don't believe in anything like a categorical ban on Islamic immigration (or immigration from any other ethnoreligiously-defined demographic). Such a policy is a cruel act of collective punishment. But the case for a non-zero level of government immigration regulation strikes me as completely defensible from a culturally liberal/libertarian perspective, and not necessarily evidence of a shift towards cultural conservatism.
>. To clarify, I don't believe in anything like a categorical ban on Islamic immigration (or immigration from any other ethnoreligiously-defined demographic
Then don't waste your time talking about libertarianism. Or even liberalism. The future you have accepted for yourself and your nation is of a semi-islamized & Africanised state. Like Nigeria. Morocco at best.
If you don't want that, you have to be for not just immigration restriction but remigration.
You might not like that choice - I don't - but it is where we are.
I may have made a mistake, but I do distinctly remember an atheist (and Objectivist, which you said you were back in 2024 in a comment here on Substack) blogger named ThePrussian who was using the same icon as you and was active (if perhaps on a different blog network... was it SkepticInk?) back around the Elevatorgate/Atheism Plus years.
Well argued, BC. I now change my mind and think we should allow unlimited hordes of uneducated Muslims who want to force Sharia Law into California where politicians and state bureaucrats will gladly shovel half million dollar houses and free medical care and unemployment insurance and whatever it is they call food stamps nowadays.
It’s so obvious. Not really sure what I was thinking before.
“Almost no one wants to ban alcohol, which plausibly does more social harm than all other irresponsible behaviors combined.”
Bryan, most of your arguments are correct, and almost all of them are logical.
But this one is illogical bias.
The only reason that the “plausibly more social harm” might be true is because of the prevalence of use.
On a per instance basis, your “plausibly” claim is utterly… implausible. And so people who choose to prefer bans on other activities are completely rational not to want bans on alcohol (which has the further evidence of “been tried and failed”).
Do better.
Because as you’ve written elsewhere (paraphrased), when you make dumb arguments it causes us to take less seriously your other, better arguments.
What policies are you arguing against exactly, and who holds them? I mean, aside from immigration restriction.
Regarding drugs: Libertarianism as opposed to "libertinism" would encourage a system where people, at least on average, reap the positive benefits they create and pay for the negative consequences. Free markets are very good at this, but not perfect. Given that anyone who cares to see can tell that hard drugs are a net negative, a system that allows people to profit from this is failing. We can argue in some cases about the cost of restricting peoples' freedom and maybe when only imperfect solutions are available, we err on the side of freedom. In the case of something like crack, heroin, meth, the downside of restricting this freedom is completely uncompelling.
The war on drugs has had enormous negative effects. The costs include the cost of running the DEA, loss of civil liberties, imprisonment of millions for using drugs, and destruction of millions of black families.
It’s not hard to imagine a better outcome from choosing not to fight it.
You can see the effects of *essentially" not fighting it in cities like San Francisco. Only in a libertarian bubble mind do people think drugs are consensual and thus victimless. You can see the destruction they cause. Homeless addicts are the victims, among others - including those of us who have to see it and pay for the consequences. If you set rat poison out and it kills the rats, did *you* not kill the rats because they ate it voluntarily? Drug makers and dealers are responsible for the foreseeable damage they cause. Nobody in their right mind puts crack dealers in the same category as a grocer or other seller of legitimate goods.
- The net cost of DEA is most likely a positive compared to alternative tax base destruction.
- Civil liberties like what? Injecting mind-altering substances?
- US in particular has a weird "underpoliced, overimprisoned" problem _in general_. Otherwise, imprisonment for using drugs is not unlike a forced rehab.
- Drugs destroyed the families, not imprisonment, which just finalized the already-inevitable event.
Using drugs should not be a crime. The negative effects from use by non-addicts would be minuscule. And use does not mean inevitable addiction.
ChatGPT replied to the question “What impact did the War on Drugs have on civil liberties?” As follows:
The War on Drugs had a large and lasting effect on American civil liberties, especially beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s.
The underlying problem is easy to overlook: drug crimes are usually consensual and concealed. There is ordinarily no victim calling the police. To enforce prohibition, the government must discover the crime. That creates unusually strong pressure for searches, surveillance, informants, undercover operations, and seizures.
The Fourth Amendment: Search and Privacy
Traditional Fourth Amendment doctrine begins with the idea that police generally need individualized suspicion—and often a warrant—to search people or their property.
Drug enforcement created enormous pressure to find exceptions to those requirements. Over several decades, courts permitted or expanded the use of drug-sniffing dogs, warrant exceptions, searches incident to arrest, undercover operations, informants, and some forms of suspicionless drug testing.
There were limits. In City of Indianapolis v. Edmond (2000), Indianapolis established roadblocks at which motorists were stopped so police could look for drugs. The Supreme Court struck them down, holding that ordinary crime control did not justify suspicionless stops of motorists.
The case illustrates the pressure drug enforcement placed on traditional constitutional restraints: innocent motorists were being stopped without any particular reason to suspect them of a crime simply to see whether police might discover drugs.
Civil Asset Forfeiture
Perhaps the most striking departure from ordinary notions of due process was the expansion of civil asset forfeiture.
Police could seize cash, cars, houses, and other property alleged to be connected to drug trafficking. Because civil forfeiture proceedings were technically directed against the property, the government could sometimes obtain forfeiture without first convicting the owner of a crime.
Congress greatly expanded federal drug forfeiture in 1978 and 1984. The 1984 legislation also created the Justice Department’s Assets Forfeiture Fund and allowed federal authorities to share forfeiture proceeds with participating state and local law-enforcement agencies.
That created a troubling incentive: an agency involved in deciding whether property was connected to criminal activity could potentially benefit financially from taking it.
From a classical-liberal perspective, this is an extraordinary arrangement. Government was given substantial power to take property while the agencies exercising that power could receive some of the proceeds.
Militarization and No-Knock Raids
Drug enforcement also changed how American policing was conducted.
Because drugs can easily be flushed away, swallowed, hidden, or moved, police argued that conventional procedures—knocking, announcing themselves, and waiting for occupants to respond—could allow evidence to disappear.
That encouraged increasingly aggressive warrant execution: SWAT teams, forced entry, flash-bang devices, nighttime raids, and no-knock tactics.
The logic is important. It isn’t simply that drug offenders are uniquely dangerous. The evidence itself is unusually easy to destroy.
Consequently, a policy intended to prohibit possession and sale of particular substances helped normalize police tactics originally associated with exceptionally dangerous situations.
Punishment and Prosecutorial Power
The War on Drugs also produced mandatory-minimum sentences, sentencing enhancements, expansive conspiracy prosecutions, and extremely long prison terms for some drug offenses.
This isn’t technically an erosion of a specific constitutional protection in the same sense as an unreasonable search. Legislatures have considerable authority to prescribe criminal penalties.
But severe mandatory sentences changed the balance of power within the criminal justice system.
If a prosecutor can effectively say, “Plead guilty and receive five years; go to trial and risk twenty,” the prosecutor possesses enormous leverage. The constitutional right to a jury trial still exists, but exercising it becomes extraordinarily risky.
Drug prohibition therefore contributed to a broader feature of modern American criminal justice: formal procedural rights can remain intact while the incentives to exercise them become much weaker.
Surveillance and Informants
Drug investigations also increased reliance on undercover officers, confidential informants, controlled purchases, wiretaps, and surveillance.
Again, this follows from the peculiar nature of the offense.
A robbery normally produces a sequence something like this:
Victim → complaint → investigation → suspect
A consensual drug transaction is different:
No complainant → police search for an offense → surveillance/informant/undercover purchase → suspect
That distinction is fundamental.
Prohibiting consensual transactions tends naturally to require more intrusive policing than prohibiting crimes with identifiable victims.
The Larger Lesson
Critics of the War on Drugs have sometimes described these developments as creating a “drug exception to the Bill of Rights.” There is no literal constitutional doctrine by that name, but the phrase captures an important historical phenomenon.
The government did not announce, “We are going to reduce Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights.”
Instead, the process tended to work incrementally:
Drug prohibition → enforcement problem → demand for new police power → legal exception → exception becomes normal
And once a law-enforcement technique exists, it does not necessarily remain confined to drug cases. Asset forfeiture, aggressive tactical policing, surveillance techniques, and expansive search doctrines can migrate to other forms of law enforcement.
That may be the most consequential civil-liberties legacy of the War on Drugs. It didn’t merely result in the imprisonment of large numbers of drug offenders. It helped change the normal relationship between police power, privacy, property, and due process for everyone.
> The negative effects from use by non-addicts would be minuscule. And use does not mean inevitable addiction.
"Inevitable"? Maybe not. But highly likely. As for negative effects from use by non-addicts, most prohibited mind-altering substances have negative health consequences as well. (In particular, the supposedly-easy marijuana drops IQ by several points, which is more of a crime than a school shooting.)
For alcohol, it didn't, because it is so easy to produce. But for many other drugs, it certainly did. It is just not true that in the alternate world where there would be no prohibition on cocaine the amount of cocaine available or of its users would be the same.
There's a problem with that. The ridiculous Miranda standards that are applied to policing nowhere in Europe are barely older. Random searches are the norm.
“If government has no right to stop or slow cultural change, it has no right to stop or slow cultural change from immigration.”
This is a particularly stupid argument.
And one for which Bryan himself has acknowledged that there is at least one exception: the state of Israel.
Given this (blindingly obvious, to the sane and moral) exception, the claim is a dumb one.
One can argue that the gains to the existing populace writ large from open borders exceed the costs. Fine. And so perhaps claim that restricting immigration is almost always unwise. Also fine.
But claiming that a group of people have no right to self-determination - which is what this claim at core is - is something only a hard core anarcho-capitalist type believes.
And so it is just preaching to the choir.
Except that it is the kind of preaching that is likely to actively repel new converts, not attract them.
The logic of this post rests on the assumption that there is and can be no real threat to the order/peace/stability/prosperity of The West. Social Conservatives do not share that assumption. I think that’s the key difference.
Surely Point 4 of the Soft-Core Case is the most common point of departure. In modern history, correlating political boundaries to religious, ethnic, cultural, and/or linguistic boundaries has often seemed the *only* feasible cope for human heterogeneity.
I'm not hard-core libertarian, and I view immigration control as within the government's purview, not necessarily to keep bad people out--I'm sure there are plenty of good people we're keeping out, too--I just don't think there's an obligation for a country to accept immigrants, and there's lots of reasons beyond the individual immigrant's value to the country that we might refuse them. That said, I'm responding more for this, and I apologize if it's something of a tangent...
"In the real world, exceptions to 'my body, my choice' are deeply arbitrary, so almost everyone supports extreme versions of this principle in some ways."
Not that I ever get a satisfying response besides being huffingly told it's offensive to conflate abortion with anything else at all, but my challenge to anyone pushing 'my body, my choice' is, why aren't you pushing for a constitutional amendment that says it this generically? Like, the left side of the aisle is always just focusing on abortion and sex when they use this line. The obvious reason being that they still want to tell people to take a vaccine, or draft them into going to war, or prevent them from taking drugs, or any number of things that might not be _exactly_ like abortion, but certainly fall at least as much within the purview of, "My body, my choice."
I'm libertarian enough to be pro-choice, I'm just tired of it being a one-way street. Like many positions on the left, they carve out some slice at the margins that society as a whole might want to restrict (see also: gay marriage) and talk a big game about personal freedom. But it's always a cover to distract from being more restrictive about stuff that just about everyone agrees should remain a matter of personal freedom, especially when it comes to economics and ideology. I actually agree--my body, my choice! I'm a gay man married to another man; I'm not looking to be socially conservative here. I don't want the government to have anything to do with your abortion. But I'm not rallying behind it as a specific cause; I'll rally behind it when it's one component of a "whole-life" personal autonomy agenda. And if abortion is literally the _only_ thing where you suddenly care about personal autonomy, then I'm just not interested in supporting you politically, sorry.
> my challenge to anyone pushing 'my body, my choice' is, why aren't you pushing for a constitutional amendment that says it this generically?
Well, as a not-libertarian-at-all, I can answer this: because fully free abortion is welfare-increasing and many other cases that would fall under that generic a statement are welfare-reducing.
You can only say this if you completely ignore the welfare of the 8 month old fetus.
Other parts of the abortion debate are quite difficult. This one, however, is not. So your claim is only true with a very special, very warped view of whose welfare counts.
"’8-month-old fetus’ is not abortion, it is premature birth.“
I was obviously referring to a fetus still in the womb
But your next paragraph makes it clear that you hold said very warped moral view.
Which thankfully very large majorities of civil society disagree with you on. And I even suspect that a majority of your fellow leftists don’t actually hold those views (actually, for newborns, I’m quite sure they don’t).
But I will concede that you are one of the very few committed to legal abortion up to the moment of childbirth who openly acknowledges the logical conclusion that there becomes essentially no moral difference from infanticide.
>"’8-month-old fetus’ is not abortion, it is premature birth.“
> I was obviously referring to a fetus still in the womb
When you remove an 8-month old fetus from the womb, the procedure is premature birth (and if the fetus is viable, it is then treated accordingly, like in natural premature births).
“and if the fetus is viable, it is then treated accordingly, like in natural premature births”
No! The whole point is that in states like NY that is NOT how it is treated under the law. Instead it is up to the mother in consultation with the doctor to decide if they want to terminate the pregnancy.
if you are not in favor of that, then you are not in fact in favor of “fully free abortion” by the plain meaning of words.
Or did I misunderstand you and from the beginning you were only referring to full taxpayer funding of abortions, but making no reference whatsoever to what the rules are for when it is legal vs. illegal?
That's not "My body, my choice." That's a conversation about where to draw the line for best increasing "welfare." I'm addressing those who would use the argument from personal autonomy to forestall that conversation altogether.
It kinda is though, because most of the users of "my body, my choice" have something like this stance and thus do not believe it applicable to vaccines or whatever.
What breaks the argument is that by demanding that nobody enforce any cultural norms (through non-coercive methods), or reward them, you remove any incentives or constraints on behavior, breaking any sort of cultural evolution. There's no feedback mechanism to accomplish your goal of discovering the best set of norms.
A second problem is that you also just introduce a single overarching meta-cultural norm: you're not allowed to judge anything anyone else does or apply any sort of non-coercive correction, or support. Why should we believe that's the single best cultural norm? It is just implicitly asserted that this is the correct cultural norm, and that no further discovery is needed through the experimentation that's ostensibly meant to find the best set of norms, because this norm destroys it.
Addendum: on my first read, I took this as you saying private individuals should not enforce or reward cultural norm following through non-coercive means.
On second read, it seems that you were mostly saying the government shouldn't enforce them. I agree with this. But it's easy to misread you as sliding between thin and thick libertarianism.
You pretend not to know about regular law enforcement. Play that kindergarten game with somebody else. Of course those measures don't stop all crime, but don't embarrass yourself by saying protectionism would. I would love to think you actually studied Sharia law, but given your track record, I can't.
Libertarians make a great deal out of their property and that nobody has any right in whom they rent the property to and whom they employ on the property.
But they ignore the question of how their property is secured and defended against foreign invaders and domestic criminals.
Also, who enables and secures smooth transactions on which property depends.
The libertarian makes will and expects it would be honored and executed. Who does that honoring and executing? Who is supposed to pay for all these services the libertarian expects as a matter of course.
> In recent years, I’ve had the same experience with libertarians becoming culturally conservative. While immigration is almost always the wedge issue, once libertarians turn against immigration, they commonly move on to a bunch of other culturally conservative views. And once again, the more I listen to them, the more I wonder why they changed their minds.
You're thinking about the question incorrectly. They adopt the views of their new social group for the same reason they adopted the views of their earlier social group in the past. Or, in the terms used by this very post, they get their new positions by exactly the same method that they got "whatever Big Picture views they embraced when they were 15-25 years old". Their consideration of the new positions is negligent or nonexistent, just like their consideration of the old positions.
Would you ask someone who converted from Catholicism to Jainism which aspect of the catechism they disagreed with, or would you consider it sufficient to observe that at the same time they converted, they married a Jain woman?
"Using government to suppress non-conformists is usually more trouble than it’s worth."
This is probably where I deviate. As a non-conformist myself, I paradoxically am a big fan of assimilation. This is because a cohesive, high-trust society is a good thing, and when too many people are allowed to not conform, that society will be lost. If you want to be part of society, make an effort to conform at least somewhat, or go be a hermit(sometimes that seems like an attractive option to me).
There are times when I see dumb rules in life, and I follow them anyway when the purpose is for improving trust and stability. The government does not need to be neutral in everything.
One point about assimilation(#7): mandatory public schooling probably did a good job assimilating the children of immigrants in the past. Today's public schools are a disaster and probably have the opposite effect. The conditions that made immigration work in the past no longer exist.
The problem with this is Caplan's unbelievably shallow idea of what culture is. It's not just funny folkways. It's how you see the world, and others.
Take rape. We regard rape as "a special kind of evil" - but that is _not_ a universal thing. Many cultures see rape - at least of the other - as fine. Witness the rape-and-torture gangs of Britain. But, Caplan would say, you can go to the cops! Well, about that.... a) the cops can't unrape you, and b) they are on the rape gangs side, because if they aren't, then people like Caplan wail that hey are horrid waycist anti-immigrant types.
Or what about: working for a living? Yes, sure, low IQ migrants will totally agree to be janitors and whatnot. Or - hear me out - maybe they will leach on welfare and make TikToks about how native Europeans are suckers? There are entire cultures and one religion that sees nothing wrong with that view.
But that's crazy talk! You might as well say that there is a Syrian clanlord with over 30 kids taking in 100K a year from the German taxpayer... Oh. Right. Yeah.
And 'cultural freedom' is a cultural value of _one_ culture. The one Caplan represents. Other cultures are assertive and make no bones about, e.g., yelling at uncovered women and calling them whores or attacking other places of worship and so on.
And so on, and so on. The trouble with Caplan's ideas is that they sound great and shatter on the first contact with reality.
The trouble with Caplan is that he combines a total resistance to contrary evidence with an absolute conviction hat he is, like, the most open-minded guy _evah_.
Ironically, this comment is a great example of the exact pattern Caplan calls out in his second paragraph: skip the work of identifying where you part ways with the argument, and instead emote and swing at a straw man. "Funny folkways" isn't Caplan's view of culture. Go back and reread the piece. He defends speech, religion, family formation, and sexual norms specifically because those are how people see the world and each other. You aren't correcting a shallow reading here; you're supplying one.
On the grooming gangs: Baroness Casey's national audit found that the ethnicity of perpetrators had historically been "shied away from" by the institutions responsible for stopping it (exactly the failure you describe). There is now a statutory national inquiry with an explicit mandate to examine the role ethnicity, religion, and culture played in both the offending and the institutional response. That isn't a fringe claim anymore, so credit where it's due.
But watch the move you make next: jumping from specific, local, contested cases to claiming "many cultures" see rape as acceptable. The national data doesn't back that leap. Where ethnicity has been recorded, the majority of grooming gang suspects nationally have been white, and the Home Office's own review found insufficient evidence to pin this disproportionately on any single ethnic group at a national level. What's real is a set of documented local clusters (genuinely worth investigating, which is why the inquiry exists), not a national or religious pattern. You are doing to the rape gangs what you do a few lines later with the Syrian clan lord: cherry-picking an individual case and dressing it up as "entire cultures." No legal code, religious text, or cultural tradition anywhere formally holds that rape is acceptable. What varies is enforcement (who gets protected, who gets believed), not the nominal moral status of the act. Outgroup-targeted sexual violence tracks dehumanization, which is a general failure mode of tribalism present in every conflict where one group stops seeing another as fully human, including in Western history. Treating it as a special property of "them" rather than a risk everyone is capable of does rhetorical work the evidence simply doesn't support. Caplan's actual position already handles the valid part of your point: punish the crime severely, which is precisely what failed to happen here. That is a failure of law enforcement, not a failure of the freedom principle.
On welfare and work: Caplan has spent years arguing against the welfare state on the exact grounds you raise. If you pay people not to work while subsidizing large families, some people, whether immigrant or native, will take that deal. That is an argument for reforming the transfer system, not for treating free movement as original sin. Similarly, one clan patriarch gaming German benefits law is a policy design failure, not evidence about "entire cultures." It's the same hasty generalization as the rape gang argument, just aimed at a different target. Caplan's actual bar for immigrants is lower than you imply anyway: "well below average and still better than nothing," not "must be a net fiscal contributor in an overgrown welfare state."
Claiming "cultural freedom is just one culture's value" proves too much, and it argues against you. Where an idea comes from doesn't settle whether it is true; that is a genetic fallacy regardless of which idea you apply it to. Apply your own standard consistently: if cultural freedom is disqualified for being "just" one culture's value, so is your objection to rape, to welfare fraud, and to harassing women in the street. Those are also value judgments that plenty of cultures, by your own account, do not universally share. You cannot treat all cultural values as equally parochial and then condemn the ones you dislike as objectively wrong. Either there is a fact of the matter about which norms produce better outcomes (in which case where a norm originated is irrelevant), or there isn't (in which case your own moral judgments here are just as parochial as the ones you attack). Caplan isn't claiming Western cultural freedom wins because the West invented it. He's making an empirical claim: it wins in competition under conditions of free exit and association. Your own examples make his point for him: attacking a place of worship is already a crime, prosecuted the same regardless of who commits it, falling squarely inside his "punish literal violence" line. Yelling insults at women is uglier, but it falls under the obnoxious, protected speech that every free society tolerates, including from its own native bigots. You've sorted your own examples into the exact two buckets Caplan drew. You just haven't noticed it yet.
"Sounds great, shatters on contact with reality" is a mood, not an argument. Caplan gave you a specific, answerable question: soft-core, medium-core, hard-core: where do you get off the train? You haven't answered it. You've simply listed bad outcomes and declared, without touching a single premise, that they refute a position built specifically to survive that exact list.
> "Sounds great, shatters on contact with reality" is a mood, not an argument.
No, it is simple fact. I don't owe Caplan an answer for anything, certainly not on his rigged questions and, especially not since I answered his ludicrous book at great length here:
https://skepticink.com/prussian/2020/03/24/seal-the-borders/
(Caplan never reads any criticism or any fact that runs counter to his ideas)
Ceuta is an example of what I mean. Caplan writes thousands of words how Open Borders are totally awesome and great. In reality, we see that within a week, an ancient city is transformed into a slum, the streets and beaches are full of trash, girls are being abducted and dragged up to the mountains for gang rape.... and does Capland even acknowledge any of that?
From the dawn of history, people have freely migrated between all shores of the Mediterranean. All the ancient cities rose to greatness with open borders. Ceuta only became a problem recently, and closing the borders caused that.
Literally everything is false there. From.the dawn of history,.migrations meant displacing,.subjugating or exterminating the people already there.
Yeah, because closed borders let's throw trash everywhere and kidnap native girls for gang rape.
Do you read your stuff?
I did not need more evidence that you don't know what you are talking about, but thanks anyway.
The kind of thinking Caplan attracts 🤦🏼
> No legal code, religious text, or cultural tradition anywhere formally holds that rape is acceptable. What varies is enforcement (who gets protected, who gets believed),
Yes, exactly. Yslam is totally against rape - unless the victim isn't a believer, and even if she is a believer, only if she can get 4 witnesses. Else, she's an adulteress, and faces death. Do you understand how _weak_ your comment is?
23:5–6, 4:24 et cetera explicitly sanction and demand sex slavery.
*sighs* Reading your comment is like seeing myself - twenty years ago. I know how hard it is to give up on the dream of universal cosmopolitanism, the dream that these values - because they are so obviously right - will be held by everyone.
Try this experiment, would you? Name the countries you would be happy to live in. To build a life in. Go see what the majority has in common. Then go to your bookshelf. Take a look at the authors you like to read. Really, _really_ look. What do the majority have in common? Keep this experiment going for a week, in every permutation you can think of. It is very hard to look directly at reality and not at what you think you have to think.
You _think_ these values are universal because they are... to you. You don't see that there are other ways of seeing and living. There is no rule that your values have to win.
> Outgroup-targeted sexual violence tracks dehumanization, which is a general failure mode of tribalism present in every conflict where one group stops seeing another as fully human
BY GEORGE I THINK HE'S GOT IT! You got it. _We_ are the exception. We are the rare exception in this world, what we have, in fact, in reality, right now. If it goes, do you think that it will ever come back?
That is why I want to defend it.
> Your own examples make his point for him: attacking a place of worship is already a crime, prosecuted the same regardless of who commits it, falling squarely inside his "punish literal violence" line.
Yeah? Who is going to punish it? We already see what happens in the UK. How do you expect to punish it when more and more reject the cultural value of tolerance and think that blasphemy is way worse than murder?
This is the bottom line: this isn't whether you can have some clever, clever argument about 'universal standards' or whatever. It is whether or not you, you yourself, are willing to live in an Yslamic or African society. And if you aren't... what do you propose to do about it?
Are you really willing to watch all the good stuff in Western society - science, progress, prosperity, rights of women, art, literature and so on - go out the window? Never to be reclaimed? And if not, what do you propose to do about it?
Not going to tackle the entire argument, but I’m pretty sure there is a world of difference between allowing people to enter an area, and the British government’s insane two tier justice system.
You mention welfare being an issue? I agree, immigrants should not be incentivized with welfare. (No one should) The obvious short term fix would be to prevent immigrants from getting welfare, as a condition of entry, not banning them entirely.
Your accusation that Caplan would defend rape gangs because of “racism” is quite insane and makes me question if you have any idea what he believes.
It is evil that the British state is so caught up in self hatred that it is failing to punish actual criminals. But you are making a massive equivocation between criminals and immigrants.
Pretty much all of your criticisms stem from an issue of the British government failing to properly enforce property rights. The solution is not to have it violate more of them. If the UK is capable of banning immigration, surely it would also be capable of actually solving crimes instead.
I did not say that he defended the rape gangs. I said that people like him squeal when the subject is raised.
Caplan doesn't _advocate_ for the rape gangs, the crime wave, the stabbings, the mosques that openly scream for Shariah, and all the rest of it. He just... doesn't talk about it. He blocks any and all contrary evidence from his mind.
It's the way here he talks about "illiberal cultures" as... Eastern Europeans and Asians. That's right, he wants you to believe because Russians and Chinese can assimilate and become productive members of society, there is no problem with an unlimited number of Somalis and Afghan Muslims.
> The obvious short term fix would be to prevent immigrants from getting welfare, as a condition of entry, not banning them entirely.
Oh, and how are you going to do that? There's plenty of votes in that. How are you going to kick them off welfare once they are in?
> If the UK is capable of banning immigration, surely it would also be capable of actually solving crimes instead.
Cute line. Doesn't work in practice. Who IS the UK here? Who, exactly, is going to go around solving these crimes in the modern UK? We already know why the rape-and-torture gangs get given free pass: ethnic lobbying.
Could I ask one thing, please? I go into detail why he's not just wrong but dishonest. Please read this:
https://skepticink.com/prussian/2020/03/24/seal-the-borders/
"Who is the UK here? Who, exactly, is going to go around solving these crimes in the modern UK?"
Same argument works against you. Who exactly is going to go around banning immigration and deporting these immigrants?
If they were capable (and willing) of doing this, there is no clear evidence why they would not be able to fight the rape-and-torture gangs, and solve other crimes.
Bruh. The native Europeans. The only ones with a right to our continent.
And, bruh, expelling this menace is how we fight them.
Social conservatives believe that certain norms are good for society. Libertarians believe that the use of state coercion to enforce norms is bad for society. These two beliefs are not contradictory.
They are not contradictory, true. But they are very frequently in conflict.
Conservatives believe that the state is ordained of God (Russell Kirk). The libertarian belief that the state is, at best, a necessary evil, is irreconcilable.
"In recent years, I’ve had the same experience with libertarians becoming culturally conservative. While immigration is almost always the wedge issue, once libertarians turn against immigration, they commonly move on to a bunch of other culturally conservative views."
Professor Caplan, I'm a libertarian and an economist and, whilst I have become more sympathetic towards some level/some types of immigration regulation, I don't think its become about "cultural conservatism" in either my case, or the case of many libertarians who shifted similarly.
A lot of us are becoming more amenable to immigration regulation precisely because we want to AVOID cultural conservatism. This is most obvious when discussing Islamic immigration. The average Muslim seeking to immigrate to the West (and may I emphasize, this is just an average, of course there is a minority of liberal Muslims) is at least as culturally conservative as a George W Bush era Christian fundamentalist (and is arguably much moreso). The views they (often, not always) hold about sexual minorities and women (and rock music, and religious freedom, and offensive speech...) are hardly liberal in any way.
Couple this with the fact our society practices electoral democracy, and that certain demographics are literally being imported by opportunistic politicians as a form of gerrymandering (bringing with them all their illiberalism and political/economic ignorance - a subject you've extensively written about). Yes, I think that we need more constraints on elected representatives too, but if that is not politically feasible, we need to look at other alternative courses of action.
We already have enough illiberals among domestic Western populations (and they vote). Do we really want to bring more in? You already are painfully aware of just how rare genuine libertarian or classically-liberal inclinations are among the population broadly. Indiscriminately importing large numbers of people from highly illiberal demographics only makes this situation worse.
To clarify, I don't believe in anything like a categorical ban on Islamic immigration (or immigration from any other ethnoreligiously-defined demographic). Such a policy is a cruel act of collective punishment. But the case for a non-zero level of government immigration regulation strikes me as completely defensible from a culturally liberal/libertarian perspective, and not necessarily evidence of a shift towards cultural conservatism.
>. To clarify, I don't believe in anything like a categorical ban on Islamic immigration (or immigration from any other ethnoreligiously-defined demographic
Then don't waste your time talking about libertarianism. Or even liberalism. The future you have accepted for yourself and your nation is of a semi-islamized & Africanised state. Like Nigeria. Morocco at best.
If you don't want that, you have to be for not just immigration restriction but remigration.
You might not like that choice - I don't - but it is where we are.
Would you happen to be the same "ThePrussian" who used to blog at FreeThoughtBlogs and got caught up in the atheism/atheism plus conflict?
No. I was never at FtB
I may have made a mistake, but I do distinctly remember an atheist (and Objectivist, which you said you were back in 2024 in a comment here on Substack) blogger named ThePrussian who was using the same icon as you and was active (if perhaps on a different blog network... was it SkepticInk?) back around the Elevatorgate/Atheism Plus years.
Yes, I blogged at SkepticInk. That was formed to try and rescue atheism from the FtB crowd.
I think we can all admit we failed.
Why?
That specific culture war was rather formative for me. I did read your SkepticInk blog regularly back in those days.
The fact that "our side" ended up losing was deeply unfortunate.
Well argued, BC. I now change my mind and think we should allow unlimited hordes of uneducated Muslims who want to force Sharia Law into California where politicians and state bureaucrats will gladly shovel half million dollar houses and free medical care and unemployment insurance and whatever it is they call food stamps nowadays.
It’s so obvious. Not really sure what I was thinking before.
“Almost no one wants to ban alcohol, which plausibly does more social harm than all other irresponsible behaviors combined.”
Bryan, most of your arguments are correct, and almost all of them are logical.
But this one is illogical bias.
The only reason that the “plausibly more social harm” might be true is because of the prevalence of use.
On a per instance basis, your “plausibly” claim is utterly… implausible. And so people who choose to prefer bans on other activities are completely rational not to want bans on alcohol (which has the further evidence of “been tried and failed”).
Do better.
Because as you’ve written elsewhere (paraphrased), when you make dumb arguments it causes us to take less seriously your other, better arguments.
What policies are you arguing against exactly, and who holds them? I mean, aside from immigration restriction.
Regarding drugs: Libertarianism as opposed to "libertinism" would encourage a system where people, at least on average, reap the positive benefits they create and pay for the negative consequences. Free markets are very good at this, but not perfect. Given that anyone who cares to see can tell that hard drugs are a net negative, a system that allows people to profit from this is failing. We can argue in some cases about the cost of restricting peoples' freedom and maybe when only imperfect solutions are available, we err on the side of freedom. In the case of something like crack, heroin, meth, the downside of restricting this freedom is completely uncompelling.
The war on drugs has had enormous negative effects. The costs include the cost of running the DEA, loss of civil liberties, imprisonment of millions for using drugs, and destruction of millions of black families.
It’s not hard to imagine a better outcome from choosing not to fight it.
You can see the effects of *essentially" not fighting it in cities like San Francisco. Only in a libertarian bubble mind do people think drugs are consensual and thus victimless. You can see the destruction they cause. Homeless addicts are the victims, among others - including those of us who have to see it and pay for the consequences. If you set rat poison out and it kills the rats, did *you* not kill the rats because they ate it voluntarily? Drug makers and dealers are responsible for the foreseeable damage they cause. Nobody in their right mind puts crack dealers in the same category as a grocer or other seller of legitimate goods.
- The net cost of DEA is most likely a positive compared to alternative tax base destruction.
- Civil liberties like what? Injecting mind-altering substances?
- US in particular has a weird "underpoliced, overimprisoned" problem _in general_. Otherwise, imprisonment for using drugs is not unlike a forced rehab.
- Drugs destroyed the families, not imprisonment, which just finalized the already-inevitable event.
Using drugs should not be a crime. The negative effects from use by non-addicts would be minuscule. And use does not mean inevitable addiction.
ChatGPT replied to the question “What impact did the War on Drugs have on civil liberties?” As follows:
The War on Drugs had a large and lasting effect on American civil liberties, especially beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s.
The underlying problem is easy to overlook: drug crimes are usually consensual and concealed. There is ordinarily no victim calling the police. To enforce prohibition, the government must discover the crime. That creates unusually strong pressure for searches, surveillance, informants, undercover operations, and seizures.
The Fourth Amendment: Search and Privacy
Traditional Fourth Amendment doctrine begins with the idea that police generally need individualized suspicion—and often a warrant—to search people or their property.
Drug enforcement created enormous pressure to find exceptions to those requirements. Over several decades, courts permitted or expanded the use of drug-sniffing dogs, warrant exceptions, searches incident to arrest, undercover operations, informants, and some forms of suspicionless drug testing.
There were limits. In City of Indianapolis v. Edmond (2000), Indianapolis established roadblocks at which motorists were stopped so police could look for drugs. The Supreme Court struck them down, holding that ordinary crime control did not justify suspicionless stops of motorists.
The case illustrates the pressure drug enforcement placed on traditional constitutional restraints: innocent motorists were being stopped without any particular reason to suspect them of a crime simply to see whether police might discover drugs.
Civil Asset Forfeiture
Perhaps the most striking departure from ordinary notions of due process was the expansion of civil asset forfeiture.
Police could seize cash, cars, houses, and other property alleged to be connected to drug trafficking. Because civil forfeiture proceedings were technically directed against the property, the government could sometimes obtain forfeiture without first convicting the owner of a crime.
Congress greatly expanded federal drug forfeiture in 1978 and 1984. The 1984 legislation also created the Justice Department’s Assets Forfeiture Fund and allowed federal authorities to share forfeiture proceeds with participating state and local law-enforcement agencies.
That created a troubling incentive: an agency involved in deciding whether property was connected to criminal activity could potentially benefit financially from taking it.
From a classical-liberal perspective, this is an extraordinary arrangement. Government was given substantial power to take property while the agencies exercising that power could receive some of the proceeds.
Militarization and No-Knock Raids
Drug enforcement also changed how American policing was conducted.
Because drugs can easily be flushed away, swallowed, hidden, or moved, police argued that conventional procedures—knocking, announcing themselves, and waiting for occupants to respond—could allow evidence to disappear.
That encouraged increasingly aggressive warrant execution: SWAT teams, forced entry, flash-bang devices, nighttime raids, and no-knock tactics.
The logic is important. It isn’t simply that drug offenders are uniquely dangerous. The evidence itself is unusually easy to destroy.
Consequently, a policy intended to prohibit possession and sale of particular substances helped normalize police tactics originally associated with exceptionally dangerous situations.
Punishment and Prosecutorial Power
The War on Drugs also produced mandatory-minimum sentences, sentencing enhancements, expansive conspiracy prosecutions, and extremely long prison terms for some drug offenses.
This isn’t technically an erosion of a specific constitutional protection in the same sense as an unreasonable search. Legislatures have considerable authority to prescribe criminal penalties.
But severe mandatory sentences changed the balance of power within the criminal justice system.
If a prosecutor can effectively say, “Plead guilty and receive five years; go to trial and risk twenty,” the prosecutor possesses enormous leverage. The constitutional right to a jury trial still exists, but exercising it becomes extraordinarily risky.
Drug prohibition therefore contributed to a broader feature of modern American criminal justice: formal procedural rights can remain intact while the incentives to exercise them become much weaker.
Surveillance and Informants
Drug investigations also increased reliance on undercover officers, confidential informants, controlled purchases, wiretaps, and surveillance.
Again, this follows from the peculiar nature of the offense.
A robbery normally produces a sequence something like this:
Victim → complaint → investigation → suspect
A consensual drug transaction is different:
No complainant → police search for an offense → surveillance/informant/undercover purchase → suspect
That distinction is fundamental.
Prohibiting consensual transactions tends naturally to require more intrusive policing than prohibiting crimes with identifiable victims.
The Larger Lesson
Critics of the War on Drugs have sometimes described these developments as creating a “drug exception to the Bill of Rights.” There is no literal constitutional doctrine by that name, but the phrase captures an important historical phenomenon.
The government did not announce, “We are going to reduce Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights.”
Instead, the process tended to work incrementally:
Drug prohibition → enforcement problem → demand for new police power → legal exception → exception becomes normal
And once a law-enforcement technique exists, it does not necessarily remain confined to drug cases. Asset forfeiture, aggressive tactical policing, surveillance techniques, and expansive search doctrines can migrate to other forms of law enforcement.
That may be the most consequential civil-liberties legacy of the War on Drugs. It didn’t merely result in the imprisonment of large numbers of drug offenders. It helped change the normal relationship between police power, privacy, property, and due process for everyone.
> The negative effects from use by non-addicts would be minuscule. And use does not mean inevitable addiction.
"Inevitable"? Maybe not. But highly likely. As for negative effects from use by non-addicts, most prohibited mind-altering substances have negative health consequences as well. (In particular, the supposedly-easy marijuana drops IQ by several points, which is more of a crime than a school shooting.)
Of course there is the fact that prohibition did not cut drug availability.
So there was literally no upside.
https://www.facts-vs-fiction.com/blog/has-the-war-on-drugs-failed
For alcohol, it didn't, because it is so easy to produce. But for many other drugs, it certainly did. It is just not true that in the alternate world where there would be no prohibition on cocaine the amount of cocaine available or of its users would be the same.
Not even close to true. Many drug users quit on their own.
Many more don't, insofar as we are speaking of hard drugs. And even when they do, they very often do not leave unscathed.
There's a problem with that. The ridiculous Miranda standards that are applied to policing nowhere in Europe are barely older. Random searches are the norm.
Caplan wants total open borders and this will lead to his libertarian utopia where everyone is free and prosperous and nobody is mean.
I am not exaggerating. That is the whole theme of that stupid "Open Borders" book.
“If government has no right to stop or slow cultural change, it has no right to stop or slow cultural change from immigration.”
This is a particularly stupid argument.
And one for which Bryan himself has acknowledged that there is at least one exception: the state of Israel.
Given this (blindingly obvious, to the sane and moral) exception, the claim is a dumb one.
One can argue that the gains to the existing populace writ large from open borders exceed the costs. Fine. And so perhaps claim that restricting immigration is almost always unwise. Also fine.
But claiming that a group of people have no right to self-determination - which is what this claim at core is - is something only a hard core anarcho-capitalist type believes.
And so it is just preaching to the choir.
Except that it is the kind of preaching that is likely to actively repel new converts, not attract them.
I do not understand how and why Israel can be an exception to the moral principle of open borders. How has Caplan justified it?
So your friends discovered that Singapore works and LA doesn't.
The logic of this post rests on the assumption that there is and can be no real threat to the order/peace/stability/prosperity of The West. Social Conservatives do not share that assumption. I think that’s the key difference.
Surely Point 4 of the Soft-Core Case is the most common point of departure. In modern history, correlating political boundaries to religious, ethnic, cultural, and/or linguistic boundaries has often seemed the *only* feasible cope for human heterogeneity.
I'm not hard-core libertarian, and I view immigration control as within the government's purview, not necessarily to keep bad people out--I'm sure there are plenty of good people we're keeping out, too--I just don't think there's an obligation for a country to accept immigrants, and there's lots of reasons beyond the individual immigrant's value to the country that we might refuse them. That said, I'm responding more for this, and I apologize if it's something of a tangent...
"In the real world, exceptions to 'my body, my choice' are deeply arbitrary, so almost everyone supports extreme versions of this principle in some ways."
Not that I ever get a satisfying response besides being huffingly told it's offensive to conflate abortion with anything else at all, but my challenge to anyone pushing 'my body, my choice' is, why aren't you pushing for a constitutional amendment that says it this generically? Like, the left side of the aisle is always just focusing on abortion and sex when they use this line. The obvious reason being that they still want to tell people to take a vaccine, or draft them into going to war, or prevent them from taking drugs, or any number of things that might not be _exactly_ like abortion, but certainly fall at least as much within the purview of, "My body, my choice."
I'm libertarian enough to be pro-choice, I'm just tired of it being a one-way street. Like many positions on the left, they carve out some slice at the margins that society as a whole might want to restrict (see also: gay marriage) and talk a big game about personal freedom. But it's always a cover to distract from being more restrictive about stuff that just about everyone agrees should remain a matter of personal freedom, especially when it comes to economics and ideology. I actually agree--my body, my choice! I'm a gay man married to another man; I'm not looking to be socially conservative here. I don't want the government to have anything to do with your abortion. But I'm not rallying behind it as a specific cause; I'll rally behind it when it's one component of a "whole-life" personal autonomy agenda. And if abortion is literally the _only_ thing where you suddenly care about personal autonomy, then I'm just not interested in supporting you politically, sorry.
> my challenge to anyone pushing 'my body, my choice' is, why aren't you pushing for a constitutional amendment that says it this generically?
Well, as a not-libertarian-at-all, I can answer this: because fully free abortion is welfare-increasing and many other cases that would fall under that generic a statement are welfare-reducing.
“…fully free abortion is welfare-increasing”
You can only say this if you completely ignore the welfare of the 8 month old fetus.
Other parts of the abortion debate are quite difficult. This one, however, is not. So your claim is only true with a very special, very warped view of whose welfare counts.
"8-month-old fetus" is not abortion, it is premature birth.
But also, there is nothing warped in only counting sapient beings, which fetera (and even newborns) aren't.
"’8-month-old fetus’ is not abortion, it is premature birth.“
I was obviously referring to a fetus still in the womb
But your next paragraph makes it clear that you hold said very warped moral view.
Which thankfully very large majorities of civil society disagree with you on. And I even suspect that a majority of your fellow leftists don’t actually hold those views (actually, for newborns, I’m quite sure they don’t).
But I will concede that you are one of the very few committed to legal abortion up to the moment of childbirth who openly acknowledges the logical conclusion that there becomes essentially no moral difference from infanticide.
Have a great day.
>"’8-month-old fetus’ is not abortion, it is premature birth.“
> I was obviously referring to a fetus still in the womb
When you remove an 8-month old fetus from the womb, the procedure is premature birth (and if the fetus is viable, it is then treated accordingly, like in natural premature births).
“and if the fetus is viable, it is then treated accordingly, like in natural premature births”
No! The whole point is that in states like NY that is NOT how it is treated under the law. Instead it is up to the mother in consultation with the doctor to decide if they want to terminate the pregnancy.
if you are not in favor of that, then you are not in fact in favor of “fully free abortion” by the plain meaning of words.
Or did I misunderstand you and from the beginning you were only referring to full taxpayer funding of abortions, but making no reference whatsoever to what the rules are for when it is legal vs. illegal?
That's not "My body, my choice." That's a conversation about where to draw the line for best increasing "welfare." I'm addressing those who would use the argument from personal autonomy to forestall that conversation altogether.
"Have personal autonomy where the welfare effect is above N but not where the welfare effect is below N" is a consistent stance.
Sure, it’s just not the stance I’m addressing.
It kinda is though, because most of the users of "my body, my choice" have something like this stance and thus do not believe it applicable to vaccines or whatever.
Not in my experience.
What breaks the argument is that by demanding that nobody enforce any cultural norms (through non-coercive methods), or reward them, you remove any incentives or constraints on behavior, breaking any sort of cultural evolution. There's no feedback mechanism to accomplish your goal of discovering the best set of norms.
A second problem is that you also just introduce a single overarching meta-cultural norm: you're not allowed to judge anything anyone else does or apply any sort of non-coercive correction, or support. Why should we believe that's the single best cultural norm? It is just implicitly asserted that this is the correct cultural norm, and that no further discovery is needed through the experimentation that's ostensibly meant to find the best set of norms, because this norm destroys it.
Addendum: on my first read, I took this as you saying private individuals should not enforce or reward cultural norm following through non-coercive means.
On second read, it seems that you were mostly saying the government shouldn't enforce them. I agree with this. But it's easy to misread you as sliding between thin and thick libertarianism.
You pretend not to know about regular law enforcement. Play that kindergarten game with somebody else. Of course those measures don't stop all crime, but don't embarrass yourself by saying protectionism would. I would love to think you actually studied Sharia law, but given your track record, I can't.
Libertarians make a great deal out of their property and that nobody has any right in whom they rent the property to and whom they employ on the property.
But they ignore the question of how their property is secured and defended against foreign invaders and domestic criminals.
Also, who enables and secures smooth transactions on which property depends.
The libertarian makes will and expects it would be honored and executed. Who does that honoring and executing? Who is supposed to pay for all these services the libertarian expects as a matter of course.
> In recent years, I’ve had the same experience with libertarians becoming culturally conservative. While immigration is almost always the wedge issue, once libertarians turn against immigration, they commonly move on to a bunch of other culturally conservative views. And once again, the more I listen to them, the more I wonder why they changed their minds.
You're thinking about the question incorrectly. They adopt the views of their new social group for the same reason they adopted the views of their earlier social group in the past. Or, in the terms used by this very post, they get their new positions by exactly the same method that they got "whatever Big Picture views they embraced when they were 15-25 years old". Their consideration of the new positions is negligent or nonexistent, just like their consideration of the old positions.
Would you ask someone who converted from Catholicism to Jainism which aspect of the catechism they disagreed with, or would you consider it sufficient to observe that at the same time they converted, they married a Jain woman?
"Using government to suppress non-conformists is usually more trouble than it’s worth."
This is probably where I deviate. As a non-conformist myself, I paradoxically am a big fan of assimilation. This is because a cohesive, high-trust society is a good thing, and when too many people are allowed to not conform, that society will be lost. If you want to be part of society, make an effort to conform at least somewhat, or go be a hermit(sometimes that seems like an attractive option to me).
There are times when I see dumb rules in life, and I follow them anyway when the purpose is for improving trust and stability. The government does not need to be neutral in everything.
One point about assimilation(#7): mandatory public schooling probably did a good job assimilating the children of immigrants in the past. Today's public schools are a disaster and probably have the opposite effect. The conditions that made immigration work in the past no longer exist.