Many people believe that the main reason housing is expensive in coastal California is that land is so scarce. As the saying goes, “They’re not making any more land.” That view is plausible. It’s also incorrect. Two economists who study US housing are Ed Glaeser of Harvard University and Joseph Gyourko of the Wharton School. Some years ago, they did a study that used a clever method of separating the effects of scarce land from the effects of restrictions on building. They looked at houses that were comparable in size, amenities, and location but that differed in one main respect: one had much more land than the other. If scarcity of land were the crucial factor, then a house with much more land should sell for a much higher price. But that’s not what they found. Instead, a house with a quarter acre of additional land sold for only about $10,000 to $20,000 more. But, they found, a quarter‐​acre empty lot on which building was permitted often sold for over ten times that amount. That means that the key driver in high house prices is not scarcity of land but scarcity of building permits. This is from David R. Henderson, “How to Make Housing More Affordable,” Defining Ideas, September 23, 2021. And: In the past two months, moreover, the California legislature has moved quickly to reduce even further state and local restrictions on building. Last week, fresh from defeating the recall election against him, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 9, a bill that abolishes single-family zoning. The bill allows homeowners to subdivide their lots and/or to convert homes to duplexes. A homeowner could conceivably split a lot into two lots and allow a duplex on each lot, effectively increasing the number of housing units by 300 percent. It’s difficult to know how much new housing will result. One limit is that SB 9 exempts single-family lots in historic districts, fire hazard zones, and rural areas. Still, that would seem to leave lots of lots (pun intended) in which homeowners can add housing units. Slate reporter Henry Grabar, who is skeptical about how many new units will be built, writes, “On millions of parcels, the possible revenues from a duplex just aren’t high enough to justify the investment.” But Grabar also points out that governments in California grant permits for only a measly 100,000 units per year. If even 500,000 homeowners decided to build an additional unit each year, that would increase by 500 percent the annual number of new units built. I also go after the “more mansions don’t help the middle class” argument and the “we can get more housing with price controls” argument. Read the whole thing. (0 COMMENTS)

Angelo Codevilla died on September 22. Here’s Steve Hayward’s obituary, here’s Michael Walsh’s and here’s Brendan Dougherty’s. I met Codevilla only once, a few years ago, thanks to my dear friend Jim Lucier. Some may remember him for his translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince , some for his columns. While his blend of conservatism was not to my taste (though his worries about the American ruling class turned out to be prescient), I remember a vigorous man, with a splendid sense of humor. Both Hayward and Dougherty mention this interview, which indeed provides a glimpse of his personality. The first answer, where he denied he “predicted” the rise of Trumpian populism (which, in many ways, he did), indeed reminds me of the man I met. As does the part of his interview on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: The drafting of FISA was a cooperative enterprise between the Democratic majority, at that point, of Congress, the staffers being all Church Committee staffers, every one of them. And the ACLU. What I’m calling the establishment left. They were the drafters. But the impetus of the drafting came from the FBI, primarily, and secondarily from the CIA, the NSA. The reason for their pressure was that the left had sued individual members of the FBI for having wiretapped them during the Vietnam War, in their communications with North Vietnam, communist Czechoslovakia, the KGB, and so on. Now they didn’t like that, and they wanted to make sure that nothing like that ever happened again. So the point of FISA from the standpoint of the left was to keep that from happening again. The point of FISA from the standpoint of the FBI etcetera was never to be in a position to be sued again. Right. A judge signed it. So now it’s legal. Right. What the FBI etcetera demanded was preauthorization. We will not do any wiretapping unless it is preauthorized. Unless we are ipso facto clean. Now the objections to FISA were primarily of a constitutional kind, mainly that wiretapping for national security was an inherent part of presidential power. The president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. And that was a true objection. I however made a different objection, although I agreed with the constitutional objection. I said that pre-authorization, pre-clearance of wiretapping, would be an unendurable temptation for people in the agencies to do whatever the hell they wanted. They would be exempt from the prudence that the fear of being sued would impose. My objection caught the eye of the American Bar Association at the time, which organized a debate on that subject at the University of Chicago Law School, with me on one side, and a local law professor by the name of Antonin Scalia on the other. Scalia took the position that the danger, which I described, which he found real, was minor compared to the need to get the agencies doing their job vigorously. We see how the future turned out. I must note that Scalia is a southern Italian. And I am a northerner. Che la terra ti sia lieve, caro Angelo. (0 COMMENTS)

Inside Higher Ed covers the proposed Liberty Institute at the University of Texas – and makes an admirable effort to talk to academic dissidents.  My friend Richard Lowery speaks: Not all professors are so skeptical of the Liberty Institute, as they understand it thus far, however. Richard Lowery, an associate professor of finance, said during the council meeting that he was confused by some of the criticism, as the university already funds various programs that are “explicitly political,” including social justice and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Lowery declined an interview request but provided the following written statement: The University of Texas at Austin administration, with the enthusiastic support of the faculty, has implemented a diversity, equity and inclusion plan, the original version of which was described by the Foundation [for] Individual Rights in Education as follows: “[T]he proposal’s mandates present a serious threat of establishing a viewpoint based litmus test for both hiring and promotion,” with the final version being, in my opinion, as bad or worse than the original draft. Thus, not only are the supposed concerns about a political test in a potential “Liberty Institute” hypocritical, but in light of this explicit, and many implicit, political tests being used at the university, it is absolutely essential to establish some structure at UT-Austin where academic freedom can be restored. While I support the principle of establishing such a structure, the Provost’s plan is clearly designed to give control over such a unit to the existing faculty, who generally oppose academic freedom, and thus would serve as little more than a fig leaf.” (0 COMMENTS)

When I was young, people used to say that global trends started in America and American trends began in California. One famous example was Proposition 13, which signaled a broader tax cut movement in many other states and countries. California recently passed a couple of bills that may signal the beginning of a major pushback against NIMBYism.  SB-9 allows homeowners to divide lots in two, and then build two housing units on each of those lots.  Of course many lots are too small to do this, and thus the impact on housing construction is likely to be modest: A property must meet certain criteria under SB 9 before it can be developed into multi-family housing. It must be large enough, for example, and the owner must live there for at least three years before splitting the property. A study by UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation found that the new law likely would add, at most, fewer than 700,000 housing units across California. Another bill aims to reduce red tape in new construction: Newsom on Thursday also signed SB 10, creating a process that lets local governments streamline new multi-family housing projects of up to 10 units built near transit or in urban areas. That new legislation also simplifies zoning requirements under the California Environmental Quality Act, which developers complain can bog down projects for years. For years, environmental regulations have been used to stop new housing projects, even though adding density to urban areas near transit lines actually helps the environment.  (As an analogy, environmentalists often shut down zero-carbon nuclear power plants, which means more reliance on fossil fuels.) Housing regulations have dramatically increased the cost of housing in many high productivity regions. As a result, younger adults who grew up in California are often forced to move to other states in order to find affordable housing.  NIMBYism has even spread to formerly “open access” areas of the country, such as Austin, Texas.  Let’s hope that these two California initiatives are a sign that the tide is turning. (0 COMMENTS)

The featured image of this post is a photograph I took two weeks ago less than a mile from my home in Maine. It is only illustrative but, I think, powerfully illustrative. In evaluating the truth, objectivity requires one to check one’s own biases. It is not absolutely impossible that in an advanced society with multiple independent officials and checks against election fraud (as opposed to a banana republic), the government’s party steals an election. It is not absolutely impossible either that the opposition steals the election, as some claim happened in the 2020 federal elections. It is however very unlikely. This remains true if one—like your humble blogger—does not like the party that actually won. In his recent introduction to philosophy for college students, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy (self-published, 2021), University of Colorado’s Michael Huemer offers interesting thoughts on rationality and the difficulty but necessity of avoiding biases. A few quotes from chapter 3 on Critical Thinking: Rationality is the master intellectual virtue, the one that subsumes all the others. (p. 32) Objectivity, like all other intellectual virtues, is part of rationality. The character trait of objectivity is a disposition to resist bias, and hence to base one’s beliefs on the objective facts. The main failures of objectivity are cases where your beliefs are overly influenced by your personal interests, emotions, or desires, or by how the phenomenon in the world is related to you, as opposed to how the external world is independent of you. (p. 32) The purpose of intellectual discussion is promoting truth (for yourself and others). If your view can’t survive when you treat the opposing views fairly, then that pretty much means your view is wrong. As a rational thinker, you want your beliefs to be true, so you should welcome the opportunity to discover if your own current view is wrong; then you can eliminate a mistaken belief and move closer to the truth. If you are afraid to confront the strongest opposing views, represented in the fairest way possible, that means that you suspect that your own beliefs are not up to the challenge, which means you already suspect that your beliefs are false. (p. 34) The human mind is not really designed for discovering abstract, philosophical truths. Our natural tendency is to try to advance our own interests or the interests of the group we identify with, and we tend to treat intellectual issues as a proxy battleground for that endeavor. Again, we don’t expressly decide to do this; we do it automatically unless we are making a concerted, conscious effort not to. And naturally, when we do this, we form all sorts of false beliefs, because reality does not adjust itself to whatever is convenient for our particular social faction. (p. 35) If you can only maintain your beliefs by being biased or irrational, then your beliefs are almost certainly wrong. (p. 38) Irrationality and bias can support any ideology, including your opponents’. Nazis, Marxists, flat-Earthers, and partisans of any other crazy or evil view can base their beliefs on irrational biases, and there is no way to reason them out of it if you’ve rejected rationality and objectivity. So don’t attack objectivity and rationality. Unless you’re an asshole and you just want intellectual chaos. (p. 39) Also, by the way, collect information from the most sophisticated sources, not (as most people do) the most entertaining sources. (p. 39) Dogmatism is probably the most common kind of failure of objectivity. (p. 40) A related quote from Huemer’s book (p. 303), which co-blogger Bryan Caplan reproduced in his recent Econlog series on Knowledge, Reality, and Value: If you have a philosophical view (or any view really), and you know that a lot of smart people disagree with it, you really need to think about why they disagree. And I don’t mean “Because they’re jerks” or “Because they’re evil.” What you need to think about are the best reasons someone could have for disagreeing. If you can’t think of any, then you probably haven’t thought or read enough about the issue; you should then go look up some intelligent opponents and see what they say. And I don’t mean television pundits or celebrities on Twitter. The best defenders of a view are usually academics who have written books about it. You should then think seriously about those objections and whether they might be correct. If you don’t find them persuasive, try to figure out why. This is the part of rational thought that most human beings tend to skip. I confess I have sinned before, but I think I am better at controlling my own biases than when I was younger. It remains a work in progress. (0 COMMENTS)

University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers tweets: Stunning new estimates suggest that the 400 wealthiest American families paid an average Federal tax rate of only 8.2%. Wow, I thought. That is stunning. It’s true that a large percent of Americans have a zero average federal tax rate. But many higher income people like Justin and me don’t. I think my wife’s and my average, not counting my hefty Social Security taxes, is between 15 and 18 percent. But then when I read the first paragraph of the study that Justin quoted, I wasn’t surprised at all. Here’s what it says: Abstract: We estimate the average Federal individual income tax rate paid by America’s 400 wealthiest families, using a relatively comprehensive measure of their income that includes income from unsold stock. It’s well known that you don’t pay taxes on capital gains until you sell the asset. Very wealthy people typically have huge amounts of stock and stock prices have risen a lot recently. So there’s no real news here. Instead the White House economists who did the study, Greg Leiserson and Danny Yagan, have redefined income. UPDATE: See also Greg Mankiw’s insight about the study. Here’s a key paragraph from Greg’s post: The problem is that this question has little connection to the policies now being discussed. As I understand it, the essence of the plan under consideration is not a tax on the unrealized capital gains of the 400 richest families. Instead, the plan aims to raise the corporate tax rate, which in turn is paid by the many shareholders, workers, and customers of the companies. (Economists debate the relative incidence.) In addition, the plan aims to raise the the tax rates applied to the already-taxed income earned by people making more than $400,000 a year. I would guess that this latter group includes about 1.5 million taxpayers. Needless to say, 1.5 million is a much larger number than 400. And the finances of the 400 are in no way representative of the finances of the 1.5 million. Greg adds, “Don’t get distracted by this shiny object.” Justin Wolfers did. (0 COMMENTS)

In a comment replying to MikeP about my post “Preach What You Practice,” September 20, 2021, I made the point that acting rationally often involves going along with something that doesn’t make sense because the penalties are substantial. I wrote: Something that helps me deal with government in these situations is to think of it as a big angry bear. That helps me not moralize too much and, instead, to just remember to focus on how to survive and thrive around the big angry bear. That’s why I pay the incredibly high taxes I pay; it’s why I don’t bother fighting expensive traffic tickets for driving in ways that endangered no one; etc. It’s not just government. I find that going along with other things that don’t make sense is often a good idea when others can impose substantial costs. A case in point is my flight yesterday from San Francisco to Washington Dulles airport. When a friend had asked me on the phone the day before if I was looking forward to being in Washington, I said I was but I wasn’t looking forward to being on a long flight and having to wear a mask. When he found out I was flying United, he reassured me that he had flown back from Hawaii a week or two earlier and the mask rule had not been enforced, with about half of the passengers not masking. I told him that I would do what I normally do: get on the flight with my mask beneath my nose and see if anyone said anything. She did. The flight attendant told me in no uncertain terms to put my mask over my nose. So I did. When I was seated in an aisle seat, I told the guy beside me that I had had 2 Covid vaccine shots and that I was more comfortable with the mask below my nose, but that if he wanted me to, I would wear it over my nose. He told me he didn’t care. So I placed it beneath my nose. But about 20 minutes into the flight, the woman across the aisle from me said, “Please wear your mask.” What to do? I realized that she held all the cards. If I refused, she would almost certainly call the flight attendant, who, whatever her own view of enforcement, would feel compelled to enforce. They had said twice over the PA system that failure to comply could result in a prison sentence. So I kept my mask on and took it off whenever I drank, and I drank in little sips, and whenever I ate peanuts, which I did a few at a time. And I put my mask beneath my nose the two times that the woman across went to the bathroom. I didn’t focus on my anger at her, which was only momentary. I just decided to see her as an angry bear. So I didn’t waste time thinking about revenge, thinking about nasty things to say, etc. That would have taken energy and taken away from the good feelings I was having about the trip. Of course, there was a government component at the root of this. The airline would probably not have enforced the rule and certainly wouldn’t have able to threaten a prison sentence if President Biden had not required masks. (1 COMMENTS)

Can corporate America, and Big Tech in particular, be democratized? How can we make capitalism more accountable to the people? In this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts welcomes back the OCTOPEST of Microsoft, Glen Weyl. Says Roberts, “I love capitalism. Because capitalism, profit, and loss, gives firms the incentives to discover those new techniques and new products and so on, and it works pretty well. What do we need that’s new? What do we need that’s different?” Listen to Roberts and Weyl discuss this question and more, and then consider the further questions for thought we pose below. Share your thoughts with us today in the comments, or use them to start your own conversation offline.     1- How have the origins and traditions of antitrust changed over time, according to Weyl? What policy objectives ought antitrust law be expected to advance? How should we be thinking about antitrust and market power in a world where the firms in question often charge zero price?   2- Why does Weyl think that the greatest period of productivity growth in the United States occurred between the 1920s and 50s, and how does Roberts push back on this claim? How might social and/or state institutions play a role in allowing entrepreneurial activity to flourish?   3- What do you think Weyl means when he talks about a “democratized economy?” How does he make the case for it, and what would need to happen to help the United States get there? How does Weyl suggest we may be able to get closer to the sort of feedback loops we find in markets? (Hint: Weyl makes much of the Taiwan example…We wonder what you think of that, too.)   4- Why does Weyl think it problematic that companies such as Google had to rely on venture capital to get their start? What do you thin of his ideas for creating a big pool of (public) matching funds for things like start-ups and research and development? To what extent might such ideas really alleviate the free-rider problem Weyl is worried about?   5- How does Weyl define democracy? What sorts of values does he suggest it should uphold? How does he use the example of the French and American Revolutions to explain the proper role of legitimacy and authority in a democracy?   (0 COMMENTS)

The Wall Street Journal had a very good and rather comprehensive Review and Outlook piece yesterday about what’s wrong with the Democrats’ push to create a federal paid leave program. The piece makes some important points, not least of which is that the absence in the U.S. of a federal paid leave program doesn’t mean that workers in the U.S. have no access to paid leave. In fact, although we may be the only industrialized country without a national paid leave program, we are also the only country with a vast and expanding network of companies that provide paid leave and other fringe benefits that are flexible, accommodating, and often more generous than is the program being pushed for in the Democrats’ massive $3.5 trillion bill. In fact, in countries where government provides or mandates such benefits, the programs haven’t been delivered as promised. The WSJ notes: “These policies haven’t delivered on promises like increasing birth rates or narrowing career earnings gaps between men and women. Or that they are funded with steep taxes on middle earners and value-added taxes that slam the poor.” We have a lot of data to confirm these problems. As I myself recently noted: “Consider Denmark. Its government offers 52 weeks of paid leave and other generous, family-friendly benefits. But even in paradise, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. A well-cited study shows that while men’s and women’s pay grew at roughly the same rates before they had kids, mothers saw their earnings rapidly reduced by nearly 30% on average; men’s earnings were fine. Women might also become less likely to work, and if still employed, earn lower wages and work fewer hours. Women are also seriously underrepresented in managerial positions. Some people argue that paid leave is only one side of the equation: In order to get the full benefit of paid leave, the government needs to subsidize childcare, too. This is incorrect. A recent paper looking at 50 years of data from Austria shows that the generous expansion of paid leave benefits, even when coupled with generous childcare benefits, “have had virtually no impact on gender convergence.” In other words, those claiming that the benefits are necessary to close any real or imaginary gender gaps in the workplace should find another way.” Here is a good story about the Austria example. One thing that government provision of paid leave is great at doing is shifting the cost of the current private programs to taxpayers, with most of the benefits going to middle and higher income workers: Here’s the WSJ reports on California’s system: “The dirty secret is that government leave programs end up helping middle-income folks who can live on partial pay. A 2013 analysis out of California, which offers a state benefit, found that less than 4% of claimants earned less than $12,000; more than 20% earned north of $84,000. Based on the Ways and Means bill’s formula, a new parent earning $200,000 a year could be eligible for more than $1,000 a week for 12 weeks every year. No matter if this person is married to another six-figure earner, who can also claim the leave.” Other countries have failed too as the Heritage Foundation scholar Rachel Greszler writes: Canada. Government paid family leave programs have exacerbated class inequality: “Despite proportionate and obligatory contributions of all employers and employees to these programs, the distribution of benefits is unbalanced and aids the social reproduction of higher-income families, especially outside of Québec.” While Quebec, which operates its own program, has taken action to increase government benefits, they “are still not equally used by mothers with lower socio-economic status.” Norway. In Norway, which expanded paid leave to 100 percent replacement rates for nearly all mothers, researchers found that “paid maternity leave has negative redistribution properties,” and that “the extra leave benefits amounted to a pure leisure transfer, primarily to middle and upper income families.” The researchers concluded that “the generous extensions to paid leave were costly, had no measurable effect on outcomes and [also had] poor redistribution properties.” These studies also prove that the goal of increasing access to paid leave for lower-income workers is harder to achieve than the “let the government provide paid leave” talking point suggests. Unfortunately, there are two crucial aspects to this issue which the WSJ doesn’t address. First, it doesn’t go to the root of the confusion by debunking the idea that there’s a “failure” in the labor market that is evidenced by the fact that when workers are asked if they would like to get paid leave benefits, without ever being told at what cost they would get it, most workers say they would love to. Yet not all workers receive paid leave. This reality is no more evidence of market failure than is pointing to poll that shows that most Americans would be happy to receive a Tesla for free if given to them and calling the reality that most of these Americans do not have a Tesla a market failure. The market is a process of exchange through which order emerges, not a static snapshot or outcome of exchange. And so the market shouldn’t be judged by comparing the outcomes of exchange at a certain point in time to the outcomes desired by policy makers or pundits. The fact is in most cases, there is simply a gap between what people think the world should look like and what the world really looks like given the necessity of making tradeoffs. The other point ignored by the WSJ is this: Whether the provision of paid leave is private or public, over time it will reduce the wages portion of workers’ total compensation. This tradeoff is one of the reasons why not everyone gets paid leave. This point is important to understand especially for those who claim that the main reason to require paid leave is to improve the lives of workers. The adoption of a paid leave policy will only improve the lives of workers during the time that these workers value the benefit more than the cost of taking home less money as a result. This tradeoff exists whether the benefit is public or private. This is important to understand even for those conservatives who are trying to find “more market” solutions to the lack of paid leave benefits for lower income workers. The more total compensation is paid for in the form of fringe benefits, the more they invite the left to complain that wages aren’t growing fast enough. There is no way around that. This is not an argument against the benefit, but it is an argument against the complaint we hear coming from some conservative circles that the market is failing lower income Americans on paid leave. Veronique de Rugy is a Senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and syndicated columnist at Creators. (0 COMMENTS)

The Czech translation of Open Borders is now available for sale.  And for those of you who don’t speak Czech, here’s the English version of my all-new Introduction to the Czech Edition.  Special thanks to Martin Pánek, Director of the Liberální institut, for making this all possible.  Enjoy! Introduction to the Czech Edition During the Cold War, the mass murder and slavery practiced by tyrants like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao received little attention in the West.  Yet almost everyone knew about Communist migration policy.  Immigration to the East was barely an issue because almost no one wanted to move to Communist countries.  Emigration, in stark contrast, was a massive issue because so many people living behind the Iron Curtain were plainly eager to leave.  Why didn’t they?  Because they were not free to do so without their rulers’ permission – and that permission was nearly impossible to obtain. The Berlin Wall provided the most dramatic illustration of Soviet Bloc emigration policy.  Armed guards murdered anyone who tried to cross the border without permission.  The Berlin Wall stood out because Western media could easily film the blood.  But the same “No one gets out of here alive” policy was the norm throughout the Communist world. Once in a long while, Communist leaders forthrightly defended their migration policies.  Gorbachev, most notably, told American journalist Tom Brokaw: What they’re [the West] organizing is a brain drain.  And of course, we’re protecting ourselves.  That’s Number One.  Then, secondly, we will never accept a condition when the people are being exhorted from outside to leave their country. Since the collapse of Communism, virtually the whole world has come to see Soviet-style migration policies as an abhorrent human rights violation.  While such policies helped Communist regimes endure, they were almost certainly bad for their people.  And even if they weren’t, denying the freedom of migration just seems morally wrong.  If your government has made its subjects eager to flee, your government should switch to better policies – not turn your country into a giant prison. On reflection, however, this epiphany raises an awkward question.  Suppose that the government of, say, Communist Czechoslovakia negotiated the following deal with every neighboring country: “We’ll remove our ban on emigration if you institute a ban on Czech and Slovak immigration.”  Strict enforcement continues, but now it is foreign – not domestic – guards who shoot people for illegally crossing the border.  Challenge: Would this have been morally permissible? The quandary is clear.  In today’s world, almost everyone continues to recognizes countries’ right to restrict immigration in any way they please.  Yet my hypothetical immigration ban has exactly the same effect as the policy of Communist Czechoslovakia.  If the latter is an abhorrent human rights violation, why isn’t the former as well?  The book in your hands, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, tries to grapple with this question on a deep level. The most straightforward response is to argue that free immigration, unlike free emigration, has very bad economic, fiscal, cultural, or political consequences.  So bad, in fact, that turning countries into prisons is the lesser evil.  Open Borders considers each of these objections in turn, and concludes that the overall benefits of free migration have been vastly underrated. This is clearest for immigration’s economic effects. Consider the case of a citizen of Communist Czechoslovakia who escaped to West Germany.  Higher wages were one of the main reasons to move.  Why, though, were wages so much higher in West Germany than Czechoslovakia?  Simple: Because the West German economic system used human labor far more efficiently.  Moving from East to West could easily triple your productivity.  Migration did not merely shift GDP from East to West; it raised the GDP of humanity by moving labor from places where labor accomplished little to places where labor accomplished much.  And the same is true for virtually all migration.  Migrants flow from places where wages and productivity are low to places where wages and productivity are high, enriching themselves and the world.  Estimates of the size of these gains are massive; a standard figure is that open borders would roughly double the production of the world. Immigration’s other effects are less clear-cut, and more likely to vary from country-to-country.  Open Borders heavily focuses on the United States, the world’s top destination for immigrants. At least in the United States, the fiscal, cultural, and political effects of immigration look quite good.  The bigger lesson, though, is that even if fiscal, cultural, and political effects were much worse, they would likely be dwarfed by immigration’s aforementioned productivity gains.[1] Is there any way to justify immigration restrictions despite these enormous benefits?  The “ethics” portion of Open Borders evaluates the facts from a wide range of moral philosophies.  In the end, the only solid foundation for immigration restrictions is the socialist premise that countries are the collective property of their citizens – collective property they may legitimately use as they collectively wish.  Only then can one flatly say, “The actual costs and benefits of immigration are irrelevant.  If the people of this country don’t want to admit immigrants, they have every right to exclude them.”  With private property, in contrast, employers, landlords, and merchants individually decide whether they want immigrant workers, tenants, and customers in their businesses, apartments, and stores.  And when free to choose, many –  though not all – employers, landlords, and merchants will embrace immigrants with open arms. What’s so terrible about the socialist premise?  Most strikingly, the socialist premise readily justifies the emigration restrictions that almost everyone now concedes to be a moral travesty.  If the nation and everything in it collectively belong to its people, what right does anyone have to take his talent elsewhere?  That was Gorbachev’s position – and from a socialist viewpoint, he was correct. Do I really expect these brief remarks to change anyone’s mind on an issue as passionately debated as immigration?  No.  My hope, rather, is to make you muse, “Maybe this open borders idea isn’t so crazy after all” and start flipping the pages.  Once you see Zach Weinersmith’s gorgeous art, I think you’ll want to keep reading.  As you read, you’ll notice that unlike most political books these days, my arguments are designed to persuade readers who don’t already agree with me.  My goal is not to condemn those who think differently, but to find common ground and calmly move forward from there.  If you read to the end, I really do think you’ll see immigration in a new light. Notes [1] Critics of this argument often object that, “All of these gains go to the immigrants.”  In the real world, however, the benefits of large productivity increases are almost always widely shared.  The main beneficiaries of industrialization, computers, and vaccines have plainly not been factory-owners, programmers, or medical researchers, but consumers.   (0 COMMENTS)