Why I am an immigration restrictionist and a trade protectionist

In a Facebook back and forth, Ashland University History Professor John Moser pointed me to this April 2015 NYTimes piece by Greg Mankiw arguing for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

My father, Levis Kochin, is a Chicago School economist and so I grew up hearing this kind of argument.  I do not believe anymore that these arguments should persuade people who care about the well-being of their country.  Here is why:

The classical free trade/open borders arguments ignore
1) Distributional consequences, who gets what
2) People's risk preferences. I offered a room full of academic economists each a dollar to give up their tenure while retaining all the other parts of their contract. No takers.
3) fiscal consequences: classical mercantilism was intended to maximize net state revenue by routing trade through ports where customs could be conveniently levied. Nowhere in The Wealth of Nations does Smith mention this.
4) One argument Smith does mention and endorse:  "defense is more important than opulence" -- presumably this applies not just to defense of territory but defense of culture or our way of life.
5) classical economics treats labor as a cost and leisure as an unalloyed benefit. And yet I know academic economists who forfeit income in order to teach when they could collect more if they retired. In other words, this is bad psychology.

The most compelling case I know for a protectionist and restrictionist political economy is made by the German philosopher J. G. Fichte, in his short book The Closed Commercial State (originally published 1800).    Read it and decide for yourself.

The Future of the American Party System

Michigan State political scientist Ben Kleinerman wrote last night on his Facebook wall: "The parties are essential to the rational functioning of American government. Van Buren recognized a failure in the founders' system that he sought to correct through the party system. It elected Jackson while also controlling him. The two are not mutually exclusive."

But I say:

1. If parties like the ones we have now are essential (though Monroe, the most successful wielder of executive power between Washington and Lincoln governed without them) how is it that Congress and the executive branch have become more partisan and more dysfunctional?
2. Even if we need parties like the ones we have now that does not mean we need the party cleavage we have now. It has been Democrats and Republicans uninterrupted since 1868. But the Republican brand (and maybe the Democratic one as well, with the rise of Sanders) no longer recruit among the young. If the Republicans win as the Trump party, perhaps a new elite-cored anti-Trump party on the Whig model will arise? And what would be so bad about that?

A few facts to increase your anxieties

Michael Gillespie writes "For all of you interested in politics, don't be taken in by the dire scenarios presented by candidates from both parties and by our sensationalist, anxiety obsessed media. The world is not going to hell in an hand basket but in fact has become a much better place. Don't believe the doom and gloom. Just a few facts to ease your anxieties."

Read his post if you want to see his claims.  Her are my rebuttals.

1. We are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are also fighting in San Bernardino.
2. Mexican immigration to the US has waned because demand for labor is weak, because the economy is still in bad shape.
3. US unemployment statistics are down because those numbers don't include those who have given up looking for work, or those in jobs well below what there experience and education would suit them for and that pay below what is needed to sustain a decent lifestyle.
4. Yes, more Americans have health insurance. But to call that "coverage" implies that they have access to the care they need without outrageous copays and deductibles. Efforts to "bend the cost curve" will help insure that medical progress is largely a thing of the past.
5. Teen pregnancy is down for the same reason birth rates and marriage rates are down, because the future is clouded for everybody below the peak of the peak in skills and income.
6. Violent crime is lower both because of demographic changes (see 5. above) and because of "racial profiling," "mass incarceration" and wider gun ownership. If the Democrats win the White House and get to pack the Supreme Court, the policies that have helped keep crime down will be reversed.
7. American universities have become "islands of suppression in an ocean of freedom."
8. The refusal of the Obama administration to enforce immigration law or prosecute powerful allies and subordinates for egregious offenses have broken the faith of politically aware Americans in the rule of law.

Wisdom and the University

My friend Lee Trepanier has just published a review of Sean Steel's The Pursuit of Wisdom and Happiness in Education: Historical Sources and Contemplative Practices. 

I haven't read Steel's book. But I have been thinking about the relation between universities and wisdom.
Greek philosophy, historically, comes after the first Greek "wise men" and disputes their claims.
Universities were created to check philosophy institutionally by subordinating it to theology, the faculty where divine wisdom was transmitted. It was only in the twentieth century that most universities stopped seeing as their ruling purpose the transmission of Christian knowledge.

Philosophy calls itself "love of wisdom," which means on their own admission they lack it.  Philosophers, when they are true to their vocation, devote themselves to crafting disparaging wise-cracks about those who pretend to wisdom.  Philosophy has a place in the university, but since philosophers are not wise, they cannot rule there.
Universities can only be led by the wise, those who know how to educate because they know how to live.  But Christian wisdom no longer has the social power to rule universities.  Today's academic administrators are virtually without exception not leaders but managers and fundraisers, who substitute flattery for wisdom.

Reply to Tom Palmer on Bush, Reagan, and Immigration

Tom Palmer, who I have known for not quite thirty years, posted on his Facebook page this video of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan in their 1980 debate addressing the issue of illegal Mexican immigration. Tom added this caption: "America could use more common sense like this today."
     What was common sense in 1980 is vanished today. In 1980 Americans were still largely religious, patriotic, committed to the defense and promotion of freedom both at home and abroad. A strong proud society that knew what it stood for, and, despite its serious challenges, could take "the huddled masses yearning to breathe free" and educate them and their children to citizenship.
     Today faith in God and love of country are banished from polite company. America is just another post-imperial, post-Christian, post-industrial society, defeated in three of its last three wars. California's Central Valley is a man-made dust bowl, the skilled working class is in China, middle management in Bangalore, and the cohorts that were supposed to replace them have, at best, stocking jobs at an Amazon warehouse and at worst, reality TV, Prozac, and early disability. 

     The US has no advantage any more in making unskilled peasants from traditional societies into modern productive citizens. The US, today, is an immigration magnet only for those disrupters who aim to profit from or violently exploit the absence of social solidarity made possible by a society that has abandoned its political and religious common ground. Some of those disrupters are app gurus, and some of them are jihadis, and the US government is so incompetent it can't tell the difference.

     Thirty years ago when I entered college, I too had the views on immigration displayed here by 1980's future Presidents. But just as we can't (thanks to the Supreme Court and ruling elites) have 1980's modus vivendi on gay rights, but all must celebrate LBGQT identities or face ostracism, unemployment, and penal sanctions, we can't have 1980's immigration policy either.

     I am not sure to what extent the Reagan/Bush years of nonenforcement and amnesty are responsible for America's predicament. But America is a country of immigrants, shaped by immigration, and in the last generation a society that was in 1980, the freest, most pious, and most prosperous the world has ever seen, has been, to quote President Obama, "fundamentally transformed." Sorry, Tom, the DeLorean is on blocks in the garage, and on Amazon, flux capacitors are "out of stock."

Six Theses in reply to Eric Schliesser on Zionism

Eric asked me for a response to On Herzl's Critique of Liberalism; the enduring Jewish Problem. So here it is:

1. To call the Arabs "natives" is already to beg important questions concerning the justice of Zionism.
2. The Zionism that triumphed in 1948 does not rest its claim on the fact that the Jews were persecuted, as you state in an earlier post, but on the fact that the Jews are a people distinct from all others with the same claim as others to self-determination, and that have inalienable rights in the land of Israel (see the first few paragraphs of Israel’s Declaration of Independence).

3. One cannot, on secular liberal principles, persuade people to risk their lives for the rights of others, even their fellow citizens.. This, and not residual antisemitism, is why the Fifth French Republic has failed to protect French Jews, just as the Fourth Republic failed to protect Algerian Jews and Algerian secularized Muslims (and the Third Republic failed to defend France in 1940). Secular liberal selfishness did in the dream of “cosmopolitan, law-governed multi-ethnic empires” you refer to in that earlier post. No "Dei Gratia Rex Imperator", no cosmopolitan law-governed multi-national empire.

4. One cannot even persuade secular liberals to have enough children to sustain their societies over time -- so even homogeneous secular liberal societies will dwindle and become extinct, or cease to be homogenous and cease to be homogeneously liberal.
5. For the reasons I give under 3 and 4, all realistic political projects, and not just Zionism, are in tension with secular liberalism, or must rest partly on foundations which are not secular and perhaps not liberal.

6. Genuine liberals in Israel are few and far between. The ones I have run into, like Moshe Berent of the Open University, tend to be irredentist on Judea and Samaria, just as French Fourth Republic liberals were irredentist on Algeria: It is not so easy, on liberal principles, to justify handing over a couple of million people to Islamist or semi-Islamist tyranny -- actual Israeli doves are almost all of them Jewish chauvinists like Yossi Beilin or supporters of Palestinian nationalism like Ilan Pappe.

"Chief Ab Beth Din WyRosh Yeshivo"

Today I ran across the 1792 pamphlet "Minutes of debates in council on the banks of the Ottawa River, November 1791."  The pamphlet (you can download it here) purports to be an account of speeches given by Indians after the defeat of a US force under Arthur St. Clair on 4 November 1791.  This was the worst defeat ever suffered by the United States at the hands of the Indians.

Its authenticity has been questioned (see here), but no one has noticed that the author left signs of his mockery (as well as his knowledge of Hebrew) on page 20:

Yes, either this pamphlet is a joke, or there really was an great Indian peace chief in the early 1790's named Ab Beth Din WyRosh Yeshivo אב בית דין וראש ישיבה -- "Chief of the Court and Head of the Yeshiva."

The speech of Ab Beth Din WyRosh Yeshivo is preceded by one by Gush-Gush-a-gwa, (this joke I don't quite get).  Appended is a letter on gardening (!) dated April 3d 1762, and signed by General H. Bouquet (who was a historical personage, though not for peaceful reasons. ).  

May the flowers of peace bloom for all nations of the earth --MSK