Bryan Caplan and Dave Rubin: Anarcho-Capitalism, Economics, and Immigration (Full Interview)

I wanted to like this video more, but there is too much hand waving. It’s all based on assumptions. He doesn’t cite any studies/data except for a “1930’s charity”. Maybe he is right, maybe he is wrong. Who knows. Free markets produce improvements, but other times not. Yahoo Finance is still awful and has gotten worse over the past few years. It’s still extremely hard to find certain information online, because so many websites are in disrepair and are useless due to ads and other clutter.

The part about private security is correct up to point, but private security and the police often work together. A private guard will call the police if problems arise and or if conflict deescalation fails. For example, in the case of shoplifting, when a private store security apprehends a shoplifter and calls the police, the police will take the shoplifter away). Bouncers seldom forcibly eject patrons anymore, but rather will ask the patron leave, and if he or she refuses, call the police. This is probably due to liability in that many businesses aren’t financially suited to deal with costly personal injury lawsuits that will inevitably arise from the initiation of physical contact.

Somewhat related, a major problem with the private sector is frivolous/excessive lawsuits, which are initiated by business and individuals against individuals and or other businesses, often at great inconvenience for the defendant, who must answer to even the most outlandish of claims or lose by default. So much money and time is wasted preventing and dealing with lawsuits.

Agree that if colleges are supposed to be teaching ‘general knowledge’, they are failing miserably, and that the value of college is in the signaling value of the degree, not the knowledge itself.

Regarding healthcare, also agree that healthcare should be conditional upon having insurance, rather than taxpayers paying the bill, but a common problem is that insurance may not cover all conditions, and or may fail to pay to entire bill. He mentions rare diseases for impoverished families who cannot afford insurance, as an exception for which limited government may be needed, but that invokes a slippery slope argument of how much government is ‘enough’, as well as the demarcation between poverty and irresponsibility. The problem is a sort of cognitive dissonance among many an-caps and libertarians who hold two views that may not be compatible with each other: that marketplaces and privatization is always the answer, yet everyone has an unalienable ‘right to life’. That some life may have negative market value, and thus no reason to exist, is a possibility many an-caps will not entertain. Often it’s brushed under the rug of ‘charity’ or ‘special exemptions’.

The government has decided it has a moral obligation to not let people die, if such deaths can be prevented or forestalled. As discussed in earlier articles, there is a trade-off to this: subsidizing expensive procedures can make such procedures cheaper and more effective in the future. By ‘giving up’ on the most difficult of diseases, even if such treatments are unprofitable, medical innovation stalls.

Caplan’s pro-immigration argument is a tough sell. Immigration is one of those issues where both sides can marshal convincing arguments, precluding the possibly of there ever being a resolution on the matter, which is why it’s almost pointless debating it. He says the Mexico–United States border is not vulnerable to terrorist entry, yet as 911 and recent incidents have shown, terrorists have obviously succeeded anyway. But he’s kinda attacking a straw man here: regarding Mexican immigration, the biggest concern is not terrorism, but job loss and pubic resources being strained. Islamic terrorism is huge problem for Europe right now, so while Mexican immigrants may be mostly harmless, the same can’t be said about all immigrants.