All posts by Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith is an assistant professor of economics at Fresno Pacific University. He did his Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University and has also worked for the World Bank. Smith proposed Don't Restrict Immigration, Tax It, one of the more comprehensive keyhole solution proposals to address concerns surrounding open borders. See also: Page about Nathan Smith on Open Borders All blog posts by Nathan Smith

Open borders and the justifications for the welfare state

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Three major justifications for the welfare state, distinct but related, are (1) social welfare functions may be increased by redistribution (see my previous post on “the conservative social welfare function,”) (2) the welfare state serves as a form of social insurance against the ill chances of life, and most impertinently ambitiously (3) welfare and aid to the poor generally may be a public good via its effect on the utility functions of people who are at least mildly altruistic. Jonathan Gruber’s Public Finance and Public Policy, 3rd ed. offers the following defense of argument (3), stopping at argument (1) along the way:

Why is the government involved in the business of redistributing income?… If society cares equally about the utility of all its members, then social welfare may be maximized by redistributing from high-income individuals (for whom the marginal utility cost of losing a dollar is low) to low-income individuals (for whom the marginal utility gain of getting a dollar is high). Arguments for redistribution are even stronger if society cares in particular about low-income persons, a philosophy embodied in the Rawlsian social welfare function…

The private sector, however, is unlikely to provide such income redistribution, since redistribution faces the same free-rider problems encountered in private provision of other public goods. The consumption of the poor is a public good: I would like the poor to consume more, but I would prefer if others provide them the means of doing so, since I would then get the benefits of seeing the poor consume more but not bear the costs of their increased consumption. If everyone feels this way, then there will be too little private redistribution because everyone will be relying on others to contribute… There may be a role for a government in solving this free-rider problem by taxing its citizens to provide public redistribution. (Gruber, pp. 490-491)

Let me unpack this.

Recall that a public good is defined by two characteristics: (a) non-rivalry, and (b) non-excludability. Non-rivalry means that one person’s use of a good does not preclude another person’s use of it. Non-excludability means that it is not feasible— as distinct from merely not legal as a matter of policy– to exclude anyone from using the good. In this sense (to illustrate the concept) public schools are not a public good, though the general public refuses to hear this message and public finance economists often try to weasel out of it because of its unpopularity. Nonetheless, the fact is logically inescapable, for it is quite feasible– though perhaps illegal, but that’s beside the point– to exclude a child from a public school classroom. Also, classroom seats may be scarce/rivalrous at the margin, and a teacher’s grading time is certainly a rivalrous service: I can grade student A’s exam or student B’s exam, not both.

A welfare payment is certainly not a public good. It is rivalrous: if you receive cash from the government, I can’t receive that same cash. It is excludable: it is clearly feasible not to send the welfare payment. How, then, can Gruber claim that redistribution might be a “public good?” In a rather subjective sense. If a poor person eats a meal, no one else can eat that meal, or get any immediate benefit from it. But if a certain kind of altruism is built into others’ utility functions, these altruists all get some satisfaction from the poor person eating the meal. Given that the poor person eats, these altruists can’t be prevented from thus enjoying, second-hand, his meal. Therefore, this benefit is non-excludable. Nor does one altruist’s enjoyment of the poor person’s meal prevent another person from enjoying it. Therefore, this benefit is non-rival. Being non-excludable and non-rival, the external benefits of helping the poor

I have many objections to this interesting argument. First, it seems improper, somehow, for public policy to take into account such subjective factors. If one does allow it, the practice soon leads to unwanted conclusions. Suppose that, instead of altruism towards the poor, the general population felt hostility towards some group, but didn’t bother to harm that group much because of a free-rider problem. (“I wish somebody would go beat up those nasty wogs, but I can’t be bothered to do it myself.”) If we accept Gruber’s “public good” argument for the welfare state, we should also have to argue, it seems to me, that the brutal mistreatment of unpopular minorities is a public good. Second, the attitudes imputed to the public are not observable. If they were observable, the welfare state could be financed by a Lindahl tax enjoying universal consent. Of course, this argument applies to some extent to all public goods– how much people like a public good can’t be measured effectively in the absence of revealed preference and the price mechanism– but at least in the case of other public goods, the physical use of the good– walks in the park, driving on the roads, listening to public radio, whatever– is observable. Third, the argument is, in its strange way, simultaneously flatters and insults taxpaying citizens, with a certain insolence in both respects. It tells the citizen: (a) we know that, whatever you may say to avoid paying taxes, you really do care about the poor, but (b) we know that, left to your own devices, you won’t give as much as you wish that people like you would give. If some citizen sincerely says, “No, I really don’t care about the poor at all,” the public goods case for the welfare state fails. On the other hand, if most people, when it comes to charitable matters, follow Kant’s advice and act by maxims they desire to be universally practiced, the public goods case for the welfare state fails again.

But my biggest objection to the “public goods” argument for the welfare state is that it assumes what might be called a citizenist, or perhaps a territorialist, social welfare function. That is, it imputes to citizens a certain degree of altruism towards their fellow citizens, but not an equal degree of altruism towards the rest of mankind. If citizens would like the poor in general to consume more, regardless of nationality, then their first priority would probably be open borders, though possibly, if they have a very different understanding of how economy and society work than I do, they might support more foreign aid instead. At any rate, helping poor people resident in the US would not be a very high priority. Even if citizens are assumed to have a citizenist social welfare function, that should really point them towards the citizenist case for open borders and keyhole solutions (like DRITI) that hold natives harmless. To offer the public goods case for the welfare state, and at the same time to support migration restrictions, seems to make sense only from a decidedly territorialist perspective, i.e., if citizens feel altruism towards those present in a country, or at least they’re squeamish about observing dire poverty, but place little or no value on the welfare of those not on the country’s territory. They don’t want to be made to feel pity towards the less fortunate: hence they support the welfare state, and at the same time, the border as blindfold.

It’s irritating to have such attitudes imputed to me as a citizen-taxpayer. Even more irritating is the suggestion that such attitudes are implicitly granted the moral high ground. Gruber may well be right that attitudes such as he describes are an important reason why the welfare state exists. But since some of us don’t share the territorialist social welfare function, the welfare state cannot properly be regarded as a public good. And from a universalist utilitarian or Rawlsian perspective, the territorialist attitudes on the part of citizens that undergird support for the welfare state may be among the chief barriers to rational pursuit of the welfare of mankind.

The great land value windfall from open borders

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One of Steve Sailer’s themes seems to be “affordable family formation.” In the link, Sailer lays out a theory of housing prices: expensive in coastal cities because they can only expand on the landward side; really expensive in “paradises” like Hawaii and (to a lesser extent) California; cheap in “dirt” states where cities can expand in all directions. He sees “affordable family formation” as one of the main factors in making a state vote Republican. And he sees restricting immigration as a means of keeping housing prices down and family formation affordable. Partisan goals aside, it’s surely desirable for people to be able to afford to form families.

As a theory of voting, there may be something in this, but as an argument for restricting immigration, it is extremely unconvincing. If you look at a map of population density in the United States (Census Bureau), what stands out is how few and far between are the counties with 2,000+ people square mile, and how the vast majority of the country’s land has less than 90 people per square mile. Even 2,000 people per square mile is hardly crowded. That’s about an acre for a family of four. Granted that can’t all be living space. There are streets and schools and shopping malls and parking lots and all that. But 2,000 people per square mile is a comfortably thin suburb. The Census Bureau also reports that “94.6 percent of U.S. land is rural open space.”  Granted, not all land is equally pleasant to live on, and the emptiest land is in the Great Plains and other regions that most people probably wouldn’t want to live in, but there’s lots and lots of lightly settled land in verdant, temperate, even beautiful country, say in the mid-Atlantic or upstate New York, or for that matter where I live in central California. Even coastal California is pretty empty if you go north of San Francisco, or between San Luis Obispo and Monterrey. There are plenty of very livable places in America where hardly anyone is living. I think land’s share of national income is about 5%. We’re not running out of (residential) land, not even close. (Farming covers more ground, but farming is a lower-valued activity that residential users can easily buy out.)

In denying that land is scarce, I refute one critique of immigration, but you might suppose, I also forgo an argument for immigration, namely, the land value windfall for native Americans when immigration increases demand for the land they own. Surely I can’t claim that immigration benefits American homeowners by raising housing prices, yet at the same time doesn’t harm American non-homeowners by raising the housing prices they’ll face when they want to buy.

Actually, I can and do claim exactly that, and what inspired this post is that I thought of a graphical way to make the point clear. First, the effect of open borders on the market for existing housing is represented in Figure 1:

Figure 1.

market for existing housing

The stock of existing housing is, by definition, fixed– supply is perfectly inelastic— so an increase in demand due to new immigration would only raise prices. American landowners would see their real estate rise sharply in value. You might think that American landowners would only enjoy these gains if they sold, but that’s not true. Land in city centers isn’t just more expensive, it’s more valuable, because it’s close to more things, more restaurants and fun things to do, more schools, more jobs, more shopping, more varied people, more transportation. Not all Americans would put as much value on the changes as market prices would put on them; that’s why they’d sell. Meanwhile, the market for new housing would look like Figure 2:

Figure 2

market for new housing

The supply curve of new housing is horizontal because the land it’s built on would be basically free, being taken from farming activities, and the construction cost is constant. Actually, the construction cost would probably fall under open borders, given the abundance of low-wage homebuilders that would be available, but never mind. Since supply of new housing is perfectly elastic, the increase in demand would not raise housing prices at the margin. As quantity rose from Q (status quo) to Q (open borders), there would be a building boom.

Why would people pay the high prices shown in Figure 1 for existing housing, when new housing is available at P=C? Location, location, location. As cities would expand outward, the existing housing stock would be more central, and consequently more desirable, so it would command high prices. But in that case, wouldn’t American non-homeowners, even if they could still afford homes as easily as before, be pushed into less desirable locations. Not really. After all, why is urban land desirable in the first place? Density. The land per se is usually nothing special, but it’s valuable to be able to plug into the networks of specialization and trade that the city provides. Well, as cities expanded to accommodate immigrants, they could provide as much of the benefits of density to the new housing as they previously did to the old housing, even as they provided even more of these benefits to existing housing. So American non-homeowners would be held harmless even as American homeowners enjoyed a large windfall.

Of course, I’m simplifying. The supply of new land for home building isn’t always perfectly elastic. Some city sites, like San Francisco, really are uniquely beautiful and special. That said, the almost uninhabited coastline north of San Francisco is beautiful, too. Meanwhile, many other city sites– Indianapolis, say, or Denver, or Fresno– really aren’t very special. Older cities have special historic monuments. It’s possible that the new urban space called into being by the open borders building boom would be drab and lacking in character, though on the other hand technological modernity plus immigrant new perspectives might make them especially exciting. Even then, though, there would be adjustment pains, and probably in some places family formation would become less affordable.

By and large, though, the effect of immigration on land values is, if not a win-win, a win-draw: homeowners gain, non-homeowners are held harmless. The wealth effects of the land value windfall would be not only large, but widely distributed. As of 2009, over 67% of American households owned homes.

International Tiebout competition

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A major reason for skepticism about open borders among many who are partially sympathetic is the fear that poor immigrants will vote for redistribution. Natives might benefit, on average, from their interaction with immigration in the market, but in the political arena, poor immigrants with little to lose will vote for higher taxes and government handouts, making natives worse off. To deny immigrants the vote would solve this problem in theory, but raises other philosophical issues about the meaning of consent of the governed, and in any case might not be politically sustainable. Opportunistic parties might hand out citizenship to immigrants who they hope will be their future constituency. Immigrants might also take advantage of their physical presence to agitate in the streets for the vote and/or directly for the government benefits they hope to win by it. In short, open borders will make government more redistributive.

But the logic of Tiebout competition points the other way. Tiebout (1956) famously argues that local governments will provide public goods efficiently if people are free to move among jurisdictions, and concludes that we can expect public goods to be provided more efficiently at the local level than at the national level. Caplan recently explained where Tiebout goes wrong: (1) local governments are not perfectly competitive but face downward-sloping demand curves for residence and so can extract monopoly rents; (2) emigrants can’t take their real estate with them so bad local governments will reduce property values; and (3) local governments aren’t for-profit corporations and don’t face the incentives that for-profit corporations do to give customers/residents what they want. All good points, but there’s still something to be said for “voting with the feet.” Local governments may not be profit-maximizing firms, but they still differ in their performance, and people do get some choice over what local public goods they want by deciding where to live. In the short run, local misgovernment may depress property values more than inducing migration, but in the long run, capital can be adjusted, and misgoverned places can revert to weeds while well-governed places teem with new high-rises. And local governments are still somewhat competitive.

In the Tiebout model, government provides public goods rather than engaging in redistribution. The people who choose to live in a location don’t mind paying for what the government does, because they regard the benefits as greater than costs. If not, they would move. The government might charge the rich more than the poor, if it’s still providing the rich value for money, and especially if the rich value local public goods more, in money terms, than the poor do, which is plausible, since they presumably get less marginal utility from a dollar but might not get less marginal utility from a statue in the park or clean air or good streetlights. But if the government charges the rich too high a price for local public goods, they’ll move to a jurisdiction with lower taxes, and explicit redistribution is ruled out by the exit option.

Garett Jones has pointed out that a comparison of state tax regimes with federal tax regimes seems to support (loosely) the Tiebout model. See “Can Progressivity Survive Exit?”:

I should note though, that while state taxation is regressive in percentages, it’s progressive in dollars.  And that’s the point of my tweet: Higher earners pay more than lower earners even though they could leave.  Perhaps some of that is altruism, but I suspect-without-proof that most of it is just that the rich (and middle class) buy more and better government services than the poor.
It’s possible that progressive income taxation could coexist with voluntary competitive government. Maybe the high-skilled need to be near each other to produce a lot, so the locales preferred by the rich can tax that demand for proximity.  The (not very progressive) New York City income tax comes to mind.But at the national level, I suspect that the reason the rich pay higher total tax rates is mostly because it’s hard to leave the nation.  Easy targets.

Jones also points to the French government’s retreat on capital gains taxes as a victory for “[the] Tiebout [model against] progressivity” (I think that’s what the title of his post means). And here he entertains the suggestion that the fact that European tax systems are much less progressive than America’s is explained by Tiebout competition. Since the EU has open borders, wealthy elites can shop among jurisdictions. I don’t know enough about European tax politics to affirm or deny the causal link here, but it fits the theory. An international comparison of corporate tax rates also suggests that Tiebout competition is at work. From the Tax Foundation’s blog, here are “Corporate Income Tax Rates Around the World.”

Country Corporate Tax Rate in 2000[1] Rank in 2000 Corporate Tax Rate in 2006 Rank in March 2006
Japan 40.9 3 39.5 1
United States[2] 39.4 6 39.3 2
Germany 52 1 38.9 3
Canada 44.6 2 36.1 4
France 37.8 7 35 5
Spain 35 11 35 5
Belgium 40.2 4 34 7
Italy 37 9 33 8
New Zealand 33 16 33 8
Greece 40 5 32 10
Netherlands 35 11 31.5 11
Luxembourg 37.5 8 30.4 12
Mexico 35 11 30 13
Australia 34 14 30 13
Turkey 33 16 30 13
United Kingdom 30 21 30 13
Denmark 32 18 28 17
Norway 28 26 28 17
Sweden 28 26 28 17
Portugal 35.2 10 27.5 20
Korea 30.8 20 27.5 20
Czech Republic 31 19 26 22
Finland 29 24 26 22
Austria 34 14 25 24
Switzerland 24.9 28 21.3 25
Poland 30 21 19 26
Slovak Republic 29 24 19 26
Iceland 30 21 18 28
Hungary 18 30 16 29
Ireland 24 29 12.5 30
OECD Average[3] 33.6 28.7

Note that the US has the second-highest (after Japan) corporate income tax rate in the OECD. This is counter-intuitive, since ideologically the US has a reputation for being free-marketeer and pro-business, with a comparatively thin welfare state and less regulation. But if international Tiebout competition is at work, this pattern is sort of what you’d expect. The US is big and geographically isolated, so corporations based in the US won’t find it very easy to hop the border. European countries face steeper competition from other jurisdictions, so companies are relatively mobile.

Open borders would make international Tiebout competition a more effective force for disciplining governments’ redistributive impulses. But here I don’t mean primarily unilateral open borders, nor open borders with very poor countries. The US government is not likely to cut taxes on the wealthy for fear that they’ll emigrate to Rwanda, or even Mexico. But it might someday cut taxes to keep the wealthy from moving to Hong Kong, or Italy, or some yet-to-be-founded futuristic free charter city. If the right to emigrate were made a global reality, international Tiebout competition might start to matter a lot.

Continue reading International Tiebout competition →

The progress of freedom

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This will be a bold claim, but I think that much of the history of the progress of freedom is summarized in three general patterns:

  1. Accountability vs. sovereignty.
  2. Separation of solidarity from violence.
  3. Rights flow from insiders to outsiders.

Clearly these need some explication.

  1. Accountability vs. sovereignty. By sovereignty, I mean the separation of rulers from the ruled, the claim of certain persons or organizations to be above the law, not answerable for following the moral rules that most people expect one another to abide by. Sovereignty appears to be primordial: at the dawn of history, we see the absolutist phaorohs elevating themselves to divine status and commandeering the labor of Egypt to build them spectacular tombs. The opposite principle, accountability, means people having to render an account, and the hearers of the account being placed, in some way and degree, in a position to judge the adequacy of the account. Accountability is subjection to the moral law. The slogan “a government of laws not men” is one way of putting the struggle of sovereignty vs. accountability. Under sovereignty, accountability consists in the subject being accountable to the sovereign, not the other way around. To make the sovereign accountable creates logical difficulties and a danger of an infinite regress, which is why thinkers like Thomas Hobbes are contemptuous of it, but in fact roundabout, tangled-up, ambiguous, confusing systems of accountability make the framework of freedom in which civilization flourishes. Senate, House of Representatives, Supreme Court, states, Federal Reserve, common law… Who’s in charge here?! There’s no answer, and that’s the point. Nowadays, democracy is taken to be the touchstone of legitimacy, and perhaps the dimly understood yet potent reason for this is that democratic accountability gives the regress somewhere to stop. “Who’s in charge here? The people,” says the democrat. But in truth, elections can’t and shouldn’t be the whole story of accountability: can’t, because of all the logical problems with democratic decision-making noted by (among many others) Buchanan and Tullock (1962) and Arrow (1951/1970); and shouldn’t, because when “the people” do agree, they might agree on doing something very bad, like segregation or slavery or electing Hitler. It’s good if the power of the people to get what they want is hedged about and constrained by courts that protect individual rights and economic technocrats to manage the money supply and international treaties that protect foreigners from the whims of domestic majorities and churches and civil disobedience movements that appeal to higher laws and stand ready to defy the democratic state when it is in the wrong.
  2. Separation of solidarity from violence. The word “solidarity” is not part of an economist’s usual vocabulary, and I don’t find it easy to define, but I think it’s historically important. Solidarity is people working together in pursuit of a common goal. Solidarity is people bonding, forming a group, a shared identity. Solidarity is fans rooting for the local sports team, friends helping one another move house, wearing the school colors or waving the flag or singing the family’s favorite song. An economist, habituated to methodological individualism, or a libertarian, adhering to an individualistic ideology, might want to dispense with it, with the practice, with the concept. It’s a part of human nature and human history. It’s also necessary to achieve all sorts of good ends– even including the cohesion of profit-seeking firms. Miller (1993) painstakingly shows how it’s impossible to arrange incentives within a firm so that the interests of all the individuals who comprise the firm coincide with those of the firm as a whole (in whatever sense). Doubtless, firms are shot through with misaligned incentives and conflicts of interest and operate inefficiently for that reason, but surely there is also a good deal of genuine team spirit and corporate loyalty and forgetfulness of self-interest, in short, solidarity, in firms, that makes them run better than they otherwise could. Of course, this applies more obviously to ideological groupings in civil society– Cato Institute fundraisers doubtless appeal to solidarity when asking donors for cash– as well as churches, nations, and so on. Of course, solidarity is not at all an unmitigated good. It is often a great evil, or at least a means to great, evil ends: the solidarity of white southerners against black civil rights; or the solidarity of the Germans under Hitler against the Jews. Now, at the dawn of history, it seems that solidarity was usually bound up with violence, in two senses: (a) it was in the crucible of war that solidarity was chiefly formed, and (b) the maintenance of solidarity was typically backed up by threats of violence. Of course, this is true even today: the solidarity of the Anglo-American alliance, a crucial historical force in the 20th century, owes much to their fighting two world wars together; the solidarity of the United States itself owes much to various wars going starting with the Revolution, and was also sealed in the Civil War, which set a precedent that perhaps deters would-be secessionists even today by a threat of violence. But as civilization advances more and more forms of solidarity arise that are independent of violence: the Christian church (perhaps ultimately the fountainhead of them all); the monastic orders of the Middle Ages; the “associations” whose abundance Tocqueville celebrated when he visited America in the 1830s; the teeming NGOs of today. Most striking of all, perhaps, are the great civil disobedience movements: Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns; Martin Luther King’s marchers; and Polish Solidarity, which brought about the fall of communism. But also schools and political parties and sports clubs and, as I said, firms. As freedom progresses, more and more of the groups with which we identify ourselves are consensual. Some institutions, like families, largely retain their form but become more consensual in character, while others, like feudal suzerain-vassal hierarchies or ethnic tribes, vanish, and new, more consensual institutions appear.
  3. Rights flow from insiders to outsiders. Societies entirely lacking in justice and rights seem rare in history, though perhaps that’s only because they don’t produce much that’s worth remembering. Stalin’s Soviet Union, where even, or especially, top Communist leaders were routinely liquidated, might be an example of a society from which every vestige or simulacrum of justice had been utterly erased. Perhaps phaoronic Egypt was like that, I don’t know. But more often, some clique or set around the centers of power enjoys rights and conduct within it is shared by some norms or standards of justice, only no one thinks these norms apply to outsiders. In The Iliad, the Greek heroes appear to have no scruples about seizing women as sexual prizes and raping the wives of the Trojans, yet they do have some sense of justice among themselves, and Agamemnon, when he seizes a girl whom the army had allotted to Achilles, is definitely thought to be in the wrong. The progress of freedom often consists in the extension of rights established among themselves by some clique or inner circle to more and more of those outside the circle. The impressive freedom of speech which existed among the Greek heroes in The Iliad, but which did not extend to the ranks of common soldiers, was later, in the democratic revolution in Athens, extended to the whole people. Early 19th-century Americans prided themselves on their freedom, but did not grant the same freedom to black slaves or Indians. Later on, these freedoms were extended to all Americans. Constitutional government in England began with the Magna Carta, when the barons demanded and won recognition of their rights from the king, but as time passed, the liberties of the English, from habeas corpus to (much later) the vote, were extended to all Englishmen.

In view of these patterns, open borders can be seen as a natural next step in the progress of freedom.

  1. My co-blogger John Lee, in posts like this and this, highlights the arbitrariness and lack of accountability in immigration enforcement. Discretionary exercise of consular authority to exclude and deport people is an anomalous bastion of unaccountable sovereignty, a bewildering and often shocking exception to “government by laws, not men.” But to abolish discretion would be to recognize some sort of right to migrate, which virtually implies open borders, at least in an attenuated form.
  2. In immigration restrictions, solidarity continues to express itself in the form of violence against outsiders. We are we, therefore they must go. The maintenance of our collective identity somehow depends on the expulsion by force of foreign-born persons, the separation of families, the splitting up of communities, etc. The long transition from violent to peaceful forms of solidarity suggests that history will tend to move away from this.
  3. Open borders consists of extending some of rights of citizens, won in part through political struggle but demanded ex ante and recognized ex post as the requirements of justice quite apart from historical contingencies, to the foreign-born.

I don’t mean to say that open borders are inevitable. Logically, I don’t see why the progress of freedom should be inevitable, and while history gives considerable reason for optimism, it also shows that vast backsliding is possible. The early modern period in most of Europe seems to have seen a major reversal of the progress of freedom that had been attained in the High Middle Ages. Slavery, which had largely disappeared in medieval Europe, began again in the New World. Absolutist sovereignty gained ground at the expense of medieval accountability, with its patchwork of customary and feudal rights, including the parliaments and Cortes and Estates-General and zemskiy sobor and so on, which were eviscerated or ceased to be summoned. This was true even in England to some extent before 1640. Again, a major reversal in the progress of freedom occurred in the early 20th century, from which in some respects we have yet to recover. But open borders is the sort of advance that the progress of freedom, when it happens, has historically tended to realize.    Continue reading The progress of freedom →

The Iraq War and open borders

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As the ten-year anniversary has made the Iraq War topical again, I thought it might be interesting to draw a few parallels between the Iraq War and open borders. For me, one of the most striking features of the Iraq War is the generosity of the war aims, at least as publicly declared. I find many of the critical suggestions made about the Bush administration’s motives, e.g. war for oil, as implausible as they are uncharitable, but if we put to one side the question of the “real” motives, the generosity of the motives that the Bush administration claimed to have make the Iraq War, as far as I know, a unique episode, and Bush a unique figure, in modern history. On the eve of the invasion, Bush said to the Iraqi people:

Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them: If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you.

As our coalition takes away their power, we will deliver the food and medicine you need.

We will tear down the apparatus of terror, and we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free.

In free Iraq there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms.

The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near.

It is too late for Saddam Hussein to remain in power. It is not too late for the Iraq military to act with honor and protect your country, by permitting the peaceful entry of coalition forces to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Our forces will give Iraqi military units clear instructions on actions they can take to avoid being attacked and destroyed.

I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services: If war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.

Here the stress is on liberation. The war aim is to deliver freedom to the Iraqi people, freedom from poison factories, execution of dissidents, torture chambers. Of course, just because this was a motive of the war doesn’t mean it was the motive. Maybe you could deny that Bush was even claiming that liberation was even a motive. That is, you could say that (Bush thought) the war was in the US national interest, but we happened to intend to conduct it in a way that would benefit the Iraqi people too, and by publicizing this intention beforehand we would reduce resistance and make the military’s job easier. But then consider Bush’s Second Inaugural.

We have seen our vulnerability – and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny – prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder – violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary. Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own. America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.

The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America’s influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America’s influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause.

Note the universalism of Bush’s speech. Bush wants to “end tyranny in our world.” While he does represent this as being in the national interest, it is difficult to read this speech and think that Bush regards “ending tyranny in our world” as merely a means to an end (US national security). What other major public figure alive today has even paid lip service to such a lofty objective?

To critics of the Bush administration and the Iraq War, I would pose the question: Were Bush’s ideals too high? Was he wrong to (at least claim to) aspire to end tyranny in our world?

If so, why? Is it because he overestimated the value of freedom? Maybe freedom isn’t suitable for everyone? Maybe some peoples are “not ready for democracy,” or have different cultural values that make them prefer what a Westerner like Bush calls tyranny? Or is it that Bush was unrealistic, over-reaching, over-estimating America’s power to effect change? Is tyranny too entrenched, too grounded in human nature, to be overcome?

If not, what’s your alternative? How should we pursue the goal of ending tyranny in the world, if not by the means that Bush championed? It seems to me that the great disillusioned masses at both the popular and the elite levels have largely shirked this question. The general response seems to be to sneer, to dismiss Bush as dumb or whatever, to spin conspiracy theories or impute– possibly with justice, but that’s not the point– ulterior motives, and to try to forget the whole episode. The disillusioned have not tried to answer Bush’s high ideals with better high ideals. Rather, high ideals in general seem to have gone out of fashion. This is unfortunate.

Certainly, it seems unlikely that tyranny in our world will be ended in the fashion that America ended it in Iraq since 2003. The war was costly– perhaps $2.4 trillion— and neither the US nor other developed countries can afford to do that routinely. The regime in North Korea is still standing, possibly a worse tyranny than Saddam’s Iraq, and while there may be no other really totalitarian regimes left, Belarus, Vietnam, China, most of Central Asia, Saudi Arabia, and many other countries are unfree to an extent that a charge of “tyranny” might be appropriate. And while the war in Iraq has created a messy quasi-democracy in place of totalitarianism, in Afghanistan, where conditions were less favorable for democracy, a full Taliban restoration seems likely enough. Exporting institutions directly, via liberation, is too expensive and unreliable to be applied globally.

If we really want to end tyranny in our world, open borders will surely have to be a big part of the strategy. By realizing the right to emigrate on a global scale, we would free people to free themselves from tyranny. Emigres might then be a potent force for liberating their homelands, as I argued in “American Hajj: Towards an Open Society.” Unfortunately, the reaction against Bush has dispelled any consensus one might have hoped for in 2004 that we should be trying to end tyranny in our world. So this argument might have limited force just now. Incidentally, compare Bryan Caplan’s recent post “The Rights of the World’s Poor.” I like Caplan partly (let me mischievously suggest) for the same reason I liked Bush. High ideals.