Economics is all about incentives. We understand that if you offer more money for a particular job, there will be more people willing to do that job. I could provide an endless list of similar examples, but everyone understands this. But when it comes to other areas of public policy, people are much less clear. We see this all the time in the illegal drug trade where increased penalties and enforcement have led to a larger supply of cheaper and purer drugs. But that’s very complicated. The way that incentives affect immigration policing is much simpler.

Incentives of Immigration Enforcement

Let’s think about what’s going on right now with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). We’ve heard lots about how ICE agents were very unhappy with President Obama and how much they supported Donald Trump. And now that he’s president, they are even more happy. Trump hasn’t given ICE any more money, but he’s changed their priorities. Or rather, he’s more or less letting them do whatever they want. And what is the incentive there? Well, it isn’t complicated.

For the agents, he’s made their lives easy. Now they can just wait outside the court room for when an undocumented immigrant leaves having dealt with a traffic ticket or some other minor offense. It’s not just easy because they don’t have to go looking. It’s also easy because they don’t have to worry that the person they are arresting is violent. Just imagine if 90 percent of the work you have to do in your job was lifted. You’d be very happy.

For the managers at ICE, this is fantastic. Now they can catch more people and get credit for doing a great job. They’ll hear, “Wow! You doubled the number of people you deported!” And they’ll think to themselves, “It was easy! I used to have go after violent criminals, but now I capture housewives and grandfathers.” There will be nowhere on the reports they file to indicate what percentage of the people they captured were “bad hombres.” A 55 year-old father of four with no criminal history is as good as a gang leader captured after shooting the graveyard clerk at the local 7-11.

Unintended Immigration Consequences

And that’s the thing: Trump promised us that he would get rid of the “bad” people, but he’s set up a system that does just the opposite. Why should ICE go after people who might be violent, when they get just as much credit for getting people who have a long history of abiding by the law? And the answer is that there is no reason. So now undocumented immigrants who have a history of violence are actually safer than the kind of undocumented immigrants that Trump and his supporters claim to not be worried about.

Remember: when Trump first started his campaign, he talked about immigrants as being bad for the economy. But that didn’t play the way that “violent Mexicans” did. And so that was his main talking point. But now, when Trump supporters see people they know deported, they usually react the same way, “That’s not the kind of person I thought he would deport!” Yeah, Trump supporters all had their own secret decoder rings that told them what Trump meant when he said things they disagreed with. It turns out that the only thing you needed to decode was anything he said about helping the middle class.

Priorities

When Obama was president, he talked a lot about priorities when it came to immigration. This was treated by conservatives as a kind of dodge. But the truth is that ICE (and every other part of the government) has limited resources. So clearly, what it needs to do is prioritize. Obama’s priorities were what most people would think were reasonable. Trump’s “get them all” priorities is really just “let the agents do what they want” priorities. And that is the same as “let the agents do what is easiest.” And that means that we are going to deport the people that most Americans least want to see deported.

Of course, most people won’t care unless ICE’s new policies directly affect them. Fewer resources will go toward removing violent people. And that means that more people will be harmed, even as ICE’s deportations go up. But it will be impossible to show that this policy has actually harmed us. Indeed, if an undocumented immigrant kills someone, it will be used by President Trump as an excuse for deporting more undocumented grandmothers who have never so much as jaywalked in the 30 years they’ve lived here.

Jonathan Chait wrote a short article last week, Fox News Congratulates Rand Paul For Being Loyal Trump Stooge. In it, he notes the apparent irony, “Every authoritarian requires spineless lackeys who will attack his dissidents. In Trump’s Republican Party, the authoritarian’s best friend is the libertarian.” The thing is: there is nothing surprising about this.

Purely on a practical level, Rand is not his father (Ron). Ron Paul at least is principled in the very limited way that American libertarians tend to be. But Rand Paul has always been willing to cast aside principle for furthering his career. So I think of Rand Paul as more libertarian-ish. But it isn’t the practical aspect that I think is interesting here.

The Foundation of Libertarianism

Libertarianism itself is fundamentally fascistic. The foundational idea of libertarianism is that the strongest thrive and the weakest don’t. I know, I know: most internet libertarians will tell you it is all about the non-aggression principle (NAP). It isn’t, of course. As Matt Bruenig has shown, Non-Aggression Never Does Any Argumentative Work at Any Time.

What it comes down to is Social Darwinism. You probably remember the Ron Paul fans applauding and cheering the idea that society should just let a 30 year old die because he acted stupidly and didn’t have health insurance when it turned out he needed it. Regardless of what utopia any given libertarian may have in mind, ultimately, it is “personal rights and personal responsibility.” And that is just a nice way of describing law of the jungle.

“Rights” Trump Lives

Now some people may push back on this and claim that libertarians don’t think that people should be able to kill other people. Except they do. We ultimately get back to the NAP. And in the libertarian utopia, if you decide some plot of land is yours and another person insists upon camping on it, you have the right to do what must be done to “protect” your property.

So what you get in the libertarian utopia is not any kind of equality, but the powerful getting more powerful and weak getting weaker. This is considered a good thing. And if you scratch this concept just the slightest, you end up with eugenics. You can trust me on this: I spent about a decade of my live committed to the Libertarian Party — for a couple of years, going to weekly meetings. And I’ve spent the last decade thinking, reading, and writing about libertarianism.

Libertarianism Is Fundamentally Racist

When it turned out that Ron Paul’s libertarian newsletter was filled with racism, it wasn’t surprising. The libertarian movement itself is quite racist. Of course, it doesn’t come off as blatantly as it does with fascists, for example. And there are libertarians who fight against it. But there really isn’t much difference between a libertarian and a neo-confederate.

The best spin you can provide is that libertarians tend to say (in public anyway) that they think if the government just got out of the way the races would be equal. Now like I said: I know that most of them don’t believe this. There are basically three reasons people have for being a libertarian: (1) they don’t want to be taxed; (2) they want to use prohibited substances; (3) they are racists. I would say the percentages are about 15, 5, and 80. But even if you accept that libertarians just want to let people compete, they are still in favor of eugenics — just not one based on “race” — which is at best a slippery concept anyway.

The Romantic Hero Archetype

What this all means is that libertarians see the world very much as it is presented in an Ayn Rand novel: Romantic heroes and the unwashed masses (as well as the Evil Ones who get power by pandering to the weak — still a Romantic archetype). And this is the basis of fascism: the idea that there are “betters” who the rest must follow.

With fascism, you get some kinds of notions of the will to power. With libertarianism, you get the perfect market. But it hardly matters what the mechanism is by which you create an authoritarian class. So libertarian Rand Paul is a great ally of authoritarian Donald Trump. It makes perfect sense.

Afterword

Note that in the discussion above, I was talking about the way society would be as libertarians themselves portray it. What would happen in practice is that libertarianism would degenerate into straight-up fascism, because the powerful would just take control by force and you’d already have the Romantic hero archetype. That’s getting a bit in the weeds, but basically: (1) lack of government would create a vacuum that would be filled with an authoritarian government; (2) the heroes libertarians worship are the same as the heroes fascists worship, so you would get the other stuff too.

For a bit more discussion of this topic, I recommend checking out my article, Why Ayn Rand Was a Proto-Fascist.

I have pushed back my article about the ties between libertarianism and fascism because I was forced to watch much of Trump’s address to Congress. You see, I’m down visiting my sister, and my brother-in-law is a Trump fan.

Note that I say he is a “fan” and not a supporter. He doesn’t vote and isn’t politically involved. But he does like Trump for the typical reasons we all saw throughout the campaign. Trump “tells it like it is” and supports his racist notions like undocumented immigrants taking more from the government than they give. But mostly, my brother-in-law likes to hoot and holler because he thinks it’s funny because everyone in his immediate family hates Trump.

Three Reasons Event Turned Serious

I was cooking, so I was in and out, and thus didn’t see the whole thing. But it was interesting that the entire event evolved to a more serious affair, with my brother-in-law having less fun. This was due to me. And it was for a few of reasons. One is that his Trump fandom has made my sister so reflexively hostile that I come off as mellow. A second reason is that I was able to fact-check Trump in real time.

This second issue is telling of Trump’s speech. I don’t pay attention to politics the way that I used to. Yet the speech was filled the same lies and deceptions that have been widely debunked that it was an easy matter to run a constant, well-informed, commentary.

NATO

A third reason is probably that I gained some credibility when Trump spoke about NATO. Long before the speech started, I explained that I hated these speeches. Nothing new is said and there is as much time spent applauding as speaking. It is just an ad for the president. But what he said about NATO was actually important:

Leave aside the idea that we “defeated” communism. And especially leave aside this whole idea (common in conservative thought, but even more intense with Trump) that poor little USA finances everything and gets taken advantage of. Trump made a clear statement of NATO support. Normally, that wouldn’t matter. But he’s spent the last two months making our NATO allies very concerned that he was more committed to Russia’s international needs and desires than he is our long-time NATO partners.

So this clear statement of commitment to NATO was important. I was shocked and genuinely pleased to hear it, so it probably made my running commentary seem more objective. Because the rest of Trump’s speech was a disaster.

(“I Do Not Think…)

(“Disaster” is a word Trump loves to use to describe Obamacare. Indeed, he used it last night. But is always makes me think of Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” It’s insured over 20 million more people; it has cost less than predicted; the rate of healthcare inflation has gone down. Not a disaster. But you’ll note that Republicans almost never have a systemic critique of Obamacare. It is always some vague appeal to “freedom” or some bit of anecdotal evidence about premiums skyrocketing. But if they would admit to what they really think, they would be right, “It’s been a disaster because it raised taxes on the rich!”)

Trump Was the Same as Ever

It was amazing to watch Trump use the same tired lines that he has so long been using. And despite his disingenuous pleading to Democrats to join him, he was just as vile as ever. I told my sister at one point that it was a perfect example of demagoguery. The constant refrain of America’s weakness (when we spend roughly as much on our military as the rest of the world combined) was particularly telling. And I think my counter to that was appealing to my brother-in-law, because even most conservatives secretly know that we aren’t weak and that this is just nonsensical political rhetoric.

Of course, I suspect that the spin of mainstream pundits will be that Trump did well. After all, these things are always graded on a curve. And that’s sad. After all, again Trump told the nation that violent crime is surging in this nation when it isn’t. That alone should make the press apoplectic. But instead, if Trump lies and otherwise deceives less than usual, he’s “presidential.”

Deflating My Brother-in-Law

So I think the speech will probably cause Trump’s approval rating to go up — at least temporarily. But on the plus side, I seem to have managed to deflate the gasbag that my brother-in-law is regarding Trump. At least temporarily.