Mailbag #2
I’m doing another mailbag. If you have questions, leave them in the comments. I’ll take number of likes for each question as an indicator of how interested people are in it, and respond to the most popular ones. To avoid confusion, if you have more than one question, split them up into different comments. I should get to answering your questions in the next week or two. Anyone can ask whatever they want, but the replies will only be available for paid subscribers.
I’m wondering whether I should actually keep writing down the responses or you’d prefer a podcast where I just read the questions and answer them.
To find out what people think, I’m conducting the poll below. I won’t necessarily abide by the results, but if public opinion is strong in one direction or the other it’s likely to influence what I do.
Are you going to do another mega-poll on what your audience thinks where they rate things from 1 to 5? Curious to see how it's changed since last time you did such a poll. How has it grown and with what demographics? Who has joined? Who has left? Maybe the pro-Putin pro-Taliban crowd.
Fun activity is also for you to try to guess the results beforehand and see how close you are.
You've written a lot about how free market economics, especially open labor markets, are empirically the best based on which countries have the highest living standards and migration patterns. How do you then explain the fact that so many people around the world (plus a lot of Americans) hate America's economic system? In surveys in many developing countries, people list countries with bigger welfare states and more gerontocracy like Canada and Germany as their ideal destination. While it's true Canadians and Europeans immigrate to America in larger numbers than Americans to Canada or Europe, that's because only a fairly small group of people leave developed countries. When it comes to developing countries, people's stated preference is to go to places with somewhat lower GDPs per capita in exchange for more of a social safety net. I tend to agree with you, but for libertarianism to succeed, the only country where it's somewhat applied (the USA) seems to be in need of wider acceptance as a model of how to organize a political unit