The David Knight Show - Future of Freedom Pres Jacob Hornberger On Freedom Of Association, Collectivism & Immigration

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

Future of Freedom President Jacob Hornberger joins Gard Goldsmith to discuss why liberty isn’t just optimal but also moral as well as the Libertarian answer to immigration. Go to www.theDavidKnightShow.com for more, and watch Gardner each M-F with Liberty Conspiracy, at 6 PM, on Rumble, Rokfin, and Gard's X @gardgoldsmith For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHT Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Every dollar counts to keep up with the bills or to help with the cost of raising a family. A little bit extra can make a difference. You might be eligible for benefits and credits, like the Canada Workers' Benefit, the Canada Child Benefit, the Disability Tax Credit, and the GST-HST Credit. You may also be able to get your taxes done for free. Find out if you qualify. Visit Canada.ca slash EveryDollarCounts for more information. A message from qualify. Visit Canada.ca slash every dollar counts for more information. A message from the Government of Canada.

When you're not weighed down by high interest rates, life lightens up. MBNA TrueLine MasterCards have low interest rates on balance transfers and purchases to give your finances a lift. Find the credit card that's right for you. Visit MBNA.ca slash TrueLine Cards. Give your finances a lift. Now, I want to offer the opportunity now to bring in our next guest. And that man is Jacob Hornberger. Jacob is the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation. And you might have seen me mention his excellent piece, among many, about what I mentioned before, about fake charity through government. And of course, much more when it comes to the ripoff that is the social security program. And so I want to welcome Jacob. I believe Jacob is going to be there. Oh, it looks like he's just away from the camera right now. So we'll bring him in in just a

minute, I think. Oh, are you there, Jacob? Yeah, I'm here. Oh, great. I think we don't have you on camera, but I think we'd get, you're just going on audio, it looks like right now. So we'll, we can go with that. That's fine with me. Thank you for joining us, Jacob. Welcome to the show. Well, thank you, Gardner, but I should be there. I can't understand why I'm not there. Let me see. Let me check on something here. You've got a background and your name, of course, which is great. But we do need your handsome face. And by the way, kudos to you. I recently got to see one of your brief pieces in Spanish.

Hello. Ah, there you go. Looking very familiar. I've watched that face and heard that voice many times on video. Jacob, welcome to the David Knight Show and thanks for joining us. That's great. And thank you for having me, Gardner. It's nice to be here. Real pleasure. Real pleasure. And you handled the text so well. It's always so interesting. You know, we haven't met in person and I've admired your work for so many years. And as you know, we have your friends with Richard Ebeling and I'm acquainted with Richard from his days when he was at fee and you were, you headed up foundation for economic education for a while and your education, both of you have brought me so much. And you probably hear this from so many people, such a rich and deep, fun way of learning from people who are positive about so many subjects. And some of these subjects, Jacob, and this is one of them we're going to touch on this now.

Some of these subjects are very, very touchy subjects. And as I mentioned to you in email, one of the things we're going to discuss today, Future Freedom Foundation, first want to talk about how people can find you. And we'll give them a little preview. We're going to talk about immigration and the border for the bulk of our chat today. And some people might find what you have to say as running counter to what they might have heard or some of the things that they've really gotten intense about when it comes to the battle over the border and United States policy and checking the immigrants and things like that. A lot of nuances here. We're going to talk about that. And I really like your approach because it's the peaceful, voluntary approach, and it reminds people about some deeper lessons. Why don't you tell us about Future Freedom Foundation, how they can find you online and on Twitter and X and YouTube and so on? Okay. Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me on. And let me just make a slight correction. Richard, my good friend, Richard Ebeling, did serve as president of the Foundation for Economic Education, FEE as it's known. I

served as program director, not as president. Just wanted to clarify that. So I founded the Future of Freedom Foundation after leaving FEE. I founded it in 1989. And our mission from the very beginning and has been ever since is to present the principled uncompromising case for the libertarian principles and put them in the context of real life issues. So that rather than just writing an esoteric article on why the minimum wage should be repealed, we take a minimum wage controversy occurring in some state and we apply the libertarian principles to that so that these principles would be more relevant. So that's what we've done for some 34 years. Richard and I worked together from the very beginning, and we're still working together. We're very good friends. We're on the same page as the importance of principle when it comes to advancing libertarianism, and we co-host a weekly show called The Libertarian Angle.

It is phenomenal. I've spent so much time. You know, it's interesting, Jacob, many, many years ago, I was pretty badly injured and I got, and you're probably familiar with these things. I got copies from laissez-faire books of the knowledge products, audio tapes narrated by Charlton Heston and Louis Rukeyser on philosophy and economics and so on. And I would listen to those over and over again. I literally, I had to do a lot of physical rehabilitation. So I was lying down a lot and then I would start to walk and I would listen to these on cassette. I got such a great education from those things, from some free market people. And I get the same satisfaction when I get to hear you

and Richard together. And what I really like about Future Freedom Foundation is, again, you don't separate the consequences of the morality, of the moral choice of freedom and peace, leaving your neighbor alone. Because it's not just the consequentialist philosophy of the greatest good for the greatest number, because good is a subjective valuation in economics. It's also something we have to assess ourselves with our own souls. And when it's imposed core, you always draw out the consequences, the bad consequences of even for the consequentialists, if they want to argue, well, this will be better. No, you show how it doesn't work and you show how freedom leads to more prosperity. It leads to better lives for people. So the idea of the golden rule of treating your neighbor as you would want to be treated or treating your neighbor in a way, knowing that you don't want to be

treated a certain way, also reciprocating that you do a great job with that. And so kudos to you. Absolutely. And please pass on my best to Richard. He's, he's phenomenal too. Well, well, and thank you very much. I mean, I've always believed that the moral case for freedom is the most powerful case. I mean, that's what caused me to just realize that I was a libertarian, that freedom is right. People should be free to live their lives any way they choose, so long as their conduct is peaceful. And as Milton Friedman once said, that even if freedom resulted in, let's say, more poverty, he would still favor it because freedom is right. And that's my position. But what's nice is that God has created a consistent universe where good things bring good consequences. And so a free society brings prosperity, harmony, peace,

freeing people to pursue happiness in their own way. So we've got the best of all worlds. We've got the moral case for why people should be free, but we've also got the cases. Freedom increases standards of living for people, and it frees people up to become the best of whatever they wish to be. You know, Jacob, you remind me of, and you probably have read it, that short story by Ursula Le Guin, who passed away a few years ago, the science fiction writer. And she was very much against Jeremy Bentham's concept of the greatest good for the greatest number. She was very critical of, you know, utilitarianism in its early forms without any sort of moral tie and again there's the illogic of describing the greatest good of someone dictating to you well this is the greatest good and of course the sacrifice of the individual she wrote a short story called the ones who walk away from omelas and it's about a city that's constructed in

concentric circles with a tower in the middle just like like the panopticon of Bentham. And the city is idyllic. But once a year, everybody who is young goes into the center of the city where there's no disease and everyone is happy and so on and so forth, every youngster looks at a child, one child who is kept in the cell, in the dark, in squalor and pain. And in a way, it's a sort of metaphorical application of all the pains and anguishes and all the troubles of all those people are transmuted to this one child who suffers for everyone. And those people who see it and walk away are the ones who are moral because you can't just have the benefits, so-called benefits for everyone. But the key thing there is that you're not going to get the benefits if you don't allow for freedom, as you say. And I think one of the very important things to think about here is central authority,

central planning, as F.A. Hayek noted, as many economists noted even before that. But Hayek got a lot of the recognition, thus deserved as well. But central planning and the larger areas of control lead to an information problem where the central authority isn't able to get the information that we on hand could define for ourselves and express through prices and allow for resource allocation and discovery. Instead, they make the decisions for people. So let's turn to an issue that you have done a phenomenal job discussing, the border, so-called uniform border. You might have seen in my emails, I've mentioned that constitutionally, the word immigration doesn't even appear in the U.S. Constitution for those people who call themselves constitutional

conservatives. But you bring up a lot of stories from your own experiences in your youth near the Rio and working on a farm and also talking about free association, again, the economic importance of it. And I'd love to hear your thoughts for people. If you encounter people who are very bound up over the federal government's got to guard the border, the federal government's got to stop illegal immigration. How do you explain it to people in ways that especially conservatives who might be very worried about the so-called immigration issue? How do you approach it? What do you think is usually the best way

that you find is a productive way where they won't look at you as being some, you know, excuser for conservative writer in the 1950s and 60s, he got it right. He said, our job is not to make libertarians, it's to find them. But, you know, I I'm very skeptical of convincing any conservative right winger of the merits of libertarianism, open borders. I really think that our job is to find the people who are receptive, that are looking for for a viable alternative, because the problem with a lot of conservatives is their minds are just shut. And so I'll, you know, if they really want to gather, enter into an exchange, a well-meaning exchange, instead of just to argue, the first principal argument here is the argument of freedom. I mean, it's what I said earlier, that for me, that's everything. Now, that doesn't appeal to a large number of people. A lot of Americans think they're free. It brings to mind Johann Goethe's famous quote, none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

But what I mean by freedom is the libertarian concept of being free to cross borders peacefully, to engage in any peaceful act. That's essentially the overall concept. To live your life the way you want so long as your conduct doesn't involve the initiation of force or fraud. Well, when you cross a border, a political border, you're not initiating force against anyone. You're not violating rights. I do a lot of traveling by car and I cross borders all the time, state borders. And a lot of other cars that are moving in my direction or in the opposite direction do the same thing. You don't even know you've crossed a state border. There's no big red line there that says state border. The only way you really know it is you see a sign that says, welcome to the state of North Carolina.

So there is no violation of rights crossing the border. That's part of what freedom is about. If somebody interdicts you, stops you, they're the ones that are initiating force. Now, again, I think a relatively small number of people respond to that freedom argument. I think most people respond to the utilitarian argument. And that is that this system simply doesn't work. It was designed to keep people from entering the United States without permission, without official permission. Well, originally they just put a sign there at the border. Let's just take my hometown of Laredo, Texas, which is situated there on the border. They put a sign at the international bridge saying you cannot enter the United States without permission. And that's it. OK, well, the problem is, is that people have always wanted to pursue happiness by crossing borders,

by going to areas where they they can get a better standard of living, better opportunity, maybe even save their lives. And so they're going to circumvent that sign. And they're just going to go around it by trespassing onto somebody's private property by swimming across a rail grant. So that means the state then has to build this huge police state. And I experienced that police state. I lived almost half my life on the border. You got highway checkpoints and all this and a lot of death, a lot of suffering. It has never worked, Gardner, and it still isn't working. But rather than recognize that, people say, oh, Biden has

opened borders, which is ludicrous because you've got a massive border patrol. You got a massive Berlin Wall. You got now Constantino wire checkpoints. Yes. Everything. So it hasn't worked. The only thing that works is freedom. And that's open borders. Absolutely. And when when I think about this, there are a few facets. We're speaking with Jacob Hornberger, founder, president of the Future Freedom Foundation. Find them at FFF.org, Fff.org. I'm telling you folks, sign up for the daily emails, literally some of the best satisfaction of your morning and your day reading from these people. And Jacob, this isn't to sing your praises so loudly I could sound like

Andrea Bocelli, but it's just, it's a real pleasure to be able to chat with you. I've been looking forward to this so long. You know, there are a number of facets, little vectors that come in here, Jacob, that I'd like to mention when we think your freedom of association? Yes, absolutely. Is getting together for a date part of your freedom of association? Absolutely. Is sitting next to someone on a park bench? Yes, absolutely. How about engaging in a trade, a baseball card trade or something? Yes, absolutely. How about a financial trade? There's no difference there. It's two consenting individuals engaging in what they want to do with each other and not harming each other. Should someone aggressively interfere with that?

No. Okay. Then how about we'll apply the same argument to, I would like to buy a baseball card from someone in England. He made the baseball card. Well, you know, we got to pick and choose here. And I think the American maker of the baseball card, again, the consequentialist utilitarian idea that they seem to think will benefit the American maker of the baseball card. And we can apply it to human beings as well. And a lot of times from especially union members, they would they would really get angry about the idea of more migrants. Now, some of them would

think, well, maybe we could get them onto the unions and things like that. A lot of political machinations there. But particularly, they didn't like the idea of high immigration because they would say they're stealing American jobs. And so one of the things that I did very early on is I thought, OK, I want to do a study myself of time periods in American history of very high so-called legal immigration, according to the United States government, people coming in from Ireland or Germany or Italy or something like that, and see whether or not the argument that native workers lose a lot of jobs to these people who will work for less, whether that consequentialist argument actually held anyway. And as I went into it, I discovered that Julian

Simon had already done the work and he had already done this macro study of five other studies of periods of high immigration. So again, they're skipping the moral part of it. But when we look at saying to people, no, they don't, we can work through the economics. And I often bring up the simple machines. I say, look, when I talk to my students, I say, I introduced them to the simple machines. I said, even cave people use the inclined plane. They might not have been sitting at a table saying, I want to invent the inclined plane, you know, or I want to invent the lever.

But they knew by using a tool that could increase the amount of distance they could have, they could have smaller amounts of force per distance. And one person could now do the work that it used to take two. So now one person is free. You're not going to complain that that person now no longer has to toil to do what one guy can now do with a simple invention. You're not going to say that man is now unemployed. How awful. Let's get rid of that invention. No. If people like the invention, just like language or the growth, the spontaneous growth of money as a way to communicate value to each other and give people something that is exchangeable, if it works for people, they'll keep it spontaneously.

And this is what freedom of association is, why it's so important. Because when you have these artificial impediments, they always get gamed. And of course, in the end, we see that the person who could be saving some toil with being able to hire someone for maybe a little bit less, now you're never going to know what happened with that money that could have been saved. Just like Frederick Bastia said in the parable of the broken window, the opportunity is now lost. We're never going to know the other person who could have been employed by the money that was saved. We never are going to know what that other person could have done if he didn't have to help that one guy lift something up. And this I think translates to periods of high immigration because people didn't have to help that one guy lift something up. And this, I think, translates to periods of high immigration

because people didn't lose their jobs. New businesses started because consumers could save money. And it's just like choosing a product from overseas or working with someone. If you can reduce your costs, you are reducing costs for the consumer. Why do we want to increase costs for the consumer? The whole point is to try to get more for less, right? Yeah, your points are eloquent and insightful.

Let me address the first one on freedom of association, because it's one that often comes up in the immigration debate. I often get emails from people saying, we should be able to keep the door locked or decide who comes in the door, just like our homes. Would you let anybody into your home, Jacob? Well, we're not a national home. You know, it's logical that Cuba would think in terms of a national home because in Cuba, the state owns everything. But here in the United States, we're a nation built on the concept of private property. So a person has the right to exclude people from his private home. In fact, that's

the kind of system we live in. You have freedom of association with respect to who comes into your house. You can discriminate against Jews, Catholics, blacks, Italians, whoever you want to discriminate against. And the state can't do anything about it because it's your private property. But by the same token, I have the same right and no one has a right to interfere with me if I want to bring into my home an Italian, a Mexican, a Guatemalan or whatever. It's my right to associate with whom I want. And I would extend that to businesses. Businesses are private owners. And so if businesses want to sell to foreigners or hire foreigners, that's their right. It's their business and their money. So it's totally different from this

national concept of a national home that has one door to it. The other thing is very important that you point out that the division of labor that comes from immigration, it does increase standards of living. And look at the, it wasn't an open border situation totally, the Ellis Island kind of system. Government was controlling, filtering people, but they let in around 95 or 96% of the immigrants. And this was one of the major factors that led to the tremendous increase in prosperity, especially by the time the 1800s starts ending up. And the people at the bottom of the economic ladder here in the United States, let's say farm workers that have high school degrees or working on a farm,

are they displaced by an uneducated immigrant from Mexico? Absolutely. And that appears to the farm worker, the American farm worker, to be catastrophic. Actually, it turns out that he's much better off because, as you point out, the immigrants are now buying things at Walmart. They're buying used cars. They're buying used clothing. And the market there, all of a sudden a sign shows up at Walmart saying, we've got this tremendous demand, workers needed here. So the Americans that had been working on the farm are now being employed at Walmart because they have educations. They're able to deal with customers better than the migrant can, and they have an increase in wages.

So that's what's happened historically, that when you have this open immigration, open border system, everybody's prospering, including the people that are displaced at the bottom of the economic ladder. Well said. Jacob, can I ask you a question? I sometimes will use the sort of the terminology that many people found to really rub them the wrong way during the lockdowns of the the the picking winners and losers. The your job is essential. Your job is not essential to try to translate that into things about tariffs. You know, I had James Bovard on recently when I was filling in for David and, you know, his book, The Fair Trade Fraud is just so phenomenal. It's great. And so we know that a lot of people find it very distasteful to hear these top down authoritarians telling us, well, your job is essential. What they're saying is I'm going to use force to decide whether you can work, right? Whether you can go and get together with people and actually offer services to other people. Well, that sort of same

thing is translated to tariffs that I try to tell people. I say, if you oppose the central authority, the central planners, from not only engaging in the immoral act of blocking you from just engaging in peaceful conversations or work with other people, then how do you feel about the immoral imposition of them choosing what is an essential or non-essential job? And then of course, we have the economic ramifications of that central planning. It never works. They are always screwing things up. And I say, well, let's translate it to tariffs because what they're doing there is saying, we know what is essential and not essential. We are going to favor a particular field or particular workers, whether they're

washing machine manufacturers in Ohio and Senator Portman loves them. And he gets Donald Trump to impose this ridiculous tariff on imports or something else, steel or something like that. And so that oftentimes people say, yeah, you know, that did bother me. Sometimes you can't convince them. But I think the same sort of thing with this sort of authoritarian usurpation, this conceit, this hubris that politicians seem to have. And I think many people in a way use the politicians almost as avatars. They buy into this and they say, oh yes, definitely we're doing the right thing. We're stopping these other people for our neighbor. Well, you're picking and choosing essential and non-essential.

You're telling the consumer your choices are not essential. I'm saying to you, I am precluding you from even thinking about dealing with this person. So, of course, the ramifications of that are very clear. As you say, you have a police state. You have checkpoints 50 miles away from the Mexican border in Arizona. People trying to go to work. And again, seeing the same people every day rolling down the window like, hi, I'm trying to get to work again today. And yeah, and, you know, complete, complete abrogations of the Fourth Amendment, of the Constitution and so on. And I think it's interesting because your experience on a farm is something that really helps, I think, give examples. And I worked on a farm stand myself and worked with Jamaican migrants who would come up every summer here in New Hampshire to pick apples. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the changes that you saw as a kid working on the farm near the Mexican border in Texas? And of course, people can actually watch you

speaking Spanish to spread the word of freedom in Espanol. If they're on Facebook, they might have seen one of your most recent posts over there. Tell us a little bit, if you could, about your personal experience and how that sort of works into what you did professionally as a lawyer. And again, bringing it back to today with the central planning and the borders. Yeah. Let me first amplify on the two points you made though, because they're such good points on the central planning aspect. You're absolutely right about the protective tariffs. And it's what you said earlier about Basiat's concept of what is seen and unseen. A tariff is just a sales tax on a foreign good. And when they impose it

high enough, people say, okay, I'll buy domestically. But what's unseen in this is all the money they would have saved by buying the cheaper product. They would have used that money for other purposes, buy a vacation, buy shoes. And so we never see those businesses that are hurt by virtue of the tariff. And you're right. It's what Hayek called a fatal conce You have government officials planning the movements of millions upon millions of people in a very complex labor market, deciding what the total number is going to be, what the credentials are going to be, how much allocated to each country. This is what Hayek called the fatal conceit of the planner. It cannot be done without what Ludwig von Mises called planned chaos, which is what we've had on the border.

And then they bring in this police state, which is what we've had on the border. And then they bring in this police state, which now leads me into answering your question directly. I grew up on a farm on the Rio Grande. We hired illegal immigrants. When I was in high school, I was out, you know, we were playing, we would work with the workers out there. It wasn't illegal to hire illegal immigrants at the time. And they were my buddies, my brothers and me. And we would play football out in there. We'd sometimes sit out on the porch and eat dinner with them. They were our buddies. They lived there on the farm with us. And one day the border patrol came in without a warrant. They could enter onto our farm without any judicial order whatsoever, whenever they wanted.

If we put a lock on the gate, they would just shoot off the lock if we hadn't given them a key. And so they came in and usually our workers were quick enough to hide, like in a barn we had there. And fortunately, the Border Patrol never came into our home. We lived out there on the farm, but, but they would come into our farm and they, one day they came and busted our workers. And it was a very traumatic experience for me. I mean, my brothers and I had tears in our eyes as they were carting away our workers. And, and that was my,

I think my real first experience with the immigration police state. Another, I mean, it goes, it shows you how far back this goes. This is like in the 1960s, this immigration crisis. It's nothing new. It's been going on for some 80 years. Another time I was headed to the beach in Port Aransas near Corpus Christi. I was meeting friends and all of a sudden the red light turns on. It's a border patrol agent. And he pulls me over. No, no excuse at all. No broken taillight. I had done nothing wrong. No speeding anything. He just says, get out of your car and open your trunk. This is called a roving border patrol checkpoint. Oh, of course. And so I objected, you know, I said, you don't have the authority to do this.

And he says, well, you can follow me back to headquarters and we'll resolve it there. Or you can open up your trunk. Well, I was late. I wish I said, screw you, I'll follow you back. But I didn't. I opened up the trunk. And then when you head north out of Laredo, about 40 miles, you come over the crest of a hill and you think you're in Mexico. There's this huge immigration checkpoint there where they're stopping cars. You can be subject to

a complete search there, like if you're at the bridge, where they can, you know, at the bridge, they can tell you to drop your trousers, drop your underwear, bend over so they can check your body cavities. Same with women. You forfeit your rights with this system of immigration control. It's not just a control on foreigners. You go into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico for one hour just to shop at the market. You come back, you have forfeited your rights. If you got a cell phone, you have to disclose your password so they can search your cell phone if they choose to do this. This is the this is the police state that exists along the border.

And now they've got this concertina wire that's designed to cut people up. They've had this Berlin Wall and then they finally criminalized the hiring of illegal immigrants, along with the transportation of them, caring for them. If you're driving along a highway and you see an immigrant collapsed on the side of the road from dehydration, you give him water, you carry him to an emergency room, you're going to get indicted for a felony offense of harboring or caring for illegal immigrants. So it's just a horrific system. It violates religious principles. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. It violates economic principles, free markets. It violates moral principles of freedom.

It's very befuddling to me, Gardner, why Americans continue to hew to this system. And I finally decided it's because we've all been born and raised under this socialist system. And you're accustomed to it. When you become accustomed to something, freedom becomes a very frightening prospect. It's like, oh my gosh, that's unpredictable, Jacob. The whole world might come here and all these catastrophic thoughts start entering people's minds. Boy, those are such great insights. Our guest on The David Knight Show, I'm Gardner Goldsmith, filling in for David today on Good Friday. Thank you for joining us. Our guest on The David Knight Show, I'm Gardner Goldsmith, filling in for David today on Good Friday.

Thank you for joining us. Our guest is Jacob Hornberger. The Future of Freedom Foundation can be found at fff.org and also on Twitter slash X. Is it futureoffreedom on Twitter slash X, Jacob? I believe so. Yes. Yes. We'll double check and I'll make sure that I get that out there. I've never, I've never liked Twitter. So I, my colleague Bart handles it all. Well, what I,

what I, what I like is anytime I share one of your articles, it will do the at future freedom. It will recognize what you, you know, when I put it out on X, it'll do the at, so that, you know, that I shared something because, um, I really, uh, I really appreciate so many the at so that you know that I shared something because I really I really appreciate so many of the pieces that you write. And, you know, you're always featuring great pieces by so many of the people who have been heroes to me and sort of, you know, over time as I started to lecture on economics and I used to drive five hours just to get to Irvington from New Hampshire when Richard was president of F.E.E. And I would go down there and see Robert Higgs or Tom DiLorenzo speak or whatever. And it was just, it was phenomenal.

It was just the best time. And I have to tell you, Jacob, one time after Richard left Hillsdale, my father had passed away. My dad was a proto-libertarian, born in 1917. He had a copy of human action that he annotated for the kids. You know, Adam Smith had notes. Yeah. And so when I was a teenager, he was giving me Hazlitt and Milton Friedman. And I had a question. I was like, dad, I think Milton Friedman's got a little something wrong here. And he goes, ah, yes.

Well, he's not exactly. He's good, but there's some mistakes. So, you know, he was right on it. And so I used to drive down to their Friday afternoon lectures, you know, and then walk over to the library in Irvington and see the statue of Rip Van W admire, you've worked for a great amount of time. So many people have been influenced by this. And I had the opportunity a while back to write a piece, at least to tell people, my go-to as a voluntarist, my position is peace and the golden rule, as you say. But I at least will try to appeal to people on the central planning concept. I try to tell people to say, look, in the constitution, as you can see, as you said, you start to deal with these laws and they pile up like layers of tarnish on silver,

one after the other, a new regulation, and it never works. Now we've got many people complaining that the government, literally the central planners, that they always said, you've got to be the answer. You've got to take care of the border. Now, well, it's not doing what they wanted. Now they're literally spending tax money to give $10,000 debit cards

to migrants in New York. They're paying for people to be housed in hotels outside of Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, where the Patriots play football. So now we're seeing so many people so riled up about the border under the central authority, but it's not under the authority they want to run the system. And they're not learning the lesson of central planning, which is, it just depends on who the central planner is. So you're not going to get what you want. You just have to. And so what I do is one of the ways that I try to start things off is you talked about seeing the legal side of things in so many cases.

And you got involved as a lawyer when you went back to Texas to try to help for the civil liberties of these people. I try to bring up to people, look, you're under a false artifice. You're under an artifice when you look at so-called or something like that, or even the Articles of Confederation, I would probably prefer. But according to the politicians who swear their oaths, there's no word immigration in the Constitution. The word migration appears in it, and it pertains to a particular clause of the Constitution that was about slavery, the importation or migration of certain persons in the states now existing, as they said in the Constitution, shall not be influenced by the Congress until after 1808, which was a way to try to entice and cajole the southern states to sign on to the Constitution. And then they had the Missouri Compromise. They would never have had the Missouri Compromise if the federal government could control the migration or importation of slaves into any of the new states,

because the slave state, free state thing would have been negated. They could have said, we're going to make it impossible to import slaves there. We can talk about the evil of slavery, but as far as their functionality went under the Constitution, then it wasn't a federal purview. And during the Sedition Act, the Alien and Sedition Act period, the Alien Act, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in 1798, they both wrote one was the Kentucky Resolve, Virginia Resolve for Madison. It's a state purview. And it wasn't until 1875 with the Supreme Court ruling in this case called Chee-Lung v. Freeman, when basically the Supreme Court made it up out of whole cloth. It was a California statute and it was up to the California government,

as bad as I think it is, they were blocking importation of Chinese people to come into California because they claimed that the women were going to be prostitutes carrying diseases. Really, it was a block against Chinese laborers on the railroads and in the gold mines. They didn't want the native workers to have the competition. And so from there, it went to the federal government. And there we get all of these things that you had to deal with as a kid, as they grew and grew and grew from Ellis Island being the port. You've got to show your documents. Now, as you say, you've got to show your your phone. I mean, it's like Checkpoint Charlie. It's it's craziness.

But again, it goes towards unfortunately, I think a lot of the media plays on this. It all goes towards looking to the central authority and to break out of that mindset, at least by showing people, look, if you think that the constitution is at least going to be the functional system, look at what it says and recognize that they didn't want that sort of central authority making those plans, at least go with some sort of confederation concept, but they won't buy into it. It's very difficult to convince people of that. Yeah, you've raised a lot of good points. First of all, I've got to say I'm very envious that you learned about these ideas when you were in high school. Richard did too. I was in my late 20s when I discovered libertarianism. So when I went back to practice law in Laredo,

I just hated the system, the whole immigration system, even though I didn't realize that I was a libertarian. I didn't know anything about libertarianism. So I went to the local federal judge who I'd known as a kid because my dad was a lawyer. And I said, Judge, I'd like you to appoint me to represent illegal immigrants for free. I'll do it for free because I think it's a very arbitrary, capricious system, the way they're enforcing it. And it was. And I want to I'm going to challenge the constitutionality of it. I'm going to take it to the Fifth Circuit on an appeal. And the judge says, fine. So he started appointing me. And and that was actually laying the seeds for my discovery of libertarianism, because one day I was out at the detention center waiting for one of my clients to come over to me to talk.

And I was watching all these guys walk around, probably about 200 guys in this detention center. And it had like a concentration camp environment to it, you know, guard towers and barbed wire on the walls and stuff. And as I'm watching all these guys, Gardner, it hits me. If the leftists, which I was, I thought government should be helping the poor and so forth, love the poor, needy, and disadvantaged so much, why are they doing this to these people? All they want to do is work. And so I went and asked a couple of my leftist friends, how do you reconcile this? And I was really troubled by it. This was before discovering libertarianism. And they said, oh, well, the law is the law. Well, that wasn't good enough for me.

Because as you point out, the Constitution brings into existence a government of limited enumerated powers. There is no enumerated power to control immigration. And not surprisingly, because in the Declaration of Independence, one of the reasons for the break with King George was he was controlling immigration into the colonies. Right. And that's cited as one of the reasons. That's right. I forgot about that. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. And then in the Constitution, they allow for naturalizations as a way to become a citizen. But that's a totally different concept from people just crossing the border, retaining their citizenship, working, touring, visiting, and so forth. And so that framework was a beautiful framework. Now, as you point out, and as I've pointed out, the Ellis Island system was not an open border system. Everybody had to go through a government checkpoint. And government was vested with the power to decide who comes in. Now, they were flexible. They let in more immigrants.

But then that leads, as you point out, to the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Because government says, OK, well, we're vested with this power. You invested with us. So now we're going to use this power to exclude Chinese because it was a racist law. It was designed with the idea that Chinese will never be real Americans because they don't look like real Americans. And, you know, isn't it interesting because, Jacob, what's fascinating is the California statute that was exclusionary against Chinese coming into the state of California that was challenged, that led to the 1875 Chi-Lung-Vi Freeman decision, which was a completely errant and destructive decision, that led to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act on a national level. So the very people who were

challenging that on a state level ended up ceding the power to the federal government, which did exactly the same thing that the Chinese Exclusion Act did in California seven years earlier. It's crazy. And again, it's central authority. I don't want to come down too hard on those people who I think rightly recognize the immorality and the injustice of central planners now actually paying for other people to move. I understand that argument. I understand the distaste that people have for that and the complexities of the confusion that it creates in all these localities. But by the same token, I think not getting to the root of this really is a disservice to people intellectually and also on a moral level to not look at this deeper lesson. And I'll

translate it to something here. I was helping a young woman from Siberia actually move to the United States a number of years ago. She wanted to go to law school here and we had met at a free state project thing. She was dating a friend of ours and she and I stayed in touch and she toured around for a little while as I brought her to various schools and so on and a really nice woman. And, um, and so we were, we found this Mexican restaurant in a town called Bedford. It was amazing. Casablanca, just incredible. And I started to talk to the waiter and he, he didn't really speak English all that well. And I started to talk to the waiter and he he didn't really speak English all that well. And I said, gee, you know, I'm really glad you're here. And we got on the subject of immigration and he actually let us know he was not here legally, according to the statutes.

Now, the prices at this place and the service at this place, I we we must have saved 10 or 15 dollars every time we ate there. We ate there over and over. And it was so good. It was incredible. And she was just delighted. She was, this is incredible. This is wonderful. She was a libertarian as well.

And, um, so they got busted and it made me think to myself, if a bunch of mafia thugs had entered that building every day and smashed a window to take it in in in bastia's parlance right in a way um and said ah you know you bought that window from uh from so-and-so i didn't like that you should buy from veto my friend and veto stuff costs ten dollars more per window that's money that that that restaurant is going to be losing. Eventually, the restaurant, when we were there, the restaurant, they got busted. They got shut down. That was a place where we were saving the $10. I could use that to buy gasoline or go to a convenience store or buy a painting by someone if I had added up enough money. So as you say,

these opportunity costs, when we don't stick with the morality of things, when we don't leave people alone, when we engage in force, when one engages in force, these have secondary and tertiary consequences that people don't see. And so I do appreciate so much your personal story and then what you do telling people about these things. And by the way, kudos to you also about talking about how they try to flip it in the other way, where they try to portray things as compassionate. Your piece the other day on Social Security, going through the history of Social Security as a Ponzi scheme and how charity can't be defined as state action. And this is where I'll make sort of my final point that I've made a few times on David's show and my Liberty Conspiracy show, which is that even when one goes to define charity,

you need to have volition. The politicians aren't the ones who are spending the money on Alzheimer's research or on cancer research, yet they claim America cares. They're not the ones who are providing the help themselves out of their own wallet for an elderly person. And Social Security, as you pointed out, they claim it's insurance. It's not. It's a Ponzi scheme. It's a welfare scheme. But I try to say, even if, logically, someone tries to define a political border or barrier as a political border or barrier, technically speaking, that's not possible because there's nothing that the state does that anyone can actually say is good because the actual quality of goodness hasn't been allowed to be

translated through anybody's volition. So the same thing applies to a political border. You can't have, there was no volition in the decision as to where that political border is, where it's going to be placed over somebody's private property, typically, or how it's going to be managed. Then you get to the tragedy of the commons where everybody's arguing over how's that going to be managed. Well, the only way you can really manage it is if you leave people alone to have private property. Then you can show where people wanted their borders to be. Because one person might say, well, yeah, I was a taxpayer, but I don't like the way they're managing that. And another person might say, I like the way

they're managing that. It's impossible. It's not manageable. And this, of course, goes towards the voluntarist argument against the state itself in the abstract. But any final thoughts on that? And then to wrap things up, of course, I know you've got to go at 11, but there are some other things that I'd love to people, whet people's appetite about the JFK assassination, because you're a real, real student of this, a real expert on this. But any final thoughts on the border thing to, you know, again, I don't want to attack people too hard who are recognizing some problems with this collectivist system. But I think it's important to to actually express this.

This is a problem of collectivism. It is. But I think your human interest story about that restaurant is so friggin fascinating. And as you were relating it, I was thinking about the lockdowns that there is among libertarians. There's a moral indignation and outrage, and rightly so, over the lockdowns of so many businesses. It destroyed the businesses. And yet, why is it they cannot translate that over to what happened to there in your town? I mean, so what if they're Mexican citizens? They're providing a service. Why should they get locked down and sent away? They're just human beings. Who cares what citizenship they are? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's a fascinating

point. And I really think that we as Americans have the duty to lead the world to freedom. I mean, the whole world is mired in central planning, mired in socialism, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, school vouchers, all these things that have come to be defined as freedom and libertarian. They have no more to do with care and compassion than any other socialist program. And I often hear that with Social Security. Oh, Jacob, how can you be so heartless? We need to continue this for indefinitely because people will be dying in the streets. Pure nonsense. There is no care or compassion with the IRS and the initiation of force through taxation. Genuine charity comes from the willing heart of the individual. And

that's where we need to lead the world, to the restoration of faith and freedom and free markets. We live without social security and Medicare and immigration controls for more than a hundred years. And everybody was fine. In fact, more than fine. And there was the greatest outburst of economic, voluntary charity that mankind has ever seen. And let me make one final point here. We should never forget that after the Mexican War, the United States stole and absorbed the entire northern half of Mexico. Now, you talk about an alteration of culture. I mean, how could you have a bigger alteration of culture than to steal and absorb the entire northern half of a foreign country that had been

part of the Spanish empire, including the 100,000 citizens who know that we were automatically made American citizens. Is it really unusual that people would want to say they would want to cross the border into what had been their land for centuries? I don't think so. And I think that's another important point that we should keep in mind when we see migrants simply crossing the border to what had been their country. You know, Jacob, you remind me a little bit. I don't know if you got to see the first season of the AMC TV series. And I very rarely watch TV anymore. But Pierce Brosnan starred in a show called The Sun based on a novel. And it's about the early 1900s down near the Rio Grande in areas that formerly had been run and owned by Mexican people. And then the United States government, then you have the Texas

problem. Then you've got the Native Americans and they're all arguing over who should have this land, what tribe had this land, and so on. And Pierce Brosnan now is discovering that there's oil interest in some of these areas. And it is a fascinating look. It's a real great snapshot, very honest as well, I think, from at least the history that I know of the area, about all the disparate interests and arguing that went on about, well, our family was here first and our family was here first. Well, this happened to us. It's fascinating. And it's really quite something to see. And, you know, just from a sentimental standpoint, you know, I hate to say for my own interest purposes, because these are real lives that are at hand and at stake and, you know, I hate to say for my own interest purposes, because these are real lives

that are at hand and at stake and, you know, people's rights that are being abrogated. But to look into the history itself is very enriching, I think. And you do a great job, even in your personal story, showing snapshots or maybe film, because it's so much more rich, it's so much richer, to be able to show people what that's like. Actually, this isn't an intentional transition, but I was checking out your recent, and for the second time, part of your series on the JFK assassination, in particular the Zabruder film and the edits that seem to have been made from the original Zabruder film. And you have done great work on that. And I'd love to whet people's appetites before you go about how they can find some of your

work on the JFK assassination, because you've done multiple episodes on things. You've written extensively a book about this. Could you tell us a little bit about your take on where people might want to find some of your work on the JFK assassination and the cover ups and so on? Yeah, well, the very first best book to start out with for somebody that that is interested in understanding why this is not a conspiracy theory, but is in fact is a fact and in fact, it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, in my opinion, is the very best book is JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglas. And I'd recommend everybody start with that book. It's the best overall, deep, profound, easily read synopsis of this national security state regime change operation. Then go to my book, The Kennedy Autopsy, which is FFF's all-time

bestseller. And then it's really a synopsis of a five-volume book by a man named Doug Horn called Inside the Assassination Records Review Board. And Horn served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. And Horn's book put the matter over the line for me beyond a reasonable doubt. Prior to that time, I had been convinced that it was a regime change operation based on all the evidence, but I couldn't prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, which, as you know, is the standard of proof in a criminal case. Horn's book put me over the line on beyond a reasonable doubt. And I think like a lawyer, you know, I don't think in terms of conspiracy theories. I was a trial attorney for 12 years. Well, Horn's book concentrates on the autopsy that was conducted on President Kennedy's body and documents in excruciating detail the fraudulent nature of that autopsy. Well, once you establish beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a fraudulent autopsy conducted by the military, it's case closed. That's it now because there's no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. It's over. No one has ever come up with an innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy.

And like I say, Horn documents it. We could go into examples, but that sealed it for me. So I would recommend the Kennedy autopsy. Now, my newest book is called An Encounter with Evil, the Abraham Zabruder story. One of the things about the fraudulent autopsy, Gardner, was that the military came up with a photograph that showed the back of Kennedy's head to be intact. Well, all the Dallas doctors and the nurses and Secret Service agent Clint Hill and a multitude of witnesses said Kennedy had a massive hole in the back of his head. These were the treating physicians. So something's wrong there.

You've got a fraudulent film or fraudulent photograph that's falsely depicting this head to be intact. Well, the Zabruder film also shows the back of Kennedy's head to be intact. So I decided to delve into that. And I wasn't the first one, I mean, but I wrote this book showing that what happened on the weekend of the assassination, contrary to what had been the official story, was that the original Zabruder film is diverted to a CIA photographic center, first in Washington and then over to Rochester, New York, where they produced an altered copy of the film. And I document that in the book in detail, because in Rochester, they could essentially do anything Hollywood could do. And that's where they produced

an altered copy in order to show that the back of the head was intact to match their fraudulent photographs. So that's the essence of my books. And really they revolve around, Horn was the real pioneer in this. We also have conferences that we've held featuring Horn and other people. We featured Oliver Stone that are on our website showing the fraudulent nature of the autopsy, the Cold War context, why they did this. Another book I'd highly recommend is JFK's War with the National Security Establishment, Why Kennedy Was Assassinated. This goes to Motive. We published that book, The Future of Freedom Foundation. It was written by Horn. So if you take these books, and Horn's the most difficult

read of them all. It's a five-volume work, but I will guarantee you, you get through horns books and you will have no doubts at all. I don't have any doubts after reading his. And in fact, we also published a multi-part video by horn. That is our most downloaded video in our history, detailing the fraudulent nature of this autopsy. It's rich work, I think, and really must have consumed a lot of time. But once you start to see that the narrative that you were sold is a fake narrative, then you say, why is it fake? And then you start to unpeel the onion. And it's a pretty rancid onion, that's for sure. Well, let me say that the real point of this is not to see criminal justice because everybody who's involved in this is dead now. It's to challenge what I consider the greatest mistake in U.S. history, and that was the conversion of the federal government to a national security state consisting of the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, the vast military industrial complex. This, I mean, is a horrific governmental system that we live under now, a national security state.

You got totalitarian powers, power of assassination, torture, indefinite detention, including of Americans. And so that's the real point of this, is that I'm trying to raise people's vision as to the importance of restoring our original governmental system established by the Constitution, and which lasted for 150 years or so, and that was a limited government republic, which is the total opposite of a national security state. If I may, I'd like to also mention something that I should have mentioned in our immigration discussion, is that we're not the only ones making this case. There's three other great books that I'd recommend to people. One is brand new,

came out about a month ago, called The Case for Open Borders by John Washington. I think it's one of the best books I've ever read on immigration. It addresses every single objection to open borders that people raise. There's our book that we published 30 years ago called The Case for Free Trade and Open Immigration. A third book is Open Borders by Brian Kaplan, who's a brilliant economics professor at George Mason University, which I consider the best economics department in the country. And then from a free market Austrian perspective. And then the fourth book I'd recommend is a book called Let Them In, The Case for Open Borders by Jason Riley, who serves on the editorial board of Wall Street Journal. You read these four books and I will guarantee you that you will be an open

borders advocate because it's not just some esoteric pie in the sky theory. There's people actually making the intellectual, moral, religious case and economic case for this concept. Well, that's so well stated. And I'm so glad you brought that up. In fact, Brian Kaplan was here two weeks ago speaking in New Hampshire at a Free State Project event. And so a lot of people were really excited to see him. And it just, it's amazing the nexus of people that you find. You say to yourself, oh, I like this person's work here. And then you find out that they did excellent work over here.

And you say, oh, I'm enriched even more. This is great. So same thing with Brian Kaplan's work and your work and Richard's work. And I highly recommend if people get the opportunity, I bought An Encounter with Evil most recently from the store over there. And, uh, there's so many great items at FFF.org in the store.

You can get all sorts of excellent stuff, everything on, uh, monetary so-called policy, which that term itself indicates a problem. Uh, and, um,

over into immigration and history, Austrian economics, history mixed in with the Austrian economics theory and the practicality of leaving one's neighbor alone. Jacob, thank you. Thank you so much for being here. It's been an absolute pleasure. And I hope I get to talk to you again. This is great. It's phenomenal. I just can't tell you, this has been an hour of pure joy for me. I mean, it's just, it's been a real, real pleasure to interact with you on these. And thank you for letting me share my perspective with you and your viewers. This has really been nice. Well, thank you for your work. And I'll be in touch with you via email a little bit later today. I have to go to a couple appointments this afternoon and so on, but I'll write to you tonight,

send you links and things like that. And of course, as long as the NSA doesn't arrest me, I'll email you. Okay. Maybe we'll end up in Guantanamo and share the same cell together. You can teach me Espanol. Thank you so much, Gardner. It's been a real pleasure. You got it. Thank you, Jacob. Real pleasure. Absolutely. So great to talk to Jacob Hornberger. What a nice, nice man. And of course, FFF.org, everyone. Check out FFF.org. And Jacob Hornberger's work is absolutely great. I hope that you will find him there. The David Knight Show is a critical thinking

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