F.H. Buckley on The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America
2016-07-02 · Guest: F.H. Buckley (Professor of Law at George Mason University) · 17:29
Restoring American economic and social mobility
Bob Zadek interviews Professor F.H. Buckley about his book, The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America. They discuss the decline of economic and social mobility in the United States, comparing it to other first-world nations like Canada, and examine how immigration policies and legal structures contribute to the hardening of class lines.
Topics: Income Mobility, Social Mobility, American Dream, Immigration Policy, Populism, Economic Inequality, Points-Based Immigration, Family Reunification
Speakers: Bob Zadek: Host F.H. Buckley: Professor of Law at George Mason University and author
Introduction [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. Proudly and always the show of ideas, not attitude. Thanks so much for listening. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation at any time.
This is my favorite holiday celebration of the year. It is the July 4th weekend, the birthday of our country. And little-known trivia fact: July 4th was the day on which more of our presidents died than any other date on the calendar. Three of our presidents died on July 4th—all of them founding members of the founding generation. We know two of them, Adams and Jefferson, who died on the same day. The trivia question is: who was the third founding president to die on July 4th? A gold star if you get it right.
This morning we will attempt to break media ground. We will go where no one in the media has attempted to go before. We will spend the entire, and I mean entire, hour discussing, having a content-rich conversation about the principles of Donald Trump. Yes, the principles of Donald Trump.
I’m happy to welcome back to my show to help us in this conversation, Frank Buckley. Frank is a professor of law at George Mason University School of Law, soon to be renamed Antonin Scalia School of Law—a move that I heartily endorse. He is also a senior editor at The American Spectator and, most importantly for today’s conversation, Frank has written a new book, a must-read to get the full picture of political life in America today. Frank’s book is The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America. And what better topic to discuss for an hour on this July 4th weekend than the way back, restoring the promise of America? Frank, thanks so much for joining us this Sunday morning.
F.H. Buckley: Bob, thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be back. Love to talk to you.
Bob Zadek: Now Frank, the book—we’ll get into Donald Trump in a very short moment, but first the book, because the two topics are related. The restoring of the promise of America and Donald Trump—those two topics are, at least your premises, they are very much related. But tell us about the book. What prompted you to write the book and what was the core premise of the book?
F.H. Buckley: Well, I tell you, I wrote the book before Donald Trump decided to run for the presidency, but I will say this: Trump has plugged two books in the last year. His book was the other one. In other words, he plugged mine. And in many respects, it overlaps with the things he’s been saying and offers, I think, an intellectual defense of his policies.
So I think people who are interested in what it’s all about may want to read the book. And what I focused on was something really new in America, which is the decline of mobility. I mean, we’re told that the idea of America is this is a country where everybody can get ahead, right? It’s Horatio Alger’s America, where wherever you are, wherever you’re born, you have an equal chance of getting to the top. And that’s just not true, right?
The Decline of American Mobility [02:58]
Bob Zadek: Well, you talk about mobility. Just so the audience can follow the conversation, you mean income mobility or class mobility—the ability, not interfered with by society, of moving from one class to another. And you really mean moving upward in classes, because it’s always been pretty easy to move down. Moving up has been the trick.
F.H. Buckley: Absolutely right. Well, you know, I talk numbers and I talk income mobility, but social mobility—moving from one class to another—is also part of it. And I think what has happened to us is we’ve spawned a new class of aristocrats at the top of the heap. And you know, when you look at the numbers, it’s absolutely shocking how they and their children do well compared to everybody else. I mean, if you’re in the top 50%, your kids have about a 50% chance of being in the top 10 or 20%. And it’s just not like that in other countries—at least in most other first-world countries. I mean, we’re up there in terms of mobility, we’re up there in their aristocracy, we’re up there with places like Britain. And we thought we had left that behind us, right? We thought this was the country of promise, and it turns out, you know, we’re not the country of promise. That’s Denmark or Canada or some other country. And that entirely betrays Lincoln’s promise of an America where we can all get ahead. That was at the core of Lincoln’s beliefs. And really, I’m decrying this new class that seems to be on top of the heap.
Bob Zadek: Now, income mobility is generally measured—there’s a lot of ways to measure it—but statisticians and economists generally measure it by comparing the income class, usually by percentile (20%, 40%, 60% in five percentiles), they measure the class of the child as compared to the class of the parent. That’s a very convenient and pretty telling way to examine if we have income mobility. And Frank, your position is that income mobility—the expectation that children will do better than their parents—has now, the mobility has declined, and that inures to the detriment of Americans and society as a whole.
F.H. Buckley: Absolutely right. We have to distinguish two things. One is income inequality, which is how are we divided up in the present generation, from mobility, which as you say is a matter of comparing parents and children. And I’m more interested in mobility because I think most Americans would agree, look, it’s mostly about the kids.
And here’s what’s really interesting. I mean, behind all of these statistics—and you know, I’ve got them—when polled, Americans for the first time say they don’t expect their kids to do as well as they did. And that is absolutely huge. And it accounts for what is really a revolution in American politics. I mean, on the Democratic side, you had a self-proclaimed socialist—never mind it was socialist-lite, but a self-proclaimed socialist—who did extraordinarily well, surprised everybody.
Bob Zadek: That was of course Bernie Sanders. Go ahead.
F.H. Buckley: Yeah. So, and they’re similar in a way in that both are railing against what has become an immobile society. And the perfect Republican idiot simply doesn’t get it. And so they’ve been swept aside. I mean, who back in August of last year, looking at those 17 people in the Republican debate, would have predicted that Trump would make the distance, right? But everybody else failed, and other people just didn’t get the class warfare aspect of it. And that’s the sense in which Trump resembles Sanders.
Structural Causes and the New Aristocracy [04:50]
Bob Zadek: Since you have chosen income immobility as an important consideration—and I don’t quarrel with that, it’s a reasonable place to start—income immobility is the result of policies. It’s not a policy in itself; it’s the result of other policies, obviously. So Frank, focus on the structural causes in your opinion of income immobility. And then as we segue into Donald Trump—and we’ll be going back and forth between the policies suggested in your book and Donald Trump—but after you explain for us the structural causes of income inequality, and I would presume they are somewhat new, then explain how the policies of Donald Trump more than Hillary, for example, to take the stalking horse, would ameliorate those structural problems.
F.H. Buckley: Yeah, absolutely. Look, the Republicans who want to say, “Oh, we don’t want to talk about that,” will say, “Well, first of all, this is all about class envy and we don’t do envy, we’re too noble to do that.” But you know, all we’re talking about is the ordinary human instinct that you want your kids to do well.
And what are the problems in America, Frank? What caused, what resulted in income immobility? Because obviously in your book you list structural problems that cause income immobility. So list them for us.
F.H. Buckley: Well, let me get there. The other thing they say is this is caused by structural changes over which we have no control. And what they’re talking about here is mostly the move to a high-tech information age economy, right? Which gives disproportionate rewards to the really smart and highly educated people—i.e., the new class—and leaves the middle class in the dust. And you know, that’s happened, it’s there, but that’s a completely inadequate explanation for the following simple reason: and that is that other countries which beat us hands down in terms of mobility are living in the same information age that we are.
And you know, the really shocking thing is to look at the country we most closely resemble, which is Canada, which is precisely Lincoln’s country. I mean, the American Dream lives on, just not in this country, right? You know, so I talked about how the top 10% in this country, their kids will do extremely well. You don’t find that elsewhere, right? And you know what? They’re not exactly living in the Stone Age there. So that explanation doesn’t carry water.
So my explanation, getting to it, is look, it’s all about differences in the legal regime of the countries. There are all these legal barriers to getting ahead in this country which don’t exist in other countries.
Immigration and Economic Mobility [06:40]
F.H. Buckley: And immigration is huge. We import immobility in this country. We are bringing in people who will not do as well as Americans on average—and by the way, I’m talking about legal, not illegal here. And number two, their kids will not do as well as the kids of native-born Americans. And the effect continues to the third generation. In other words, we’re more immobile as a consequence of all of that. And by the way, this is also a tremendous disservice to native Americans, particularly African Americans. I mean, their jobs are being taken away.
Bob Zadek: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We have to pause just for a moment because you were—first of all, you combined two very important topics, which is on the one hand you mentioned briefly the rule of law (we’ll come back to that), and then you segued into immigration as being a cause of income immobility, and you said immigrants are taking away native-borns’ jobs.
As you know, of course, nobody owns a job. A job is simply an agreement where an employer simply looks for the person who will do the best job for the least amount of money, as any rational player in the economic American life would do. And if an immigrant is willing to do work for $7 an hour and a native-born for $10, well, the native-born is simply—it’s his job if he’ll do it for $7. So he doesn’t lose his job; he simply wants more than the job is worth. So this concept of “my job” doesn’t work for me.
F.H. Buckley: Okay, you know what? I completely agree. I mean, if it’s a matter of an employer deciding whether to hire a native-born American versus let us say an illegal at much less money, that certainly is something the employer might rationally decide to do, to give the job to the illegal. All I’m saying is the illegals shouldn’t be there in the first place.
Comparing US and Canadian Immigration Systems [09:15]
F.H. Buckley: Now let me tell you something about—I mean, we got started by my comparing us to other countries that beat us hands down in terms of mobility. So let me tell you about the Canadian system. Here’s what they do with illegals in Canada: they put them on the plane. You know, it’s sayonara. I mean, they give them a refugee hearing, but apart from that, the Canadian system is one that Donald Trump would love, right? So there’s no question about the illegals.
And by the way, it’s not just about crossing a river, because one-third of the illegals in this country arrived here by plane. So much of it is the same issue. But apart from that, the big issue with immigration is not the illegals, but legal immigration. We have the craziest legal immigration system in the world. It is absolutely nuts. I don’t think any respectable academic would tell you this is a great system. It just stinks all over the place. It’s so crazy that they award 50,000 places by virtue of a lottery. I mean, no screening whatsoever.
So what they do in Canada is a country one-tenth the size of the United States actually takes in a greater absolute number of economic migrants than the United States—160,000 a year in Canada versus 140,000 in the US. I mean, that’s crazy. Our system here is based on family reunification, and that made sense maybe in the 19th century—or it would have made sense if that had been the rule in the 19th century because travel was hard. But right now they got something called Skype and they got cheap cell phones and they got cheap air travel, so it’s not the long goodbye. So there’s no great hardship in saying, “Look, it’s great your mother’s back in the old country, but if you like her, go visit her. You don’t have to necessarily bring her over here.”
Bob Zadek: Now Frank, on immigration, Trump of course has gotten most attention on immigration. And here’s where you and I were separated at birth—we agree 100%. The immigration system, if you can call it that most charitably, in this country is awful. So we can stipulate that. And when people oppose illegal immigrants, I always ask them: which part of it do you oppose—the illegal part or the immigrant part? That is to say, if we passed a law that welcomed everybody—forgetting about whether that law made sense—if we passed a law that anybody who wanted to could come in, so no more illegality, now it’s only the immigrant part that we talk about.
So the problem is we have a profoundly irrational, politically driven, makes-no-sense immigration policy. So to discuss illegality is sort of silly because the law that makes it illegal is an irrational law. So let us discuss and help us understand Trump’s position on what a sensible…