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Bryan Caplan is not a lefty. He is for open borders. He would be happy to get rid of the welfare state as well.
If we're doing political compass memes I think Caplan sits squarely in the far corner of the lib-left quadrant.
I get the impression that "He would be happy to get rid of the welfare state" only in so far as he's a radical libertarian who wants to do away with the idea of "the state" entirely.
What economic-left policies does Caplan support? Let alone ones that would put him in the "far corner".
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Immigration and population replacement is what defines leftism in 2026. He is a blank slatist who believes in magic soil. So it makes him a leftist.
The fact that other leftists would happily line him up against the wall for his heretical beliefs? Well, that's leftism for you.
I do agree that unlike Bernie Sanders, who pivoted hard on immigration to stay relevant, Caplan is a principled leftist. Put him in the useful idiot category.
I don't know how this can possibly apply to Caplan, given his stated views on IQ.
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No, it's not. It's what defines the obsession of extremely online white supremacists.
Leftists - actual leftists - in American politics are people like Zohran Mamdani, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, or Bernie Sanders. While they're generally pro-immigration, that doesn't really set them apart from left-of-center people more broadly. The definitive aspects of leftist politics:
Federal jobs guarantee for people with Master's DegreesTo speak in broad terms, their political core is an ethnically diverse, college-educated cohort with a history of underemployment. This is why, for example, despite a fairly radical agenda overall, their most prominent political goals tend to revolve around shoring up the economic security and political influence of college grads.
Bryan Caplan is a libertarian. He's just... actually a libertarian, not "I hate taxes and love guns" libertarian or an embarrassed conservative.
You can believe all sorts of things and be accepted in leftist discourse and among leftists. There are only a couple topics which will get you ostracized and excluded from leftist discourse and politics.
You can believe in increasing business/capital-owning class influence, e.g., the behavior of the Democrat Party for decades across a large number of topics from financial regulatory schemes to the mega corps organizations they give government contracts to. You can be for bailouts benefitting the filthy rich in the early Obama years or the bailouts round 2 for the filthy rich during the Covid hysteria. Did they get kicked out of the club by Leftists, actual Leftists? No.
You can be against the "massive expansion of the welfare and administrative state." The lefty libertarians don't struggle to get along with "leftists." You can be in favor or against vast surveillance.
You can be frothing at the mouth neolibs who want to establish the liberal world order in Ukraine and put Russia in its place.
You can be an explicit antiwhite bigot and not only be welcomed but excel in leftist discourse and politics. You pick 3 people you think represent Leftists - actual Leftsits - except every one of them proves the rule. Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani are engaging in racial solidarity and racial resentment politics targeted at the native population. Bernie Sanders famously got the memo about the above and completely changed his opinion on a dime to the exact opposite on this topic.
What you cannot be is against replacement migration and the divestiture and removal of whites from the countries they created. And so that's what leftism is.
Rightwingers can and do exist and in large numbers in every category you claim to represent as "leftist politics." Your attempted description of what "Leftists - actual leftists" believe isn't a description of leftists, it's just disjointed, flavored current-thingism. And it's disjointed because, again, these things switch on a dime depending on the current-thing because they're not what leftism actually is anymore.
The 'only racists notice or care what we're doing' tactic isn't going to work anymore. After the millionth time the white supremacists or nazis or whatever else end up being the only people talking about what people can see with their own eyes, they stop caring about the barely veiled insults.
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This isn't going to convince anyone in 2026.
"Why do you even care bro. Immigration is no big deal. You don't want to be (gasp) racist, do you?"
Everyone now realizes that mass immigration means permanent electoral dominance for the left, which is why every leftist wants it. Immigration in itself isn't the end goal, but it is such an important instrumental goal that it dominates everything else.
Put it another way, find me a leftist who is against immigration. You can't. Remember when Bernie Sanders got the memo and did a total 180?
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...
Sounds like the extremely online white supremacists were correct all along.
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That's conservatism too, there is always some heretic that needs to be burnt. Some ideological bent, political position, or spiritual disease, that threatens the christian souls of our community!
It must be nice to see everything in a binary black and white partisan position, the one drop rule of political alignment. The 1D political axis truly is the malaise of the soul, the ultimate mindkiller. The devil ever sits on the shoulders of the self righteous.
You can do purity spirals in a 2D framework as well. There was a presentation at a Libertarian Party event (I think by David Brin) that spoofed this by showing a mockup of the WSPQ version of the Nolan Chart (unlike Political Compass, Nolan oriented the chart like a diamond with libertarians at the top) with a tiny triangle labelled "Libertarian" in the top corner and the rest of the chart market "dirty fucking commie" - this accurately describes a certain tendency within libertarianism.
It goes without saying that you can do pragmatic big-tent coalition politics in a 1D framework as well. RINOs, DINOs, Blairites etc. earn a good living doing so.
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Clearly, rightist moments have had that failure pattern, the Nazis being the most obvious example.
In the current epoch, the right, being the weaker party, calls for tolerance while the left bays for blood. And so it will go until the shoe is on the other foot. When that time comes, I'll probably become a leftist.
Physician, heal thyself.
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Bryan Caplan is not a blank slatist. "Let's Ban Discrimination: A Socratic Dialogue" makes it clear that he at least thinks HBD is "a distinct possibility." More like he believes in indestructible institutions.
The West is great, even shitty people become much more productive when they come here, let's bring as many of them here as possible and let them earn their keep by finding their comparative advantage. Worried they will go on welfare or vote for communism? Let them come without eligibility for welfare or the right to vote.
It's completely delusional (how long did blacks remain slaves, again?), but it's not leftism.
If he wants A and B, but B is impossible, then he is no different than any other supporter of A. He clearly doesn't think of himself as a leftist, and he didn't choose to become one. He just stood still while the Overton window moved to where he was standing.
Glad to hear that he thinks HBD is a "possibility", although how you could be anything other than a fervent believer in HBD in 2026 is puzzling.
I don't think he's a bad guy. He's just wrong about the things that matter, and the things he's right about don't matter.
Caplan is one person I just can’t develop a theory of mind for him. He seems smart. He doesn’t seem to have any interest that would prevent him from understanding this issue since he’s tenured at GMU in their Econ department. And GMU Econ is known for probably being the most intellectually tolerant department in any US university. Garret Jones similarly blogs and writes books for the masses and Garret Jones is fairly racists. All the arguments for why Caplans arguments on immigration are unworkable are probably discussed in the GMU Econ faculty lounge.
I can understand when a Harvard guy plays down some unfortunate truths because Harvard is a political place but GMU is not Harvard.
In Caplan's eyes immigration is undoubtedly good for the migrants themselves, to a massive degree, while also benefiting the receiving country.
Imagine that Caplan believes that the benefits to the natives of avoiding immigration are not so great as to outweigh the damage done to various peoples who could be living better lives or the foregone economic growth , and is anything in his behavior incongruent?
Caplan believes (almost certainly correctly) that a mutually beneficial arrangement is possible between Americans and most third-world immigrants, and is annoyed that no powerful faction in American politics wants to find it. The not-insane pro-immigration faction in American politics (and most other western countries) which he would presumably want to support is weak enough as is, and takes the approach of "Given an effectively-fixed deal that we are allowed to offer to third-world immigrants, how do we identify a sub-population where this deal is plausibly positive for Americans?"
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That is 100% congruent for a sophomore economics major. Caplan is smarter than that. Like he’s actually expected to derive utility functions and explain risks with his world view. GMU econ department is known for having deep thinkers with lighter biases than rest of academia.
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I've tried. The best I can come up with is that he is driven more by contrarianism than anything else. There seems to be almost an aggressive refusal to think through the details of his 'invite the entire world but abolish the welfare state I guess' positions. Every post on his blog where he visits another country ends with him saying 'this country's successes prove that libertarianism plus open borders is great' or 'this country's failures prove that it should embrace libertarianism plus open borders' and then ignoring the dozens of commenters pointing out how this wouldn't work and him ignoring them.
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Overton window moved. That makes him a lefty today. Maybe that makes him more of a homeless person now. The number 1 position he advocates for is a lefty position today.
No, that's not enough to make him a lefty. It makes him just a liberal, though right-liberal, and the right is moving away from liberalism, albeit still split. The left are mostly not liberals - in fact have not been liberals for longer - and don't want him.
There is no 'liberal' or 'classical liberal' position in history that includes open borders. As he justifies it, it's more of an extreme libertarian belief, and hardline libertarians have always been politically homeless from the moment they diverged from right-liberalism (which included freedom of the individual, but also the common good of the nation and the maintenance of tradition through non-governmental means). I believe Caplan would also describe himself as a libertarian.
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Fine call him homeless. We don’t want him either.
Though would be noted his primary position “open borders” has strong support in the most activist left circles.
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"I totally support this thing that has happened before, is likely happening now, and some people want to increase to a horrendous degree. I also support this thing that has never happened before and the last time someone tried it got struck down by a judge despite being passed with nearly 60% of the votes."
You'll excuse me if I no longer give people like Caplan the benefit of the doubt.
Speaking as someone who called himself a libertarian for 20 years, the logic was always:
Pick two. Option number 2 is essentially non-negotiable at this point, and absolutely no one has even the faintest glimmer of a fantasy of a plan to actually address it, which means adding option 1 necessarily closes off option 3. Any libertarian failing to grasp this, at this point, is just a retard or engaged in enemy action.
I do not believe that it is impossible to maintain a functioning economy under conditions of (open_borders+welfare_state). I will concede that it is harder to do so than it would be under either (open_borders+social_darwinism) or (welfare_state+sakoku), but that's why there's a Stairway to Heaven and a Highway to Hell.
You absolutely can have open borders, a welfare state for citizens, and a functional economy. Dubai and Singapore* are proofs of concept if you exclude oil sheikdoms. The deal of "you live and work in a functional economy, your salary reflects this, but you are a paypig for the bottom 20% of citizens whereas your own social insurance is fucking off if you get sick" is attractive to a lot of potential immigrants if the economy is sufficiently functional.
* Singapore make a big deal about having a stingy welfare state, but the vast majority of the citizen population live in subsidised public housing.
While I’m dubious about your claims, notably places like Dubai are not democratic. They also don’t have birthright citizenship to my knowledge.
Very few countries outside the Americas have full birthright citizenship. Singapore has limited birthright citizenship for children of long-term legal residents, and Dubai has no birthright citizenship at all.
Agreed that there isn't a good example of a democracy that has pulled off mass immigration + welfare state for citizens + functioning economy - Switzerland comes pretty close though. Also it isn't clear that there are any democracies that have a "functional economy" in the strong sense @Ichonochasm is using the world - we are all stuck in a Boomer pension death spiral.
Yes but of course the U.S. for better or worse has birthright citizen and Caplan is in the U.S.
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The only mention of Singapore in the Wiki article on Open Borders:
Dubai does not appear at all, and the AI summaries suggest they have unremarkable border control policies.
Both countries have mass immigration at levels that would horrify MAGA. Singapore is about 45% foreign born (41% non-citizen but the naturalisation numbers are not published in a convenient way) and Dubai is 80+%.
Dubai will let anyone in if they are well-behaved and have employer sponsorship, which I think Caplan would count as "open borders". Singapore keep saying they are going to clamp down on low-wage immigration but somehow the construction industry is still 75% migrant and housemaids are 100% migrant.
Sorry, I might be mixing them up with some other ME state, but is Dubai the one where people are admitted to labor under borderline slavery conditions with no rights, no benefits, and no possible path to permanent residence? I can see why Caplan might find that admirable. I doubt many Americans would.
That's the one, yes. There is a reason why, as @zeke5123a points out, the states that pull this off are not generally democracies. Dubai is proof that it is possible, not that it is popular.
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Germany would have been in this category until recently. It seems relevant to me that all of those societies are growing economically and are 80 years old max.
We have not even begun to see the long term consequences.
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Well, kudos on the bare minimal acknowledgement of trade-offs and second order consequences as a concept.
But why do you think you know which is easy, and which is right? Not enforcing a border is easy. Tolerating infinite welfare fraud is easy. Printing more money to fund infinite welfare fraud so it can be sent abroad to fund extremist and terrorist groups is easy. Caving to every pity-party and crying liberal woman and naked, bad faith emotional manipulation is easy.
That doesn't mean it's right.
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We don't have a working, common understanding of what is right. Like, at all. The social cohesion is gone. The common values are gone. The common history is gone. The good will, good faith, brotherhood, all gone. You are an alien to me. Who is "we", Kemosabe?
I understand the historical context of the sorts of appeals that you are making here, but it's an organic process, not an incantation, and organic things perish.
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The saddest moment in any serious, intelligent Libertarian's life is realizing they do not live in a world with zeppelins and talking monkies.
The more common term for a serious, intelligent Libertarian for the last decade-plus has been "neoreactionary". Mr. Caplan is certainly intelligent.
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