Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Tyler, you are just so much more creative and imaginative than I am. My rather prosaic mind hears an idea like that and thinks the idea that we’re going to have internal checkpoints within the country — even if it’s for one type of people and doesn’t apply to others — doesn’t quite know how we’d do that. It seems — No checkpoint. You enforce through the IRS. You’re sent to Idaho. If you leave Idaho in less than four years, you pay another 20 percent of your income in tax to the federal government. There’s no strong enforcement. But also, a lot of people — if they show up in Idaho, they will stay, I think, out of good faith. Maybe half of them won’t. But if half of them do, that seems like a big achievement. You’re for more immigration anyway, right? So you don’t mind if they trickle down into Nebraska. I would say, if the only way for me to get more immigrants is they have to be in one part of the country, I would probably settle for that and compromise with you on this plan. Maybe that’s not where they can make the biggest contribution to the American economy, to the American fisc, to their own families. I’d rather let people choose that than make the choices about where they want to live, including immigrants make those choices.…

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