It is no coincidence that many who oppose immigration also oppose free trade, support the war on drugs, and repeatedly suggest as remedies for every social ill more prisons, more regulations, more prosecutions, more fines, and more government.
The best solution is also the simplest: get the state out of the way.
Friedman maintained that the policies of the Great Depression were a failure because they were not based on his own interventionist proposals: to inflate and undermine property contracts. From this perspective, the state failed not because it didn't "let the market work" but because it didn't let the Chicago bureaucrats work.
This means that employment among the young, the inexperienced, and unskilled will decline with the institution of a higher minimum wage.
The evidence is only that jobholders and jobseekers are alike subject to a law which nature, perhaps unfortunately, has made universal. Like all the rest of us, they tend always to satisfy their needs and desires with the least possible exertion.
The second noticeable consequence of the state's activity in everybody's business but its own is that its own business is monstrously neglected.
In a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are 'good' in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors.
Trick names of this sort corrupt the language and confuse thought. It would hardly clarify matters to call a handout a “negative deprivation” or having your pocket picked “receiving a negative gift.”
Some of the responses to my post on General Pinochet have reminded me that along with the f
