I’ve seen multiple YouTube videos of Q&A sessions when Dinesh D-Souza gives talks at universities. He often gets his share of hostile comments and I wondered how he would be treated at Stanford when he spoke there last month. So I watched the first few minutes of his speech and then jumped to Q&A. The talk is titled “The moral case for Trump’s wall.” It probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: I’m not a fan of the wall.
The bottom line: The questions and comments from even the students who clearly disagree with D’Souza were uniformly civil and D’Souza responded in kind. Beyond the tone, there was a lot of good discussion. I haven’t checked all of D’Souza’s facts but if they are correct (and I already know that some of them are correct), then he knocked it out of the park. He said at the start of the Q&A that he wanted hostile questions. I don’t know him, but I would bet that he ended up appreciating that the tone was not that hostile. He seemed to say that at the end.
I was especially impressed by the honesty of the young woman who challenged him in the last question (at the 1:18:15 point) and D’Souza’s answers to her.
Also, I liked his discussion of young people at the 1:05:00 point.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
Mar 24 2019 at 8:42am
I respect D’Souza in the same way Mary McCarthy respected Lillian Hellman.
Thaomas
Mar 24 2019 at 10:32am
This whole idea of the “wall” being a moral issue at all is wrong. It is an infrastructure project that needs to be subjected to C/B analysis like any other. There is a moral dimension in whether the mere presence of a person who has crossed the border legally is a large negative benefit that would weigh in the comparison of present costs and future benefits, although there would still be the empirical issue of whether the “wall” is the least cost way to reduce the presence of people crossing the border illegally.
Mark Bahner
Mar 27 2019 at 11:15pm
That’s the kicker to me. I spent a significant part of my career as an engineer studying trends in technology. And I even do it for fun.
One of the most fundamental trends in the world is that of “dematerialization.” The same economic output is achieved with fewer and fewer materials. (There are an uncountable number of example, but take for instance candles to incandescent lights to fluorescent lights to LED lights. Or copper telephone wires to fiber optic wires to wireless communications. Or film cameras to digital cameras to cell phone cameras.) Another absolutely fundamental trend is towards increased computer power. Putting those two trends together, it seems virtually impossible that a border wall could be less expensive than using drones with computer analyses of their videos to keep people from crossing the border.
The Cato Institute has conservatively estimated the cost of a steel barrier wall at approximately $37 million per mile. Compare that to a single Vanguard drone. It costs $45,000, has a range of 35 km, and a flight time of 90 minutes. So for approximately the same cost as a single mile of steel barrier border wall, the U.S. federal government could probably buy approximately 1000 Vanguard drones! (Presuming the federal government would get a discount for buying in bulk…but Pentagon procurement practices being what they are, maybe they’d pay a penalty for buying in bulk. So, say 500-1000 drones for the capital cost of a single mile of steel fence. 😉 ).
That’s one of the many things that bugs me about Donald Trump. He spends taxpayer money like he’s on a reality show, and the money isn’t real. (Possibly even worse is his insane claim that he knows more about drones than “anyone”!)
Roger D McKinney
Mar 24 2019 at 7:48pm
People tend to forget Mises’ Nation State and Economy, but he had a lot to say about nationalities and immigration in it. I’m mostly a proponent of free immigration, but his statements about people having the right to protect the culture they have built made a big impression on me. Mises saw nations in primarily linguistic/cultural terms. The US had built a free market economy throughout the 19th century that achieved amazing things. Then massive immigration from Germany and Eastern Europe brought an invasion of socialists that changed the culture and began our long descent into an ever more socialist society. It would have been nice to preserve the limited government and free markets that the nation had built for a century. That would have required limiting immigration.
Hazel Meade
Mar 28 2019 at 11:52am
I’m skeptical that the American shift toward socialism had anything to do with German or Eastern European immigration. There were plenty of socialists in the UK, France, and other Western European countries during the same time period. Marxism caught on in the UK almost immediately. Rather those ideas caught on because they were direct outgrowths of our common shared culture, which has always contained the seeds of socialist thinking.
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