Co-Ops and the Panoptic Society

In class, we were talking about the structural benefits of co-ops, using the Craig and Pencavel paper as a jumping off point.

Last night when I get home, reading Polanyi - he references Bentham.

It made me think of one aspect of the co-op that may be a downside we didn't talk about.

In a previous life, Bentham was known to me more because of his idea being referred to in Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

Foucault uses the Panopticon to expand from the prison to the panoptic society. It is a society where we are all being watched, not just by someone above us, but by each other (so much for having no bosses, everyone is simultaneous a boss and a subordinate).

This might extend to the co-op literature. There are fewer no direct supervisors in a co-op situation.

In classical firms, if you have one, you can shirk (like I'm doing right now). You might have more or less autonomy, but you can also take just a bit longer in the bathroom than you really need.

But in a co-op, every is a boss, always being watched and at the same time having to perform the role of the boss since there's no principal agent problem here. One could imagine that this increases the intensity of work on its own, and that's even before adding the extra hours.

Reading Through the Socialist Calculation Debate

I’m glad that we started out with the readings on the socialist calculation debate. I’ll tell you why. I love Marx. The Marx I fell in love with was the Marx of the Manifesto that my girlfriend was mad that she was being forced to read for a political science class. But the problem with the Manifesto is the same problem as with all the old movies: once you ride off into the sunset, happily ever after does not just happen. Happily ever after must be theorized. Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!, sure but then what? And then of course as Marx progresses in his career what does he do if not show us the way by developing a much more in-depth analysis of the capitalist mode of production and exchange in the first volume of Capital and then working towards more volumes and then dying without completing his valedictory work. Even more contemporary activists struggle to explain the plan of the future as criticism of the current system is much easier to show injustice than to create. Mises, in his “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth identifies the problem as how “[Utopians] invariably explain how, in the cloud-cuckoo lands of their fancy, roast pigeons will in some way fly in the mouth of their comrades, but they omit to show how this miracle will take place” (2).

Economic argument did not sleep between the 1848 Manifesto and 1920, when Mises published his broadside against socialism, the previously quoted paper “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” but it is here that we begin our examination. The six papers we will examine all are in response to Mises’s provocation — Lange and Lerner writing in an effort to show where Mises was mistaken, and Hayek writing a repost in support and expansion of Mises’s original point. In this brief paper, we will examine several claims in the original paper and look at the responses.

The role of consumption goods in a socialist economy

The first thing to we want to look at is the role of consumption goods in a socialist society. Mises claims that in the socialist society, it is “who is consuming and what is to be consumed by each which is the crux of the problem of socialist distribution” (Calculation 4). For Mises, the problem is that under socialism, “It is characteristic of socialism that the distribution of consumption goods must be independent of the question of production and if its economic conditions” (Calculation 4). For Mises, we see there is a separation between the question of production and consumption, and this difference exposes the inherent problem with the socialist economy. For Oskar Lange, in his “Economic Theory of Socialism: Part One,” this fundamental issue identified by Mises does not exist. In fact, he does not see the common ownership of the productive machinery of society being an impediment to free choice in consumer goods: “The fact of public ownership of the means of production does not in itself determine the system of distributing consumers’ goods and of allocating people to various occupations, nor the principles guiding the production of commodities,” continuing, “In the socialist system as described we have a genuine market” (60). Both Lange and Lerner go to pains to show that this apparent contradiction identified by Mises is no such thing, showing how in their estimation a socialist market might work.

The problem with value in a socialist economy

One of these methods of looking at the potentiality for trade in the socialist economic system is the question of how you value the outputs of the economy. For Mises this is a problem. He sees an economy where “distribution will be determined upon the principle that the state treats all its members alike […] each comrade receives a bundle of coupons, redeemable within a certain period against a definite quantity of certain specified goods” (Calculation 5). In this economy he can see exchange building up based on these individual preferences, but he makes a point to say that this exchange will be limited and confined to exchange, and that since “no production good will ever become the object of exchange, it will be impossible to determine its monetary value” (Calculation 5–6). What happens according to Mises is that once market exchange develops and relative values are determined then that brings into question the value of labor. He assumes that a socialist society would be completely remunerated based on labor input “The comrade is thus marked up for every hour’s work put in and this entitles him to receive the product of one hour’s labor” (Calculation 6) and even though looking at a case where “labor is not a uniform” so in the end for Mises it becomes impossible to split the labor inputs and how to divide the yield of the labor socially (Calculation 7).

Mises goes deeper in the second section. It is in these pages that he makes the central claim of the work — “Without economic calculation, there can be no economy” (Calculation 14). This does not come from left field. He builds his argument by dividing goods between production goods and consumption goods, he makes the distinction between higher order and lower order goods. It is these higher order goods that he focuses on. Small individual exchange can happen, but higher-level coordination needs valuation to give production goods meaning: “The human mind cannot orientate itself properly among the bewildering mass of intermediate products and potentialities of production without such aid. It would simply stand perplexed before the problems of management and location” (Calculation 13).

Of course, these claims do not go without being addressed. Lerner takes this head on by asserting that Mises is trying to import the whole paradigm of the capitalist economy and lay it over a socialist economy. In fact, he notes “the competitive price system has to be adapted to socialist society. If it is applied in toto we have not a socialist but a competitive society” (Economic Theory and the Socialist Economy 55). And Lange notes that Mises is making a definition error, thinking that what is needed to make decisions is a monetary price, but a higher level relative valuation can work since what the planners utilize is the economic problem as a “choice between alternative” (On the Economic Theory of Socialism 54).

The separation of consumption and production in a socialist economy

From above, the starting point for Mises was the problem is that under socialism, “It is characteristic of socialism that the distribution of consumption goods must be independent of the question of production and if its economic conditions” (Calculation 4). This separation led to the whole issue of needing to value goods and then the introduction of money and then the problem with labor and higher order production goods. But as we have seen, demand doesn’t just go into a black box. As Lange notes, “The administrators of a socialist economy will have exactly the same knowledge, or lack of knowledge, of the production functions as the capitalist entrepreneurs have” (55). Hayek would argue that this would not be enough. The entrepreneurs are in aggregate, but if there was only one board they could have the same chance of making a mistake in production as any one entrepreneur would have but the distributed knowledge would make the system work: “the sort if knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form” (524). Where the consumer and producer are rent by socialism, the advocates of the competitive society see the market bringing them back together.

The virtues or vices of a “competitive society”

Within our reading, the strongest advocate for the competitive society was in Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in society”. In it, he show how the decentralized nature of the competitive society is the more useful way to respond to the constant change the economy faces: “If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances” (524). He goes on to emphasize that we must solve it be some form of decentralization. And is this decentralized society that most have lived in and that Mises points out that it “has obtained for some thousands of years” (14), but his destruction of the possibility of socialism relies less on building up the idea of the competitive economy, but instead taking it as the ideal status quo which to prove the impossibility of the socialist state.

The socialist side of the debate is not wholly critical of the competitive society. In fact, Oscar Lange thanks (though how much tongue in cheek, I do not know) for Mises forcing “socialists to recognize the importance of an adequate system of economic accounting to guide the allocation of resources in a socialist economy” (53). Far from the impossibility of taking the good parts from the capitalist system and overlay it on the socialist system, Mises arose the socialist theorists and made them look at their own system in the new light, so much that Lange offers up a statue of Mises in the economic planning bureau — an image so memorable that Hayek cites it in his own paper ten years later (529).

The virtues or vices of a socialist society

If you’re Ludwig von Mises, the whole point of your effort in writing was to prove not that socialism is bad, but that it is on the face impossible. But interestingly, he concedes at the end that no matter what he argues, the socialists will not listen, as he writes “Whoever is prepared himself to enter upon socialism on ethical grounds on the supposition that the provision of goods of a lower order for human beings under a system of common ownership of the means of production is diminished or whoever is guided by the ascetic ideals in his desire for socialism will not allow himself to be influenced in his endeavors by what we have said (33). Which is good, since Mises did not have the last word, in fact, as we looked at above, this paper set off the debate so much that he deserves a statue in Red Square.

One thing that really struck me was that I had been expecting to read about the waste of the capitalist system and the unequal distribution of resources between the workers and the capital owners in the reading. Though tangential, it had seemed as if the battle lines had already been drawn. It was not until the second part of Lange’s paper where anyone makes full throated appeal for socialism and against the capitalist mode of production and distribution, where he makes claims such as “Only a socialist economy can distribute incomes so as to attain the maximum social welfare” and “Under capitalism the distribution of the ownership of the ultimate productive resources is a very unequal one, a large part of the population owning only their labor power” (On The Economic Theory of Socialism: Part Two 123).

Conclusion:

One thing I noticed specifically in the reading for this week was that I have motivated reading. I took the wrong route and started reading the socialists responses before I read Mises because I was more sympathetic to them and the packet was smaller, honestly. That deprived me of the context I had to get by rereading while I was working on typing this up and able to see all the papers as a whole. It is a different way of looking at things so that it is more a becoming of an understanding — even though I know I’m only scratching the surface here. The other piece was not about the order I read things in, but in how I read them. I found that reading the socialists was more about reading for understanding, while reading the Mises piece I was reading prepared to criticize. Once I realized I was doing that I moved onto the Hayek essay with a much more open mind than the first time I read Hayek eight years ago.

Works Cited

Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (1920 [1990]): 1–46. The present translation was first published in F.A. Hayek, ed., Collectivist Economic Planning (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1935; reprint, Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1975).

Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review, Vol. 35, №4. (Sep., 1945): 519–530.

Abba. P. Lerner, “Economic Theory and Socialist Economy,” The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 2, №1 (Oct., 1934): 51–61.

Abba. P. Lerner, “Theory and Practice in Socialist Economy,” The Review of Economic Studies , Vol. 6, №1 (Oct., 1938): 71–75.

Oskar Lange, “On the Economic Theory of Socialism: Part One,” The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 4, №1 (Oct., 1936): 53–71

Oskar Lange, “On the Economic Theory of Socialism: Part Two,” The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 4, №2 (Feb., 1937): 123–142

Daniel Pink's "When": Clever Synthesis of Science to Tell a Story

Daniel Pink’s strength in is books is taking interesting studies and framing them with context to make those individual studies have greater meaning through the connections with other work. It may come across as more self-help than social science, but sometimes self-help is needed. In this case, it is at least grounded in science.

In “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing,” Pink looks at the nature of time in three sections. In the first, he looks at the day, and how we can be self-aware of our own natural patterns to make the most of our days, and order them that will optimize our work and decisions. Importantly, this will vary across individuals, so there is no one-size-fits-all answer.

In the second section, he pulls back and explores beginnings, middles, and ends separately – their importance and again how to maximize each step in a project if it is going to last a day or even how to make the most out of your whole life. For many reasons, both my age and where I’m at in a project at work, the section on middles spoke to me. Neither are at the beginning, but I know the finish line is out there. I’m still growing, but already writing my legacy. I think I’m at the point where he identifies a “uh-oh effect” where I can recenter and make progress anew.
Finally, there is a section on the importance of syncing up with people around you, if you’re in a chorale group or transporting food in India – being part of a larger whole gives purpose and meaning to your actions and is good for you to boot!

What makes it self-helpy is that after each chapter is an unnumbered section with worksheets and advice on how to apply the lessons just covered. I’m not going to go through each one and follow it, but  I did have a couple of takeaways about the importance of building and maintaining my network that I might follow through with.

When is a quick read – just over 200 pages with several charts and sections broken up so you can fly through it in an evening, so there is pretty good bang for your time investment.

De Bello Christo

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of secularists dropping softly behind.

Sale! SALE! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Grabbing the buggies just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a human sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the buggie that we flung them in,

Toys and electronics reflecting in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the hate

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Buy one, get one free*

With purchase of equal or lesser value.

Public Choice Economics in the Immigration Debate

This paper looks at Public Choice Economics, specifically in the context of how using Public Choice can shed more light on the immigration issue. To do so, it will cover the basics of Public Choice. Then it will explore the history of immigration in the United States, and from there the current attitude on immigration. The final section will look at the implications of using a Public Choice frame to look at immigration and the built-in assumptions to shine a light on Public Choice.

Introduction

Immigration has become a contentious issue politically but came to a head when Donald Trump rode down his escalator and announced his candidacy for presidency in 2015. In that speech he said “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”¹ A key aspect of his appeal was his readiness to demonize others who were not of his race or social class, and limiting immigration was a huge part of his stump speeches. What does Trump’s embrace of an anti-immigration platform and his election say about the United States? The reader will see that with a Public Choice framework the limiting of immigration is a logical conclusion.

The Basics of Public Choice

Public choice, also known as social choice, is an attempt to use the methods of utilitarian economics and apply those theories to the theory and practice of politics and government. Some of the things focused on include profit and loss, price, and efficiency. The focus is that people in the political sphere are just that – people. As people they have the same issue with bias in their dealings. Political actors, just like economic actors, act alone even if they are in groups and importantly they are self-interested.²

What this means is that in the theory, there can be a parallel failure of government just as there can be market failure, and thus the solution for market failure is not necessarily government intervention, but perhaps a look at how the market is designed.³

Further, the public choice theorist looks at public decisions as being part of a decision made between interest groups of varying power. This has numerous consequences within the theory. One of these is that in a political theory based on one axis of choice, the only way to receive the winning vote based on a simple majority is to appeal to the median voter, or the group in the middle.⁴ This means that the parties will cluster their choices in the middle. There are other consequences as well. For example, there is in the theory a concern over self-interested government officials. It is in their self-interest as bureaucrats to consolidate power in their offices in the form of growing budgets and reports in a way that heightens their own esteem and financial rewards in terms of pay and promotion.⁵

Public choice theory traces its roots to several thinkers in the eighteenth century. Adam Smith, writing in 1776 criticized the relationship between the state and businesses as well as worried about monopolies. Other thinkers worried about the best way to chose in a group amongst a variety of choices. The Marquis de Condorcet in 1785 looked at the problem of cycling. In cycling there is no one preferred choice amongst the group. An example would be to try and pick one overall winner in a competition between rock, paper, and scissors in the classic game of skill and chance. There is no one preferred choice between the three. Finally, Jean-Charles de Borda in 1781 examined that in elections that varying intensity of feeling amongst choices would create issues. To combat these varied enthusiasm, he proposed a ranked-choice system so that each competing choice would be ordered by overall preference.⁶  

The school really came into its own in the twentieth century. Thinkers such as Duncan black looked backwards and rediscovered the work of Condorcet and his contemporaries to expand the work.⁷ Aside from notable contributions like Black’s’ discovery of the median voter theorem were breakthroughs like Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem which claims that there is in fact no possible democratic system that can guarantee the best choice based on group preference outside of a dictatorship –  all other systems have inherent flaws. For his work on this and other economic achievements, Arrow was the youngest economic Nobelist at the time of his award.⁸ Coming right on the heels of Arrow was Anthony Downs who in 1957 posited Rational Choice Theory, where parties want to meet their objectives of money, prestige, and power rather than any specific policy. Downs is most renown, though, for his idea of rational ignorance. With rational ignorance you look at the time it takes to learn about a policy a candidate supports and then you balance it against the chance that your own vote would be the one that would tip the election, the most rational choice is in fact not voting at all. Downs says the question is not why it is that, so few people turn out to vote, but why it is that, so many do.⁹

The true founders of the school are James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. These two economists took the groundwork laid buy these previous thinkers and synthesized Public Choice into a concrete theory of its own. Their 1962 book The Calculus of Consent looked at the stage in which voting rules were chosen, point out that the act of choosing how to chose being as important as the choosing itself.¹⁰ The Public Choice School of Buchannan and Tullock is also known as the Virginia School of political economics based on Buchanan’s work at several university in the OId Dominion State. It is closely related to the Rochester School and the Chicago School, all noted for the conservative political leanings.¹¹

Historical and Contemporary Policy Debate

The United States has been a nation of immigrants before it was a country. From Jamestown in 1609 on, waves of people have come to settle on the land. The native population was subdued, murdered, and displaced to make way for successive groups coming to the land to escape the land they lived on for fear of religious persecution like the puritan pilgrims who settled the Massachusetts Bay area in the seventeenth century to the Irish coming over in the nineteenth century to avoid famine.¹² Traditionally, there had been plenty of land out west as the frontier was pushed further out and the railroads came, and people could settle the land. Many newcomers still settled in the city in nationalized enclaves, but the expectation was that eventually they would lose their former nationality identity and instead take on a new identity as an American as the national ideal of the “Melting Pot” took hold. The idea was that though the people on the shores between the Atlantic and the Pacific came from many places originally, they were to become Americans over time

The ideal has not always been the historical actuality. Mainly welcoming of the right sorts of Europeans based on who held economic power, successive panics led to the implementation of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to keep out the Chinese, particularly on the west coast in the name of protecting workers who were already American.¹³ This is not to mention that those workers deserving protection came in under various laws which were dictated by the states because there was no federal immigration station until the opening of Ellis Island in 1892. This led to the welcoming of generations of eastern Europeans as the quota system privileged those from Europe over immigrants over those from other areas on the globe.¹⁴

Currently, according to the left-leaning Center for American Progress, “Approximately 43.3 million foreign-born people live in the United States.”¹⁵ This is a quadrupling of the foreign-born population since the relaxation of the immigration quotas, but it also includes naturalized citizens’, lawful permanent residents, those on temporary visas, as well as unauthorized migrants. Though these numbers represent all-time peaks, as a percentage of the population it is below the total of foreign born right around the time of the opening of Ellis island in 1890, when 14.8 percent of the US population was foreign born.¹⁶

The most recent presidential election shone a spotlight on immigration, with the presidential Candidate Donald Trump making illegal immigration a centerpiece of his campaign. One of his central promises was to build a wall on the entirety of the southern border with between the US and Mexico, and to make Mexico pay for the construction of the wall. As we close in on one full year of now-President Trump’s first term, little actual progress on the building of the wall or foreign finance.¹⁷ The issue of immigration has been conflated with illegal immigration despite several important facts. The first is that of all unauthorized people in the country, it is only a quarter of all foreign-born individuals. The second is that after the crash in 2008, in-migration from Mexico turned negative. More people were returning to Mexico than were entering the United States Illegally. Finally, in percentage terms the greatest growth comes not from the Latin American population, but from Asian in-migration. From 2010 to 2015, there was a 17 percent increase in the number of Asian American or Pacific Islanders in the US.¹⁸ These facts have not quieted the most vocal of those opposing immigration, as the white “native” population was strongly drawn to the Trump campaigns’ economic nationalism covering both trade and immigration policies. Once the wall was in place, there would be less competition for low-wage jobs at the bottom of the wage ladder, and the return of American manufacturing would open America and allow it to return to its former greatness. And this narrative discounts the coded and uncoded racism against the foreign born presented in the national discourse by Trump and his surrogates. 

However, even with the subject in the news, the overall desire of Americans to further limit immigration has been trending down. Gallup, in reporting a poll this year, notes “Though preventing illegal immigration was one of the president's key campaign promises, the general desire to decrease immigration is near its historic low in Gallup's trend over more than half a century.”¹⁹ The current number of people polled who want to see less immigration is at 35%. This is lower than the number who are happy with the current level, 38% but more than the number of people who want to see more immigration at 24%, though this later number has been growing over time. The graph below shows the trends where after hitting a peak in the late 90s and then spiking directly after 9/11, the story of America’s feelings about immigration has been one of more permissiveness.²⁰

Figure 1²¹

Potential Position of School in Policy

Ultimately it seems that with the policy of open immigration a unanimous constitution would ideally have a vote for everyone in the voting unit to ask if a member should be allowed to become a member of the group. One thing that is holding back potential immigrants is that we use the constitution as the final arbiter of the exact meaning of the law – and that is divined through the Supreme Court.

There is no phrasing in the original document about who specifically can be brought in. Article I speaks of “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” In section 2 and then prohibits Congress from making rules against immigration of free or slave people until 1808.²² The original document was more favoring a federalist form of government structure where more power was devolved to the states. This form held strong for the first eighty years until the contradiction between the free north and the slave-holding south could no longer be tolerated in a single state. The constitutional amendments that came after the war could be a citizen of the south as an imposition. These amendments, specifically section one of the fourteenth amendment was drawn broadly to include all members of the once enslaved peoples: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”²³

The United States’ constitution is the one we have inherited, and as such, as a naturalized or born citizen it is the choice structure that we have, based on representative democracy. Within a Public Choice context, it does meet the goals of being limiting and lasting,²⁴ but where it fails is that the individual citizens have inherited it without choosing it. As a structure it has changed and evolved over time. Very few would vote to accept the constitution and its amendments as given. In fact, the only people who do actively make a positive choice to be governed by the rules of the constitution are those who make the choice to be immigrate to the United States. So, with a broad public choice lens the group that is doing the choosing did not assent to the laws governing the structure, but the status quo is to not grow the members of that group.   

What we can see now with the framework of public choice economics is that the design of the choosing method ties the hands of the majority. Looking at the stats in the previous section, we can see that a great majority of the participants in the poll wanted to see immigration growth in total to be the same or the current level than we now have it (the polling did not specify the composition of the preferential kind of immigrants). With the electoral college and the de facto first past the post constitutional system, the parties are beholden to the loudest groups within it, and in this case one of the key planks was to forcibly limit immigration in the guise of making in-migration from the southern border more difficult, as well as punishing those brought here at a young age and changing the visa laws for other immigrants. This means that the wide, dispersed group whose preferences are the status quo or greater will have their voices drowned out by the loudest of the minority – true tyranny, that.

The Public Choice framework can show us how there is a delicate balance between the way things are and how we make choices is structured by the choosing mechanism. America has two parties with a strong executive in terms of driving the party agenda. There are many issues that get grouped up under the party banner. Many times, there are conflicting interest groups in the parties. In the issue of immigration, the republican party has both economic nationalists and free marketers, but they stick together because of their collective priorities at this juncture are more important than what they see the collective priorities of the other party, which is itself a bundle of contradictions. Were each issue to be voted on in a preference poll with a single axis or limited group of choices like the Gallup poll in immigration above, then there would be no reason to join parties. Alas, politics, just like economics, is about making the most of limited resources and weighing the costs over the benefits in an infinite round of trade-offs.

Reference List:

1. Posted By Ian SchwartzOn Date June 16, 2015. Trump: Mexico Not Sending Us Their Best; Criminals, Drug Dealers And Rapists Are Crossing Border. Video | RealClearPolitics. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/06/16/trump_mexico_not_sending_us_their_best_criminals_drug_dealers_and_rapists_are_crossing_border.html. Accessed December 10, 2017.

2. Butler, Eamonn. Public choice - a primer. The Institute of Economic Affairs, 2013:21-24.

3. Butler, Eamonn. Public choice - a primer. The Institute of Economic Affairs, 2013:40-44.

4. Munger MC, Munger KM. Choosing in groups: analytical politics revisited. New York: Cambridge University Press; 2015: 88-92.

5. Butler, Eamonn. Public choice - a primer. The Institute of Economic Affairs, 2013:88-93.

6. Butler, Eamonn. Public choice - a primer. The Institute of Economic Affairs, 2013:30-32.

7. Butler, Eamonn. Public choice - a primer. The Institute of Economic Affairs, 2013: 32.

8. Arnold L. Kenneth Arrow, Youngest to Win Nobel for Economics, Dies at 95. Bloomberg.com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-22/kenneth-arrow-youngest-to-win-nobel-for-economics-dies-at-95. Published February 21, 2017. Accessed December 10, 2017.

9. Butler, Eamonn. Public choice - a primer. The Institute of Economic Affairs, 2013:32.

10. Butler, Eamonn. Public choice - a primer. The Institute of Economic Affairs, 2013:33.

11. Butler, Eamonn. Public choice - a primer. The Institute of Economic Affairs, 2013:114.

12. History.com Staff. U.S. Immigration Before 1965. History.com. http://www.history.com/topics/u-s-immigration-before-1965. Published 2009. Accessed December 10, 2017.

13. History.com Staff. U.S. Immigration Before 1965. History.com. http://www.history.com/topics/u-s-immigration-before-1965. Published 2009. Accessed December 10, 2017.

14. History.com Staff. U.S. Immigration Before 1965. History.com. http://www.history.com/topics/u-s-immigration-before-1965. Published 2009. Accessed December 10, 2017.

15. the CAP Immigration Team and Michael D. Nicholson. The Facts on Immigration Today: 2017 Edition. Center for American Progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/reports/2017/04/20/430736/facts-immigration-today-2017-edition/. Accessed December 10, 2017.

16. the CAP Immigration Team and Michael D. Nicholson. The Facts on Immigration Today: 2017 Edition. Center for American Progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/reports/2017/04/20/430736/facts-immigration-today-2017-edition/. Accessed December 10, 2017.

17.  Johnson J, Sullivan S. From 'build that wall' to kick the can: Trump's border promise might be hard to break. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/from-build-that-wall-to-kick-the-can-trumps-border-promise-might-be-hard-to-break/2017/04/26/1137581a-2a96-11e7-be51-b3fc6ff7faee_story.html?utm_term=.d89b0b811391. Published April 26, 2017. Accessed December 10, 2017.

18. the CAP Immigration Team and Michael D. Nicholson. The Facts on Immigration Today: 2017 Edition. Center for American Progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/reports/2017/04/20/430736/facts-immigration-today-2017-edition/. Accessed December 10, 2017.

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