Franklin Camargo

He fled a socialist dictatorship. Then he told me America doesn’t lock up enough people.

Franklin Camargo has a number of radioactive beliefs. He thinks America’s incarceration rate is too low. That Trump is the most pro-gay president in American history (I baited him on that one). We get into his beliefs and I challenge him with arguments from left, right, center, and stratosphere.

Franklin is a political commentator who fled Venezuela after the Maduro regime accused him of terrorism for the crime of debating a professor in class. As he tells it, the director of his university said to him, “This is a communist and revolutionary university. If you don’t like it, go to Harvard.” If only he knew!

The thing I keep coming back to in the days after this conversation is a deceptively simple claim Camargo made about the Declaration of Independence. The Founders wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” and Camargo pushed back: If they were self-evident, everyone would accept them. They don’t. So they’re not. Rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not things you simply recognize. They have to be derived, reasoned toward, argued for, and defended with evidence and logic.

This has enormous implications for the university system. If rights require derivation, then you need intellectual infrastructure for that work. You need institutions that teach people how to reason from first principles to conclusions about human dignity and flourishing. You need functioning universities. We currently have the opposite of those, where we take relatively well-intentioned and sincere students and turn them into ideological automatons. The fact that 62% of young Americans have a favorable view of socialism isn’t evidence that socialism is gaining on its merits. It’s evidence that the institutions charged with teaching people how to think have abandoned that mission entirely. The downstream consequences of that failure aren’t abstract. They’re Zohran Mamdani. They’re Somali daycares.

I challenged Franklin on the merits of socialism and democracy. If a majority of people decide that fighting inequality matters more than fighting poverty, what makes them wrong? His answer was simple: “We need to observe reality.” That isn’t exactly a devastating philosophical argument, but it is funny, and as a practical matter, reality has been devastating for socialism:

Chavez nationalized the means of production, attacked private enterprise, and promised the rich would pay for everything. The rich left or stopped being rich. Now, 25 years later, 90% of the population lives in poverty. Camargo put it this way: “You cannot help the poor by destroying those who create the most value in society.” Decades ago, Thatcher said nearly the same thing in Parliament: That her opponents would “rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich.”

But the harder, more central question I kept circling back to throughout the conversation was this: Don’t people have a right to vote against their own self-interest? Even if it means they’re voting themselves and their children into poverty?

I think they do. I think the heart of the American promise is the right to self-sabotage.

There’s no better example of this than New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani (Peace Be Upon Him). Camargo sees the parallels between Mamdani’s economic agenda and Maduro’s: Tax the rich out of existence, price controls, the government running grocery stores. I asked him whether Mamdani was elected in a free and fair election. He said yes. I asked him whether the mayor should be allowed to govern. He said yes, but drew the line at property rights. He doesn’t think a democratically elected official should be able to dictate what you charge for rent.

I completely disagree. If the people of New York City want to elect a socialist who tanks their supermarket infrastructure and imposes price controls, that is their prerogative. That’s what democracy means. My only condition: No federal bailout afterward. You voted for it. You own the consequences.

The reason this matters goes beyond New York. There’s a throughline from here to Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court case that struck down sodomy laws. When you enshrine the right to self-sabotage, you protect individual liberty and you pre-empt every attempt (from both the left and the right) to curtail your freedom on the grounds that it’s “for your own good.” That impulse, the impulse to protect people from their own choices, is the engine of authoritarianism. It’s what Chavez told Venezuelans when he said it didn’t matter if they were hungry, what mattered was saving the revolution. It’s what campus administrators tell students when they restrict speech to protect them from ideas they might find offensive. It’s the ultimate infantilization of the citizen—and an infantilized citizenry cannot sustain a democracy, which depends on people who can reason for themselves.

Camargo and I also went deep on immigration and the drug war. He made a distinction about Venezuela that I think deserves more attention than it gets: A conflict between the U.S. and Venezuela wouldn’t be a war between nations. It would be a war against a criminal organization. The Cartel de los Soles has been designated a foreign terrorist organization in the same category as al-Qaeda and ISIS. That reframing changes things, but I pushed back hard on the drug war logic itself. The Trump administration has been targeting traffickers in the Caribbean, and maybe they’re hitting the right boats. But the fixation on supply-side enforcement while ignoring demand is intellectually dishonest and creates a social quagmire. Why are Americans consuming so much fentanyl that it’s one of the leading causes of death for adults under 45? It is a hell of a lot easier to go blow up boats in the Caribbean than it is to admit that something is deeply broken at home.

Camargo and I don’t agree on everything. His confidence in incarceration as a solution is too tidy for me. His faith in markets is purer than mine. But he has a quality I find increasingly valuable: He reasons from a principle and doesn’t abandon it when the conclusion is inconvenient.

Peter