In a comment on a post on War on Guns I have been challenged by David Codrea to comment on my vision of ridding the world of "borders", and why I think it is necessary.
OK. Here goes:
David writes: "I'm not ready to admit any Al Quaeda operative who wants to come on over and stroll freely about." Who's to decide who is an Al Quaeda operative and who isn't? The feds are certainly not very good at it. I would much rather be "allowed" to defend myself and my property than to trust my safety to those who only want control. Many people don't take responsibility for their own safety because of the legal repercussions of doing so. I don't care what someone is or is claimed to be, but only what they do. Initiate force or fraud and I don't care if you are Al Quaeda, a cop, or BATFE, you are my enemy. Come to think of it, who really constitutes the bigger threat to my liberty? I'll bet you know the answer to that one.
David says: "That is not the world we are in, and not likely to be for the foreseeable future. .....Right now, like it or not, we have what we have. ....... In the structure that exists....." and I agree. He is pointing out, quite correctly, that the attitudes of the people and the governmental realities prevent a rational, reasonable, solution to bad guys moving to America and wreaking havoc. You don't cure cancer by removing one cancerous cell and then saying "See, you are still dying!" You must remove all the cancerous tumors and then make certain that any stragglers are destroyed before they can grow into a new tumor.
Tyranny is the same way. I don't think real freedom will ever be accomplished piecemeal. This is why I am a radical. That isn't a popular thing to say. People don't want to face the fact that they will have to relinquish their hold on their favorite bit of authoritarianism. And "immigration control" is a very popular piece of the tyranny machine.
The truth is, the freedom to travel, as long as you don't trespass on private property, is an indispensable part of individual liberty. If government owns all the land around us, or if it owns us and the immigrants as well, then government has the authority to declare independent migrants to be "illegal". Otherwise government is overstepping its authority even if it is a popular stance. Liberty may not always be "safe", but no one who knows liberty demands that it be.
Added: I realize that I left out one important fact, and that is that curing cancer (or tyranny) can be painful and some people choose to forgo the treatment and let nature take its course. That is their choice, but they do not have my permission to make that choice for me.
Well put, although I fear that it will be impossible to achieve the goal Mr. Codrea set.
ReplyDeleteI do appreciate the historical irony inherent in his objection to "illegal" immigration today. The modern concept of "legal" and "illegal" immigration has only been around since 1924, and was introduced as an explicitly racist effort to favor Northern Europeans, who were at the time considered a different race from "swarthy" Southern and Eastern Europeans. And of course those Eastern European immigrants included some from Romania, where they have names like "Codrea."
On the other hand, that same law explicitly _exempted_ Mexicans and other immigrants from the Americas. In short, we have here someone who was the intended target of the current anti-immigration regime defending its use in persecuting those who it was intended to ignore.
I just know who the real enemy is, and I refuse to be distracted. It isn't pragmatic to say that borders are an instrument of tyranny.
ReplyDeleteKen Hagler, if you read the totality of my comments, I specifically asked Kent to:
ReplyDeleteshow us how we could just open all borders and ports to all comers, right now, with the structures in place that such an action would certainly collide with, and demonstrate how my understanding is wrong.
That has not been addressed, and you seem to want to instead portray people who share those sentiments as motivated by xenophobia and racism. That's dismissive of everyone who shares those concerns.
How about persuading people like me by showing where my concerns are misplaced?
From an economist's standpoint, under the current setup, open borders would ultimately cause a huge economic upheavel. Part of why we are so rich and the rest of the world so poor is because we limit who benefits from our wealth. My child can get a free education through grade 12, and a cheap associate's degree as well by virtue of his being an American and nothing more, whereas our Mexican neighbors have no such benefits.
ReplyDeleteIf we allowed open borders, there would be a rush of people coming in, a glut of blue-collar workers who would flood the market and bottom out the pay. In the following generation, the line would creep up to white-collar jobs. The immediate result would be people like you and I get paid less (perhaps nothing), even while our costs also go down, and must meet higher standards within our work.
Ultimately the economy would stabilize and the nation would benefit, retaking its role as a major world producer as well as designer. But you and I personally wouldn't. Our prices for land and houses would skyrocket, our salaries would drop. Our taxes would go up for fewer services (a primarily production-level society doesn't make the per capita income to afford the socialist programs we have now at this level). I will say, it would certainly be the Christian thing to do, though.
And all of this is ignoring the political, social and security implications. There would be a backlash, there would be a culture war. Most likely the immigrants would not be libertarian, and so your viewpoint would be drowned out.
But it would definitely help a lot of people, and would probably push America back into economic strength.
David- The reason I don't explain how we can open the borders "with the structures in place that such an action would certainly collide with" is because, as I explained in the post, that I don't think you can do it. Not without a big mess.
ReplyDeleteThe welfare state must be ended. It will have to end no matter whether the borders are opened or not. Continued theft-by-government can't be justified. You might as well rip the bandage off quickly and stop both counterproductive government actions simultaneously.
It is the right thing to do.
"It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state."
ReplyDelete-Milton Friedman
I think economists and right-libertarians have come to grips with this, and left-libertarians have yet to. There's a serious order of operations problem with working towards open borders now. It's all well and good to call for ending both simultaneously, but compare the odds of repealing all welfare, free emergency room care and schooling for non-citizens now to the odds of getting some kind of amnesty and increased legal immigration now. You can work for both and only get one.
After we end welfare, free emergency room care and free schooling we can work on open borders.
Its helpful to realize also that a truly free, truly libertarian society may not shake out the way we imagine. Specifically, if all land were privately owned and there were no government mandates of inclusion and non-discrimination, for practical purposes, immigration might be limited to people with jobs or independent wealth. And there's nothing wrong with that. But in the absence of such a system, closed immigration can be a rough and inefficient approximation of a free society.
Nezumi wrote: My child can get a free education through grade 12 ...
ReplyDeleteOnly if by "free" you mean you don't directly pay all the costs out of your family budget. It ain't free by any stretch of the imagination; and similarly, it ain't worth the price.
After we end welfare, free emergency room care and free schooling we can work on open borders.
ReplyDeleteTactically, I think you have it backwards. If you open the borders, consumption of welfare of every kind will skyrocket, and then welfare will go bankrupt and end. All welfare, of every kind, all at once.
Giving illegal immigrants driver's licenses is a freedom-enhancing step in the right direction, in both the short and long term.
Balkanization is a good thing, it reduces the tax base of any given welfare planner, and sets the welfare planners to competing. These United States were designed to be Balkanized into at least 13 pieces.
The idea that 'people like you and me' will have the bottom drop out of the lifestyle we can earn is false. Protectionism and trade restrictions of any kind makes all but a tiny elite of favored producers poorer. This result is also true for protectionism for labor (aka closed borders). Look at how rich the middle class of North Korea and East Germany were.
Anonymous- the only disagreement I have is that no one should submit to "drivers licenses" since they are just another illegitimate restriction on travel, and the act of a slave.
ReplyDelete"I think economists and right-libertarians have come to grips with this, and left-libertarians have yet to. "
ReplyDeleteSpeak for yourself, buddy.
I think it's funny that all you big-shot American jingoists keep arguing for closing or opening something that does not exist. It's entertaining, like Christians debating the finer points of doctrine of a Jesus that never existed (and, in the past, killing each other over it).
Here's a left-libertarian's view: you're all full of it.
"Borders" may be imaginary, but the fences, guards, and prisons are real enough. Just ask the survivors who dared to cross without permission and were caught.
ReplyDeleteThat is why it is worth discussing; people are dying over this issue, and more will die in the future. That which can keep "them" out, can trap "us" in. And without some sanity, it will only get worse.
"Borders" may be imaginary, but the fences, guards, and prisons are real enough. Just ask the survivors who dared to cross without permission and were caught.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, "the privilege of driving" may be imaginary, but the punishment for driving without a license is real enough. Having a driver's license is a degree of submission. I am willing to trade a certain amount of submission in one area -- while never thinking of it as morally valid -- in order to enable a larger amount of freedom elsewhere in my life.
show us how we could just open all borders and ports to all comers, right now, with the structures in place that such an action would certainly collide with, and demonstrate how my understanding is wrong.
The ever-increasing bailouts/nationalizations suggest we're doing to experience the disruption from the structures in place going bankrupt, anyway. As long as that big mess is unavoidable, why not get some freedom in return? Open the borders and ports now, starting by implementing untraceable electronic money transfers. Like booze during prohibition, most people will say it's wrong in public, and most people will secretly do it.
Of course they accuse you of being immoral for breaking their made-up fantasy rules. All people who believe in nonsense are invested in their fantasy rules: sometimes they build whole castles in the sky around them. I mean, you can take this to an obsessive degree. Just look at any politician.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that these people believe in this fantasy world tells us that they are dangerous and irrational. But why should we be asking Kent "Kent, how do you intend to remove this fantasy line without endangering the fantasy entity?" Why should we even discuss this? Can't we talk about the real world?
The whole system needs to be flushed as quickly as possible. Ending immigration barriers is one part of the total destruction of the state. Borders are drawn by military conquest, fortified by theft called taxation, and enforced by kidnapping called detention. They are justified by the existence of other enterprises based on coercion such as public schools, the welfare state, and the turf claims of continent-spanning gangsters. Supporting the boundaries of coercion imply legitimacy for the coercion they are set up to protect.
ReplyDeleteThe freed market will provide better defense for terrorist targets than government can, just like the free-est markets in existence have always provided everything other than coercion better than governments. Defense of life and property is a service that will be in demand, and it can be provided better by enterprises whose first priority isn't ensuring its own monopoly. A libertarian country would also not drop bombs on cities to assert domination over the people and resources of a region and will therefore breed fewer terrorists.
What right libertarians have yet to come to grips with is that liberty is not a value to be reserved for the chosen few in some kind of Soviet game. The more widely liberty is distributed, the more everyone has and the better society operates.
David Codrea, I was just commenting on the historical irony of your objection. I find it's generally unnecessary to portray anti-immigration people as racist and/or xenophobic, as they are quite capable of doing that by themselves.
ReplyDeleteAs I said, I don't think it's possible to persuade people like you. To illustrate, let's consider the only specific concern you offered: "In the structure that exists, to adopt blind-eyed laissez faire would ensure balkanization, and when you have two or more disparate cultures competing for the same territory, you have, at best, tension. As the disparity increases, so does the tension. At worst, you have hell on earth."
That particular xenophobic fantasy has been trotted out for ever round of anti-immigrant hysteria since the Germans in the late 18th century. It was wrong then, it's wrong now, and it's been wrong every time in between, but if the entire course of US history doesn't persuade you, nothing I do or say will make a difference.
I have a new post related to this subject: Preserving "Our Culture"
ReplyDelete