The following is a statement released by the Libertarian Party recognizing the anniversary of the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riot…
It was on this day last year that months of lies and provocation created a powder keg that culminated in the violent and embarrassing insurgence at the U.S. Capitol, sadly resulting in loss of life.
While January 6, 2021 is remembered for the actions of right-wing rabble-rousers, perpetuating hate and stoking division is hardly a habit limited to the GOP. Both establishment parties actively expand the rift in our society, pushing many to the brink of violence.
Sadly, those intent on leading this country appear to have learned no lessons from the events of Jan 6th.
Initiating violence runs counter to seeking a world of peace and liberty. It is perhaps for that very reason that so many Americans are no longer able to find a home in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party.
Despite every attempt by the duopoly to keep competition and any alternative voices out of the political conversation for decades, Americans are realizing that they do not want to live in fear and anger – and realizing that there is another way.
The Libertarian Party does not offer an option for those who want to demonize their fellow humans; we do not offer a place where nuance is rejected and thoughts or opinions must conform to the whims of one man or woman.
What we offer is a commitment to defending each person’s right to engage in any activity that is peaceful and honest, and a rejection of the use of force to achieve political or social goals.
Libertarians stand on principles derived from mutual respect between individuals. We seek peace for all people and believe that only through real freedom can peace be realized.
This past year, we have all come to ask, “What has our country become?” Let’s turn our focus to what our country is to be.
Let January 6, 2022 be remembered for something very different. Make this the day that you reject those who exploit us to attain more power. Reject the establishment parties once and for all, and join us in bringing forth a future of liberty and of peace.
Herer’s a video interview with the guy above.
This is a quote from the interview: “This is an orchestrated, communist assault on America to destroy America’s borders, to create confusion in America, to overwhelm the system politically.” —Trevor Loudon, communism expert
Behind the Push for Open Borders
https://www.facebook.com/epochtimes/videos/2132019683512986/
Communism Expert on What’s Behind the Push for Open Borders
An interview with Trevor Loudon, author of “The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists, and Progressives in the U.S. Congress”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/communism-expert-on-whats-behind-the-push-for-open-borders_2941964.html
“Traditionalist
January 17, 2022 at 07:16
Good morning, Andy. I can certainly see why Jared and those who agree with him can’t answer your superior logic. One quibble: as I see it, immigration is a matter of national, cultural, and civilizational survival. The flooding of third world mud into our home is an imminent, clear and present danger. As such, I don’t see it as an issue we can just overlook when selecting a candidate.”
I agree that the mass welfare statist immigration that has been happening over the last several decades IS a threat to liberty, and a threat to civilization in general, but we are so screwed, especially at the federal level, that voting does not matter much. Donald Trump was President for 4 years, and he might have slowed down the immigration a little bit, but there were STILL over one million people coming in per year under Trump. Joe Biden appears to be escalating it, but Trump was President for 4 years, and he FAILED to do anything of great substance to “Make America Great Again,” in spite of his rhetoric.
So when I voted for Jacob Hornberger to be the LP nominee for President in the last round of voting at the LP National Convention, and when I voted for Jo Jorgensen in the general election, I did so IN SPITE of their cringey stance and rhetoric on immigration. They both got enough issues right, especially with ending the Federal Reserve System, that I thought that they merited a protest vote, Really, any vote for anyone other than the Democratic or Republican party nominees for high level office, especially for President, is a protest vote, Well, in addition to being a protest vote, there is also the running of an educational campaign. Jo Jorgensen was not the best libertarian messenger, but she got most stuff right, and she was the best messenger that the Libertarian Party has had on its presidential ticket since 2004, so I figured she merited a vote, and it is not like there was anyone better on my ballot.
“Elsewhere, I’ve already detailed some of the extant problems with Murray Rothbard’s essay which you have again reposted. The New American article, on the other hand, is excellent. I’ve been involved with the JBS since its early days.”
What problem do you have with the Murray Rothbard essay, “Nations By Consent”? I think he gets it right in illustrating that an anarcho-capitalist society would not have open borders, and why nation states should not have them either.
Good morning, Andy. I can certainly see why Jared and those who agree with him can’t answer your superior logic. One quibble: as I see it, immigration is a matter of national, cultural, and civilizational survival. The flooding of third world mud into our home is an imminent, clear and present danger. As such, I don’t see it as an issue we can just overlook when selecting a candidate.
Elsewhere, I’ve already detailed some of the extant problems with Murray Rothbard’s essay which you have again reposted. The New American article, on the other hand, is excellent. I’ve been involved with the JBS since its early days.
Jared said: “The paleolibertarian, LPMC conservatarian, Hoppean reactionary position that immigration restrictions are a positive good derived from property rights is an aberration even within the Austrolibertarian tradition.”
Libertarianism as properly defined is based on the Non-Aggression Principle and property rights. A key characteristic of property rights is exclusivity to property, which means the right to exclude people from being on or using property. If there is no exclusivity to property there is no property rights. If there is no property rights, there is no libertarianism.
Advocating that everyone on the planet should have access to property runs contrary to the concept of property rights.
” Friedman actually cited welfarism as a reason to prefer illegal to legal immigration.”
Yes, I have seen a video online where Milton Friedman said this. I would say that this is in some ways a better stance than some mass immigration libertarians have, because at least he acknowledges that there are some problems caused by immigration, but I still see flaws with this.
#1) Illegal immigrants actually CAN and DO get access to taxpayer funded programs, and, given the misinterpretation of Birthright Citizenship in the USA, the offspring of are regarded as American citizens, and this entitles them to every things available to American citizens, plus, under chain migration, they can bring in and gain citizenship for their family members.
#2) There are other problems with immigration beyond welfare. Some immigrant groups do cause the crime rates to go up. A super-majority of modern day immigrants and their offspring do vote for more socialism and more gun control, and many of them also support anti-free speech policies. Some immigrants are hostile to the American culture. There are some immigrants that most Americans just don’t want here. The preferences of the existing population does matter. While no immigration policy is likely to please everyone, when policy is being formed, it ought to try to best approximate the preferences of the largest percentage of the existing population as possible, as in a compromise for preferences ought to be reached.
Jared said: ” Walter Block argues today for unrestricted migration of people and goods,”
Walter Block debated this issue with Hans-Hermann Hoppe for a long time, and it was sometime over the last few years that Block said acknowledged that the borders should only be opened, AFTER everything is privatized, which is basically him acknowledging that Hoppe is correct, without him outright admitting that Hoppe is correct.
Jared said: “Ayn Rand emigrated from the Soviet Union and favored an open immigration system while railing against barbarian cultures as fiercely as any right-wing populist does today. ”
I’m pretty sure that Ayn Rand opposed Muslim immigration.
Also, Ayn Rand (real name: Alissa Rosenbaum, was Jewish, and she supported Israel, which is a walled ethno-state with a DNA test backed, Jews only immigration policy. I don’t think that they had DNA tests back when Ayn Rand was alive, but they did have a Jews only immigration policy, so they must have done some kind of check or research to see if immigrants were really Jewish, although it was likely less accurate than a DNA test, but even so, I doubt many non-Jews slipped through.
Incidentally, Bryan Caplan, the libertarian radical open borders, unlimited, unrestricted immigration advocate from the Cato Institute, is also Jewish, and while he supports this policy for the USA, and I assume for every other country, EXCEPT he does NOT support this policy for Israel, which exposes him as a hypocrite.
Jared said: “The LP Radical Caucus(es) has always favored open borders under their ‘no particular orderism’ principle, at times arguing from an accelerationist perspective: collapse the welfare state by overburdening it.”
I mostly agree with the Radical Caucus, but this is one of my disagreements with them, and it is also one of the reasons why I favor the Mises Caucus over the Radical Caucus.
I have said this before, and I will say it again, dismantling government is like dismantling a bomb, pull the wrong wire out at the wrong time, and the bomb blows up in your face.
This is exactly what ripping open the borders and allowing for unlimited, unrestricted immigration would do, unless a whole lot of other things were done beforehand. I would in fact say that this should be the LAST thing done on the was the anarcho-capitalist society, which would not really have open borders, since border and immigration policy would be completely in the hands of property owners.
“Rothbard advocated open borders until his 90s turn”
Yes, Murray Rothbard got new information, as in he saw how immigration was being used to subvert cultures and push a political agenda, so he ALTERED his position based on this data. This to me showed that Murray Rothbard was a man with intellectual integrity, something which many people lack.
I highly recommend that everyone read this article and pass it around to others.
Nations By Consent
By Murray Rothbard
https://mises.org/library/nations-consent
Libertarians tend to focus on two important units of analysis: the individual and the state. And yet, one of the most dramatic and significant events of our time has been the reemergence—with a bang—in the last five years of a third and much neglected aspect of the real world, the “nation.” When the “nation” has been thought of at all, it usually comes attached to the state, as in the common word, “the nation-state,” but this concept takes a particular development of recent centuries and elaborates it into a universal maxim. In the last five years, however, we have seen, as a corollary of the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, a vivid and startlingly swift decomposition of the centralized State or alleged nation-State into its constituent nationalities. The genuine nation, or nationality, has made a dramatic reappearance on the world stage.
I. THE REEMERGENCE OF THE NATION
The “nation,” of course, is not the same thing as the state, a difference that earlier libertarians and classical liberals such as Ludwig von Mises and Albert Jay Nock understood full well. Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one or several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions. He is generally born into a “country.” He is always born into a specific historical context of time and place, meaning neighborhood and land area.
The modern European nation-state, the typical “major power,” began not as a nation at all, but as an “imperial” conquest of one nationality—usually at the “center” of the resulting country, and based in the capital city—over other nationalities at the periphery. Since a “nation” is a complex of subjective feelings of nationality based on objective realities, the imperial central states have had varying degrees of success in forging among their subject nationalities at the periphery a sense of national unity incorporating submission to the imperial center. In Great Britain, the English have never truly eradicated national aspirations among the submerged Celtic nationalities, the Scots and the Welsh, although Cornish nationalism seems to have been mostly stamped out. In Spain, the conquering Castilians, based in Madrid, have never managed—as the world saw at the Barcelona Olympics—to erase nationalism among the Catalans, the Basques, or even the Galicians or Andalusians. The French, moving out from their base in Paris, have never totally tamed the Bretons, the Basques, or the people of the Languedoc.
It is now well known that the collapse of the centralizing and imperial Russian Soviet Union has lifted the lid on the dozens of previously suppressed nationalisms within the former U.S.S.R., and it is now becoming clear that Russia itself, or rather “the Russian Federated Republic,” is simply a slightly older imperial formation in which the Russians, moving out from their Moscow center, forcibly incorporated many nationalities including the Tartars, the Yakuts, the Chechens, and many others. Much of the U.S.S.R. stemmed from imperial Russian conquest in the nineteenth century, during which the clashing Russians and British managed to carve up much of central Asia.
The “nation” cannot be precisely defined; it is a complex and varying constellation of different forms of communities, languages, ethnic groups, or religions. Some nations or nationalities, such as the Slovenes, are both a separate ethnic group and a language; others, such as the warring groups in Bosnia, are the same ethnic group whose language is the same but who differ in the form of alphabet, and who clash fiercely on religion (the Eastern Orthodox Serbs, the Catholic Croats, and the Bosnian Muslims, who, to make matters more complicated, were originally champions of the Manichaean Bogomil heresy).
The question of nationality is made more complex by the interplay of objectively existing reality and subjective perceptions. In some cases, such as Eastern European nationalities under the Habsburgs or the Irish under the British, nationalisms, including submerged and sometimes dying languages, had to be consciously preserved, generated, and expanded. In the nineteenth century this was done by a determined intellectual elite, struggling to revive peripheries living under, and partially absorbed by, the imperial center.
II. THE FALLACY OF “COLLECTIVE SECURITY”
The problem of the nation has been aggravated in the twentieth century by the overriding influence of Wilsonianism on U.S. and world-wide foreign policy. I refer not to the idea of “national self-determination,” observed mainly in the breach after World War I, but to the concept of “collective security against aggression.” The fatal flaw in this seductive concept is that it treats nation-states by an analogy with individual aggressors, with the “world community” in the guise of a cop-on-the-corner. The cop, for example, sees A aggressing against, or stealing the property of B; the cop naturally rushes to defend B’s private property, in his person or possessions. In the same way, wars between two nations or states are assumed to have a similar aspect: State A invades, or “aggresses against,” State B; State A is promptly designated “the aggressor” by the “international policeman” or his presumptive surrogate, be it the League of Nations, the United Nations, the U.S. President or Secretary of State, or the editorial writer of the August New York Times. Then the world police force, whatever it may be, is supposed to swing promptly into action to stop the “principle of aggression,” or to prevent the “aggressor,” be it Saddam Hussein or the Serbian guerrillas in Bosnia, from fulfilling their presumed goals of swimming across the Atlantic and murdering every resident of New York or Washington, D.C.
A crucial flaw in this popular line of argument goes deeper than the usual discussion of whether or not American air power or troops can really eradicate Iraqis or Serbs without too much difficulty. The crucial flaw is the implicit assumption of the entire analysis: that every nation-state “owns” its entire geographical area in the same just and proper way that every individual property owner owns his person and the property that he has inherited, worked for, or gained in voluntary exchange. Is the boundary of the typical nation-state really as just or as beyond cavil as your or my house, estate, or factory!
It seems to me that not only the classical liberal or the libertarian, but anyone of good sense who thinks about this problem, must answer a resounding “No.” It is absurd to designate every nation-state, with its self-proclaimed boundary as it exists at any one time, as somehow right and sacrosanct, each with its “territorial integrity” to remain as spotless and unbreached as your or my bodily person or private property. Invariably, of course, these boundaries have been acquired by force and violence, or by interstate agreement above and beyond the heads of the inhabitants on the spot, and invariably these boundaries shift a great deal over time in ways that make proclamations of “territorial integrity” truly ludicrous.
Take, for example, the current mess in Bosnia. Only a couple of years ago, Establishment opinion, Received Opinion of Left, Right, or Center, loudly proclaimed the importance of maintaining “the territorial integrity” of Yugoslavia, and bitterly denounced all secession movements. Now, only a short time later, the same Establishment, only recently defending the Serbs as champions of “the Yugoslav nation” against vicious secessionist movements trying to destroy that “integrity,” now reviles and wishes to crush the Serbs for “aggression” against the “territorial integrity” of “Bosnia” or “Bosnia-Herzegovina,” a trumped-up “nation” that had no more existence than the “nation of Nebraska” before 1991. But these are the pitfalls in which we are bound to fall if we remain trapped by the mythology of the “nation-state” whose chance boundary at time t must be upheld as a property-owning entity with its own sacred and inviolable “rights,” in a deeply flawed analogy with the rights of private property.
To adopt an excellent stratagem of Ludwig von Mises in abstracting from contemporary emotions: Let us postulate two contiguous nation-states, “Ruritania” and “Fredonia.” Let us assume that Ruritania has suddenly invaded eastern Fredonia, and claims it as its own. Must we automatically condemn Ruritania for its evil “act of aggression” against Fredonia, and send troops, either literally or metaphorically, against the brutal Ruritanians and in behalf of “brave, little” Fredonia? By no means. For it is very possible that, say, two years ago, eastern Fredonia had been part and parcel of Ruritania, was indeed western Ruritania, and that the Rurs, ethnic and national denizens of the land, have been crying out for the past two years against Fredonian oppression. In short, in international disputes in particular, in the immortal words of W. S. Gilbert:
Things are seldom what they seem,
Skim milk masquerades as cream.
The Beloved international cop, whether it be Boutros Boutros-Ghali or U.S. troops or the New York Times editorialist had best think more than twice before leaping into the fray.
Americans are especially unsuited for their self-proclaimed Wilsonian role as world moralists and policemen. Nationalism in the U.S. is peculiarly recent, and is more of an idea than it is rooted in long-standing ethnic or nationality groups or struggles. Add to that deadly mix the fact that Americans have virtually no historical memory, and this makes Americans peculiarly unsuited to barreling in to intervene in the Balkans, where who took what side at what place in the war against the Turkish invaders in the fifteenth century is far more intensely real to most of the contenders than is yesterday’s dinner.
Libertarians and classical liberals, who are particularly well-equipped to rethink the entire muddled area of the nation-state and foreign affairs, have been too wrapped up in the Cold War against communism and the Soviet Union to engage in fundamental thinking on these issues. Now that the Soviet Union has collapsed and the Cold War is over, perhaps classical liberals will feel free to think anew about these critically important problems.
III. RETHINKING SECESSION
First, we can conclude that not all state boundaries are just. One goal for libertarians should be to transform existing nation-states into national entities whose boundaries could be called just, in the same sense that private property boundaries are just; that is, to decompose existing coercive nation-states into genuine nations, or nations by consent.
In the case, for example, of the eastern Fredonians, the inhabitants should be able to secede voluntarily from Fredonia and join their comrades in Ruritania. Again, classical liberals should resist the impulse to say that national boundaries “don’t make any difference.” It’s true, of course, as classical liberals have long proclaimed, that the less the degree of government intervention in either Fredonia or Ruritania, the less difference such a boundary will make. But even under a minimal state, national boundaries would still make a difference, often a big one to the inhabitants of the area. For in what language—Ruritanian or Fredonian or both?—will be the street signs, telephone books, court proceedings, or school classes of the area?
In short, every group, every nationality, should be allowed to secede from any nation-state and to join any other nation-state that agrees to have it. That simple reform would go a long way toward establishing nations by consent. The Scots, if they want to, should be allowed by the English to leave the United Kingdom, and to become independent, and even to join a Gaelic Confederation, if the constituents so desire.
A common response to a world of proliferating nations is to worry about the multitude of trade barriers that might be erected. But, other things being equal, the greater the number of new nations, and the smaller the size of each, the better. For it would be far more difficult to sow the illusion of self-sufficiency if the slogan were “Buy North Dakotan” or even “Buy 56th Street” than it now is to convince the public to “Buy American.” Similarly, “Down with South Dakota,” or a fanion, “Down with 55th Street,” would be a more difficult sell than spreading fear or hatred of the Japanese. Similarly, the absurdities and the unfortunate consequences of fiat paper money would be far more evident if each province or each neighborhood or street block were to print its own currency. A more decentralized world would be far more likely to turn to sound market commodities, such as gold or silver, for its money.
IV. THE PURE ANARCHO-CAPITALIST MODEL
I raise the pure anarcho-capitalist model in this paper, not so much to advocate the model per se as to propose it as a guide for settling vexed current disputes about nationality. The pure model, simply, is that no land areas, no square footage in the world, shall remain “public”; every square foot of land area, be they streets, squares, or neighborhoods, is privatized. Total privatization would help solve nationality problems, often in surprising ways, and I suggest that existing states, or classical liberal states, try to approach such a system even while some land areas remain in the governmental sphere.
Open Borders, or the Camp-of-the-Saints Problem
The question of open borders, or free immigration, has become an accelerating problem for classical liberals. This is first, because the welfare state increasingly subsidizes immigrants to enter and receive permanent assistance, and second, because cultural boundaries have become increasingly swamped. I began to rethink my views on immigration when, as the Soviet Union collapsed, it became clear that ethnic Russians had been encouraged to flood into Estonia and Latvia in order to destroy the cultures and languages of these peoples. Previously, it had been easy to dismiss as unrealistic Jean Raspail’s anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints, in which virtually the entire population of India decides to move, in small boats, into France, and the French, infected by liberal ideology, cannot summon the will to prevent economic and cultural national destruction. As cultural and welfare-state problems have intensified, it became impossible to dismiss Raspail’s concerns any longer.
However, on rethinking immigration on the basis of the anarcho-capitalist model, it became clear to me that a totally privatized country would not have “open borders” at all. If every piece of land in a country were owned by some person, group, or corporation, this would mean that no immigrant could enter there unless invited to enter and allowed to rent, or purchase, property. A totally privatized country would be as “closed” as the particular inhabitants and property owners desire. It seems clear, then, that the regime of open borders that exists de facto in the U.S. really amounts to a compulsory opening by the central state, the state in charge of all streets and public land areas, and does not genuinely reflect the wishes of the proprietors.
Under total privatization, many local conflicts and “externality” problems—not merely the immigration problem—would be neatly settled. With every locale and neighborhood owned by private firms, corporations, or contractual communities, true diversity would reign, in accordance with the preferences of each community. Some neighborhoods would be ethnically or economically diverse, while others would be ethnically or economically homogeneous. Some localities would permit pornography or prostitution or drugs or abortions, others would prohibit any or all of them. The prohibitions would not be state imposed, but would simply be requirements for residence or use of some person’s or community’s land area. While statists who have the itch to impose their values on everyone else would be disappointed, every group or interest would at least have the satisfaction of living in neighborhoods of people who share its values and preferences. While neighborhood ownership would not provide Utopia or a panacea for all conflict, it would at least provide a “second-best” solution that most people might be willing to live with.
Enclaves and Exclaves
One obvious problem with the secession of nationalities from centralized states concerns mixed areas, or enclaves and exclaves. Decomposing the swollen central nation-state of Yugoslavia into constituent parts has solved many conflicts by providing independent nationhood for Slovenes, Serbs, and Croats, but what about Bosnia, where many towns and villages are mixed? One solution is to encourage more of the same, through still more decentralization. If, for example, eastern Sarajevo is Serb and western Sarajevo is Muslim, then they become parts of their respective separate nations.
But this of course will result in a large number of enclaves, parts of nations surrounded by other nations. How can this be solved? In the first place, the enclave/exclave problem exists right now. One of the most vicious existing conflicts, in which the US has not yet meddled because it has not yet been shown on CNN, is the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian exclave totally surrounded by, and therefore formally within, Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh should clearly be part of Armenia. But, how then, will Armenians of Karabakh avoid their present fate of blockade by Azeris, and how will they avoid military battles in trying to keep open a land corridor to Armenia?
Under total privatization, of course, these problems would disappear. Nowadays, no one in the U.S. buys land without making sure that his title to the land is clear; in the same way, in a fully privatized world, access rights would obviously be a crucial part of land ownership. In such a world, then, Karabakh property owners would make sure that they had purchased access rights through an Azeri land corridor.
Decentralization also provides a workable solution for the seemingly insoluble permanent conflict in Northern Ireland. When the British partitioned Ireland in the early 1920s, they agreed to perform a second, a more micro-managed, partition. They never carried through on this promise. If the British would permit a detailed, parish by parish, partition vote in Northern Ireland, however, most of the land area, which is majority Catholic, would probably hive off and join the Republic: such counties as Tyrone and Fermanagh, southern Down, and southern Armagh, for example. The Protestants would probably be left with Belfast, county Antrim, and other areas north of Belfast. The major remaining problem would be the Catholic enclave within the city of Belfast, but again, an approach to the anarcho-capitalist model could be attained by permitting the purchase of access rights to the enclave.
Pending total privatization, it is clear that our model could be approached, and conflicts minimized, by permitting secessions and local control, down to the micro-neighborhood level, and by developing contractual access rights for enclaves and exclaves. In the U.S., it becomes important, in moving toward such radical decentralization, for libertarians and classical liberals—indeed, for many other minority or dissident groups—to begin to lay the greatest stress on the forgotten Tenth Amendment and to try to decompose the role and power of the centralizing Supreme Court. Rather than trying to get people of one’s own ideological persuasion on the Supreme Court, its power should be rolled back and minimized as far as possible, and its power decomposed into state, or even local, judicial bodies.
Citizenship and Voting Rights
One vexing current problem centers on who becomes the citizen of a given country, since citizenship confers voting rights. The Anglo-American model, in which every baby born in the country’s land area automatically becomes a citizen, clearly invites welfare immigration by expectant parents. In the U.S., for example, a current problem is illegal immigrants whose babies, if born on American soil, automatically become citizens and therefore entitle themselves and their parents to permanent welfare payments and free medical care. Clearly the French system, in which one has to be born to a citizen to become an automatic citizen, is far closer to the idea of a nation-by-consent.
It is also important to rethink the entire concept and function of voting. Should anyone have a “right” to vote? Rose Wilder Lane, the mid-twentieth century U.S. libertarian theorist, was once asked if she believed in womens’ suffrage. “No,” she replied, “and I’m against male suffrage as well.” The Latvians and Estonians have cogently tackled the problem of Russian immigrants by allowing them to continue permanently as residents, but not granting them citizenship or therefore the right to vote. The Swiss welcome temporary guest-workers, but severely discourage permanent immigration, and, a fortiori, citizenship and voting.
Let us turn for enlightenment, once again, to the anarcho-capitalist model. What would voting be like in a totally privatized society? Not only would voting be diverse, but more importantly, who would really care? Probably the most deeply satisfying form of voting to an economist is the corporation, or joint-stock company, in which voting is proportionate to one’s share of ownership of the firm’s assets. But also there are, and would be, a myriad of private clubs of all sorts. It is usually assumed that club decisions are made on the basis of one vote per member, but that is generally untrue. Undoubtedly, the best-run and most pleasant clubs are those run by a small, self-perpetuating oligarchy of the ablest and most interested, a system most pleasant for the rank-and-file nonvoting member as well as for the elite. If I am a rank-and-file member of, say a chess club, why should I worry about voting if I am satisfied with the way the club is run? And if I am interested in running things, I would probably be asked to join the ruling elite by the grateful oligarchy, always on the lookout for energetic members. And finally, if I am unhappy about the way the club is run, I can readily quit and join another club, or even form one of my own. That, of course, is one of the great virtues of a free and privatized society, whether we are considering a chess club or a contractual neighborhood community.
Clearly, as we begin to work toward the pure model, as more and more areas and parts of life become either privatized or micro-decentralized, the less important voting will become. Of course, we are a long way from this goal. But it is important to begin, and particularly to change our political culture, which treats “democracy,” or the “right” to vote, as the supreme political good. In fact, the voting process should be considered trivial and unimportant at best, and never a “right,” apart from a possible mechanism stemming from a consensual contract. In the modern world, democracy or voting is only important either to join in or ratify the use of the government to control others, or to use it as a way of preventing one’s self or one’s group from being controlled. Voting, however, is at best, an inefficient instrument for self-defense, and it is far better to replace it by breaking up central government power altogether.
In sum, if we proceed with the decomposition and decentralization of the modern centralizing and coercive nation-state, deconstructing that state into constituent nationalities and neighborhoods, we shall at one and the same time reduce the scope of government power, the scope and importance of voting and the extent of social conflict. The scope of private contract, and of voluntary consent, will be enhanced, and the brutal and repressive state will be gradually dissolved into a harmonious and increasingly prosperous social order.
Originally published in The Journal of Libertarian Studies (Fall 1994).
Anyone who doubts me on this, ought to read this article, and do some follow up investigation.
The Communists Behind the “Abolish ICE,” “Occupy ICE” Agitation
https://thenewamerican.com/the-communists-behind-the-abolish-ice-occupy-ice-agitation/
Who’s leading the “Abolish ICE,” “No Borders” agitation? Don’t expect the establishment media to mention that it’s the Revolutionary Communist Party, Communist Party USA, Workers World Party, Democratic Socialists of America, Antifa anarcho-communists, the National Lawyers Guild, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
From Portland, Oregon, to Philadelphia, and from New York City to Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and dozens of other “Sanctuary Cities,” the radical OccupyICE/SurroundICE/AbolishICE agitators have been waging war on America’s national security and our ability to define and defend our borders. While the attacks have centered on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including physical obstruction and occupation of ICE offices and harassment and doxxing of ICE employees, the real goal — as announced from numerous Leftist websites, as well as the chants and banners of protesters — is “No Borders” at all. In other words, according to the “no borders” extremists, any or all of the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have expressed the desire to move to the United States (according to the 2012 Gallup global poll) should be free to do so — without any restrictions.
That, of course, is sheer lunacy, and is recognized as such even by many of the same Americans who succumbed to the emotive propaganda campaign of the “no borders” lobby regarding the separation of families. A Harvard-Harris Poll published this past June found that almost three-quarters (73 percent) of swing voters oppose abolishing ICE. The survey reveals that 73 percent of Independents, 59 percent of Democrats, 78 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of blacks, 50 percent of Hispanics, 68 percent of men, and 70 percent of women oppose disbanding the agency. Even 59 percent of voters who identified as having voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 opposed the idea. The same Harvard-Harris Poll found that most voters (70 percent) also support stricter immigration enforcement.
It’s one thing to crassly manipulate people’s emotions using a cover issue such as reuniting children with parents. It’s a whole other thing to convince them they ought to favor national suicide. Even a sizeable majority of Hillary Clinton voters are not ready for that. However, the scale would tip even more dramatically against the radical “no borders” lobby, if the “mainstream” media stopped covering for the subversive leaders and organizations behind the movement and provided merely an occasional morsel of truth about their backgrounds and their extreme anti-American agenda.
Who are the groups and individuals leading the Abolish ICE/Occupy ICE confrontations and agitation? The Big Media “journalists” go to great pains to craft stories sympathetic to the break-down-the-borders activists, while bending over backwards to hide the fact this “movement” would not exist without the leadership provided by veteran cadres of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Workers World Party (WWP), Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Antifa anarcho-communists, the National Lawyers Guild(NLG), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Example: One of the most successful communist propaganda stunts for the anti-ICE, open borders campaign was carried out on July 4 by the Marxist cadres of Rise and Resist (RAR). We are referring of course, to the “heroic” scaling of Statue of Liberty by RAR activist Therese Patricia Okoumou, which caused the national monument to be shut down. That spoiled the day for thousands of visitors hoping to visit the statue on Liberty Island, but it garnered many millions of dollars worth of free, adoring publicity for the anti-ICE/no borders militants from virtually all of the establishment media, as well as the alternate far-left media.
What is Rise and Resist (RAR)? It is a “direct action” front that deploys hardened activists of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), the Democratic Socialists of America, and Refuse Fascism (another direct action front for the RCP) to initiate confrontational street actions aimed at mobilizing “mass resistance.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid provided Okoumou and her RAR “comrade” Jay W. Walker with a fawning interview, while failing to mention that Walker is a well-known activist-leader in Refuse Fascism and the Revolutionary Communist Party, which glorifies mass-murdering communist dictator Mao Zedong. Time magazine, the New York Times, CBS, CNN, and the rest of the media pack followed suit. Rollingstone described Rise and Resist as “a New York nonprofit of activists formed after the 2016 presidential election aiming to ‘oust the Trump administration, fight for equality and collaborate on a wide variety of social justice issues.’”
Fighting for equality and social justice. Yes, that’s how it was played by the group-think propagandists of the Fake News thought cartel. The damning background information on these “activists” is available with a few clicks on a search engine. Reporters and pundits will spend untold hours digging into musty archives to find (or fabricate) a factoid from the distant past that can be twisted and used to smear a conservative as a “racist” and a “xenophobe,” but remain steadfastly, willfully blind and mute when it comes to their ideological compadres on the extreme left.
So it has gone throughout the nation in one city after another. Activists from the various communist fringe groups — many of whom openly identify with the RCP, WWP, CPUSA, RAR, etc. — carry out their subversive (and often violent) anit-American attacks with the confident assurance that their comrades in the media not only won’t expose them but will portray them in the most favorable light possible.
And, should the leftist miscreants get arrested while carrying out their illegal activities, well, they can rest assured that revolutionary lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild and the American Civil Liberties Union will be there to spring them from jail and provide them with legal representation. That has been the pattern for decades, as we witnessed, for instance, with the increasingly violent and destructive activities of the Occupy Wall Street militants. (It is not merely coincidence that Occupy ICE utilizes many of the same tactics as Occupy Wall Street; we see many of the same individuals and organizations holding leadership positions in both “Occupy” operations.) However, with the escalating violence and increased arrests since the 2016 elections and the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the NLG and ACLU have become even more heavily involved in providing legal aid to the “Resistance.”
The NLG and ACLU also have been in the forefront of the open borders efforts for many decades, and their involvement is a major factor in both the current schemes to tie up the Trump administration’s immigration reform efforts in the courts and the efforts to keep the street radicals out of jail. More than a year ago, in an article entitled, “Trump Versus Everyone: A comprehensive guide to the lawsuits against the president’s executive order,” the liberal-left Slate outlined the major lawsuits brought by these legal activists aimed at stopping Trump’s immigration agenda. The list of NLG-ACLU legal ploys is now much longer, with the more recent Occupy ICE obstructions being some of the most recent additions. Two of the most militant Occupy ICE efforts — in Portland and Philadelphia — are telling examples. The websites and Facebook pages for the NLG and ACLU, along with mentions in local media make it clear that they are the primary defenders of the street radicals when they run afoul of the law.
NLG-ACLU: Fronting for Communist Dictators
To go by standard news reports and interviews with the radical attorneys representing Antifa vandals and Occupy ICE, the ACLU and NLG are “civil rights” groups whose purpose is to defend the downtrodden and uphold justice for all. It is a little more than ironic that the far-left Democrats who are shouting the loudest about “Trump-Russia collusion” were for decades the most craven and treasonous defenders of the Soviet Union, Communist China, Fidel Castro’s regime, and virtually every other communist dictatorship and revolutionary organization. The NLG’s and ACLU’s origins hail back to the International Red Aid, a front group directed by the Soviet Comintern for the purpose of protecting its communist agents from being deported.
We reported in The New American in 1995:
In 1920, the official journal of the Communist Labor Party of America, Communist Labor, stated: “The National Executive Committee of the Communist Labor Party advises all its members, whatever nationality, to oppose deportation with all means at their command…. It is the duty of everyone to get out on bail as quickly as he can and then to remain as long as he can in the ranks of the Communist Labor Party as an active worker to hasten the triumph of Communism in the United States….
In 1922, the Communist International (Comintern) formed the International Red Aid, a worldwide apparatus with tentacles in over 50 countries, for the purpose of protecting its agents from deportation and battering down national immigration controls. The American section of the apparatus was known as the International Labor Defense, and, later, as the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB). By June 25, 1942, after hearing numerous witnesses — including those like Humberto Galleani who had been members or officials of both the Communist Party and the ACPFB — the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) reported that there “was no doubt about the party’s complete control” of the ACPFB.
“The ACPFB,” we further noted, “was joined in its efforts to thwart and undermine our immigration laws by the communist front National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and the communist-founded American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). This unrelenting attack on our borders, our national sovereignty, and our national security by these radical attorneys continues to this day, and has been exposed in all its lurid details by William R. Hawkins in his recent book, Importing Revolution: Open Borders and the Radical Agenda.”
In 1950, the House Committee on Un-American Activities said: “The National Lawyers Guild is the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party, its front organizations, and controlled unions.”
The ACLU’s chief founders were communists and communist sympathizers, including top Communist Party officials William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Louis Budenz. Roger N. Baldwin, another of the co-founders (and the ACLU’s executive director from 1920-1950) may not have been an official card-carrying CPUSA member, but he was a willing collaborator. He wrote:
I am for socialism…. I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal…. I don’t regret being part of the communist tactic. I knew what I was doing. I was not an innocent liberal. I wanted what the communists wanted and I traveled the United Front road to get it.
Despite utilizing more moderate rhetoric than many of their earlier Bolsheviki forebears, the NLG and the ACLU have not swerved from their leftward course. Neither have they deviated from Comintern plan for exploiting immigration and migration issues to batter down our borders and transform the United States into a mere cog in a global socialist system. But don’t expect any of the fake journalists of the Fake News organizations to mention any of this.
Jared said: “Well, gee. Somebody should have alerted the LP Mises Caucus that Jacob Hornberger is a left-libertarian and Socialist Party sympathizer before they decided to promote his primary candidacy in 2020. How embarrassing for them. Yeah, I didn’t expect you to reply to my list of right-libertarian open borders advocates.
https://openborders.info/jacob-hornberger/ ”
I am well aware of Jacob Hornberger, and I have been familiar with him since the 1990’s. I am also well aware of the fact that the Mises Caucus endorsed Jacob Hornberger, and I actually voted for him myself as a 2020 Libertarian National Convention delegate, but I ONLY voted for him in the last round of voting.
I voted for Adam Kokesh until he was eliminated. Then I decided to give a round or two to John Monds. I did not think that John Monds would win, but I decided to vote for him anyway. Then, when it looked like it might be the last round of voting, and I believe it was down to Vermin Supreme, Jo Jorgensen, and Jacob Hornberger, that’s when I voted for Hornberger.
Adam Kokesh’s position on immigration is similar to that of Hornberger, BUT, since Adam was running on a more radical platform, which called for the complete dismantling of the federal government, this would mean that each state would have become its own country. I would be in a state that did not accept just anyone as an immigrant. One of the biggest themes of Adam’s campaign was localization. Localization is a solution to a lot of issues of issues.
I disagree with Hornberger’s immigration position, and I know that there were other people in the Mises Caucus who disagreed with him as well (I have not taken a survey, but I know some agreed with him, some did not, and some did not care much either way on the issue), but in all fairness to Hornberger, I do think that he is good for the most part. I had a couple of other disagreements with Hornberger, but I also had some disagreements with Jo Jorgensen, including her, “Let them all in,” immigration stance, which I found to be some cringeworthy it almost made me not vote for her in November.
I voted for Hornberger at the convention, and Jo Jorgensen in the general election, because no candidate is going to be perfect. None of these people are going to win anyway, so it is more of a protest vote, and an educational campaign. I believe that Hornberger and Jorgensen are both sincere in wanting to end the welfare state, and if the welfare state were abolished, it would fix some, but certainly not all, of the problems associated with immigration.
Part of the reason I voted for Hornberger over Jorgensen for the nomination, outside of wanting to help the Mises Caucus, was due to the fact that Hornberger has been a lot more active over they years than Jorgensen. Jorgensen practically disappeared from politics after her 1996 vice presidential run. I was on the C-SPAN website and watched some of the 2000 Libertarian National Convention from Anaheim, and I saw that Jorgensen was one of the speakers who got up on stage to endorse Art Olivier for the vice presidential nomination (who ended up winning. and who I thought was a better candidate than Jorgensen). I was at that convention in Anaheim (although I was not a delegate, as I even though I had been in the party for 4 years at that point, I had only attended one event, which was a Harry Browne event in 1999, so I never went to any meetings or conventions, and I did not even know how the delegate system worked back then), and I’m pretty sure I was in the room when the nomination speeches for all the vice presidential candidates happened, plus, I’ve got a VHS tape which I recorded off of C-SPAN of this convention packed away in a box, but it had been so many years that I did not recall Jorgensen being there. Anyway, I heard NOTHING about Jo Jorgensen again until I heard that she was at the 2018 Libertarian National Convention in New Orleans, which I was also in attendance, as a delegate, and I did not see her there, and I only heard that she was there after the convention was over, and I heard that she might run for the presidential nomination in 2020, but she did not actually jump into the race until over a year later. Jacob Hornberger is not exactly one of the most visible people in the libertarian movement, but he has remained active, as he frequently writes articles, and I know he put out some books (including on the Kennedy assassination), and he does occasionally do speaking engagements and interviews, so he has done a lot more than Jorgensen over the years.
I really finally find the immigration view of Hornberger and Jorgensen to be very naive, as they act like immigration is always a good thing. Reality, in my opinion, is that immigration is neither inherently good or bad. Some immigration is good, and some immigration is bad. It is something that has to be evaluated on a case by case basis. I have no problem with good immigration, but I do have a problem with bad immigration, and most of what we have today is bad immigration. So I don’t like the way that Hornberger and Jorgensen frame the immigration discussion, as the way they frame it makes it sounds as though immigration is always good, which is absurd, and makes them sound out of touch with reality.
Jacob Hornberger’s mother was from Mexico, and I think is father was an American with German ancestry. So Hornberger thinks that because his mother was from Mexico that this means there should be millions of people running across the US border, and that if anyone gets turned away, or deported that it is “racist”. I think that this is absurd on multiple levels. I had a great-grandmother from Chile. She died before I was born, so I never met her, but she was my father’s grandmother on his father’s side. She came to this country as a legal immigrant in the early 1920’s, sometime between 1920 and 1923. She was brought in by my father’s father’s father, who himself was a legal immigrant, from the Flanders region of Belgium, which is the Flemish, or Belgian Dutch region. He came to America as a legal immigrant in the 1900’s, sometime between 1903 and 1907. He worked on ships, and he met her in Chile and brought her to America. This was in pre-welfare state America. I think that most of the rest of my ancestors were pioneers and colonists, who were in this country in the 1600’s and 1700’s, except for my mother’s mother’s father, who was Irish, and who came to America as a child with his parents in the 1870’s or 1880’s. They were also legal immigrants in pre-welfare state America.
What does any of this have to do with today? There was no welfare state back when my immigrant ancestors came here, and they were from similar cultures as the people already here. There also was not much of a radical Marxist movement like there is today. Cultural Marxism had yet to rot out the country to the extent that it has today.
Another thing hypocritical about Jacob Hornberger is that he calls Americans who don’t want millions of immigrants flooding into the country “racists,” yet Mexico, where is mother was from, does NOT allow that. The Mexican Constitution says that it is illegal for Mexico to enact an immigration policy which radically alters the demographics of Mexico. Mexico does in fact deport illegal aliens. Mexico is actually more strict on immigration than the USA is, so if Americans who don’t want millions of immigrants pouring into the country are “racist” than people in Mexico must be even more “racist,” yet Hornberger never talks about this.
I tried to set up a debate on how to properly apply the libertarian philosophy to borders and immigration policy, and I had an agreement from Stefan Molyneux to participate in this debate, and I tried to get somebody from the open borders, unlimited, unrestricted immigration side to participate, and I could not find anyone willing to step up (except for Starchild; who I had on backup if nobody more prominent stepped forward). I reached out to Jacob Hornberger and asked him to participate, AND HE TURNED IT DOWN, which disappointed me. After he jumped in the presidential race I shamed him over this in the comments under one of his YouTube videos, and then he acted like he had not turned down this debate (even though he did), and then he acted like he might be willing to do it, but then the COVID hysteria hit, and because I wanted to have an in person debate in front of an audience (it would have also been put online, but I wanted I live audience at the debate), I ended up putting it on the backburner.
I found out that Jacob Hornberger used to be a Democrat prior to becoming a Libertarian, and this is not surprising to me, as he obviously has not abandoned all of his Democrat ways of thinking.
I hate to sound too hard on the guy, because I do think that Hornberger is good for the most part. I like the fact that he acknowledges that people in government engage in conspiracies, like the Kennedy assassination, and also false flags and/or lying and manipulating to get wars going, like Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
So yeah, I voted for Jacob Hornberger in the last round of voting at the presidential nomination portionof the 2020 Libertarian National Convention, and I voted for Jo Jorgensen in the general election, even though neither were my ideal candidates.
Andy: “The Socialist Party position on immigration is disturbingly close to that held by left-libertarians.”
Well, gee. Somebody should have alerted the LP Mises Caucus that Jacob Hornberger is a left-libertarian and Socialist Party sympathizer before they decided to promote his primary candidacy in 2020. How embarrassing for them. Yeah, I didn’t expect you to reply to my list of right-libertarian open borders advocates.
https://openborders.info/jacob-hornberger/
The Socialist Party position on immigration is disturbingly close to that held by left-libertarians.
When these immigrants flood into the country, do the statistics tell us they are more likely to become socialists, or are they more likely to become libertarians?
Socialist Party on Immigration
Socialist Party Platform
https://www.ontheissues.org/celeb/Socialist_Party_Immigration.htm
Abolish all anti-immigrant laws, shut down ICE
Abolish all anti-immigrant laws. Stop the raids and deportations and demonization of immigrants. Shut down ICE and the concentration camps and reunite families. The government’s war on immigrants must end. The border wall must be dismantled. Amnesty and citizenship for those without documents. Full rights for all!
Source: PSL’s 2020 Ten Point Program (2020 Socialist Convention) , Aug 15, 2020
Full citizenship rights upon six months residency
We defend the rights of all immigrants to education, health care, and full civil and legal rights and call for an unconditional amnesty program for all undocumented people. We oppose the imposition of any fees on those receiving amnesty. We call for full citizenship rights upon demonstrating residency for six months.
Source: Socialist Party Platform at 2020-2021 PSL Convention , Aug 3, 2020
Don’t militarize the US-Mexico border; freely cross instead
The Socialist Party works to build a world in which everyone will be able to freely move across borders, to visit and to live wherever they choose. We recognize the central role global capitalism plays in forcing the immigration of people from the less developed to the more industrialized countries, often leading to further economic and social injustice.
We oppose the militarization of the United States/Mexican border, and an increase in the service budget instead of the “military” budget of the INS.
We defend the rights of all immigrants to education, health care, and full civil and legal rights and call for an unconditional amnesty program for all undocumented people. We oppose the imposition of any fees on those receiving amnesty.
We oppose “guest worker” programs.
We call for full citizenship rights upon demonstrating residency for six months.
Source: Socialist Party USA: 2013-2015 National Platform , Nov 4, 2014
End the militarization of the US/Mexican border
The Socialist Party calls for an end to the militarization of the US/Mexican border, an end to police raids of immigrants, and we defend the rights of all immigrants to education, health care, & full civil and legal rights. We call for an unconditional amnesty program for all undocumented people, and full citizenship rights upon demonstrating residency for six months.
Source: Interview of Socialist nominee Brian Moore with OnTheIssues , Apr 3, 2008
Full rights and equality for all undocumented immigrants
All undocumented immigrants and residents in the United States should have full rights and equality now. That means equal wages, benefits, union rights, voting rights, and access to free, quality education, housing and health care. The government’s war on immigrants must end. Racist home and job raids must be stopped and concentration camp-style detention centers must be dismantled. The border wall must be dismantled.
Source: Party for Socialism and Liberation website, pslweb.org , Jan 16, 2008
Give sanctuary to illegal immigrants & full social services
Brian supports these summary positions from the Socialist Party Platform:
give equal rights to all immigrants and recognize their presence in large part is due to unfair US economic policies toward their countries, or bad human conditions.
give sanctuary to illegal immigrants in the US, full social services
impact immigration influx not with walls or guns or threats of imprisonment, but with fairer policies toward all other countries
oppose English as the only official language
Source: Presidential Socialist nominee website, VoteBrianMoore.com , Dec 23, 2007
Amnesty for immigrants; grant them full rights
We defend the rights of immigrants to housing, education, health care, jobs, and civil, legal, and political rights.
We call for an unconditional amnesty program for undocumented people who should be accorded the same civil rights that other members of society possess.
Source: Socialist Party Platform (via 2000 nominee David McReynolds) , Jan 1, 2000
Jared, please don’t mistake my addressing my comments to yours for me demanding a response from you. I’m addressing the arguments you make, and anyone who agrees with you can reply in your place, now or later, if you don’t feel like it’s worth your time to try. I’m also not especially optimistic about convincing you, and, believe it or not, I’m not closed off to the possibility of you or someone who agrees with you convincing me.
I’ve elaborated on the parable only in response to comments you’ve made, and I’ve offered plenty of other analogies to illustrate my point. Regarding not finding it applicable, several points in response. The first is that Andy had previously provided some statistics, which I think you also ignored. The second is that the analogy is separable.
If you set aside the question of immigrants and how industrious or not they are, you’re still left with the problem of recipients of charity voting on who should receive it and how much. In the ship analogy, this would be the sailors who simply choose not to work while voting themselves to receive provisions. This would still be an existential problem for our ship even if it never encountered any drowning men or faced any policy issue of how many of those to allow on board or how quickly.
If we set aside the question of shirkers altogether and presume that all sailors, whether they set out with the ship’s maiden voyage or are still wet from being pulled out from the water they were drowning in, are industrious, you’d still have the issue that some of those rescued from the water have a religious practice of poking metaphorical holes in our metaphorical hull.
Thirdly, the analogy is designed to address your rights argument, that we have no right in principle to exclude anyone from the country. If you prefer to engage in an evidence based argument over exactly what the limits should be or why, logically the first step would be to acknowledge that there can and should legitimately be some kind of limits to immigration, and your previous comments seemed to indicate you think otherwise. If I misunderstood that, the statistical evidence Andy presented in the prior thread would be the proper field of engagement.
If you don’t like the ship analogy, try any of the others – for instance, whether the American Indians should have set any limits on White immigrants, had they been able to do so. There are any number of others I’ve thrown out. If you can’t or don’t want to engage any of them, they’re still there in case someone else who agrees with you would like to give it a try.
Trad,
I’m afraid I just don’t care about this parable you’re so proud of, on which you’ve spilled an embarrassing amount of digital ink, and which you reference at every opportunity. One would have to sympathize with your conclusions already to find it applicable because it’s premised on the falsehood that native-born Americans are industrious hard workers and immigrants, at least those of “certain” backgrounds, are invasive welfare parasites who reject our work ethic and exploit our collective generosity.
If you want me to give honest answers to honest questions, then allow me to respond to arguments developed from facts rather than from bogus impressions and critically flawed analogies. But tbh, I don’t take you seriously enough to read your comments with more than a casual interest, and I think there’s probably so little common ground between the two of us that it isn’t worth the effort. You’re better battling it out with Andy about whether Trump is going to save America in 2024.
Jared,
“Yes, everyone is perfectly free to read the conversations we have here. I’m sure lurkers needed that reminder from you.”
Nothing we are discussing should in any way be limited to either participants or lurkers in the discussion. If anyone reading who has not yet joined the discussion wishes to do so, I welcome their participation. It’s a shame if that was all you were able to glean from everything I said, but that’s OK – my points are still there for whoever does wish to read and/or engage them, now or later, if anyone does.
Regarding your question about indigenous Americans, I don’t think it’s a simple one to answer. On the one hand, they did not exist in some utopia prior to the arrival of European colonizers. They frequently fought wars, killed, and colonized each other. Many of them died from starvation and disease, and some died in ritual sacrifices. It would, of course, be absurd to believe they should be sent to countries which did not exist when their distant ancestors crossed a land bridge that no longer exists from Asia.
On the one hand, they have benefited from the introduction of Christianity, Western concepts of property, Western civilization and technology vis a vis their ancestors; while no direct comparison can be made, except perhaps with a few remote Amazonian tribes which don’t have much contact with the outside world, we can by way of analogy see that American blacks today are much better off than blacks now living in Africa – a fact that remains true regardless of the morality of how their ancestors were brought here. On the other hand, certainly many crimes against humanity, and against Christian laws of warfare, were committed against indigenous Americans. The biggest lesson we should learn is what happens to a people that can’t or won’t defend themselves from invasion, even if that invasion gets passed off as mere immigration. When you welcome so many strangers at your table that it becomes their table, it doesn’t have to take long before you end up being their turkey, or what’s for dinner.
What should be done with indigenous Americans now? Some may choose to assimilate into a European based, Christian and Capitalist society. They should be free to do so. Some may wish to have lands of their own, where they can govern their own territories without undue federal or state interference. They should be granted those rights, but along with those rights should come responsibilities for providing for themselves and loss of concurrent rights to vote in US or state elections, travel freely outside their self-governing territories, and so on. The more they wish to be free of federal or state control, the less the federal or state governments should be obligated to support them, let them cross borders freely, or participate in the government of those states or of the federal government.
There should probably exist a range of options to what extent different indigenous Americans choose to self-govern vis-a-vis be part of our country. What I don’t support is the idea that they can fully self-govern as independent nations, yet at the same time receive all the rights and privileges of US and state citizens. There has to be some kind of trade-off there, or perhaps a range of options along a trade-off continuum, if possible.
Now that I have answered a question, perhaps you’ll condescend to explain what the sailors on board my hypothetical ship ought to do? Is there some point where you think allowing people who choose not to work to receive adequate provisions, or bringing more and more drowning men on board the boat (even if some of them poke holes in the hull) becomes counterproductive? Is there a point, were you an American Indian facing the influx of Whites in your ancestral lands, where you would have called for any limit on how many could come in and how quickly?
Trad,
Yes, everyone is perfectly free to read the conversations we have here. I’m sure lurkers needed that reminder from you.
As a matter of curiosity, what do you think should have happened to the indigenous peoples of the Americas as Western Europeans began to colonize and emigrate to the New World? Should the American Indian nations have been gently “encouraged to leave” their homelands to make way for your grand capitalist WASP republic?
Locke believed his homesteading principle gave Europeans rights to take control of Indian lands and apply their labor to put the commons to far more productive use, which quietly implies that natives could be forcibly expelled from newly minted private property once the land was sufficiently mixed with the labor of white settlers.
What’s your view?
Jared,
“You’re a paleocon ethnostate nationalist.”
You can make those claims if you want. It would probably be pointless to ask you where I called for an ethnostate, strictly defined. On the contrary, when actually asked, I explained I do not want to actually round up and deport anyone other than those who are only in the US due to the immigration law changes of 1965. American blacks would be just as much foreigners in Africa today as American Whites would be in Europe. I have not called on forcibly deporting them to nations which may not be ready, willing, or able to accept them.
As I said regarding American Jews in the Open Thread, who at least do have a nation that can and would accept them were they to be expelled: You’re inventing things I didn’t say. Where did I call for a forced expulsion of Jews? I said encourage, not expel. I do believe we should expel those who would not be here except for the immigration act of 1965, but that would not include many Jews.
What do I mean by encourage? Things like a return to acknowledging that we are a Christian nation, letting God and prayer back in the public schools, returning to the obscenity standards that were in place before the 1960s, shutting down the federal reserve and returning to sound money, ending the welfare entitlement state, ending the intervention in Mideast wars and affairs, restoring our manufacturing and energy production, fair trade not “free” trade, ending forced desegregation, ending the holocaust of abortion, ending no fault divorce, restoring foolishly abandoned voting safeguards, waging a real war against drugs, and so on.
“Cosmopolitan” Jews may feel unwelcome in a country like that, and ought to go to Israel. Nationalist Jews may then wish too go there too, since the United States will no longer be fighting or subsidising their wars. If some patriotic, culturally conservative Jews want to remain in a Christian nation, I have not said that they should all be expelled.
Likewise, if an explicitly European-based, Christian, Capitalist nation is not a place where people of other races, ideologies, or religions want to live, I would not force them to stay, but I would also not round them up and deport them en masse, force taxpayers to pay them to leave, put them in concentration camps , kill them all, or any other such fantasies you may be entertaining regarding my beliefs. Any limitations on their rights would be based solely on preserving the European-based, Christian, Capitalist character of our nation and other Western nations. As I said regarding being welcoming to strangers and providing charity, and as my ship analogy and others I have used illustrate, I’m all for charity and welcoming strangers as long as it is within reason and not overwhelming, and not for the recipients of such charity or welcome to vote on the extent of.
“So, we aren’t going to agree. And on the Biblical topic of the treatment of resident aliens (since you pretend to have a scripturally derived, divinely inspired case against permissive immigration policies), you’d rather enlist indirect support from decontextualized proverbs than contend with what relevant rexts directly and actually say—you know, like a theological liberal.”
Oddly, I would have said that about you and your positions. See above.
“I haven’t created any conundrums for myself by advocating the standard libertarian position on immigration, Trad, and I’m not the one here with only a “passing familiarity” with classical texts, mistakenly employing old analogical arguments offered in support of a political ideology radically opposed to my own. ”
I say you have created a conundrum. Readers can judge for themselves whether you have or not. You are the one mistakenly thinking I used the ship of fools in the same sense that Plato did, without having even read my ship of fools analogy as opposed to his. And passing familiarity was actually used as somewhat of a compliment in this case. You are clearly at least somewhat well read. It’s ironic that you are using what you have read in the service of destroying the very civilization that both produced and grew out of those texts and traditions. An educated, learned fool can be the worst kind of fool.
“You might consider better acquainting yourself with the Western high culture you’re happy to preserve through force of government. ”
Thank you. I’ve strived to acquaint myself with it my whole life, and to retain and pass on what I have learned. I’ll freely admit that job is never and can never be finished. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve learned how much I have yet to learn. You, on the other hand, seem to think you already know everything worth knowing, and that the best use of all you have learned is either to allow our civilization to be sunk into oblivion, or to pretend that it’s unsinkable, kind of like the fools on the ship that I wrote about above – which is another reason that, in my analogy, you are yourself on board that ship, and only voting to hasten its sinking.
Jared,
“I directly answered the gotcha question you posed repeatedly, so go back and read what I said. You aren’t a libertarian. You’re a paleocon ethnostate nationalist. So, we aren’t going to agree. ”
I read and responded to what you said; it is you who did not read my reply. I might normally agree with you that I am not a libertarian, but you can’t very well consistently exclude people from however “libertarian” is defined if you can’t exclude people from however “US citizen, eligible to vote in our elections, receive taxpayer funded welfare and medical care, etc” is defined. If you claim no right to exclude can apply to the latter, it’s not consistent that you can consistently exercise any sort of right to exclude to the former. The concept of “libertarian” is not your exclusive private property, after all. You may be a “citizen” of libertarianism, but by the same logic as you can say that whoever wants to come to the US or other Western nations and stay should have that right, others can say that whoever wants to call themselves libertarian can do so.
You only “answered” this conundrum with circular references to me not being a libertarian, which assumes that you can exclude anyone from the definition of libertarian and doesn’t address the question anyway – the question would still stand regardless of whether I am a libertarian or not. Your other reply was to accuse me of being a hypocrite because you claim I have misinterpreted the Bible. I addressed both of those points. Just as the conundrum you’ve created yourself regarding the collective right to exclude still exists regardless of whether I am a libertarian or not, the question of your hypocrisy regarding the right to exclude still exists, regardless of whether I am also a hypocrite or not. Even if we stipulate that I am a hypocrite and not a libertarian, you still have to explain your own hypocrisy regarding the right to exclude people from the concept of libertarianism versus the right to exclude immigrants.
As I explained previously:
You’re past done, and burnt , much like what will soon remain of any welfare state which allows the recipients of charity to decide who will receive it, and in what amounts, and then simultaneously lets everyone who can enter said country in the era of modern transportation vote on its laws. None of the Biblical passages you cite contemplate letting the recipients of charity decide on its amount, form, etc, combined with a system for letting every stranger vote to change the national language, religion, customs, and so forth.
The Bible also says you should drink a little wine for your stomach’s sake. That doesn’t mean you should drink as much as you can hold down every day until it kills you, or let wine merchants vote on how much you should drink and pour it down your throat.
Let’s say that this concept of yours, “libertarianism,” is redefined every two or four years by a vote of all who decide to call themselves libertarians that day and cast a vote. They don’t have to do anything else, fit the prior definition, or change any of their views. Their sole reason for participating may be that they don’t like you, and would like nothing better than to see you all die in a fire soon. Do you see any problems with defining “libertarianism” thus? Now, how about “USA citizen” or “legal resident” or “eligible for welfare and medical care and voting in our elections”?
Jared,
“Yes, Trad, I “failed to read” your final comment because I said I was done with that thread, if you recall.”
It doesn’t matter to me whether you read or respond or not. You, or other readers, only need to read it if you want to understand what I mean by you being on a ship of fools, as opposed to what Plato meant. I actually agree with you about Plato, but it was entirely beside my point. The ship of fools analogy I used was about your immigration position, wherein the “ship” represents the United States, or the Western world as a whole – take your pick. As far as I am concerned, you still remain on board that same ship, unless and until you address this conundrum:
If we were on a sea voyage and ran across some drowning men at sea, it would be unethical to allow them to drown; no one disputes this, least of all me. If some of the sailors fell ill and could not work, I wouldn’t call on starving them until they are able to earn their keep. But what if the sailors can simply vote on giving provisions to those who would rather not work, and the numbers of shirkers grows over time, while the number of those rescued grows and grows, until a dwindling number of sailors must catch enough fish to feed the growing ranks of those who prefer to take a leisurely cruise, and everyone votes on everything?
If you choose to work, not only must you catch enough fish to feed everyone and get whippings when your catch is inadequate, but you must also scrub the deck and then dance and sing to entertain those not working. Weary of whippings and sleepless toil, sooner or later you join the ranks of the leisure cruisers, whereupon you discover that some of those rescued from the sea have a religious practice of poking holes in the hull, which may be why they ended up in the water to begin with. Now, our unhappy remaining few working sailors must also bail out the boat, but they’re set upon by the rescued drowning men, who attack them for interfering with their sacred hull holes.
How long before everyone on this ship of fools starves, drowns, resorts to cannibalism, or some other such unhappy outcome? You might find the charred and gnarled remains of the last beleaguered survivors on a desert island and conclude that, yes, they’re probably done here.
I mean the standard, classical, orthodox, radical libertarian position on borders, Andy.
Ayn Rand emigrated from the Soviet Union and favored an open immigration system while railing against barbarian cultures as fiercely as any right-wing populist does today. Mises compared migration barriers to trade tariffs and believed they foster violent conflict, utterly rejecting the economic argument for labor protectionism. While Hayek and Friedman believed the welfare state should be dismantled before opening borders, they also saw unrestricted migration as the ideal and border restrictions as a transitory necessary evil. Friedman actually cited welfarism as a reason to prefer illegal to legal immigration. Nozick opposed the idea of a nation’s land as collective property administered by government and thought it undermined individual property rights by swinging the door open for the state to claim collective ownership of national wealth and resources. The LP Radical Caucus(es) has always favored open borders under their “no particular orderism” principle, at times arguing from an accelerationist perspective: collapse the welfare state by overburdening it. Rothbard advocated open borders until his 90s turn when he and Rockwell ditched the Libertarian Party to try to team up with paleoconservatives, far-right culture warriors, and chauvinistic nationalists like your boy Traditionalist. Walter Block argues today for unrestricted migration of people and goods, following early Rothbard. And these are just some 20th-century right-libertarian thinkers. You won’t find more sympathetic voices among the classical liberals or individualist anarchists of the 19th century.
The paleolibertarian, LPMC conservatarian, Hoppean reactionary position that immigration restrictions are a positive good derived from property rights is an aberration even within the Austrolibertarian tradition.
Jared, you mean the standard LEFT libertarian position on immigration and borders, NOT the actual libertarian position.
Yes, Trad, I “failed to read” your final comment because I said I was done with that thread, if you recall. I directly answered the gotcha question you posed repeatedly, so go back and read what I said. You aren’t a libertarian. You’re a paleocon ethnostate nationalist. So, we aren’t going to agree. And on the Biblical topic of the treatment of resident aliens (since you pretend to have a scripturally derived, divinely inspired case against permissive immigration policies), you’d rather enlist indirect support from decontextualized proverbs than contend with what relevant rexts directly and actually say—you know, like a theological liberal.
I haven’t created any conundrums for myself by advocating the standard libertarian position on immigration, Trad, and I’m not the one here with only a “passing familiarity” with classical texts, mistakenly employing old analogical arguments offered in support of a political ideology radically opposed to my own. You might consider better acquainting yourself with the Western high culture you’re happy to preserve through force of government. But never mind. Go ahead and keep elaborating on the Ship of Fools. You really seem to enjoy the nautical imagery.
Tony, you and Andy remain far too intolerant of each other. Additionally, Andy is quite correct regarding the manipulated events of J6 and the manipulated election of 2020.
Jared,
If you don’t see how or why you are stuck and doomed on board a ship of fools which has now sailed over the horizon, you or anyone reading need only visit or revisit the link I provided:
https://independentpoliticalreport.com/2021/12/thomas-knapp-if-you-want-more-of-something-subsidize-it-population-edition/#comment-2535586
Did you fail to read it? I provided it for a reason, precisely to put the ship of fools reference in proper context for you and the readers here. Or, perhaps you did read it, but hoped the other folks here would not? Perhaps you, being so lamentably stuck in this conundrum of your own making, hoped to distract the gentle readers with your dazzling passing familiarity with the classics of a culture you seek to allow and enable to be sunk? Not on my watch, sir. You’ll have to do better than that. Perhaps the problem might be that the lack of sufficient provisions and potable water left on board, or on your life raft or island, have caused you to suffer from delirium?
Ed, try this https://bit.ly/32XRv3c
Andy, the open immigration side is not defending trespass. This country, its borders and interior are not your private property to restrict or grant access to. Neither do you represent the interests of all property owners. Open immigration advocates are the ones standing up for property rights. The closed immigration side wants to deny landholders their right to invite certain people onto their property based on place of origin.
Just give up on HHH’s property rights argument against freedom of movement. It’s a post hoc rationalization for paleolibs. The opposing side has a much better argument from property rights. Plus, you’ll win over more people with national conservative rhetoric about preserving “our culture” and Anglo-American civilization from the rapey barbarian hordes that elect Democrats.
Nathan Norman, your link just goes to the shorturl website. You may have mistyped the link, or the article expired?
“Jared
January 8, 2022 at 21:55
Thanks for your concern, Trad. Yes, I’m still a libertarian who affirms freedoms of movement and association.”
Do you support the “freedom” to move on property already occupied by other people, even if the people who occupy that property don’t want you there?
Do you support open borders and unlimited, unrestricted immigration onto American Indian reservations? Say the American Indians only want members of their tribe on their reservation. Do you think that this should be ignored, and that anyone from anywhere in the world should be able to move onto an American Indian reservation, even if the American Indians don’t want them there?
Tony From Long Island: “Why am I not surprised??? Nothing ever changes . . . It’s always a conspiracy. Everything is a “False flag” or “the government.” You really need serious help, man.
The decision to let you back on this site was a very poor one.”
This is NOT a conspiracy theory. it is an admitted and documented fact now. Mainstream media figures like Tucker Carlson have even talked about it on their shows.
Tony,
Educate yourself: http://shorturl.at/dejmM
ANDY: ” . . . .The J6 protestors did NOT initiate violence. The entire thing was MANIPULATED by government plants, . . . . ”
Why am I not surprised??? Nothing ever changes . . . It’s always a conspiracy. Everything is a “False flag” or “the government.” You really need serious help, man.
The decision to let you back on this site was a very poor one.
Andy,
Almost certainly? I give him a D+, and the plus is only because he picked an interesting namesake.
Thanks for your concern, Trad. Yes, I’m still a libertarian who affirms freedoms of movement and association.
While I appreciate the Republic reference, I don’t see how the Ship of Fools, an argument for technocratic elitism, applies to me. Plato was as anti-populist and anti-“traditional family values” as one could be. The Republic is a work of utopian collectivist totalitarianism.
Comrades, we must work towards a world with no money, no borders, and no government! The Libertarian ideal! The Ancien Regime that has oppressed us will be removed. Libertarians of the World, Unite!
The commie is almost certainly a troll.
You sound like a communist. The Russian revolution was fought to liberate the people? How did that work out for them?
Change will not come from above! The masses will rise up and liberate the world! The Mises are lackey dogs of the statist pigs, Fascists in all but name. They are Petainists, not Libertarian. We seek the liberation of the people and abolish the state. Smash the Mise! Abolish the State! Libertarians of the World, Unite!
The Mises Caucus is not a false flag. It is officially endorsed by Ron Paul, and it has the active involvement of Tom Woods and Dave Smith. It is the real deal.
Kropotkin would not be defending the rancid Donald Trump and the reactionary violence he fermented.
Like the Mises Caucus, the Kropotkin Caucus appears to be a false flag operation aligned with the Storm Trumpers and the Trumpholes.
Comrades, those unwilling to accept revolution as an instrument to political change are cowards and traitors. The American Revolution was fought to free America from the oppression of the British. The Russian Revolutions was fought to empower the people from centuries of oppression. The Iranian revolution, also to free the people from oppression. Right now in Kazakhstan, there is a revolution going on to end the oppression. Right now, the Libertarian Party is acting like Quislings willing to appease the state, hoping for the scraps from their table. Libertarians of the World, Unite! Smash the chains that oppress us!
Is Jared still on the ship of fools?
https://independentpoliticalreport.com/2021/12/thomas-knapp-if-you-want-more-of-something-subsidize-it-population-edition/#comment-2535586
Can anyone provide an update, as to what is happening on board?
Nobody opposes welcoming immigrants. We support immigrants. We just don’t welcome invaders. Was more invaders today than immigrants.
Well, the Prags oppose dated and cheesy branding, the Rads oppose national symbolism and America, and the paleos oppose welcoming immigrants. So, Lady Liberty didn’t stand a chance.
Only kind of kidding. I agree the new logo is meh. Looks like somebody paid $5 to a kid on Fiverr.
Andy at 0450 is exactly correct.
“Initiating violence runs counter to seeking a world of peace and liberty.”
The J6 protestors did NOT initiate violence. The entire thing was MANIPULATED by government plants, adn the Capitol police were ordered to stand down and let the protestors inside the Capitol. Once inside, little damage was done, and the most violent thing that happened was a Capitol police officer shooting a an unarmed protestor for no legitimate reason.
Also, even if the protestors actually had planned the whole thing, and actually had engaged in violence, it would have been completely justified, given the election fraud that took place, and given the amount of force and fraud initiated by the federal government on a daily basis.
It is a good thing that the bootlicking cowards on the LNC were not around in the 1700’s.
“What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”
Thomas Jefferson
“Austin CassidyPost author
January 6, 2022 at 23:49
Seeing that logo reminds of just how much I dislike the LP’s rebranding. This new graphic looks very amateurish. Reminds me of the “hand banana” character from that Cartoon Network show.
Why did they drop the classic logo featuring the Statue of Liberty?”
What is even sad is that the LNC wasted a huge gob of time a few years ago debating over changing the logo to this, and after they finally did it, they wasted money implementing the new logo. They could have been doing something more important, and productive during this time period.
Ask Sarwark. He paid a lot of money for the bananas on a stick even though it’s universally despised.
Seeing that logo reminds of just how much I dislike the LP’s rebranding. This new graphic looks very amateurish. Reminds me of the “hand banana” character from that Cartoon Network show.
Why did they drop the classic logo featuring the Statue of Liberty?