Insta-libertarianism

Um, much as I enjoy laughing at Libertarians, I think if you read it again you’ll see that he’s advocating making it easier to get visas so that more foreigners can work legally in the US (and perhaps eventually become citizens).

“Libertarianism in One Country”

“Libertarianism in One Country”

I made the mistake of googling that, and what was the first hit I found?

Some wacko named John Derbyshire saying this

“I think that libertarians should take a leaf from Stalin’s book. They should acknowledge that the USA is, of all nations, the one whose political traditions offer the most hospitable soil for libertarianism. Foreigners, including foreigners possessed of the urge to come and settle in modern, welfare-state America, are much less well-disposed towards libertarianism.

That is why I say that libertarians who favor mass immigration are nuts. If there is any hope at all for libertarianism, it rests in the libertarianism of my title: libertarianism in one country.

There is no contradiction between maximum liberty within a nation and maximum vigilance on the nation’s borders.”

Well of course not if you think that,

“Libertarianism is simply not attractive either to illiterate peasants from mercantilist Latin American states, or to East Asians with traditions of imperial-bureaucratic paternalism, or to the products of Middle Eastern Muslim theocracies.”

Liberty, a good only US citizens want! So shut down the borders and keep the destructive liberty hating fuckers out!

OK back to work now.

Well, I’ve always thought myself that any consistant libertarian had to be an anarchist, but I keep losing that argument, and if you’re going to have a state, you need to have some kind of control over your borders.

I’m not an expert, but is it really inconsistent with the libertarian dogma to freely associate with some people and fence everyone else out? It doesn’t sound inconsistent.

Chris, I think your confusing “libertarian” with “capitalist anarchist.” The former believes that there *are* legitimate duties of a government, and that one of those duties is controlling who gets into the country.

“It is inconsistent both with libertarianism and with free association for the state to deny to, say, a US would-be employer of crop-pickers the right freely to associate with the Mexicans she wants to hire.”

Kit Wellman, in a recent (as of yet unpublished, I believe) paper argued that it’s exactly freedom of association that allows a majority to decided to not allow immigration if they do so decide, much as a majority of a club may decide to not allow in any more members. (It’s been a while since I read the paper by my memory is that he applies this idea to all forms of immigration.) I don’t think this works at all, since one of the major ways that a country is unlike a club is that if the majority of my club votes for things I don’t like I can go start a new one while I cannot plausibly do that with a country. But if you thought countries should just be what, say, Nozick though they should be then it might well be that that sort of libertarianism would be consistant with this sort of immigration restrictions. I have no idea what Paul thinks and have no interest in finding out, but since the chance of countries being at most dominant protection agencies where new groups can splinter off is, at best, a matter for academic consideration(thank god!)it isn’t really relevent for evaluating Paul’s position that if Nozick’s view where actually in place it might support something like that.

Abb1-
Don’t tell Chris. That’ll ruin a good snark!

Sk

As noted above, it is consistent with libertarianism to believe that true public goods should be provided by the Government. The question then becomes whether border controls are a public good. That’s a debatable question, and we know from previous posts that Chris B. thinks not. The pro-control argument would presumably be that unrestricted immigration harms both countries, lowering wages in the US and miring Mexico in political and economic stagnation by draining away a constituency that would otherwise be agitating for salutary societal change there. Again, one certainly can disagree with this argument, but I don’t think a libertarian must disagree.

Chris is correct that such controls do interfere with freedom of association, but I don’t think that libertarianism necessarily elevates freedom of association to trump all other societal values. Various provisions of criminal law also restrict freedom of association but are nonetheless acceptable to libertarians. I suppose it may come down to whether one conceives of immigration violations as “victimless” or not, which strikes me as simply another perspective on the disagreement discussed in my previous paragraph.

Matt and Tom

I am not sure you are getting at the relevant issue. How could it matter what a majority in some country thinks about the ‘right level and kind of immigration’ when the issue is about preventing some individual from entering a territory and engaging in contracts with other individuals?

If I own some land then I have a right to dictate who gets access to it. And if I own a percentage of some land with others it may be the case that a majority vote should determine who gets access, although I think we run into some problems already here.

But do citizen’s that happen to be born on one side of a border have entitlement rights to the territory such that they can legitimately use state coercion to prevent others from entering? Where do they get these ownership rights from? Nothing they have done explains why they should own a share of some part of the planet in a way that makes it legitimate to prevent others from moving around the planet. Rather, as it currently stands ‘ownership’ appears to be an arbitrary birth right. Nozickians would claim that in theory we could transfer legitimate property rights over a country to each new generation, but no thinking Nozickian would say that the borders of ownership that actually do exist are the result of just exchanges.

And, of course, the idea that any current generation’s entitlements are legitimately dictated by exchanges made far off in the past is itself highly questionable.

Kit Wellman, in a recent (as of yet unpublished, I believe) paper argued that it’s exactly freedom of association that allows a majority to decided to not allow immigration if they do so decide, much as a majority of a club may decide to not allow in any more members.

That’s patently silly. Perhaps it is consistent for libertarians to deny citizenship based on majority rule (though I fail to see how, since for libertarians, individual rights are inalienable and precede the state, and for them, that’s all citizenship is). But if a majority can take away the right, not just of an individual, but a citizen, to hire whoever he damn well pleases–it’s hard to imagine what that majority would not be permitted to do, what rights it would not be permitted to abridge.

As for immigration: the consistent libertarian position is to open the borders, but at the same time, abolish the welfare state. One wonders why Ron Paul doesn’t take that position, since he’s a vanity candidate anyway.

Has Nozick now been excommunicated by the American libertarian movement? I get the impression from reading the last two threads that he must have been.

“Like I said: rights for Americans, state coercion for foreigners is not libertarianism.”

Shouldn’t this go under “Isn’t it interesting how people can look stupid if I suck any nuance out of their arguments”?

One could just as easily point out that many supporters of the social welfare state for all practical purposes believe in welfare for our citizens but shockingly (SHOCKINGLY) don’t advocate that the United States provide a minimum income for every person in the entire world. I mean the point is idiotic of course…

Since when is Instapundit any kind of libertarian even for American citizens? “Bog standard conservative Republican who’s a gun rights crank and nominally supports abortion and gay rights (but never thinks they’re being advocated or achieved in the right way)” hardly counts…

Aaron, I _agree_ that it’s not a good argument in defending the view that we should be able to prevent free movement of people over large areas of territory! I hope I’m not required to defend views that I think are quite bad, which I clearly stated. (Geez is right!) A Nozickian state would very likely _not_ be one that extended over large territories (it wouldn’t work as the ‘framework for utopias’ if it did) and so the fact that the club analogy doesn’t apply for actual states might not apply there. I think Nozickian states are highly undesirable for other reasons, though, so won’t defend them. I think you’ve pretty clearly misread or misunderstood what I wrote.

There are as many different kinds of libertarians as there are different kinds of lunatics. Taking Reynolds to be speaking for all of them is as unfair as taking one inmate to be speaking for the whole asylum.

Yeah, and Matthew Yglesias and Belle Waring aren’t liberals because the one wants to buy a handgun and the other thinks that trans-fat bans are stupid!

Personally, I’m the kind of libertarian who favors dramatically more open immigration than we currently have (including/especially for immigrants from Mexico who usually are less skilled). But I’ve kind of made my piece with the idea that people don’t have to be exact clones of me to fall under the same basic category.

And that Ayn Rand, she was a good ole all-American gal… wasn’t she?

The real knock against Ron Paul’s claim to libertarianism isn’t any particuar arguably deviant political view, but his willingness to spend the last ten years caucusing with the statist authoritarians in the modern Republican party.

The real knock against Ron Paul’s claim to libertarianism isn’t any particuar arguably deviant political view, but his willingness to spend the last ten years caucusing with the statist authoritarians in the modern Republican party.

Indeed. But he has occasionally taken stands against Republican positions, such as on Real ID. Of course, since he stood virtually alone on the other side of the aisle, it accomplished nothing, but still. Also, he supported the alliance between Rep. Otter and Rep. Sanders to push back against the most egregious elements of the Patriot Act. It wasn’t his fault that it was killed in the Rules Committee. And officially caucusing with the minority wouldn’t have changed those outcomes. All that said,

but actually stands for libertarianism for US citizens

That would be “non-gay US citizens who accept the government’s authority to make their reproductive decisions for them.” And he is not merely in favor of strong border controls, but shares with Rep. Tancredo the wish to abolish birthright citizenship. Repealing a rights-granting Constitutional amendment does seem to run a little bit against the grain.

However, despite Ms. Waring’s concerns, Rep. Paul has actually been rather critical of the “War on Drugs,” comparing it to the “War on Terror” in the way that both deserve.

Aaron, I guess I have no idea what your objection is, then, since I don’t think states are like clubs, and don’t think they ought to be. Really, what was your objection to what _I_ said?

You said that if states would become like clubs then there would be a normative argument for majority rule determining who gets to ‘play’.

Problems:

1. It gives the impression that you are thinking of the states we have at the current scope becoming like clubs, not that large states will vanish and we will have small clubs instead.

2. For large scale clubs or states there is no change in the territory/property issue. If you mean that the scale of states as we know them would be radically reduced it is, as you say, a different story.

3. A club’s right to decide who they should associate with recreationally is very different than a group deciding that its members can’t have economic contracts with some set of people. This second idea creates many difficulties for libertarians on both their commitment to individualism and free markets (as post #25 was getting at).

Sorry about being so snotty in my reply. I can overreact when I imagine that my opponent is ignoring my efforts to debate.

But Aaron, I didn’t imply _any_ of those things, and in fact suggested that these are serious reasons to reject the analogy. Maybe the problem is that you don’t know the work I’m refering to. There’s no problem in that, of course. I think you were pretty clearly projecting things onto what I did say that are not there.

Sebastian

If you look at my posts I do not think you will see me making a caricature of libertarianism. First I cited a libertarian and then I made some analytical points in line with libertarian thinking and premises.

If citing a libertarian counts as making a caricature of a libertarian, then that is not my fault.

That’s the difference between a sensible mixed ideology and a pure ideology. You can’t easily gotcha a mixed ideology. You can a fundamentalist one.

If restricting immigration on economic grounds is compatible with libertarianism than restricting trade on economic grounds is too. Paul, however, argues against tariffs since he seems them (rightly) as taxes on consumers but he makes a fetish of taxes rather than liberty. Why can’t I hire a Mexican or Swiss worker rather than a US one? Will it depress wages for US workers in that sector? Sure. But graduating the next art history major will depress wages in that field too, so should the government ban new entrants to art history courses on those grounds?

To qualify as a libertarian, you don’t have to take the libertarian position on every issue

What if you just take the libertarian position where it coincides with the rightwing/Republican position and reject it when it doesn’t? Would you be entitled to call yourself a libertarian then? I am an interested in the answer to this question, because the number of such “libertarians” I have encountered vastly outnumbers every other kind.

Hey, calm down and take a break. Let’s all go ride bikes!

As a liberterian in not so good standing I’d say that immigration, abortion and foreign policy are the issues which liberterians are most likely to disagree over between themselves. War on drugs, guns and most economic policies are probably the ones they most agree on.

As an aside, the Miltonian “can’t have immigration and a generous welfare state”… well, first, it’s not necessarily true (it depends on whether immigrants pay taxes or not, whether they vote or not, how fast they assimilate, etc.) and second, it’s more of an argument to allow MORE immigrants in (to sabotage the evil welfare state) rather than to keep them out.

And while I disagree with RP’s position on immigration, it’s far from kooky and is tempered by the “more visas” provision.

Matt,

You seem to think that because you note that you have reasons for rejecting libertarianism and reasons for why you would not want states to become like clubs we should not criticise you for the following claim,

“Clubs, of course, can and do set rules on enterence and exit based on majority rule. To the extent that states became more like clubs they might also be justified in doing so as well.”

But my interest is not in attributing to you any ideological allegiance one way or another. What I am interested in is whether or not it is in fact true that following a libertarian theory of justice when states become more like clubs they are justified in using majority voting to impose restrictive immigration policies. What I am interested in is whether or not the content of your claim above holds, and I argue that it does not.

That you note that you have some other reasons for not accepting libertarianism does not help me one way or another in thinking about the content of the claim above. Maybe your other reasons for rejecting libertarianism are crap, if so I would not want to be caught with my pants down having not reflected over what clubs can and cannot do following libertarian premises.

It was far more than this. The attempted soviet slaughter of the Estonian ethnic and linguistic fabric was driven by the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Estonians.

I’m not terribly surprised, but I hardly see how my comment was “malcultured”. I’m well aware of the policy of Russification of non-Russian Soviet areas, and, of course, like communism necessarily is, it was brutal.

– Josh

“I was just thinking that coercive state restriction of individual’s rights freely to associate economically with others not of the same nationality might be incompatible with libertarianism.”

The right to associate ECONOMICALLY with others is not in question by Ron Paul. The right to actually IMMIGRATE is. You may have trouble distinguishing between trade and immigration, but not everyone has that problem.

You are in engaging in your typical game. At a high enough level of generalization, everything is the same. You want to use one level of generalization to criticize things you don’t like and use another level of generalization to when things you like are criticized.

Again, if you get maximalize the definitions of libertarians in their arguments, but are allowed to carefully limit definitions in your own, you can look good and they can look silly–at least to people who don’t think very well. Since that is a good number of people, I’m sure you can do at least as well as the intellectual world’s equivalent of P.T. Barnum.

Mq’s comment is spot on. You support universal health care but don’t expect the US to pay for all the angioplasty needed in the Sudan? Gotcha.

Or if you want to be intellectually serious, not so much.

I’m sorry, did you have trouble with the trade/immigration distinction again?

Did you have trouble with the levels of generalization problem again?

Do you read the comments or just snark?

So if someone advocates ‘Universal Healthcare’ but doesn’t include patients in the Sudan they are liars or non-progressives, right?

For sufficient levels of generalization of “associate economically with others” you are of course correct. Unfortunately, you are trying to maintain a “the left wants to influence capital therefore all leftists are communist” level of generalization that you wouldn’t put up with if it were applied to your ideas.

How about this level of generalization? Progressives say that they want to redistribute wealth, but complain when over time the rich get richer. Isn’t the rich getting richer a redistribution of wealth? Ohhhh, snap!

Re #74:

“That isn’t a denial of the would be hirer’s freedom to associate economically with others?”

There are many limitations to the hirer’s freedom to associate economically with others in a libertarian state. For example, Citizen A cannot hire Noncitizen B to paint Citizen C’s house without Citizen C’s permission. I’m sure not part isn’t too controversial. The question is now, Can A hire B to pick A’s crops in the country. Does this economic association violate C’s rights? Well, in order to pick the crops C must cross the border. A does not own the border. B’s crossing the border can be seen as similar to painting C’s house if C owns part of the border. Note, we not limiting A’s ablitiy to associate with B, A can pick up the topsoil fly to B and let B pick the crops and fly back to A’c country. A simply can’t enter into an agreement with B to allow B to cross the border since A does not own the border.

Since the (a) main different between an anarchist and a libertarian is that the libertarian believes in national defence as a common good, it is clear that a libertarian believes that at least some of the propertiy rights of the border are public goods (“rights-violaters” as you said above). Is it too hard to believe that other rights (like the right of noncitizens to cross) are also public goods in a libertarian state? Even when in these comments some of the most influential libertarian thinkers (Nozick, Freedman) have been quoted as stating that those rights are public goods?

Actually, it’s not that easy. The border is 3,000km. Divided by 300,000,000 people – it appears that only 1cm of it belongs to A. Senior B won’t be able to squeeze thru 1 cm hole.

Otoh, Mr. A probably has a family and a bunch of relatives and friends, so I’m sure he can still manage to bring in his worker. Well, otoh, it’s unlikely that their individual centimeters of the border are contiguous, and this is a bit of a problem. They’ll probably have to trade their pieces with other individuals to make a contiguous hole large enough for B. Or A could simply buy himself a suitable interval.

Chris, although minarchists don’t like to talk about it much, a minarchist state must presumably be controlled somehow by the citizens. Maybe not exactly Constitutionally, but at least constitutionally, and probably democratically. It’s a human organization, not a machine. Any such arrangement has the inherent problem in dealing with aliens who have different values, who would change the constitution.

Put another way, would it concern you at all if all American voters were replaced with, say, Iraqi citizens for a few election cycles? It would, me.

Immigration is not analogous to free trade in that key way. Allowing goods into the country will not change the system. Allowing people in who would change the law, and allowing them to vote (or otherwise control the system), might.

Now, I think many minarchists think that the system itself would work to nullify any damage that outsiders might do. But I think that it naive, given the evolution of this country, and given any understanding of the cultural diversity in the world.

Personally, I’m an anarchist, so I don’t have this problem. But minarchy is as far as many people can get in their libertarianism; dropping the state entirely is just too big of a leap. That is why Nozick is such a big deal to many libertarians: he offers a “proof” of the acceptability of minarchy.

BTW would I be correct in inferring that you must be an anarcho-capitalist, not a real anarchist?

Sebastian: nuanced view

Is this a new irregular verb?

He is a hypocrite.
You are not being true to your own highest principles.
I have a nuanced view.

Incidentally, I also reject Chris’s attempt to read Ron Paul out of the movement. I voted for him in 1988, and I’d vote for him this year if he runs, with any party. Paul is as close to a pure libertarian as a person can be and still somehow, almost miraculously, stay elected to that band of crooks and liars aka the US Congress.

I have now read enough to convince me that those defending libertarian arguments for nationalistic policies are not taking the problem seriously.

One of the central arguments here seems to be that all philosophical perspectives (and by all the libertarian posters here mean liberal egalitarianism) have internal conflicts so you can’t characterise a nationalistic view as non-libertarian because it is just an internal compromise like those that exists in any other philosophical view.

In particular the argument is that liberal egalitarians think we should have states and that standards and claims in distributive justice can be significantly limited by state borders so libertarians can argue that we should have states and the standards of rights protection can be significantly limited or divergent between individuals following state borders.

First, it is true that liberal egalitarianism faces a real problem when it limits the scope of distributive justice to those within a state. This appears to be an arbitrary limit on who is owed equal concern and who is not. But the fact of the matter is that at least over the past ten years just this contradiction has been the central focus for liberal egalitarians, and they see it as a very serious problem within the theory with no clear solution. In fact this debate has shown that the central figure of modern liberal egalitarianism, Rawls, to be communitarian in central aspects of his theory.

The point is then that serious thinking liberals when looking at their own theory have been forced to either move away from liberal principles in favour of, at least to some degree, communitarian principles and premises or to argue for some fairly radical cosmopolitan implication on questions of global distributive justice and positive rights duties. There are some that try to find a liberal position that gives borders moral significance without taking on communitarian views, but these argument are far from dominant and the debate is still very much alive.

But the arguments advanced here is of the character, liberals+welfare state=no problem thus libertarians+nationalis=no problem. But that fist claims is just wrong, and the second claim does not follow. There are HUGE problems with combining libertarian+nationalism and what you libertarians should do is follow liberals in actually doing some work on addressing the conflict and being open to the possibility that it might require you to change either your principles or policy recommendations.

And I want to be very clear, I think that it is a very normal human thing to be willing to see the interesting complications of thinking in people who think like we do, and to simplify our characterization of people who don’t. I certainly do it all the time. The difference between communist and socialist I can parse, but many of the screaming fights between socialists and what look to me to be nearly identical progressives are mysterious. But I don’t believe that the differences aren’t there and I don’t assume that the contradictions that are apparent to me have been completely lost on those involved. I just believe I’m not deeply immersed enough in the discussion to have seen it.

Now I could be wrong, perhaps Chris is deeply involved in understanding the ins and outs of libertarian philosophy. He makes a couple of mistakes that seem obvious to me, but libertarians are much more my natural philosophical allies than people likely to be found on this blog–which is why the mistakes are obvious to me. But that is my point. Someone who would confuse Ron Paul as a close ideological compatriot of Instapundit isn’t really understanding libertarians very well.

Now I’m not at all saying that libertarian thought is so deeply important that you should have to research it deeply if you don’t want to. I happen to think it is interesting and has some useful insights, but that isn’t a widely held belief. I’m just suggesting, Chris, that you don’t understand it enough to be able to so blithely dismiss ‘contradictions’ in libertarian thought. You are taking the slogans as if that was all to the philosophy. Pretty much no philosophy looks great if all you look at is the slogans.

Sebastian – This is starting to get a bit silly. You seem to be studiously avoiding the arguments people are making in favour of repeating, with ever greater rhetorical flourishes, your assertion that the people here who are criticising libertarianism are psychologically predisposed to see more subtleties in the ideologies to which they are more sympathetic. This may well be true to some extent (it may well also be true of libertiarians and even – dare I say it – of non-libertarian right-wingers like yourself) but you haven’t provided any evidence that it affects the arguments they have been making. As far I can see your efforts to meet the substance of these arguments have been strictly limited to your statement that libertarians accept government for national defense (which is true, but irrelevant) and your bald assertion that “Libertarians are not averse to the concept of borders”. Well, they may well not be, but the question being raised is whether such a position can really be justified in terms of libertarian principles.

The problem with ‘defending’ libertarianism in the context of this discussion is that it isn’t clear what I’m defending it against.

He isn’t willing to allow for a rather clear difference between trade and immigration which is a key distinction to the argument.

The analogy to national defence is not a sidenote. Libertarians allow for collective action in national defence. Why do they do that? They do that because they think there is something special about their nation which they would like to protect and of the nation they are trying to create. The exact nature of that is contested, but they allow for national defence to protect it. If they thought there wasn’t something special about it, it wouldn’t be a problem–let anyone come in and take over.

Mass immigration poses similar problems–it risks major changes and unpredictable changes to your society. Everyone understands this, which is why there is virtually no major political party which is for totally open borders. The United States in general, and libertarians specifically are much more open to immigration (and allowing immigrants to become full citizens)on a much larger scale than is is found in most countries or major political parties in Europe. Nevertheless, even in the Unites States, we see some limits.

Libertarians, like nearly everyone else, see the potential problems with mass uncontrolled immigration on the society they wish to have. As such, like national defence, immigration is one of the few areas where libertarians see some role for a national government.

Many people on this blog, Chris particularly, seems to think that libertarians are basically just anarchists in philosophy such that nearly any government intervention must be a violation of their principles. That is incorrect.