Category Archives: Political Philosophy

What’s Fueling The Fever Of Freedom?

Constitution, Democracy, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Philosophy, Private Property, States' Rights

IMMIGRATION IS. When states stand up to the always-oppressive federal government, it’s a good thing. When issues loom large enough to bring about this necessary rift—necessary if freedom is to prevail—they deserve a closer look, if not, I would argue, our unreserved support. If gay marriage, yea or nay, prompted a state to secede; I’d be the first to cheer that state on.

Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has ruled that “state law enforcement officers are allowed to check the immigration status of anyone ‘stopped or arrested.” According to FoxNews, Cuccinelli issued a legal opinion on Friday “extending that authority to Virginia police in response to an inquiry over whether his state could mirror the policies passed into law in Arizona.”

“It is my opinion that Virginia law enforcement officers, including conservation officers may, like Arizona police officers, inquire into the immigration status of persons stopped or arrested,” he wrote.

Bring it on is what Cuccinelli is telling the federal government.

According to Lou Dobbs, interviewed by Megyn Kelly, “11 states are preparing to emulate Arizona. It is not what the Obama administration wanted; but it is exactly what the American people want,” he told the host of America’s News. Kelly says there are at least 18 states poised to follow Arizona on immigration and into a conflagration with the feds.

Now, you could challenge me as follows: “Mercer, you are not a proponent of majoritarianism. You’ve argued vigorously against democracy—even have a book due out that is a manifesto against raw democracy. Why are the people’s wishes okay in this instance?”

Because, as I’ve often said (most recently in this blog post), people have negative, leave-me-alone rights. Preventing a foreign invasion is perfectly within the purview of the “night-watchman state of classical-liberal theory,” in the words of the late philosopher, Robert Nozick.

Having delegated defense and policing to government, a people has a right to live free of the dangers that flow from being trespassed upon.

To the American Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson especially, secession was essential to the American scheme. Jefferson viewed extreme decentralization as the bulwark of the liberty and rights of man. Consequently, the United States was created as a pact between sovereign states with which the ultimate power lay. Sadly, it has progressed from a decentralized republic into a highly consolidated one.

The Constitution assigns the narrow function of naturalization to the feds. That small thing notwithstanding; I find it hard to fathom a founder arguing that the men and militia of a state should sit on their hands because a tier of tyrants (the feds) told them to (while their farms and nature reserves are trashed and their families endangered).

Neither should libertarians sit this thing out.

UPDATED: Do Immigration Laws Violate Libertarian Axiom?

Classical Liberalism, Critique, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy

“Showing complete disregard for the Constitution, the rule of law, the democratic will of the people of Arizona, Clinton appointee Susan Bolton issued an injunction against the major aspects of Arizona’s law in federal district court,” writes the Washington Watcher at VDARE.COM.

Of course, “Arizona is doing the work Washington doesn’t want done.”

The other day, I came across the most flighty, possibly even dissembling, libertarian argument so far against the prevention of trespass, and I’ve responded to many before. Here it goes: Immigration restrictions require the use of aggression against non-aggressors. There can be no debate about that. [really?] Therefore any half-decent libertarian must reject any immigration restrictions. That’s all.

Since when are immigration restrictions predicated on aggression against non-aggressors? Only if you believe telling someone, “No, you can’t go there” is tantamount to violence. Let us not trivialize violence.

“A well-policed barrier,” for example, “on the border is the definitive, non-aggressive method of defense against ailments and afflictions. You don’t attack, arrest or otherwise molest undesirables; you keep them at bay, away.” Could it be that the “Libertarian and leftist protest over any impediment to the free flow of people across borders is predicated not on the negative, leave-me-alone rights of the individual, but on the positive, manufactured right of human kind to venture wherever, whenever”?

(From “The Swine (AKA The State) Are AWOL”)

Any law, or any form of ordered liberty, may require the use of aggression, or, inadvertently, culminate in the use of force against non-aggressors. Shall we forfeit all laws?

The above position is anarcho-libertarian, not classical liberal (which is the label I prefer for myself). Anarcho-libertarians must tell their interlocutors that they reject all centrally enforced law and order. Such disclosure is only fair.

This from “TRADE GOODS, NOT PLACES” applies:

“Matters would be simple if all libertarians agreed that a constitutional government has an obligation to repel foreign invaders. They don’t, not if they are anarchists. Both open-border and closed-border libertarian anarcho-capitalists posit that an ideal society is one where there is no entity—government—to monopolize defense and justice functions. In a society based on anarcho-capitalism, where every bit of property is privately owned, the reasoning goes, private property owners cannot object if X invites Y onto his property, so long as he keeps him there, or so long as Y obtains permission to venture onto other spaces. Despite their shared anarchism, limited-immigration anarcho-libertarians and free-immigration anarcho-libertarians arrive respectively at different conclusions when they make the transition from utopia to real life.

The latter believe the state must refrain from interfering with the free movement of people despite the danger they may pose to nationals. The former arrive at the exact opposite conclusion: So long as the modern American Welfare State stands, and so long as it owns large swaths of property, it’s permissible to expect the state to carry out its traditional defensive functions. This includes repelling incomers who may endanger the lives and livelihoods of locals.

The open-border libertarian will claim that his is the less porous position. He will accuse the limited-immigration libertarian of being guilty, on the one hand, of wanting the state to take action to counter immigration, but, on the other hand, because of his anarchism, being at pains to find a basis for the interventions he favors. Not being an anarchist, and hence not having to justify the limited use by government of force against invaders, I hope I have escaped these contradictions.”

[SNIP]

A society cannot be reduced to the skeletal essence of the libertarian non-aggression axiom. I am confident Edmund Burke, of whose Vindication of Natural Society Murray Rothbard thoroughly approved (O’Keeffe 2010: 3), would agree.

UPDATE (July 30): To the comment below: Isn’t an argument about the preservation of civilization nativist? Isn’t the preservation of civilization the prerogative only of non-Occidentals, who are forever threatened by Westerners?

UPDATED: Tea Party Central

Constitution, Founding Fathers, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Politics, Race, Racism

How do you tell that a grassroots, decentralized movement has moved into mainstream politics and has been thoroughly co-opted by its forces? Here’s one sign: A movement that arose in order to address profound issues of political philosophy begins to front “spokespersons” to apologize and bend over backwards in order to pacify mainstream muckrakers and race-baters. That’s one way to know for sure that the Tea Party is being schooled and groomed for grimy politics as usual.

MSNBC:

Mark Williams, the flamethrower leading the battle against the Ground Zero mosque, was kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation Saturday for a racist blog post.
He shrugged off the diss, calling it “grandstanding” from a “minor player on the fringe.”
A California radio host and leader of the Tea Party Express, Williams had labeled the Manhattan boro president a “Jewish Uncle Tom” and President Obama an “Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug.”
But when he posted a satirical letter supposedly from “the Colored People” to President Lincoln praising slavery, that apparently crossed the line.
The federation, an umbrella organization that claims to represent 85 Tea Party groups, kicked out Williams’ group when it wouldn’t fire him. “We have expelled Tea Party Express and Mark Williams from the National Tea Party Federation because of the letter that he wrote,” federation spokesman David Webb said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

You got a hint of the forces controlling the Tea Party—the kind of people who’ve clawed their way onto establishment forums such as “Face the Nation”—when the “gritty” movement doubled up in pain and then went into defense mode over being accused of racism by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Being so accused by such people is always false and is almost always a badge of honor.

Andrew Breitbart’s “Go to hell” is a start. But even better would it have been to ignore an organization that is too stupid to debate, but is sufficiently wily to work to ensure that nothing of the old, founding liberties remains or is revived.

It was wrong to so much as dignify these contemptible efforts to silence the small segment of America that is still true to her origins. Leaders of that America should never have chomped down on the bait, which is nothing but ad hominem intended to paralyze and marginalize liberty.

“The Many Ministries of Truth,” I wrote,

“make truth telling a difficult task. In fiction, the Orwellian Ministry of Truth is a reified entity. In reality, there isn’t one concrete ministry that decides how the nation thinks—there are many such entities. They’ve evolved over time, and they issue countless subliminal edicts.
One type of aversion treatment is to call the unhappy victim a racist. It’s the contemporary version of fingering a witch during the Salem witchcraft trials. This treatment awaits any and all who fail to conform to the correct thinking, transmitted by the education system, the churches, and the intellectuals.”

UPDATE (July 19): “Is it not an absurd world we live in?” asks a fired-up Pat Buchanan, who I’ve been seeing less and less on MSNBC.

“Here is an organization whose very name, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pronounces its goal—advancement through affirmative action, quotas, contract set-asides based on race—accusing another organization of being motivated by race.”

Jealous and the NAACP are trying to change the subject from Obama’s failure to Obama’s race, and from the failures of liberals to the motivations of conservatives.
By accusing the tea party of harboring racists, the NAACP is, in effect, demanding that the party appear in a court of public opinion to prove itself innocent of an unsupported slander.
Sorry, that’s not how things work in America.

Oh, but that’s exactly how things work in America.

To Spend Or Not To Spend: That’s The American Question

Debt, Economy, Labor, Political Philosophy, Republicans, Socialism, Welfare

Can there be a real intellectual debate with respect to spending money not your own, which you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of repaying? Sure there can. In the US, that’s what goes for a serious debate of political philosophy. The country carries upwards of $100 trillion of debt, counting its unfunded promises. Yet here we are, bickering again about extending unemployment benefits.

In June, in what was his finest hour, Jim Bunning held up a vote on a $10 billion spending bill to extend unemployment benefits. Instead of standing tall and explaining the principle of not committing theft, he spent his days ducking a hand bagging from the bug-eyed Dana Bash of CNN.

A month on, and we’re clearly overdue for a repeat performance (this is, after all, the “Age of the Idiot”).

Can we hope that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) will remain steadfast? So far he has been “defiant.” After President Barack Obama accused the Republican leadership Saturday of obstructionism, … McConnell told CNN’s ‘State of the Nation’ that the administration needed to end its ‘incredible spending spree.'”

I repeat, “the welfare state is intractable. The pigs outnumber—or are stronger electorally than—the productive. The first are feeding off the second and will not let up. Try to put distance between the state’s dependents and their Big Teat, and they’ll tear you to pieces.”