Category Archives: Private Property

BACKWARD Zuckerberg : We Subsidize His DREAMERS

IMMIGRATION, Paleolibertarianism, Private Property, Taxation, Technology

There is a very good reason Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg can promise the world to “young undocumented immigrants,” or “Dreamers,” pretend that by lobbying to let them stay in the USA, he is tapping into endless possibilities; make like they’re God’s gift to the American high-tech industry (when they’re not), and generally carry on like a filthy rich d-ck: the objects of his affection—young, illegal immigrants—are subsidized by the American taxpayer.

Legalization of low-skilled or no-skilled migrants (such as Zuckerberg’s “Dreamers”) amounts to a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to big business via big government.

As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has written, “”[E]mployers under democratic Welfare State conditions are permitted by state law to externalize their employment costs on others” and will “tend to import increasingly low-skilled and low value-productive immigrants, regardless of their effect on all-around communal property values.”

Here, the rightful owners of public property (taxpayers) do not get to vet the newcomers—the state and big business do. Yet when faced with such economic fascism (government-business collusion), open-border libertarians exalt business’ every move.

“His tentative grasp of property leads the leftist libertarian to forget that public property is property funded by taxpayers through expropriated taxes. It belongs to taxpayers. Yet at least a million additional immigrants a year are allowed the free use of these taxpayer-supported amenities. Every new arrival avails himself of public works such as roads, hospitals, parks, libraries, schools and welfare.
In the absence of a state, or in the presence of a limited government where almost all land is privately owned, migration would be a very restricted affair. It would depend on the graces of private property owners. A newcomer may be invited over by a propertied person, who would shoulder the costs. If he wishes to venture beyond the invited sphere, the newcomer would seek consent from the private property owners with whom he wishes to interface. The more the status of property approaches the libertarian ideal, the less free migration would be.” (From “LOVE-IN AT THE BORDERS”)

Train The Cameras On Police And First Responders

Crime, Economy, Fascism, Free Markets, Government, Law, Private Property, The State

Police and state-employed firefighters must be tethered electronically by video cams. The cameras worn on the helmets of weaponized government workers—they have enormous license to use their weapons—serve to keep them accountable. Business (say, free-market firefighters hired by an insurer) already polices its workforce, as it is in the business of pleasing, not killing, those it serves. Preventing fraud and abuse on the job is integral* to the job. (Guess why.) When will people get that the incentives that are at work in private property are missing from state-run systems?

Twelve or so minutes into “The Five” on Fox News, a heated airhead debate ensued over the suggestion of removing cameras from the helmets of cops and first responders. Airhead Bob Beckel said cameras must go. Kimberly Guilfoyle (not an airhead, but a bona fide statist) agreed. Poor Dana Ditz. She got it right but by default. She wants to give the boys in blue all the power in the world “to protect us.” Because Dana Ditz can’t reverse a situation in her not-so-nimble mind, she failed to see that cops filming also means cops being filmed, and abuses more likely exposed. (* Today, our Dana discovered the word “integral.” But in pronouncing it, she placed the emphasis incorrectly on the second syllable. Here’s the right way to say “integral.”)

Remember the only victim of the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash, last month? She was killed not by the crash, but by our brave first responders.

FSGate:

The San Francisco Fire Department supervisors who took charge of the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash scene were not alerted by firefighters that a 16-year-old passenger had been found near the plane, leaving them powerless to prevent the girl from being run over by a rig after she was covered by fire-retardant foam, footage of the incident shows.

In the case of state employees, the incentive is absent to be really, really, really careful. After all, responsibility for damages and deaths is collectivized; taxpayers pick up the tab; lawmakers enact laws that shield the perp from responsibility, even protecting identities. (That’s why I say name and shame the pimps at TSA.)

Film them. The many good cops won’t mind

To Moron-In-Chief, Tax Cuts Mean Moving Money Around For Votes

Barack Obama, Private Property, Socialism, Taxation

What is it about private property that Obama does not get? EVERYTHING!

Via USA Today:

“During a jobs speech at an Amazon shipping facility in Chattanooga, Tenn. Obama proposed cuts in corporate tax rates – a Republican priority – in exchange for more money for jobs programs, a priority of the president.
“I’m willing to work with Republicans on reforming our corporate tax code — as long as we use the money from transitioning to a simpler tax system for a significant investment in creating middle-class jobs,” Obama told Amazon employees. “That’s the deal.”

A tax cut is a reduction in tax rates. It means letting a poor sod (or serf) keep more of his rightful earnings, be he an individual, a shareholder or a group of them. That’s not what the Ass With Ears (AWE) is talking about. So if he proposes a reduction in tax rates on the condition that “The Money” gets moved to his pet, make-work, government schemes, what sort of tax cut is this?

Moving money around for votes is what the moron-in-chief is proposing.

To borrow from a great American, Frank Chodorov, Obama’s glib talk about property not his amounts to the following declaration:

“Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide.”

Thomas Jefferson & The Tyrants

Classical Liberalism, Fascism, Founding Fathers, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Private Property

“During a joint meeting with Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang,” last Thursday, reports the Washington Times, “President Obama … made the absolutely ludicrous assertion that ‘Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.”

A fine book on “the political theory of Thomas Jefferson” is “Liberty, State, and Union” by Marco Bassani, professor of history and political theory at the University of Milan, Italy. In it, Bassani notes that all sorts of hideous tyrants (whom Obama joins) have appropriated the decidedly classical liberal thinking of Thomas Jefferson for their own ends.

Still, I wonder if we libertarians do protest too much in an attempt to finesse some of Thomas Jefferson’s philosophical missteps? By way of an example, consider the debate, on the Tenth Amendment Center’s site, expanded upon by historian Tom Woods.

I remain unpersuaded. I believe that Felix Morley, great writer and scholar of the Old Right, was also in no two minds about early Americans having been undeniably influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseau. There was, noted Morley in his magnificent “Freedom and Federalism,” some admiration in America for the manner in which the common democratic will found expression in revolutionary France. The influx of Marxist ideas much later from Europe further cemented America’s ideological immolation.”

I am also not inclined to finesse the odd “slip” that saw this most brilliant man—as Thomas Jefferson no doubt was—replace “property,” in The Declaration, with the “pursuit of happiness.”

The “Virginia Declaration of Rights,” written by George Mason in 1776, harmonizes “property” and the “pursuit of happiness”:

“That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Elsewhere, Jefferson affirmed the natural right of “all men” to be secure in their enjoyment of their “life, liberty and possessions.” But in the Declaration, somehow, he opted for the inclusiveness of “the pursuit of happiness,” rather than cleave to the precision of “property.”

Unforgivable.