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?

Public Prefers Obama To Bush Policies

America, Barack Obama, Bush, Economy, Government, Regulation, Socialism, The State

Yet more proof that Americans love a big government: “According to the latest Society for Human Resource Management/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, conducted with the Pew Research Center, 46 percent said Obama’s path would do more to improve economic conditions in the next few years, compared to 29 percent who said policies put in place by Bush would.”

Don’t take my statement vis-a-vis statism to mean that Bush was less one than is Obama. Not true. The two men exist on the same continuum of statism. Obama has picked up where his buddy Bush left off. My point is simply this: Americans have no aversion to the president who is perceived as more of a big government guy, and is certainly no less of a central planner than was Bush.

In a really strong column I covered the other day, Anne Applebaum encapsulated the singular statism from which Americans suffer:

“…When, through a series of flukes, a crazy person smuggled explosives onto a plane at Christmas, the public bayed for blood and held the White House responsible. When, thanks to bad luck and planning mistakes, an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the public bayed for blood and held the White House responsible again.

In fact, the crazy person was stopped by an alert passenger, not the federal government, and if the oil rig is ever fixed, it will be through the efforts of a private company. Nevertheless, each one of these kinds of events sets off a chain reaction: A new government program is created, experts are hired, new machines are ordered for the airports, and new monitors are sent beneath the ocean. This is how we got the Kafkaesque security network that an extraordinary Washington Post investigation this week calls, quite conservatively, ‘A hidden world, growing beyond control.'”

…this hidden world, with its 1,271 different government security and intelligence organizations and its 854,000 people with top-secret security clearance, is not the creation of a secretive totalitarian cabal; it has been set up in response to public demand. It’s true that the French want to retire early and that the British think health care should be free, but when things go wrong, Americans also write to their representatives in Congress and their commander in chief demanding action. And precisely because this is a democracy [when it was meant to be a republic], Congress and the president respond, pass a law, put up a building.”

[SNIP]

Applebaum’s position, it goes without saying, has been my own for as long as I can remember.

A View Of The Nation

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Feminism, Gender, Media, Pop-Culture

Must I cover the president playing figurative footsie with the nation’s Delphic dames? You already know how much I dislike these idiot women—even more than BHO, whom I find quite funny when he steers clear of things about which he knows nothing: economy, liberty, etc.

Nevertheless, the “charmer-in-chief” (Drudge’s moniker) prattling, as he did on “The View,” about family, race, and pop-culture to these friendly, foolish females (that includes harebrained Hasselbeck) made headlines today. So, it’s news.

One juicy tidbit I did find interesting was BHO’s disclosure that he was not invited to witness the Clinton wedding.

The Death Heads Are Just Dandy

Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Media, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, The State, War

The New Individualist’s Spring 2010 edition doesn’t carry one of my columns (The Winter issue featured two), but it has a good, much-needed photo-journalism spread titled “This is War.” Iraqi family homes flatted by SCUDS (ours), streets in the aftermath of stupid bombs (from the US with love), the purest of the pure—the body of a beautiful little girl—washed for burial (“we love ya, democratized Iraqis”).

Scrutinizing the ever-so sad images of war brought back those horrible years during which, in vain it seemed, I pelted my readers with non-stop facts and doses of reality, the kind these images transmit with such ease. I tried the power of the Jewish teachings; these instruct Jews to robustly and actively seek justice; Just War Theory, developed by great Christian minds like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, the libertarian axiom, which prohibits aggression against non-aggressors. And I mentioned over and over again the natural law, and what the Founding Fathers provided: “A limited, constitutional republican government, by definition,” I wrote in March 12, 2003, doesn’t, cannot, and must never pursue what Bush is after—a sort of 21st-century Manifest Destiny.”

If you have a moral compass I ask you to patronize moral writers (provided they have talent, of course), not the apologists who supported this wicked foray, and are still unapologetic about it. All of them, I wager, are doing well—walking around, grins on their smug, death-head mugs, their claws dripping with blood, their wallets stuffed with wads, the Empire’s counterfeit currency. Incitement to murder and war profiteering are lucrative occupations in fin de siècle America.

The blowhards and blonds who slithered on their bellies for Bush (still do)—why do you read them? Buy their sick-making “Obama-this; Obama That” Micky-mouse books? (Okay, some like Coulter and Malkin have real talent, but the rest? Nothing but a T & A show all.)

It’s the story of Job, that Hebrew individualist, all over again; the wicked and the foolisher prosper, the righteous suffer, isn’t it?