Just another instance of parlor revolutionaries coming to the door and countering all of our progress with their blunders.
What are you talking about Stranger? The legitimacy or illegitimacy of government is precisely the issue at hand! If it were not, what is the point of this whole libertarianism thing? What is the point of carrying on this discussion/debate? What is the point of a “libertarian” immigration debate if the legitimacy or illegitimacy of things is irrelevant? How can there possibly be such a debate in the absence of moral questions? You may be trying to approach this in a “value free” manner, but when it comes to actual libertarian (not Austrian economic) analysis of things, a value free approach must be tossed aside in favor of an objective analysis of justice, otherwise one is merely going to justify/legitimize the status quo by default. Rothbard went out of his way to make this point in “The Ethics of Liberty”.
Absolutely no new restrictions on immigration are added by this plan. In fact, the purpose of the plan is to allow individuals to remove restrictions to immigrations in a way that does not impose immigrants on other individuals.
Justice is material. It is not just an ideal. If the application of a principle of justice results, by virtue of economic laws, in the party deserving justice becoming worse off than before, then what results is injustice, despite the proclamation of the absolute good of the principle.
Economists are concerned with the material results of actions, not the a priori morality of conditions. Communists insisted on absolute equality as a moral good, the morality of which is unassailable unless one looks at the economic consequences of their principles.
The workers are in fact in control of different material resources making up public enterprise, and so their cooperation is required in safely privatizing this enterprise. But the workers are not individual claims to property. You have not resolved the problem, only excluded the claims of others, and done so without hearing their arguments. (Why should the workers get free property when they have already been paid for their work?)
Once it has been said that the workers are entitled to the government property, then what results is that the workers fight each other for control of as much property as possible. You end up with a narrower, but still destructive, tragedy of the commons.
The abolition of chattel slavery was accomplished, in the British colonies, by purchasing and freeing the slaves, thus recognizing the fact of slavery as real. The alternative was the use of overwhelming military force in America that killed men senselessly to uphold moral principles.
Because the men paying for their labour paid for it through the worker’s blood. Everything the worker has has gone into the production of a particular good, of course they should be given the rights to it! Who else deserves it? Who else put their blood, sweat, and tears into the land and from thine own hands created something of worth? Not the Vulgar Libertarians, that’s for sure!
No, what occurs, or at least what I suggest could occur, is that the workers will form syndicates and will either sell off the property to wealthy capitalists or will work on the property in cooperative shares.
You keep showing moral confusion. Buying out the slavers doesn’t constitute an endorsement of slavery, any more than forgiving my assailant constitutes endorsement of assault. Technically, the slave owners were entitled to refunds from the slave traders, and the slave owners and traders were both liable for any assaults or murders they committed, as well as kidnapping charges. Pretending for the moment that the British participated unanimously and voluntarily in the buyout, they were granting an undeserved kindness to the slave-owners in order to end slavery as efficiently as possible.
In the same way, I don’t advocate killing all government officials. Instead I advocate a privatization scheme which suffers the flaw of treating government as a legitimate owner during the phaseout. That’s not because government is legitimate, or because officials don’t deserve punishment for their crimes. It’s because I’m willing to overlook crimes against myself if it brings the state to an expedient end.
–Len.
Is that you Karl Marx? You almost had me there.
The workers were paid with the wealth of taxpayers. They deserve nothing more than anyone else.
That’s what I’ve been saying all along. I’m glad to see you’ve come around.
OH…
There is no way to make it LESS RESTRICTIVE than the federal goverment allows, but they can make it MORE RESTRICTIVE.
Maybe that is the problem, because you said right after that…
Which is false. The same as federal law supercedes state law for everything else, the number of immigrants allowed through THEIR borders is set. There is no limit to how many of those allowed into the country can go to one state, but there is an actual number that will be allowed into the country. WIth all federal laws, states can enact laws that are MORE restrictive, but not LESS restrictive.
Now, if this is a plan you were thinking about, removing the caps the federal government puts on immigration and allowing the states to decide for themselves how many to allow, we are right back to the fact that the federal government has a monopoly claim on all the land within its borders. I tried to argue that they don’t have a legitimate claim, but you say they do.
I don’t think so. You’ve never shown any sign of comprehending that political entrepreneurs are criminals. You propose to offer them legitimacy, not amnesty. And the amnesty I’m willing to offer is limited: those guilty of capital crimes, including most presidents and notably the current one, would still face trial for their crimes.
–Len.
Great… More red baiting, as if defending the rights of workers was negating the rights of others… [^o)]
The “taxpayers” are the workers.
You’re correct, they deserve nothing more, nor do they deserve any less.
As me and others have tried to point out repeatedly, this isn’t a purely utilitarian economic issue. The title of the thread is “A libertarian immigration policy”, and it inherently involves the morality of the issue. You cannot approach an issue like this purely as “an economist”. You may have put the thread in the economics forum, but the issue itself is not purely economic. It is ethical and more broadly philosophical, hence the term “libertarian” rather than just “austrian” or “economic”. It is frankly absurd that you wish the evade an actual debate over the substantive ethics of the issue.
And please stop with the red-baiting.
The intention was not to describe the law, but to amend it. Otherwise your response appears to be nothing more than a refusal to understand the proposal.
How generous of you to offer them amnesty, except in cases where you don’t. Now since all that remains of this argument is whether or not the president ought to face a Nuremberg show-trial, I don’t see any point for you to pursue it further. I am not interested in debating my character, only the issue at hand.
It’s not red-baiting if you are employing actual Marxist fallacies, such as the collective distribution of titles to workers and tax-payers who, under your class system, are somehow magically the same people and no one in particular.
There’s that moral confusion thing rearing its head again. I’d like to understand it better. Are you completely amoral? Or a relativist? What’s your story?
I’ll give you a hint, though. I don’t have the power to offer amnesty for any crime, except of course those crimes committed against myself. I’m willing to overlook crimes against myself, if it advances liberty. As for your gibe about my “generosity,” you can stick it where you francophones keep your brains. Any concession on my part is indeed most generous, because I’m under no moral obligation to make any concessions at all. Had you the moral clarity, you’d realize that.
Which of course brings us full circle. First you legitmate the “property ownership” of those who have robbed me, making yourself an accessory–and then you turn around and criticize my “ungenerosity” for failing to forgive and forget every crime. If you made any sense at all, I’d have to say you’re immoral, not amoral. In a genuine free society, you probably would not last long.
–Len.
On this whole thing about morality and economics:
“Thus, while praxeological economic theory is extremely useful for providing data and knowledge for framing economic policy, it cannot be sufficient by itself to enable the economist to make any value pronouncements or to advocate any public policy whatsoever. More specifically, Ludwig von Mises to the contrary notwithstanding, neither praxeological economics nor Mises’s utilitarian liberalism is sufficient to make the case for laissez faire and the free-market economy. To make such a case, one must go beyond economics and utilitarianism to establish an objective ethics which affirms the overriding value of liberty, and morally condemns all forms of statism, from egalitarianism to “the murder of redheads,” as well as such goals as the lust for power and the satisfaction of envy. To make the full case for liberty, one cannot be a methodological slave to every goal that the majority of the public might happen to cherish.” – Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty
On the slave question:
“We have indicated above that there was only one possible moral solution for the slave question: immediate and unconditional abolition, with no compensation to the slavemasters. Indeed, any compensation should have been the other way—to repay the oppressed slaves for their lifetime of slavery. A vital part of such necessary compensation would have been to grant the plantation lands not to the slavemaster, who scarcely had valid title to any property, but to the slaves themselves, whose labor, on our “homesteading” principle, was mixed with the soil to develop the plantations. In short, at the very least, elementary libertarian justice required not only the immediate freeing of the slaves, but also the immediate turning over to the slaves, again without compensation to the masters, of the plantation lands on which they had worked and sweated.” – Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty
On land monopolism (which does relate to the immigration issue):
“Suppose that centuries ago, Smith was tilling the soil and therefore legitimately owning the land; and then that Jones came along and settled down near Smith, claiming by use of coercion the title to Smith’s land, and extracting payment or “rent” from Smith for the privilege of continuing to till the soil. Suppose that now, centuries later, Smith’s descendants (or, for that matter, other unrelated families) are now tilling the soil, while Jones’s descendants, or those who purchased their claims, still continue to exact tribute from the modern tillers. Where is the true property right in such a case? It should be clear that here, just as in the case of slavery, we have a case of continuing aggression against the true owners—the true possessors—of the land, the tillers, or peasants, by the illegitimate owner, the man whose original and continuing claim to the land and its fruits has come from coercion and violence. Just as the original Jones was a continuing aggressor against the original Smith, so the modern peasants are being aggressed against by the modern holder of the Jones-derived land title. In this case of what we might call “feudalism” or “land monopoly,” the feudal or monopolist landlords have no legitimate claim to the property. The current “tenants,” or peasants, should be the absolute owners of their property, and, as in the case of slavery, the land titles should be transferred to the peasants, without compensation to the monopoly landlords.” – Murray Rothbard – The Ethics of Liberty
Note: The state is comparable to a great big monopoly landlord.
Its not a refusal to understand the proposal, I would love to understand it. It just doesn’t make any sense, especially taken with your other arguments. So, you are saying it is to amend the federal law or state laws? Or both?
It still won’t be what I would consider a libertarian immigration policy. A libertarian policy would allow you to keep anyone you want off your property or allow anyone you want on your property. Any policy that allows the state to say who you can or can’t have on your property does not fit in with libertarian ideas. If it disallows someone the ability to hire whoever they want, associate with whoever they want, dispense of their property however they want, I don’t see how anyone could argue that it is a libertarian policy.
Let me put it this way. It would appear that the proposal, in part, is to leave the issue to the states or counties. Now, in comparison to a national immigration policy, this is indeed comparatively more libertarian in the sense that it is more decentralized. But in principle it is still not a libertarian position on the issue because at the end of the day it still allows the exact same type of political authority, only over smaller territories or jurisdictions. The states or counties have no more legitimate authority to decide such matters than the federal government. So the principle is no different in this scenario. The actual individual private property owners in question are still not being allowed to decide the matter for themselves. The individual is still being denied the liberty to associate with, hire or sell stuff to who they want.