Not as high as South Florida where I live and I actually HAVE talked to Hispanics where I live about libertarianism. Have you?
Why do American citizens have any claim to welfare that immigrants don’t? Because they were born in the USA?
Your support of the US government’s right to build a wall implies that you agree they have ownership of the land inside their wall/ borders as you’re claiming that they have the right to decide who is allowed on this land. Surely if you claim this you have no right to complain about taxes? In any case you’re legitimising the government by supporting closed borders.
Good luck with that. Argentina went broke…nope…the state still exist there. Soviet Union went broke…no…no anarchy in any of the former Soviet states or in Russia. A city out in California recently went bankrupt…but alas…the city government still exist. The state wont go away so long as people support it, bankrupt or not. You have to destroy the idea of the state, the myth of the state and convince people that the state is not needed. Bankrupting it wont do anything but give you more state since it will insist that it failed because it didn’t have enough control over things.
Yeah, southern Florida is huge libertarian haven isn’t it? Hmmm…with such a large libertarian population in Florida I wonder how many libertarians are in Congress from that state…let me check…oh! None. That’s just because it’s national politics. How about the State legislature? Hmmm…crap! Zero! I thought there would be at least ONE with such a large and active libertarian community! I do see quite a number of people elected to local office. Consider one John Simms who is a Councilman for Cooper City or Larry Bush and Aaron O’Brien who are on the Lee county Nuisance Abatement Board or Carl Strang who sits on the Workforce Development Board in Polk county. But we do have a mayor! Scott McPherson of New Port Richey is the one and only Libertarian mayor in Florida! Yes that massive libertarian community in South Florida is really doing a bang up job! I’m sure glad all those libertarians fled Cuba to come to Florida to make it better place!
I’ve yet to detect any interest in libertarian political philosophy in Atlanta’s immigrant populace. And I don’t think the first and second generation Cubans you’re talking to in your social class are exactly representative.
Isn’t the Mises Institute ground zero for libertarian thought in the US? That place is whiter than the Piedmont Driving Club.
I never said American citizens have any claim to welfare. I said we can’t support the ones born here so how on earth can we support the ones who move here. Try reading with comprehension before you spout off.
Did I ever say anything about a wall? I don’t think I did. So shut you mouth about that. And I have every right to complain about taxes because I pay them. I don’t legitimize government by suggesting we should not take the money stolen from me to give to some immigrant family who can’t afford to care for themselves here. We can’t afford the people born here so we certainly cannot afford anyone else who might move here. It’s about legitimizing not taxing me to death that I’m talking about here. I’ve said it a thousand times and please LISTEN this time.
Get rid of the welfare state and then I would support open borders! I don’t feel like paying for every third world Marxist to come up here just so they can make $2.50 an hour and get on food stamps, Medicaid, SCHIPs and whatever other welfare service they can get on. It’s bad enough I have to support the worthless and lazy here. I shouldn’t have to support the whole third world as well.
Guess who keeps bailing out failed states – The United States! Even our former enemies! We bail them out, set up government institutions and turn them into nations whose populations hate the U.S. but whose governments support our government. Now, what happens if the U.S. goes bankrupt? Hmmm, who will bail out our elected mafia?
I will agree with one part of what you say though. For the state to remain permanently dead and not resurrect itself it is necessary to destroy the concept of the beneficial state.
Two things: Libertarian Party and libertarian are not synonymous. Secondly, not all libertarians support the concept of voting. Some libertarians refuse to vote on principle. There is a thread that was started recently on that subject called “ON Voting”. I once thought that line of thinking was foolish but I am less and less convinced that real change can occur through the political system. I think real change will have to occur independently of government institutions. It has been said that organizing libertarians is like trying to herd cats. We are, as a group, mostly independent minded. This is not a weakness however, it is one of our great strengths. Not everyone will be convinced in the same way. We need many approaches the problem of government to succeed.
I understand what you’re saying, and I agree with the sentiment to some extent. However, supporting closed borders hurts the libertarian movement in the long run. Lets look at all possible scenarios, since you agree that open borders is more libertarian, just not practical given the welfare state.
Right now if you suppose closing the borders up then you will save some in welfare payments and medicare, medicaid and all that. More specifically, the government will save that money in that area, but they’ll still find plenty of places to spend it on others. Meanwhile, the state’s power has increased in two ways; because you will necessarily need to increase state power in order for them to shut down the borders, and also public sentiment (should they succeed) will cause more people to believe the state should be fixing other problems as well.
Now supposed we give them the power to try and they fail, as they have before. This is the most likely scenario in my mind. Then the worst of all possibilities happens. The government’s power has increased, they will demand more money for their failed programs, and you are spending more money on illiegal immigrants coming across the borders anyway.
Really, as you said, it doesn’t matter too much if you support open borders because realistically it isn’t going to happen any time soon. But I would be for opening the borders or cutting off the welfare state in either order, because one will lead to the other. We can’t afford to support the people in this country forever, but we can do it for a long time. On the other hand, we can’t afford to support every needy person in the world even for a small time period. Open up the borders and it will crush the welfare state much quicker.
HACER, The Hispanic American Center for Economic Research, is not Piedmont Driving Club: http://www.hacer.org/whoweare.php
You may find them interesting.
From their website:
“Lacking traditions that consistently uphold the rule of law, the free society remains a work-in-progress throughout the Spanish-speaking countries of the Western hemisphere.”
Great. Let’s bring all these people who have no idea about the rule of law here. I mean, like the US doesn’t have enough social democrats–we gotta import more.
Here is what the State does: it imports people to increase economic activity and expand the tax base necessary to fund its welfare schemes, and it justifies its existence as the arbiter of social conflict caused by the compulsory association of divergent and even outright antagonistic cultures.
Thus, the US imports Jews, who lobby in favor of their ancestral homeland in its thousand-year struggle against Arabs.
The US imports Arabs, who hijack aircraft and kill people.
The US responds with more national security regulation, more anti-discrimination laws, and more intervention in Arab and Jewish homelands.
The US imports Serbians and Albanians.
The US intervenes overseas on the side of the Albanian Kosovars against the Serbian nationalists.
The US intervenes in Somalia. The US imports Somalians.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Sorry, characterizing illegal immigration as the state “importing” people is absurd on its face. These people are breaking the state’s laws to come here and settle. It’s an entirely agoristic activity. The state’s laws are not “importing” these people, it is saying “you cannot come here” and they’re coming anyway. That’s why many of them are actually heroes in my book. To hell with the nation-worshipers and the labor unions who are trying to stop these people from fleeing their own countries and finding employment here.
Furthermore, sweepingly characterizing these groups (such as the jews and the arabs) in mass as having bad intent is highly vulgar and I don’t see why you would wonder why people have suspicions of racism.
Is the “rule of law” your ultimate goal? Perhaps a fresh perspective by people who do NOT understand the “rule of law” could be beneficial?
The exact same thing came to my mind as well. Is “the rule of law” one’s goal or is liberty one’s goal? They’re not necessarily the same thing, especially considering what and who’s “law” it is that we’re talking about here.
Quite correct and this is exactly the sort of thing that I was referring to earlier in this thread. If someone unfamiliar with libertarianism stumbled upon that post and saw that as his first example of “libertarian thought” what might that person think?
Thank you Brainpolice, I for one would welcome someone who was “unfamiler” with the assumption that to be moral an action must be legal.
I could care less about “suspicions of racism.” It is indisputable fact that Jewish people are lobbying the US government to protect their homeland and that Arab people on the other side of the conflict have struck back. As the US increases its foreign interventions while continuing to import people from both sides of foreign wars, social conflict will increase. The US will respond by more intervention, more national security regulation, and more propaganda to obscure the fact that multicultural empires are held together by brute force.
You can be ruled by law or you can be ruled by people.
So, in other words, you could care less if libertarianism in general and Austrian Economics in particular has a good or bad reputation. So, in other words, you could care less if these ideas are spread far and wide so we have some chance of living in a free society during our lifetime.
The term “Jewish” is a collective term for any person who’s mother also fit the definition “Jewish”. These people have nothing else in common. Not all “Jews” even practice the religion of Judaism. They certainly do not all agree on politics or foreign policy. Michael Medved is Jewish but so Larry King. Dr. Laura Schlesinger is Jewish but so is Stefan Molyneux. The only thing they share is . . . well . . . being Jewish. Many Evangelical Christians are stronger supporters of the modern State of Israel than a lot of Jewish people.
Or, at some point in the future, neither.
Let’s introduce some intellectual honesty into this. The rule of law is an apologetic device for the rule of men. Laws do not rule all on their own, as if they are in some separate platonic realm of forms or something. They are created and enforced by men.