Is to convince Hispanics of the evils and errors of socialism. No! Don’t hit the Back button-please hear me out! From my understanding, there is a ferocious, yet imperfect(and I’m hoping malleable) streak of collectivist philosophy deeply embedded in the psyche of the young Latino male. You can tell from their support of Chavez, to apologizing for Castro’s regime to the deification of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.
(Per the last case, I am convinced that this is not an explicit internalization of communist ideology and more along the lines of youthful rebellion… Latin style)
So I’m looking for translations into Spanish of the beginners’ Libertarian texts. I think it would be very profitable indeed if we filled our libraries and schools with these translations. Not to mention the churches, community centers and streets.
The problem is not collectivist hispanics, but collectivists in general. I’m with Walter Block on this, I just don’t think people are wired to understand implicit cooperation. A few get it, most don’t, and likely never will, hispanic or not.
In my senior year of high school I campaigned for Ralph Nader.
In my freshman year I watched, and was wholeheartedly convinced, by Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine.
In my sophomore year I was a pamphleteer for the campus recycling movement.
All through my undergrad days I believed that global warming was a valid ecological problem. I avoided Wal-Mart because an indie media tract told me they created pollution…
A year after I earned my B.Sc. I picked up Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics and it changed my life(but not without a large measure of resistance.)
I don’t believe, for a second, that people out there are just can’t understand free markets and the value of government coercion strictly confined to the rule of law. I am living proof that a mind can be changed for the better [H]
I did allow for a few who can get it. However it requires a modest amount of intelligence to understand the cooperation implicit in markets, and the simple truth of the bell curve is that most people are of average or below average intelligence. And they all vote.
In a way you have a point…we need to educate new immigrants about The American Republic and why it’s good and essential to sound govt. and freedom. However, all of us need to be convinced that in any sound govt. our laws need to be enforced and our representatives need vote in the best interests of their citizens !!
I’m certainly for the spread of more libertarian texts to Spanish, among all languages, including English (Mises spoke German, after all). It’s a little preposterous however to think that a streak of collectivist philosophy is deeply embedded in the psyche of the young whatever population, any more than say other earthlings in general. Let’s not forget, von Mises’ mother tongue is German . . . I don’t need to mention what kind of psyche the German speakers were presumed to have in the 1930’s. Von Mises probably spent a few days in the “enemy civilian” detention centers when he immigrated to the UK then the US.
In any case, back to the young Latino male, in case it’s not obvious, Chavez supporters are mostly in Venezuela not in the US (in fact, even in Venezuela, the college students are in the forefront of the opposition to Chavez), the Cubans in the US are “virulently” (for lack of a better word) anti-Castro, and “Che” is far more popular among the left-leaning anglo whites in the US than among Latino Americans. Let’s not forget, even as “Che” was holed up in a cabin plotting “revolutionary raids” to get his medicine (was it diabetese?), and the anglo white youths in the US were chanting their support for “Che” . . . it was a group of Latino militia men in Bolivia that hunted down and killed “Che,” with the help of some CIA agents who spoke fluent spanish.
The quickest way to alienate an ethnic group is presume them to be inferior. Considering that we libertarians are polling only 7% or so in primaries, we certainly can’t afford to alienate anyone who has a chance of joining in our cause. Those who have bothered to pull themselves together and move thousands of miles in search of better opportunity are certainly far more likely to be individualists than those who have stayed home and never left the state safety net.
It doesn’t take above-average intelligence to understand the cooperation implicit in markets. That’s why freedom is a universal desire. On the other hand, our current public education system is quite adept at suppressing the basic human instinct for freedom . . . dressing up the repression in all sorts of flowery languages of socialism and nationalism (the two basic pillars of collectivism).
On the other hand, any freedom-loving people also need to understand that law-making in a free society has to be about the minimum set laws, not prohibitionist laws that create “crimes” out of victimless behavior.
The mass colonization of hispanics to the virtue of limited government exposes just what Americans fear when they claim that hispanics are coming for the welfare system. The problem is not so much that they are consuming welfare, the problem is that they are going to take control of the political system as they grow in number and thus impose more welfare government. This is an expropriation of the government from the hands of American citizens, and this problem must be examined separately from that of labor competition, which dominates the debate on free immigration.
Because the idea of one-man one-vote is unchallengeable in the political debate, conservatives have fallen back on economic arguments against free immigration. Were property rights protected, the problem of excluding foreigners from local communities would be solved, and social tensions would be largely diminished. What would remain would be that Americans and hispanics would still be forced to associate politically, and that problem cannot be resolved under a democratic system. So long as the democratic system is in place, open immigration cannot be supported.
In case it’s not obvious, the last time Hispanic votes influenced a presidential election, they were voting for a man who was running on smaller government, just like the rest of us libertarians who bothered to vote (how many libertarians voted for Gore?) If not for Hispanics (Cuban Americans) in Florida protesting and blockading the recount office, the southern Florida recount would have taken place, and Gore would have been president. Now, W turned out to be a terrible president, but how many libertarians would have preferred Gore over Bush based on their 2000 campaign pledges?
That’s as silly as saying “so long as there is a democratic system, reducing taxes cannot be supported.” You know, borders do not close themselves; bureacrats have to be paid to patrol the borders, bureacrats have to be paid to run national ID systems, and bureacrats have to be paid to run employability verifications, and bureacrats have to be paid big times to run raids on private businesses and private homes to stamp out the “smuggling.” It’s ironic that a country that started off with tea smugglers and tax resistors now have self-proclaimed believers in that spirity of liberty advocating having the government to enforce a feudal system that attaches individuals to the land.
Mises observed long time ago that government interventions inevitably lead to failures in the market place; the solution to that is not new interventions to correct the “side-effects” of the old one, but abolishing the first intervention to begin with. BTW, if you have no faith in that your own political credo can make new converts out of non-believers, it would mean that you have a morally bankrupt and hopeless credo.
Cubans generally vote Republican, yes. They also vociferously oppose free trade with Cuba.
Most Hispanics are not Cuban, and they vote Democrat and for ethnic identity politics very strongly (as do the Cubans, actually). Which, in the end, is fine with me when the US finally breaks up along its ethnic and cultural lines and we can reverse the 200 year process of centralization. God grant this inevitable break-up is peacable and not violent when the Reconquistas decide the gringos owe them more water.
The other alternative is the conversion of these groups to secular democracy, in which event I suggest you learn to live with the US hegemon a long, long time.
I for one certainly don’t believe that 100% of the people can be educated to reason. Only a slim minority of people are educable, maybe less than 5% of the population. The rest only follow leaders.
This is why democracy is so dangerous, particularly if the people massively immigrating into a democratic state have an even lower level of education than the locals.
If you truely believe that less than 5% is “educable,” you shouldn’t be a believer of libertarianism at all. What would enable the less than 5% to rule the remaining 95+% would be some kind of extreme caste system enforced through government sanctioned violence against the overwhelming majority. There is no way even a constitutional republic would be able to enforce a system that make 95+% of the population having no say in politics. Even in the Indian caste system, the ruling top two castes constituted much much more than 5% of the population. The ruling and voting class of Sparta was more than 5%, even with all women ineligible to vote. The ruling white minoriy in apartheid South Africa was more than 5%. You vision is quite a hopeless situation.
Luckily, people in general are actually quite educatable, and most people are born with a natural yearning for freedom and liberty.
If the local public education agenda is consisted of turning 95+% of the population into sheeples and worship the less than 5% feudal overlords, then I suppose having a lot of new comers, especially stateless individualists who have a track record of thinking for themselves and voting with their feet, would indeed be dangerous to the existing feudal order.
They vote whichever party that does not virulently discriminate against them, just like all immigrants in the US history. German, Irish, Italian immigrants all voted overwhelmingly against the parties that embodied nativism.
The third, and most probable, outcome would be the one that truely follow the Anglo-American tradition: voluntary economic integration without politicaly enforced integration or apartheid. When Voltair was exiled to London from a turbulent France, he observed that there was a most miraculous phenomenom happening in London: Christians, Jews and “Mahamedians” peacefully traded with each other in the exchanges during the work hours without any regard to each other’s religion, yet when the bell sounded for the market close at the end of the day, each trader would retire to his own church, synogogue or temple without the least of care what altar everyone else worshipped . . . that in stark contrast to a continental Europe that wrapped itself in waves of bloodshed between Caholics vs. Protestants, Aristocrats vs. Plebians, religious vs. religiously atheistic, haves vs. have-nots. That’s what enable England, a place of but 1/10 of the population of that of Europe as a whole (and even less in geographic area) to effectively rule supreme over not just all Europe, but practically the entirely planet.
Right now the less than 0.1% rule the remaining 99.9% through elections where the candidates and process are picked by the people already elected.
If we can get the educable people to stop consenting to this mad system and establish a truly competitive system of government, there is hope for the rest of the people.
I liked this little video of Julian L. Simon owning Peter Brimelow on immigration. I haven’t heard of PB either, although I like to dip bananas in it [:|]
