Being able to send money overseas at all means that they are consuming less than they are giving to the society here, even at their depressed wage levels.
Medical cost is a red erring; most illegals are at prime age, or what insurance companies would call best customers. The long desert walk tends to weed out the weaklings On any given day, far more immigrants, legal and illegal, probably work in our hospitals than there are patiants in the same place. Along with car insurance, if there is a rational policy that does not outlawing their buying insurance (how can one buy car insurance without SS# or driver’s license, for example), the problem would largely solve itself. Instead, now we have to spend more tax money (car chases after accients) because we previously wasted money on irrational enforcement policies.
The argument about depressing wages doesn’t make much sense. Someone is getting their service for less than otherwise would be. If depressing wages were a logic argument, shouldn’t we outlaw new births and most certainly outlaw volunteerism?
"totally agree. but the first bit sells well even to the non-racists, those who are solely self-interested. "
Only if they believe that protectionism by the government could possibly enhance standards of living. In reality, such government intervention not only leads to the deadloss triangle that is familiar on any microeocnomics textbook but also, as Mises and other Austrian economists repeatedly pointed out, the material and moral cost of enforcement: gaggles of new bureacrats would have to be appointted to essentially get in the way of free exchange between willing men and women, plus the inevitable corruption, then another layer of bureacratic watchers, and so on and so forth. Road to serfdom indeed. The very idea that people should be attached to the land of their births is the foundation of the relaitonship between the Feudal lords and their serfs. The massive national ID system that will be required to have a “comprehensive immigration control” would go a long way towards stripping what freedom is left of US citizens.
IMHO, the difference is largely the result of them running in different party primaries. While both parties have libertarian-thinking individuals (more on the Republican party in the past few decades), there are huge amount of statist votes in both party, especially traditional primary goers. Republican statists tend to be the variety that demand law and order, even if some laws make no sense and only breed corruption that might undermine law and order in general (besides immigration, there are issues like Prohibition and War on Drugs); Democat statists on the other hand can’t wait for the Republicans to make the immigrants feel scared by the xenophobia so they can come out and play the good cop and drag the entrepreneurial immigrants into voting their money away for protection. It’s a dog and pony show, I tell ya Unfortunately, Ron Paul too has to get enough votes among Republican primary goers to get anywhere. IMHO, as soon as the bill of hundreds of billions of dollars to actually enforce existing immigration laws, on top of requiring every US national to have a natinal ID, is made clear, the support for enforcement will vanish. Statist tendencies are usually subsisted upon a common fantasy that government intervention against natural human behavior has no cost.
Exactly. This has already been addressed earlier in the thread. The state, including its “borders” (which defines its territorial monopoly), is not private property. To equate state enforcement of political “borders” and immigration restriction to protection of private property is absurd, especially considering that it must violate the liberty of individual owners to do as they please with their individual plots of property. To enforce political border is, by default, to strengthen or reinforce the state’s territorial monopoly. Hoppe seems to think that this territorial monopoly should be treated as the quotal, common property of the tax-payers (which strikes me as a collectivist approach, treating entire nation-states as common property of all the legal citezens when in reality it is treated as the property of the government, who directly controls it in actual fact). I think that it should be treated as unowned, homesteadable property because it has no legitimate original owner that can be reasonably distributed to. The state certainly is not a just owner of it, and the tax-payers cannot reasonably exercise their alleged quotal share of ownership of it.
i agree with you about free handouts not being a primary motivator, but think you’re wrong on the first point. most immigrants come to the us (and europe, where personal freedom is less vis-a-vis the us) for economic reasons. just like your example of us nationals flocking to nyc for a piece of the (rich) action.
I think we are actually in agreement. “Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happniess” The word “freedom” is not explicitly in there as it may mean different things to different people, yet somehow inter-related between “Liberty” and “Pursuit of Happiness.” To a lot people, “freedom” can be as simple as the freedom to buy drinks on Sunday and party until sun rise, both are in much greater abundance in NYC than in upstate NY; to others, it may also mean not having to have their lives sucked dry by corrupt Mexican officials. It is no co-incidence that freedom and economic prosperity go hand in hand . . . and if you think about it, without freedom (free exchange), economic prosperity as measured by government statistics is quite meaningless. I remember a time, back in the 80’s, both the soviet block and CIA were telling us that East German economy was more prosperous than that of West Germany I guess that 1/3 of the entire population working for national security (spying on spouse, parents, children etc.) must really puffed up the GDP numbers, along with the protected domestic car productions etc. to ensure full employment.
If I steal your property then you are entitled to it back. Agreed. Yet you seem to say that if the state steals it then you can’t have it back? Contrary what you say the state cannot own anything- what it claims to own is owned by the taxpayer. So those parts treated as government property should be considered as a taxpayer owned firm in which each taxpayer owns shares according to their net tax receipts. To consider it unowned would deprive millions of people of their rightful property. Your point about Hoppe’s system violates the liberty of the of individual owners to use their own land is absurd. The can do what ever they wish with it; all that is restricted is how they bring people their using taxpayers land.
The real issue here though is how to deal with taxpayers, or public, land. Does a bum have the right to sleep, and live, in a public library or not? Should the public roads have no enforced rules given? This is a far wider issue than it first seems as Walter Block points out in his Rothbard and Big Tent Libertarian lecture.
Finally I don’t think we should impute bad motives to the pro and anti immigration position and declare them not libertarians or true market anarchists. We all agree that the state shouldn’t exist and is what we’re working towards. However how one deals with the state while it’s here is another question. This is not a fundementals debate; it is a complex question of the application of the libertarian axioms.
Since I paid over $60k in federal taxes last year, show me which slice of the Rio Grande or St. Lawrence River border is mine. I will start selling tickets
Every single socialist People’s Democratic Republic prolaims common ownership of all the country’s land and other “means of production” by all the people of that country. Are we so naive as to believe that propaganda? Instead of reconizing the reality that those countries are owned by their dictators/oligarchs? Ownership means control over use and disposal. If you can not use a particular strip of border for your purpose or sell it, you don’t actually own it. How would you like your two neighbors to the left and to the right of your house take a vote 2-to-1 and decide that henceforth they will have exclusive use of your house and you can not sell it even though you are still the “owner” of the house? What kind of ownership is that? It’s not ownership; you just got expropriated by majority tyranny.
That kind of ownership exists though isn’t legally recognised; this is why the share scheme should introduced to make it a reality. You example doesn’t stand because I exclusively own the house and no-one else has shares in it unlike roads etc.
Thanks for illustrating my point. Exclusive ownership is ownership; shares that are re-assignable (for profit) are ownerships. “Shares” that you are born with and can not be sold, nor idetifiable to specific subdivision of the property is not real ownership. People live in “people’s democratic republics” around the world like North Korea do not actually own their land or any “means of production” despite what their government propaganda says; they are serfs to their government. The example I gave about the majority being able to vote the minority out of their dwellings is exactly the type of ownerhsip in “people’s democratic republics” in the former Soviet bloc; sure, everyone was theoretically part of the shared ownership of everything in the country according to the propaganda, but in reality the government could strip anyone of their dwellings at any time.
The idea that people are attached to the land of their births is the very foundation of serfdom.
I’m saying that this notion of the state as being the quotal, common property of tax-payers is absurd and impossible to enforce. I don’t understand this view that treats government land as the common, quotally shared property of the tax-payers. There is no discernable just owner. It would be impossible for the individual tax-payer to exercise their alleged quotal share of such property. You cannot sell your 1/500000th (or what have you) portion of government land. The tax-payer does not directly control it in any way whatsoever. Even granting that it may constitute stolen property, it has been redistributed so many times over and time has passed for so long that it would be impossible to allocate it back to the original just owners. I disagree with your view of public property. I say it is homesteadable. It currently has no just owner.
My accusation that immigration restriction inherently violates the liberty of individual property owners to associate with immigrants is not absurd. If I wish to sell a home to an immigrant, hire one or allow one into my home, in order to enforce the anti-immigration laws you must violate my liberty to do so with my property as I please. You cannot enforce political borders and immigration restrictions without reinforcing the state’s territorial monopoly. You cannot control the entire territory without implictly controling the individual plots of land within it. Furthermore, the tax-payers have no uniform desires. They are conflicting with eachother in their preferences as to how to use it. So any attempt to enforce on particular such preference is not going to represent the will of all tax-payers. We therefore fall back on interest groups.
What to do about the bum sleeping in the public library, or by the doorsteps? Treat the public library as if it were private property and kick him out? Or is should the bum be viewed as essentially homesteading it? And, even if the public library is treated as if it were private property, how do we know that a given owner may not very well allow the bum to sleep there? This has a lot of implications for the immigration debate. I think that to treat the public library as if it were private property or the common property of the tax-payers is absurd. Once again, the tax-payers are not a single entity. They have no uniform desires. Enforcing one particular preference in the name of all tax-payers is not going to represent their preferances accurately. There is no way for them to exercise ownership of it as individuals.
I’m not so sure. The last time I checked, Prof. Hoppe didn’t exactly praise Honecker for ordering the shooting of East German serfs who dared to cross the Berlin Wall. On top of that, Prof. Hoppe himself has at least seen his own career bringing himself outside Germany to Italy and the US . . . very much in the role of a new entry alternative to the market place of intellectual ideas that had been previously stifled by monpolistic political correctness (even if I personally do not necessarily agree with some of his points of view).
What I mean when I say that immigration restriction must inevitably violate the property rights of individual owners, Inquisitor, is this. Suppose I, a legal citezen, invite an illegal immigrant into my home. Suppose I sell one a home or rent one out to them. Suppose I hire one. In order to enforce the immigration laws, you must essentially, in effect, restrict trade and force disassociation. You must forcibly kick them out of voluntarily aquired homes, from willing sellers and renters. You must forcibly end their voluntarily aquired jobs, from willing employers. Thus, these immigration laws cannot be enforced without eggregious violations of individual property rights; the property rights of citezens. If any citezen wishes to voluntarily associate with an illegal immigrant in any way, you must forcibly end those associations. If you wish to allow the government to control access to the entire territory, you must implictly control access to individual plots of property within it. Conclusion: immigration restrictionism violates private property rights.
Another observation about immigration: Comparative advantage anyone? Even if you can demonstrate that these immigrants are on average uneducated and unskilled, even if you can demonstrate that a given group of people is inferior in all kinds of ways, it is still generally mutually beneficial to associate and trade with them on some level. In the long-term, discrimination is a suicidal buisiness practise. I don’t see how immigration restriction is any less suicidal in the long-term either. Yes, an individual owner of private property has the right to exclude groups that they do not like from that property. But no, this is not in their own best interest in the long run. Hoppe’s vision of an anarchist society in which there is widespread ethnic separatism (unless I’m interpreting him wrong, although I don’t think I am) strikes me as nonsensical. Once the state actually is gone, the incentives towards association do not dissapear.
Exactly! Restrictions against immigration labor essentially amounts to a government enforced labor union running the whole economy as a closed shop. Talk about massive capital impairment!
From a historical perspective, anti-immigration policies were indeed pushed through by the labor unions.
This debate has gotten rather repetitive. Let me try to summarize the problem with the property-rights immigration arguements and why they clash at least with anarchism and why they must inevitably legitimize the curtailment of the liberty of individual owners to decide how to employ their property by vesting that power to decide how it will be employed in either the state or others within society who do not legitimately own the given individual piece of property.
The monopolistic, monarchal legitimization of the state.
If the state is treated as the private property of the government’s members, then it is legitimized. The members of the state itself may henceforth be treated as legitimately controlling the entire territory. All of us who reside in the territory, and all of the individual plots of land and things that we possess, may be treated as the property of the government. You do not own yourself, the state owns you. You do not own your home, the state owns your home. You may not decide how to employ your property; you are not its owner, you are only being allowed to use it by its true owners, the state. It is not your property. The members of the state may freely decide to exclude anyone from the territory as they please, since it is theirs. You may not decide how to employ the individual portion that you are “allowed” to use; the state decides this for you. All hail the total state.
The democratic, communal legitimization of the state.
If the state is treated as the common property of the tax-payers, then it is legitimized. We should all henceforth buy into the phrase “we are the government”. Of course, a gigantic practical problem arises: the tax-payers cannot act as a single entity with a preference scale of its own. The tax-payers are conflicting over how they wish to use this common property. The tax-payers cannot exercise their quotal ownership in reality. It is impossible for the “community” as a whole to enforce all of their individual preferences for how to employ such property. Thus, in practise, we are left enforcing either the members of the state’s preferences for how to use it or the preferences of a particular group of people within “the commity” for how to use it in the name of “the community”. You may not decide how to employ the individual portion that you think you own; “the community” (I.E. in practise, the state or a special interest group acting through the state) decides this for you. All hail the total state.
Basically, apply what Rothbard said about communalism in “For A New Liberty”. It devolves back to monopolism anyways.
On any given day, far more immigrants, legal and illegal, probably work in our hospitals than there are patiants in the same place. Along with car insurance, if there is a rational policy that does not outlawing their buying insurance (how can one buy car insurance without SS# or driver’s license, for example), the problem would largely solve itself. Instead, now we have to spend more tax money (car chases after accients) because we previously wasted money on irrational enforcement policies.