If an action is immoral for me and you, it is also immoral for others, including those who constitute the government. Election to public office is not a licence to lie, defraud, extort, rob, kidnap, or murder. Those who believe that government officials, employees, and contractors may morally do what other individuals may not do are morally bankrupt.
Author: Robert Higgs
Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, the University of Economics, Prague, and George Mason University. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation.
Roving Bandit, Stationary Bandit, and Income Tax
When a mugger or a home invader accosts you, he points a gun at you or waves a knife in your face and demands your wallet or some other property. In most cases, if you surrender your property to him as he demands, he takes it and flees, and you will most likely never see him again. He is, in the classic phrase, the roving bandit. In contrast, the state is, in Mancur Olson’s classic term, the stationary bandit.
Unusually Willing to Bear Risk and Take Initiative
Among the many mistakes one encounters frequently in the views of anti-immigrationists is the assumption, sometimes the explicit allegation, that immigrants are representatives of or even the dregs of the countries from which they come.
A Great Deal of Ruin
Probably the only thing that keeps a country from going full-frontal totalitarian at once is that the negative economic effects of the government’s actions can take such a toll that people begin to give some weight to that consideration, even though they rarely see through any of the grasping, brutal programs the government carries out, even the most ruinous ones.
The Price to Sate Your Bigotry
As Kant taught, he who wills the ends wills the means, inescapably. To satisfy your hatred of disagreeable aliens, you are asking for the government to turn the USA into a police state on steroids.
Unsung Heroes of the Market
Now, you may be thinking: why are you going on and on about such utterly mundane transactions? Why are you celebrating this Lucio guy, who after all is pretty much the same as countless millions of other merchants around the world? But that mundaneness, mis amigos, is precisely the point.
Americans Created Progressivism, not Immigrants
As for the specific fear that the immigrants will dilute the vaunted American devotion to freedom and free enterprise, don’t even go there. Who exactly do you think has been undermining that devotion — to the extent that it ever existed at all — since the late nineteenth century?
Mystery All The Way Down
We are constantly told that we are only a click away from a nearly infinite amount of information and that scientific inquiry is pushing out the frontier of knowledge at a breakneck pace.
Nativists Don’t Know the Future
Acting morally means treating every person as he deserves, not treating every person as a perfect representative of the average person in a certain group. Doing the latter commits the sin of collectivism, which is the very thing that many anti-immigrationists pretend to fear if immigrants are allowed into the USA.
Definitely Not a Nazi
Maybe there’s more smoke than fire here — after all, the news media love things that are bizarre, ugly, and outrageous — but it does seem that during the past year or so, a lot of white guys who formerly identified themselves as libertarians have put on their Klan garb and picked up their tiki torches, if only symbolically on social media and their obscure podcasts, and proclaimed their Nazism so that all the world will witness their villainy and quake at the sight of their monstrous stupidity.