When you and I separately define the borders of our individual properties, we define them for ourselves only. You and I may allow or exclude whomever we please. We may make different choices for ourselves, but may not impose those choices on each other. National immigration controls take that choice away from us.
Tag: borders
Answer to The “Unanswerable Challenge”
I knew the answer almost immediately, but kept quiet for a long time for the sake of politeness. But it just keeps being brought up over and over, and it’s a little embarrassing. It’s almost as bad as a supposedly knowledgeable gun owner lecturing a newbie about the “shoulder thing that goes up” and why it should be “illegal.”
The Liberal Spirit and Its Opposite, Alt-Rightism
Maybe a few self-described libertarians cling to the idea that property is essentially about exclusion, but they are fated to hit a wall: liberalism is a spirit as well as a set of ideas, and it cannot be turned against itself. It fosters human solidarity, not separation. Libertarianism, like its precursor, is an answer to the question: under what conditions do reasoning social animals best flourish? In answering that question the way it has, liberalism offers no home to sowers of division.
The Problem with Ancap Thought Experiments
Yes, you can make a point with using an example of a small number of people interacting in an isolated system, but you could just as easily create a thought experiment starting from our current situation that people might find easier to follow. Such a thought experiment might look something like this.
Breaking up is Hard to do. Or is it?
“A cliche is haunting America — the cliche of a second civil war,” writes Jesse Walker in the Los Angeles Times. Pundits left and right wax ominous over the prospect of a permanent break in American society along partisan Republican/Democratic lines, citing outbreaks of street fighting a la Berkeley and Charlottesville.
New Reflections on the Evolution in France
The biggest change is the ubiquitous police and military presence. Teams of militarized police and policified military patrol every tourist site and every public function, plus numerous random locations. It wasn’t just Paris; even small cities like Bayeaux were on guard. I’ve never seen anything like this in the United States, even on September 12, 2001.
Aggression Justifies More Aggression?
“Well of course, as a libertarian I would ideally want the market to handle everything, but as long as government taxes, regulations and licensing make health care so expensive, we can’t give up Medicare and Medicaid!”
Immigration and Social Engineering
Social engineers of all parties and persuasions talk as though an economy is some kind of mechanism to be centrally fine-tuned and overhauled occasionally according to a plan. Even those who style themselves free enterprisers display the central-planning mentality when it comes to immigration.
The State is at War — with the Future
What we’re seeing is the latest bit of backlash from a political establishment scared witless by technologies which threaten to make it superfluous.
A Kind Word on Behalf of the Mexicans
They are in the great majority of cases good and decent people seeking what most people seek—an opportunity to work toward building a better life for themselves and their children. For those of us who know them more intimately than most, it is painful to hear the ignorant and malicious statements that circulate about them, especially perhaps on social media, where people are frequently unrestrained in letting loose the most vitriolic and baseless accusations.