Comments Elsewhere

Me: “So where does the government get the right to demand that I pay them protection money to keep their goons off of my family’s doorstep?”

Frank: “The same place the government (ostensibly) gets all of its powers, from the governed.”

Do you, as an individual citizen, have the rightful authority to take a shotgun and point it at non-citizens and demand that they pay you protection money in order to keep you from kidnapping them and leaving them back in Mexico?

No?

Then how did you manage to delegate that authority to the government?

Frank: “My point was that there are more parties concerned than just immigrant and employer.”

Indeed. The immigrant needs a place to stay. But that’s provided by his family, in the hypothetical. (Or the immigrant might make a deal with a willing hotel owner, or landlord, or buy a plot, or…). The immigrant needs roads to drive on. But in the present system those roads are paid for primarily by gasoline taxes which the immigrant pays as much as you do. And so on. So what? Where does your right to demand protection money to keep the government from invading the property of the immigrant’s family and kidnapping him and sending him back home against his will come in?

“The concept of sovereignty seems to have escaped you”

As a libertarian, the only form of sovereignty I recognize is individual sovereignty, which can be delegated but can never be alienated or destroyed. You do know that that (classical liberal, Lockean, Jeffersonian) notion of individual rights and legal authority is where phrases like “consent of the governed” comes from, don’t you?