J.C. Earnharth: I think there is something to be said for not allowing liberty to be swamped under by non-liberty minded folks.

1. Are you suggesting that the government has the right to use force against immigrants on the basis of their political opinions? Or, worse, on the basis of political opinions they may not even hold but happen to be held by a lot of people from their former home?

2. The post is about whether immigration without a government permission slip ought to be treated as criminal. Do you seriously think that liberty is going to be enhanced by condemning immigrants who don’t notify the government of their whereabouts and intentions at all times, and praising those who patiently trudge through years of pointless paperwork?

J.C. Earnharth: It’d be one thing if our nation was the nation of 1815, where basically the economic laws of gravity associated with liberty and freedom pretty much forced you to behave in a liberty oriented fashion in the U.S.

Yeah, unless you were a white planter in the South. Then there was that little slavery and ethnic cleansing thing.

But hey, who’s counting?

Matt,

If your dividing line between “liberals” and the “left” wouldn’t count (just to pick a couple examples) Pierre Joseph Proudhon or Karl Marx or Leon Trotsky or Ellen Willis or Noam Chomsky as a leftist, then maybe your attempt at a definition is ill considered, and ought to be revised. That is, if you mean for “left” to be a term of analysis and criticism that applies to real people over the past several decades, rather than a merely polemical term for whoever you find distastefully envious at the moment.

Jeremy: “Certainly there are those on the left who advocate greater state control, deprioritization of business freedom, obnoxious anti-americanism, etc. However, you must look at it from the perspective of the other side as well. Having a Kerry/Edwards sticker may not make you a Molotov cocktail throwing Black Bloc’er …”

Just so we’re clear, whatever you think of the Black Bloc, they do not “advocate greater state control.” Black Blocs are an anarchist protest formation. They favor the abolition of the State as such. If you think that being of the Left, or the radical Left, ipso facto equates to greater state interventionism, then you need to think harder about the variety of people who come under the Leftist banner.

Brian,

I think you’re oversimplifying the causes of the riots in France (the relationship of the police to residents of the immigrant ghettoes, just to take one example, seems to have been pretty important). But even if the riots were purely about “violent rejection of French culture,” there’s two different elements that you have to look at in that formula: (1) the rejection of French culture (whatever that comes to concretely), and (2) the violent expression of that rejection. I’d like to suggest that (1) is not a sufficient condition for (2), and Belgium and Switzerland are good examples of why.

It’s true that Belgium, like many of its neighbors, has problems with bristling, sometimes-violent relationships between the white population and the residents of immigrant ghettoes. What I was referring to, though, was the prickly but notably nonviolent relationship between Flemings and Walloons (as well as the small German-speaking minority), not the relationship between the white ethnic groups and the population in immigrant ghettoes. The fact that these two kinds of relationships across inter-ethnic divides are so different might tell you something about the underlying causes. Perhaps it has more to do with the way that immigrants and their descendents are treated by the government than it does with whether or not any particular national group is “assimilating” to, selectively incorporating elements of, rejecting, or simply ignoring the culture of other national groups within the country?

The point here is that people very often cite countries that have suffered ethnic bloodbaths within living memory (the Balkans in the past decade, for example) in order to “demonstrate” the need for unitary, homogenous national cultures within the borders of a given state. I find this frankly ridiculous. Quebec is not descending into civil war; Czechoslovakia existed and then disappeared without bloodshed; and Switzerland has remained as peaceful, prosperous, and free as any country in Europe for several centuries. There’s precious little evidence to suggest that “balkanized silos” of people who aren’t substantially alike in their language, religion, literature, etiquette, habits, leisure activities, dress, or other elements of culture, are a sufficient condition for making inter-ethnic relationships particularly hostile, let alone openly violent. What does tend to reliably produce inter-ethnic hostility and violence are political arrangements in which some national groups are ghettoized and politically and culturally subordinated to other national groups. In other words, the issue here is political domination vs. political equality, not cultural melting pots vs. cultural salad bowls.

“… we can’t afford the rise of balkanized silos or a salad-bowl scenario.”

Yeah, that would be horrible. I mean, we could end up like Switzerland or Belgium.

Unless, just maybe, violence in certain multinational societies (French immigrant ghettoes, the Balkans, Iraq) has more to do with issues of constitutional politics, and not much at all to do with cultural “assimilation” or the lack of it, after all?

Indy: “Well, that, and there are a bunch of corporate whore economic libertarians who are trying to kill america.”

Please don’t use the word “whore” as a slur when what you mean is “unscrupulous apologist.” Women in prostitution are doing a job, some of them in quite desperate circumstances, and don’t deserve being used as part of your derisive vocabulary.

Mike T.: “My problem with Libertarians (whichever style of grammar they use for the “l”) is I’ve never met one who doesn’t think that the Government and the Buisness World are two diametricly opposed forces, instead of two barely disseperate groups working in collusion to keep the status quo right where it wants to be.”

Well, expand your horizons.

Historically, libertarianism was a movement of the economic and social left, associated with wildcat unionism, opposition to mercantilism, and anti-imperialism, as well as abolitionism and radical feminism. Some (Benjamin Tucker’s circle) went so far as to describe themselves as “anti-capitalist” or “voluntary socialists.” For various reasons, a few of them good and most of them quite bad, libertarians drifted from their roots in the left into intellectual and political alliances with the Right during the 1930s-1950s onward. There are many of us making deliberate efforts to reverse this trend, for both theoretical and strategic reasons. (I happen to think that trying to pitch radical change to the existing cultural elite is a damned fool project. I also happen to think that anti-racism, feminism, wildcat unionism, populism, anti-authoritarianism, etc. are the right positions to hold, and essential parts of any sane politics.)

Hope this helps.

“That assault resulted in the repression the Bolsheviks then unleashed on the left opposition and anarchists in Russia, using the invasion as the basis for claiming they were under attack from White Russians and Imperialists and that all opposition to the Bolsheviks would be considered counter revolutionary.”

This is an important point, but this way of putting it lets the Bolsheviks off the hook too easily. The imperial adventures in Russia didn’t cause the Bolshevik Terror; Bolsheviks caused it. The imperialist support for the Whites only provided them with an excuse for baring their fangs as they’d been hoping to do for quite some time.

Of course, the imperial war in Russia was still unjust, on other, independent grounds, besides the evil excuse-making function that it served for Lenin, Trotsky, et al.

Kennedy,

Doesn’t it follow from your argument that you’d be justified in recovering your property from any welfare recipient, for instance, who received benefits in excess of what he’d paid into the system since he was receiving stolen goods?

I don’t know. I also don’t know whether it would make it unjust for other employees at 100% tax-funded institutions (government school teachers, EPA bureaucrats, contractors on government buildings, or whatever you like) to accept their salaries. As a practical matter, I’m not worried very much about welfare recipients (since I think all or nearly all of them are arguably net taxpayers, not net tax recipients, once all taxes, indirect taxes, and compliance costs for getting the benefits are factored in), but there are other cases where practical worries are raised, and it’s an important theoretical question regardless of practical import. I have to admit that I have conflicting intuitions, so this is more a matter of doubting the legitimacy of taking a Congressional salary than it is positively denying it, until I have a better idea of how to sort it out.

As I see it, there are three viable options:

1. Net tax-recipients can lay claim to the loot as lost property, no matter how they acquire it; as long as they played no active role in the process of expropriating it, the victims’ claims are only against the expropriators, not against those who received it. (Thus, accepting a Congressional salary and accepting a government school salary are equally just, even above the total debt of the Treasury to you.)

2. Net tax-recipients can’t lay claim to the loot, no matter how they acquire it, since it is owned property; even if they played no active role in expropriating it, laying claim to it rather than returning it to its owners makes one an accessory to theft. (Thus, neither acceping a Congressional salary nor accepting a government school salary would be just, once you’d already made back whatever the government owes you in taxes.)

3. Net tax-recipients can sometimes lay claim, and sometimes they can’t, depending on how they acquire it; this would need to involve some kind of distinction between loot paid out for some purposes (say, Congressional salary) and loot paid out for others (say, government school salary). This would have to make the fact that even a legislator who happens to vote in accord with perfect justice is still being paid for a job description that involves criminal usurpation, whereas a government school-teacher (say) is not.

I lean towards (3), and if not (3) then I’m undecided between (1) and (2). I understand (1) to be your position; please correct me if I’m wrong. (3) would be an eirenic solution, but I’m not sure whether this distinction can actually do the work that it needs to do to justify it. In any case, I think the issue is tricky, simply because the moral law around conspiracies and accessory is tricky.

There are also, actually, difficulties with immediately translating the injustice of accepting loot from a particular class of individuals, into a right of recovery by any member of that class against particular recipients (it may be that it’s unjust for Bizarro Ron Paul to take the salary, but that no particular net tax recipient has a right to recover from him in particular; if so, then he’d be obligated to turn it over but the obligation wouldn’t be legitimately enforceable). But this is already running too long.

Just out of curiosity, do you think that your argument applies in all cases of receiving stolen property? I.e., are there any cases where you consider it a moral crime to receive property you know to have been stolen from one or more identifiable victims?

MikeT: Well, at least you can rest easier knowing that DNA evidence (you know, that old dead white man notion of due process of law) has proved that they didn’t rape her.

No, it didn’t.

WinstonWebb: Well, whaddya know? The stripper was lying.

The article you linked to doesn’t say that she was lying:

“It doesn’t mean nothing happened,” Nifong said at a public forum at North Carolina Central University, where the 27-year-old alleged victim is a student. “It just means nothing was left behind.”

No charges have been filed.

Nifong said prosecutors were awaiting a second set of DNA results, but did not say how those differed from the tests reported Monday. Nifong added that in 75 percent to 80 percent of sexual assaults, there is no DNA evidence to analyze.

The district attorney said a rape case can built on testimony from the alleged victim and other witnesses. Nifong also said the hospital exam of the woman has led him to believe a crime occurred at the March 13 party.

According to court documents, a doctor and a specially trained nurse found the alleged victim had “signs, symptoms and injuries consistent with being raped and sexually assaulted.”

If you want to work yourself up into righteous indignation about evidence and proof, then you had better learn to read your sources carefully, to represent your sources honestly, and to learn to exercise basic logical distinctions, such as the distinction between (1) the lack of a particular line of evidence for an event, and (2) particular evidence for the lack of that event. What you’ve got here is at the most (1) and not (2).

But hey, don’t let that stop you from your little “women who accuse male atheletes of rape are lying whores” jag.

Kennedy:

Assuming Paul has only acted justly, defensively, he doesn’t owe you anything.

That’s begging the question. The claim is that he can’t act justly while taking money that belongs to other people, so if he does keep it, then he owes a debt of compensation to the victims.

He cannot steal from the state and he’s not responsible to secure any of your rights.

He can’t steal from the state, but he can and does accept stolen goods from it. You can homestead unclaimed property, but not claimed property that happens to be inaccessible to the claimant due only the actions of criminal conspirators with your co-operation. (This isn’t like finding buried treasure, after all; the victims are identifiable and the piracy is extensively documented.)

If you think the property is unclaimed by net taxpayers, well, here: I want mine back.

Stefan:

For one thing, it would seem to follow from your logic that a net-taxpayer could receive money via “repayment” and then pay Ron Paul, a net tax-recipient, with the money. It would then be his, no?

Sure, if they wanted to voluntarily contribute to his upkeep. I wouldn’t, personally, since I think Ron Paul’s presence in a single seat in Congress is perfectly useless as a defensive measure. But to each her own.

In fact, Ron Paul could even deliberately choose to “repay” net tax-payers who would then kick back the money to him, as long as he didn’t pay them over what they were owed, on net, by the Treasury. I think that would be morally sketchy, but it would arguably be a vice rather than a crime.

And why does restitution get metted out on a first-come first-served basis? This is a fungible good we’re talking about. It seems that in an anarcho-capitalist society both Kennedy and Lopez would have a claim on that $500, and that some kind of arbitration would be in order.

I would hold that because it is a fungible good, the $500 is available for something analogous to homesteading by whichever of my victims can recover it. (After all, what matters is getting the amount back, not getting back the specific dollars I stole, so it doesn’t matter whether those $500 were originally Kennedy’s, Lopez’s, the casino’s, or mine.)

It may be prudential for Kennedy and Lopez to work out some agreement via arbitration and then pool their resources for recovery. But from the standpoint of justice I owe both Lopez and Kennedy $1,000, but without some kind of contractual agreement neither Kennedy nor Lopez owes the other aid in recovering his share of the money. So if Kennedy gets $500 of his money back before Lopez can get to it, Lopez only has a claim against me, not against Kennedy.

My problem with the Bizarro Ron Paul who actually votes in accord with perfect justice is that he has no claim to the money he’s taking as salary in the first place, so he’s not eligible to recover it or to homestead it.

Macker:

Oh, come on, surely you excommunicated him from libertarianism long ago for ….. holding public office.

I think both Kennedy and I made it pretty clear that the problem isn’t that he holds public office. It’s that he’s a statist.