Jim Perry:

When Mr. Williams addresses the situation in the united States, where illegal immigrants get to take from the cookie jar to which legal citizens are forced to give, …

This is completely counterfactual. Undocumented immigrants are forced to pay taxes, too, and “legal citizens” have a great deal more access to tax-funded programs and “services,” which often require proof of citizenship, than undocumented immigrants do.

Even if it weren’t counterfactual, it would be morally irrelevant. It’s true that if you combine something fundamentally moral (free movement from place to place) with something fundamentally immoral (a coercively funded welfare state), that might lead to bad results. But then the thing to focus on is the immoral part of the combination, not the moral part, and the fault lies with those who are doing the coercing — that is, the government that does the taxing, not the migrants (or the citizens) who receive a pittance on the other end.

See also On the Dole.

Jim Perry:

He sets up a strawman argument to which liberty-loving, thoughtful people readily agree.

A strawman is the fallacy of refuting a distorted version of your conversation partner’s argument, and then claiming that you have refuted their actual argument. But where does Roderick do that?

Williams directly asserts that individual people don’t have a natural right to live peacefully in the U.S. without permission from the federal government. (This is not very far off a direct quote from his article, although he phrases it as a rhetorical question.) Roderick denies that assertion, based on the libertarian premise that people have a natural right to live peacefully anywhere they want to live. (The only permission required being that of the property owner, if any.)

Maybe Roderick’s premise is true and maybe it’s false; but if the premise is true, then it would follow that what Williams directly asserts cannot be true. And, thus, his argument for government immigration laws cannot be sound.

Where is the strawman? At what point did Roderick misrepresent Williams’s argument?

Roderick,

Thanks for the plug! I actually make roughly the same point in the specific context of Intellectual Monopoly laws in Counter-Economic Optimism.

Mike D.:

Simply staying put when the owner has made it clear he or she wished you to leave seems to me to be sufficient to constitute a violation, though I admit I need to think more on the matter.

Well, I’ve held the same position as you on de minimis trespass before, so I’m sympathetic to the worry, although I’m no longer persuaded by it.

Would help to think about some concrete cases? For example, do you think that people who slip into talks at conferences (say, the APA) without paying the registration fee are violating the rights of the conference organizers (who have stated clearly ahead of time that the sessions are only supposed to be open to those who register and pay up)? Or does the lack of an attempt to enforce mean that they have effectively abandoned claims against freeriding audience members?

(Note that this is actually directly analogous to some of the sit-ins: many sit-ins ended without any arrests at all. The protesters were refused service, but police often weren’t called in to arrest them unless and until white thugs came in to terrorize or assault the protesters. At which point the black students would be arrested by the police, not for trespassing, but for “disorderly conduct.”)

Anon73:

He linked the map in the post; at any rate I misspoke, my question was *why* the western states are the most owned percentage-wise?

Well, land that was newly conquered by USGov was parcelled into territories, where all empty land was held to be owned by the U.S. government. (This included land that actually was empty, and also a lot of Indian land that the government was happy to seize and ethnically cleanse.) During the first part of the 19th century, the land was typically sold off to politically-connected speculators as a source of revenue; after the Civil War, it was supposedly opened up to homesteading. But the Feds reserved the power to close off federal land from homesteading if they could make up some way of claiming that they were using it, and beginning in the early 20th century the Feds started locking away large sections of the remaining available land in newly-created National Parks, National Forests, set-asides for loosely-defined military purposes, etc.

The Western states have the most federally-controlled land because, among other things, they were among the latest to get state governments; they also were the slowest to have land homesteaded, since Homestead Act specifically called for large-scale planting, but a lot of the land West of the Rockies was marginal to useless for large-scale planting without some fairly massive investments in irrigation, which didn’t exist yet in the 19-oughts. (There were later amendments to the homestead act to better allow for homesteaders to practice dryland farming or grazing, but these weren’t passed until very late in the game.) Anyway, as a result, they were the states with the least land homesteaded, and the most land still remaining under Federal control when the Feds started moving into full lockdown.

**Sheldon,**

The goal was to make the owner’s life so unpleasant that he would relent and integrate. Fine. But are the tactics likely to be effective against someone who wants to integrate but fears for his life and property if he does so?

It’s hard to know how many store-owners were in that position, but briefly, I think the answer is yes. For two reasons. Firstly, because it’s not like the Civil Rights Act itself instantly changed local culture or eliminated the threat of retaliation from the Klan or WCC. (* In a lot of towns the threat of economic blackballing through the WCC was actually more of a threat to white business owners than the threat of physical retaliation from the KKK.) Death and firebombing are also a lot more unpleasant than a Title II lawsuit; at most, what Title II and Title VII did was to give intimidated closet integrationists a plausible excuse to tell the local terror groups — “Well, it’s not that I want to let black people in, you know; but I run a business and I need to follow the law to keep it” — which might make them less likely to retaliate, and also strength in numbers — if all businesses are moving to integrate at once, it’s harder to single any one out for retaliation. But the economic and social pressure created by the sit-in movement also created plausible excuses — “It’s these damn students; I can’t run a business if they’re taking up seats!” — and often allowed an opportunity for a lot of downtown merchants to buck Jim Crow at once — in Nashville, for example, the NSM protests led to an agreement from all the downtown business owners.

Second:

I don’t approve of the CRA64, but there is a sense in which it “worked”; the culture changed relatively quickly,

I agree that the culture changed quickly, but I don’t think that the Civil Rights Act was the reason for that. There’s more than one way to change a culture, and I think the deliberate confrontation, the assertion of black dignity, the practice of social solidarity, and the firestorm of conversations that the grassroots movement provoked, were the social forces that actually brought about cultural change in Southern towns. (See, for example, the decisive role that the cultural pressure from the sit-in movement — and a single question posed by Diane Nash — played in desegregating downtown Nashville in 1960.) Not the Civil Rights Act, which was a late development and which only came about because of the huge cultural shift in progress, not vice versa.

(If anything, tended to *stifle* efforts at cultural change, by redirecting the fight away from moral arguments in the streets and neighborhoods, into legalistic arguments in the federal courts and the Equal Opportunity bureaucracy.)

Rand Paul is a liar and a politician. (But I repeat myself.) However, in the interest of fairness, I watched that interview, and he didn’t say that he was against “lunch counters being desegregated.” What he said is that he’s against the use of federal antidiscrimination laws to desegregate lunch counters.

The second position implies the first only if there’s no other way to desegregate lunch counters except for getting a federal law so you can go hire a lawyer and file a Title II lawsuit against the department store in federal court. But of course there are other ways besides that kind of bureaucratic bullshit. Nothing that Rand Paul said about Title II or Title VII would rule out the use of grassroots organization and nonviolent direct action, of exactly the sort that was already being used effectively to dismantle Jim Crow in towns throughout the South, when the a bunch of grandstanding white Democrats decided to rush in and take all the credit.

... I think it's interesting that you're so obsessed with people "in power." Why is that? It's not unusual to observe that people in power are often the worst,

... Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but just as a bit of historical trivia, Nader may point this out now, but the phrase doesn't come from Nader

... Barr certainly is a bigot and a ridiculous conservative tool, but I find it hard to get myself worked up about this one. Not because I have anything

... Scott, Oh, I didn't mean to suggest that you were calling Paul a consistent libertarian, and I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. All I was saying is that some