I never “agreed” to have my neighbors cook barbecue for dinner last night. Fortunately for them, I was never asked; because their right to engage in basic social commerce on their own property doesn’t depend on my prior approval.

Terry Hulsey:

Allow anyone in the U.S. — employers, individuals, groups — to post a five-year bond on anybody they want to sponsor as an immigrant to this country. At the end of the five years, the immigrant presents himself to an immigration office, and, provided that the immigrant has no serious criminal violations, the bond is returned and the immigrant becomes a citizen.

This is an absurd, Rube-Goldberg sort of solution that imposes extensive bureaucratic requirements on immigrants for purposes that are entirely unclear. (What is supposed to be the advantage of this arbitrary probationary period for people who you have no reason to suspect of any criminal intent? What’s the benefit to be gained by giving police arbitrary powers to punish traffic stops and noise complaints with exile from the country?) It also clearly cannot deliver what it promises. (How exactly do you think the police are going to identify people to deport after a traffic stop, except through a system of immigration papers, which constitute a de facto national ID?)

I have a better suggestion. How about what we do instead is this: if somebody is on my property with my permission, then they have a right to stay there, unmolested, as long as I am happy for them to stay there. If somebody is own property without the permission of the owner, they can be deported — to the edge of that property.

In practical terms, this would, of course, mean open borders and unconditional amnesty for all currently undocumented immigrants. (Since undocumented immigrants typically live in houses and work in shops they’ve been invited to live and work in; and if they aren’t, well, there’s already laws against trespassing, and the appropriate remedy is to get them off the property, not to strand them hundreds of miles away from their homes.) I am sure that that would make my proposal both unpopular, and unlikely to be brought about through any conventional political process. (As you say, “This is a solution that will satisfy only a small coterie of thinkers, and will not be implemented.”) But so what? Popular beliefs aren’t always right, and if I weren’t comfortable with standing up for unpopular beliefs, I wouldn’t be an Anarchist, or any kind of libertarian. And I would point out that your Rube-Goldberg proposal of bonds and probationary periods is also extremely unlikely to ever be brought about through any conventional political process. (Certainly, it looks nothing like the status quo, and nothing like any immigration “reform” on the table from any political party.) If I’m going to spend my time promoting very unlikely political schemes, then I may as well spend it promoting the very unlikely political schemes that I believe in, rather than very unlikely “compromise” schemes that I don’t believe in.

your conception of property ignores many things that most people find of value in property, namely, its utility in allowing us to associate with some people and not others.

No, what we’re objecting to is precisely that you intend to use the state to stop property owners from associating with the people they want to associate with on the property that they own.

Of course, you have a perfect right to set up your stupid little Fremderein zone of parochialism and belligerent ignorance. On your own land. You have no right whatever to use coercive political means to force your neighbors to do the same.

Terry Hulsey:

If you maintain that “monarchy isn’t a case of (legitimate) property rights” then you are placing yourself on a wheel of endless regression that absolutely undermines any establishment of property rights.

What in the world are you referring to? Do you seriously want to claim that challenging the propriety of any claim to property “absolutely undermines any establishment of property rights?” If so, why do you believe such a crazy thing? (There are lots of mutually exclusive claims made about property rights in this world; some of them have to be false.) Or do you think that the challenge to monarchical property claims rests on some tacit premise that would undermine any establishment of property rights? If so, why do you believe that? The standard radical libertarian objection to monarchical claims is that they are based on nothing but aggression and conquest. (Most libertarians suggest a theory of homesteading based on productive labor, instead; but the negative claim against conquest as a means of acquisition is separable from the positive claim for labor-mixing.) Do you think that ruling out conquest as a means of acquiring rightful ownership “would undermine any establishment of property rights”? If so, why? If not, what’s your beef with Roderick?

Terry Hulsey:

Versailles as a typical case of monarchy

You’re right that Versailles is not typical of monarchy; it’s an extreme example of the trend towards absolutism. But precisely because it is, it ought to be a better example of the kind of monarchy that Hoppe favorably compares to democracy, not a worse one. Hoppe’s whole analysis rests on the claim that the king acts like a proprietor over the entire country. But that far more clearly describes the position of early modern absolute monarchs than it does the complicated system of mutual rights and obligations that existed between overlords and vassals under feudal systems, or the various sorts of elected kingship that prevailed throughout most of the early Middle Ages. If you squint hard enough, “L’etat, c’est moi” might look kinda like the attitude of a landowner towards his or her land; the Magna Carta, say, or the Holy Roman Empire prior to the late 15th century, certainly does not.

... Why? I'd be surprised to *not* see DiLorenzo writing in an overheated-bordering-on-hysterical tone in a mad-dog defense of some white conservative being

... I don't know about fair, but bringing it up in such a context is still a pretty flagrant example of the fallacy of tu quoque. Whether or not one's

... Horse hockey. Do you have any evidence for this claim other than the fact that you want it to be true? Google search results for "site:ronpaul.com

Gene Callahan:

Yes, she probably thinks bakeries are made up of magical super-people, since she stupidly thinks that without bakeries we wouldn’t have bread.

Man, if she thought that, it really would be a stupid thing to think. I made some bread just the other day, with no help at all from a baker or a bakery.

Maybe you ought to pick another example — like nuclear physicists and supercolliders, or something like that.

But of course, if you pick an example where it’s obvious you’re referring to specialized expertise, rather than to rule, the problem is that it becomes rulers have no specialized expertise that’s of any use in building roads, inspecting food for safety, teaching college, or protecting people and property from danger, and that these things would be better left to engineers, consumer protection agencies, colleges, and security guards, all whom provide private goods that can be chosen and gotten by open exchange in a free and competitive market, rather than being monopolized and allocated by political prerogative.

WesternCivFan:

Do you think 20 million fundamentalist Muslims immigrating to America this year will make us less free in the future? Just answer the question, yes or no? If it’s yes, your whole argument collapses

Besides what Roderick already said below about the stupidity of this kind of argument-from-a-completely-imaginary-worst-case-scenario, I’d also just like to add that, since I’m not a consequentialist, I don’t believe in assaulting, arresting, imprisoning, or murdering innocent people in order to ward off hypothetical dangers from unrelated third parties. So it doesn’t at all follow that if free immigration leads to bad results, therefore the argument for free immigration “collapses.” It would only collapse if you think that considerations about collective consequences override considerations about individual rights and liberties. But why believe that?

On the contrary — if it turns out that the only way to save myself from the machinations of 20,000,000 Evil Alien Invaders were to violently turn back even one innocent migrant or refugee, who had no intention of violating my rights, then I would certainly not save my skin at the cost of violating the liberties of the innocent migrant or refugee. That strikes me as the most stinking sort of moral and political cowardice.

WesternCivFan:

One, my religion forbids abortion while allowing for national borders.

Hey man, I’m not a Christian, so my apologies if I’m not getting something, but does your religion involve a special Bible that doesn’t include Colossians 3:1-15? Or perhaps you have a special Colossians 3:11 — one which tells you that Christians really ought to pay attention to earthly political distinctions after all, and to treat people differently based on the nation they come from?

Jim Perry:

Don’t think so, but if you say so it must be true.

Undocumented immigrants routinely pay sales taxes, gasoline taxes, cigarette taxes, alcohol taxes, property taxes (directly if they own property; or indirectly, as part of the rent they pay), highway tolls, various government licensing “fees,” etc., the same way that you do. Did you think that undocumented immigrants shop at secret underground Wal-Marts that don’t charge sales tax? That they live in special immigrant dirigibles that allow them to avoid being on land subject to property tax?

You might be thinking of Social Security and income taxes; but in fact about two thirds of undocumented immigrants pay those, too (1), either under a forged SSN or else through an ITIN, which isn’t linked to immigration status.

As for eligibility for federal welfare programs, WikiPedia Is Your Friend.

Jim Perry:

As for a strawman, Roderick talks about freedom of movement in a country that has roadblocks for its own citizens and suggests that illegal immigrants have every right to go places as long as they don’t interfere with others.

How is that a distortion of Walter Williams’s argument? What does Walter Williams say that Roderick is misrepresenting?

In any case, what Roderick is that everyone has a right to move freely. That’s a statement about how people ought to be treated, not an attempt to empirically describe how they are being treated by the government right now. It takes a pretty heroic misreading to suppose that Roderick is unaware of government roadblocks, in an article explicitly devoted to criticizing restrictions on freedom of movement.

So, as far as strawmen go, logician, heal thyself.

Jim Perry:

My comments suggest that the tax burden of citizens is increased when illegal immigrants come here and increase the tax rate

This is plainly absurd. Do you really think that if undocumented immigrants weren’t coming to the U.S. the IRS would be giving you money back? Why?

Jim Perry:

doesn’t address the idea that most illegal immigrants are recipients of stolen goods

This is a specific statistical claim. Do you have any evidence for it?

when they benefit from state-supplied education and health care in the US (whatever the value one may put on those). The goods are stolen from taxpayers,

Everyone who benefits from tax-funded government “services” in the U.S. is receiving goods that were ultimately funded by robbery. Most of those who benefit from those services are, in fact, legally-recognized citizens of the United States, not undocumented immigrants. (I don’t know if you’ve heard, but American citizens also often put their kids through government schools, take advantage of government health and human services programs, etc. In fact, they do this much more often than undocumented immigrants, because undocumented immigrants are often legally ineligible for the “services” in question.) If it’s a problem when non-citizens do it, then it’s a problem when U.S. citizens do it, too; if it’s not a problem when U.S. citizens do it, it’s not a problem when non-citizens do it either. (My own view is the latter: the problem isn’t who’s receiving government “services,” but rather who’s robbing people to fund them. Which welfare recipients have no effective control over: you’d still be taxed at exactly the same level whether any individual welfare recipient chose to accept or to reject the money being offered. The people who do have control over it — the tax-men, law-men, Congress-men, et al. — are the ones that you ought to be blaming for your tax problems. But even if there some kind of moral problem with taking money from government “services,” that moral problem, whatever it may be, applies just as much to citizens as to immigrants.)

So why do you keep harping on immigration status? It has nothing causally or morally to do with the problem you’re complaining about.