Comments Elsewhere

Lopez:

If advocating immigration restriction makes you a “collectivist”, then how on earth is it not “self-evidently un-libertarian”?

… because it’s only self-evident if the collectivist premises behind the anti-immigration policy are in clear sight; and there are matters of degree as to how transparent the collectivist move in a given argument for an immigration control policy is.

I take it that Roderick regards Hoppe’s position to require a violation of individualist principles; that’s why he strongly disagrees with it. But the question is whether the violation is an obvious one or a subtle one. Mike Tuggle, who Roderick is jousting with in the article you cite, wears his collectivist premises on his sleeve and makes it fairly easy; Hans Hermann Hoppe, who claims to be a rights-absolutist and has spilled a lot of ink trying to defend enforcing immigration restrictions on rights-absolutist libertarian grounds, makes it somewhat harder. I think Hoppe’s arguments on the matter are a bunch of nonsense, but they are there; so showing how Hoppe’s position violates libertarian principles does require engaging with an argument of Hoppe’s and showing where it is fallacious. (I think that’s a task that y’all have done well enough here on several occasions and that Roderick and Walter Block have done well enough elsewhere.)

The difference here corresponds to the difference between arguing over whether or not libertarian principles are correct (as Roderick is in his argument with Mike Tuggle) and whether those principles, once agreed on, are being correctly applied (as Roderick is in his debates with Hans Hermann Hoppe).