Comments Elsewhere

Brandon:

I’m not saying there aren’t storm troopers now, but I doubt Paul would vote for increasing them, since they’d have to be paid out of federal moneys.

Again, Ron Paul has already voted for bills to increase the number of Border Patrol storm-troopers. As he himself has said,

I have also supported the strengthening our border and increasing the number of border patrol agents. It is an outrage that our best-trained border guards are sent to Iraq instead of guarding our borders. For national security, we need to give more attention to our own border which is being illegally breached every day, and yet the government shirks one of its few constitutionally mandated duties, namely to defend this country.

Brandon:

And there is a libertarian argument for closed borders.

There are some arguments for closed borders which are advanced by people who happen to be libertarians. But I deny that the arguments are libertarian arguments.

Ron Paul’s own favorite arguments on the topics are barefaced appeals to legal positivism, belligerent nationalism, and utilitarian arguments about the allegedly disastrous results of combining welfare statism and freedom of immigration. The kind of Hoppean argument that Rothbard favored is, I think, dead wrong, and obviously so, but it does at least attempt to justify exclusionary immigration policies in terms of individual liberty rights (generally, the right to exclude from either private or common property); the kind of arguments Ron Paul has been pushing, on the other hand, simply stomp all over libertarian principle in the name of desiderata (like uncritical deference to standing law, nationalistic strength-through-unity, sacrificing the moral rights of the minority in the alleged interests of the majority, etc.) which are, if anything, the exact opposite of genuine libertarian goals.