JimBob, in reply to claim that he is both supporting, and benefiting from, immigrant labor every time he shops at the grocery store, objects: “Most if not all agriculture harvesting can be done by machines today.”

Of course, most if not all agricultural harvesting can be done by tech industry CEOs—you just have to pay them enough. But there’s the rub: the reason that so much agricultural labor is done by migrant farmworkers—many of them immigrants from Mexico and Central America—is that it’s more cost-effective for farmers to get their tomatos picked that way than to automate the process.

That’s not to say that farm labor is great for the immigrants. It’s hard work and the bosses usually treat you like shit. But workers do it because they are willing to put themselves through a lot in order to improve their lives. Also because, thanks to anti-immigrant blowhards like you, it’s often very hard to find work in any other field.

I’ll leave the question of historical food price trends to those who have spent more time researching it; I’d only like to point out here that the issue is not whether the price of beef now is more or less than the price of beef in 1960, but rather whether the price of beef now is more or less than the price of beef would be now if fewer Mexican and Central American immigrants (documented and undocumented) agreed to work at the prevailing wages in the industry. (And as for privatizing profits—I’m all for it. Would that more profits were privatized.)

What about the claim that immigrant labor “socializes the costs” of the labor? It’s hard to see how—and hard to see how it would matter if it did. Documented immigrants pay much the same taxes that you do. Roads are paid for primarily by gasoline taxes, which everyone who drives on a road pays. Schools, local law enforcement, and state law enforcement are all funded primarily by property taxes and sales taxes, which immigrants (documented or undocumented) pay whenever they buy anything and whenever they live anywhere (either directly, or through their landlord). Nor would it matter very much if these things were funded primarily through taxes that immigrants don’t pay: in that case, the fault lies on the government that imposes the taxes and uses the money to provide the services—not on the peaceful immigrants who come here to work.

As usual, people who favor assaulting peaceful immigrants neglect the obvious. The overwhelming reason that Mexican immigrants come to the United States is to work. They benefit from work; and they can find it because employers benefit from hiring them. When employers can produce goods at a lower cost, it helps you, because they will make more of the goods and/or lower the price at which they sell it. The laws of economics are not repealed just because the people involved happen to speak Spanish. Markets work.

Paleo-Anarchist writes: “I’m not blaming the immigrants for invading, but rather blaming the state for encouraging and allowing the immigrants to invade.”

1. Whose property are immigrants “invading”?

2. If you blame the government rather than the immigrants, then why is it the immigrants you are proposing to shoot?

To Kinsella, I wrote: “But, like both Hoppe and Karl Marx, you believe that until the State does wither away, its powers over ordinary, peaceful people and the daily conduct of their affairs should be drastically expanded. (How much more interdicting, harassing, snooping, demanding of papers, and shooting do you think that the Border Patrol and La Migra ought to be doing?)”

Kinsella replied simply: See above

Which I take it referred to these two paragraphs, in reply to Kennedy:

No, no, I’m just opposed to the state. I’m also opposed to the state opening the borders while it has control of the country in the way that it does.

Are you in favor of completely open borders now, *given* our existing state system? Really? Let me ask you, what is your prediction on how many immigrants would swarm into the country over the next 10-20 years, if we totally opened the borders? Keep in mind we have about 275 million people.

But this does not answer any question I asked or reply to any statement I made. Kinsella does support drastic expansion of the State’s powers over the ordinary affairs of non-citizens. And since government agents have no way of identifying non-citizens without harassing, snooping on, stopping, searching, and demanding the papers of citizens and non-citizens alike, and imprisoning them, beating them, or shooting them if they don’t comply (otherwise known as “closed borders”), Kinsella supports the drastic expansion of State violence and interference in the ordinary affairs of everyone. (As if his proposed assaults on peaceful immigrants weren’t enough!) This is what saying that you are “opposed to the state opening the borders while it has control of the country in the way that it does” means. (Similarly, War Communism, round-ups, government central planning, labor books and internal passports, and turning Party bureaucrats into the dictatorial boss of every worker in the country is what Marxism means–even if Marx piously hoped that it would lead to autonomous, freely-associated labor and the withering away of the State “in the long run”.)

Nor did Kinsella answer the question. Since he believes (as he has repeatedly argued) that current immigration levels are partly due to statism, he evidently believes that as long as the State exists, it ought to be doing more to force immigrants not to peacefully move into the United States than it already is. So how much more of what “closed borders” inevitably requires doing, should they be doing?

And, for what it’s worth, in answer to your questions (which you directed to Kennedy, but apparently also directed to me when you directed me to “See above”): Yes, yes really, and I have no earthly idea–and don’t particularly care. If you don’t like the increasing numbers of peaceful immigrants who don’t speak your language, you can always learn Spanish, or perhaps move to Idaho.

JimBob writes: “The elites and a few wacko libertarians keep trying to convince the American people of all the great benifits dirt poor Mexicans bring to our quality of life. Okay. But I for one ain’t buying it.”

Yes you are—in a very literal sense. Every time you buy beef, chicken, lettuce, tomatos, grapes, oranges, or any number of other kinds of meat and produce at your local grocery store, you are reaping the economic benefits of Mexican immigrant labor—much of it undocumented. While you dick around posting on weblogs, Mexican immigrants are breaking their backs in unpleasant agricultural labor in order to make a better life for themselves and their families, and thanks to their efforts you can head down to your local grocery store and find high-quality food year round, at remarkably low prices.

Don’t think that’s much of a benefit? Then try picking your own damn vegetables sometime and see how much you like it.

Kinsella, on being charged with thinking that the State is necessary: “No, I oppose the state. I’m an anarchist. Like Hoppe. I think the state is unjustified and should be disbanded.”

But, like both Hoppe and Karl Marx, you believe that until the State does wither away, its powers over ordinary, peaceful people and the daily conduct of their affairs should be drastically expanded. (How much more interdicting, harassing, snooping, demanding of papers, and shooting do you think that the Border Patrol and La Migra ought to be doing?)

Critto says: … And besides, he [Hans Hermann Hoppe] is an immigrant. He should start preventing immigration from himself, by returning to Austria first.

You’re missing the point. White German-speaking immigrants aren’t the sort of immigrants that are going to “devastate America” in Paleo Bizarro World. You see, sitting around and writing economics papers on the government dime is honest, productive work, in tune with the liberal values of Anglo-American culture. Working long, hard hours in meatpacking plants, chicken farms, picking tomatoes, caring for children, etc., privately funded and often under-the-table and tax-free, is a recipe for social disintegration. Why? Because the people who do that work are Mexicans. And that’s enough for Hoppe, Kinsella, and friends such as Jared Taylor or Pat Buchanan to be sure that there goes the neighborhood…

John Lopez asks Stephen Kinsella, What is it that the INS is doing that needs to be done?

Don’t you get it yet? The answer is “Beating the tar out of some brown people.” It’s a dirty job, but, in Paleo Bizarro World, somebody’s got to do it.

Villager asks: “New here… can someone offer a definition of Objective Reality?”

Nope. But I can point it out to you: open your eyes and look around a bit. It’s that stuff in front of your face.

“Of an Anarchist society?”

An anarchist society is a society without rulers. For all his many faults, the left-anarchist P.A. Kropotkin put it best when he explained “Anarchism” as:

the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government — harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being. In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions.

I don’t know what the secret “breeding” designs of our would-be rulers are. But whatever they are, governments cannot succeed in breeding stupid, avaricious people: stupidity and avarice are not bred in humans. They are learned and chosen. If you think there’s too much of them going around (and I suppose any amount of them going around would be too much), then you would do best to address them as fellow rational beings and deal with them as people who can (and ought to) live up to something better.

The notion that some people are simply born to be slavish (and should be treated accordingly?) is an Aristotelian idea. But it’s the sort of Aristotelian idea that would-be libertarians would be better off rejecting.

Kennedy clarifies:

“What I mean is that the fall of the USSR was driven by economic reality not movements. That’s not to say that movements had no role it how things played out, but the USSR didn’t fall because it’s citizens wanted it to.”

There’s an important truth in this: the USSR and its sattelites had grinding through a state of internal economic collapse for decades when things finally fell apart. But it’s also important to remember that economics is a discipline that concerns what people choose to do no less than politics is. If it’s true (as it is) that individual people’s economic decisions under the conditions of Bolshevism made it so that the Eastern bloc suffered a long, steady, grinding economic collapse (as it did), to the point that people began to be forced by economic realities to decide that they could no longer get along by cooperating with the government, or (if they’re within the government), no longer sustain the institutions of the regime, then that’s just one convoluted way in which a regime can fall because its citizens want it to—or, at least, no longer want to commit the resources needed to sustain it. If John’s account of the fall of Moscow-line Communism is correct, then I think we have to be careful about where it is that we draw the distinction between that explanation and explanations in terms of coordinated political action by movements of people: the difference would not be that in one case people wanted the regime to fall and in the other case it just fell without them wanting it. It would be that in one case, the conditions that made people want the regime to fall were produced by an intentional, coordinated plan; in the other case, the conditions that made people want the regime to fall were unintentional consequences of other things that people wanted and acted to get.

Fair enough: it would be foolish to deny that unintended consequences are important, or to dismiss the importance of the economic situation that people were acting from when trying to explain the fall of the USSR and its sattelites. But while that may explain part of the context (not all of it—see, for example, North Korea) in which the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc was possible, I don’t know how well it explains how it came to fall apart when and how it did. (Did the economic realities in Poland explain why the Communist regime collapsed in 1989 rather than, say, 1987 or 1993? Do they explain why in Poland and in the Soviet Union, there was a soft crash rather than the worst happening? Wouldn’t it be reasonable to say that these facts—pretty important for giving an accurate causal account of the fall of Moscow-line Communism—had a lot to do with the widespread strikes, the organization of groups such as Solidarity, the weakened ability (both in terms of resources and in terms of political will) of the regimes to crush dissident movements, the effect in coordination and inspiration that this had for, e.g., turning crowds of ordinary Russians out to resist the attempted coup against Gorbachev, etc. (If it hadn’t been for popular movements, that coup would very likely have gone off without much of a hitch. And what would the collapse of the USSR have looked like then?)