Macker: I have a question. Is this a lame attempt to paint those who are against open borders as racists? Are you trying to for instance smear Hoppe indirectly?

I believe the point is that Bob Wallace is a racist moron. This point is demonstrated by his statements to the effect of “Look at me, I am a racist moron. Here’s some unreconstructed anti-Semitism to go along with it, free of charge.”

The connection with Hans-Hermann Hoppe exists, as far as I can tell, only in your fevered imagination.

Macker: I guess Lopez thinks this style of argumentation is cute. I think it’s a vile ad hominem attack

The fallacy of argumentum ad hominem is committed when, and only when, irrelevant information about the person holding a position is used to dismiss the position without argument. Quoting idiotic racist statements that Wallace made in order to demonstrate that Wallace is an idiotic racist is not an argumentum ad hominem. It’s a straightforward argument from empirical evidence.

If Lopez were arguing, “Closed borders is a doctrine held by racists; therefore it is false” he would be using an ad hominem argument.

But he’s not arguing that.

Well, there are two major possibilities as to the kind of information Felt might have had on hand.

1. Haldeman was referring to dark, nefarious things that Felt could reveal, which we now know about, but that we didn’t know about around October 1972.

2. Haldeman was referring to dark, nefarious things that Felt could reveal, at least some of which we still don’t know about.

There may be no way to find out, of course. But it’s worth noting that Felt was sitting on top of millions of pages of records relating to COINTELPRO at the time. We found out about COINTELPRO a year before (1971), but the knowledge of its history and operations was pretty limited in 1972 (systematic investigations didn’t begin until 1976). If Felt decided to retaliate against the Nixon administration by releasing several volumes of uncensored records of the details of government surveillance, deception, and malfeasance, at a time when the Watergate scandal was already heating up and the Pentagon Papers a recent memory, then I don’t doubt it would have been pretty hot news at the time, and catastrophic for an administration that was already in deep, deep trouble.

Alternatively, it might have been a matter of old J. Edgar’s blackmail files. Maybe he had dirt (personal or otherwise) that Nixon was afraid of; maybe not. Nixon had his own share of personal demons; but would stuff that just made him look venal or ridiculous be that much worse than what was already coming out about him?

Of course, it could be something else entirely.

The title of the post contains a category error. I have serious ethical qualms about prostitution, but whatever one thinks, women in prostitution are just doing a job to make a buck. If you want to find lazy, shiftless, greedy, shameless people trying to live off of others, you might look at pimps (who routinely employ coercion and graft to take money from others). Or politicians.

Or, for that matter, any number of corporations within the tech industry. I mean, this is lame, but it’s not like it isn’t Standard Operating Procedure in the tech industry for big firms to get out the legal club and use it to bar competition wherever they can get away with it. It’s just that the assault on substitute goods and services usually comes under the heading of a “patent”, so the companies can not only go around bludgeoning peaceful competitors with the law, but also piously proclaiming how they are doing it in the name of free enterprise (!).

Ah—not only have we got Justin Raimondo complaining of “character assassination;” we have Justin Raimondo complaining about “character assassination” in the pages of The Palmer Periscope, a weblog created for the sole purpose of obsessively trashing one man, Tom G. Palmer.

Which makes the whole thing feel rather like opening up an issue of Pravda and reading an article on distortions and lies of the U.S. foreign press.

Here’s how Kinsella answers my question about immigration onto private property and the use of helicopter shuttle services:

I would not oppose immigration only onto private property, but as soon as he is caught on public [property] he would be jailed for trespass. Which is basically the same thing as today’s immigration polices.

No, it’s not. If you were arrested for criminal trespass you would be charged with either a misdemeanor or a low-grade felony (depending on the state and the nature of the offense). The likely punishment would be a fine. It would not be sustained imprisonment and it sure as hell would not be the solution currently favored by La Migra—deportation, i.e., exile and confiscation of property. If you’re seriously proposing that we treat undocumented immigrants like trespassers then simple considerations of proportionality would mean that federal immigration policy as it currently stands would have to be completely dismantled and reconfigured to look more like the issuing of traffic tickets.

That’s not to say, though, that the trespass-on-public-property argument works in the first place. It doesn’t. Quite frankly, it’s crap. Here’s what Kinsella used to back it up earlier:

Well. In my view the American people as taxpayers—or some of them—are true “owners” of public land.

Of course, the “or some of them” is necessary to do your mischief. Because, as you know, or ought to by now, immigrants pay taxes too. Among other taxes, they pay gasoline taxes more or less in proportion to their use of roads.

Ergo, it seems that as soon as an immigrant has filled ‘er up, he has (thereby) become an American taxpayer, and (thereby) gained as good a claim to access to the roads as anyone else.

You might claim:

1. That a driving (i.e., taxpaying) immigrant does own a share of the roads like everyone else, but the decision of the majority of the joint owners overrules the individual’s decision to allow herself to access the road. But it’s an awfully strange kind of joint ownership in which the majority of the owners can simply categorically exclude another owner from accessing the commonly-held property no matter what.

2. That once immigrants have paid taxes they have access to the roads, but all you propose is a policy that would close government-controlled property to people who haven’t paid taxes yet, and so do not yet have any ownership claim. But there are lots of ways that an immigrant who has never set foot on a government road could go about acquiring shares of ownership if that’s how it really is—for example, by paying an agent to purchase some taxed gasoline on her behalf, and then using her newly-bought shares in the government roads to drive out and get it. Or by buying it from someone else who’s willing to sell their shares. (I, for one, have no particular interest in owning or investing in highways, and would be glad to sell.)

That said, note that all of this is predicated on a particular theory about what the “ownership” of the roads amounts to in the first place. Even though I don’t think that theory proves what you want it to, I think it’s frankly ridiculous on its face, and ridiculous in ways that undermine the possibility of alternatives giving you the results you think you can get from this theory. In particular, to get the policy outcome that it’s licit for majority opinion to close down the entire road system (and all other government-controlled land) to immigrants, you have to hold:

1. That everyone in the shareholding class owns a share in the entire network of roads

2. That they own all the parts of the network of roads equally (so, for example, you have as much of a say as I do about how to dispose of the roads between my apartment and some place that an immigrant guest of mine might work)

3. That the terms of this joint ownership are such that a sufficiently large number of shareholders can overrule the decisions made by one of the shareholders for non-interfering use of any part of the network. (Such as, for example, driving an immigrant guest from my apartment to her place of work.)

If you don’t have all of (1)-(3), then the trespassing-on-the-roads argument never gets off the ground—since to get the conclusion that approximating the enforcement of private property rights on roads, you first need to show that the entire network of roads—not just this or that byway—can be closed to immigrants. But (1), (2), and (3) are all obviously false; insofar as there are any legitimate property claims that can be disentangled here, you’ll have a decentralized patchwork of claims over different parts of the road system, not a giant joint stock corporation in the road network as a whole. There are good reasons to think that I have some legitimate property claim to the street outside my house; some mootable reasons to think that I have some rightful claim in the major thoroughfares in my city; very little reason to think I have any claim on the interstates; and no reason whatsoever to think I have any claim to the roads in front of your house.

This is connected with your sympathy for monarchist immigration policy:

Almost every American would want SOME restrictions on immigration, and it seems clear that a private monarch-owner would also do this.

But why should anyone care what One Big Cartel on the whole goddamn continent-spanning network of roads and government-controlled property would do? That’s not at all interesting for the property rights that would arise in a free society (in which the OBC would collapse due to calculational chaos); it’s not at all interesting for the issue of property rights in this vale of tears (in which neither I nor the collective of American taxpayers nor any monarch has any just claim on the road in front of your house); and it’s not even interesting for the sorting out of utilitarian considerations (since the decisions of OBCs are not reliably efficient).

So why bring it up?

Regarding Switzerland:

I think this is just ridiculous. It is quite clear if Switzerland had open borders then it would radically change.

Of course it would radically change. Everything changes. So what? The question isn’t whether it would change or not but whether the change would be damaging. And why in the world would it be? Because the Swiss would have to figure out how to cope with enclaves of people who have a different religion or speak another language? Well, gee, the whole bloody country is nothing but a loose confederation of unassimilated ethno-linguistic enclaves. Of all the countries in the world to pick for your example of how large-scale immigration and “multiculturalism” would inevitably lead to catastrophe and civil war, Switzerland is so unhelpful to Hoppe that the choice seems downright perverse.

Are you saying that if you did believe this, you might agree with his conclusions? Is your difference only an empirical one?

No. Utilitarian considerations about the plausible effects of large-scale immigration don’t have anything to say to the permissibility of using violence against peaceful immigrants.

However, Hoppe is making a sociological claim in the passages that you quoted above, in addition to his claim about justice. Although I don’t think he would have made the case for immigration restrictions if he were right about the plausible consequences of large-scale immigration in a statist world, it’s also worth pointing out that he’s also wrong on what the plausible consequences actually are.

Kinsella wants to know what, specifically, Ghertner would disagree in in Hoppe’s comments pasted above. I don’t know about Micha, but as for myself there are so many places that I don’t know where to start. More or less arbitrarily, here’s one passage that struck me as, frankly, particularly laughable:

Accordingly, when the welfare state has imploded there will be a multitude of “little” (or not so little) Calcuttas, Daccas, Lagoses, and Tiranas strewn all over Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. It betrays a breathtaking sociological naivete to believe that a natural order will emerge out of this admixture. Based on all historical experience with such forms of multiculturalism, it can safely be predicted that in fact the result will be civil war.

For starters, I deny that there is such a thing as a “natural order;” I think the notion, at least as Hoppe deploys it, is dangerous, anti-human nonsense. (The most important part of our nature as human beings is our capacity for creating things anew and making and remaking our social relationships.) Maybe you could explain what you think a “natural order” means, Stephan, and why you think we should aim at getting one to coalesce.

For the follow-up, I had a good hard laugh when Hoppe predicted civil war inevitably following from the formation of ethno-linguistic enclaves—in Switzerland—and accused his opponents of a “breathtaking sociological naivete.” Switzerland is, in case you haven’t noticed, already a multi-ethnic, polyglot society; it has, compared to the rest of Europe, been remarkably peaceful and prosperous for over 700 years. While we’re at it, somewhere around 20% of the population are already resident foreigners or temporary foreign workers. Somehow, the Swiss seem to manage. This has a lot to do with tolerance, military neutrality, and an intensely decentralist political system, and very little to do with ridiculous notions like a Swiss “national identity.” (There is no Swiss nation at all.)

So why does Hoppe believe that the formation of new ethno-linguistic enclaves in Switzerland would inevitably lead to civil war when Switzerland has been a loosely-affiliated collection of ethno-linguistic enclaves for 700 years? He doesn’t say. It is, apparently, supposed to be taken as more or less self-evident; certainly anyone who doesn’t buy it is accused of “breathtaking sociological naivete.” Yet the facts are already on the ground. Res ipso loquitor.

Kinsella:

Surely you can see the analogy to immigration policy.

I sure can’t. Here’s why: immigration policy, as we know it today, is practiced against people whether they are using government “property” or not. (Would you propose using force to stop me if I operate a helicopter service to transport Mexican immigrants from Mexico to a house that they have rented, and from their house to their place of work, without using any government roads? La Migra would.)

Of course, if you want to claim that your attacks on “open borders” don’t have anything to do with immigration policy as currently practiced—or, for that matter, with borders (since you’re proposing enforcement at the entry to roads etc., not necessarily at the border)—you can do that. But then it’s incumbent on you to explain how your proposals for pre-anarchic immigration policy are relevantly different from those of the assorted Know-Nothing blowhards who are calling on La Migra and the Border Patrol to escalate their war on immigrants rather than fundamentally change their approach.

Once you’ve done that, it’s still incumbent to you to explain how imposing the restriction on coercively monopolized resources (e.g. roads) is morally any different from stationing gunmen to enforce the restriction on private resources against the owners’ will. If there is a salient difference, what is it? If not, then how are you not advocating a violation of rights?

Lopez:

That said, it then follows that someone can be against open borders because they haven’t given the matter too much thought and they don’t have the tools to think about it even if they did. There’s plenty of “law-n-order” asshole conservatives that are against illegal immigrants simply because they’re breaking the law.

Sure, but I don’t think that means that their reasons aren’t bigoted. It just means that the dominant form of bigotry at work is either (a) bigotry against non-citizens as such, rather than against a particular racial or ethnic or socioeconomic group (believing that the government has more-or-less unlimited authority to impose coercive restrictions on non-citizens that they wouldn’t accept if placed on citizens), or (b) bigotry against civilians as such (believing that, among other things, the government has the unlimited authority to attack anyone it sees fit if the right background conditions—e.g., an allegedly worthy goal, or alleged majority support—obtain). I think most conservative “law-n-order” immigration creeps are creeps of type (a); although there are probably some straight-up type (b) totalitarians, too. Either way, the reasons they have for supporting assaults on immigrants comes down to collectivist group-warfare; I take that to be, as such, a violent form of bigotry.

Ghertner:

Charles Johnson already adequately defined it previously in one of these No-Treason threads, and you never responded. I’m not going to waste my time looking up those posts since it will most likely be a waste of time when you choose to ignore it again.

Probably, but I keep links to my offsite comments around, so the marginal cost is lower for me to dig them up. So here’s the definition and the clarification. In case you hate following hyperlinks, the definition is:

bigot, n.: One who is strongly partial to one’s own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.

… let’s add the qualifier: a bigot is one whose partiality towards members of one’s own group and intolerance of those who differ is irrational.

Ghertner apparently accepts this definition; I don’t know whether or not Lopez does.

Kinsella:

Here’s what I WILL DO. I will assert NOW that it will be ASSUMED, unless and until you explicitly deny it, that you DO in fact maintain that those who oppose open border are “nativists and racists.”

Lopez:

I don’t think that everyone who is against open borders is a nativist and/or a racist.

That’s Lopez’s prerogative of course. But I’ll be your huckleberry even if he won’t. I think that everyone who is against open borders is against it for bigoted reasons; that’s because there are no non-bigoted reasons to oppose open borders. They aren’t necessarily racist or nativist reasons (there are imaginable immigration policies that are based on socioeconomic class or sexuality or religion rather than race or nationality, for example), but I take it that the general claim of bigotry is what you’re interested in rather than its specific application in claims of racism or nativism.

Does advocating something for bigoted reasons always make you a bigot? I don’t know. Maybe in one sense and not in another sense. I don’t care much anyway.

So everyone who opposes open borders is, therefore, advocating a policy for bigoted reasons. Now what?

I agree with most of the things that Lopez has to say about (in)civility and clarity of argument. But I’m a bit baffled by this:

Civility is neither moral nor immoral. You’re conflating vices with crimes. Vices Are Not Crimes. And vices are often incredibly problematic to uncover in others.

It’s certainly true that vices are not crimes. But since when does “immoral” mean the same thing as “criminal”? Given the choice, I’d say it’s far closer to being synonymous with “vicious” than it is with “criminal.”

There are lots of rotten things you can do without violating anybody’s rights. The fact that they’re non-violent doesn’t mean that no moral judgment can be rendered on them; it just means that moral judgments about them can’t (legitimately) be enforced at gunpoint.

(For what it’s worth, I don’t think that incivility as Lopez practices it is vicious, either. Incivility can be a vice, but only when it’s practiced in a way that detracts from the conversation; and Lopez’s approach doesn’t usually do that.)

Macer:

Saudi Arabia allows NO immigration period. They only allow temporary workers in.

This is a form of immigration, just as Bush’s crackpot scheme for a bracero program is a form of immigration. Workers live and work in Saudi Arabia for substantial periods of time. The fact that they are denied legal rights that they ought, by right, to have, and that this results in very shitty treatment, says many bad things about the Saudi dictatorship but it does not say that they don’t allow immigration by non-Muslims.

Anyway, now what? What do you think that the shitty selective immigration policies imposed by Saudi royals entails about how you can treat ordinary Muslims? (I.E., people other than Saudi royals)

Macker:

You use other ideological concepts like “non-person” that I just don’t use.

People have rights. To claim that Jones does not have rights anymore just is to claim that you have no more obligations to her than you do to a rock, or perhaps a wild animal. It means that you can, without doing anything wrong to her, beat her, take the house she lives in or the things she uses, enslave her, or kill her. You might think that there are other reasons that you shouldn’t do these things (just as there are reasons you might not want to smash a rock) but on your avowed position, none of the reasons not to do these things to an avowed anti-propertarian involve her moral standing as a fellow human being.

That’s treating someone as a non-person. If you don’t like your position being so described, then you should change your position.

There are plenty of good reasons not to steal from someone who makes a phony assertion that property rights do not exist. If however his claim is genuine, then his property rights cannot be one of them. If genuine then he has rejected all claims to property so there is no reason for him to even complain. It would be physically impossible to steal from him, he has nothing to steal.

Whether or not Jones can consistently complain about you taking stuff from her against her will is immaterial to whether or not you are actually violating her rights. Property rights do not come from your claim to hold property and they don’t evaporate if you cease to make those claims. Jones could, of course, abandon all her property—by setting it out at the curb, for example, or inviting people onto her land to take it. But just saying “I don’t believe anyone can own anything” is not an abandonment of your property; it’s just a statement of (mistaken) philosophical belief.

Suggesting that you have the right to use force to take stuff away from someone who holds foolish beliefs about property rights is, of course, both unhinged and totalitarian—whether or not you actually think you ought to do it.

(You can, of course, abandon property. But saying “I don’t believe anyone can own anything”, while continuing to hold onto and to use your property exactly as you always have, may be hypocritical, but it’s not an act of abandonment.)

Besides where do you get the idea that all of the sudden I have this desire to steal from the other guy and beat the shit out of him (assault him) just because he denied the right to property. That’s just one right. He didn’t deny the right to be free from unprovoked assault, did he.

I think the distinction you’re trying to draw here is spurious: the reason that you have a right to alienable property is ultimately the same as the reason you have a right not to be assaulted; if you deny someobdy the one then you ultimately deny them the other. But suppose that it were not so. Then so what? If someone did say, “I believe that human beings have the right to assault or enslave other human beings if they can get away with it,” that would certainly a wicked belief. But does that give you the right to assault or enslave the person who utters it? If so, why?

People have rights because they are people. They don’t lose them by being bad people. Not even if they commit crimes. It would be bad enough if your theory entailed that criminals have no rights (what I originally took it to entail); but from what you have said it appears that you actually believe that having bad thoughts—a vice, not a crime—is enough to do the job. That’s not libertarianism; it’s totalitarianism, or possibly sociopathy.