... 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.

... GIYF: ... The evidence of his bigotry are the ignorant statements that he made about

... The e-mail you're responding to had nothing to do with whether his stance is a good one or a bad one. Of course, I think it's an awful stance, as you know,

Jim Perry:

When Mr. Williams addresses the situation in the united States, where illegal immigrants get to take from the cookie jar to which legal citizens are forced to give, …

This is completely counterfactual. Undocumented immigrants are forced to pay taxes, too, and “legal citizens” have a great deal more access to tax-funded programs and “services,” which often require proof of citizenship, than undocumented immigrants do.

Even if it weren’t counterfactual, it would be morally irrelevant. It’s true that if you combine something fundamentally moral (free movement from place to place) with something fundamentally immoral (a coercively funded welfare state), that might lead to bad results. But then the thing to focus on is the immoral part of the combination, not the moral part, and the fault lies with those who are doing the coercing — that is, the government that does the taxing, not the migrants (or the citizens) who receive a pittance on the other end.

See also On the Dole.

Jim Perry:

He sets up a strawman argument to which liberty-loving, thoughtful people readily agree.

A strawman is the fallacy of refuting a distorted version of your conversation partner’s argument, and then claiming that you have refuted their actual argument. But where does Roderick do that?

Williams directly asserts that individual people don’t have a natural right to live peacefully in the U.S. without permission from the federal government. (This is not very far off a direct quote from his article, although he phrases it as a rhetorical question.) Roderick denies that assertion, based on the libertarian premise that people have a natural right to live peacefully anywhere they want to live. (The only permission required being that of the property owner, if any.)

Maybe Roderick’s premise is true and maybe it’s false; but if the premise is true, then it would follow that what Williams directly asserts cannot be true. And, thus, his argument for government immigration laws cannot be sound.

Where is the strawman? At what point did Roderick misrepresent Williams’s argument?