Stephan:

Technically, “owners” refers to those who have a claim on state assets (mostly US taxpayers, but others too, I suppose), and “outsiders” to those who don’t.

Well, right, which I think is my point — that the classes of “owners” and “outsiders” here don’t actually line up very well at all with either citizenship or immigration status. Which I would think tends to undermine the extent to which discrimination in favor of use by owners would result in anything looking like an even minimally restrictive immigration policy.

true… but one could argue that IF the basic argument here is correct, then the road-owners can, via their agent (the state), condition the use of public property by outsiders on an agreement to pay taxes–so that the taxes paid by undocumented or even documented “outsiders” don’t count to give them an ownership claim.

1. I don’t think that the state is acting as the agent of taxpayers.

2. I agree that this sort of thing is a possible arrangement in a case of property that is either owned jointly by an association of private individuals, or owned in common by the unorganized public, if you already have a tolerably good idea of who constitutes the association or the public, prior to and independently of the arrangement. In fact, I imagine it’d be pretty common on thoroughfares where they might be able to get some tolls from it.

But as a way of sorting out and settling the rightful ownership claims for a road currently occupied by a criminal enterprise like government, when we don’t yet have an account of who has the rightful ownership claim and who doesn’t, this seems pretty ad hoc. If natural-born citizen Roderick, naturalized citizen Arnold, documented immigrant Hans-Hermann, and undocumented immigrant Juan Maria all start using government roads at about the same time, and all start being forced to pay in taxes at about the same time, what’s the basis for categorizing (say) the taxes paid in by Roderick and Arnold as payments toward a share of ownership, but no the payments put in by Hans-Hermann or Juan Maria, such that Roderick or Arnold’s preferences for the property count towards setting requirements for admission, but Hans-Hermann’s or Manolo’s don’t? Of course, you can’t just cite Roderick and Arnold’s preferences about who should or should not be allowed to buy in, while ignoring Hans-Hermann’s and Juan Maria’s, when the question at hand is precisely who among the possible candidates are going to have their preferences counted and whose are going to be ignored; that would pretty directly beg the question.

(My own view on the matter, for what it’s worth, is that payment just radically underdetermines the question of who has the best claim here, since it’s so universal and run through so many anonymizing centralized slush funds; so what you’ll have to look at is, first, trying to reverse eminent domain seizures to the extent possible, and, after that, looking to something more like payment plus Rothbardian homesteading, which would be determined by who lives on, works on, or otherwise habitually uses the road. But if that’s the standard, then there are lots of communities where lots of undocumented immigrants live on, work on, or otherwise habitually use, U.S. roads.)

I’m not sure there is any armchair libertarian way to figure this out. It’s messy (which is one problem with crime in the first place). …. I tend to think it would be decentralized and ad hoc and catch as catch can ….

Sure, I agree. And doesn’t that make it extremely unlikely that any one-size-fits-all national border restrictions could even remotely approximate what the rightful owners would do with their property in roads, parks, etc. if free to set their own terms? If it actually reflects a decentralized, ad hoc, messy sort of approach, shouldn’t the expected result be decentralized, ad hoc, and messy, rather than a single policy for everyone all across the continental expanse of the U.S. — producing a border sieve rather than a closed border wall?

Stephan,

I understand that you don’t necessarily mean to endorse the argument you are presenting. But, just to get clear on the details of the setup:

1. In the argument, as presented, the people who you claim to be the rightful owners of the road system are “U.S. taxpayers” (since it was their money that was stolen to build and maintain the roads). You then suggest that this is a reason why rules of the road could legitimately be adopted which exclude or condition access for “outsiders,” which apparently you read as people who are not U.S. citizens.

But “taxpayer” and “citizen” are not the same category. Not all citizens are taxpayers and lots of taxpayers aren’t citizens. Many citizens are net tax recipients; all immigrants, both government-approved and undocumented, pay at least some taxes to the local, state, and U.S. governments (gas tax, sin tax, sales tax, property tax through markups on rent, often income tax, etc.) and many, probably most, are in fact net taxpayers (since immigrants are ineligible for most welfare benefits that citizens are eligible for). So if you’re considering “taxpayers” to be the class of people who rightfully should have joint ownership of the roads, wouldn’t that suggest that your average undocumented worker has a substantially better claim on having a say in forming rules about who can use of government roads than upstanding citizens like Fritz Henderson, military-welfare recipients like Jim Gilchrist, or milfare administrators like Marvin Stewart?

1. Presuming, arguendo, that U.S. taxpayers (not necessarily citizens) are the rightful owners of government-funded roads (certainly the government is not, so…), do you think it likely that the shares and distribution of rightful ownership would be uniform across all taxpayers and across all roads? So, for example, have I, living on Rochelle Ave. in Las Vegas, earned a vote over what people living and working on Cass in Detroit can or cannot do with their road? Have the folks on Cass earned an equal say to me over who can or cannot use Rochelle here? When we’re trying to figure out what a private property owner would do, do we have to conceive of, say, the policies of a single private proprietor or a single private entity who owned all 2,500 miles of I-10? Or might the patterns of rightful ownership — hence the distribution of use policies — be somewhat more decentralized than that?