Comments Elsewhere

El primer texano que te cae bien? Quizás no sepas que naciera yo en San Antonio—hace todos estos años que conoces a un texano y no lo sabes!

No somos todos Bushistas!

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.

Well, I helped get us into this mess; let’s see how far I can help us get out of it.

By Radgeek’s definition, does a greater affinity for family and friends than strangers make one a bigot? —Jonathan Wilde

No, not unless you think that preference for your friends and family over strangers is rationally unjustifiable. I think that’s obviously false in the case of friends (part of what ‘friends’ means is that you prefer them to strangers, or foes), and usually false in the case of family (although someone who’s more of a mad dog moral individualist than I am might object).

Of course, someone might go on to try to push the point in favor of overt racism or nationalism on the claim that the racial or ethno-linguistic groups we belong to are like a sort of extended family. (So extended that it extends beyond what normal people use the words “extended family” to mean, i.e. people who have traceable relations to you within some small number of generations.) I think this is sheer mystification, and frankly that it’s insulting to the ties of family to try to pass off my relationship to some dumb jerk who happens to come from my hometown or (worse) who just happens to share my native language or dialect or (worse yet) just happened to be born within the same State-drawn lines in the sand as I was, as something of a kind with my relationship to my sister or my parents or my cousins.

On the other hand, it’s also worth pointing out that there are some things for which it would be bigoted to prefer your kin, say, over strangers: for example, if you think that you have the right to slay someone at will unless they are your kin, that’s a bigoted belief. Specifically it’s a rather narrow form of tribalism. It’s worth noting that this is relevant to the open borders argument: I happen to agree with Micha about the ethics of “Buy American!” campaigns, but even if you don’t think that a boycott of foreign-made goods is rationally indefensible, the issue at hand in immigration policy isn’t just a consumer boycott; it’s whether or not you should call men with clubs and guns to attack foreigners who try to cross a government-drawn line in the sand without a permission slip. Part of the reason I’m as confident as I am about the claim is that opposition to open borders logically commits you to the claim that foreigners, as foreigners, lack at least some of the individual rights that you are willing to recognize for citizens.

It is not at all clear to me why being bigoted (as defined by Rad Geek) or racist (meaning to discriminate on grounds of race) is immoral, let alone unlibertarian. —Paul Coulam

Whether bigotry is unlibertarian or not depends on what you think “libertarianism” means. It’s true that being racist doesn’t mean that you therefore endorse violations of the non-aggression principle. (Although most racists actually have, historically, endorsed all kinds of brutal rights violations, it’s conceivable that you could have, say, a commitedly non-violent faction of the Klan that seeks to create a white separatist community solely through the exercise of free association and peaceful property rights.) But just because a set of beliefs is logically consistent with the non-aggression principle doesn’t mean that it can’t be unlibertarian. That follows if you think that the only ethical commitment entailed by libertarianism is a thin commitment to the non-aggression principle. But I think there are good reasons to favor a “thick” version of libertarianism (which requires strict adherence to the non-aggression principle, but which also calls for ethical and political commitments other than just non-aggression). For a start on the argument for that conclusion, see Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?.

As for whether bigotry (as I defined it) is immoral or not, well, the definition was framed in such a way that bigotry is a vice term: the intolerance has to be rationally unjustifiable (most people don’t consider intolerance towards serial killers a form of bigotry, for example). So in order to qualify as a bigot (as I defined it), you have to at least be indulging in a cognitive vice. I guess whether that means you’re also indulging in a moral vice depends on whether or not you think that it can be moral to treat one person worse than another without any rational justification. I don’t think it can.

Note that this leaves open the question of whether or not racism (as the term is commonly used) is a form of bigotry: to show that it is, you’d have to show that racial prejudice is rationally unjustifiable. I think most civilized people these days have a pretty good idea of the reasons why that is, but if you want to press the point we can argue about that. (The main thing is to get clear on where the argument actually is.)

Rad Geek says that [everyone who opposes open borders is, therefore, advocating a policy for bigoted reasons.] Apparently because he claims that there are no non-bigoted reasons for opposing open borders. Couldn’t someone simply be in error due to confusion? —Paul Coulam

You’d have to explain what sort of confusion you have in mind. Lots of people make errors due to confusion, but sloppy thought isn’t necessarily a defense against claims of bigotry (lots of bigots think sloppily; so what?).

In particular, failing to think seriously about a government policy that you endorse means for the victims of that policy isn’t an innocent confusion. The fact that people often endorse policies that entail treatment of foreigners that they would never endorse for fellow-citizens or their family is a sign that people often fail to think about things that they should think about. Why do they indulge in these cognitive vices for foreigners and not for fellow-citizens or their family? And why shouldn’t we chalk up that cognitive vice as part of a particular (fairly common) form of bigotry?

You might point out that there could be a consistent totalitarian who just thinks that the government has a right to assault anyone that it sees fit. True; but that just means that the person holds to another form of bigotry: bigotry in favor of government officials over their subjects.

If you have some sort of innocent confusion that you think would fit the bill, feel free to specify it, and we can discuss whether that avoids bigotry or not.

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.

This is nonsense. I’m heavily in favour of open borders, but I recognise there are plenty of non-bigoted reasons to oppose it: national security risk, fear of public services being overwhelmed by an influx of poor people, belief that major cities would be ringed with violent, desperately-poor shanty towns of new immigrants. I reject all these arguments, but there’s nothing bigoted about them. —Wild Pegasus

On the contrary, I think that all of those arguments are transparently bigoted. The notion that you have the right to discard presumption of innocence, due process of law, individual property rights, etc. for some set of people for the sole reason that those people are not (yet) citizens of the state that you live in—worse, in the name of mythical collectivist interests like “national security” and “public services”—are obviously bigoted. They may not be specifically nationalist or racist (some people favor immigration restrictions for reasons of class prejudice, for example, rather than racism or xenophobia), but they are bigoted all the same.

To put it another way, there’s nothing in the arguments you give above that essentially has any connection with national borders; you could press every single one of the arguments that you use above as an argument for internal passports, restricting immigration from Kentucky to New York, restricting immigration from rural Illinois to inner-city Chicago, shooting people from inner-city Chicago who try to buy houses in suburban Chicago, etc. The fact that most people—even if they don’t very much like the internal migrations that they’re experiencing in their communities—would be appalled by ideas like these, but aren’t appalled when the argument is used to justify the same summary policies against foreigners, should be a sign that something is rotten here.

(Of course, if they did feel comfortable endorsing these kind of internal immigration policies, they might not be xenophobes but it wouldn’t be hard to make the case that they are a particularly appalling sort of classist, racist, or what have you.)

As for the application of the same principles to “Buy American!” campaigns:

1. “Buy American” is not necessarily protectionism. One could advocate free trade and Buy American.

Well, whether it counts as “protectionism” or not depends on whether you think “protectionism” has to entail government policy or not. Whether you call it “protectionism” or not, I think there are some ethical issues in common between government protectionism and voluntary boycotting of foreign goods (even if the boycotters are principled free traders). E.G., both the “Buy American” campaign and the government protectionism usually operate on the premise that you ought to chip in for American companies just because they’re American. I think that sort of thing is stupid enough when the pitch is some kind of allegiance to fellow alumni of my University or to people who happened to be in a chapter of the same fraternity as you; it makes it that much worse when it is called for on the basis of the territorial lines drawn in the sand by a continent-spanning government.

2. It’s not just “Americans” they expect will be better off. The people who support Buy American believe that their livelihood, and that of their friends and family, depends on people purchasing American-made goods. They might even be right. I don’t see how it’s unreasonable or unjustifiable to prefer one’s one livelihood to someone else’s, nor why it’s unreasonable or unjustifiable to prefer the livelihood of your friends and family to someone from Ghana. — Wild Pegasus

Then they’re being gulled by ridiculous pseudo-economic arguments. This might be a perfectly good reason to (sometimes, at least) buy locally, or to favor your friends and family in your business dealings. But if that’s a good argument for buying locally, it’s a better argument for my buying goods from Toronto than it is for my buying goods from Los Angeles; and if I lived in Los Angeles it would be a better argument for buying goods from Tijuana than it would be for buying goods from Chicago. Of course, there are some further complications that are caused by existing government violations of laissez-faire principles; but that’s increasingly untrue in the age of NAFTA, and in any case it’s a good reason to curb the violations, not to join a Know-Nothing boycott.

Of course, there is a further question of why people are gulled by such bad arguments. Part of the reason, I’m sure, is that most people just don’t know a lot of economics. But another reason is because people are gulled into thinking that fellow residents of the United States as such have more in common with them than people who live not so many miles away, but happen to be over a border. I think part of the reason that people tend to stop thinking about other people when they hit a national border is that they are buying into statist mystifications; and part of the reason is plain xenophobia. But both reasons are rationally unjustifiable, and both of them constitute a particular form of bigotry.

Have you and/or your kids seen any of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies (My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away…)? If not, you should see as many as you can get your hands on, and nearly all of them are available on Netflix. Brilliant, beautiful, delightful stuff.

Netflix also has a “Friends” service that forwards you recommendations automatically from people you know on the service. If you go to friends and send an invite to catallactics@comcast.net, for example, you can see ratings and recommendations based on L.’s and my rentals and ratings.

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?

Now I am only going by that article, I haven’t read the book. But as it stands with the article, I am not sure I see how spammers are going to switch to RSS with any success at all.

Well, the article doesn’t say anything at all about spamming; it says that “web marketers” may turn from e-mail to RSS. Depending on how you define your terms, it may be the case that all spammers are web marketers; but it’s not the case that all web marketers are spammers. Their point may be that “legitimate” web marketers (however they think that term ought to be applied) are likely to get by spam filters and to have their messages go unread when customers are inundated with spam anyway, and so are more likely to move their means of communication to RSS feeds that users can voluntarily subscribe to (and unsubscribe from). Of course, some websites that specialize in advertising of employment or services that users have a significant incentive to seek out—e.g. Craiglist—already offer RSS feeds along these lines.

That’s my charitable guess at an interpretation, anyway.

This is not a meme. There are no such thing as memes. It is a game or a quiz or a thingy that you thought it would be a good idea to spread. You are not a passive host for self-replicating information patterns; you are a human being. Take responsibility for the contents of your own mind!

Rock on, by the way. Smash the State.

I was a bit puzzled to see some of the following quotes at http://www.fathersforlife.org/feminism/quotes1.htm#Femicommies, apparently intended to demonstrate that feminism is derived from Marxism:

Marxism and Feminism are one, and that one is Marxism — Heidi Hartmann and Amy Bridges, The unhappy marriage of Marxism and Feminism

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism…

— Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.
Catharine A. MacKinnon, 1989, First Harvard University Press. Page 3.

I wonder whether anyone involved with this page has actually read Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, or “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism.” In fact, one wonders if you have even read the title of “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,” since that puts it in a nutshell before you have even made it to the essay. I ask these things because the two pieces are extended discussions of the problems inherent in trying to combine feminist and Marxist politics. The first 1/3 of MacKinnon’s book is devoted to a lengthy feminist critique of Marxism and of attempted Marxist-feminist syntheses.

There are plenty of places to find Marxist influences on feminism, or attempts to combine Marxist and feminist politics. But MacKinnon and Hartmann’s essays are not among them. Frankly it’s hard to regard the selective use of these quotations as anything other than (i) incredibly sloppy, or (ii) dishonest.