J. Croft,

I’m more or less entirely with you as a matter of principle. (Like you, I believe in an unconditional right to keep and bear arms; like you I believe that the Constitution was a tyrannical usurpation in its conception, and that appealing to one’s favorite interpretation of the Constitution to somehow safeguard liberty is a sucker’s bet; like you I believe that the standing army and the (increasingly overtly militarized) standing police forces are one of the most toxic political forces in America today. But there are a couple of historical claims you make along the way which utterly baffle me.

You write: See, the backbone of the nation’s defense was on each of us arising out of necessity with arms and the skills to handle them well. They certainly did rise-whether the threat came from British Empire during the Revolutionary War; Mexico when it tried to conquer the Midwest during the 1840’s; …

I’m not aware of any point during the 1840s when Mexico “tried to conquer the Midwest” or when a Mexican invasion was resisted by citizen militia. Are you referring to the U.S. invasion of Mexico (1846-1848)? If so, then what attempt to “conquer the Midwest” was there, at any point? There was fighting between Mexican and U.S. soldiers, after professional soldiers in the standing U.S. army were deliberately moved, as an act of provocation, into the disputed territory between the Rio Grande and the Nueces river; at most, the Mexican end of the fighting was intended to recapture a small strip of southern Texas. In response the U.S. government—with the nakedly imperialistic President Polk at the helm—launched a massive invasion of Mexico, carried out not by militia, but by professional soldiers in the standing U.S. Army (cavalry and infantry) and Navy, which proceeded to invade Mexico, conquer it, seize its capital, and to seize 1/2 of Mexico’s territory, most notably Alta California and Nuevo Mexico (now California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, part of Colorado, etc. The radical libertarians in America at the time — William Lloyd Garrison; Henry David Thoreau — opposed the war at the time, rightly seeing it for what it was — an imperial war, orchestrated by the expansionist Slave Power. This was no militia resistance; for the U.S.’s part it was no resistance at all. It was an act of military aggression, carried out more or less explicitly for the purpose of imperial conquest, and sold to the public with a combination of lies, equivocation, and by-jingo brutality.

Secondly, you write: Immigration was encouraged; millions of Europeans were shipped in who were pig ignorant of what Freedom is. Eventually their mentalities, formed by centuries of despots wielding absolute power over them, made more radical social controls a viable option. Controls… like the banning of guns in New York with the Sullivan Act in 1916.

This strikes me as bizarre. Have you read the editorials, speeches, etc. that led up to the passage of the Sullivan Act? The people arguing for the Sullivan Act were more or less universally anti-immigrant, and justified the gun grab quite explicitly as a way of keeping guns out of the hands of immigrants. For example, here’s the New York Times in 1905, on a forerunner concealed-carry licensing law, then being mooted in the state Assembly: “Such a measure would prove corrective and salutary in a city filled with immigrants and evil communications, floating from the shores of Italy and Austria-Hungary. New York police reports frequently testify to the fact that the Italian and other south Continental gentry here are acquainted with the pocket pistol, and while drunk or merrymaking will use it quite as handily as the stiletto, and with more deadly effect. It is hoped that this treacherous and distinctly outlandish mode of settling disputes may not spread to corrupt the native good manners of the community.”

The reason the Sullivan Act was passed was not because immigrants accepted or supported it. The reason it was passed was because the immigrants targeted (mainly eastern European and Italian immigrants) generally could not vote, and had no political power in the city machines; whereas the cities nativists, whipped up by anti-immigrant rhetoric, decided that they were willing to accept an unprecedented expansion of government power, government gun-grabs, and the beginning of police-state regimentation, as the price for government control over the demonized immigrant population.

I agree with you about the tyrannical nature of so-called “gun control,” and the tyrannical nature of the system which produced it. I agree with you about what needs to be fought for. But I think that it’s very important that, historically speaking, we keep the real enemy in our sights.

You write:

The Constitution gives the federal government ultimate authority over immigration, for good reason, in my view.

Well, but this just relocates the question. If the Constitution delegates authority in such-and-such a way, what gives authority to the United States Constitution to decide the question? (I can write “Open borders and amnesty for all” on a napkin, and then write “THIS IS A CONSTITUTION FOR THE UNITED STATES” on the top of it; but obviously just writing it down isn’t sufficient to actually delegate the authority.)

If the answer is the authorization of a handful of long-dead men, who were a tiny minority of the population even at the time, then I certainly don’t see where they get the right to impose positive obligations on hundreds of millions of people today as to who should properly make decisions about whether or not to forcibly exclude immigrants from homes or workplaces.

If the answer is unanimous consent by the people currently held subject to the Constitution’s provisions, well, clearly, it doesn’t have that, any more than the particular immigration policies have unanimous consent.

If the answer is the authorization of some subset of the people currently held subject to the Constitution’s provisions (say, the majority of eligible voters or somesuch), then, again, the question is what right one group has to dictate terms to the other group, who does not authorize or consent to the terms.

Both here and in my next point, a question for you is whether a federal compact like the Constitution represents a contract, obligation, and statement of purpose that carries significant weight for you, and if so (as I provisionally assume it does), how much.

A contract between whom? If it’s a contract among individual citizens of the United States, or between each individual citizen and the government, then it is certainly nothing of the sort: I never signed it, was never asked to sign it, and have never been expected to sign it before its terms would be inflicted upon me. I expect the same is true for you. Personally, if I had been asked to sign it, I certainly would have refused, if that meant I would not be held to its terms.

If the compact is understood as a contract among something other than individual citizens — say, among the governments of the several states — then it might very well count as a contract, but then it’s entirely unclear how it gains any authority to settle political questions for either individual citizen, or would-be immigrants, unless some other compact, contract, or other relationship independently establishes an obligation by those individual people to the governments of the several states. I for one never authorized any of the several states to act as my agent, or to contract obligations on my behalf, so if they have a binding contract amongst themselves or with the federal government, then I still don’t see, as yet, how that has anything to say about who I may or may not welcome onto my own property.

Taking care not to imply that immigrants are a “bad”, there’s still the possibility that one locality’s decision will affect its neighbors willy-nilly in ways they perhaps should not have to accept.

I’m not clear on what you have in mind here. Could you be more specific what kind of effects you have in mind that people should not have to accept?

I mean, after all, suppose that all the people in my neighborhood (E. Rochelle Ave.) want to have a very welcoming policy towards would-be immigrants, while all the people the next neighborhood over (University Ave.) wants to keep them all out. If we voluntarily choose to invite immigrant guests into our homes and apartments, to rent or sell land to them, to invite them to work in our shops, etc., while the people on University choose to turn them away, refuse to rent or sell to them, refuse them employent, etc., and if the different policies in each neighborhood are consistently respected, then how exactly does our welcoming policy on Rochelle “affect … willy-nilly” the exclusionists over on University? The immigrants won’t be in their homes or workplaces or renting neighboring property. The only effect is that if people from University want to come over to Rochelle, then they will encounter the immigrants that we have invited to live and work with us. But while I sympathize a great deal with people having to deal with unwanted effects on their own property or in their own communities, I have very little idea why I should care about whether or not people in one neighborhood get their way about how other people should use their own property or what communities other than their own community ought to look like. If the question is properly devolved, then I can’t imagine how it is any of a University resident’s business how we live over here on Rochelle; let alone any business of somebody in New York or Washington, D.C. who I choose to live or work with here in Las Vegas.

Call me crazy, but “states rights” and “local polity trumps all” seem to me to often be a smokescreen for “let us mistreat people the way we want to, come hell or high water.”

I’m not defending a “states’ rights” position.

While I think that, when there are disagreements between states over immigration policy, different states should be able to enact different policies, I also think that, when there are disagreements within a state over immigration policy, different communities should be able to enact different policies, and different neighborhoods within a community should be able to enact different policies, and, ultimately, different individual people should each be able to enact different policies about the use of their own homes and workplaces. I agree that many people who have defended “states’ rights” position use it as a smokescreen for shitty treatment of other, less powerful people within their state. But that’s precisely because they stop devolving the question once they get to the level of the state. Thus, for example, defending the right of states to peacefully secede from the jurisdiction of the federal government, but then turning around and insisting on the supposed right of state governments to brutally crush any efforts by enslaved Southern blacks to peacefully secede from the jurisdiction of state governments or their local taskmasters. The problem there was too little devolution and secession, not too much.

My whole point, on the other hand, is not to fetishize the claims of any particular level of centralized political authority (such as state or even municipal governments), but rather that the question should be devolved downward until you reach genuine consensus on the localized question — if necessary down to the neighborhood; if necessary down to the individual property-owner.

Thus, on the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, I think that the right approach for Northern whites to take would have been, first, the Garrisonian strategy of cutting all political ties with the slaveholding states — thus allowing for the repeal of all Fugitive Slave Laws in the North, removing Northern bayonets from the Southern slavers’ arsenal, and moving the line of freedom from Canada south to Ohio. And then, second, the Harriet Tubman and John Brown strategies of aiding slaves in their efforts to escape slavery, instigating and providing aid to slave uprisings, and aiding efforts to create autonomous Maroon communities within the South. That is to say, strategies that focused on solidarity with black people struggling for their own freedom, rather than strategies which focused on white political prerogatives, or on “saving” black people from slavery through the outside intervention of a white-led, white-manned, white-controlled military engaged in a conventional war of invasion and conquest. Solidarity-based strategies like those proposed by the radical abolitionists could, I think, have ended slavery with substantially less bloodshed (and especially less collateral damage against non-slaveholding Southern whites), and with substantially more empowering results for Southern blacks who had been empowered to fight for and win their own freedom, rather than having to depend on the goodwill, ongoing concern, and military campaigns of Northern whites for it. Indeed, I think that those strategies probably could have averted the dreadful century of immiseration, dispossession, lynch law, and American apartheid that ended up following the formal emancipation, precisely because the Northern white political and military apparatus ended up dropping that goodwill and that concern, and selling out Southern blacks, in the name of “reconciliation” with Southern whites.

To return to open immigration and “undercutting legal labor markets,” I think there’s a basic problem in the way you’re framing the issue. It’s true that, under certain circumstances, when large numbers of poor immigrants move to a particular community, the average wage for existing native-born workers will tend to go down as a result of competition. But the average wage for the immigrant workers goes up from what they could have expected had they not moved; after all, that’s generally why poor immigrants move long distances to begin with. But the status of the native-born workers as “legal” residents can’t be used as part of the justification for making a legal distinction between native-born and immigrant workers, without simply making the argument circular and thus begging the question. And if we are discussing some other difference between the two — like a difference in nationality, or language, or ethnicity, I don’t see how any of those could make the standard of living among the relatively more privileged native-born workers somehow more important than the standard of living among the relatively less privileged immigrant workers. Certainly U.S. workers deserve a decent standard of living, but so do Mexican workers, and it’s not at all clear to me why the former should be able to force the latter out of the country in order to support their own standards of living at the expense of Mexican workers’ standards of living. I think there is no way to treat this sort of market dynamic as a reason for excluding Mexican workers (say) except by tacitly or explicitly accepting the nativist premise that the lives an livelihoods of U.S. workers somehow matter more than the lives and livelihoods of Mexican workers, just because the one group are from the U.S. and the other group are from Mexico. Which claim I find morally and politically indefensible.

(For myself, I’d say that the best solution is to empower all workers, regardless of race, nationality, language, ethnicity, or any of the other lines which are used to divide us. But that’s best accomplished by means of fighting unions that organize the entire working class, and by transnational labor solidarity, not by means of political gamesmanship and immigration policies which protect the wages of one group of workers only by means of screwing other, even more vulnerable and exploited groups of workers out of homes and jobs that they’d otherwise be able to get.)

Does that help clarify?

GT 2008-05-16: Women and the Invisible Fist, in which I try to offer a close reading and sympathetic reconstruction of Susan Brownmiller’s “Myrmidon theory” of stranger-rape (as presented in Against Our Will, and as against the crude but common misrepresentation of her views as some kind of conspiracy theory rather than the radical analysis of sex-class that they are), consider how the specific case illustrates important nuances that need to be incorporated into libertarian and anarchist theories of spontaneous order, and argue that considering the Myrmidon theory and the (nuanced version of the) concept of spontaneous order in light of each other helps illustrate how key parts of radical feminist and anarchist analysis can benefit from and enrich each other’s understanding of social and political power.

GT 2008-05-20: Cops are here to protect you. (#5), in which Officer Christopher Damonte, 250 pound hired thug for the city of San Francisco, keeps public order by screaming at a couple of “suspect” women, who may have been guilty of being drunk in public and perhaps also intent to commit jaywalking in the first degree, and then, when one of them — Kelly Medora, a 118 pound preschool teacher — had the temerity to ask for his name and suggest that his conduct might be out of line, proceeds to call in his posse, arrests her, and wrenches her arm behind her back, breaking one of her bones “with an audible crack.” The city’s lawyer says that “Damonte used an approved method of holding her arm, but she struggled. Then ‘in an effort to escape,’ she squatted down and ‘broke her own arm.’” The city government decided to pay out a settlement of $235,000 to Medora, while Damonte faces, at worst, “potential” administrative discipline from fellow cops — meaning that this violent, domineering control freak of a man will never face any legal consequences for this heinous assault and battery, except possibly a verbal reprimand, a forced vacation from work, or at the very worst losing his job — while a bunch of innocent San Francisco taxpayers, who had nothing to do with it, will get sent the bill for his violent rages.

GT 2008-05-14: Voyage of the S. S. St. Louis, in which I consider the ways in which anti-immigrant border laws condemn innocent people to misery, mutilation or death, in the name of segregating world population by nationality or in the name of an illusory need for control. Particularly when the victims of violence are women and when (therefore) the abuse and terror inflicted on them is categorized as a “personal” or “cultural” but not a “political” problem by the malestream opinions of a bureaucracy legally entitled to pick and choose who does and who does not count as Officially Persecuted for the purposes of the United States federal government.

Micha: I fail to see how the issue of immigration could be seen as complex, rather than for what it is ….

I think the short answer is this: calling border laws and internal immigration policing a complex issue for libertarians primarily serves a social function, not an intellectual one, in the Mises Institute / LewRockwell.com circle.

The issue is actually, obviously, extremely simple, and Hoppe’s and Ron Paul’s positions are actually, obviously, completely wrong. I suspect that most of those who criticize their positions but pass off the issue as a complex one realize this, but also reckon that it wouldn’t go over well in mixed company to say so in as many words.

TGGP:

Birthright citizenship,

The fuck do you care whether or not an arbitrary gang of usurpers, thieves, and swindlers does or does not issue an Official Membership Card for the children of complete strangers living on land that you’ve never even seen and have never done anything to earn a proprietary interest in?

use of social services.

The fuck do you care whether or not they use government-monopolized “social services”? If you’re concerned about your money being taken for purposes that you disagree with, why don’t you take that up with the people that are actually robbing you, rather than complete strangers who had nothing to do with it and couldn’t have stopped it if they tried?

To me the entire of idea of “preferences that ought to have priority” doesn’t make any sense.

I’m sure it doesn’t make any sense to you.

Nevertheless, why should immigrants or anyone, really, other than yourself, give a damn about your personal preferences about whether or not they can pass through or exist on land that you’ve never seen and that you’ve never personally done anything to earn a title to? What do you think made it your business to go around telling them, or the landlord, what to do with it?

TGGP:

The trespass is across the border which is said to be collectively owned by the citizens of the U.S. You can say such a notion is unlibertarian and I’ll agree. My opposition to open-borders is unlibertarian and results from my belief that libertarianism by itself is insufficient …

Well, yes, I suppose that if one of your goals is to violently control who can or cannot pass through land that you’ve never even seen and that you’ve never done a damned thing in your life to earn a real title to, you will eventually find that libertarianism isn’t “sufficient” to meet those goals.

GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform, in which an Ohio county sheriff declares that when a woman is thrown in jail on a bogus “disorderly conduct” charge, having a gang of cops, including two male officers, pin her down and strip search her over her screams of protest, and then leave her naked in a freezing-cold cell for six hours, counts as “us[ing] reasonable force to … protect prisoners in their custody.”

GT 2008-02-10: The Conservative Mind (second Sin Fronteras edition), in which we’re reminded that they’re not against immigrants; they’re just against illegal immigrants!

GT 2008-02-13: Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism, in which your humble blogger appears in print.

Constant: I have never said, “if you want to know what a libertarian is, look at Ron Paul”. Do people do that? I guess if people do that, then that’s probably a mistake if they don’t agree with his whole platform. But do people really do that?

I don’t know whether anyone’s done that, but a lot of people have given money to the campaign, or put up signs and banners (“Ron Paul 2008,” “Ron Paul Revolution,” “Google Ron Paul,” etc.), or made personal endorsements of Ron Paul’s campaign, all of which they’ve justified on the grounds that Ron Paul’s campaign literature, debate answers, etc. promote libertarian ideals, and so getting more attention for his campaign will, in turn, educate more people about libertarianism and perhaps persuade more people to embrace it.

Presumably that’s only a good argument to the extent that Paul’s campaign actually is promoting libertarian ideals. If the money, for example, goes to produce nasty nativist-statist propaganda rather than propaganda that actually promotes libertarianism, then the money may be going towards promoting Ron Paul, but it’s not going towards promoting, or educating people about, libertarianism.

Keith,

The fact that Roe has survived this long in spite of long-standing presidential opposition has little to do with any great security that the ruling (which is currently supported by at best a 5-4 margin) has, and a lot more to do with the fact that historical accidents — like Bush Sr.’s deicision to appoint the moderate Souter, or the counter-to-expectations behavior of Reagan appointees Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy — can profoundly influence the direction of a divided court for long periods of time, thanks to lifetime terms and the small number of justices involved. The Roberts court has already upheld substantial new federal restrictions on abortion in Gonzales v. Carhart, and several anti-abortion state legislatures are already chomping at the bit to pass state abortion laws in order to force a review of Roe v. Wade before the new court. You’ll forgive me if I’m not as sanguine as you are about the threat of new forced pregnancy laws.

As for your comments on immigration, I simply have no idea what you mean. Immigrants are wanted in the United States; they come here, in spite of great physical danger from both the law and the physical conditions that the legal situation forces them to endure in their crossing, precisely because there is ample work to find. The reason that every year there’s one or two dozen immigrants who die from exposure or dehydration in the southwestern deserts is precisely because the statist federal immigration controls, which Ron Paul wants to enforce even more aggressively and rigidly than they are currently enforced, force them to try to cross in remote desert areas where they can evade detection, rather than at urban border crossings in Tijuana, Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, and similar border towns. Ron Paul has directly stated that he wants to continue, and in fact escalate, the border policies that cause these deaths. He also wants internal immigration cops to enforce immigration controls even more aggressively than they have been, which means more of the “Ihre Papiere, bitte” treatment for both non-immigrants and immigrants, more paramilitary raids on workplaces, and threatening millions of undocumented immigrants with arrest, jail, and government-imposed exile from their current homes, their livelihood, and their families.

As for feminism, you wrote: “In your comment above you laid down a laundry list of statist policies that you support in the name of radical feminism”.

Could you please list a single statist policy that I stated my support for in my comment above?

As I explicitly stated in my comments, all of the items that I listed — broad sexual harassment policies, free daycare, employer-paid maternity leave, and worker ownership of the means of production — are things that can be brought about voluntarily within a free market, without government intervention.

The issue of libertarianism or statism only arises when it comes to the question of MEANS — whether these projects are to be brought about through voluntary cooperation or through government coercion. Government-imposed sexual harassment policies (whether broad or narrow) are statist; government-funded daycare is statist; government-required paid maternity leave is statist; but in a free market employers can adopt any sexual harassment policy they want, including the kinds of policies that radical feminists favor; and community groups can provide free or sliding-scale daycare if they feel like it; and employers can offer whatever sorts of parental leave policies they like, including gender-neutral employer-paid leave benefits of the kind that liberal feminists generally advocate.

You might think that these sorts of things won’t happen on a free market, because they are impractical ideas; you might think that they oughtn’t happen on a free market, because they are foolish ideas. But you had better make sure that you understand the difference between free market principles and favoritism for your preferred business model. And, as I directly stated above, and as Roderick and I also spent quite a bit of time explaining in detail in the essay that, I’ve repeatedly referred you to, there is an existing tendency within radical feminism that has favored grassroots cooperative action rather than attempts to seize or influence state power, and it is that kind of non-statist or anti-statist activism that Roderick and I support.

It is extremely frustrating to have to repeat this point once again when I already made the same point obliquely in the post you were putatively replying to, and made it directly and in some detail in the essay linked from that post, and made it directly again in the rejoinder to your comments immediately above your most recent reply.

You wrote: “… excuse me for questioning your commitment to limited government”

I have no commitment whatsoever to limited government. But your suspicions are pointed in the wrong direction. I am an anarchist, and so I oppose both limited statism and welfare statism. Less destructive governments are preferable to more destructive governments, but given the abject failure of every single attempt in the history of the planet earth to sustain a “limited government” against mission creep and the ambitions of professional politicians, I don’t think it’s worth devoting a lot of energy to such a doomed project.

If you seriously believe that Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution is the only real shot we have to resist an ongoing slide into totalitarian hell, then I’d suggest you get out of the country as quickly as possible, because your plan has an awfully limited chance of success, and if he fails to make it past the primaries, then you have about 1-3 months before it’s all over.

Personally, I’m rather more optimistic, because I don’t think that the only way for good men and women to do something is for them to support a candidate for a government election. I prefer to spend my time on forms of activism that are more practical than the proven failure of libertarian electioneering.

You wrote: “The question is are we going to be concerned about winning a philosophical argument or are we going to be concerned about some American soldier in Iraq being blown up by a roadside bomb in 2010?”

Dude, this is a ridiculous cheap shot and you know it. I could just as easily go around telling those, such as Gordon, who attempt to give philosophical defenses of voting for Ron Paul, “The question is are we going to be concerned about winning a philosophical argument or are we going to be concerned about some woman dying in a back alley in 2010?” or “The question is are we going to be concerned about winning a philosophical argument or are we going to be concerned about some immigrant dying of dehydration in the Arizona desert in 2010?” Your argument cuts as much ice as either of these, which is to say, none at all. All the parties to this debate are arguing over issues that have real and grave human consequences in the near term.

As for radical feminist literature and action, Roderick and I discuss that at length in our essay, so it would be more productive to engage with what we said there. For what it’s worth, there’s nothing inherently unlibertarian about broad sexual harassment policies, free daycare or employer paid maternity leave (or, what radical feminists are more likely to advocate, radical transformation of the economy away from an employer-employee model and towards ownership of the means of production by working women and men). These ideas may be wise or foolish for other reasons, but libertarianism as such only comes up when we turn to the question of whether these kind of measures are to be attained through voluntary means or by means of the State. As Roderick and I explain in the essay, while there are many radical feminists who advocate State action, there are many others who distrust State action for practical reasons or even reject it entirely on principle.

You write: “I also recall prominent radical feminists arguing that sex between a man and a woman in marriage was a form of rape.”

Can you specify which radical feminist(s) you’re referring to and where she or they say this? (If you’re referring to Andrea Dworkin’s discussion of martial rape laws in Right-Wing Women, that’s not actually an accurate statement of her conclusion, but in any case you should know that even if it were, she was discussing the ramifications of a legal context has mercifully ceased to exist since the book was written.)

As for the radical feminist menace to the safety of men’s wing-wangs, the legitimacy of violence depends on whether it is aggressive or defensive. Given the radical feminist emphasis on the prevalence of violence against women, I’d suggest that even if that talk were meant literally rather than rhetorically, that wouldn’t necessarily be an objection to it.