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?

John,

1. It’s not my case. It’s Kevin’s case. He gives the argument for it in his book and a series of articles which I’m certainly not prepared to reproduce in full here in the comments thread. My point so far has simply been that specific criticisms Will has offered as a reply to the case are in fact crude misrepresentations of the case he’s allegedly replying to.

My own view is that Kevin probably overreaches on the extent to which centrifugal effects on agriculture will result specifically in sustenance kitchen-gardening. But I’m not prepared to wave that off as “bullshit” in the absence of a reply to the evidence he gives, and I’m not about to try and make the case that he overreaches based on the (clearly false) claim that he just denies the existence of benefits from specialization or economies of scale.

1. That said, it’s also simply not true that centralized growing of fruits and vegetables “aren’t subsidized” in the U.S. They receive far less in the way of direct federal subsidies (in the form of domestic price supports and export subsidies), compared to (say) cereal grains, soybeans, sugar, etc. But many vegetables (e.g. potatoes, onions) are bought up heavily through government purchase and donation programs (school lunch program, military procurement, etc.), many are included in government agricultural export financing and promotion programs (e.g. the Market Access Program), the market is just as heavily regulated as the cereal markets in favor of large incumbents by means of USDA and state and local regulations, they are covered by federal crop insurance bail-outs, and — this happens to be awfully important in the agricultural markets near where I live — benefit very heavily (especially with crops like melons, which are now mostly grown in the Southwestern desert) from government irrigation subsidies and engineering projects.

Moreover, Kevin’s point is not simply concerned with the effects of direct government subsidy to producers. It’s part of a larger case which significantly has to do with (among other things) the suppression of potential competitors and substitute goods, either by government-enforced cartelization, direct legal suppression of the product, by direct legal suppression of necessary inputs, or by the ripple-effects of economic distortions that make the inputs artificially expensive compared to how they’d be in a free market, or that make the inputs for centralized business models artificially cheap.

Is all of that enough to demonstrate that there’d probably be a large scale shift towards home food production in a free society? I dunno. In any case, we’re still talking about a really heterogeneous set of products (the economics of tomato growing are quite different from those of cantaloupe farms, and both are awfully different from banana plantations), and all this is no doubt beyond the scope of this comment thread. But it’s certainly a reason for believing that the market we have to look at now is pretty damn skewed, and so that pointing to revealed preferences under those market conditions is not a very reliable guide to what would be economically efficient in a genuinely free market, which was my point in mentioning all this stuff in the first place.

Will,

As you please, but to back someone into a corner you need to actually start with the position that they have, not some a strawman position that’s easier for you to attack. To attribute a claim to Kevin which he does not hold (for example, that there is just no such thing as gains from specialization or economies of scale, and that he is just in “denial,” rather than having given a specific argument with specific evidence as to why there are countervailing costs and diseconomies that are important in the case of a particular set of potential producers and a particular good) and then smugly ridicule this cartoon version of your interlocutor, rather than replying to the argument that was given you, is something quite different. To then describe your interlocutor as “totally incompetent” at economic analysis on the basis of this ridiculously crude strawman, when he has repeatedly and at length set out a more nuanced view, is awfully graceless, not to mention unreliable as a way of getting to the truth.

As for ad hoc rationalizations of prior convictions, I suppose that the charge against Kevin would be just if Kevin hadn’t ever set out in any systematic or comprehensive way to provide evidence for his claims that a shift, on the margin, away from wage-labor (yards, whatever) and towards home food production, might be preferable for some significant number of current wage-workers under free market conditions, or that state intervention systematically tends to favor hypertrophic centralized producers, to subsidize centralized capital-intensive agribusiness (and centralized, cash-lubricated capital-intensive business in general), etc. Or if he simply stopped and then refused to consider any kind of countervailing factors that might tend to push in the opposite direction under the conditions he is supposedly considering. But if he has provided such a systematic investigation and argument ahead of time, and has considered the countervailing factors, then we’re not talking about an argument ad hoc; we’re talking about the application of prior evidence to a specific case. And, well, you know, I hear he did already write some stuff about that stuff, even at some length. Maybe you think that what he wrote about it is underargued, or “terribly unconvincing,” or maybe even that it’s “bullshit.” But you’ve not yet given any reasons that anyone else can inspect or has any reason to care about for finding it so. Because, at the level of principle, I am fairly sure that no competent economist would deny that there are limits to the benefits of specialization and to economies of scale, that those limits are not homogeneous across all goods and all producers, and that large-scale government interventions may have large-scale systemic ripple-effects which tend to skew the trade-offs in some markets towards artificially centralized or capital-intensive equilibrium points. And on the level of detail, Kevin has presented some detailed evidence in favor of his take in many different books and articles, whereas you’ve offered “people like yards” and some contemptuous ad hominem swipes at smug urban eco-asshole basil growers, without any concerted effort to show that Kevin’s wrong on any particular point that he made. Maybe you don’t want to spend the time necessary to respond point by point, or even on one point. Which is fine; everyone’s got preferences and priorities. But if you’re not prepared to present a systematic response, then summary handwaving about what’s “bullshit” and what’s “terribly unconvincing” to you seems like an immoderate way to respond to an argument you’re not actually willing to reply to. And the fact that you don’t like the conclusion of the argument (that revealed preferences on this point under actually-existing capitalism reflect the influence of government intervention and not what people would likely do in a free market) doesn’t mean that citing the premises by way of explaining how Kevin came to the conclusion is an “ad hoc” response.

As for my own prior convictions, you seem to know more about my prior convictions than I do. Try finding anything that I’ve personally written which makes a detailed claim about how much wage-workers would shift towards kitchen-gardens for personal or family use in a free society. Insofar as I’ve argued about any of this stuff, it’s in the form of pretty broad claims about shifts on the margin, ceteris paribus, away from centralization, dependence on cash savings, and employer-employee relationships, in a free society. I’m not an especially good gardener myself, would most likely still be doing web development to pay for my food if laissez-faire broke out tomorrow and would be happy to do it, and generally have a much less detailed set of expectations about what free labor would look like in practice than Kevin does.

I do, however, have a pretty strong prior conviction in favor of playing an argument where it lies. And what I get really tired of is seeing Kevin put as much work as he does into putting out interesting, original, and detailed writing and analysis specifically on the question of economies of scale and benefits of specialization, producing reasoned responses to inappropriate and out-of-context applications of the economics of scale, division of labor, and roundabout production, only to see that work casually misrepresented and ridiculed as if he were simply unaware of, or trying to wish away, elementary pin-factory economics.

Will,

This, for example, is bullshit…

Maybe, but I can’t see that you’ve earned this assertion by means of argument, at least not as presented here.

(1) People like yards.

Sure. And people also dislike their jobs, and like cheap fresh produce.

People also typically like gardening work more than their jobs up to some point of labor-intensiveness, after which they start liking gardening work a lot less.

Given all this, the question is one of trade-offs among alternative uses for land and labor — whether people’s desire for (say) maintaining a grassy yard as a consumption good is strong enough, on the margin, to outweigh the countervailing benefits of small-scale biointensive vegetable gardening on the same land and with the same labor-time.

No doubt this will in fact be different for different people: some people really like yards; other people really hate their jobs; etc. But of course Kevin is not suggesting that, given the choice, all workers will prefer to transform some marginal units of lawn into marginal units of a kitchen garden as a means of reducing work hours. Nor is he even claiming, in the passage quoted, that any workers will withdraw entirely from the wage system in favor of gardening. What he does suggest is that, given the choice, some (significant number of) workers will prefer to trade out some (significant amount of) marginal wage-work, yardwork and yard-land in favor of marginal increases in garden-work and garden land. Of course, it’s easy to throw around isolated bits of data about what people “like” and don’t “like” in the abstract without considerations about opportunity costs, substitute goods, or division of the stock into marginal units, but given that Kevin’s point was about people’s preferences over alternatives on the margin, I can’t see how that gets any serious economic work done by this kind of response.

You might then ask, “Well, why don’t they already do what Kevin suggests? Seems like people’s revealed preferences tell us all we need to know about the trade-offs involved.” Which would be true — (1) if decisions were being made under conditions of adequate information (so that there is no need for, say, “mutualist propaganda” to offer information to people currently dependent on wages for their food about available alternatives which they may not have known about), and (2) if those preferences were revealed in a free market, where (among other things) substitute goods aren’t subsidized by the government, the wage-system isn’t made artificially difficult to escape by government-imposed needs for ready cash on hand, research and dissemination of information aren’t artificially skewed towards the needs and interests of competing business models, necessary inputs (notably, a patch of land, space to compost, etc.) aren’t made artificially expensive by government price-fixing and government-imposed restrictions on use; etc.

But they aren’t.

(2) The claim that it’s cheaper for families to grow their own than to buy from a store amounts to a denial that there are gains from specialization plus a denial of economies of scale (a Carson specialty), …

Well, no, what it amounts to is a specific application of a denial that gains from specialization and economies of scale are (1) unlimited (2) homogeneous across all goods and all producers.

Whether the application is apt or not is something that depends on more data than you can get from a one-paragraph pull quote (and is something that Carson discusses at length throughout his work on questions relating to, e.g., cottage industry and home food production). But the principle being applied is that there’s an equilibrium point at which marginal gains from specialization are outweighed by marginal costs (transaction costs, heterogeneous preferences for marginal labor-time, etc.), and an equilibrium point at which marginal gains from economies of scale are outweighed by marginal costs of scale, and that this equilibrium point may be different for, say, low-wage service sector workers than it is for highly-paid professionals, and may also be different for tomatoes or chili peppers than it is for pickup trucks or jumbo jets. Remembering which is not “totally incompetent,” but rather a prerequisite for actually doing any kind of serious economics in the real world.

I’m pro-gardening, but I’m smart enough to know that my investment doesn’t begin to cover my opportunity cost.

Maybe the kind of gardening that you do, and the alternative uses of your time that you have in mind, are different from the kind of gardening that Kevin has done, and the alternative uses of his time that he has in mind.

Or maybe that’s a bad example because cars would not exist in freed markets because we’d travel attached to inexpensive homemade kites which the corporatist conspiracy has brainwashed us into believing are impossible!

Is this kind of rhetorical broadside at ridiculous cartoon versions of your interlocutor supposed to be funny?

Because it sure isn’t necessary to make the point you’re trying to make, and it’s also neither particularly fair nor particularly reliable as a way to get out a relevant response to the argument your interlocutor actually made,rather than other, different arguments that he didn’t make, but which you find easier to lampoon.

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?

Brad,

Thank you for the mention. And for the kind words.

I also have a problem with the “free-market anti-capitalists” assuming that there would be no hierarchical firms in a freed market…

Well, I think the claim is usually not that there will be no “hierarchical firms” in a free market, but rather that firms will be (much) less hierarchical on average, and that hierarchical firms will be (much) less prevalent and (much) less central in the broader economy than they are today under the rigged state-capitalist economy. At least, that’s my view. (Similarly, it’s not that I think a free economy with a rich bed of mutual aid networks and wildcat unions will result in there not being any employer-employee relationships anywhere at all; rather, what I think is that those kind of relationships will no longer be the overwhelmingly predominant means for workers to make a living, and that those workers who do agree to them will be much less dependent on them for their economic survival.)

In any case, these theses aren’t just something that we’re “assuming.” They’re the conclusion of an argument. (Or rather, of several converging lines of argument. Having to do with, e.g., ways in which the state burns out informal-sector alternatives to hierarchical firms, subsidizes hierarchical firms over grassroots alternatives through government-granted monopolies, cartelized captive markets, corporate welfare, “development” policy, etc., privileges politically-connected big landlords, mobilizes tremendous amounts of money to support capital-intensive forms of production, big agribusiness, large-scale resource extraction, and long-distance shipping, etc.) Maybe these arguments don’t go far enough to establish their intended conclusions; but I think that they are at least a pretty substantial line of argument that needs to be engaged with by those who predict business-as-usual to continue, even if with greater competition from the bottom, when the gigantic firms you see running today pretty much all depend very heavily (as in fact they do) on government privileges that would be abolished in a freed market.

Many poor people are pretty much responsible for their own problems insofar as they haven’t made the best of things within the current system.

Well. Everybody makes mistakes. Certainly I’ve made my own, and I have lots of friends who got themselves into all kinds of financial trouble through their own bad decisions. Not least the college-educated kids from well-off families who enter their mid-20s with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to repay and no clear plan on how to do it. But I think the interesting thing is how far people have an economic support structure, or available economic opportunities, to cushion the fall and to get back up on your feet after it, once you’ve made your mistakes.

But the situation faced by the economically comfortable, and the situation faced by the poor, in these respects are very different. Things like whether or not you have access to credit, whether or not you have access to alternative housing, what your options are for alternative ways of making a living if your current arrangement falls through, whether or not you are constantly being socked with new expenses that knock you back, whether or not you have access to insurance to cover emergency expenses, etc. And I’d say that in each case, the differences between rich and poor in these respects are in no small part the result of either direct government assaults on poor people’s property rights and alternative survival strategies (as I discuss in “Scratching By”) or else indirect ripple-effects of cartelizing, rigidifying, and subsdizing interventions by the state into the market. Everyone walks a tightrope, and people of all classes fall off from time to time; the real question is whether you’re allowed to work with a net, or whether the government has cut it down and taken it out from under you.

Richard,

Well, part of the reason that so many native Russian and Ukrainian anarchists were excited about the October Revolution is that they had participated in making it, and figured that the Revolution was a big step towards the realization of power in their lifetimes. In 1917, the issue was not so much that they trusted or were excited about the Bolsheviks or Party communism, but rather because the Bolsheviks were only one of many different factions involved in the October Revolution, and often not the most important. Their enthusiasm about the whole project started dropping off in mid-1918-1921, as the state socialists started seriously putting together their workers’ state, the Bolsheviks started moving to consolidate power within it (with the Civil War serving as the health of their state), and the Bolsheviks formed up the Cheka and the Red Army and put them to work imprisoning and shooting anarchists. Most of the exiles from out of the country started arriving toward the end of that period (e.g. Goldman, Berkman, and most of the other exiles from the Palmer raids arrived in January 1920).

Vin Suprynowicz:

Because I am taxed to pay for them.

This is pretty rich, coming from someone who vocally insists on the right of tax-mooching immigration bureaucrats and a jackbooted federal police agency to reach their hands into the tax slush fund to enforce immigration policies that I never asked for and don’t want, and then tax me to pay for it against my will.

In any case, in a welfare statist system, it is true that government forces to pay for everyone–and that it forces everyone to pay for you. But this is true regardless of immigration status. Every time some pair of Officially Approved Citizens send their Officially Approved children to government schools, the government spends money which is ultimately extracted from your pockets and mine. I have no idea why you would blame this on people who could not possibly have shaved one cent off of your taxes by refusing to accept government hand-outs — do you suppose that if government doesn’t spend tax funds on schools, it’ll give the money back to taxpayers? ho, ho, ho — rather than blaming it on the people who are actually taxing you.

But in any case, if you are going to blame the people who reclaim government-seized money, rather than the government that seizes the money in the first place, then you do realize, don’t you, that illegal immigrants aren’t special in any particular way on this count? That you could use this argument just as easily to justify government force against just about anyone — government-enforced population control (since children receive big tax subsidies for education, healthcare, etc.), internal passports (since immigrants from poorer states tend to move to richer states and take advantage of the more plentiful welfare benefits), summarily jailing and exiling everyone over the age of 65 (seeing how they mooch of Social Security and Medicare, usually far in excess of what they paid in when they were working), or any other collectivist horror you might dream up.

Perhaps, rather than creating a police state in order to hunt down, round up, and punish those who take receive welfare payments funded by taxation, the thing you should be doing is focusing on the real problem — the welfare state and confiscatory taxation?

Illegal immigrants … tend to vote socialist, because they are looters.

Dude, what you are talking about? Illegal immigrants don’t tend to vote at all in the U.S., because illegal immigrants can’t legally vote.

Maybe you’re worried about what would happen if currently undocumented immigrants were able to become citizens, and then to vote. The fact is that right now, in the real world, immigrants from California pose a much bigger threat to freedom in Nevada than immigrants from Mexico do. And the real threat is not immigrants from anywhere, but rather from unlimited majoritarian democracy, which is always going to have these problems regardless of who can or cannot immigrate. Maybe you would be better served by focusing on the real problem, rather than on trying to get government to police political beliefs (!) or on getting government to inflict punishment on all members of a population for the bad thoughts or bad behavior of some of them?

Ask those charged with collecting hospital bills how many illegal aliens make good faith efforts to pay their bills.

You know, as it turns out, there are already perfectly just laws against refusing to pay your bills, without getting the federal bordercrats involved.

Surprisingly, it turns out that the appropriate punishment for this is not exile from the country.

Also, surprisingly, they don’t take a federal police state or “Papers, please” checkpoints to enforce.

Also, as it turns out, the laws against running out on your bills generally only allow for you to go after the individual person who actually defaults on the bill, or occasionally close family members — in any case, not against complete strangers and entire populations on the collectivist premise that everybody in that population can be held to account for the bad behavior of a bunch of perfect strangers who just happened to come from the same country as they did.

I have no idea what the hell you think this kind of collective guilt-by-association smear, let alone your proposal for addressing it by means of collective punishment of both the innocent and the guilty, has to do with the politics of individual liberty.

If there is no right to exclude looters from our midst;

You have a perfect right to exclude anyone you want from your private property, for any reason, or for no reason at all. What neither you, nor the United States federal government, has any legitimate right to do, is to go around excluding people from my private property, let alone inflicting a massive system of “Papers, please” documentation requirements and checkpoints on me in order to do so, without my permission and indeed against my will.

So, please, exclude whoever you want from your midst. But who’s “we”, kemosabe? Keep your preferences on your own property.

if we must allow free entry of anyone who wants to come to our community

You have a perfect right to evict trespassers from your own property.

The problem is, you see, that “the community” as a whole is not your private property. Or the United States federal government’s. Sorry.

… and then allow them to decide how my stuff shall be redistributed “by majority vote,” then freedom of a family of three can last only until four “guest workers” break down their front door and “vote” on how to divvy up the food in the refrigerator.

This is of course a ridiculous strawman of my position. I explicitly argued above that private property owners should have a right to exclude anyone they want from their own private property.

It’s also pretty rich, hearing this stirring defense of the sanctity of the family home and private property, come from someone who is so angrily insisting that the federal government has a right to send federal police agencies around and stage stormtrooper raids on my private home or workplace, if some elected government passes a “perfectly constitutional” law that says that I can’t invite who I damn well please onto my own damn property.

Or those who violate our perfectly constitutional immigration laws.

Your immigration laws, maybe. Not mine. I wasn’t asked, I didn’t pass them, I don’t enforce them, and I don’t support them; they are inflicted on me and on people I care about without my permission, against my will, and over my explicit protests. Keep that “our” to yourself.

organizing a campaign to track down and punish lawbreakers is inherently “collectivist.”

It is when the laws you’re trying to enforce are collectivist.

Illegal immigrants, who are trespassing because they come where they have no legal right to be, violating the laws of the place to which they travel ,

Again. Trespassers against whom? You can only trespass against the will of an aggrieved property owner; that’s part of the meaning of the word “trespass.” But the laws you’re talking don’t come from the owners of the property on that illegal immigrants live on, or work on. They are passed by government.

Staying somewhere in the U.S. that the United States federal government doesn’t want you to stay is “trespassing” only if you think that the United States federal government is in fact the rightful owner of all the land in the United States. Do you?

I don’t. My view is that the government is not the rightful owner of my home or my business. I am. If I want to invite anyone to peacefully move in on my land (for love or money), or to work for me in my shop, that is exactly none of the government’s business, and the fact that people have not gotten a permission slip from the federal government doesn’t make them “trespassers” on my land — when they have permission from me.

As for whether or not It’s The Law, who gives a damn? Seriously? So’s tax evasion; so’s nonviolent drug use; so’s owning an unlicensed fully-automatic AK-47; lots of things are Against The Law that government actually has no legitimate right to prosecute or punish people for doing. When that happens, the problem is with the government law, not with the law-breakers.

“Rad Geek” is a pseudonym, but it’s hardly a “cloak of anonymity.” If you spent a minute searching for it on Google, you’d find my website, which (among other things) talks at length about what my views are, who I am, where I live, what my real name is, and what I’ve published under my name. I don’t usually post comments on the Internet under my given name because it’s a common name, which happens to be shared by at least one prominent blogger with radically different views from mine, so that “Rad Geek” actually provides you with a more reliable way of finding out who I am and what I stand for than “Charles Johnson” would.

Not that your sniping about pseudonyms as against big manly signatures, or your thuggish anti-intellectual sniping at “ivory-tower twits” has anything to do with the argument; these are simply textbook examples of argumentum ad hominem (abusive form).

Warning of — heck, simply observing — the consequences of allowing unlimited millions of people to violate American immigration laws, arriving here to flood the government welfare schools and enormously expensive tax-subsidized hospital emergency rooms every time they come down with the sniffles, means I want to “save” these evil redistributionist schemes?

The question is simple. If you don’t want to save government welfare schools and tax-subsidized hospitals, then why in the world do you care whether or not they are flooded? Are you normally in the business of advising government bureaucrats about how to keep their unsustainable socialist schemes running?

By this logic, if you believe the Constitution forbids government agents from restricting your right to carry a loaded firerarm into a federal courthouse (as it most certainly does), you MAY NOT leave your firearm in the car; you MUST carry it into the courthouse in defiance of the orders of the armed guards there, lest you stand accused by “Rad Geek” of “wanting to save all their unconstitutional gun laws.”

Well, no. All that I think you “MUST” do is refrain from cheering on government agents when they go to arrest, exile or kill those who DO choose to exercise their rights.

If you stand by government police when they do try to enforce tyrannical gun laws on innocent people exercising their rights, then yes, you are trying to save tyrannical gun laws. Otherwise, no, you aren’t.

Of course, the problem here is that you ARE explicitly calling for bigger and more aggressive government when it comes to monitoring, policing and punishing illegal immigrants. Even though you haven’t anywhere stated who they are “trespassing” against by living in the U.S. without a permission slip from the federal government. And one of the reasons you give for this is the alleged effects of free immigration on cockamaimey socialist schemes that you yourself consider wasteful and foolish.

Yes, if there were no tax-funded “commons,” and none of us were numbered or taxed, the arrival of a million strangers seeking work would do me little harm, provided they maintained reasonable sanitary safeguards.

It’s true that when you combine something basically moral (free immigration) with something completely immoral (government subsidies for education and medicine) you may get bad results from the combination. But why spend your time attacking the moral part of the combination, instead of the immoral part?

Are they fighting to free us, as well as themselves, from unconstitutional tyranny? I haven’t noticed them doing that. What I notice them doing is walking away from car crashes and hospital bills and orders to appear in court to answer for their crimes, refusing to take any responsibility for the damage they cause.

I don’t care whether or not illegal immigrants fight to free me from tyranny. A little help is always appreciated, but I don’t think that fighting for everybody else’s freedom is necessary for people to be justified in breaking unjust laws. Do you think the American Revolutionaries should have been expected to fight not only for their own freedom but also to free the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh, the English commoners, or any number of other victims of tyrannical English government? Do you expect Ford to make cars for GM?

As for those fighting for their own freedom, maybe it’s a matter of who you know. I know plenty of undocumented immigrants who are actively engaged in pro-freedom politics and against the bordercrats’ “Papers please” police state.

And as for irresponsibility, I’m sure there are some individual illegal immigrants who are irresponsible. So what? I hear some native-born Americans are irresponsible, too. In a free society, institutions work to hold individual people responsible for what they do. They don’t launch massive collectivist campaigns to hunt down and exile whole populations regardless of whether or not they have ever actually done any of the things you mention.

But if we WERE allowed to take one state of 50, and make it a Libertarian state, hasn’t it occurred to you that we’d have to require new immigrants to forswear socialism, under oath, and upon penalty of immediate exile, before granting them the right to vote?

No. I don’t believe in using government to police political thought.

I also don’t know how you intend to enforce these immigration restrictions you plan on implementing without exactly the sort of Officially Permitted Citizen, “Papers-please” documentation requirements that you claim you would prefer to abolish.

Those employers and landlords soon find themselves in an Alice-and-Wonderland world, threatened with fines by the EEOC and other alphabet bureaucracies, you simpering innocent.

Oh, please. If you think that Tyson wouldn’t be hiring any illegal immigrants but for the nefarious manipulations of the EEOC, I think you probably need to think about this harder.

Of course, in specific cases where a landlord would like to exclude illegal — or for that matter legal — immigrants from renting apartments, or a boss would like not to hire them, I think that he or she ought to have the right to do so, and that if the EEOC tries to interfere, the EEOC is violating the rights of that boss or landlord. But of course this doesn’t answer the question of who illegal immigrants are “trespassing” against. If the landlord doesn’t give a damn where the tenant comes from as long as she pays her rent — and many landlords don’t — and if the boss doesn’t give a damn where the worker comes from as long as she does her job — and many bosses don’t — then just who the hell is left for this “trespasser” to trespass against?

Tristan,

Thank you for the mention, and for the kind words.

For what it’s worth, I agree with you about “real socialism,” for reasons that I discuss at [1] and [2] (which are basically just riffs on Tucker’s “State Socialism and Anarchism”).

meika:

The reality in Tasmania is that we have a free market corraled by an alignment of interest which, for example, sees a puported private company (Gunns Tasmania, I suppose the profits are privatised) bankrolled by Tas Government pension money …

So, in other words, you don’t actually have a free market?

Markets in which purportedly private companies are bankrolled by big government slush funds aren’t free markets. At most what you have is an example of state-capitalist privateering. And consistent free marketeers are against that as much as they are against any other state-controlled or state-manipulated mode of production.

If we, the market, are stupid (Tasmania is an island all the bright ones leave or are left on the dole) then the ‘real left’ is also stupid, mediocre and falling into a hole.

Well, if everyone is stupid then widespread stupidity may lead to stupid outcomes on the aggregate. (Although this isn’t guaranteed; to infer that individual-level stupidity must lead to aggregate stupidity would be to commit a fallacy of composition. Sometimes a process can counterbalance individual stupidities in order to get a smart aggregate result. A lot of “wisdom of crowds” research tends to show that this happens more often than you might think, and that even when individual answers stand a good chance of being wildly wrong, on aggregate the results tend to converge around the right answer.)

But, in any case, I don’t see how this is an objection to free markets. If most people are stupid, then presumably democratic politics will also produce stupid results (indeed, stupider results, since unlike markets, majoritarian democracy provides no way for the minority to try out alternative experiments on a small scale). And anti-democratic politics will only produce non-stupid results if you have some reliable method for making sure that the ruling elite will tend to come from the few who are non-stupid rather than from the majority who are stupid. If it fails, then non-democratic regimes will tend to produce even stupider results than democratic regimes, since they allow one stupid person, or one select class of stupid people, to magnify their peculiar stupidities without any means for others to check, neutralize, or countervail against them. But I would submit that no reliable non-democratic method for filtering out stupid rulers has ever been devised in the history of world politics.

So if people tend to be mostly smart and good, then it seems like statist “solutions” are unnecessary. If people tend to be mostly stupid or wicked, then it seems like statist “solutions” are far too dangerous. In either case, freedom is preferable.