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?

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.

Those who are curious about how Anarchists expect their ideas of lawless order and consensual cooperation to work out peacefully in a free society, those who are sure they have a knock-down argument that Anarchism cannot possibly work, and those who are just interested to learn more are all invited to come to our upcoming Anarchist Cafe event tomorrow at 6:00pm at the Coffee Bean (4550 S. Maryland Ave.). Part of the night’s event will be a freewheeling “Ask An Anarchist!” Q&A session in which you can ask your questions directly, and you can find out more about how Anarchists would respond to them.

(For example, questions such as “How would people defend themselves from violence without government law-and-order?” is nothing that Anarchists have not heard before. Our literature table, in fact, carries pamphlets that address precisely that question.)

goingbust, regardless of what I, personally, am or am not capable of defending myself from, if you think that Anarchists advocate a society without peace or social order, then you have misunderstood what Anarchists advocate. We advocate a society without rulers, not a society without rules. Perhaps you think that without government laws, there can be no rules of orderly social conduct and no organized defense against violence; but if so that claim is something you’ll need to prove.

Anarchists (or at least, those who believe in the kind of Anarchism that I advocate) have no beef with peace, order, civilized society, or organized self-defense. What we believe is that peace, order, and civilization can emerge from the social connections between free and equal people, without having to be imposed by a central government. In such a society order is achieved by means of community-based (rather than government-based) self-defense, a peaceful and competitive selection of private mediators and arbitrators for disputes (rather than monopolizing mediation in an overwhelmed and constantly rigged government court system), and voluntary associations for community, trade, and mutual aid (rather than government welfare bureaucracies, government-privileged-and-government-subsidized corporations, and government-controlled “public spaces”). If you think that such an arrangement is impossible or impractical, again, that’s fine, but you’ll have to give some explanation of what’s wrong with it, rather than simply assuming it away, if you want anyone else to agree with you.

mred, I agree with you that the American Right is not consistently opposed to invasive big government. That’s part of the reason why I’m an Anarchist rather than a Rightist.

Anarcha-feminists believe that government should not intervene in any way in women’s decisions about their own bodies or about their own reproductive healthcare. So they oppose any form of government prohibitions on birth control (or abortion). There is no one particular anarcha-feminist position on whether women ought to choose to use birth control, and if so what methods they ought to choose; that’s something that each individual woman needs to work out for herself in her own life. The important thing is that she be free to choose and able to get all the relevant information needed to make the choice.

Hope this helps. And if you’ve got more questions, again, come on down to the A-Cafe tomorrow night and you can ask them directly.

Whatever the virtues or the vices of unions, and whether or not the motives of the Culinary make sense to outside observers, and whether or not Obama would approve, there remains one basic issue that the redevelopment machine and its apologists always dodge: whether or not taking millions out of workers’ pockets, in order to build nicer offices for Oscar Goodman and his cronies, is actually a productive use of our money.

You won’t hear anything about this, because it’s much easier to impugn the motives of your critics, or appeal to a popular politician, than to defend such a ridiculous and self-serving claim.

We are told that this will provide “construction jobs.” Of course it would; so would building a 40-foot golden statue of Oscar Goodman in downtown; so would digging a giant hole out in the desert and then filling it back up. But every dollar Oscar Goodman forces you or I to spend on his new office is a dollar that won’t be spent on providing for our own lives, or patronizing businesses that provide us with genuinely useful goods or services. Meaning a few more jobs in construction come at the expense of fewer jobs and a worse living for everyone else.

City government has no power to wish wealth into existence; they can only take wealth from taxpayers and apply it to some particular project. If they didn’t take it, it wouldn’t disappear; it would be applied to different projects. The question to ask is whether this project actually improves my life or yours in any way. If this project has any benefits worth mentioning for anyone other than city politicians, they ought to be able to persuade me those benefits are worth paying for. Not force me to pay for it by means of taxation and lawsuits.

Vince Alberta says: “We generate a return on investment of about 10 times the amount.”

If the LVCVA’s activities have such a great ROI, then why should Las Vegas taxpayers be forced to fund their budget out of tax revenues? Good investments can find private investors, and if the casinos, in particular, benefit from LVCVA’s advertising, why not ask them to foot the bill for their own good investments?

If, on the other hand, the LVCVA’s activities are not actually beneficial enough that firms wouldn’t be willing to cover the costs on their own, then why should Las Vegas taxpayers be sent the bill for such a waste of money?

In either case, I can see no reason why we need a government-funded agency doing advertising for multibillion dollar private businesses.

You write: “That may surprise you, but it is hard for me to be totally comfortable with dropping the age to 18. You see too much of the dark side of gambling when you live here to want teenagers exercising those judgments, new credit cards in pocket. I would not have made good choices at that age.”

It doesn’t surprise me at all. That sort of discomfort is perfectly natural. It’s also unfortunately common for people to try to use their own personal discomfort with someone else’s decisions as a justification for coercing other people into acting in ways that make you feel less personally uncomfortable.

It’s good that you have the self-insight to know that you personally would not have made good choices when you were 18; and you certainly have a right to be concerned for other people’s financial well-being. You should of course feel free to express these concerns to any 18-20 year old who asks for your advice. But 18-20 year olds are, after all, young adults, who are legally and morally responsible for their own financial decisions. What do you think would give you the right to make a decision on the matter for all 18-20 year olds everywhere, and then impose that decision on them with or without their consent, rather than allowing them to make their own decisions — and their own mistakes?

The new movie may, for all I know, be part of the reason for the timing of the close. Every new Star Trek product that comes out actually requires some fairly expensive changes to the attraction, and in particular the large Star Trek future-history timeline that they have between the entrance and the two rides. Prequels are the worst, since they can’t just add more material on the end, but rather must start the whole thing over from scratch in order to add material at the beginning. If they were already thinking about closing the attraction, they may well have decided that they would be unlikely to make up the cost of the rewriting and retconning before the time came to pull the plug.

I’m just glad I got my “Romulan Ale — Legalize It!” t-shirt before they shut down.

This is the text of the communique issued today by a newly-formed activist group, the Southern Nevada Alliance of the Libertarian Left:

This is the first communiqué from the Southern Nevada Alliance of the Libertarian Left.

Today, April 15^th, guerrilla educators affiliated with Southern Nevada ALL struck targets in the streets of southeastern Las Vegas and on the UNLV campus. Flyers—with slogans including Taxes Pay For Torture, Taxes Pay For War, and Your Money Or Your Life,—were raised to reach out to unwilling taxpayers and potential new ALLies, and to raise public consciousness about taxes.

On the filing deadline for 2007’s federal income tax—when countless honest working folks are sick of meddlesome government—when they are tired of being forced to fill out complex forms—and when they are forced to take (on average) 30% of the money that they worked to earn in the previous year and render it as tribute to the United States federal government—against their will, and whether or not they approve of what the government will do with the money—we have a perfect opportunity to spread our message about the violence of government taxation.

Taxes mean violence, both at the point of collection, and at the point of government spending. Collecting taxes is inherently violent because taxpayers are forced to pay the government whether or not they want to, under the threat of government violence. Those who refuse to turn over the money are subjected to government fines, confiscation of their homes and effects, or locked away in prison. It must never be forgotten that anything is funded by taxes could have been funded voluntarily, if enough people could have been convinced to donate the money willingly, or to give it freely in exchange for something that they get in return. In the last analysis, there is no reason to fund a project by taxation unless there is no honest and peaceful way to persuade people to support that project voluntarily. But if there is no honest and peaceful way to fund something, then it should not be funded. Taxation ought to be considered the last resort of the scoundrel and the thug. Morally, there is no difference between tax collection and highway robbery.

But the violence of taxation is even worse than the violence of highway robbery—for while the robber takes your money violently to satisfy his own greed, and then leaves you alone, the tiny handful of people who constitute the the ruling faction of the federal government take your money violently, and thenthey use that money to fund yet more violence — whether by locking nonviolent drug users away in government prisons, or in the form of police brutality, or in the use of torture by government intelligence agencies in the name of “National Security,” or in the form of government wars and occupations. The government’s ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost more than half a trillion dollars, and which cost millions of dollars more with every passing day, and the only reason that this government can afford to continue with their occupation and their bombings, long after the majority of people in the United States have concluded that the wars are hopeless and fundamentally wrong, is that tiny handful of people have the power to force the millions of us who are against these wars to fund them anyway, against our will and in violation of our own conscience. Taxes pay for police brutality. Taxes pay for torture. Taxes paid for Guantanamo. Taxes paid for Abu Ghraib. Taxes pay for war. And when taxes pay for something, what that really means is that unwilling victims, including you and me, are forced to pay for it even if they don’t think that it is worthwhile. Even when they think that it is abhorrent to their own beliefs.

We believe that there is another way. Southern Nevada ALL is working to raise public awareness, and to work towards a new, consensual society, in which no-one will be forced to pay for torture or war, and in which working folks will be able to keep what they have earned, rather than being forced to turn it over to be used at the whim of the violent minority faction known as the United States federal government. We are starting small, and we are starting here, because that is what we have, and this is where we live. We ask that everyone in Southern Nevada who believes in peace, voluntary co-operation, mutual aid, and individual liberty join us in our struggle.

—ALLy C.J., 15 April 2008.

The Southern Nevada Alliance of the Libertarian Left can be reached through its website, sonv.libertarianleft.org, or through its e-mail list ALLSouthernNevada.

These are the flyers that were found posted today on the streets of southeastern Las Vegas:

How Government Works (#1)	How Government Works (#2)
Taxes Pay For Torture (#1)	Taxes Pay For Torture (#2)
Taxes Pay For War (#1)	Taxes Pay For War (#2)
Your Money Or Your Life!	Your Tax Dollars At Work (#1)
Your Tax Dollars At Work (#2)

I’m sorry, I’m confused. What’s so heroic about vandalism and petty thieving of other people’s property?

1. I don’t know. It probably depends on the context and the intent with which it was done.

2. No. Being offended doesn’t give you the right to trash or steal somebody else’s private property.

3. No. I generally don’t fly flags at all.

4. No.

5. Yes, and he should pay damages to the barkeep for the destruction of property.

6. No, not unless Jesus stood for vandalism and petty thieving. I don’t think that He did.

Jonathan Payne states “There is a reason for the laws that govern the display of our flag.” But in fact — in spite of what the media have repeatedly, inaccurately claimed — there are no laws that regulate how private citizens can or cannot display an American flag on their own property. The Federal Flag Code (4 U.S.C. §§ 4-10) offers only a set of voluntary guidelines “for the use of such civilians or civilian groups or organizations as may not be required to conform with regulations promulgated by one or more executive departments of the Government of the United States” (4 U.S.C. § 5). It has no enforcement section and assigns no penalties. Unless you are employed by the military or a government agency, there is no federal agency with the authority to impose binding regulations on how you, as a private citizen, display a flag on your own private property.