Geoffrey Transom:

As I read Mr Preston’s piece, he – like me – doesn’t give a rat’s ass whether you, or I, or anybody else is gay, bi, bi-curious, or whatever:

I dunno, dude, when someone starts complaining about “cock-ringed queers,” “bearded ladies,” “pissed-off, man-hating, dykes with an excess of body hair,” and “persons of one or another surgically altered ‘gender identity,'” quote-unquote, and states, without any qualification, that fewer such people ought to be “in our midst,” in order to make the kind of person he thinks of as the “average young rebel” (who, we can glean from the textual evidence, is supposed to be white, male, straight, and not an immigrant) more comfortable joining up — well, I get the impression that he does care, and moreover that he expects other people to care. Not so much about the fact of sexuality per se, but more about how far one is open about sex and gender in a way that makes things uncomfortable for those who believe in a very rigid set of gender norms.

the thing he is warning about is the futility of efforts to ‘buddy up’ to the GLBT LOBBY (by which, I am sure you know, we mean a militant group who seeks legislative action in its favour).

Geoffrey, I know what lobbying groups are, and I’m aware of several of the different lobbying groups concerned with a legislative “gay rights” agenda (HRC, OutFront, Stand OUT for Equality, ACT UP, etc.). However, I don’t know what “the GLBT lobby” is — there is no such single coordinated group. There are many different groups with many different aims and many different tactics. And I don’t know how “the GLBT lobby” is supposed to encompass who Keith Preston was actually talking about — his post was not about people engaged in lobbying the legislature or attempting to seek “legislative action in [their] favour”; it was about people currently engaged in the anarchist movement, who are calling for non-legislative, non-governmental forms of cultural activism which Keith feels to amount to “reacting to those with un-PC views on ‘gay rights’ with hysteria, shrillness, rudeness, slander, villification, and threats.”

Talking about ‘you and your friends’ in lieu of a ‘lobby’ is a tad disingenuous. After all, the leadership of the Soviet Union could have been said to be ‘Lenin and his friends’

Let me repeat this in case there is a chance of your getting it.

I talk about “me and my friends” in lieu of a “lobby” because I am not part of a fucking lobby, and neither are my friends. I (we) do not attempt to get legislation passed in my (our) favor. I do not attempt to meet with or communicate with legislators in an attempt to influence their opinions. There are groups that do these things. I am not a member of those groups, and I am opposed to both their agenda and their tactics. I am an anarchist, an anti-electoralist, and specifically an advocate of direct action and counter-economics. The people Keith Preston is complaining about in his post are people like me and my friends, not members or supporters of political lobbying groups. The activism that he is complaining about has to do primarily with calling him names and suggesting that people dissocate from him; it doesn’t have to do with attempts to influence the legislature. The people he is calling for a “purge” of are not members of GLBT lobbying groups — you can’t purge people who were never part of the movement to begin with — but rather anarchists who are vocal gay liberationists (which would include not only “me and my friends,” but also, presumably, organized, anti-legislative anarcho groups like Bash Back). If you want to have a conversation about statist GLBT lobbying groups we can have that conversation; it will be a short one: I’m agin’ ’em, just like I’m agin’ all statist lobbying groups. But you don’t get to rewrite the entire past conversation in order to pretend like Keith’s target is actually something completely different from what he explicitly said it was.

It’s straightforward that if there is existing group-owned infrastructure which has been funded by current inhabitants, then immigrants need to ‘buy in’ to that infrastructure if it is not priced on a ‘user pays’ basis.

Immigrants who use the roads pay gas taxes and other sales taxes to support the roads. To the extent that non-immigrants “buy in” to the government roads by funding them, immigrants “buy in” in exactly the same way. I think this kind of argument is nothing more than special pleading in an attempt to find an argument for a predetermined conclusion; for a more detailed discussion, see 1 and 2.

That said, Mr Preston makes no reference to the State monitoring the borders – he leaves that to militia (which at least renders it voluntary, and reduces the likelihood that such enforcement would last long or be very effective).

Bull. He calls for the use of Minuteman-style militias in addition to existing government border checkpoints (checkpoints staffed by whom? , screeners, Fugitive Alien courts and immigration enforcement squads (to do the screening of people coming here and the deporting of people already living here), etc., not in place of them. He calls for more government laws, not fewer (e.g. having government further criminalize peaceful labor contracts between immigrants and willing employers — to be policed and enforced by whom, if not by a government immigration bureaucracy much like the present one, with its “papers-please” I-9 form monitoring and its paramilitary workplace raids). There is no honest reading of his expressed position that would suggest any reduction to the intensity or scope of government enforcement of state borders.

The rest of the stuff he wrote about was predicated on the existence of state benefits, so it seemed clear that he was talking about current conditions, not some future state-free situation.

It’s true that if you combine something fundamentally moral (free immigration, without government monitoring or control, and without respect for politically-fabricated “borders”) with something completely immoral (a coercive welfare state), you may get bad results from the combination. But when somebody responds to that situation by crusading against the moral part of the combination, and calls for massive saturation deployments of state surveillance and state violence, which target everyone on the basis of a morally irrelevant feature (their nationality) regardless of their intentions or their conduct, to suppress the moral part of the combination, rather than, y’know, focusing on the immoral part — well, then it seems to me that that’s a pretty cracked way of responding to current conditions. One which happens to strengthen the State rather than weakening it, to move us further away from a future state-free situation rather than closer to it, and to guarantee that lots of innocent people are going to get jailed or shot right here and right now, for no good reason at all.

Still, immigration ‘policy’ is one in which even the most ‘with it’ anarchists can disagree;

If your idea of a “with it” anarchist includes Anarchists For National Borders And Police States to Enforce Them, well, then, yeah, I suppose you’ll see a lot of disagreements.

Frankly, I would like to live in a world in which you didn’t feel obliged to mention that you’re ‘an out bisexual man’.

I’d like to live in such a world too, because the reason I “felt obliged” to mention the fact had to do with the fact that LGBT folks were being rhetorically attacked in the conversation, based on a number of claims that are not actually true of me or of a number of other LGBT folks here, and mentioning that we are present in the conversation is an important part of dealing with such attacks. I’d much rather live in a world without such attacks, and hence without the need to go out of my way to formally declare it.

Roads and other infrastructure should be provided by voluntary means, with some combo of user fees/advertising, etc. paying for them–and they would be in a free market, just as innovation would still get done without the monopoly formerly known as intellectual property paying off politically-connected rent seekers. Roads would also be better maintained in a free market, so the transportation costs incurred by Wal-Mart would fall in a free market.

Here’s how Kinsella answers my question about immigration onto private property and the use of helicopter shuttle services:

I would not oppose immigration only onto private property, but as soon as he is caught on public [property] he would be jailed for trespass. Which is basically the same thing as today’s immigration polices.

No, it’s not. If you were arrested for criminal trespass you would be charged with either a misdemeanor or a low-grade felony (depending on the state and the nature of the offense). The likely punishment would be a fine. It would not be sustained imprisonment and it sure as hell would not be the solution currently favored by La Migra—deportation, i.e., exile and confiscation of property. If you’re seriously proposing that we treat undocumented immigrants like trespassers then simple considerations of proportionality would mean that federal immigration policy as it currently stands would have to be completely dismantled and reconfigured to look more like the issuing of traffic tickets.

That’s not to say, though, that the trespass-on-public-property argument works in the first place. It doesn’t. Quite frankly, it’s crap. Here’s what Kinsella used to back it up earlier:

Well. In my view the American people as taxpayers—or some of them—are true “owners” of public land.

Of course, the “or some of them” is necessary to do your mischief. Because, as you know, or ought to by now, immigrants pay taxes too. Among other taxes, they pay gasoline taxes more or less in proportion to their use of roads.

Ergo, it seems that as soon as an immigrant has filled ‘er up, he has (thereby) become an American taxpayer, and (thereby) gained as good a claim to access to the roads as anyone else.

You might claim:

1. That a driving (i.e., taxpaying) immigrant does own a share of the roads like everyone else, but the decision of the majority of the joint owners overrules the individual’s decision to allow herself to access the road. But it’s an awfully strange kind of joint ownership in which the majority of the owners can simply categorically exclude another owner from accessing the commonly-held property no matter what.

2. That once immigrants have paid taxes they have access to the roads, but all you propose is a policy that would close government-controlled property to people who haven’t paid taxes yet, and so do not yet have any ownership claim. But there are lots of ways that an immigrant who has never set foot on a government road could go about acquiring shares of ownership if that’s how it really is—for example, by paying an agent to purchase some taxed gasoline on her behalf, and then using her newly-bought shares in the government roads to drive out and get it. Or by buying it from someone else who’s willing to sell their shares. (I, for one, have no particular interest in owning or investing in highways, and would be glad to sell.)

That said, note that all of this is predicated on a particular theory about what the “ownership” of the roads amounts to in the first place. Even though I don’t think that theory proves what you want it to, I think it’s frankly ridiculous on its face, and ridiculous in ways that undermine the possibility of alternatives giving you the results you think you can get from this theory. In particular, to get the policy outcome that it’s licit for majority opinion to close down the entire road system (and all other government-controlled land) to immigrants, you have to hold:

1. That everyone in the shareholding class owns a share in the entire network of roads

2. That they own all the parts of the network of roads equally (so, for example, you have as much of a say as I do about how to dispose of the roads between my apartment and some place that an immigrant guest of mine might work)

3. That the terms of this joint ownership are such that a sufficiently large number of shareholders can overrule the decisions made by one of the shareholders for non-interfering use of any part of the network. (Such as, for example, driving an immigrant guest from my apartment to her place of work.)

If you don’t have all of (1)-(3), then the trespassing-on-the-roads argument never gets off the ground—since to get the conclusion that approximating the enforcement of private property rights on roads, you first need to show that the entire network of roads—not just this or that byway—can be closed to immigrants. But (1), (2), and (3) are all obviously false; insofar as there are any legitimate property claims that can be disentangled here, you’ll have a decentralized patchwork of claims over different parts of the road system, not a giant joint stock corporation in the road network as a whole. There are good reasons to think that I have some legitimate property claim to the street outside my house; some mootable reasons to think that I have some rightful claim in the major thoroughfares in my city; very little reason to think I have any claim on the interstates; and no reason whatsoever to think I have any claim to the roads in front of your house.

This is connected with your sympathy for monarchist immigration policy:

Almost every American would want SOME restrictions on immigration, and it seems clear that a private monarch-owner would also do this.

But why should anyone care what One Big Cartel on the whole goddamn continent-spanning network of roads and government-controlled property would do? That’s not at all interesting for the property rights that would arise in a free society (in which the OBC would collapse due to calculational chaos); it’s not at all interesting for the issue of property rights in this vale of tears (in which neither I nor the collective of American taxpayers nor any monarch has any just claim on the road in front of your house); and it’s not even interesting for the sorting out of utilitarian considerations (since the decisions of OBCs are not reliably efficient).

So why bring it up?

Regarding Switzerland:

I think this is just ridiculous. It is quite clear if Switzerland had open borders then it would radically change.

Of course it would radically change. Everything changes. So what? The question isn’t whether it would change or not but whether the change would be damaging. And why in the world would it be? Because the Swiss would have to figure out how to cope with enclaves of people who have a different religion or speak another language? Well, gee, the whole bloody country is nothing but a loose confederation of unassimilated ethno-linguistic enclaves. Of all the countries in the world to pick for your example of how large-scale immigration and “multiculturalism” would inevitably lead to catastrophe and civil war, Switzerland is so unhelpful to Hoppe that the choice seems downright perverse.

Are you saying that if you did believe this, you might agree with his conclusions? Is your difference only an empirical one?

No. Utilitarian considerations about the plausible effects of large-scale immigration don’t have anything to say to the permissibility of using violence against peaceful immigrants.

However, Hoppe is making a sociological claim in the passages that you quoted above, in addition to his claim about justice. Although I don’t think he would have made the case for immigration restrictions if he were right about the plausible consequences of large-scale immigration in a statist world, it’s also worth pointing out that he’s also wrong on what the plausible consequences actually are.