Who Plans Whom? » immigration

Commentary on Dallas Immigration Visas and Local Police Brutality

Justin Oliver — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 18:00:42 +0000

The city of Dallas, in concert with the federal government, has a relatively new program to grant immigration visas to foreign nationals in exchange for investing in Dallas business projects. The program has targeted investors from Mexico but has expanded to other countries as well. On one hand, I appreciate that the federal government has reduced its immigration enforcement. Yet predictably, a state’s insiders are the only ones who stand to benefit.

The second story relates to police brutality committed by a former Dallas officer who was fired and faces a misdemeanor charge of official oppression and not a more serious charge that his attack presumably warranted.

Both stories underscore the exploitative nature of government privilege and — for the former — state capitalism.

More Immigration, More Wealth

Justin Oliver — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 18:00:35 +0000

I was listening to an episode of The Fuze, a local internet show co-hosted by Ken Emanuelson of the Dallas Tea Party, with former New Mexico governor Garry Johnson as his guest.

The show got contentious when the discussion moved to immigration. From my understanding, Emanuelson is concerned that mass immigration will drive down wages of those already in the country. As a self-described libertarian, he also made the point that those who advocate for open immigration “have to be honest” when stating its economic impact on wage rates. I can confidently state that historically and praxeologically the economic evidence gives overwhelming credibility for an open immigration policy.

A leading open immigration opponent in academia, George Borjas, thinks that existing immigration rates are a net positive to income. He said, “Although the entry of immigrants reduces the wages of comparable natives, it increases slightly the income of U.S. natives overall.” Coincidentally, Tyler Cowen wrote about a new study that demonstrates why immigrants create a demand for higher-paying management jobs and that immigrants compete more so with foreign labor than with existing native workers. Those might be some valid points, but I’m not ready to say they are conclusive just yet.

Clarifying Terms

Granted, the purpose of a quota system is to drive up prices (including the price of labor), so it is reasonable to believe that the immediate effect for a particular profession might be to experience decreased real wages if immigration were abnormally high for that profession compared to the rest of the labor market. With an open immigration policy, that problem could be minimized since open immigration would not be restricted to just one or a few classes of workers. But if real wages in a profession did fall, that only tells us that wages for that profession were too high for the market to bear, which was likely brought about by government manipulation of the market in the first place. One thing we know for sure is that the sooner an economic distortion is eliminated, the less harm it will do overall. Certain professions are assuredly propped up by the existing immigration restrictions (like border patrol agents), but they are being supported on the backs of other Americans through taxation and lost economic opportunities. In fact, Frederic Bastiat offers some great advice on this:

Every injustice is profitable for someone (except, perhaps, restriction, which in the long run benefits nobody); to express alarm over the dislocation that ending an injustice occasions the person who is profiting from it is as much as to say that an injustice, solely because it has existed for a moment, ought to endure forever.

Counter-intuitively, immigration restrictions do not raise wages; at best, they shift (or redistribute) wages from honest native workers to ones who benefit from privileged government intervention. Just as it would be a gross misrepresentation to say that sentencing a bank robber to jail time would ipso facto reduce his “wages,” it would be equally absurd to claim that returning to a free market would do anything but restoring the economy to the natural state it should have been in all along. If it seems odd why I would characterize immigration restrictions as theft, it might be helpful to read a past post in which I explained why immigration restrictions against peaceful people are a logical contradiction.

Free Markets, Free People

I said that “at best” immigration restrictions, or any prohibition of consensual activity for that matter, merely shift income patterns. It likely could be the case that increased competition leads to more specialization, more innovation, and thus more demand for the product of that profession, so real wages could rise with a greater influx to that labor market.

Historically, the periods of greatest growth in American living standards took place in a climate of lenient or almost non-existent immigration policies. Part of that came about because the founders had railed against the king’s immigration policy, even levying a charge of obstructing “migrations hither” in the Declaration of Independence, and so purposefully did not give the federal government any enumerated power to govern immigration (only naturalization), save for the importation of slaves into the 13 original states.

Contrary to the predictions of Keynesian interventionists, if we look to the greatest American wealth expansion in the 20th century, which followed the end of World War II, millions of GIs returned home and flooded the labor market, just as some anti-immigration hawks fear would happen with open immigration. As a matter of deductive logic, independent, rational people must produce more than they consume in order to remain alive, creating a surplus of products for the market and driving down consumer costs. Those consumer savings can then be spent on other products that before they could not afford to purchase. Freedom and self-interest provide not only the necessary components for consumer demand but also the supply and ingenuity to meet those demands.

Despite its patriotic backdrop, the contemporary anti-immigration stance has its origin in Marxism as it tends to view people as laborers only and not also as consumers who are going to desire products of their own. Our desires are limitless, practically speaking, and so a free market (if one existed) would never have a shortage of jobs. After Word War II, the economy expanded to accommodate the desires that were now possible to accomplish with an influx of new workers. With more workers, we increase our division of labor, and so we can become more specialized, which enables each individual to exert his or her comparative trade advantage. It was Adam Smith who called the division of labor the source of the “greatest improvements in the productive powers of labour.” Even those workers temporarily laid off could be somewhat placated with falling consumer prices that result from increased competition. They would be able to shift to sectors of the economy that have a greater demand for their labor, and so their real wages (the amount of products they can afford to purchase with their earnings) will increase (since consumer prices have fallen) even if their nominal wages do not increase.

Notice the effect here. People are able to save more because of greater competition, reducing the rate of interest to borrow money, which in turn reduces the costs of capital investments, which increase productivity to pull up wage rates. Various government interventions sharply reduce the availability of capital and raise the barriers to entry through a multitude of regulatory, credit monopoly, legal tender, and intellectual property controls, severely hampering this free-market mechanism from taking place today.

Lying for Liberty

What also stuck with me is Emanuelson’s view that people should be honest when discussing the reality of a political policy. I would agree further that people ought to always be honest, though we would probably differ on how we bridge the is-ought gap.

In reply to an inquiry of mine, he confirmed that he does equates honesty with, at a minimum, not knowingly making a false statement. As for myself, I do not think that honesty and lying (deliberately making a false statement) are mutually exclusive. The classic case is of an angry abusive husband knocking at the door looking for his frightened wife at the neighbor’s house. Would it ethical to lie to the husband? I hope so. The alternative of putting people in direct danger risks having their rights violated by the abusive husband. Honesty is fundamentally a recognition and acknowledgment of the facts of reality; integrity would be acting on behalf of those facts. Ayn Rand called honesty “the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.” To be acting honestly does not mean telling the truth no matter the context. Honesty means taking into context one’s full knowledge. In the case of a surprise party, it would be ethical to lie to the special guest because I am have not deprived him or her of any values. Ethics is not a matter of floating categorical imperatives — these principles are derived for the purpose of living happily, which requires the existence of rational values to achieve.

People who support immigration restrictions that stretch beyond those necessary to defend individual rights are necessarily advocating for aggression, as I explained before. In that context, it would be acting honestly to make a false statement about the economic consequences of immigration in the same sense it would be ethical to lie to a thief who wants my friend’s wallet. I am being honest. I am taking into account the full context of my knowledge, including a recognition of the fact that no one has a (natural) right to aggress against others. My lie would not be denying the anti-immigration hawk any rightful value of his or hers, but I would be protecting those values of prospective immigrants and native residents, namely their freedom.

For the record, I do not think it is necessary to lie about the political consequences of freedom, as there is no moral-practical dichotomy. With that said, I do not advocate lying to voters, if for no other reason than their net impact on the political process is negligible and does not present what might be called a “clear and present danger,” and because they are not ethically liable for the actions of the state. That responsibility rests with politicians and their agents, to whom it would be justified to lie given the proper context.

Image credit: Mises Institute, with a Creative Commons license

Constitutional Arguments for Open Immigration

Justin Oliver — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:15:44 +0000

For context, I have written before why libertarians, and particularly libertarians committed to small government, should support open immigration as a matter of principle. Further, I have given a consequentialist argument for open immigration and what that entails.

For me, the least impactful line of argument I would think is the constitutional argument. That so many constitutionalists nevertheless support uniform immigration restrictions demonstrates how meaningless the constitution is if its most ardent defenders conveniently pervert it so far from the original meaning.

As an Implied Power

A common line is that the Naturalization Clause, which gives the legislature the power to make a uniform process of becoming a citizen, implies the power to regulate immigration in context with the Necessary and Proper Clause.

That is an interesting idea, and it would have been worth mentioning by the Federalists since immigration had been under the domain of the states during the existing constitution. Yet, the framers who supported the constitution never so much as hinted at that idea during ratification. In fact, “Agrippa,” the Anti-Federalist who is supposed to be John Winthrop, lamented that congress would have no such power under the then-proposed constitution.

It was not until 1875, after congress had passed four separate naturalization bills, did the Supreme Court discover the new-found power to control immigration.

As a Protection from Invasion

Further in Article 1, Section 8, congress is also given the power to summon the militia to “repel Invasions.” This line of argument has been given by Ron Paul and other less distasteful politicians as a reason to resist open immigration.

For this to be true, we would need to look at the meaning of the word “invasion” at the time of ratification. The widely circulated Johnson’s Dictionary defined an invasion as “a hostile entrance, an attack.”

I have defended extending open immigration, at a minimum, to peaceful, honest people. Obviously, that would exclude violent criminals who have not offered restitution for their crimes. With that said, peaceful, honest people entering the country to better their lives should not fall within the scope of “a hostile entrance” by any means.

As a Limit on Slavery

I do not encounter this argument often, but the constitution does provide for the prohibition of “Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit” after to 1808 in the 13 original states. Ironically, this was meant as a check on congressional power to control the importation of slaves.

In all other cases, immigration control should be reserved for the states, according to the constitution. However, as a practical matter, any federal immigration controls like that would break down under political pressure within a generation, so soon enough all the states would be setting their own policy. After all, it is unlikely that the other 37 states would be willing to pay for the immigration enforcement of others states.

Lessons from History

Mary Ruwart once wrote, “We reap as we sow. In trying to control others, we find ourselves controlled. We point fingers at the dictators, the Communists, the politicians, and the international cartels. We are blithely unaware that our desire to control selfish others creates and sustains them.”

The decentralization of power is a good thing. For one, it would slow plans for this New World Order that so many constitutionalists tell me about. The expansion of immigration controls follow closely with the expansion of government power in general.

For the most part, peaceful, honest foreigners are trying to escape exploitation so they might live somewhere they do not have to get permission to create wealth. It is a false choice to have to choose between our own happiness and abundance and that of others. All interests are served by practicing non-aggression. By refusing to aggress against others, the special interest groups and politicians in government have no authority over of us.

Image credit: Jaume d’Urgell, with a Creative Commons license

‘Sticky’ Government and Immigration

Justin Oliver — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 20:03:38 +0000

One of John Maynard Keynes’ criticisms of the market mechanism was what he called “sticky” wages. He claimed that the market for employment does not work as efficiently as previously thought, because employees are reluctant to accept lower wages. He not only claimed that wages failed to respond to supply and demand but that it was a good thing they were unresponsive.

In his book “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” he said, “It is only in a highly authoritarian society, where sudden, substantial, all-round changes could be decreed that a flexible wage-policy could function with success.” Astoundingly, he thought authoritarian societies were more susceptible to the market process. In an earlier comment, he said that was “because men want the moon. … There is no remedy but to persuade the public that green cheese is practically the same thing and to have a green cheese factory (i.e. a central bank) under public control.” So Keynes thought the role of government was to deceive individuals in the public into making decision they otherwise would not have made. In an authoritarian society, he swooned, there is no need for such pretenses.

Part of Keynes’ confusion was failing to distinguish between the total wage income and the hourly wage rate of an employee. In today’s market, there are all sorts of adjustments that employers can consider when wanting to cut their overall labor costs, such as reducing the number of labor hours and providing fewer health benefits. But those are best achieved in an open, dynamic market process.

Governments, as commonly conceived, are incapable of this downward flexibility because they are anything but open and dynamic. They are a violent assault on reason. Government escalates in a progressively intrusive way, making it what is sticky downward.

For the most part, conservatives, who rightly deplore their stolen tax dollars being redistributed to make welfare recipients more dependent on government handouts, hardly ever talk about reducing government welfare. Not including the automotive and financial industry bailouts, entitlement spending almost doubled under George W. Bush from 2002 to 2009. Instead, conservative politicians look to expand government power in hopes of deterring those who have moved into the country without government permission. They understand how difficult it would be politically to reduce government handouts, even to those without the ability to vote. Their best bet is to advocate for more government power, more police, more laws, more taxes.

Worse still, government is slippery upward. The reason why conservatives do not more vigorously advocate for reducing government welfare is varied. It might be because they do not want to be called racist, or it might be because it would hurt their chances of gaining control of government to impose their own social agenda. It is also not worth much of an individual’s time to lobby congressmen to reduce spending when the extra savings would probably just be spent on some other boondoggle. Violence does not produce positive overall results. It is less than a zero-sum game. In government, you are either stealing or being stolen from. The power of the state is being used immediately for your benefit, or the power of the state is being used against your benefit.

I can understand why conservatives clamor for more laws. On their own, they could not afford to kick out all the foreigners, to hire bounty hunters and deport them. That would be awfully expensive, and people might not look too kindly on using violence against peaceful people, even against those who broke an arbitrary government edict. But somehow, people acquire a different moral nature while wearing a government-issued uniform. If they can lobby for power of their own, they can use the government to achieve something, financially and culturally, not possible otherwise. The government’s monopoly on taxation means they can spend resources they did not have access to beforehand, extinguishing liberty one amber at a time.

We can see why government does not solve problems but only makes them worse. We can also see why reducing government aggression, at least through the conventional electoral process, has been so fruitless.

Image credit: Pacoy69, with Creative Commons license

Originally posted at DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left

A Minarchist’s Case for Open Immigration

Justin Oliver — Thu, 06 May 2010 02:07:44 +0000

Before I had run out of excuses, as one bumper sticker chides, I was still a minarchist — whereby I believed the only purported role of the state was the defensive protection of individual rights. I was still fiercely opposed to immigration restrictions, based on my reading Ayn Rand, who was obviously sympathetic to immigrants having moved from Russia in her early adult life.

I still have the same support for open immigration today but for different reasons, of course. What I mean to say is that support for open immigration is not exclusive to anarchists, though I do believe they have a deeper understanding of why immigration should be unregulated. Support for open immigration is not universally adopted by anarchists. One example would be Hans Hermann Hoppe, who claims that open immigration is equivalent to “forced integration.” I believe Sheldon Richman has sufficiently eviscerated that argument though.

Another libertarian unfortunately caught in the current immigration scare is Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX). He has called it “an invasion.” Constitutionally, congress has no expressly delegated power to regulate who may immigrate to or emigrate from the country, only how to become a citizen. The framers of the constitution had intended that states would be responsible for their own immigration policy but never envisioned such a welfare state either. In the interim, until government welfare is no longer subsidizing immigration, Paul and other constitutionalists dumbfoundingly insist that government needs additional powers to alleviate the consequences of the immigration problem it created.

Using Paul’s own premise of the necessity of political government, I believe it is self-evident that the only practical and ethical immigration policy is to open the borders. I do not happen to share Paul’s premise that government is necessary or proper, but I think I understand his stance after being a minarchist for several years myself.

Through Minarchist Glasses

Accepting for a moment that the state, as commonly understood, is necessary for the protection of individual rights, an open immigration policy would be a necessity. With that said, open immigration does not mean letting anyone into the country for any old reason whatsoever. A minarchist government could still require immigrants to register and pass a screening check to ensure they are neither perennial aggressors nor intent on committing aggression in the future. Additionally, a government could establish its own guidelines for becoming a citizen.

The argument against open immigration, as I understand it, is that government has the final say who can enter its territory. For this to be true, two conditions must both be true, that the government’s territory is legitimately controlled and that government can properly be assigned powers outside the scope of the defensive protection of individual rights.

First, I have said before that a stipulation on whether property is legitimately controlled is the means by which it was acquired. Government property, presently, is commonly acquired under coercion and with stolen money. Mandatory taxation is one form of theft, even to minarchists like Rand and Andrew Napolitano, who support the idea of a voluntary taxation paid in exchange for government services. Presently, no state in the history of civilization has met this fist condition, so no state in the history of civilization has the legitimate power to exclude peaceful, honest immigrants.

So far, I have made the gross assumption that government is necessary for the protection of individual rights. Simply looking at it as a thought experiment, I’m going to imagine that a government had aquired its territory by just means. The second hurdle a government would have to prove is that it can properly be assigned powers that are outside the scope of its legitimate function of defending individual rights. But this is objectively impossible. In the ontological sense, an individual or a group of individuals may not transfer power to a government other than those which are used expressly for the defense of individual rights. Government by its nature is coercive. That coercion may be used defensively or aggressively. Any government action that does not involve the defensive protection of individual rights must necessarily be used in aggression, even if everyone in the society agrees beforehand to grant government additional powers. To say that somone has the right to violate my inalienable rights is contradictory, so government can have no proper powers beyond the scope of the defensive protection of individual rights.

Rand said, “To take rights like those of property and contractual freedom that are based on a foundation of the absolute self-ownership of the will and then to use those derived rights to destroy their own foundation is philosophically invalid.”

Transferring additional rights other than those necessary for the defense of individual rights would require being able to transfer one’s free will, which is impossible, of course.

In the same way, a group of people could not form a government wherein someone becomes a voluntary slave. Free will is not transferable, in whole or in part, so a voluntary slave can never exchange his free will. The notion that property like roads and parks, neither of which are necessary for the protection of rights, can properly be granted to government would still require a transfer of free will but only to a lesser scale and in a slightly augmented way. At worst, a voluntary slave could be looked upon as a making a promise. A slave who breaks that promise could be ostracized, but it would not be legitimate to use force against him.

Basically, just as someone cannot be held liable for agreeing to voluntary slavery, one cannot properly assign rights or powers to a government other than those which make forming a government a necessary function of society. This is important because a government that goes beyond its proper function could no longer operate as an objective referee who enforces objective rules. A government is given this exception of having a legal monopoly to determine the proper use of force, according to minarchists like Rand, because free will could not function in any practical sense without the existence of a limited government to defend rights and enforce lawful agreements.

Further Implications as a Minarchist

Property that is currently under the unjust control of government does have an owner. It just so happens that proper claims are made so murky that it would be practically impossible to determine who deserves restitution and to what degree, making property under unjust government control de facto unowned.

Sentimentally, I agree that someone with long-standing ties to the community or the original owner has a higher moral claim to that property than a recent mover. But when left with the alternative of leaving it in the hands of an oppressor or liberating that stolen property, the emphasis should be to reduce the harm being inflicted as soon as possible.

If government property is being used to violate individual rights, that property should revert [Edit May 6, after some reconsideration] to whoever is being aggressed against. If someone were to destroy that property or liberate it, then the government responsible for violating rights would be morally responsible for providing restitution to the willing legitimate owner.

Back in Reality Mode

My thoughts are that citizenship under political government is just an embellished form of voluntary slavery, making it void and in contradiction with human nature.

The questionable land acquisition of nearly every government in existence is an obvious point in favor of anarchism. But that debate usually breaks down into how consent of the governed can be achieved. My deeper concern is whether granting final decision-making authority to a single organization could result in a just social order. Often, we can see how relationships based on power are exploitative without either party resorting to aggression. After all, the state minimizes its naked aggression because it can rely on the inertia of majority will, propaganda, or its overwhelming military presence to command obedience. Many libertarians or so-called anarcho-capitalists I read do not seem to object fundamentally to these power structures, which is disappointing, because they do overly focus on the low-hanging fruit of the state’s land acquisition process. So, I associate a pro-liberty mindset with more just anti-statism but with a more robust expression of opposition to collectivist authoritarianism in general.

It is still an on-going process in my own mind to understand, and I am open to criticism (including the ones I mentioned above). If anyone would like to discuss this off-site, let me know.

[Note: This post was compiled from an e-mail discussion.]

Melting(pot) Rallies in Dallas

Justin Oliver — Sun, 02 May 2010 23:10:01 +0000

I don’t make it to Dallas all that often for activism events, but the May 1 event was worth the effort. We had a marijuana re-legalization rally at high noon and an immigration rally in the same afternoon.

Well, we had parked the car and were walking up just as the local Worldwide Marijuana Rally that took place in some 300 cities was just beginning. I would guess there were about 300 to 400 people there. Katy and I distributed almost every flier we printed. The basic message was that consensual behavior should not be the domain of government. We explained that the only way to enforce laws against consensual behavior, such as drug use, would be to instill a massive police state that intrudes on our privacy. The flier said, “We don’t need to change the law. We just need to make it irrelevant.” It said that “ultimately to disarm government coercion,” we need new strategies and social arrangements for how society is organized. It seems that at least one of us talked with or handed fliers to most of the people.

After a half an hour or so, we began marching to the famous grass knoll on Elm St. Some people from DFW NORML, the group which organized the effort, talked for about 20 minutes. I didn’t smell anything in the air, but some did report seeing people light up. When we got back to the original rallying point, people were milling around. We got honks from bus drivers, other drivers and even a thumbs-up from a Dallas traffic enforcement officer on his bike. Everybody seemed to like our message about getting government out of our personal lives.

We tried framing the issue in terms of just letting people be free. We talked with Emo kids, a guy who said he was undergoing chemotherapy (that was really touching) and business owners. It was a really diverse crowd. I’ve uploaded some pictures to Meetup. I even got a photo of an unofficial Ron Paul 2012 shirt.

One disappointing thing happened just as we were leaving about 1:30 p.m. We crossed the street and were on the sidewalk next to the Cabell Federal Building. We were not there more than 30 second while deciding where to get lunch when were approached by a Dallas police officer. She told us that we could not stand on federal property, which apparently includes the sidewalk. The short discussion, in which I was threatened with arrest, is on YouTube now. I was planning to ask her if she was aware of Oath Keepers, but she rode off on her bike.

After a brief lunch, we headed to the immigration rally just a few blocks away. We didn’t march as originally planned, but we met at the endpoint at Dallas City Hall. From a distance it was difficult to say which side was which because the pro-amnesty side had more American flags.

Immigration Rally

The rally was sparked by the passage of a new draconian anti-immigration law passed in Arizona. We went in hopes of promoting a pro-liberty spin on open immigration.

Many people asked to take a picture with Katy’s sign, which said, “The principles of liberty have no borders.” (She was expressing that the principles of liberty apply to all people, regardless of their heritage or place of birth.) We arrived before the marchers, so there were just a thousand or so people there. I counted at least a dozen mounted police and maybe 30 other officers around the event.

Katy and I began passing out our flier, and the police were immediately suspicious of us. I think they were trying to overhear what I was saying to make sure we were not starting a confrontation.

We handed out nearly 400 immigration fliers, which read, “Immigration restrictions usurp the natural right of individual autonomy …. Most immigrants escaping tyrannical governments know firsthand the importance of liberty, and they remind us all of the importance of preserving that liberty.” It continued, “This new Arizona law is rewarding government failure with more government power.” When talking with people, our basic lines were that resources should be spent to investigate violent people who have violated the rights of others and that we wanted peaceful families left alone.

I think it was important to bring a liberty message to that crowd. We wanted to express that these ideas are friendly to all people. It was a really festive atmosphere. People were having a good time with their families, the weather was perfect, and music was playing in the background. Once the marchers arrived, the whole place swelled with people, and it was easy to get lost in the crowd.

The counter protest was also entertaining, though the police prevented us from crossing sides. My favorite sign said, “Illegal immigrants are not legal.” One guy’s sign said, “Illegal is a crime.” Another listed the snitch hotline to “Report Illegals.” A few times, I saw they had huddled around some speaker, I presume. It was difficult to understand what they were saying.

All in all, we passed out about 600 fliers, took lots of photos, and met even more friendly people.

Instead of a Law

Justin Oliver — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:04:36 +0000

A new law passed in Arizona is reported to be one of the harshest crackdowns on so-called illegal immigrants in several decades. Barrack Obama has also chimed in and criticized the legislation for being “misguided,” whatever that means. I have not read the new law, and I do not care to. Conservatives love it, particularly since they get to irk Obama.

In actuality, what conservatives do not understand is they are furthering the statism that he embodies.

The uproar that caused this anti-immigrant backlash was the fault of government. Whether it be the lax enforcement of property rights of farmers, the government welfare benefits given to immigrants, the terrible safety conditions on government roads, obtrusive regulations that prohibit honest competition in the labor market, or the gang violence created by the prohibition of tabu drugs, they are all the result of government intervening into peaceful people’s lives.

This new Arizona law is rewarding government failure with more government power. How can we ever expect to achieve liberty if we support expanding government every time government decision makers fail?

Instead, we could encourage immigrants to build social aid organizations, so they can reduce their dependence on government welfare. We could also support those who avoid paying the taxes that fund the government programs that immigrants allegedly exploit. We could welcome a whole new generation of families, who for the most part are escaping their own failed governments. Those are much better solutions to promoting liberty in the long term than punishing people for moving across arbitrary political lines on a map.

Government, as is true of all hierarchical violent organizations, relies on assigning blame and inflicting misery on scapegoats. If government decision makers ever had to take responsibility for the harm they do, not even the most ruthless savages would take the reigns of government. But they never have to worry about that. The purpose of political government — as it is currently understood — is to avoid responsibility. A small minority of people decide how to spend taxes on self-serving programs they could not accomplish by market means. How many would support the current foreign policy of the United States, for example, which runs approximately a trillion dollars per year? If only the people who voted for Barrack Obama and John McCain were responsible for funding the empire, it would cost each voter approximately $8200 per year. You can bet that would bring the war to a swift conclusion.

I mean, read “The Road to Serdom” for goodness’ sake.

Image credit: The Adventures of Kristin & Adam, with Creative Commons license

Toward a Consistent Immigration Policy

Justin Oliver — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:45:49 +0000

My discomfort with so many of the state and national “liberty” candidates for office is their general willingness to appeal to collectivism on issues like immigration, otherwise known as “moving.” Even Ron Paul was plagued by this, in part to be taken seriously by Republican voters. Of course, I may be too cynical in calling it a total affectation. I don’t think it comes from a xenophobic fear of foreigners, either. He probably recognizes that the people who most blatantly and systematically usurp our liberty are mostly middle-aged white men, not day laborers at Home Depot. Nevertheless, it is just as safe to assume that Paul’s harsher immigration policies drove away as many potential liberty supporters as they attracted.

Immigrants and their friends and families, many of whom have experienced or witnessed government persecution, could have been the most receptive audiences of a consistent message of liberty. Instead, they may have permanently associated the message of liberty with a perceived hostility toward immigrants. In the long term, that is going to create some challenges for future candidates wanting to promote a message of individual autonomy. They recognize the common objection — that some immigrants take far more from the government trough than they contribute — as a spurious argument, at best, since some government employees and some government contractors take all of their resources from the government, yet immigration foes do not propose deporting them. For that matter, legal immigrants are far more likely to acquire government welfare than unsanctioned movers.

What brings this to mind is the announced immigration platform of one of Paul’s supporters, Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina, someone to whom I have donated my own time and money. For the most part, she sounds a lot like Paul in that she really dislikes the federal government. She wants to nullify the enforcement of some federal laws she believes are unconstitutional and to end property taxes. Thumbs up on my end, though I would prefer nullifying all federal laws and ending all taxes. As someone opposed to non-consensual monopoly government, I can’t enthusiastically endorse any policy other than to disband. However, that shouldn’t discourage me from critiquing existing political proposals or from identifying that some ideas are better or worse than others.

Some of her proposals, like wanting to reduce the scope of gun regulations and to nullify sham free-trade treaties like NAFTA that primarily benefit corporate special interests, would be great. Her most disagreeable idea is to assign “sufficient numbers of Texas National Guard and Texas State Guard” to help local law enforcement. Ethically, it is an abandonment of the non-aggression principle (NAP) as she openly calls for the use of aggressive force to solve what she perceives to be a social problem. The troops and all their resources are funded by the use of force, taxation. In turn, they will initiate force against peaceful movers and foreign entrepreneurs. (Insert the obvious caveat that not all individuals wishing to cross the border are peaceful.) The result will be failure, as all government prohibitions are. It will increase the violence on the border, breed corruption among those guarding the border, and cost a fortune. She also plans to target documented movers convicted of a state or federal law. So for those who break a non-violent federal law, which is done by each individual on average three times a day, they could get tossed, again violating the NAP.

What a Consistent Immigration Policy Looks Like

Since Medina has already shown her support for nullification of unconstitutional federal law, let’s start with all federal immigration laws. The constitution provides no existing expressed powers for the federal government to make immigration policy, only for the naturalization process of becoming a citizen. In fact, the Texas constitution that congress approved after Reconstruction had a Bureau of Immigration, as did most other former Confederate states.

Step two would be to end all government welfare benefits. Then fully re-legalize the prostitution, drug and arms trades. It would completely eliminate the need for anyone to enter the country by sneaking across the desert or trespassing on private property. The vast majority wanting to cross the border conventionally would be those wanting to earn their own way. The fear is that gangs would run wild, causing chaos in the streets. That is unfounded since dishonest criminals who could no longer sustain themselves on inflated black-market profits can in no way compete on the open market. Those wanting to live off the government or engage in criminality would remain in their own country.

We could reduce the scope of government, relieve taxpayers of an extra burden, and demonstrate the fruits of freedom. Government meddling and excuses to circumvent the Bill of Rights would be curtailed, which might get the ire of conservatives in the Republican Party who would rather imprison strangers rather confront the reality of emancipating themselves. If there were ever a litmus test for empathy for the oppressed, immigration surely is it.

An Examination of Alternatives

But maybe I am being too hard on Medina. She’s running a state-wide race in Texas, after all. It is extremely unlikely voters would support a candidate who took such radical steps. We can’t expect someone to be agreeable on every issue, and she would certainly be better than the any other credible choice. The other candidates in the running would have no qualms about some academic non-aggression principle. I agree with all that. But I presume that she has read Paul’s books and articles, in which he has advocates his support for the NAP. In “End the Fed,” he said for example, “We must reject the initiation of violence by individuals or governments as morally repugnant.” Apparently, even Ron Paul does not get the full impact of that idea. His claim is that it is an “invasion,” yet his emphasis is on curtailing it through economic means by removing the welfare incentives. Medina lists that at the very bottom of her of proposals and puts the state guard patrol at the very top, a complete reversal of Paul’s priorities.

My primary and probably only significant purpose in participating in electoral politics is to spread the ideas of liberty. I readily concede that if I want to participate in electoral politics, I can’t expect ideological purity. Engaging the government in any manner, driving on government roads or attending government school, is a regretful concession. I suppose that “When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spread,” as Paul declared. The temptation is to bite one’s tongue. That is my source of resentment for electoral politics. It offers this simple, elegant solution, making it very seductive. The danger is that by not expressing criticism of supposed pro-liberty candidates who abandon that message, assuming that is their highest political goal, we come across as just another empathetic-less political movement wanting to impose our beliefs on others. I don’t even ask that a politician be opposed to all forms of aggression to receive my support, only that he or she oppose increasing the present scope of violence against the peaceful. In this respect, Medina readily and consistently advocates increasing the use of government violence against largely peaceful immigrants. If I were to vote for her in the March primary or the November general election, I would necessarily be sacrificing the interests of an already exploited group of people for my own interests.

I think it is more practical to practice libertarianism consistent with its principles. There are steps that have already proven more effective and more immediate. Primarily, they focus on liberating ourselves to demonstrate firsthand how beneficial living by these principles can be. That is, if you want freedom, you don’t have to participate in the elaborate resource-depleting, shame-inducing rituals of voting and petitioning for a band of thieves to recognize your humanity. Those rituals and institutions are in place to obscure the violence behind it all. Once the glaring blessings of liberty are realized, all mystic pretenses for an intrusive government will be shattered. Now I’m not saying that being right is easy, for if it were easy than it would have already been done.

Rand Paul, Neo-Con Thug

Justin Oliver — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 05:51:59 +0000

Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul, the son of 2008 Republican presidential contender Ron Paul, is not as principled as his father, it appears.

In a recent statement, Rand Paul said that terrorism suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay prison, many of whom have been ordered released on a lack of evidence, do not deserve simple civil rights, saying “Foreign terrorists do not deserve the protections of our Constitution. These thugs should stand before military tribunals and be kept off American soil. I will always fight to keep Kentucky safe and that starts with cracking down on our enemies.”

With all the negligence and shameful acts at these prisons, it is hard to interpret Paul’s assumption of guilt as anything but pandering to the torture wing of the Republican Party. For example, in the case of Chinese-born Huzaifa Parhat, the government’s evidence was so flimsy that the most damning proof it could produce was that while fleeing from the religious persecution of his home country, he had camped at the same village as another suspected terrorist who had no relationship with Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That was grounds to hold him as an enemy combatant for nearly seven years. He was released in June along with three others worshipers who simply sought religious freedom.

I really wish this was my only nugget of contention with Paul. Bizarrely, he also calls for a declaration of war and continued presence in Afghanistan. Elsewhere on his site, he says he supports a law mandating English be used on documents and contracts and wants to build electric border fences patrolled by helicopters. He says that “illegal” immigrants should be punished for breaking a law they had not part in constructing, yet he does not support upholding the constitution and prosecuting the Bush administration for cases of admitted torture. What we see here is a repeated pattern that foreigners should be denied their liberties and any civil protections under the constitution, but the ruling elite are given a pass when the highest law of the land explicitly calls for the president to “faithfully execute” the law. He is caving to the party line. In essence, he is a neo-con on these fundamental issues.

If you ask me, it’s becoming more and more clear that even leading Ron Paul Republicans refuse to acknowledge they do not own other people’s bodies.

In Reluctant, Partial Defense of ACORN

Justin Oliver — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:20:00 +0000

The community organizing group ACORN has been on the ropes after the release of a series of seemingly damning videos in which employees appear to lend cause to a prostitute and her pimp. ACORN employees are shown instructing the undercover couple how to skirt paying taxes and secure a loan to house child prostitutes from Honduras.

In response, ACORN has done what the guilty do, attack the messenger. A press release on the ACORN homepage calls coverage by the “international entertainment conglomerate (FOX)” part of an orchestrated effort “to achieve their agenda, their missions, their ideal, retrograde America.” I think they are correct that FOX News has pushed this story far more than any other news agency and given the organization too much attention. I suppose FOX News personalities like Glenn Beck, who has been the point man in the investigation, would say these videos are emblematic of its troubled relationship with the Obama administration.

The ACORN release further states that “We are their Willy Horton for 2009. We are the boogeyman for the right-wing and its echo chambers. … But it is clear that the videos are doctored, edited, and in no way the result of the fabricated story being portrayed by conservative activist ‘filmmaker’ O’Keefe and his partner in crime. And, in fact, a crime it was – our lawyers believe a felony – and we will be taking legal action against Fox and their co-conspirators.”

Utilizing the coercion of the state to suppress the filmmakers is surely despicable, and being willing to assist in the kidnap and bondage of child prostitutes is unconscionable. However, I do support that ACORN employees have been willing to assist in the voluntary trade of prostitution and avoid the revenue collection arm of the state. I know that its favorables are far outweighed by its unfavorable actions. Keep in mind, the vast majority of its customers (granted I’m speculating) do not intend to run Honduran child prostitution rings, which exist in part because of the federal and local government’s immigration and prostitution restrictions.

The Law by Frederic Bastiat (Part 3 in a series)

Justin Oliver — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:17:00 +0000

This is the third installment of a live-blogging series on Frederic Bastiat’s The Law. Past posts in the series may be found here and here.

The Idea of a Passive Mankind

This fallacious idea of the state as the primary motivator of progress was repeated during his day, Bastiat said. In one Frenchman’s account, “Whatever the issue may be, persons do not decide it for themselves; the prince decides for them. The prince is depicted as the soul of this shapeless mass of people who form the nation. In the prince resides the thought, the foresight, all progress, and the principle of all organization. Thus all responsibility rests with him.”

If this isn’t the common belief today, it surely is close. And that’s the problem. If an individual or organization is responsible for a task, it’s reasonable that the same entity would seek to secure those powers necessary to carry out that task. The problem lies in recognizing an entity’s legitimacy in exercising aggression to accomplish a task, because it then becomes injurious or detrimental for a bystander to not only question the means of fulfilling a task, but the mission itself. That act of questioning the actions and consequences becomes threatening to the entity’s continued legitimacy. The bureaucracy and constituency directly benefiting from those acts are then heeded to mobilize in support. So the state advances, and liberty yields, as Thomas Jefferson noted.

Socialists Ignore Reason and Facts

The same French author that Bastiat quoted from above assigns the credit of Egyptians civility, not to the reason and virtue of the citizens themselves, but to their benevolent leader. “Happy,” said Fenelon, “is the people ruled by a wise king in such a manner.”

Socialists Want to Regiment People

“We are taught to treat persons much as an instructor in agriculture teaches farmers to prepare and tend the soil,” Bastiat said. Well said.

A Famous Name and an Evil Idea

Bastiat quoted theorist Charles Montesquieu as an example of how socialists desire to command and to control:

To maintain the spirit of commerce, it is necessary that all the laws must favor it. These laws, by proportionately dividing up the fortunes as they are made in commerce, should provide every poor citizen with sufficiently easy circumstances to enable him to work like the others. These same laws should put every rich citizen in such lowered circumstances as to force him to work in order to keep or to gain.

Bastiat then lists Montesquieu’s script to achieve such a society. The first step is to “Establish common ownership of property as in the republic of Plato.”

This is de facto the case today. If property is not already owned by a government authority, then the manner in which that property may be used certainly is subject to thousands of contradictory laws, regulations, and judicial decisions. In the vast majority of cities, a certain portion of a property’s wealth is confiscated on an annual basis.

The second step is to “revere the gods as Plato commanded.” Plato viewed gods as beings with perfect knowledge of justice and goodness, A.K.A the state, which holds the premier sovereign territorial authority. We may not have Zeus any longer. Our gods — democracy, obedience, duty, equality, and in sum, the collective — are in sense more tangible but equally fabricated.

The fourth aspect of forced egalitarianism is to “prevent foreigners from mingling with the people, in order to preserve the customs.” Luckily, the interconnectedness of the Web makes this an impossible task. Nevertheless, immigration laws serve to wedge “illegals” from respectable culture.

Next, “let the state, instead of the citizens, establish commerce.” This is surely true. Legislators govern with whom an individual can trade, by what terms, and even when trade is permissible. The government then commands that it’s own debased currency be accepted as payment. If the federal government can claim authority over a chicken farmer raising grain with water from his own well to feed chickens for his own consumption, the transformation is already complete.

Finally, “legislators should supply arts instead of luxuries; they should satisfy needs instead of desires.” Montesquieu’s meaning of luxuries is anything above the level of subsistence living. His failure is a failure to integrate and differentiate the concepts of individualism and collectivism when encountering the nature of human beings and their needs. Instead of viewing human beings as individuals who are social creatures, the prevalent opinion views society as apart and greater than the actions of individuals.

A Frightful Idea

Bastiat concludes this critique of Montesquieu by damning these popular ideas. “These random selections from the writings of Montesquieu show that he considers persons, liberties, property — mankind itself — to be nothing but materials for legislators to exercise their wisdom upon.”

The next part of the series will continue with “The Leader of the Democrats,” a further critique of Montesquieu view on the supreme authority of government.

The Incoherence Of ‘Consequentialist’ Libertarianism

Justin Oliver — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:57:00 +0000

For the “consequentialist,” the political ends justify the political means. In promoting the greatest good, ethical rules are inconvenient obstacles to sacrifice to a higher goal, as the Bureaucrash Crasher-in-Chief has conceded. “Look, you cannot support the Free Market and ignore the concept of trade-offs.”

That thinking has led him to make such statements as (I confirmed many of the quotes, with slight typographical editing, given here on another blog.):

“You should accept that might makes right, and that is why we have a government.”

“Since America has the most powerful military, we are in control.”

“I’m willing to have America as the most powerful Nation.”

“The world exists as such that the strong win, and it might as well be us.”

“Did I like McCain? No. Did I vote for him over Obama? Yes.”

“The fact that limited government expanded ignored what life was like before government if you didn’t have a strong government. That is how you became a REAL slave.”

At other times, he has supported or condoned torture, the deliberate targeting and killing of civilians in wartime, military expansionism and occupation of foreign nations, immigration restrictions, governmental limitations of the marriage of consenting adults, regulation of the right to keep and bear arms, the suspension of habeas corpus for people suspected of certain crimes, the death penalty, and the abduction and killing of tax resistors. To his credit, he acknowledges the inherent violence of his beliefs, but insists that there should be procedures to keep from going to those extremes whenever possible.

BCS members have experienced firsthand the consequences of the CiC’s Machiavellian behavior. A member was banned and then reinstated under the lame excuse that the CiC thought he had renounced his citizenship and was posting a manifesto about it, while the renunciation actually happened only last year and the manifesto — completely unrelated to citizenship — was published in 1973. Forum posts and member content have been deleted without warning. These actions mirror the accusations leveled against him at his YouTube channel when other users challenged his authority or honesty.

These behaviors seem to flow from the ideas of a misguided individual, the inevitable consequence of an incoherent belief that he calls consequentialism. This dismisses the stance that human beings have rights as a basis in nature that are required for their very survival and prosperity.

There are, as I see it, some important objections to this utilitarian mindset that make it unworkable and contrary to libertarian objectives. The basic objection is that there is no rational means of objectively measuring the net impact to society for any peaceful action. (We can conclude that coercion is a net drain on utility since coercion by its nature is destructive.)

The first is the time preference concern. If we were to measure the aggregate sum of goodness, we will find that some people have more patience that others. In the political realm, politicians have a very high time preference because they want to see action as soon as possible, while they are in office, so they can further their agenda. Those outside the system or a little younger may have a longer time horizon to gauge political successes and setbacks.

Next is the scale of values. In a similar way to time preference, individuals are going to place higher and lower values on achieving political goals. A conservative Christian may have a different policy agenda than that of a member of the liberal NOW. Even members of NOW may have competing agendas on the table.

Third, one cannot aggregate utility. Utility is an ordinal (or ranked) measure of a person’s desires. So even if every person in the country had the same time preference and the same values, it would still be impossible to know how much of the national treasury should be devoted to accomplishing some goal. Only individuals, working freely with a legitimate market motive, can coordinate that effort with others.

Finally, at its heart, consequentialism relies on what Bastiat called the seen and the unseen, the truth and the half-truth. Human beings act in unpredictable ways because they have different (and sometimes secret) motivations and desires. At any time, there are at least two options (to act or not to act). Even if everyone had the same time preference, the same values and a hive-mind to sum the collective good, we would still be ignoring the possiblity of the unseen consequences of what could have been had a different action taken place. We could not weigh the consequences of an action against another when we don’t know what the other consequences would even be.

Thus, consequentialism is missing two important aspects of an ethical code, falsifiability and universality. It locks its believers into the hopeless death spiral of collectivism, leaving liberty-lovers to chip away at their chains as the total state continues its restless expansion, while liberals and conservatives are left fighting over how much freedom is necessary by using this utilitarian belief to do away with our inherent rights as individuals.

Consequentialism has limited benefits when acting with peaceful, consenting adults in predicting the results of one’s actions, but a measure of happiness is not the measure of right and wrong when that gain comes at the expense of someone else.

This consequentialism will violate the principles of Bureaucrash — and that means sacrificing you. If this is the type of belief CEI wants to govern such a great organization, I will not sit quietly.