Friday, December 11, 2015

Open Borders Means Big Government

I could be described as a small-L libertarian, one who does not believe in open borders. Why? Because the only way a country can have open borders is if it has a huge federal government. Right now, we have a huge federal government, so we have open borders. It overrules the states, counties, cities, neighborhoods, and individuals.

Why does the federal government do this? One reason is that corporations, themselves creations of the state, want cheap workers and have enough political influence to get their way.

Another reason is that there are leftists who just want to destroy the country. Perhaps they think, as all leftists think, that once existing institutions are destroyed all the inherent “goodness” in human nature will pop up and create a utopia. Apparently they think all people are the same, including low-IQ foreign populations.

I suppose they think all of people of the world, with their 80 IQS, will be united in their material love of SUVs and Blu-Ray players, and peace will reign for all. That's just plain retarded.

Or perhaps everyone will accept everyone else's religion? The War Nerd had it right: when different tribes share the same land, the result historically has been genocide.

I agree with a comment made by the late Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: leftists don’t merely misunderstand human nature. They don’t understand it at all. And a lot of "libertarians" are in reality leftists.

Human nature is terribly flawed, and civilization is a thin film on top of a whole lot of badness. Destroying that thin film doesn’t create a utopia. It creates a hell.

Under a purely libertarian society, all property would be private. Contrary to the belief the borders would be open, the truth is the exact opposite. There would not be mass migration, because the landowners would not stand for it.

Occasionally libertarians tell me, "Well, immigrants would pay to cross the property." Oh, really? Where are millions of poor immigrants going to get the money to pay for such a thing? It also assumes the owners place money above all. The only people I've seen do that are people who don't have any money. People who have money have other priorities.

Do the defenders of open borders think thousands of landowners are going to spend the night wandering around their property with a flashlight (and a shotgun?), catching immigrants and charging them a dollar? And that immigrants are going to carry thousands of dollars in cash, to pay the landowners whose property they have to cross?

I also get the comment (actually a mantra, and a clichéd one at that), "I should be able to hire whom I want." True. But how are those potential hirees going to get there, when they have to cross other's property and the owners won’t let them?

Do the defenders of open borders really think thousands if not millions of people will allow mass migration across their private property? What sort of bizarre self-deception is that, to believe such a thing?

I’ve been told, “They’ll use the interstate highway system.” The interstates are a creation of the federal government, were first started in 1956, and the purpose was for the transportation of the federal military.

No federal government, no interstates.

For that matter, anarcho-libertarians believe in no government at all. If all property was private, how would roads ever get built? Or are all roads supposed to look like a maze instead of being straight, in order to find landowners who will allow roads to be built on their property?

When I use these points in arguments with open-borders libertarians, I can see the pain in their faces, then their brains shut down. They cannot accept the fact not only does "libertarianism" not support open borders, it completely opposes them.

If all property is private, there will be no mass immigration.

I have come to the conclusion that there will always be government. And I am not so naïve as to not understand that governments grow and grow and sooner or later always get out of hand. That is an eternal problem.

The problem, as always, is how to keep government under control. To that, I have no answer. Neither does anyone else. But I know getting rid of government completely is no answer at all.

Anarchy is chaos - which is what no government invariably leads to. And chaos creates nothing but crime. It creates hell.

What am I supposed to think, when libertarians who claim to despise the federal government above all, support policies that can only exist because of that same government?

8 comments:

Kent McManigal said...

There is a solution, and it isn't the Big Government welfare known as "Borders"- it's property rights

Unknown said...

I just destroyed that concept.

Kent McManigal said...

"Right now, we have a huge federal government, so we have open borders"
"We" don't have open borders*, but "we" do suffer under a huge federal government. I am not an "open borders" advocate, I am a "no borders but private property lines" advocate, and as I say in my link above, if respecting private property totally shut down migration, that's just life.

I am still waiting for an answer I have been asking for many years: How do you (or any borderists) propose having "secure national borders" without a huge government, private property violations (including "taxation"), and surveillance/tracking/checkpoints? Aren't those things "huge government" by definition?

*As it is, the "government" closes the border to those it wants to keep out (or in), and brings in those it wants. This is an inevitable consequence of borderism, specifically, and statism in general.

Unknown said...

All property rights are enforced by violence or the threat of violence, without exception.

The Indians of North America, Central America and South America found that out the hard way,l when they lost their property and cultures to those more violent.

There will always be govenment of some kind.

AAB said...

Kent McManigal said...

How do you (or any borderists) propose having "secure national borders" without a huge government, private property violations (including "taxation"), and surveillance/tracking/checkpoints? Aren't those things "huge government" by definition?


The Swiss have been doing it successfully for a few hundred years, and they don't have a huge government. Any foreigner who want to work in Switzerland needs permission, and if they don't have permission then they get kicked out. Simple. The USA could easily, and cheaply, control it's borders by emulating Switzerand by first downsizing it's military and then using it to patrol it's (small) borders and expel illegal immigrants.

Libertarians need to go and live in an anarchists commune if they want to get a real idea of what it's like to live without rules instead of writing magazine articles, or blog pages. They're big on theory but little on practice.

Kent McManigal said...

I'm not against rules, I'm against Rulers. Big difference.

I have lots of practice living without pretending I own others or am owned. It's odd that some people seem to think it's not feasible.

Robert What? said...

Open borders in combination with a welfare state is societal suicide, plain and simple.

Rusty Shackleford said...

Well, a country with no system of interstate transport is so different from our situation that the whole argument seems unbound from reality. What society in human history has ever had such a rigid concept of private property that they didn't allow even people within the nation to traverse the land without the explicit permission of every landowner along the way. It seems to me like we are deep into "suppose we had a can opener" territory.

But, okay, I'll play anyhow. What if a large corporation set up a factory in an ocean port and shipped in immigrants from overseas? Are the city streets now a quiltwork of private property also? They could house them at the factory. Alternately they could ship them by river from New Orleans to work sites along the Mississippi. In actuality the Mississippi is dotted with the remains of company towns. In theory anarcho-libertarians usually suggest that interstates would be handled by private companies who would run them like toll roads or maybe that these companies would just take over the existing system from the government. This seems like a rube goldberg scheme which only ends in the creation of a very powerful, corporation with governmental powers in everything but name. But supposing such a road existed and that it adjoined foreign lands. Businesses and corporation would presumably be able to pay the road owners to allow their migrants transport to their work sites?

Alternately the migrants could just ignore property rights and cross whatever territory they wanted. It's not like individual land owners can do much about it when facing massive migratory waves. That's what's happening now in Europe and along the Mexican border. Private property is a sort of sacrament to libertarians, but most people in the world don't have a reverence for it on a conceptual level. Ultimately, only the inculcation of blood, soil, faith and history within a people will allow a nation to resist invaders. The fundamental idea that "this is our land and you don't belong here. Out!" Libertarian theory is a piss poor substitute for a lack of that.