The Mind of a Conservative

Here is the latest from Mr. Farah, the editor of worldnetdaily.com, in which he claims that Mexico is not a friend to America. It will be instructive to try to answer the next-to-last question in his essay: What am I missing? It seems to me that what Farah is missing is that he thinks in terms of nations rather than individuals or, say, companies. There is no collective entity called "America" that acts on its own volition. And America, because it is so diverse, is not strictly speaking even a "nation"; the only thing that unites it is language.

Even if we take his references to nations in terms of the "general welfare" or the common good of the people living in the US or North America or in the entire world, Farah does not have any idea how these ends are to be promoted. According to Farah, the federal government, run by his kind of "conservatives" (or whatever he wants to call himself), imposes order on the unwilling and morally depraved populace. To him, society is not peaceful cooperation, in which individuals are able to pursue their many and varied conceptions of the good without harming one another and therefore without interference from the authorities. It is, on the contrary, a battlefield in which those who disagree with him, especially the hated "liberals," are utterly wicked and must be brutally repressed. Here is another sample of his writings: "The choice is simple: the world of standards and morality, of marriage, order, the rule of law, and accountability to God or the world of anything goes, aberrant behavior, do-your-own-thing lifestyles, and moral codes that change with the speed of the latest public opinion polls." Farah is deeply confused. What has any of this to do with freedom with which he is supposedly concerned? Isn’t freedom precisely the right to live "do-your-own-thing lifestyles"? Or is our author advocating "do-what-Farah-says lifestyles"?

This is not to say that what is good is arbitrary and purely subjective. It is subjective in the sense that each person is a "world in himself" and decides himself and for himself what is good and what to fight for. No one can make the decision for him, not even God. Each individual alone is the one who feels happiness if he succeeds and misery if he fails. It is inter-subjective, in the sense that human beings discuss morality and their ideas of the good with each other, influence and teach each other, love each other and therefore will good to each other, rejoice at their friends’ successes and suffer when they fail. In particular, it is inter-subjective because the presence of other people around us changes our ideas of the good. And it is objective or real in the sense that, despite individual differences, what is good is bounded by or grounded in human nature. There can be a fully legitimate "science of happiness" whose teachings are valid for all people.

Unfortunately, Farah is not competent to teach this science.

Our author is extremely uncharitable towards other nations in that he believes that Americans are surrounded by enemies who are eager to destroy them. In the age of global marketplace, such nationalism is uneasily adhered to. That does not stop Farah from writing such things as "Have you ever studied the votes of Mexico in the United Nations? They more closely parallel those of Fidel Castro's Cuba than they do the votes of the U.S." Those commie Mexican officials. Insolent pigs, they refuse to do the bidding of the emperor (who is infallible and perfectly good). Off with their heads. So, because of some bureaucratic disagreements among the political classes of the two countries, individual American citizens cannot befriend Mexicans or buy and sell to them?

In the previous piece he claims that "illegals are taking lots of jobs Americans would love to do." Whatever the arguments for limiting immigration at the level of the US as a whole, this is not one of them. First, "jobs" are not at all scarce. As long as any human need that labor can fill remains unsatisfied, there will be uses for human labor and therefore "jobs," i.e., things that people can do that are of value to others and for which those others will pay them money. Now in order to have jobs there need to be capitalists and entrepreneurs, the former to invest into capital goods that make labor more productive, the latter to direct productive activities and the efforts of labor. Hence, for one, we can facilitate job creation by such things as repealing business regulations and abolishing capital gains taxes. Further, the true issue here is not "jobs," but production and consumption. Low-cost labor reduces costs of doing business and, due to competition, results in lower prices and a greater variety of goods and services. In the free market the consumer is king, and it is around his welfare, not the worker's welfare, that all economic activities are centered, although, of course, every worker is also a consumer. The worker, just as much as a capitalist, is a servant to the consumers. His remuneration is determined by how well he adjusts his conduct to the needs of businesses who struggle to satisfy their customers. None of this means, of course, that unemployment is not a problem, nor that a person who loses his job may not suffer greatly before he finds another one and that even then his salary may be lower than what he was making previously. But if we are to have a free market, then workers, like entrepreneurs, too, must accept the possibility of failure. That’s just life. The only recommendation for them is to keep on their toes, update their skills, and respond nimbly to changes in the labor market. Finally, nobody is worried when Ohioans move to California and take "Californian jobs," or when the residents of Kent, Ohio move to Akron, Ohio and take jobs that "belong" to the folks who have lived in Akron for longer than a few months. There must be something magical about the US-Mexican border, some kind of superstition floating around that causes Americans to treat this imaginary line on the map as important for policy decisions.

Another "conservative" argument is that some immigrants refuse to "assimilate." In other words, they refuse to become like everyone else. In a culture that supposedly values diversity and in which the free market has created millions of products to satisfy every wish and desire, the insistence that they "melt" is a contradiction. Perhaps the complaint is that the immigrants do not become "conservatives," hate foreigners, and worship George Bush but have their own ideas of the most suitable form of political organization and of whom they want to put in charge of local public affairs. Look, it’s up to the immigrants to decide whether they want to listen to Rush Limbaugh. Otherwise, we should leave them alone to live as they please.

If Farah were truly interested in liberty, he would understand that immigration rules in a free society would be made and enforced ideally not by any government but by individual property owners. You have no right to "immigrate" to my apartment. You cannot sleep in a mall or a private park. You cannot enter many office buildings if you don’t work there or are not invited. It is against the law to sneak into a movie theater without buying a ticket. Under freedom we should expect for there to exist a vast patchwork of private properties and associations of property owners that will grant different levels of access to their holdings to different people. In particular, people will be allowed to discriminate with respect to who they will allow onto their properties. Great kingdoms like the US would not be responsible for any immigration decisions. The benefits of such an arrangement is that when the state makes a decision regarding whether a certain person is allowed to immigrate, some citizens agree and other disagree; that is, some are helped while others are harmed. If the decision is to let the person immigrate, then some will suffer from forced integration (because they don’t want him on public properties); if the state refuses permission, then some will endure forced exclusion (because they do want him). If, however, the decision devolves to individuals, and government-owned properties are non-existent, then those who do not want that person can keep him out and those who prefer to let him in can do so as well for any reason at all. Everybody is happy and everybody’s rights are respected as a result.

Furthermore, the state, especially a democratic state, does not have the proper incentives to discriminate well, whereas property owners are fully responsible for their own choices. What would a bureaucrat lose from admitting a criminal or a future welfare recipient? What would he gain by turning away a genius? Nothing at all; on the contrary, more undesirable individuals would mean higher budgets for the police, the prison industry, and the officials in charge of the welfare state; and, conversely, a genius might end up stirring trouble for the regime.

My advice to Mr. Farah: let your "rage" dissipate and prove your commitment to liberty by opposing the state, all its works, and all its empty promises.

July 1, 2006

Dmitry Chernikov [send him mail] is a graduate student in philosophy at Kent State University.

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