Libertarian Views on Immigration (Part II)

From: X
Sent: Wed 12/21/2016 3:48 PM
To: Walter Block
Subject: Re: introduction

Externality has a pop meaning, i.e. “harm.” Harm can rise to the level of an NAP violation. I’m talking about externalities in the political sense and legal sense.

But you haven’t helped the small town Alabamians. Unless and until they successfully abolish government, are they responsible for bearing the cost Tyson’s won’t bear? Must they move, and seek a stateless society? Are they effectively at fault for allowing taxpayer-funded compulsion to arise?

People having babies is not the same as people migrating. Related, but not the same. Fears of “outbreeding,” say by Arabs in Israel, is a reason for Israel to restrict Arab migrants in the first place. Not saying Israel should, but rather that the stork problem is not a direct analogy to the migrant issue.

Ok, so what’s your answer for the small town in Alabama? S**t happens?

Dear X:

There is a sharp distinction, between harm and NAP violations. A chasm. We may, compatibly with libt law, harm each other in a myriad of ways. A can seduce B’s finance away from him. C can open a store next door to D, and “steal” all his customers away from him. E can beat F in tennis. All these things are harmful to B, D and F, but entirely legal under our libt philosophy. The very essence of libertarianism, at least as I see it, is to distinguish these things, one from the other. You, in contrast, are trying to conflate them.

Anything you say about an immigrant (he’ll commit a crime, be a burden, change our culture, etc), I can say about a baby, 18 years later. Anything. Can you offer a counterexample? If it is justified on libt grounds to prevent immigration, or reduce it, or regulate it, the same goes for babies; here comes the Chinese one-baby policy. No one will accept the latter. The former can only be accepted on a logically inconsistent basis.

No. My answer is, no public schools, no public hospitals. Even more deeply, no Mexican workers in the first place, or at the very least, no inundation of them; yes, maybe, a few of them; invitees, only. If every square inch not only of Alabama, but Alaska, Wyoming, the entire country, is privately owned, the only people coming to this country will be those who are explicitly invited. And, if you’re an invitee, your host is responsible for your behavior.

Forget about that small town in Alabama. Let’s talk about the rapefugees in Germany. Say Merkel invites a dozen of them to her house (she can only invite, say, that many, not 1 million of them, they won’t all fit into her house!). And, now, a few of them go out and commit rape. SHE is responsible for these rapefugees’ actions. She aided and abetted a rape. She goes to jail (actually, libertarian punishment theory is a bit more draconian than that, but that’s another story), along with them of course. This ought to slow down the invitees from Muslim countries quite a bit.

As I said, in my view, we get to have our cake and eat it too. In “my” (private property right!) system we can be just as safe as in Hans’. But, with mine, we can adhere to the NAP. With Hans’, we can’t. Murray changed his mind on this because the USSR stuck hundreds of thousands of Russians in small places like Latvia, Lithuania, etc. But this was statism! This was not the operation of the free enterprise system.

My answer for the small town in Alabama is this: adopt the proper libertarian view on immigration (mine), and in that way we’ll both be safe and, also, just.

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1:45 am on March 4, 2019