KOL426 | Discussing Immigration and Homesteading Donuts with Matthew Sands of Nations of Sanity

Here are the updated show notes for the podcast episode at https://stephankinsella.com/as_paf_podcast/kol426-immigration-homesteading-donuts-sands/, incorporating additional details about the discussion on forestalling and hostile encirclement, as informed by the provided posts and the YouTube transcript:

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Show Notes: KOL426 | Immigration, Homesteading, Donuts, SandsIn this episode of the Stephan Kinsella on Liberty podcast, libertarian legal theorist Stephan Kinsella engages in a detailed, two-hour discussion with Matthew Sands, who runs the Nations of Sanity project, focusing on libertarian principles surrounding property rights, homesteading, immigration, and the contentious concepts of forestalling and hostile encirclement. The conversation delves into the nuances of libertarian philosophy, particularly self-ownership, the non-aggression principle (NAP), and their application to practical issues like borders, access to unowned resources, and the theoretical “donut homesteading” scenario.Introduction and Background

• Matthew Sands introduces his Nations of Sanity project, which is grounded in defining law and crime through individual self-ownership as a basis for peaceful agreements.
• The discussion originates from a debate about immigration and borders, evolving into a broader exploration of property rights, specifically addressing the “donut homesteading” scenario—where a property owner surrounds an unowned or owned piece of land, potentially restricting access to it—and the related concepts of forestalling and hostile encirclement.

Immigration and Libertarian Principles

• Kinsella outlines the libertarian immigration debate, noting the traditional “open borders” stance among some libertarians, who argue that the state, being illegitimate, has no right to restrict movement. However, he highlights a shift in the 1990s and 2000s, led by figures like Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Murray Rothbard, who questioned open borders due to practical and cultural concerns, such as welfare state externalities and forced integration.
• Kinsella clarifies he is not anti-immigration but argues that denying outsiders access to public roads—legally controlled by the government but rightfully owned by taxpayers—does not inherently violate their rights. Sands counters that while property owners can exclude others from their land, actively preventing access to unowned resources (e.g., wilderness areas like the Grand Canyon) through measures like border walls constitutes a violation of libertarian principles.

Donut Homesteading, Forestalling, and Hostile Encirclement

• The “donut homesteading” scenario, inspired by Walter Block’s “Blockean Proviso” and Frank Van Dun’s work, becomes a central point of contention. Sands argues that enclosing someone’s property or unowned land, thereby imprisoning them or denying access, violates the NAP. He distinguishes between not facilitating access (e.g., denying road use) and actively blocking it (e.g., building a wall or completing a donut-shaped property to encircle another).
• Kinsella references Frank Van Dun’s 2009 article, “Freedom versus Property and Hostile Encirclement,” which critiques the idea that property rights allow one to prevent others from accessing unowned resources through encirclement. Van Dun argues that such actions could be seen as initiating force by restricting others’ freedom to act, aligning with Sands’ perspective on the NAP violation.
• Walter Block’s “Blockean Proviso” (discussed in Kinsella’s 2007 post and 2024 Libertarian Answer Man article) posits that libertarianism abhors unowned property, suggesting that preventing access to unowned resources (forestalling) via a donut-shaped homestead could be problematic. However, Kinsella challenges this, arguing that forestalling does not inherently violate rights, as property owners are entitled to control their land without a positive obligation to facilitate others’ access.
• Kinsella dismisses the donut scenario as an unrealistic hypothetical, akin to left-leaning concerns about monopolies. He cites civil law solutions, such as granting easements to enclosed estates, as practical resolutions that align with libertarian goals of minimizing conflict. These solutions, detailed in his 2024 post on Block’s oeuvre, reflect historical legal practices where enclosed property owners gain a right of way if encirclement occurs through no fault of their own.
• Sands emphasizes that the violation occurs when the final property owner closes the “C-shaped” gap, effectively imprisoning someone or blocking access to unowned land. He argues this act of hostile encirclement—actively preventing access rather than passively refusing to facilitate it—crosses a libertarian line. Kinsella acknowledges the reasonableness of rights of way in private law contexts but cautions against directly applying these to national borders, given the differing contexts of citizenship and state-controlled property.

Practical and Theoretical Implications

• Both agree that the ultimate libertarian solution is a stateless society where private property reigns, eliminating immigration as a political issue. Sands stresses that libertarian solutions, like denying immigrants access to welfare and public services, are preferable to anti-libertarian measures like border walls. Kinsella suggests a compromise inspired by Hoppe: allowing immigration with sponsorship to mitigate welfare state issues, which Sands acknowledges as an improvement but not fully libertarian.
• The discussion on forestalling and hostile encirclement ties back to immigration, with Sands arguing that building a national border wall is analogous to closing the donut, actively preventing access to unowned resources and violating libertarian principles. Kinsella maintains that denying access to state-controlled roads does not violate outsiders’ rights, as they lack ownership claims, but he concedes that violently blocking access to unowned land (e.g., via military force) would be problematic.

Conclusion

• The conversation concludes with mutual appreciation for the exchange, recognizing the complexity of applying libertarian principles to real-world problems. They agree that while edge cases like donut homesteading, forestalling, and hostile encirclement highlight theoretical principles, the focus should be on moving toward a freer, stateless society. Sands plugs his Nations of Sanity project, and both express interest in future discussions to further explore these ideas.

Resources Mentioned

• Nations of Sanity project (Matthew Sands)
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s work on immigration
• Walter Block’s “Blockean Proviso” (Kinsella’s 2007 post: https://stephankinsella.com/2007/09/the-blockean-proviso/)
• Frank Van Dun’s “Freedom versus Property and Hostile Encirclement” (Kinsella’s 2009 post: https://stephankinsella.com/2009/08/van-dun-on-freedom-versus-property-and-hostile-encirclement/)
• Kinsella’s “Libertarian Answer Man: Homesteading, Donuts, Prostitution” (2024: https://stephankinsella.com/2024/03/libertarian-answer-man-homesteading-donuts-prostitution/)
• Kinsella’s “A Tour Through Walter Block’s Oeuvre” (2024: https://stephankinsella.com/2024/05/a-tour-through-walter-blocks-oeuvre/)

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These updated show notes integrate the additional details from the provided posts and transcript, particularly emphasizing the discussion on forestalling and hostile encirclement, while maintaining the structure and key points of the original notes. The added content clarifies the theoretical underpinnings from Van Dun and Block, and elaborates on the debate over whether encirclement violates the NAP, connecting it to both the donut scenario and immigration policy.

GROK CLEANED UP TRANSCRIPT FROM YOUTUBE:

Intro

Stephan Kinsella (0:04): Okay, I’m starting this recording now. This is another episode, I think, of the podcast, and we have a recurring or return guest, Matthew Sands. We’ve been talking offline about some issues, and we decided to just hash them out here. I think we’re talking about homesteading and blocking homesteading, and those kinds of issues. Is that right?

Matt Sands (0:36): Yeah, primarily. Why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself and what you think this talk should be about?

Matt Sands (0:43): Okay, my name is Matthew Sands. I have a project called the Nations of Sanity Project, which is built on the assertion that crime, and therefore also law, can and should be defined by the concept of individual self-ownership and established as the terms of a peace agreement. That’s kind of what my little project is about in a nutshell. The reason for this conversation actually started with talking about the border issue, as it relates to blocking or denying people access to things that aren’t your property. Then we moved on to the subject of blocking someone from homesteading around them or blocking them in, which I think works on the same principle. I initially came to you speaking about borders, and then we evolved into a more general conversation about denying people access to anything other than your own property. That’s when we came across this disagreement with regards to the donut homesteading issue. We had a few back-and-forths on email and got to this point. Why don’t we set the stage a little bit with the background?

The Immigration Debate

Stephan Kinsella (2:03): This came about because of the immigration disputes among libertarians, right? The default position for a long time among some libertarians was what you might call open borders, because it means the state has no right to stop anyone from coming into a region because the state is illegitimate and criminal and doesn’t own anything—that kind of typical reasoning. But some libertarians, even the more radical ones, in the old days, or in the minarchist or moderate libertarian sphere, I would say most libertarians are not open borders because they’re not anarchists. They might be pro-immigration because they don’t have this false economic idea that immigrants are bad for jobs or whatever. If they have opposition to immigration, it’s not economic; it’s more cultural or practical or something like that. In the ’90s and 2000s, Hans-Hermann Hoppe and others who were radical anarchist Austrian libertarians, who were anti-state, nonetheless started saying, “Hold on, we should not be so much in favor, as libertarians, of open borders because of X, Y, and Z reasons.” Even Rothbard seemed to change his stripes a little bit on this and joined with Hoppe and others. They got accused of being nativist and racist by the other side. But I think we can come up with reasons why this debate happened, why it emerged, and why it’s still happening today. Would you kind of agree that’s a fair assessment of where we are?

Matt Sands (4:15): Yeah, definitely. My own evolution into this subject—hold on, I didn’t have it set to record. Yeah, it says it’s recording here.

Stephan Kinsella (4:27): Oh, does it? On my end, it says it’s recording, so good.

Matt Sands (4:33): Okay. I agree with that. The only thing I might have said slightly differently is, although I agree that a lot of libertarians hold that position, I think it’s kind of incorrect in accordance with their own principles. From a principled point of view, I don’t really think there should be any difference between a libertarian and an anarchist because they’re both working from the same basic principle of individual self-ownership. A lot of people who call themselves libertarians, I’m not trying to be derogatory toward them, but I often refer to them as inconsistent libertarians or less consistent libertarians. A fully consistent libertarian, for me, is just an anarchist, really.

Stephan Kinsella (5:17): Of course, I agree with that. I’m trying to be magnanimous for once, like I will include in the libertarian ambit people that are not fully consistent libertarians.

Are Libertarians Anarchists?

Stephan Kinsella (5:24): So, yes, a Henry Hazlitt or a David Friedman—no, he’s a bad example, he’s an anarchist—Milton Friedman or an Ayn Rand or Robert Nozick, it’s hard to deny that they’re actually libertarians or big libertarian influences. I would classify them as minarchists, and I would say they’re not fully consistent libertarians because a fully consistent libertarian is an anarchist libertarian. On the other hand, I would also say that many anarchists are not consistent anarchists because the socialist libertarians, or socialist anarchists, say they’re anarchists, but if you’re a socialist, you have to support the state. We know this from economic reasoning and political theory. So, there are people who call themselves anarchists who are not true libertarian anarchists, and there are people who call themselves libertarians who are not true consistent libertarians because they’re not anarchists—the objectivists and the anarchists. The way I look at it is there’s a core of libertarian thinking, which is the most consistent, which is libertarian anarchist, and then we can expand that group to include the minarchists and maybe the objectivists, and then beyond that, there are the classical liberals. That’s how I look at this issue. I’m trying to be reasonable and welcome people into the fold, but of course, I agree with you that, in the end, there’s no difference between a libertarian and an anarchist. But “anarchist” has different meanings in the world today; it can mean lefty or whatever.

Matt Sands (7:21): Yeah, I must admit, when I describe myself, I usually go for “voluntarist” just because I don’t like the connotations of “anarchist” or “libertarian.” Often, if I say “libertarian,” they might think I’m just a conservative who smokes weed, and if I say I’m an “anarchist,” they might think I’m a left-style anarchist who doesn’t respect property rights. So, I always go for “voluntarist” because I feel like that’s less likely to be confused. But no one knows what that means, so that gives me an opportunity to tell them.

Stephan Kinsella (7:55): I’m not averse to that view. I think I hit the mute button. Alright, go ahead.

Matt Sands (8:08): Right, so with regards to our disagreement, as I say, it started with the border thing, and I heard Dave Smith having a few debates that I just wanted to be on the other side of. Then I heard him referring to Hoppe a lot, so I read Hoppe and got a good idea of where he was getting his ideas from with border enforcement. Then it came across to these other things, which is what I discussed with you, about homesteading. The basic crux of it, if I want to try to condense it down into the most concise form, is that I disagree with Hoppe, I disagree with Dave Smith, and potentially with you as well. I don’t see how, with our property rights, we have the right to defend and deny people access to our property, but I don’t see how we have the right to deny people access to anything other than our property. That doesn’t mean I’m obliged to make it easier for somebody to get somewhere, but it does mean I’m obliged not to make it impossible for them to get somewhere. That’s kind of where I’m landing on it. The way I view property rights, much like self-ownership, is the same kind of idea: you can do what you want with yourself as long as you don’t infringe on other people’s rights to do the same. It’s the same with property rights: I can do what I want with my property, build it where I want, etc., as long as I’m not violating somebody else.

Stephan Kinsella (9:34): Yeah, I got you. Let me interject for a second to try to set the stage for people who are not familiar with the background here, and then you can continue on.

Socialism Hurts the Poor

Stephan Kinsella (9:45): In a sense, what you’re saying, from my perspective, is a little bit like when the conventional person says, “Oh, you libertarians want to deny food to the poor,” or they’ll say, “You want to let the poor starve.” That’s how they frame the issue. It’s like, well, we don’t want to let the poor starve, but we’re focusing on what property rights should be, and then the consequences are something we can address later. Our goal is not to let the poor starve. In fact, I would say most libertarians that I know, including me, contrary to popular wisdom, are overly concerned with the fate of the poor. I do think that socialism hurts the rich and the billionaires or the potential billionaires, but it hurts the poor the most. That’s my main reason for opposing socialism: it hurts the poor. I forgot my train of thought—where was I going with this?

Matt Sands (11:19): You were saying about how socialism hurts the poor, and I think you were trying to say that my argument was a little bit like when people say, “Oh, you’re trying to stop people from getting food,” because you’re right.

The Property Argument

Stephan Kinsella (11:37): Yeah, so it goes back to the property argument, like, “Oh, you want to have a system that blocks people from doing A, B, and C.” It’s like, no, we’re focusing on incremental ideas that show what people are justified in doing. So, if I say I have the right to have this piece of property, that simply means I have the right to exclude people from using it, etc., and that has certain implications and consequences. If it happens to have the effect that you can’t cross my property to come to this virgin territory that’s somehow encircled by a donut—I mean, this is such an unrealistic thing in the first place. Let’s go back to the whole thing that caused the dispute. Frank Van Dun and Walter Block have argued that if you could somehow use Lockean principles, which infuse most of the libertarian arguments, which say that the basic libertarian property principle is the way we identify who owns what is from Lockean homesteading principles plus contract, something like that. So, the guy who gets it first, and then who he transfers it to by contract—that’s how we figure out things. But then they say, well, even though we’re libertarians or kind of Lockean or free-market guys, we’re worried that we can imagine a scenario where one guy could homestead a donut or a bagel or a circular kind of slice of property or somehow isolate someone from crossing our property, basically to access a wilderness, an unowned segment of land. By the way, this came up in the immigration debate because among immigration policy discussions, you will have different arguments on different sides. For example, one of my arguments, trying to give a different spin on the anti-open-borders argument, is I would say something like, “Well, I’m not saying that the U.S. state is justified in existing, having an INS that stops immigrants, all this kind of stuff. I’m anti-state, so it’s hard to defend that.” On the other hand, the fact is that the U.S. government controls, as a matter of legal fact, 43% of the land territory in America, which is huge and vast, including roads and public facilities and borders, but also including just vast wildernesses, like the Rocky Mountains and unowned territory. So, one argument I posited in the article I mentioned that you talked about was that it’s not clearly a rights violation if an outsider, meaning a non-American, is denied access to, say, public roads in America, which they need to use to immigrate into the country. The reason is they’re not an owner of that. Then you have to go into the distinction between legal ownership and rightful ownership. So, legally, the federal government owns these roads or the state governments, and then, as libertarians and especially as anarchist libertarians, we would say, rightfully, they’re owned by someone else—some private citizens or private people, usually American citizens or something. You could make a crazy argument that everyone is entitled to it because everyone in the world is a victim of the U.S. government, and so they’re all claimants on restitution from the U.S. government because, you know, someone in Colombia or Vietnam or even Russia or China. You could make a crazy argument like that, but once you open that door, I don’t know where you go from there. That’s where this came from—this idea that the argument among some libertarians is basically a dispute about what is the status of what we call public property. So, let’s distinguish transformed property, like government buildings and government roads, or natural resources, like millions of acres of untransformed land, like in the Rocky Mountains in America. The thing is, most libertarians, especially the left-leaning ones, want to classify all government property as unowned and therefore subject to appropriation by anyone except for the government. So, if you have a public library and a bum comes in and he’s just messing the whole thing up, or a public elementary school and you have a pervert in the girls’ bathroom, they say, “Well, you can’t object to that because the government doesn’t own it.” That’s why people get really upset. I think the mistake in the analysis is they think that if the state owns something, it’s unowned. I think they fail to make a distinction. If the state claims possession, protects, and restricts access to certain natural resources, there’s a distinction. If you have a public road or a public library, those things are owned, but as a libertarian, what I would say is the government is the legal owner, but they’re not the rightful owner. The rightful owner is whoever has a claim against the government, and I would say the taxpayers, the local taxpayers, and the local landowners are the best claimants to get that. If we ever have a revolution, reduce it as for other things like the Grand Canyon or the Rocky Mountains, they’re not owned at all; it’s just the government preventing you from using it. So, I would classify it that way. That’s how I look at these things, and then this leads to the second distinction, which is, okay, well, what if someone homesteads this donut of property, and they prevent you from homesteading the interior? This is a totally private scenario, even potentially. Your argument, I believe, is that if you use your rights in a way that blocks people from accessing unowned resources, you’re somehow violating their property rights or something like that. That’s my kind of prelude. I’ll let you take it from here.

Matt Sands (18:52): Yeah, I mean, that’s pretty much where I’m coming from. I’ll clean it up a little bit, but yeah. The one thing you said there, most of that I agree with and actually hold the same position with regards to. I’m not saying I have a problem because, again, this is something that Dave Smith brought up when he was having an immigration debate—like the heroin addict that walks into the public school kind of thing. I’m like, yeah, that’s fine; I don’t have a problem. Dave’s argument—I love Dave, but his argument is, “That’s crazy,” and yeah, you might agree or not, but that’s not really a coherent argument. I think he could flesh it out if he had to, but just saying it’s crazy is not referring to libertarian principles to make a claim.

The Unowned Principle

Stephan Kinsella (19:41): Exactly. If I were to steelman the people who would defend the heroin addict, their position is obviously that it’s not rightfully owned property by the government; therefore, they basically take the unowned principle.

Matt Sands (19:55): I have no problem with the idea of treating government property as if it was private because it’s still property. That school would otherwise be private, and you can argue that even in our current situation, even if the government aren’t the rightful owners of it, you could argue that the taxpayers are because they paid for it and what have you. So, I don’t have a problem with roads and schools and things as actual property. But, like you, that doesn’t apply to things like the wilderness and the forest. One of the reasons why I objected to Dave using that example with regards to the border discussion is I’m like, well, yeah, but keeping somebody out of a school, which is property, so you’re treating it as if it was privately owned property, which is fine because it is property and it would otherwise be private property, is not the same as an entire country that wouldn’t be private property. Even in our ancap society, it would be a region of a lot of unowned areas that aren’t even property at all, as well as different properties of different people that are all existing within this kind of region. That’s kind of where I’m coming from. Even though I agree, that’s one of the reasons why I really wanted to jump into this debate, because I see this divide with the libertarians arguing that government property should be unowned, and then people more on Dave Smith’s side saying, “Well, no, we should treat it like private property because, you know, it technically is.” I’m thinking, well, okay, I actually disagree with both of you in a way because I don’t agree with the people saying, “Oh, yeah, let’s treat schools like it’s the same as the Grand Canyon.” I’m saying, no, no, I’m saying they’re very different. I’m saying the school in an ancap society would be private property, and we can make the case that right now it should be treated as private property, even though it’s technically public property. It still has a rightful owner that you can assign, and in an ancap society, it would be private. But in an ancap society, the Grand Canyon wouldn’t be private property. These untouched areas that you mentioned—forests and land that hasn’t been homesteaded, mountains, and all of these things—they wouldn’t be property. They wouldn’t be anybody’s property in an ancap society until someone comes along and homesteads. Even when someone does come along and homesteads, they’re only going to own the little spot that they’ve homesteaded. My point is that I’m fully accepting the argument that we treat government property like private property, and we can exclude people from it; that’s perfectly fine. But how does that justify us denying them access to everything else? Because we wouldn’t do that in an ancap society.

What is Property?

Stephan Kinsella (22:55): Okay, so let’s talk about a couple of things. I’ve pointed out in my writings, and it’s pedantic, that it’s better to use the word “property” to refer to the relation between an owner and a resource, but the common parlance is to call something property or not property, like you’ve just done. Let me just clarify: I think what you mean is, when you say, “Oh, this is property, this is not property,” you’re saying this is a resource that has already been transformed and is already subject to ownership by someone.

Matt Sands (23:45): Yeah.

Stephan Kinsella (23:45): I think we could distinguish between the national forests, which are just wildernesses, which, by the way, might have been appropriated by now if the government hadn’t stopped it. Maybe not, but we don’t know because the federal government prevents people from using, in any substantial way, about one-third of the entire territory of this massive United States country. So, they’re blocking people. By the way, I’m not opposed to a private owner homesteading a donut that prevents someone else from homesteading the inside of it, because I don’t agree with Walter Block’s idea that you’re preventing—just as nature abhors a vacuum, libertarianism abhors unowned property, and therefore you’re committing a libertarian crime if you have a piece of property and you don’t allow people to cross over it to homestead unowned property. I don’t agree with that, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t agree that the federal government in America, which is a statist criminal organization, can be criticized for preventing people from homesteading the Rocky Mountains or whatever—actually, I think they can, Alaska, whatever. But the reason is because they’re an illegitimate criminal state, which is doing something unnatural and unjust. Being a private owner who’s done nothing unjust and merely not allowing your property to be crossed for someone else to homestead or access some wilderness somewhere, I don’t see how that’s any kind of trespass or rights violation, which to me is the interesting issue. That’s why I make all these distinctions.

Matt Sands (25:56): Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. I think the rights violation becomes clearer when you put somebody else in the middle of that donut. So, say you’ve got an existing property, and someone creates their little donut property surrounding your property. It depends on how big the donut is, I suppose, but the thing that prevents me from agreeing with Walter completely or saying, “Oh, yeah, Walter’s right on this one,” is because I’m imagining the donut homestead and this unowned area in between, and I’m just thinking, if people were complaining that they didn’t have access to that and you didn’t own it, it seems very easy that you could just homestead it in a way that you basically did own it, depending on how you know—like, why wouldn’t that just be your kind of inner garden?

Property as a Concept

Stephan Kinsella (26:57): I know what you’re saying. I don’t think that’s a solution, actually, and I’m denying myself an obvious solution. First of all, property as a concept is not linked to—well, it is linked to Lockean concepts, but it’s not linked to living on a spherical landmass, number one. We happen to live on a spherical orb, like the Earth, and the surface, right, for now. But that’s just what happens to be the case right now. Of course, you could imagine the circle going all the way to the equator and then going smaller the other way. So, it’s like if you have a donut of property here, or at the equator, or here, or you have a peninsula and you have a line across—I mean, there’s all kinds of geographic orientations you could imagine where people are basically inconvenienced by the fact that someone happened to have a lot of contiguous property ownership. But this concern to me is no different than the concern you hear from the lefties all the time, like, “Well, what if one guy buys up the entire Earth or something like that?” It’s basically the concern about monopolies. If you’re really concerned about monopolies, you should just be a libertarian who opposes the state because that’s the only source of real monopolies. That’s the way I look at it. I’m just not concerned about these trivial grad school dorm room bullshit hypotheticals you think of, which are basically unrealistic because this is not going to happen. Walter Block, who writes about the donut himself, thinks there’s no case for government expropriation of property to make roads because he thinks it’s always possible to make a road if you just make a deal with people. Well, if you really believe that, who’s going to do a donut of property that’s going to encircle a huge valuable tract of unowned land and just never make a deal with anyone to homestead the inside or not homestead it himself? The whole thing is so unrealistic. If you look at human history and everything we know about human life today and for the last 10,000 years, when has this ever been the problem of human life—that there’s a donut, and people just can’t get to this magical forest of psilocybin crystals in the middle? It’s like Star Trek space cadet hypothetical bullshit that makes no sense. It’s a dreamed-up problem to solve what problem, really? That’s kind of my question. For real-world humans walking and homesteading and contractual title transfer, it actually works to solve the basic problems of humans living in a world of scarce resources where we can conflict with each other. It’s pretty good—it’s better than socialism, it’s better than statism, it’s better than theocracy, it’s better than autocracy. So, now you’re complaining that you could imagine a hypothetical donut? The whole thing makes—I don’t really see what the point is. Do you follow me? That’s where I kind of am on this.

Matt Sands (31:00): Okay, I understand what you’re saying. Two things: although I understand that the donut property is perhaps unlikely, I think it’s more that the principle it’s attaching to connects to real-life situations, like national borders, for example, like blocking off a peninsula. The other thing, for me—I can’t speak for the lefty libertarians because I’m not one of them—but my concern isn’t monopoly because I agree with you fully that that’s just not going to happen in a libertarian society. If anything’s geared up to not have monopolies, it’s a libertarian society. So, if anyone’s scared of monopolies, I fully agree with you—they need to be libertarian because that’s the best way to avoid those. But my problem isn’t a monopoly. To go back to the donut scenario, let’s put myself—I’m a property owner, and I’ve got this donut of property around me. It doesn’t have to be one person who owns the entire donut; it could be a collection of properties, all of which are up against each other, so there’s no gap between them. Say the last property owner closes that circle on me. Up until that last property owner came in and closed that last little bit of land, I didn’t have a problem with all these property owners around me because they weren’t affecting me. But as soon as they closed that circle, they imprisoned me, and that’s when I feel like they’ve stepped over the NAP.

Three Considerations

Stephan Kinsella (32:36): I don’t disagree, but let me give you three considerations here. Number one, if that’s a problem of human life, what’s the best way to solve it? Is it to adopt socialism? Probably not. My point is, if you can find problems in libertarian approaches to practical living, they don’t result in utopia. We don’t pretend to be utopian, or some of us don’t. What’s the alternative? That’s one. Number two, I pointed to you in my writings, and I’ll put it in the show notes for our episode here—the civil law, the common law, has come up with solutions for this. The civil law says, very rationally—this is not some libertarian enterprise, it’s just the practical way that people resolve their disputes using scarce resources—that if you get enclosed through no fault of your own, you’re going to have a right of way to access the public road or something like that. However, if it’s your fault—like if I’m enclosed by a donut with one little opening, and I sell that to someone, and that closes me off—that’s my own fault. But, of course, this never happens because no one wants to be closed off. So, these problems are so ethereal, ephemeral. I’m not opposed to the reasonable idea of a right of way to access other things. The other thing is, though, where’s the stopping point for this reasoning? Because, again, you could imagine a belt around the equator, which is the bigger circle? What is it bounding? It’s just separating two hemispheres, or a peninsula with just a horizontal line across it. Or, if you have a donut, mathematicians would, I’m sure, weigh in here, like the total dorks that they are—the level dorks that they are—if you have a circle, what’s the inside and what’s the outside? There are whole PhD theses about what’s the inside and outside of a bounded shape. You could say that people on the inside are being prevented from homesteading the outside. There is no objective difference between an inside and outside of a circle on a spherical surface because there’s just a difference in area. Maybe the inside is the more valuable part, and the outside is just wasteland. None of this is objective, but none of it’s realistic. This has never happened in human life. So, I think people focus on this as a hypothetical situation to illustrate the fact that, in some cases, you can’t block people from using this barrier territory to cross from A to B. You can’t use ownership of middle ground B to prevent people from going from A to C if there’s a barrier between. But I think, if you’re going to argue that, this comes up in the immigration debate because people like me say, “Well, I’m not really arguing against open borders. I’m simply saying that, in the current state of affairs, like in America, the federal government, as a legal matter of fact, owns 30-40% of the country’s territory.” I don’t think they own it as a matter of natural right, but they own it legally, and I think the natural owners are the citizens who have the right to reclaim it if we ever have a revolution, and we can just auction it off and sell it off. In the meantime, it seems reasonable to me that the government’s going to commandeer the functions of, say, roads. I think we can all agree that in human society, there would be a need for transportation routes and roads. The government has commandeered that, like they commandeer communications and education and money and banking and everything and law and order. But one of them is transportation and roads. Given that they’ve done that, and they’ve actually used taxpayer dollars and expropriated property of people to build these roads, at least give the people that they’re subjugating with their system the right to transport, to move, using the roads. Does this mean that, automatically, an outsider from Colombia or China has the right to use this road? I don’t think it’s so obvious that they do because they don’t have a property claim. You could argue they have a restitution claim if they’re, you know, a Vietnam citizen America bombed or something. I guess you could make these extended arguments.

How Do We Do Justice?

Stephan Kinsella (38:22): Some government in some local region—America, France, Europe, China, whatever, Russia—it doesn’t have to be American—they have legal control, but it should be controlled by the citizens or by someone else, by some private actors. How do we distribute that? How do we do justice? In the meantime, the way justice is done is to let the citizens, at least, have a reasonable semblance of usefulness of the natural life service that the government has commandeered. If you’re going to have government schools, it would be better if they’re better than if they’re worse because you’re forcing the citizens into that. If you’re going to have national healthcare, it’d be better if it was better than if it was worse if the government’s going to force you to pay taxes to support it; that’s your only solution for healthcare. The same thing for transportation and for other things. It’s, I won’t say it’s even second best, it’s simply recognizing the fact that the government or the state harms people, and it’s better if the state harms people less than if it harms people worse. This is why some libertarians argue and have preferences about different forms of government. Even the anarchists might say, “Oh, I’m an anarchist,” or the minarchists might say, “I’m a minarchist,” but they’ll say, “Okay, in the real world, I would rather A versus B or C.” I don’t know—monarchy versus democracy versus theocracy or whatever. So, when you say that I would prefer a monarchy to a democracy, it doesn’t mean that you’re a monarchist. It just means that you’re saying, given this state of events, the state of affairs, I prefer the least harmful one or the most beneficial one. That’s sort of how I look at all this, and so I think you—that’s how we translate that to immigration policy or to ownership issues and things like that. I think it’s reasonable for a libertarian who’s an anarchist and who abhors the state to say, whatever the state does is going to harm people. Given our welfare state’s democratic system, if you have immigration, you’re going to have problems one way or the other. If you don’t have immigration, you’re going to have problems. Whatever the state does, they’re going to be hurting people. They’ll hurt outsiders, they’ll hurt insiders, they’ll hurt citizens, they’ll hurt non-citizens. They restrict the right to travel, and then when the people can travel, they give them the right to vote and the right to travel on the public property to get welfare. So, there’s no good solution. We know this. The only solution is to privatize everything down to the nth degree. That’s how I look at all this. Tell me what you think is crazy about this, given a libertarian perspective.

The Solution Isn’t Socialism

Matt Sands (41:40): There’s a few things there that I wanted to touch on. The first thing I wanted to say, because when you said about, like, you know, what’s—like when I said about the donut or the denying people access through property and all the rest of it—and you obviously said the solution isn’t socialism or to reject property rights. One of the things, because I’ve had this argument with lefties and socialists before, where they try to argue against property rights, and they’ll give extreme examples of how property rights might be used to violate somebody in some way, as if that’s an argument against property rights. I’m saying, well, no, no, no, that’s no more an argument against property rights than saying this person might use their self-ownership to rape somebody is an argument against self-ownership. It’s not. We can have property as long as we don’t violate people. We can have our self-ownership, but the condition of it is that we don’t violate people because everyone’s got to have the same self-ownership and the same freedom. So, when I present this problem with the donut thing, I’m not saying, “Well, this means we can’t have property.” I’m just saying, no, it just means that when we apply our property rights, we’ve got to—I kind of picture this trifecta of self-ownership, property rights, and the non-aggression principle that are all linked to each other. Self-ownership being the fundamental presupposition, property rights coming from that, and the non-aggression principle being the implicit moral principle for it. That’s what governs your self-ownership, and for me, that’s also what governs your property rights. So, it’s not about saying you don’t have the right to build your house, or even—it’s also not even saying you have to let people have a pass through your property or have some kind of easement or something like that. I’m not even saying that. I’m saying that you can build your property where you like, as long as you’re not violating anybody. For me, denying people access to anything other than your property is the violation. That’s kind of the crux of it for me.

Civil Law is Reasonable

Stephan Kinsella (43:57): Yeah, no, I see where you’re coming from, and to concede some things now that I’ve been too hardcore to admit—so, as I said earlier, I am somewhat of a loose fan of the way the civil law deals with this enclosed estate issue. I think it’s a practical, reasonable way, and again, even the law—this is a positive, normal, modern law—they say that if you allow yourself to be enclosed, you can’t complain, but if other people enclose you, then you have to have a right of way to get outside. To me, that’s reasonable, and I think it’s reasonable as a libertarian as well, for many reasons, one of which is, first of all, this wouldn’t be a real problem. You could always just buy access from someone. But in the end, the whole purpose of property rights is to come up with a system where we can live together without conflict. But if you do trap someone in their own property, you’re gonna have a fight at some point. So, we need to have a resolution to this, and what’s the most reasonable resolution? Okay, some kind of right of way. But knowing this, I think people would find ways around it, or they wouldn’t get trapped. This would be a very, very rare thing. Again, this is not a problem of capitalism; it’s a problem of the fact that we live together in a world of scarce resources where this is possible. This problem could happen in socialism, and then the solution would be the dictator tells you what to do. So, this is, again, my fallback when people point out, like, “Oh, what if you’re two guys on a desert island, and you’re going to starve? How does capitalism help you then?” Or, if you’re three guys on a boat, and there’s only enough food for two? Well, okay, yeah, capitalism won’t solve that problem, but socialism won’t either because sometimes tragedy is possible. Failure is possible in human life. So, I don’t see these as big reasons to oppose, generally, the idea of Lockean homesteading and contract as the most reasonable ways to decide what property rights are. To me, that’s the fundamental question. If you can say, “Oh, I can dream up a scenario where there’s a figure-eight loop, which looks like infinity on one side, looks like a figure eight the other way, and then people couldn’t cross from here to here, and there’s Moldova here, and there’s an interior country here”—okay, you can dream up scenarios, but the purpose of political rights and theory and law is to solve real-world conflicts and problems between people that can practically actually help them do it. That’s what the private law has done, and the private law has come up with, okay, in the civil law—I’m not sure with the common law, I’m sure the common law has something similar—but if you enclose an estate, people have a right of way to get to the local road. Now, that whole solution assumes a state because they’re assuming a state road. So, all these solutions come about with judges in a quasi-state system, and they’re taking for granted certain state institutions, like roads and things like that. Okay, so that’s the solution they came up with. What would they have come up with in a totally private situation? I don’t know—maybe something similar, maybe something different. I don’t know. But the fact that we haven’t run the experiment yet, because we haven’t had a free world yet, and all we know is what people have done before in a quasi-private world, and we can only draw our lessons from that. I don’t see how that’s a criticism of a free society and the goals that we all favor as libertarians. Does that make sense, and do you agree with that?

The Right-of-Way Issue

Matt Sands (48:06): It does make sense, and I do agree with it. To clarify my own position, I don’t think anything I’m saying is an argument against a free society or an argument against property rights or anything like that. I’m not looking to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Nothing I’m saying, in my view at least, from my perspective, compromises or is an argument against Lockean homesteading and property rights. For me, it’s not. Also, sorry, I’m a bit all over the place; I’ve got so many points I want to make. One of the things I really want to pick up on is the right-of-way issue. Although I do agree with you that this kind of idea of saying, “Okay, well, if you were enclosed, the state saying, ‘Okay, well, then someone’s got to provide an easement so you can access this thing,'” and all the rest of it—although that does sound relatively reasonable, the thing that bothers me about it is it’s not libertarian. I actually think there’s a libertarian answer that’s better than that. The better answer I have is, say, take you back to the scenario where I’m the property owner that’s trapped in the middle of this donut, but it’s different lots of different property owners that make up this donut.

Stephan Kinsella (49:27): Wait, wait, wait, can we just—I want to clarify something. There’s two issues, apparently. One is the issue that Walter Block talks about, which is a donut that encloses unowned property, so no one’s trapped there; it’s just that they’re prevented from crossing your property to homestead. That’s one issue. The other issue is if you are actually in the middle of that, and you’re now trapped. I assume you’re talking about the second issue right now.

Matt Sands (50:03): Yeah, I’m talking about the second issue, mainly because I think it illustrates my side a bit better, so I’m cheating a little bit. Imagine I’m the property owner, and I’m the one that’s about to be trapped in the middle of this giant circle of this donut of properties, but it’s not one property owner; it’s different property owners. Say you’re one of them—say you’re one of the many property owners that lives in what eventually becomes the circle around me. It’s not—you’re the last one that—99% of the guys get to homestead, but then the final guy, he can’t now really homestead his property completely because now he has to have a right of way. He’s the guy that’s blocking.

Stephan Kinsella (50:54): Just to put a bow on it before you tell me what’s wrong with this—so, yeah, basically, what I’m saying is that last guy, the one who’s closing the circle, he’s the one who’s violating because he’s the one who’s imprisoning you. Now, my problem with the state solution about property owners being given easements is, I would say that, for example, even though he’s the violator, let’s say he goes ahead and does that and closes that circle, so now I’m trapped, and I’m not just trapped by his property, I’m trapped by lots of people’s property, including you. I can’t come to you and say, “Right, you’ve got to give me an easement,” and I don’t think it would be right for a government to say, “Stephan, you’ve got to give Matt an easement because he needs to get to so-and-so, and now he’s trapped.” Because you didn’t trap me; this final property owner did, who closed the circle. Rather than saying even that he’s got to provide an easement, I’m actually saying he was never allowed to build that property there in the first place because he was never allowed to trap me in the first place.

Easement

Stephan Kinsella (51:54): Or you’re saying he could build it subject to an easement, is what you’re saying.

Matt Sands (52:00): Well, he could build it subject to the right of the person—the enclosed person—to cross.

Stephan Kinsella (52:07): Yeah, yeah, but basically, the fundamental point I’m trying to make is that it’s not about—

Matt Sands (52:13): It’s not about—

Stephan Kinsella (52:19): Wait, wait, hold on, hold on. So, we can imagine two scenarios. Let’s just—I wish we were both AI, so we can imagine a circle which is like 99% closed, right? A big “C.” The guy in the middle sees this “C” forming around him over centuries, and he’s just like, “Oh, well, I guess I still have a way out.” So, the final piece of property—it’s either homesteaded because it’s unowned, or it’s owned by someone else, and they just sell it. So, there’s only two ways we can imagine some new owner coming to own this little final—this final link in the chain, this final gap in the fence. So, you could imagine, if it’s by contract, then the person who owns it, you could say he has to sell it but subject to the condition that the new buyer knows that he can use it, but he can’t block egress from the interior people. Or, if you homestead it, if it’s unowned, which is hard to imagine, you homestead it subject to, again, this requirement. So, basically, people come to own this thing subject to a right of way or an easement. To my mind, as a lawyer, this is not confounding because—and this is where I sympathize, in a way, with the left because, when they oppose what they call the enclosure movement in Britain, or they say ownership is theft or property is theft, part of what they’re getting at is that—and, by the way, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in his paper in my journal, Libertarian Papers, talks about this: you can have distributed property rights or collective property rights or partial property rights. So, you could have, like, a town that is a little community of people, and they have access to a river, and they have a little path between the buildings, but they haven’t totally homesteaded it yet where they own the path or the ground, but they’ve established a right of way, which is a type of partial property right, you know, the way to get to the river or the way to get between the streets. So, if someone paves a street, they want to make a business or whatever, they can do that, but they have to do it subject to the existing, the pre-existing property rights, which might have been partial. They might have been rights of way; that might have been what we call easements or usufruct in the law. They’re just—all property rights are usage rights of scarce resources, and you could describe them legally in different ways. They could be absolute, fee simple, allodial, you can call it, or it could be a right of way or an easement or a usufruct, something like that, which is temporary or partial. This is what results when people have contracts with each other. Like, if two neighboring landowners have a big tract of property, and they have a road there nearby, and they want to have a driveway, instead of having two driveways, they might say, “Let’s just have a driveway right down the middle of our property lines to save money and to save property, save acreage, real area.” Let’s just have an agreement. So, they agree to have a co-ownership agreement. So, who owns this? Let’s say there’s a driveway between tracts A and B, right, between the middle or on one side or the other—it doesn’t matter. They have an agreement between the two owners that each one can use the driveway, and that’s fine because you’re not parking cars on the driveway; you’re just doing it occasionally, so you can both use this one strip of land easily. Who owns it? Well, the contract between them, to the rest of the world, A and B as a conjoined unit are the owner. That’s all they know, is that A and B are the owner, which means that for C or D or E or F to get the right to use this driveway, they’ve got to get the permission of A and B. Which one, they don’t know. The agreement between A and B is a private contractual agreement that specifies which one gets the consent to others using it and when they can use it themselves—on Tuesdays or Wednesdays or whatever. To me, this is just the nuances of the clever ways people can use their contractual and property rights for resources to come up with ways to use them right. So, a right of way, to me, is not surprising. I think the problem is you have libertarians who are not familiar with the nuances of the law, and so they think in these things—they use this term “allodial,” which is a little crankish—and they think it’s either A or B, it’s either all or nothing. If I sell you a car, then I cannot control how you use the car; that’s it. If I can control how you use this car, or if I lease you an apartment, and I can prevent you from smoking weed in this apartment, then you don’t really own this apartment. It’s like, okay, that’s fine, but still, people can have complex contractual arrangements about how they divide up the usage rights of these scarce resources. I see no problem with this as a libertarian, none, and as a lawyer.

Matt Sands (58:09): I don’t see a problem with that either, and I can see that being probably the more likely way people negotiate, particularly with local property owners and stuff like that. Just to go back to the big “C” that’s about to become a big circle around my property, let’s say, for example, the “C” hasn’t closed yet; it’s still a “C.” So, I can go out the gap of the “C,” but let’s say that I like to go somewhere that’s on the other side of the opening in this big circle, and it would be more convenient for me if there was some kind of easement or passage on that side. That’s when these kinds of negotiations with property owners would really kick in, you know, for me.

Stephan Kinsella (58:53): I agree with that, but think about this for a second. We have to be careful about not being circular in our reasoning. For example, if you live in a community where the law is this as opposed to that, and you know that you’re screwed if people encircle you except for the last segment, if you know that’s the law, then you’re going to negotiate that way, taking that into account. On the other hand, if the law was different, you would negotiate in a different way. Like, if you knew that, okay, well, when the last guy encloses me, he’s not the guy at fault; now the law says that I can choose the most convenient route to the nearest public road, even if that’s not the last guy—if it’s the guy to the south of me instead of to the east of me or whatever. If you know that’s what the law is, then you will ordinate your affairs accordingly during the development of all this stuff. But you can’t, when we talk normatively about what the law ought to be, we have to be careful about not building it upon what happened to happen already, because what happened to happen will factor into people’s predictions. Then the second question is, as a libertarian, what’s the role of a libertarian thinker? Is it to predict and map out everything ahead of time, or to just map out general principles that we think ought to be followed, and then we have to wait and see what develops from that? That’s the way I look at it. So, I think that we have to be a little bit humble and cautious in, from our armchair, saying, “Well, I think it should be like this.” All I can tell you is that in the civil law, in France and in, say, Louisiana, and probably in the common law, the common law over time has incrementally developed solutions for this actual problem, which is a fairly rare problem, but when it has happened, they developed a solution. If I look at it as a libertarian outsider, yeah, I know that the judges weren’t thinking like libertarians, but they were basically trying to apply the established private law principles, which are roughly compatible with libertarian thinking, and they were trying to do justice, trying to do the fair thing, trying to do the workable thing, and they came up with a solution. So, all we can say is, this is all we know for now; this is how the courts and the legal systems have approached these issues, and it seems to have worked. All we can do is imagine that probably something like that would happen in our utopian libertarian society, either by contract or by custom or something like that. That’s how I look at it. Beyond that, when people say, “I want you to tell me right now exactly how your society, your utopian anarchist”—they’ll say, “What’s your anarchist plan?” It’s like, well, you don’t get anarchy if you want to know what my plan is. We don’t have a plan. Our plan is to abolish the state and to let private interactions reign, and whatever happens, as long as it’s just at every step of the way, that’s what we’re okay with, unless we want to advocate, as private citizens, to say, “Oh, you’re doing this wrong; you need to change it.” So, I guess I’m always comparing—when people criticize anarchy for having the wrong plan or system, I’m like, well, number one, we don’t have a plan, and number two, what’s your plan? What’s socialism’s plan? Why is that better?

Matt Sands (1:03:16): Yeah, I understand. I do agree with a lot of that. For me, what libertarianism and these intellectual discussions that we do are all about, and certainly what my Nations of Sanity Project is about, is drawing those lines. As anarchists, we’re not trying to dictate to people exactly how they negotiate peacefully amongst themselves; all we’re dictating, or all we’re demanding in our principles, is that they do it peacefully, within the realms of ownership, property rights, and the non-aggression principle. There’s a lot of areas where that’s very obvious where the lines are drawn, but there’s certain areas, like this, where we have these discussions and debates because I think it is important. Even though a lot of these scenarios are very edge cases and obscure and extreme, they often tie to a principle that does connect to something more real. So, the donut homesteading might be more fringe and unusual and unlikely, but the borders, blocking off peninsulas, that sort of stuff, isn’t so unusual; it’s even a real-world situation discussion, and it’s something that you can also picture happening in a private property society. For my example, even though the whole thing about saying, “Well, you’ve got to provide an easement sometimes to people to get to different places”—although that does come across as quite a reasonable solution, I remember when we were having our email back-and-forth, and I was kind of saying, you know, you don’t have the right to deny people access. One of the things—this isn’t verbatim—but one of the things you kind of said to me was, “Well, why do I have to let someone across my property?” And my point is, that’s exactly right; you don’t. That’s my point: under libertarian principles, you shouldn’t have to let somebody across your property. If we go back to this “C,” and you’re a part of this “C,” you shouldn’t be forced to make me go through your property.

Stephan Kinsella (1:05:22): Right, right, right, right. So, let’s assume, with our previous discussion from this, what I was trying to get at was, you need to identify exactly why what I did was a violation of someone’s rights. That’s all I was trying to say. So, let’s give an example. If you say that if I enclose my estate completely with no exceptions, now I’m violating someone’s rights, which is effectively what you have to say to argue that by enclosing off the guy in the middle from either homesteading the middle or from escaping the middle—whichever one it is—there’s two separate arguments. I’m violating his right; then you have to basically make some argument, like there’s a duty or something like that. I think the better case would be the reasonable case, which would be, you always homestead property or acquire property or use property or have property rights in a given area in a contextual way, which means there’s always a history and a background context. So, I think that if this was a realistic possibility in a given community, then traditions and customs would develop, which means that when I take this property, I know that I’m taking it subject to certain rights of way. So, in a way, I’m being sympathetic to the lefties who are opposed to the enclosure movement or to a property right that prevents people from crossing this unowned field they used to cross or from hunting in it or whatever. That’s why, by the way, in some European countries, like in Italy and stuff, they still have these sort of traditional rights, like even if you own a thousand-acre estate, you can’t stop hunters from hunting on it because they had that right before. I think there’s something to that, but to me, that’s not a limitation on property rights; it’s respect for property rights, and it’s a recognition of the nuances and the complicated ways you can have property rights. Sometimes, this is why I was a little bit mocking of this allodial idea—this allodialism idea is this idea that I own it 100% to the end of the Earth, to the core of the Earth, or whatever. It’s like, well, most property rights, you take it with certain conditions. If I buy some property from you, but you, as the seller, retain the right to come visit it once a year to see your old home, then you take it with that condition. I think that sometimes we have to homestead or contractually acquire resources subject to certain usage rights that have been acquired somehow by other people. I’m completely sympathetic to that notion. Once you take that into account, you can see a little sympathy for this idea that, yeah, if I encircle your estate, and I’m the last guy, okay, maybe I have a special duty, or maybe someone else on the ring does—I don’t know. By the way, I don’t know—it doesn’t have to be bagels or donuts; it could be any weird shape, as we mentioned. The point is, these are practical issues that get worked out. I think there’s also something to—I don’t want to be—I mean, you mentioned the word “voluntarism”—there’s something to mutualism, even though I think there’s a leftist aspect to it, which I think is misguided, but there’s something to the mutuality of property rights. Property rights are normative; they’re not causally things that you have, like this godly ability to enforce. You have to rely upon your neighbors to mutually recognize each other’s property rights, and if you push it too far in a certain condition, in a certain reality, no one’s going to cooperate with you. At one end, they might just simply not be willing to help you; they’re going to say, “If you’re going to sue everyone every day in this jury system, we’re not going to show up and be jurors, and screw you, you’re wasting our time.” At the other end, they might actually say, “That’s it, we’re not even going to respect your rights at all because you pushed it too far.” There’s a certain aspect of mutualism that goes along with normativity, I think. So, I do believe that when a conflict reaches epic proportions, if people want to avoid outright war and physical fighting, they need to find a compromise. I do believe there should be a norm of the obligation to try to compromise, which, again, is a heavy, sophisticated, deep legal notion, and it complicates things. If you’re just some libertarian absolutist who says, “I own this,” you’re not going to like this because you want an answer to the question, but you can’t always deduce answers, and you can’t always ask a libertarian scholar from their armchair, “Tell me what the fuck the answer will be in your system,” because we’re not dictators, we’re not even judges. We’re just people with opinions who try to think about the way that people living together in a peaceful way, trying to do the fair thing and the just thing, what they would do, what they should do. That’s about all we can do. Of course, we have a lot of economic knowledge now and knowledge about politics and the state and history that we can draw to bear, but in the end, we have to let people play their parts and work things out as best they can, which is why I think that these donut problems are not the real problem of human life. I mean, if that was the last problem that we had, I’d be happy.

Stephan Kinsella (1:12:12): So, we need to wind this up in a second, but the reason this all came up is because I was using some of these arguments to talk about how, well, I’m not anti-open borders, but given that—let’s take the American example—given the federal government literally, legally owns so much property, including, say, the roads, then the question is, does it violate the rights of outsiders for the federal government to prevent them from using the roads? If you say no, then you can have immigration policy because if the federal government has the right, in effect, to prevent outsiders from using the federal roads, then you could make immigration policy out of that. You see what I mean? What about all the unowned land that they could travel across? Well, they have to get to it. I’m just making a very narrow claim: the federal roads and public facilities. But I think I would argue, as a libertarian, the federal government has no right to restrict outsiders from accessing the interior, but they don’t have to let them use the public roads to get there. So, that means that, as a matter of practicality, it’s going to be a minor problem. I could see an argument, as I mentioned in my email to you, I guess I could see an argument that, say, American citizens have primacy of—I mean, let’s imagine tomorrow the federal government is winding down, and they’re going to have an auction. So, they sell the Rocky Mountains and all the public lands in Alaska and everywhere else, and they make, you know, $75 trillion. Who gets the money? I mean, I would say the American citizens who paid taxes have the primary claim, but you could make an argument that, you know, people that we bombed in Iraq have a claim. At this point, it gets to be ridiculous. My single point is that I think you could make an argument that American citizens and taxpayers—and I hate to make this American; we could make it British or something like that—but in the U.S., I think that the natural owners of the American roads are the taxpayers. The legal owner is the federal government, but outsiders are not owners at all. So, if they’re denied access to the roads, then it doesn’t violate their rights. Now, if 95% of American citizen taxpayers want the road used to allow immigrants to come in, I would say it violates the rights of the citizens because the property that they own is not being used the way they want it to be used. But I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think that the primary harm being done to the American taxpayer who has a natural claim on the roads is that they’re not being used to allow illegal immigrants to come and use them. I think it’s that the roads are being poorly managed and not being upkept, and there’s money wasted on whatever. So, I just think that’s a weak argument. That’s sort of my libertarian argument about the open borders debate. I’m simply saying that if the federal government blocks outsiders from using federal roads, which would reduce immigration, it doesn’t violate those outsiders’ rights. Now, you could argue that it violates the rights of citizens and employers here in America who want to invite them to their property, which is why I think that they should be allowed to invite them, which is why Hoppe’s solution is, okay, just let anyone invite someone as long as they’re willing to pay their—I don’t know—pay their upkeep instead of them being able to go on welfare. To me, that’s a reasonable—it would be an improvement. It’s not libertarian anarchist, but it would be a step towards reducing one of the harms of immigration policy, which is that it prevents people from inviting people that they want to invite. It would also reduce the other problem, which he calls the first one, forced inclusion, the second one, forced integration—like, the fact that in the U.S., because of anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action and public facilities and welfare and voting rights and all this stuff, once you allow someone in, they’re an active human with different legal rights in the system. If you make them have a sponsor, that reduces that problem too. To me, that would be a reasonable solution, and the fact that someone who comes up with a reasonable solution that reduces both of the fundamental problems of immigration into a social democratic welfare state, and they’re called a racist and a bigot and all this—it’s to me, it’s insane. It’s a reasonable solution, and by the way, it’s not his—you know, he’s an anarchist, like, abolish the state, and then this goes away. The entire concept of immigration disappears in a political context if you get rid of the state. But as long as you have a state, whatever you do, you’re going to screw someone. That’s kind of how I look at it, and what makes me look at it without as much angst is the fact that, well, if you don’t let them use public property of the government, I’m not saying that’s what I prefer, but what I’m saying is, that’s not the travesty of our time. If I’m not invited to go to Japan and use their public property, I have zero claim on Japanese property on that island; it doesn’t really violate my rights. Do you follow me? That’s sort of how I look at it.

Matt Sands (1:19:09): I suppose, from my point of view, it’s the difference between being obliged to help somebody get somewhere and being obliged to not prevent them from getting somewhere. So, like with the whole, “We don’t have to let them use our roads,” and all that would very much discourage a lot of immigration because it’s going to be harder for them to get across, all the rest of it. But that’s not where the violation of libertarian principles comes in, in my mind, when it comes to immigration enforcement. It’s more about when people talk about building a big wall to prevent people—you know, that’s when you actually stop. This is to go back to that “C” example and the donut thing; that’s where it ties to that. Because it’s like the difference between me saying to you, who lives on one part of the “C,” who didn’t imprison me—I’m not saying the reason why I’m saying that no one should have a right to say to you, “You’ve got to give them an easement, you’ve got to give them a pass,” because they’re blocked in, because you didn’t block them in. So, you’ve got no—there’s no positive obligation on you. It’s that more negative obligation: just don’t imprison me. It’s the last person who closed the “C”—that’s—so, for me, it’s like, I don’t object to everything you said about denying people access to the property that was rightfully owned by the taxpayers and all the rest of it; that’s all fine and well. But when we start building walls and violently preventing people from entering the entire region, including areas that would be unowned, you know, if we’re going to do the rightful ownership thing, that’s when I feel like we’re violating libertarian principles. Although I do understand all of the externalities when people say, “Well, yeah, but what about all these other violations that come with immigration?” I fully accept that point, but my argument to that is, well, yeah, but all of those externalities, the libertarian solution is to fix those, much in the way that you alluded to with your whole, “Don’t let them use public property,” and a lot of these problems go away because they’re not coming over here. Certainly, I mean, it’s different in America, but we have an immigration problem here in England as well. I say to people, “Look, they’re not coming over here for the weather; they’re coming over here for the free stuff.” If we had any control over our government to the point that we could make them do an immigration policy that we would want to stop them coming over, then we would have that same level of control to get rid of these externalities and stop them giving them all the free stuff in the first place. So, from my point of view, there’s two issues I have. One is my problem with a lot of the kind of—I’m not using it derogatory—but statists, for want of a better word, is there’s this potentially libertarian-violating kind of action that they’re advocating at the expense of actual libertarian solutions that are just as easily obtainable—both arguably unrealistic, but no more than the other, you know. But one’s a libertarian solution. The other thing as well, if you fix those externalities, the immigration problems go away, and a lot of other problems that those externalities cause, even without immigration, go away. Whereas, if you fix immigration, which, if you did it violently, would likely be an anti-libertarian thing, but also all those other externalities are still a problem, even within your domestic populace. You know, like the welfare—all these other, you know, immigration makes them worse, I’ll grant you that. But that’s my—that’s those are my kind of two points. One is, I feel like we’ve got a libertarian solution to a problem that’s being ignored for the sake of a kind of statist one or an anti-libertarian one. Then the other issue is, I think there’s something that’s getting lost in the argument because, like I said, I agree with you, and I actually think that’s the—that’s a libertarian solution: don’t let them use the property, don’t let them have all the welfare, don’t let them—you know, those are the libertarian solutions to the immigration problem. There’s also that issue of, like, let’s not get things confused; it’s not about saying we have to invite these people in, we have to give them our roads to drive on, or fly them over on our planes on our dollar and all the rest of it. No, no, no, we’re saying we don’t get to stop them; we don’t get to physically stop them because we don’t have the right to do that. We can prevent them from using our stuff, but we don’t get to prevent them from, say, let’s just, for example, say they want to trek across and visit the Grand Canyon from outside. What right do we have to stop them from doing that? That’s where my issue is.

Stephan Kinsella (1:23:33): I agree. I think if we had a hypothetical where Ecuadorians were somehow hiring charter planes and parachuting down into the Rocky Mountains, and the American military was shooting them down in the air, I would completely oppose that. I think the real solution is the obvious solution, right? The obvious solution is to be—well, it’s anarchy or at least minarchy and have a more reasonable situation, at least in America, because we’re not a homogeneous country like Japan or Switzerland or something, which has different considerations. If we had a total free market and no welfare and no automatic birthright citizenship, voting rights, and no affirmative action and no anti-discrimination laws, then the only argument against immigration would be an economic one, which would be flawed, right? Which would be, “Oh, you’re stealing our jobs,” which libertarians think is not the argument to use against immigration. Or it would be racist or something like that, which, again, is not what I think we ought to do. I mean, I think diversity is good, and humans are all humans, and blah, blah, blah. So, I think immigration would actually be a good thing, and I actually think, in America’s case, immigration is still a good thing on balance, although I’m not sure that’s the case in every country, given the welfare states and all that. We’re a unique case; I think it’s still a good thing. But, you know, what I would think would be a more sensible policy would be to radically expand legal immigration by quality and by sponsorships or whatever and to have less illegal immigration. I think that would make more sense. But this is, again, the statist situation, right? So, the point is, given that you have the state, it’s just—it’s a difficult problem because I’m actually concerned about—well, you have so many competing issues. Many countries in the world, we have a declining world population, right, for the first time ever. So, we have Ponzi schemes in almost every major country with our social security and our welfare systems. I mean, they count on expanding young people to pay the debts of the old people because it’s just not sustainable. These countries are all facing a big problem soon, and unless we increase fertility somehow, which I don’t think is happening in most countries, you have to have immigration to make this welfare state Ponzi scheme sustainable. That’s not the most ringing endorsement for immigration, but you know what I mean—it’s the reality. I guess my argument is simply, I simply tried to point out that the people that are the libertarians that pretend to be open borders and that are so hostile to anyone who points out real-world problems—I mean, if you look at my article, the only article I wrote on this, I called it something like, “A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Open Borders,” but I didn’t say that it was my argument or that I agreed with it. I was just pointing out that if you agree that there’s public property, which is not unowned—so, again, this gets back to the theoretical thing—a lot of libertarians will make this argument that, “Oh, if it’s government property, it’s unowned,” which is why a bum can come into a library or to a public school. Early on in our talk, I said, well, I think there’s a distinction between owned property and unowned property. The Rocky Mountains are unowned, let’s say, or parts of Alaska, whatever. But there’s lots of land that’s owned, but then the question is, then you have to get nuanced. The government is the legal owner, but we libertarians don’t think all law is just, so it doesn’t mean just because the government’s the legal owner that they’re the natural owner or the rightful owner. So, you have to make these distinctions, and I was simply making the point that I’m not taking a side either way. I can’t side with the INS, the federal government using force to stop these innocent people. I mean, if I had to take a side of a person, I would take the side of the innocent immigrant because they have committed no aggression, but the other guy is an agent of the state. I’m simply saying, if they’re prevented from using a public road in America that they have no ownership claim to, that in and of itself doesn’t violate their rights. That was my only narrow claim, and that if that was put into place, that would, as a matter of fact, be one way to reduce what we see now as the flow of illegal immigration. That was my only point. But to me, the interesting issue is what’s public property, what’s unowned property, who the natural owners are, who are the claimants to this property. To me, that’s the interesting issue.

Matt Sands (1:29:41): No, I agree. I suppose the only thing I would sort of tack onto that is that, like, what you’re saying about—oh, God, I’ve lost my train of thought now. My mind’s done a little—sorry, could you just repeat the last bit you said because it will help me get back in my head again?