StephanKinsella.com

From his post Against Libertarian Nostalgia (linked in Preference Falsification: A Case Study):

I’m sure that David [Boaz] would be happy to add genocide against American Indians to the list of historical crimes that libertarians ought never forget.  But I wonder whether he’d join me in condemning the American Revolution itself as yet another unjust war that yielded nationalist – not libertarian – fruit.

Caplan is right, as I noted in various posts linked in Boaz on Hornberger and Slavery, such as Rockwell on Hoppe on the Constitution as Expansion of Government Power, The Declaration and Conscription, Revising the American Revolution, The Murdering, Thieving, Enslaving, Unlibertarian Continental Army, Happy We-Should-Restore-The-Monarchy-And-Rejoin-Britain Day!, Jeff Hummel’s “The Constitution as a Counter-Revolution”.

My reply to Roman Pearah’s blogpost:

You have to refer to property rights and force to define aggression. “using someone as a means” won’t cut it. In fact it’s perfectly okay to use people as means: see my discussion in Causation and Aggression–the section “COMPLICATING THE PICTURE: CAUSATION, COOPERATION, AND HUMAN MEANS” on p. 101.

Aggression is simply the unconsented to (or uninvited) change in the physical integrity (or use, control or possession) of another person’s body or property–as Hoppe puts it, it’s aggression if someone “uninvitedly invades or changes the physical integrity of another person’s body and puts this body to a use that is not to this very person’s own liking”. I elaborate on this in What Libertarianism Is, particularly notes 9 and 11. So of course what aggression is depends on what property rights there are. So what makes libertarianism unique is our unique view of aggression, which is unique just because of our unique property assignment rules. As I wrote in the article noted above, “Protection of and respect for property rights is thus not unique to libertarianism. What is distinctive about libertarianism is its particular property assignment rules: its view concerning who is the owner of each contestable resource, and how to determine this.”

And this, I submit, is the Lockean view of homesteading, more or less. This is precisely why I object when left-libertarians veer from this with either ambiguous, vague, non-rigorous standards as you are doing here with this “means” talk; or when they adopt non-Lockean rules like the mutualist occupancy rules or crankish Georgist-related rules.

Yet another thing Rand was good on. No offense quasi-mystical/collectivist types who “take pride in” belonging to ethnic, religious etc. groups like atavistic cavemen.

Racism

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination. [continue reading…]

Fundamentalist Christians are often “young earthers” who believe the Bible is literally true often think the earth and human history is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old–you get this by counting enumerated generations in the bible back to Adam and Eve. This leads to ridiculous theories about dinosaurs living contemporaneously with man, skepticism of carbon-dating techniques, etc.

Well now there’s yet another in a long line of reports that the remains of Noah’s Ark has finally been found. Support for the claims? “They claim carbon dating proves the relics are 4,800 years old — around the same time the ark was said to be afloat.” Uh oh! What’s a fundamentalist to do? Reject carbon dating, or accept it?

Related:

• Switzerland, Immigration, Hoppe, Raico, Callahan
• See links at On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession, Immigration, Public Roads, and the Bum in the Library
• A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders, LewRockwell.com, September 1, 2005
• I’m Pro-Immigration and Pro-Open Borders
• Switzerland, Immigration, Hoppe, Raico, Callahan
• Reply to Neverfox on immigration: “Whatever Mileage We Put On, We’ll Take Off”
• Boudreaux on Hoppe on Immigration ¹
• (KOL258 | Liberty Forum Debate vs. Daniel Garza: Immigration Reform: Open Borders or Build the Wall?), by Stephan Kinsella, Daniel Garza, and Jeremy Kaufman, New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Manchester, NH (Feb. 7, 2019)
• Kinsella on Anarchy Time Discussing Immigration
• Discussion with Bieser on Immigration

***

Update and Clarification: I now believe my title here is misleading. I am anti-INS, but I do not believe my position can be described as “open borders,” as most libertarians seem to mean when they use that term. Let me elaborate. See my recent post On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession, Immigration, Public Roads, and the Bum in the Library, which fleshes out my views here. I reject the framing by “open borders” libertarians because I believe it is either from the pro-state minarchist side, or from the anarchist side based on a mistake about the status of state-owned property. Given the existence of the state and its ownership of “public property,” especially in a modern, democratic welfare state, there is really no solution. Whatever policy the state adopts will violate rights, since there is no way to use the property legally owned by the state but rightfully owned by the citizens that is objectively optimal. Rights of citizens will be violated either by forced exclusion or by forced integration and related harms.

In an ideal society there would be no state and no public property, and, as Hoppe points out, really no such thing as “immigration” since there would be no citizenship or immigration controls by a state. Instead, there would be privately owned property, and perhaps other property that is unowned since it has yet to be appropriated by anyone. In such a world, anyone is free to homestead unowned land, but for privately owned, already-appropriated land, no outsider can enter or use that land without the owner’s consent.

In today’s world, non-owners, including legal (and illegal) immigrants, have various rights to use or affect owned land because of anti-discrimination and related laws and because of public roads that make exclusion of outsiders by existing owners from their homes or businesses difficult or impossible, i.e. forced integration. In my view, ² the state controls two types of property: state-owned property that is rightfully owned by taxpayers and others who paid for it via taxes, and unowned property such as most of the federal public lands, including about 245 million acres of surface land and 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estate across the U.S., administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

The state should “privatize” all of this by returning the owned property to the relevant taxpayers, and should permit anyone to homestead the unowned land (perhaps citizens would have the first right to homestead since returning owned state land to them will not fully compensate them for past harms, but this is a detail).

In the meantime, the state ought to set rules for the use of state owned resources to provide as much in-kind restitution to the citizen-taxpayers as possible. This would mean the right of citizens to use state roads, for example, and imposing normal rules for use of the roads like speed limits and so on, to make the roads actually useful to the citizens. Similar rules for other resources like state owned libraries, and so on. Because foreigners have no claim on these resources it does not violate their rights for the state to deny them access to state roads. If the state did not grant permission to every outsider to use state roads, this would not violate their rights. However, it would reduce the amount of harm done to citizens in two ways: (a) it would provide them some valuable service (transportation services) and (b) it would reduce to some extent the forced integration otherwise caused by immigration.

However, in some cases—namely, where a given resident wants to invite an outsider to his home or business, for employment, say, or to marry someone, or to have a relative or friend come live with them—a state rule banning all non-citizens from using the roads would amount to forced exclusion and thus violate the rights of some citizens (not the outsiders, though). Thus, the state ought to permit use of the roads by an outsider who has such an invitation from a citizen. This policy would increase the absolute numbers of immigration, reduce the amount of forced exclusion caused by state ownership of public property, and also reduce the amount of forced integration.

Is this likely? No. As Hoppe explains:

What should one hope for and advocate as the relatively correct immigration policy, however, as long as the democratic central state is still in place and successfully arrogates the power to determine a uniform national immigration policy? The best one may hope for, even if it goes against the “nature” of a democracy and thus is not very likely to happen, is that the democratic rulers act as if they were the personal owners of the country and as if they had to decide who to include and who to exclude from their own personal property (into their very own houses). This means following a policy of utmost discrimination: of strict discrimination in favor of the human qualities of skill, character, and cultural compatibility. [Hoppe, Democracy, p. 148]

Still, I would argue it would be a big improvement in a world of second-bests.

The open borders libertarians maintain state property is unowned, because it is illegitimate. This is to make the mistake of legal positivism, as I mentioned in my recent post On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession, Immigration, Public Roads, and the Bum in the Library. Because they make this mistake, they think any rules the state sets on public property are illegitimate, and thus that no rules, including those that discriminate between citizens and outsiders, is legitimate. But there is no basis for this, as I explain there; and it would increase the harm already being done to citizens by reducing the amount of in-kind restitution that is provided when the state sets more reasonable rules in line with the preferences of the rightful owners.

This does not make me opposed to immigration, in my view, but the open borders guys will see it differently.

***

And though I do not deny that mass immigration is a problem, I simply cannot take the side of the federal government goons or ICE or INS. As I wrote previously:

“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.” ³

Tyrell: So going to a libertarian issue that I have some issues thinking about because there’s just so many different things to consider—it’s the open versus closed borders. I used to be quite a firm closed borders libertarian but then I’ve just gotten more doubt into that position. So what are your exact thoughts on it?

Kinsella: Ideally I’m an anarcho-capitalist or an anarchist. So I think the state should be abolished and in such a world the concept of citizenship and even immigration would just evaporate. There would just be private property and rules related to that. In today’s world I think Hoppe’s analysis is roughly right. What Hoppe identified is that especially in today’s world where there’s no monarchy anymore and there’s mostly democracies and large powerful democracies at that which have led to welfare states and to all kinds of egalitarian rules like anti-discrimination law and welfare and voting rights and all this kind of stuff—in such a world whatever the state’s immigration policy is, and it will have a policy like to the extent the state exists it will have a policy one way or the other—someone will be harmed by this which is one reason we’re against the state because the state results in a situation where against in a sense we’re all losers and we’re all there’s a war of all against all… we’re all sharing for our piece of the pie since the government forces us to fight for it because they take from us and they only let us get back what we can fight back for all this kind of stuff.

So Hoppe’s kind of paradigm is what he calls forced integration and forced exclusion, which means that if you have a mass immigration into a modern democratic welfare state then this violates the rights of homegrown citizens because the immigrants have the right to vote. They have the right to get welfare. They have the right to use the public roads to move in next to you. They have the right to work in your factories because you can’t exclude them because of anti-discrimination law. All these kinds of things. So it’s called forced integration.

On the other hand if you were to not have open borders you’re preventing some people from entering and at least in a large number of those cases it’s someone that would be invited by a local resident who wants someone to come work for them or to live on their property and they’re not permitted to do that. So that’s called forced exclusion. So that’s the problem there.

So both of these problems exist.

Now let’s take the United States. If the United States had open borders tomorrow I’m afraid it would result in hundreds of millions of people if not billions just moving here and you would lose the character of being American and maybe you’d lose the country at a certain point. So you’d lose liberty. ⁴ Just like if we had a one world government and we had egalitarian policies then the top 10 rich countries would all become impoverished because you’d have to they would go from a GDP per person or an income per person of 50-70,000 per year to like 10.

So that’s why decentralization is always optimal and centralization is always bad which is effectively what immigration is doing. It would basically extending the scope of the state to more people by having a billion people move here. Now they’re covered. It’d be like making the world one state in a sense.

On the other hand as a libertarian I simply detest and despise the federal government of course in the US the central state and I just can’t side with the INS either stopping people from coming. So I have like a dilemma, right?

Now my personal view is like in the US and probably many other countries an obvious not solution but an obvious improvement would be if the US were to simply say anyone can come if they’re invited by an employer or by a property owner. As long as you have a legitimate invitation you can come. That would result in now it’d be better if that could come with limitations like and you can’t get welfare and all that but let’s say whoever invites you has to be kind of responsible for you for some period of time that would limit it—basically it would increase the number of immigration because I think you could at least get 10-20 million people a year in the US if they were invited but that’s way way more than we allow now so it would expand the number of immigrants and therefore it would reduce the amount of forced exclusion that we’re doing, right?

But it would also reduce the amount of forced integration because the people that would come would be more productive. They would be less of them would be on welfare.

So that would be a second best improvement I think would be to move to an invitation system. That’s the only thing I can think of that would be an improvement in liberty for immigrants, citizens, and libertarians that live in the country.

Tyrell: So in Australia we have an election coming up and our Libertarian Party has kind of put out like a similar Hoppe-like invite-y.

Kinsella: Oh really? I didn’t know that.

Tyrell: Yeah it’s not completely Hoppe. It’s like an in between from like the current state to Hoppe. I forget the exact details but it’s quite interesting.

Kinsella: I mean there are some countries that need immigration and you can see them doing better. I mean the US is pretty good at assimilating people. Probably Australia and some other countries they need immigration and they’re good at assimilating it. Now there are some other countries you can imagine Liechtenstein or Switzerland or Japan. ⁵ Now they might although Japan might need immigration because of their plummeting birth rates but if you just open the doors in Japan or Switzerland or Liechtenstein you might the countries might be like you might no longer have Japan you know it wouldn’t be Japanese anymore after a certain point in time and I don’t think those costs are negligible. It’s everything’s a difficult problem when you have collectivism and tribalism and statism all mixed in together.

Tyrell: Yeah it is. ⁶

It’s hard for an ancap to support the INS, or any other federal goonds. OTOH it’s hard to support mass subsidized immigration either. Hoppe himself sees the heart of the problem is one caused by state democracy, welfare, and intervention: if the state prevents a citizen from inviting some outsiders, that violates his rights; it is what Hoppe calls forced exclusion. He specifically criticizes state immigration policy when it violates the rights of its citizens to invite whoever they want to their property. OTOH if the state subsidizes mass immigration and forces people to support and associate with and employ and give voting rights to these outsiders by means of antidiscrimination laws, welfare, and public roads and transportation and other state owned public property and facilities, this violates the rights of citizens by way of forced integration. Both forced exclusion and forced integration violate property rights of the citizens, according to Hoppe. Hoppe’s solution–the “first best”–is to abolish the state so that neither forced exclusion nor forced integration occur. Barring that, his “second best” solution as to a reasonable way to minimize both, to reduce the rights violations from either forced exclusion or forced integration, is to deny outsiders the use of public resources owned by citizens (because given welfare and other legal rights, they will have access to this as soon as they are permitted access) unless they are invited by a citizen who takes responsibility for them. By prohibiting them from accessing public resources (without an invitation) you reduce forced integration and related costs and rights violations; by permitting someone who is invited by a citizen, you reduce the forced exclusion problem (and by making the invitee-citizen responsible, you further reduce the forced integration problem since presumably there is a lower chance the immigrant will be a criminal or on the dole, since a citizen has to vouch for and to some degree even be responsible him). Until we abolish the welfare state, voting, and the state itself, you can see why his solution has an appeal to some libertarians: it’s an attempt to reduce both types of rights violations perpetrated by the state: forced exclusion, and forced integration/mass-subsidized immigration. ⁷

See also KOL258 | Liberty Forum Debate vs. Daniel Garza: Immigration Reform: Open Borders or Build the Wall? (quoted below):

It’s hard to say that any libertarian with a good heart can support the INS.  In the end, if forced to choose, I don’t want to lose liberty in this country.  I don’t want something to happen that will cause us in 10, 20, 30, 40 years to have lost the liberty that we have and the tenuous grasp on it that we have and the potential that we have.

00:14:57

But in the end, we also can’t support the INS.  So I’m left with an uneasy sort of conclusion.  I can never support the INS, the goons of the federal government.  You just can’t do it. “

***

Update: see Open the Borders, End the Housing Glut; also my comment to Michael Barnett’s post Anti-immigration libertarians are treading in dangerous waters, where he linked to my article “A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders”:

Mike, my article was to provide a simple argument against unrestricted immigration. I did not imply that I agreed with it. I was trying to emphasize a few points: that the real owners of public property in (say) the US are the taxpayers, not outsiders; that there is no way for the state to manage the property in a way that satisfies all owners, short of returning it; that if an outsider is prevented from using the public property held by the state but owned by US citizens, this does not violate the rights of the outsiders, any more than if the natural owners were to forbid them use of it. But it’s an argument about second- or third-bests, and one meant to focus on the main point: some private people (victims of the state) are the natural owners of or claimants to the property; the state is the legal owner, but should not be. Ideally it should dissolve itself and return the property to the real owners; but if it does not, the question arises as to what rules it should set if and so long as it does legally control the resource. I sought to tie in some implications of this notion to the immigration issue.

In any case, let me be clear that I completely oppose any state laws or action that restricts immigration.

I’ve also pointed out that I have trouble supporting the criminal Federal Government, via its INS, policing immigration at all. And also, that when would-be immigrants—outsiders, foreigners—are prevented by the federal government from using public property such as roads, their rights are not necessarily violated (though would-be hosts and employers might have a different complaint). ⁸

Immigration Invitations: A Marginal Improvement

Given this, as Hoppe and I agree, the only real solution is to abolish the state—at least large, democratic, modern welfare states. Milton Friedman had a point when he said “You cannot simultaneously have a welfare state and free immigration. I am in favor of free immigration, but not if you have a welfare state.” ⁹

As long as we have the our current large democratic states, one significant improvement would be to change the immigration system so as to permit anyone so long as they are invited or sponsored by an existing citizen or local employer. This would (a) reduce the amount of forced exclusion and also probably greatly increase the (absolute) numbers of (legal) immigration, and also (b) reduce the degree of harm caused by forced integration. (See my various tweets on this in the Appendix I below.)

In order to reduce the effects of forced integration while still reducing the degree of forced exclusion of our current system, the sponsorship or invitation program would have the following features:

• exclusion of the immigrant from all publicly funded welfare
• exclusion of the immigrant from all existing antidiscrimination,  affirmative action, and similar laws and policies
• exclusion of the immigrant from any birthright citizenship policies
• a valid invitation and personal sponsorship by a resident citizen and his assumption of liability for all property damage or crimes by the invitee committed against the person or property of any third party and a requirement for the invitor to carry liability insurance for such guests/invitees. (For more on this, see Hoppe’s comments on what constitutes an “invitation” or “sponsorship” in Appendix II below.)

This would not be an ideal solution—short of an anarchist libertarian society, there is no real solution especially in a modern large, western, rich democratic welfare state. Hoppe and libertarians who oppose open borders do not deny that current government welfare policies violate some citizens’ rights, as in the case of forced exclusion. An invitation system would greatly ameliorate this harm and also expand legal immigration. But the open borders side seems not to want to acknowledge that state control of immigration necessarily leads to some harm, not only forced exclusion, but also forced integration. ¹⁰

00:13:19

If we believe that if Japan or Israel or Switzerland tomorrow lowered their barriers completely, I think we all have an idea that they would be overrun very quickly by lots of outsiders, and things would change very quickly.  And those societies where they’re not libertarian utopias, they are relatively liberal and open societies compared to the bottom half of the world or the past.  So let’s say the Swiss identity or the Japanese identity are the way of life or freedom itself was wiped out within a generation or two because of mass immigration.

00:13:59

Would we be in favor of it even then, even though that was the right thing to do?  I’m not so sure.  The problem as a libertarian is we have to recognize that the federal government in America is the steward of the government behind, in a sense, the greatest nation on the Earth.  But it’s also the greatest, the most evil, powerful government that’s ever existed because it’s parasitical upon the wealth that the free market in this country produces.

00:14:29

It’s hard to say that any libertarian with a good heart can support the INS.  In the end, if forced to choose, I don’t want to lose liberty in this country.  I don’t want something to happen that will cause us in 10, 20, 30, 40 years to have lost the liberty that we have and the tenuous grasp on it that we have and the potential that we have.

00:14:57

But in the end, we also can’t support the INS.  So I’m left with an uneasy sort of conclusion.  I can never support the INS, the goons of the federal government.  You just can’t do it.  On the other hand, you can make a theoretical case, which we maybe can get to if we have time, for how to analyze this situation and how to view that the best second-best policy that we can hope for,  ¹¹ for a state like we have now would be to do something similar to what the effective rulers in a free society would do to try to minimize the harm done to us.  So that would be the policy that I would say they should adopt.  And to be honest, from having read Mr. Garza’s policies on his website, they seem pretty reasonable. ¹²

Update:

An old LRC post:

More on Immigration and Open Borders

Posted by Stephan Kinsella at September 1, 2005 11:54 AM

Re my LRC column “A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders,” I’ve already received many comments, most, surprisingly, positive. One thoughtful reader writes to tell me he is concerned that the argument could be used to justify all sorts of unlibertarian laws. For example, the State could say citizens can only use the roads if they agree to submit to taxation and narcotics prohibitions.

Let me quickly summarize my thesis and then reply to this. My basic idea is that the citizens are the true owners of public property, and should have some say-so over how the state uses that property. Their interests and preferences should be taken into account. This will result in a greater degree of restitution, and thus an overall smaller degree of net harm, to them. Now obviously all their preferences cannot be simultaneously satisfied, but it seems reasonable, other things being equal, for the state to try to use the property in reasonable ways (like a private owner would) so as to result in partial restitution being made the citizens, or as many of them as possible. Obviously a greater degree of restitution (a better use of the property) made to a larger number of citizens is “better” (even from a libertarian standpoint) than a smaller degree of restitution (a more wasteful use of the property) made to fewer citizens. This does not imply there is an “optimal” usage of state property (other than to privatize it) but it does imply some uses are clearly worse than others. And it also implies that not every rule that ends up reducing usage by outsiders (immigrants) is necessary or inherently unlibertarian.

And yes, I share the concerns that this can be abused and it could be used to impose illiberal regulations on us. Gray areas and slippery slopes are a problem, but that is the unavoidable problem accompanying a state-run society. Given such a society, I see no reason we have to throw up our hands and say that any (second-, third-, or fourth-best) rule of property usage is just as good as any other. I threw in a lot of ceteris paribuses in my argument.

Given public ownership of property, which is already an offense, a rights-invasion, is it not libertarian to at least prefer certain public uses (and rules) to others, namely, those rules that don’t further victimize people, and/or that return to them some benefit to partially compensate them for the damage done to them by the public system in the first place?

And is it not sensible then to ask, what would a private owner do? to determine a better public use of property? Sure, this can be limited, and can only go so far, because the state is not a private owner. For example: a private road might not discriminate against outsiders–it might allow immigrants to move on the roads to property of willing participants. But the private road would also charge a fee (which is a way of filtering out some people); and would only take people who had a destination to go to (a willing invitee); and would not be imposing affirmative action and anti-discrimination requirements on citizens, so that its trafficking immigrants would not be a costly action.

And consider this too: whose rights are violated if the state does not permit immigrants onto roads? The immigrant’s rights? How so? This is a resource collectively owned by the citizens of the U.S. Whatever rule “they” adopt, I don’t see how the outsider has a right to complain. So I don’t see that it violates immigrants’ rights to not be permitted to use a U.S. public resource.

So whose rights are violated? arguably, those citizens who want to use the roads to transport immigrants to their own property. These citizens are “part owners” of the road and are unable to have it used in the way they wish. But for every citizen like this, there are 99 others who do not want the roads open to all–because that means dumping tons of immigrants onto public services and having the right to sue for discrimination and having access to everyone’s neighborhood due to the network of public roads. So if the open borders citizen has his way with the property, then 99 of his neighbors have their rights violated, because the road is being used the way 1 guy wants but not the way 99 others prefer. So there is no way to avoid violating someone’s rights, since the property is public and it has to be used one way.

It seems to me it is reasonable to use the property in this case the way 99 prefer, instead of the one prefers.

Now, as I stated in the article, if the state let only the military use the roads, that would harm the citizens by failing to let them use the roads. The state could theoretically enfore all kinds of bad “law”–taxes, drug laws–by saying to citizens: you may use the roads only if you agree to submit to taxes, drug laws. However, notice that this is just a conditional grant of usage of the property. I would not agree that is a good use of it–it’s tantamount to saying only the government can use it. Given that the citizens own it, it’s reasonable to allow the citizens to use it (with orderly rules, like speed limits) instead of to ban them from using it. If you prevent citizens from using it, that is reducing the restitution. So I would say that conditioning a citizen’s right ot use the roads to establish de facto unlibertarian laws is reducing the restitution, and increaseing the state aggression and harm, so I would oppose it. But denying an outsider the right to use the roads is not the same at all.

Bottom line: any libertarian who disagrees with me her must do so on one of two grounds: (a) there are no second-best rules; the state may not impose any rules at all; or (b) there are second-best rules but they require the state not discriminate against outsiders in the rules set on public property.

I reject (a) because it means you can’t prefer a peaceful use (a park or library) over a tyrannical one (IRS office, nuclear weapons facility); and it means you can’t prefer a reasonable use that gives some benefit back to citizens (public roads with reasonable rules and usable by citizens) rather than a wasteful use that provides no restitution (roads with no rules at all; or usable only by the military). And as for (b), the critic would need to set forth a theory of second-best usage of property. I tried to sketch some of these factors: prefer a peaceful to a criminal use; prefer a reasonable use along the lines of what a private owner would do, and taking into account the level and degree of restitution and the preferences of citizens. If someone has a better theory, let’s hear it.

Coda:

Email from a reader:

Stephan:

I’m surprised you’re surprised about all the positive comments on your recent essay. There seems to be a disconnect between people I would consider at the “top” of the libertarian community (academics, writers and political activists) and “rank-and-file” libertarians. Perhaps more people (not necessarily you) realize that the cause of liberty is hampered by the importation of millions of people with no tradition of limited government. These new arrivals (the ones here legally) owe the blessing of US residency not to the locality where they live but to the District of Columbia.

I think the libertarian arguments against immigration can be summarized as follows:

1. Mass immigration is a form of rent-seeking. Employers can increase their margins and off-load the increased infrastructure and various non-monetary costs on others.2. Government is enforcing compulsory association. “Civil rights” laws and welfare benefits mean that those who do not want immigrants around are forced to abide and pay for them.

3. Government is importing more welfare-warfare state constituents.

4. Government is deliberately changing the native culture over the wishes of its own citizens. Substantively, there is no difference between the US open borders policy and the American Indians de facto open borders policy.

5. Open borders are a tragedy of the commons.

6. Government is inflating citizenship and residency in the US, as it did with college educations. Prior purchasers of these assets now see them devalued.

Few people realize that prior to a Supreme Court ruling in the 1850’s, immigration was a matter for the individual States, where the expense of immigration is actually borne.

Keep up the good work.

1. In fact, an entire Journal of Libertarian Studies symposium issue a few years ago about immigration had only one open-borders advocate (as I recall) Walter Block. The rest Hoppe, Machan, Raico, Simon, Hospers, et al. if I remember right, were all against completely open borders/unrestricted immigration:
   

   Volume 13
   Introduction	Ralph Raico	Vol. 13 Num. 1
   Are There Grounds for Limiting Immigration?	Julian Simon	Vol. 13 Num. 2
   A Libertarian Argument Against Opening Borders	John Hospers	Vol. 13 Num. 3
   A Libertarian Case for Free Immigration	Walter Block	Vol. 13 Num. 4
   A Libertarian Theory of Free Immigration	Jesus Huerta de Soto	Vol. 13 Num. 5
   Immigration Into A Free Society	Tibor R. Machan	Vol. 13 Num. 6
   The Sanctuary Society and its Enemies	Gary North	Vol. 13 Num. 7
   The Case for Free Trade and Restricted Immigration	Hans-Hermann Hoppe	Vol. 13 Num. 8

   [↩]

2. See On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession, Immigration, Public Roads, and the Bum in the Library; Hoppe and Kinsella on Immigration; “A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders.” [↩]
3. KOL426 | Discussing Immigration and Homesteading Donuts with Matthew Sands of Nations of Sanity. [↩]
4. Switzerland, Immigration, Hoppe, Raico, Callahan, on Switzerland. [↩]
5. Switzerland, Immigration, Hoppe, Raico, Callahan. [↩]
6. KOL464 | Law, Rights and Hoppe | Tyrants’ Den Ep 4. [↩]
7. Tweet. [↩]
8. See A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders; I’m Pro-Immigration and Pro-Open Borders. [↩]
9. Friedman Contra Open Borders (1999): A Line-by-Line Critique. See also Look to Milton: Open borders and the welfare state; Milton Friedman’s objection to immigration. [↩]
10. On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession, Immigration, Public Roads, and the Bum in the Library. [↩]
11. “What should one hope for and advocate as the relatively correct immigration policy, however, as long as the democratic central state is still in place and successfully arrogates the power to determine a uniform national immigration policy? The best one may hope for, even if it goes against the “nature” of a democracy and thus is not very likely to happen, is that the democratic rulers act as if they were the personal owners of the country and as if they had to decide who to include and who to exclude from their own personal property (into their very own houses). This means following a policy of utmost discrimination: of strict discrimination in favor of the human qualities of skill, character, and cultural compatibility.” Hoppe, Democracy, p. 148 [↩]
12. KOL258 | Liberty Forum Debate vs. Daniel Garza: Immigration Reform: Open Borders or Build the Wall? [↩]

The recent case of the lost next-generation iPhone prototype can help illustrate the absurdity of intellectual property rights. The basic idea of IP is that information can be owned–patterns, recipes, methods, designs, and so on. Even Rothbard, in The Ethics of Liberty, makes this assumption in arguing for a type of contractual copyright:

A common objection runs as follows: all right, it would be criminal for Green to produce and sell the Brown mousetrap; but suppose that someone else, Black, who had not made a contract with Brown, happens to see Green’s mousetrap and then goes ahead and produces and sells the replica? Why should he be prosecuted? The answer is that, as in the case of our critique of negotiable instruments, no one can acquire a greater property title in something than has already been given away or sold. Green did not own the total property right in his mousetrap, in accordance with his contract with Brown—but only all rights except to sell it or a replica. But, therefore Black’s title in the mousetrap, the ownership of the ideas in Black’s head, can be no greater than Green’s, and therefore he too would be a violator of Brown’s property even though he himself had not made the actual contract.

Note how Rothbard, in order to defend a type of copyright that “contractually” ensnares third parties (which is essential if there is to be anything like IP), has to assume that ideas are separable from things they are embodied in and somehow separately ownable. I discuss this interesting and uncharastic mistake of Rothbard’s at pp. 47- of Against Intellectual Property. The “Farmer Jed” example on pp. 54- provides an illustration of the obvious absurdity of ownership of knowledge:

Farmer Jed discovers oil under his land. No one for miles around knows about the black gold. Jed plans to buy his neighbors’ property for a song; they’ll sell it cheap, too, since they don’t know about the oil. In the middle of the night, his nosy neighbor Cooter, suspicious over Jed’s recent good spirits, sneaks onto Jed’s land and discovers the truth. The next morning, at Floyd’s barbershop, Cooter spills his guts to Clem and the boys. One of them promptly runs to a pay phone and gives a tip to a reporter at the Wall Street Journal (who happens to be his nephew). Soon, it is common knowledge that there is oil in the vicinity. The neighbors now demand exorbitant prices for their land, thus spoiling Jed’s plans.

Let us grant that Cooter can be prosecuted for trespass and harms flowing therefrom. The question is, can Jed’s neighbors be prevented from acting on their knowledge? That is, may they be forced to somehow pretend that they do not know about the oil, and sell their land to Jed for what they “would have” sold it when in ignorance? Of course they may not be so forced. They own their land, and are entitled to use it as they see fit. Unlike tangible property, information is not ownable; it is not property. The possessor of a stolen watch may have to return it, but so long as the acquirer of knowledge does not obtain that knowledge illicitly or in violation of a contract, he is free to act upon it.

Note, however, that according to the reservation-of-rights view, the neighbors would not be permitted to act upon their knowledge because they obtained it ultimately from Cooter, a trespasser who had no “title” to that knowledge. Thus, they could not have obtained “greater title” to it than Cooter himself had. Note also that others, such as geological surveyors mapping oil deposits, cannot include this information in their maps. They must feign ignorance until given permission by Jed. This imposed ignorance correlates with the unnatural scarcity imposed by IP. There is clearly no warrant for the view that reserved rights can somehow prohibit third parties from using knowledge they acquire.

I was reminded of this by the recent lost iPhone story. Surely there are first-gen iPhone and iPhone 3G owners who have been planning to buy the iPhone 3GS, the current top of the line iPhone model. And surely there are some people out there who were planning to buy their first iPhone in the next few weeks or month. There can be no doubt that a number of these people will hold off on that purchase, now that they know a new iPhone model is going to come out probably in the upcoming months. They’ll wait for the new iPhone instead. This means Apple will lose sales, or at the very least that sales will be delayed.

According to IP advocates, Apple owned the lost iPhone and also its IP–the designs, the trade secrets, the very information that a new iPhone was coming out. If you take IP seriously, then the Gizmodo employees had no right to the “knowledge” they gleaned from the iPhone prototype (we can safely assume here that they were aware it was Apple’s property and that they were dissecting and using this device without Apple’s consent–a form of trespass). Gizmodo had no “title” to these ideas. And, as Rothbard argues in the case of the mousetrap, we masses who have heard about this incident have no title to these ideas either–after all, we got the ideas from Gizmodo, but it’s a well known legal maxim, as Rothbard relies on, that you cannot receive greater title than the person you receive the thing from. Thus we have no title to these ideas either. That means we have no right to use this information. If I was going to buy an iPhone 3GS next week, I must still go through with it. If I don’t, I am committing trespass against Apple by using their property (the information about the existence of the new iPhone prototype) without Apple’s consent. No, Apple is entitled to that sale. As Jeff Tucker remarked to me, in discussing this, I’d be committing “insider refraining from buying” if I acted on information I don’t own. (Note that the idea of being entitled to a sale underlies the notion of defamation law and also trademark law. If Big Burger spreads lies about Giant Burger then Giant Burger sues because it “lost business”–business it was presumably entitled to. Same thing if Big Burger uses a mark too similar to Giant Burger’s trademark.)

But no worries that I’ll buy the new iPhone and feel bad about my purchase–even doing this would be using the information, and I have no right to do this. So I must be glad about my new purchase. To fail to do so violates Apple’s proprietary rights in patterns and information.

This is all nonsense, of course. But it’s one of the many absurd results you get if you treat information as ownable. As I discuss in Intellectual Property and the Structure of Human Action, human action employs means to achieve ends. Action is guided by knowledge and information–your knowledge about what means are suitable to achieve your ends, say. To take a simple example, suppose you and I each want to bake a cake. We can both make a cake at the same time using the same recipe (ideas), but not using the same eggs (scarce means). That’s precisely why there are property rights in scarce resources and only in scarce resources. Where there is scarcity, the things have to be rationed and assigned to particular owners so that these things can be successfully employed as means in action. If eggs were in infinite abundance at the snap of a finger no one would need to take anyone else’s eggs, and if they did, it would not matter. You could conjure up eggs and make your cake, or if you take my eggs I can just conjure up more and make my cake. There’s no scarcity problem to solve. When there is scarcity, we assign property rights so that there can be peaceful and prosperous use of these things in action. But for things that are not scarce, such as information, the question of property rights does not arise, and makes no sense.

In other words, for scarce things, property rights are assigned so that these scarce things can be used. Property rights help address a limitation of things in the real world. For ideas, IP assigns property rights in something that is infinitely abundant, in a bizarre attempt to make these things scarce, or less abundant. In the case of scarce things, property rights are a response to the problem of scarcity. In IP, property rights are assigned to create a problem of scarcity that did not exist before. The goal should not be to make abundant things limited and scarce; but, if anything, to make valuable scarce things as abundant as possible.

[Mises]

See Roderick Long’s blogpost Left Cop, Right Cop. In my view, this just gives further support for the contention that we libertarians should associate ourselves with neither right nor left. Both are corrupt and statist.

I have spoken.

After all, I hate crime.

Update: This was just a rant when I was in a bad mood. In actuality I like helping people, especially friends and fellow libertarians. So take the following with a grain of salt. However I do wish more libertarians had better manners when the approach others for help. SK

***

I don’t mind giving free advice. Really. I do it a lot.

But libertarians sometimes are inept at social graces. They ask for help in a demanding, entitled way; they ask for legal advice without realizing that the attorney who does this is liable for malpractice even if he doesn’t get paid; they often are clueless about standard professional letter-writing standards. Typically I get an unsolicited email from a strange libertarian, something like this,

Hi Stephen,

See this link–it’s an interesting article about [xyz]–why does the author think [abc]?

[or: I am starting a business and need some advice. How can I tell if [xyz] is patentable? Do you think this is a good idea?]

Etc. etc. Note the many problems: mispelling my name; informally and inappropriately taking the liberty of calling my by my first name; failing to politely introduce yourself and to politely explain why you are writing and exactly what you want from me; giving me an out in case I do not have time; etc.

I mean, libertarians are often just hopeless in this regard. It’s one reason I sometimes despair about our movement, and moan “DOOMED” to myself. And it’s notorious to have libertarians who are moochers–some guy you met at a conference one time 7 years ago calls you out of the blue, “Hey, I’ll be in Houston for a few days, can I stay at your house?” I think there have been a couple of LP Presidential candidates who could not even campaign in some states because of outstanding arrest warrants … for failure to pay child support. The problem is our movement attracts a disproportionate share of losers and marginal types simply because they have less to lose from advocating our radical philosophy. Competent, smart, successful types have financial and other opportunities in the real world that tempt them to eschew marginalized radicalism. Just the way it is. Sad. What you gonna do?

I was reminded (remound?) of some of this, this morning, when I stumbled across the witty message by GTD expert Merlin Mann, who makes it clear here the of all the emails he gets, he has instructed his assistant to make sure he sees the ones from actual clients actually willing to pay him actual money (no doubt, as opposed to all the imposing freeloaders out there):

Hello, I’m Merlin Mann. That one guy from the internet. Hi. Thank you VERY much for your note and your time. These are valuable things.

I get so much great email every day. SO much. SO great. But, unfortunately, I do get way more of it than I could ever do anything responsible with—unless I got lots of help. Which I do.

Consequently, my ninja assistant, Erica, looks over all my messages-including the note you were kind enough to send just now-and, then she tells me what, if anything, I need to do about those messages.

She’s great like that. LOVE that Erica. Good people.

Work & Money: An Admission

Because I’m a selfish little homunculus of a man-happily charged with stewarding an exquisite young family as well as a career that’s increasingly difficult to either explain or manage-I have instructed Erica to dedicate an unaccountably large amount of her time to working on things that are related to my paying work as a writer, speaker, and freelance helper-of-people.

Thus, if you have written about trying to give me money in any form or fashion, please do not be squeamish about pointing this out to Erica in any subsequent correspondence; Erica and I have talked about this topic at length, and we both agree that money is very important with regard to work.

In fact, from what I can gather, “money” has, in practice, become SO heavily associated with “work” that many Americans would not actually “do” a given “job” were they not “paid” to “do so.” Just from what I can gather.

This is really charming and witty. I’m about to hire Merlin myself for a bit of inbox zero/GTD/43 folders consulting.

As for ineptness in communication, I also see this as editor of Libertarian Papers. I often get letters from authors who make all sorts of mistakes. For example, the often fail to make it clear that it’s a submission. I’ll get an email with a horribly misdescriptive subject line, such as “the fed,” with the body saying “Hi, I’m wondering if this would be suitable.” Or, “Hoping you find this of interest.” With a file attached. No mention of Libertarian Papers.  No “Dear Editor.” So I have to ask, “Is this a submission for publication in LP?” Another horrible mistake is pleading for their article’s importance. When this is done in the first email, it’s a bad sign. I can almost always predict the article will be crap. “Dear Sir: I’ve attached my paper, which I have worked on for 13 years. I believe it is an extremely important thesis that will lift the libertarian movement out of its doldrums and presage a world of liberty within 33 years!!” Even worse is when an author is rejected and then argues with me about this or demands a better justification for the rejection. When this happens, literally 100% of the time the author is a crank.

By the way, I stumbled across this delightfully practical article the other day (no offense, libertarians), How to Ask for a Reference Letter (h/t Gary Chartier), which provides excellent advice on professional, polite ways to word overtures to people when you ask them a favor. How to start the letter, how to give your target a way out of your intrusive requests, and so on.

Come on, libertarians, learn. Yes we can!

My 6 year old loves when I have deep conversations with him. Well the other night we got into one about heat/cold, light/dark, good/evil. I started out with the physical things to lead him into the latter conversation, which was my main goal because of something he said about good and bad when we were reading a book together.

So I pointed out for him that some people conceive of heat and cold as independent “things” and to make it hotter, you add more heat; to make it colder you add more cold. But I said that implies you could potentially make it as hot as you wanted–just add a bit more heat, and it gets hotter. There is no upper limit. And that if cold was some “thing” then you could keep getting colder forever, just add more cold. But then I asked him, what if there is just one thing, and the other is the absence of it? Which one is the real thing? So he says, “heat!” and I said, right–you can keep adding heat to make it hotter; but to make it colder you remove heat (then we digressed into a discussion of negative numbers: how you can do subtraction by adding a negative number to a positive one; and so on). That’s why, when you have removed all the heat there is, you can’t make it any colder: it’s absolute zero. (That led to a tangential discussion of the Fahrenheit, Celsius, Centigrade, and Kelvin scales.)

So he got the idea right away. Then we explored others: light/dark, etc. I tried to find examples of where this works and where it doesn’t. One that works is speed (as a scalar)–once you stop, remove all speed, you can’t slow down any more. (This led to a tangent about relativity: I explained that for speed while you can keep adding more, and go faster each time, there is an upper limit: c, the speed of light; although you approach it asymptotically so that in a sense you can always increase your speed a bit more.)

Then I went to the realm of ethics, in particular good and evil. We toyed with the idea that good is the real thing, and evil is just the absence of good. And that God, likewise (or Heaven), is the real thing, but “Hell” is just the lack of being with God. That lead to a tangential discussion of a passage in Lewis’s The Last Battle, where, during armageddon, Lewis illustrated the animals confronting Aslan (Jesus) at the gates to Aslan’s country (Heaven), and if they saw his face and smiled, they went in; if they were afraid, they became dumb animals and fled into the dark wilderness. Here is the idea that Hell is just the absence of being in God’s presence, as I was taught in Catholic school religion class. So here, too, is a case of the idea of one real thing: heaven/God/love, and you either have it, or not: there is not actual evil force or thing or substance. (This is also in a way what Rand believes as exemplified in Atlas Shrugged: the idea that evil is basically impotent.) (This Narnia excursion led us to go grab The Silver Chair and re-read my favorite passage from all of Lewis’s books, which we had read together months earlier, but which I re-read from time to time.)

Anyway, I’m getting to the point. When we were talking about this idea, that Hell is not a real place, but just means the absence-of-Heaven, of course we discussed the conventional view: good people die and go to Heaven; bad people die and go to Hell. My boy said, well, what happens? I said, well, Satan tortures them. My son says, “Why?” I said, well, Satan is bad, so he likes to torture people, I guess. My boy said, asking a question that struck me because I had never thought of it this way before: “But I don’t get it. Why would he torture people on his team?” And I have to say, he sort of stumped me.

I love the minds of children.

I’ve noted in recent posts that while some left-libertarians seem to oppose standard libertarians’ positive endorsement of “capitalism” for semantic or strategic reasons, for others they actually oppose the substance of what libertarians mean by (non-crony, non-corporatist) capitalism (see, e.g., Capitalism, Socialism, and Libertarianism, and links in that post; see also Wirkman Virkkala’s post A capital ism?). An example of those with a more semantic or strategic concern would be Sheldon Richman, who is concerned about the “baggage” associated with the word, which will hamper our getting our pro-property rights, libertarian message out. Thus he favors using “free market” instead, but as far as I can tell this is similar to what we mean by “capitalism”–a libertarian society with a market based on respect for property rights, which of course includes private ownership of the means of production (and everything else). (See also Sheldon’s comment to Should Libertarians Oppose “Capitalism”?) Another would be Jock Coats, who notes here that while the baggage of the term “capitalism” might have turned him off had he not also seen the term “free-market anti-capitalism,” now that he understands the term he is “quite happy to be identified as an Individualist Anarchist/Mutualist and at times an Anarcho-Caplitalist,” and is “for keeping ‘capitalism’ as a word in our lexicon.”

To be clear, I think the semantical and strategic debate is one we can have, but it’s different than a substantive disagreement–and we can have that discussion too. But these are separate discussions and should not be intermingled. This leads to confusion at best and equivocation and dishonesty (on the part of leftists) at worst.

In my view there is little doubt that libertarians who have concerns about the appropriate words to use or strategic matters are of course libertarians. We just differ on the best way to convey and spread and communicate about our ideas. But those who disagree on substance may simply not be libertarians. This should not be masked by conflating the discussion with more mundane issues of semantics and strategy.

Now some of the left-libertarians more concerned about terminology and strategy deny or downplay the charge that at least some of them have much more than a mere lexical disagreement with us. So it is good that some of them are willing to explicitly admit this. Take, for instance, one Roman Pearah, who writes in Hmmm…No, Sir. I Don’t Like It.: [continue reading…]