First of all, it requires some study and serious effort.
Here is some direct and fascinating evidence from Vox Day, a former libertarian personality who is now an Alt Right blogger, about why he turned against libertarian ideology both on the issues of immigration and free trade:
As we can see, it was the feeble libertarian responses to the problem of free movement of people, and gaping holes in the theory of free trade that did it for Vox Day. Vox Day also cites Ian Fletcher’s Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why (2nd edn.; 2011) as an influential book against free trade.
Libertarianism is flawed by its insistence that the individual is sovereign, and its inability to see the importance and interests of larger groups, above all, the family and nation. Without government policies to secure and create a viable political unit of people with common interests where those people can flourish, individuals cannot flourish.
What would happen to America if it went full anarcho-capitalist, and if its government were abolished and government control of the borders were ended?
As all barriers to trade and capital movement were removed, the collapse of manufacturing and industry would be accelerated as free trade under absolute advantage would implode the US economy.
As centralised government border control was abolished, and decisions on immigration flows were totally privatised and decentralised, there would be a tidal wave of mass immigration from the Third World, which would destroy the demographic and cultural cohesion of America.
The owners of any big business and industry left would also happily bring in millions of cheap, foreign and easily exploitable labour from the Third World to smash wages and labour rights and make themselves internationally competitive.
Given the fact that there would be no US national government concerned with national security, hostile foreign governments like China or the Arab Gulf States would be able to buy up vast real estate, property and national assets, and then import millions of their own people, which would reduce vast areas of America to colonies of China or Saudi Arabia. As in Europe, whole areas would be gradually lost to segregated and fundamentalist Islamic communities, deeply hostile to the culture around them.
The result would be increasingly isolated, militarised gated communities of wealthy Americans, surrounded by a sea of Third World poverty, economic collapse, crime, drug cartels, violence, social collapse, intercommunal violence, and then civil war.
In short, America would turn into Brazil.
Some libertarians have realised this. Others remain mired in their utopian cult, as cult-like in its own way as dogmatic Marxism/Communism.
Anarcho-Capitalists entire philosophy is based on abstract assumptions. They fail to realize that neither property nor individual rights exist outside of the State. Secondly, there is no such thing as a "free market" they always champion. There are countries who have more economic freedom than others, but it simply comes down to regulations that are put in place. The very existence of Corporations is based on regulation. They literally do not exist without State creation or regulation. If one is for the government being regulated through the Constitution, they must also be for the regulation of Corporations. The idea that we can have Capitalism without regulation is just absurd.
ReplyDeleteLife gets in the way of ideology, it'd never happen in the real world. The bourgeoisie encourage greater competition between the poor, but the skills and abilities of foreigners are devalued at the door when they compete against middle class professions. The middle class, particularly the upper middle class, have a protectionism without borders, it's not free trade.
ReplyDeleteVox Day is just as dishonest about libertarianISM as you are, LK. Under AnCap, or a private property society, people can refuse to allow “Immigrants” or minorities onto their property. It is the statists who make this a crime. Under social democracy, if immigrants or unpleasant minorities move in and take over the neighborhood and the schools, middle class folk move from 8 Mile to 28 Mile leaving behind what was formerly a nice neighborhood. This could not happen in a PPS. A private property society would not have a single visitor who had not been vetted for whatever qualities the owners of the community prefer. It would be possible to forbid druggies, drugs, thugs and guns. Or trannies. Or Trump supporters. Or foreigners. Or evangelicals. Or people who are not evangelicals. Or people who hate guns. Or non-Ukrainians. No drug war, no black markets, no crummy schools, no one allowed to walk around at all without permission.
ReplyDeleteIf Germany were a PPS, where might all these new swarms of immigrants even step foot without the permission of the owners of the roads? Where would they live without trespassing? Why would they even be coming at all if there hadn’t been a social-democratic Keynesian funny money Wilsonian warmongering USA to disrupt their homeland?
The fact that so many libertarIANS cannot handle the fact that the central core of libertarianISM is private discrimination says a lot about them and nothing about libertarianISM.
(1) "Under AnCap, or a private property society, people can refuse to allow “Immigrants” or minorities onto their property. ...
DeleteThat paragraph is just an admission that anarcho-capitalism would destroy the ethnic and social cohesion of the United States, and reduce it to segregated and mutually hostile communities.
Outside your segregated, militarised, fortress neighbourhood you would have a Third World nightmare of crime, drug cartels, violence, social collapse, intercommunal violence, or even civil war.
You have not addressed the issue of how anarcho-capitalism would impose a totally privatised and decentralised immigration system, where in theory millions of people or private institutions (especially corporations) could invite in a tidal wave of mass immigration from the Third world onto their properties, causing social fragmentation and collapse.
You have not addressed the issue of how the Saudis or Chinese could buy up vast tracts of America and bring in millions of hostile people, and turn those areas onto huge dangerous areas of Muslim sharia law, or colonies of China.
(2)"If Germany were a PPS, where might all these new swarms of immigrants even step foot without the permission of the owners of the roads?... etc."
DeleteIn numerous places, you dumb bastard.
Lots of people would be happy to admit migrants, refugees or low-wage Third World labour, e.g.:
(1) corporations
(2) multiculturalists and Cultural leftists
(3) Christian pro-refugee movements
(4) hostile, wealthy foreigners or foreign governments who could easily buy up vast tracts of land or property in Germany and import millions of their own people.
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In short, without a sensible government monopoly on border control and immigration policy, your nation is f*cked.
'If Germany were a PPS society..'
DeleteLook at Saudi Arabia for your answers. Where wealth is concentrated in a society and the individual is preferenced over the community, the community typically becomes less homogeneous because foreigners will serve property owners for less than locals.
The result is racially mixed and stratified dystopian societies like Saudi, Brazil and South Africa.
Screw that for a joke. If I have to sacrifice some of my 'personal liberty' to avoid that horror show, so be it.
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Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and South Africa aren't and never were libertarian societies. It's bizarre that you regard them as such, when they're far more characterized by communitarianism and socialism, just with different religious and cultural backgrounds and favored groups.
DeleteIn the past, Germany was much more of a PPS, with much of its land owned by various princes, dukes, and other nobles, and it was much more homogeneous and communitarian than it has been under a centralized unitary state.
Perhaps I was unclear. I don't contend that they were libertarian, but I find it equally bizarre that anyone could characterise Saudi Arabia and South Africa (for most of the last 100 years) as 'characterized by socialism'.
DeleteThey - and Brazil - are countries where at some point in history, the wealthy were unconstrained by the state as to who they would employ - and voted with their wallets for multiracial societies. All three are now stratified by race and class.
It's ironic that Tea Party libertarian types spend so much effort whining about 'The Left's' plan to bring on multiculturalism, when the pioneers of the whole concept were wealthy capitalists, unconstrained by state power.
In Australia, the US and elsewhere, it was the early labour movement (yes, socialism..) that put in place immigration restriction laws in the early 20th century.
All that's changed today is that the vast bulk of the Left has foolishly bought into globalism and now regards immigration controls as a form of repressive state power - a thing they regard with a horror only matched by libertarians.
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Libertarians and damned near everyone else these days are so dip shittedly hypnotized by orthodoxy of one stripe or another you'd think there was a church on every door step instead of every block or so. What about the thirdness of Wisdom and the oneness of its pinnacle concept of grace though? Do I advocate for only science? Hell no, science is almost as afflicted with orthodoxy as anyone and everything else. Do I advocate for religion? Oh Jesus no, one obsessively contending duality is no better than any other. But if we contemplated the philosophical concept of grace, some of the aspects of which are the essence of tolerance of other people's beingness, opinions and culture, personal mental freedom and a kind and ethical rationality and if applied to our economic system abundance, stability and sustained free flowingness....maybe we'd be a little less asshole opinionated, prosperous and peaceful.
ReplyDeleteWisdomics-Gracenomics: The New Integrative Economic Theory
I'm not a libertarian, but this seems to be a straw man of libertarianism.
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing in libertarianism that says that you can't have large privately owned communities or societies or land trusts the size of countries whose members or shareholders decide in concert to exclude various people for whatever reason.
It seems to me that you want there to be segregated and mutually hostile communities, and that you view immigration as problematic because it introduces people formerly segregated into mutually hostile communities into contact. So I'm not sure why the creation of more segregated mutually hostile communities according to people's preferences would be a bad thing in principle according to you.
You mean like something like let's call it a "Republic" where the member shareholders which we will call "citizens" are the sovereign owners of these trusts which will call a "nation-states."
DeleteWhy would decentralized and more local decision making necessarily increase immigration? If states, counties, and towns could dictate their own immigration policies, then immigration would probably be much lower in the US than it has been under the centralized policy making at the federal government which has dictated immigration policy for the whole country.
ReplyDelete