Libertarians and Moving (Occasionally referred to as Immigration)

Allow me, if you will, to pose a question and then, not to answer it, but to describe the process by which the question might be answered and in doing so shed some light on a related debate within the libertarian community. This unfortunate debate is curious because libertarian principles are quite clear on the issue, and yet many confirmed libertarians with impressive pedigrees have bungled the thing. Perhaps the humble blogger’s efforts will be of some assistance in correcting the errors of certain of our number who have done so much for the cause of liberty and yet stumble in the most maladroit fashion whenever the topic in question arises.

My question is this: May a man who lives at spot A be justly permitted to travel along path B and begin to live at spot C? The libertarian cannot yet answer this question, because there are up to seven further questions he must ask before he can deliver a verdict. When he has obtained accurate answers to these questions, the answer produces itself quite naturally from the core belief of libertarians. The seven questions are as follows:

1. Is path B unowned?

If B is unowned, we can conclude that, at the least, the man may be permitted to move along it and we can skip to question 4. If it is owned, we must proceed to question 2.

2. Does the man own path B?

If this answer is yes, we again conclude that the man is justly permitted to move along it and may skip question 4. If the answer is no, we must ask the third question.

3. Does the owner of path B give permission to the man to move along it?

An answer of yes to any of the previous questions leads us to conclude that the man is well within his rights to move along the path in question. Only an answer of no to all three questions forces us to conclude that the man may not move along B and may be, if necessary, forcibly prohibited from doing so. The second part of the original question must now be investigated, and the three questions are of the same form as the first three with a different focus.

4. Is spot C unowned?
5. Does the man own spot C?
6. Does the owner of spot C give permission to the man to live there?

Again, an answer of yes to any of these last three questions leads to the conclusion that the man may be permitted to live at C, and only an answer of no to each would morally, if not physically, prohibit the man from living there. There is only more question which must be asked.

7. Is the man free from any contractual obligations which he has voluntarily entered into under which he is prohibited from moving along path B and/or living at spot C?

An answer of yes once again leaves the man free to effect his move, while a no leads us to conclude that the man may be prevented from the move or must be made to pay a penalty for breach of contract should he go ahead with it. There is nothing left for the libertarian to ask. Those yet seduced by the specious charms of statism are, in concocting reasons why a man may be prevented from this hypothetical translocation, limited only by their own creativity. They may, for instance, choose any clause from the constitution of whatever government claims to rule the territory they happen to be in and, after having pummeled the original intent out of the clause, connect to it, by the most absurd and abstruse reasoning, the issue at hand (My favorite example of this was the dissenting opinion of Justice (sic) Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a case in which the Federal Government of the United States sought to prosecute rape crimes under the pretext that a) the Constitution provided for the Federal Government to regulate interstate commerce and b) rape was positively correlated with decreases in interstate trade. Never mind that the intent of the Commerce Clause was to open up free trade amongst the states, and never mind that prosecuting rape was not actually regulating trade). The libertarian, however, is restrained by the decency of his moral reason and, if he has gotten answers to his question, will go no further. Essentially, the issue may be reduced to a single sentence: go where you will, but do not trespass.

It is very instructive to point out the questions that were not asked. What language does the man speak? What shade is his skin? Will he corrupt my children with piñatas and soccer balls if he moves next door? Most of all, is there a group of thugs who call themselves government officials pretending that there is a national border that bisects path B? None of these questions does the libertarian ask, because they have no bearing on the ethics of a man moving to a new place.

For someone who has already accepted libertarian ethics and principles, the issue is very simple and very easy. Why, in that case, do so many libertarians get it wrong? How can men and women of anarchist proclivities allow the putative presence of a national border to influence their thinking? I say putative presence when perhaps I should say dubious presence, because the men and women who stand around with guns where these borders are reputed to be are engaged in the same sort of fanciful playacting as so many children lining up to see Santa Claus. It is not my intent in this post to argue anarchy to the good reader, merely to point out the disquieting absurdity of a market anarchist, anarcho-capitalist, libertarian – call it what you will – who agrees with me about governments, using the excuse of a national border to forcibly prevent what he terms immigration but what is really just moving.

Two influential thinkers have no doubt exerted a great influence in this area and have obliged those of us with clearer thoughts on the matter to engage in cleaning up their mess when we might otherwise direct our efforts to more fruitful enterprises. The first is Murray Rothbard, an otherwise impeccable giant of anarcho-capitalism who spent the vast majority of his life arguing for open borders or, more accurately, no borders and who, towards the end of his life, regrettably showed signs of succumbing to a grouchy conservatism that thankfully seems to have done little damage to his legacy save for on the topic of moving, which he came to call immigration when it involved crossing those national borders that he did not believe in. The second is an extant Teutonic scholar, perhaps even more resolutely anarchist than Rothbard, who currently resides in Nevada, goes by the name Hans Hermann Hoppe, and spends a portion of his time berating the United States government for allowing him in the country. These men cast long shadows indeed, as they should, but I fear that, in falling under their sway, certain of our brethren have been ensnared by reputation rather than convinced by reason. At least this is the more pleasant explanation, because permeating this issue is the unpleasant fact that, unless the humble blogger is mistaken, moving did not divide the purer libertarians until a critical mass of the immigrants were brown.

Stephan Kinsella, a prominent anarchist who has devoted ample time to arguing against the government monopolization of law and law enforcement, has likened the prohibition of entry for some would be movers to a municipal government owning a pool and restricting access to town residents. I have heard no good arguments in favor of moving control, but this is the least bad that anti-moving anarchists have come up with, though the spuriousness of its seeming plausibility is not difficult to reveal. The custom of public pseudo ownership can indeed make ambiguous certain concerns which under private ownership would be perfectly clear, and it is in this miasma that the anarchist I referred to conceals the warts of his argument.

The solution to public ownership, for the anarcho-capitalist, is privatization, for clearly delineated property rights allow one to ascertain what is permissible and what is not. When everyone owns something, effectively no one does, and control falls to the oligarchs at the top. This control is less execrable the more it imitates the market. Of course, one can never be sure if the decisions of the oligarchs are actually imitating what would have happened on the market, but sometimes one can take a reasonable guess. With the public swimming pool, sustained by taxes and to which town residents are granted free access, it is not unreasonable to imagine private owners restricting use of certain pools to dues-paying nearby residents, and so the admission policy is less intolerable.

But imagine if the entire world were privatized and government disappeared. Anyone who thinks that all, say, Mexicans would be boxed up in Mexico by a coordinated policy under which all land elsewhere was homesteaded and all property owners agreed to deny Mexicans transit rights on streets and refused to sell or rent any parcels of land to them is engaging in self delusion. It is not intelligently deniable that under market anarchy there would be an influx of “foreigners” into the territory comprising the United States, especially if the other nations remained statist and only the territory comprising the modern United States went anarchist. An anarchist who opposes moving, whether in any case or merely beyond a certain number or rate, must ask himself why he wishes to use government force of arms to thwart what the market would surely produce.

Herr Hoppe, in his argument in favor of allowing government to control moving, claims that in a natural market order there would be very little movement from one cultural region to another. This contention, confidently put forth by Herr Hoppe, seems less evident to your humble blogger, but no matter. At least our German immigrant friend recognizes this basic right of movement so long as no trespassing has occurred. His analysis gets muddled when he says that under a statist system, with respect to movement, there is either forced exclusion or forced integration. Allowing moving forces residents to integrate with people they might not otherwise choose to, and we must concede the point that moving, taken with certain "civil rights" laws does produce a forced integration, but there is one fundamental question we must ask ourselves: does forced exclusion or forced integration necessitate more government involvement? To ask the question, as Walter Block is fond of saying, is to answer it. There is no feasible way to keep out immigrants who wish to get into the United States, and any such efforts entail expensive and useless walls, coerced detentions at gun points, forced deportations that split apart families and quite possibly ID cards to prove you are not an immigrant. On the other hand, forced integration entails... pardon me while I recover from a bout of the willies... meeting people of a different culture. I respect the insight that government involvement and stewardship of property, if one may be permitted to so abuse the term as to use it to refer to government management of anything, makes issues difficult. But short of a sudden turn to an anarchic order, I prefer to see my government do as little as possible, and with respect to moving it is quite clear what that means.

Libertarian principles are clear, and their application is generally lucid too. Though there are some murkier areas, moving is very plainly not one of them. The libertarian position is obvious, and the anarchist who opposes moving or supports government curtailment of moving, much like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, commits the most sickeningly comical acts of mental gymnastics in order to twist libertarian ethics into a shape that permits one to prohibit movement across a national border the existence of which these same libertarian ethics deny. There has been quite enough of this nonsense for my taste.