Does not freedom, in the political sense, include the right of a population to self-determination? Do not free societies, all the way from your local bowling team up to the United Nations have the right to decide who may become a member and who will have use of their facilities?
I'm not the one arguing against self-determination. You are.
Arguing that people should be allowed to immigrate with less hindrance is not arguing that everyone should be made a member, which in this case would be citizenship. And secondly, you're confusing free societies with private organizations. Do private organizations have a right to decide who gets to be there? Sure. Is the U.S. a private club? No. Does the U.S. government own the country? No. If it does, then private property does not exist within the U.S. You don't get it both ways.
I'm not the one mistaking private property for legal sovereignty, either. As a matter of fact, every sovereign nation
is a private club. Every sovereign nation has the right to determine who will and who won't be admitted. Every sovereign nation has the right to determine who will and who won't be granted citizenship. And not only does every sovereign nation on earth do exactly that, in democratic nations they're obviously doing it with the full consent of the governed. In not a single nation on earth is there a popular demand to abandon control of it's borders.
Borders are not a relinquishment of rights. They're an assertion of them.
So you equate private property with sovereignty? Ok, then - does the government have the legitimate authority to make and enforce laws preventing you from killing people or molesting children on your property? Would you have the right to construct and operate a machine that would emit deadly radiation for a hundred mile radius from your property? If not, why not? Where does the government derive the authority to prevent you from doing those things on your own property?
In any case, your example works in my favor. Does the local bowling team have a right to decide who joins the team? Sure. But then by the same reasoning, the local business owners have a right to decide who they hire for work. Do individuals have a right to decide to enter into private agreements to trade labor for monetary compensation? Or is that something the government should decide? Should the government decide whether or not you can be employed? If you're going to argue that people have a right to decide for themselves with whom they associate and do business, then why would you want to trample over that right with onerous laws? Your position is not tenable because it is self-contradictory.[/color]
And here we have Dishonest Argument #11315 from the open borders advocates.
Tell me - are you planning to escort your workers up from the border, house them on your property, absorb the expense for any needs they might have, and escort them back to the border after work?
Oh wait - you aren't planning to do that! You're asserting that your right to property is the right to introduce elements to the public sphere, where they'll have an impact on everyone else, whether they like it or not.
And I suppose your right to keep and bear arms also equates to the right to discharge them out of your window into a crowd? The gun and the window, after all, are your property, right?
Try this one on for size: my family and I would like to have a Bengal tiger. Since we own the property, nobody should be able to tell us whether or not we can keep a Bengal tiger.
By the way, my family and I are going to be busy, so we're only going to be keeping the tiger on our premises from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Monday thru Friday, and the rest of the time we're going to let it wander the streets so everyone else can enjoy it, too.
Apparently you're arguing that ownership of property gives you the right to preempt public judgement on very public impacts that you're use of that property will entail. I call bullshit! This has nothing to do with your property, and everything to do with the public impact you're proposing to inflict on your fellow citizens without their consent. You're standing on your right to the use of your private property while abdicating the responsibility for the public impacts of that usage.
In addition, you're rights to free association and free enterprise are tempered by your obligations to the rights of others and to the law. You may very well have the right to associate and trade with Charles Manson, but you don't have a right to demand the State of California grants him his liberty to convenience your doing so. Given the current legal restrictions on Mr. Manson's movements, you are obliged to have to visit him in the penitentiary where he currently resides.
You're perfectly free to associate and do business with anyone you please. There are few American laws that actually restrict such associations. However, in the case that the person you wish to associate or do business with is not legally permitted to enter the United States, then you are going to be obliged to visit them in their country.
To argue that right's to free association and free enterprise are license to usurp the right of a sovereign nation to control it's borders is like arguing that a right to drive your car across town is license to run over any pedestrians who happen to be in your way.
Apparently your flavor of libertarianism believes the preferences of specific individuals preempts the right of a population to self-determination.
Not quite. My "flavor" of libertarianism believes that a population is not a collective mind but a group of individuals. And the rights of individuals are the rights of the population and therefore the rights of the population do not trump the rights of individuals. You seem to disagree. Which leads me to question where you have any room to criticize anyone else's concept of freedom because apparently you prefer a collective will enforced on others.
No, I recognize there are legitimate private claims, and legitimate public ones. If you want to burn down your own house, knock yourself out. If you're disposing of toxic wastes in your backyard such that they contaminate the neighborhood water supply, then you're damn right I think the public has a legitimate input into how you're using your property.
And I submit that your flavor of libertarianism isn't libertarianism at all, but a bastardized third-way socialism that's basically replaced the individual with the nation-state as the unit of redistribution.
Sure we won't tax the individual. Sure we won't tell him he can't smoke dope. We don't need to. Having already stripped him of the legal, political and economic means to affect any input as to what kind of country and society he lives in, why bother? He's like a lizard in a terrarium. He can do anything he likes inside the confines of the terrarium. Unfortunately, if someone decides to fill that terrarium with methane and ammonia, he's just shit out of luck. We wouldn't want to restrict the freedom of people who want to poison terrariums, would we?
First, immigration and trade are two different things. It's entirely possible to trade without immigrating, and the right to trade does not exempt one from compliance with applicable laws, the rights of other individuals, or the sovereign rights of the law. My right to trade does not include a right to run a whore-house out of your living room without your consent.
You're overlooking one simple fact. Most immigration to the U.S. is about achieving trade. Yes, immigrants are trading labor, not goods, but it is trade all the same. Yes, your right to trade does not include a right to run a whore-house out of my living room without my consent. But then my right to privacy does not include preventing you from having having someone over to your house to remodel your kitchen even if I don't like the person you hired for the job.
And the simple fact that you're overlooking is that nobody much gives a shit who remodels your kitchen. What they give a shit about is that you're aiding, abetting and encouraging people to enter the country illegally. Again, if you were escorting your kitchen remodeler from the border to your house and from your house to the border, you might have a point. But you aren't doing that, you're abetting an impact to the public environment such that the public, i.e. the collection of individuals that constitute your fellow citizenry, has deemed undesirable.
If you were leaving rotten foodstuffs out on your property such that it attracted rats, do you not think your neighbors might have a legitimate complaint?
Second, your assertion that immigration is "relatively harmless action in and of itself" and "raises the level of the pond" is only your opinion, it is not a point of agreement even among economists, especially libertarian economists not on the payroll of the Cato Institute.
I have yet to see demonstrated any harmful effects of allowing people to come here to trade labor for recompense. Everyone keeps saying it's so awful, but so far the best anyone can do to support this idea is to say that it is a drain on government run social programs, programs which we really should not have in the first place, this drain being one of the reasons why the programs are a bad idea. So obviously the fault lies with the programs, not the immigrants. I have, on the other hand, seen evidence of the detrimental effects of interfering with the trade that immigration brings and I have seen the beneficial effects of trade, so until you can show me something besides your weak appeal to authority, I have no reason to believe you're right.
You forgot to mention that the major economic damage done in the article you posted was due to lawsuits against the city.
Quick question - if our economy is so short of labor that we need to import it, as our Susan Sontag libertarians assert, how is it that the cost of labor hasn't risen in this country in nearly a decade? When the demand for something outstrips the supply, the price of that something rises, right?
Ok, then. I want to see the rising cost of labor. Where is it?
Further, you might want to consider that the costs that "everyone keeps saying are so awful" might be of the variety that economics is inadequate to quantify. Social capital, cultural integrity, political environment, crime rates, etc.
Despite the fact that most Americans understand that illegal immigration helps provide them with cheap produce, most of them are willing to forfeit that benefit in return for securing the borders.
If immigration provides such an abundance of benefits, why is that? Perhaps people are willing to trade tangible values for some intangible ones that elude the economists....
Third, declaring that individuals are free to act as they choose while rendering them powerless to protect the social/cultural/political infrastructure that permits free-trade and freedom of action to the extent that they do is indeed draining the pond from under the fish.
I'm sure it would. However, no one here declared that or rendered anyone powerless. So your whole argument falls as flat a man made of straw. Too bad.
Really? You've asserted that your fellow citizens don't have the right to prevent you from preemptively admitting laborers to this country over their objections, a situation which would effectively force them to confront the resulting social, cultural, political and economic public effects that by a substantial majority they have, through their elected representatives, expressed a desire not to be confronted with. If that isn't stripping them of their legitimate power as sovereigns of the republic, I don't know what would be.
Lizards in a terrarium.
