Tuesday, April 27, 2010

All Individuals Have a Right To Travel Freely

The vast body of consistent libertarian work does not care for protecting the USA from "illegal aliens", but rather seeks to protect the rights of the individual ---ANY INDIVIDUAL--- to travel freely. ANY activity of a police state is an affront to individual freedom. What is "deportation" but the police state at its very worst, initiating force against innocent people? (Arguments against the innocence of illegals are red herring arguments, because nothing about immigrating --in and of itself-- creates a victim. In fact, the "unintended consequences" of immigration prohibition are what creates victims. Just like alcohol prohibition created low-grade moonshine dealers that blinded people, the skirting of border police incentivizes human trafficking by creating trafficking victims who cannot legally seek the help of the law.)

Moreover, there can be no deportation without every other kind of imaginable violation of privacy and personal freedom. Like the "war on drugs", the battle against illegal immigration can only be won by a totalitarian police state that sees all, and knows all. How else do you identify "illegals"?, monitor them up to the point of arrest?, avoid wasting law enforcement resources by "going after" the largest groups of illegals? ...There is no way to wage a war on "illegal relocation".

There is pain and suffering caused by breaking apart of families. When "illegal" breadwinners are "deported", the remaining family cries for "relief from that tyranny" and demands compensating welfare handouts that recursively destroy the system. Deportations also undermine the consistency of the message of individual freedom in elections (The very first anti-Ron-Paul website mocked his stance on illegal immigration, and turned away scores of leftists and purist libertarian independents who were otherwise open to his message). Deportations also weaken the economy by removing the source of low-cost entry-level labor that operates at closer to its true value. And, of course, cheap "black market" labor indicates that the minimum wage does, in fact, create joblessness.

Every ill ascribed to "illegals" is actually an ill caused by two standards of documentation: one for "documented citizens" and another for "illegals". The incremental cure is simple: unite everyone under one standard, voluntarily offered and voluntarily accepted by all. Those who exist totally outside the system have no access to the system's protections, as "outlaws". (As desribed in the famous youtube video by Schaeffer Cox, "The Plan".) This way, collectivism is shown as being the curse it is, for everyone.

Of course, the standard of justice and private property rights that America is based on cannot support collectivism. Collectivism cannot support influxes of incentivized collectivists (tax eaters). ...But collectivization destroys ANY system! The answer is to eliminate the collectivism, not the influx of new individuals (individuals who will operate as incentivized individualists in an individualist system, and incentivized collectivists in a collectivist system). No welfare state can survive. If illegals pouring into our welfare state hasten its destruction, they actually do us a favor: ask: "Do we want a prolongued depression, or a speedy crash?" In the "prolongued failure" scenario, the police state might survive into an era when it gains powerful computational tools of absolute control over the individual: at that time, the welfare state results in democide ---a terrifying reality! Might it not be better to reap what we've sown --a destroyed socialist state-- sooner? A complete failure's ashes can be built upon, but a burgeoning "big brother" cannot. To that end, I welcome illegal immigrants to our current system, and I preach the message that they are not at any fault, so long as they do not support welfare statism.

...I have created many new libertarians in conversations that way, as have libertarians like Marc Stevens, with his youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrwXYhCU9pQ


The illegals didn't vote for collectivism, year after year, since 1913. But they can and will end it, ...catastrophically. I say, "more power to them!" Let's stop pretending we have a constitutional government, and solely consider strategies toward creating a government that protects individual rights. "Rewinding the clock" cannot work: America was sold to a central bank in 1913. Perhaps we cannot go back to Jefferson's constitution. But we can reinstate free speech, jury trials, and property rights, in their fundamental form.

We can blame illegal immigrants for the fact that the clock cannot be turned back, or we can put the blame squarely where it belongs: on US voters who ignored the birth of the Libertarian political alternative in 1971.

Let's teach illegal immigrants about the ideas of Harry Browne, Samuel Konkin, Marc Stevens, G Edward Griffin, and other libertarian philosophers. After all, they crossed a river, government checkpoints and barricades, drug dogs, and border police, and they have seen the worst of the American police state. (They are our most natural demographic!)

Illegal immigrants are a growth market for libertarian and individualist ideas. By supporting ideological opposition to immigration, we undermine our own message, and set ourselves up for imminent failure by conceding moral libertarian highground to the Democrat and Republican Parties that have caved in (kind of) to allowing (some) illegal immigration.

A supremely intelligent supercomputer would predict that opposing illegal immigration is doomed to failure. If there is a market pressure that rewards immigration, it will happen. Moreover, the purist libertarian position favors free immigration. (Only a narrow market of contrarian quasi-libertarians oppose immigration, because they are marketing to a tiny but vocal market of contrarians.) The purist libertarian position here is winning, but instead of saying "I told you so!" and welcoming thousands of new libertarians into our midst, we allow "La Raza" (a ragtag bunch of collectivists!) to take the moral high ground (and the potential political victory!) that has belonged --unused-- to libertarians for the prior 30 years!

Rather than marching against "La Raza", we should be marching with them, and opposing only the portions of their message that are collectivist. The "the path is over here!" method of political competition is the best. Go to where the crowds are, and show the crowds the message of truth!

Opposition to immigration is another example of the libertarian/individualist movement snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. We should be smarter than that.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Obama Extends Bush Fascism

In this video, Keith Olbermann points out that the Obama administration has now gone beyong anything that Bush did, in the name of "fighting terrorism". Interestingly, this command now opens the door to Harry Browne's dire warning about the importance of due process even with respect to "terrorists".

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