At the Mises Circle in Chicago earlier this month, I not only gave a speech, but I also had the honor of participating on a panel with the other speakers, Walter Block, Douglas French, Roderick Long, and Yuri Maltsev.
We addressed audience members’ questions on a variety of topics, but you may be especially interested in the discussion of immigration that begins at the 10:45 mark.
Here’s the audio:
Panel Discussion: Strategies for Changing Minds for Liberty, Mises Circle, Chicago, 4.9.11
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Seated near me in a cafe here in Columbus, Ohio are several political operatives who have come in from out of state to work on one of the two major parties’ political campaigns. Listening to them talk is sickening.
They of course have no interest whatsoever in studying political ideas, and openly admit it, at least here among each other. One of them has just purchased a middlebrow political book, which he half-jokes that he won’t read but will carry around for a while and then put on his coffee table to look impressive. Another says in as many words that she has no interest in policy per se — she only cares about getting her candidate elected.
Yet these people are happy to come into my state and foist a ruler on me whose policies I’ll have no choice but to care about because they’ll affect my money, my property, and my life. These people will feel no consequences, except that if their guy wins, their careers will benefit, and if not, they’ll just move on to the next race in the next state anyway.
Being around political parasites in a state capital is bad enough. I shudder to think about what it must be like to live in Washington, DC where everyone around you is like these creeps, only worse.
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Normally, when one party is in power in Washington, libertarians tend to root for the party out of power. When the Republicans are running things, the Democrats start to seem good, and when the Democrats are running things, the Republicans start to seem good. And of course, when the out-of-power party gets back in power, they disappoint you terribly by pursuing all the things on which they’re bad and forgetting the things on which they’re supposedly somewhat good — and you’re embarrassed that you ever (kind of, grudgingly) rooted for them.
Now, though, the right is making things much easier than usual. The Republicans’ incessant whining about the non-mosque that is not at Ground Zero, their war on immigrants, and their calls for war against Iran make me hate both parties equally — so I won’t have to feel at all bad for temporarily liking one of them (I don’t) or feel betrayed by them (since they never showed any real promise anyway).
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One question I regret I didn’t have space to discuss in detail in my book is immigration.
John Stossel does a decent job of discussing some of the relevant issues in this new article, but for libertarians, the issue should be even simpler than the questions of how many crimes immigrants commit or how many immigrants go on welfare.
The real question is: Do immigration restrictions require using aggressive violence against peaceful people? The answer is, of course, yes, which should put such restrictions right off the table for any consistent, principled libertarian.
This wouldn’t change even if immigration did lead to some bad consequences — if, say, immigrants as a group committed more crimes, or even if immigrants as a group voted for bigger government. Libertarianism is opposed to punishing people before they commit crimes, and it’s opposed to collective punishment. So this issue does not present a close call.
Manuel Lora and Albert Esplugas published a good article on this topic in a recent Journal of Libertarian Studies. Butler Shaffer also wrote an excellent one for LewRockwell.com.
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