Oh hello. I’m still here. Reading ur blogz. I particularly appreciated Rad Geek’s debate with Vin Suprynowicz, which RG had the presence of mind to preserve in its entirety. It is amusing in part because non-libertarians often complain of ad hominem attacks and caricaturing of the left and right by libertarians: Suprynowicz amply demonstrates that libertarians call each other names quite a bit too. In Libertarians Against Property Rights and Freedom of Association, Unabridged Edition, we see that Suprynowicz wrote on June 16 2009:
Yes, if there were no tax-funded “commons,” and none of us were numbered or taxed, the arrival of a million strangers seeking work would do me little harm, provided they maintained reasonable sanitary safeguards. When “Rad Geek,” hiding in the shadows of anonymity, has managed to accomplish goals to which courageous Libertarians have been unable to win over even 5 percent of our casually socialist neighbors in 40 years of effort, I hope he’ll let us know.
Meantime, since he wants to speak in hypotheticals, let’s pretend “Rad Geek” is a landlord or an employer, telling all applicants who speak poor English, “I’m not going to rent to you or offer you a job, because I think you may be an illegal immigrant and I don’t want to become an accessory to your crime.” Do you think our brave federal bureaucrats will congratulate him and back him to the hilt, demanding the applicant prove he or she is here legally?
Those employers and landlords soon find themselves in an Alice-and-Wonderland world, threatened with fines by the EEOC and other alphabet bureaucracies, you simpering innocent. “Presumably my boss and landlord are willing?” Go talk to a few of them, before you go presuming too much, you ivory-tower twit.
I applaud Rad Geek for stepping into the fray and battling it out with an anti-immigration libertarian. I’m already so overwhelmed by the conservative pro-war and anti-immigration folks that I get psychologically fried at the idea of having to explain, to a freakin’ libertarian, that if the government fouls up whenever it intervenes in the domestic economy, that the problem gets infinitely worse when you hand them extra guns and tax funds.
RG addresses Suprynowicz’s central concern here, basically that of mooching:
But in any case, if you are going to blame the people who reclaim government-seized money, rather than the government that seizes the money in the first place, then you do realize, don’t you, that illegal immigrants aren’t special in any particular way on this count? That you could use this argument just as easily to justify government force against just about anyone — government-enforced population control (since children receive big tax subsidies for education, healthcare, etc.), internal passports (since immigrants from poorer states tend to move to richer states and take advantage of the more plentiful welfare benefits), summarily jailing and exiling everyone over the age of 65 (seeing how they mooch of[f] Social Security and Medicare, usually far in excess of what they paid in when they were working), or any other collectivist horror you might dream up.
I think RG gets to the heart of the matter here: whenever you have a government program that rations inefficiently, you inevitably start thinking people are the problem, rather than the program itself. We see this over and over and over. There is overfishing due to the tragedy of the commons/lack of private property rights in the oceans—hence women should stop having babies. (No, seriously. Someone wrote this. As a rebuttal.) For our socialist programs that allow some to mooch off the many, we scapegoat illegal immigrants, or whoever else is easily at hand, preferably a vulnerable, unpopular group. For now we’d laugh, I hope, if someone proposed that we fix public schooling by reducing the number of children who are born. Unfortunately, people take seriously the notion that we can solve our immigration problems by persecuting the immigrants. And, as we’ve already seen in single-payer healthcare systems abroad, those over 65 often receive especially substandard care, and I’m sure the idea of withholding services from those who are already “too old” will gain increasing traction here as healthcare goes down the socialist tubes. Again, “old people” will be the problem, not Medicare itself.
I mean, I sort of understand where Suprynowicz is coming from. I really do. (Oops, can you tell that I’ve reread Catcher in the Rye recently?) That is because collectivist thinking is so seductive and so pervasive, even if you’re an otherwise hardboiled libertarian. It’s really hard not to think of the state as some sort of gated community writ large, where you pay your dues in exchange for getting public roads and stuff. As far as I can tell, anyway, this is an extremely prevalent mindset that is used to justify all sorts of abominations. Sometimes the money gets used for things you don’t like, such as keeping foreigners out, or for not keeping enough foreigners out. But for all that so many are anti-market, there is an implicit understanding of taxes as a kind of membership fee for a big crazy gym called the state, which just happens to have waterboarding machines out back. It’s pretty easy to preoccupy everyone with worrying about how to keep people from sneaking in and using the water fountain.
I’ve probably stopped making sense a while ago, but in closing I’ll say that this is why I have issues with identifying government as an industry in any sense. It just makes it sound so much more benign than it really is, and adds to the confusion that citizens have in seeing themselves as shareholders or club members of a sort.
