By Tom Rogers
This video seems to be about tactics and strategy for right-libertarians. I am not well-schooled in the internal politics of the libertarian community and the different strands of thought, but if I understand correctly, the argument seems to be that provoking both sides of the conventional political spectrum will cause more people to come over to libertarian ideas. This is based on an assumption that right-libertarianism stands outside the ideological war between the Right and Left. That premise wouldn’t hold in my country, Britain, but I suppose in an American context, where libertarian-type thinking is deeply interpolated into the public consciousness, right-libertarianism can be presented as the non-ideological Centre.
A major issue today in all Western societies is of course mass immigration. I’m sure somebody will come along to correct me on this if I am mistaken (I am not an expert on all these different strands of right-wing anarchoid/libertarian thought), but my understanding is that the intellectual luminaries of right-libertarianism, Messrs. Mises and Rothbard, were firmly against mass immigration and would have accepted the need under present conditions for Western societies to collectively defend themselves. We are, after all, talking about a threat to the very existence of libertarian ideas. The moral and ethical difficulty that Western intellectuals seem to have in recognising this threat is what I call the Knappian Paradox, which I described in a previous thread [‘Karl Popper and the Intolerance of the Intolerant’]:
“The Knappian Paradox sums up the Western liberal dilemma, which is that tolerance itself leads to intolerance, and that arguing against the intolerant who defend tolerance leads to greater intolerance. To put it brutally, Mr Knapp is arguing against himself. It would actually be quicker if he just put a gun to his own head.
“The Paradox is that in order to defend tolerance, you must also be prepared to be intolerant. If you are not willing to be intolerant, then your tolerance will eventually negate itself and become the embodiment of the thing that you set out to oppose. You will also kill your own civilisation in the process, or at least, change it in such a way that it becomes unrecognisable, as it will be detached from its own biological roots.
“So, intolerant ideologies can be a vaccine and antibody against intolerant enemies.
….
“A resolution of the Paradox requires that the liberal be intolerant so that the LIBERAL can survive (and thus, his standards of tolerance can endure in some form).”
Accusing others of horrible ‘racism’ and ‘nazism’, while failing to acknowledge the need to defend the very civilisation that gave you the freedom to believe in nice things, does present rather a dilemma if your ‘libertarianism’ leads to the destruction of any possibility for the practical realisation of those principles.
That’s not to say that non-Western societies are incapable of sustaining liberty. I know a few contributors to this blog believe that to be so, but I don’t myself hold that view. I think it’s true that in many non-Western countries, what appears to us to be liberty and an absence of repressive linguistic correctness and all the other trappings of the European censorious Left, is in fact just expediency and government weakness. However, I see no inherent reason why non-whites cannot build and sustain comparably free societies. The real issue, as I see it, is who the society is being built for. It is the ‘Who’ question that is being ignored.
I think some kind of anarchy is the destiny of any civilised, high-trust society. This will probably take the form of global socialism, relying on automation for most labour and distribution needs. A civilised people have no use for a ‘state’, private property or formal hierarchies and will probably want to be rid of such things in time, but that’s just my preference. I accept that certain of these things could survive in an advanced society with a market or capitalist basis, along the lines supported by Hoppe, among others.
The fundamental problem for people who have this sort of vision is that in order for libertarian and anarchist priorities to survive, these have to be subordinated to the civilisational questions of race, culture, borders and immigration, which are among the overarching issues of our time. The nagging paradox is that you must be prepared, in practice, to abandon or weaken your principles in order to preserve any chance that they might one day become reality.
Thus, the Alt Right and other similar intellectual currents, such as national-socialism, have to be seen as the antibody that protects the civilisation. Building a border wall between the United States and Mexico is, from one perspective, firmly illiberal and anti-libertarian, and libertarians can also fairly argue that the existence of such a wall might contribute to a more intrusive climate within American society. But there is another perspective on this, which is that if you want American society to evolve in a more libertarian direction, then you need to have a culture that favours libertarianism, which in turn means you need to have some control on who enters the country. Libertarianism that destroys libertarianism isn’t libertarian. Libertarianism that acknowledges the hard realities within which society has to work, potentially could be.
From where I’m sitting, libertarianism at this stage appears to be more akin to a luxury parlour game and is of no practical use. Sure, I’d like a libertarian or anarchist society. Wouldn’t we all? It’s a bit like saying you like chocolate ice cream or burger and chips. I’d like to lose five stone too, but the problem is, I have to make a choice of one or the other. I can either kill myself or I can live. Libertarianism might help to create a freer society, but Quixotic libertarianism will kill us.
I’m not saying libertarianism is childish or utopian. I accept it has a realist basis to it. What I am suggesting is that to advocate libertarian or anarchoid philosophies now as anything other than a possible long-range aim or goal is to be impractically idealistic. It can’t work unless the people themselves are politically conscious in some comparable way, which they are not, and the prospects for this will diminish unless the civilisation itself that gave rise to these ideas is defended. For that reason, I would actually question whether libertarianism – of anything other than the most realistic kind – can be regarded as a distinct political tradition at all. I think under present conditions it is just a disposition in most cases, and where organised, as in the United States, amounts to a disguised ginger group for corporate interests.
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Excellent. One of the most sensible postings regarding this subject I’ve ever read on this site. If only call me Dave had your vision. When you are well-schooled Tom, you’ll be bleedin’ brilliant 🙂
I don’t think I’ll ever be well-school, but thanks anyway. 😉
I think it’s a great article, but I have a problem with your view that civilized societies are evolving towards a state where (if I understand you rightly) there will be no private property. The instinct to acquire wealth for its own sake will always be one of the strongest motivating forces, unless suppressed by a tyrannical state. And as human ability and intelligence are unequally distributed, so will wealth.
Thank you for the kind words (perhaps too kind). I think the latter of your two objections is the strongest: natural inequality is, in my view, a major stumbling block to any sort of stateless society (civilised anarchy). I’m not so sure about human beings having an instinct to acquire wealth. I think that’s just an expression of a more fundamental instinct. In a propertyless society, it would manifest in a different way.
Why does the article say it was written by Keir Martland and also say it was written by Tom Rogers? Is one name a pen name for the other?
Certainly not! Tom Rogers is not Keir Martland! However, I have posting rights to the LA Blog and posted Mr Rogers’ submission on his behalf.
Interesting stuff. I’m not yet super familiar with the arguments of Mises and Rothbard and Hoppe on the immigration subject. My impression is that Mises didn’t write that much on the subject, but where he did write about it, he was against restrictions. Rothbard seems to have changed his views over time, from a more liberal to a more conservative position, while Hoppe has always been very restrictionist. Some of this may be generational: Mises was old enough to remember the pre-WWI regime, which was by today’s standards pretty open borders, and immigration restrictions were associated with the wartime growth of the state and loss of liberty.
I’m a bit worried about the idea of sacrificing principles in the short term in order to achieve some long-term goal. How do we know how much principle to sacrifice? Maybe we just need to reformulate our theory in order to accommodate immigration restrictions, as Hoppe has done. Otherwise, we will just slide into statism, since just about anything can be argued to be a public good and an area where freedom needs to be sacrificed to collective needs.
I prefer to approach the problem differently. I think we should be able to articulate desirable social goals, such as ethnically homogeneous societies, without entailing state intervention to achieve those goals. Instead, as right-libertarians, we should be able to argue for ways to achieve such goals that respect individual privacy and freedom. For example, speaking as an American, instead of militarizing our border and intrusively policing citizens in order to catch illegal immigrants, which attacks freedom of movement and association, we should restore powers to the states to discriminate against illegal aliens when providing benefits.
On the latter point, I think it would be much preferable to discriminate upon who can and cannot come to settle and populate our societies, than erect what could become an endless list of complexities that discriminate against people in their daily lives once they enter a nation.
An apartheid system of this kind is not really sustainable and something that I think can only lead to disaster, much like South Africa. Two or more peoples cannot often share a territory without an upset occurring eventually, particularly when different rules exist between the two of them, and when disparate demographic numbers can ultimately come to render the rules and premises an absurdity.
In the case of England, immigration was once extremely small. In fact, we exported much more people to new found lands and colonies than what arrived. I believe immigration and settlement here was so rare, and so unheard of, that we never really had any laws that governed it that much.
The kind of situation we are now presented with would not really have crossed the mind of the thinkers of the early last century and before, in my opinion.
In 1958s, according to the Time Magazine article “The Dark Million”, written in 1965, there were only around 200,000 notably different peoples residing in Britain – mostly around the heavy industry ports.
When Enoch Powell was giving his “scaremongering” predictions in 1968, he was aghast at the prospect of 50,000 people a year coming to Britain to settle.
The “net” number today is over 330,000 a year, within a 650,000 or so population churn. There has been more immigration into Britain over the last decade or so than in over 1000 years of history, going right back to the foundation of England itself.
I am not suggesting you do, but some people seem to believe that this process will not have any effect upon how this country operates, what fundamental essences it has, etc. Furthermore, they care not whether the indigenous people of Europe survive.
On this, they may cry and whine about ‘fascists’ and whatever else, but you can’t get more scummier in my eyes than being okay with policies and actions that will help eradicate peoples from the face of the planet, engineering a state of being that cannot be undone, unlike theoretical monetary policies, or social, law, justice, policies.
On all these points, I think they are completely off their rockers – especially whilst they jabber on about ‘property rights’ and finer points of libertarian philosophies from up on high in some lofty heights of academia and theory.
To such people who are proudly and defiantly “open borders”, I suggest that they head out on a plane to the third world and Middle East and work their magic there, in order to get these potential new arrivals here a good solid grounding in libertarian theory and practice before the come…….rather than advocating turning our nations into the third world and Middle East whilst they pretend that group dynamics and group differences don’t exist.
I think you’re missing the point. I’m not disputing any of your arguments about the disadvantages of immigration; as far as I know, they may very well be true. What I object to is the argument that, in this realm, we must abandon our libertarian principles and adopt a statist solution to the problem. I believe this is wrong-headed and that right-libertarians, that is, libertarians who accept conservative arguments about what makes for a good society, need to find solutions that respect fundamental principles of non-aggression.
My point about devolving powers to the states would involve fewer regulations at the federal level. In case you don’t know the context, in the United States there were some landmark federal court decisions in which states were stripped of the power to discriminate against aliens in the provision of public benefits that state taxes paid for. That is, the federal authorities were given expanded powers and jurisdiction, with a net loss to liberty. The solution I propose is that such decisions be overturned, or better yet, federal courts be stripped of jurisdiction over such issues by Congress. States would then be allowed to demand proof of legal residency when receiving applications for benefits. They could even deny benefits to legal resident aliens, though not to US citizens. In sum, there would be more local control over such decisions, which I think is a goal that most libertarians would want.
I’m not sure what the equivalent approach in the UK should be, though I’m pretty sure it involves withdrawal from the EU and reassertion of national control over immigration policy. Ideally, this would be followed by further devolution to the local level.
Maybe there is a divide between Britain and America on some of these points.
True, the aspects of immigration were more in general and not applied to the context of your reply – but the nature of different peoples sharing the same territory and applying different rules to them in their every day life does apply.
I think it would be far more unjust to allow this situation to happen, than take a simple measure of restricting their access to start with.
As I said above, such situations where people are let in at a certain rate (or ‘freely’, as open borders advocates seem to suggest) and where demographic disparates can come to apply, it an cause instability and inability to uphold the structures and rules of society.
The American Constitution, for example, is meaningless – if people abandon it, don’t believe in it, choose not to uphold it. As I am sure you’re aware, it has gravitas – but it is not necessarily cast for all time. It depends upon the demographics and outlooks that support it – and who would die to defend it.
If people are allowed into America, such as all the Muslims who are currently flowing into Europe, how can they square their religious duty with also upholding the American Constitution? If they ever arose to be a critical mass, is it unreasonable to expect that they would rather live under Sharia than under the traditional American laws?
Once the camel’s nose is in the tent, the whole camel will soon follow. This is why it is an absurdity for our own Prime Minister David Cameron (and the compliant media) to be up and down rattling EU reform papers about “restricting welfare” to immigrants that have come here, for a duration of three to four years.
It is not the “welfare” that is the problem. It is the fundamental change to the character of Britain itself, leading to the obliteration of the indigenous peoples of the British Isles that matters.
Subjecting these immigrants to different rules will cause nothing but resentment and agitation within both their ranks and amongst our own – and it is all entirely besides the point of what is important anyway!
If they were coming for five years on temporary visas and then being forcefully deported along with any progeny, it may make some sense. However, these people are coming and they are coming here to stay forever.
Whether they receive welfare in three or four years is therefore immaterial to the fundamental issues of how the future of this country develops. On that score, it is a bit of a sideshow that solves little.
I disagree that welfare is just a marginal concern. It is in fact a central concern. Welfare is what supports these immigrants and their dependents in the country; without the welfare, they would for the most part not be able to survive here, at least not without working and assimilating to your own culture much more than they do currently. When it comes to the “camel’s nose” argument, I think you’ll find it still comes down to welfare: the children of the immigrants, unlike the immigrants themselves, get treated like natives, which means that they get to enjoy the welfare benefits that may have been denied their parents. If you abolish the welfare state, you solve the problem. Same goal, different means.
[quote]”If you abolish the welfare state, you solve the problem. Same goal, different means.”[unquote]
I suppose it depends on what you mean by the ‘welfare state’, but I agree with your general point that a genuine and radical rolling-back of the welfare state would probably cut immigrant numbers drastically. It wouldn’t solve the problem, as non-European migrants would still come here if they have jobs or family ties, but it would go a long way to addressing the situation, not just for immigrants but also for the native white population as well.
What seems to underlines the thinking of yourself and a lot of traditional libertarians is the belief that Western societies can return to a pre-1914 situation, where Anglophone states were in effect libertarian, and lacked serious border controls. Your view is that all we need to do is adopt internal policies that discourage non-European immigration and encourage whites to remain in their home countries rather than emigrate in such large numbers. In short, what you want to create is a tacit form of national-socialism.
This sounds attractive, but my problem is that I am not sure it is any longer tenable as a political goal. The world you hark back to was very different socially and technologically. Normal people were implicitly racialist. Today, normal people are instructed that they must be explicitly anti-racialist, and often we can imply from their behaviour or stated views that they are privately that too. I think this is a time in which strength is going to be needed. Quaint WASPy visions of bucolic anarchy will have to remain the stuff of dreams, though I hope one day they come true.
I think what you’re really saying is that libertarianism doesn’t work. We should stop calling for an end to the welfare state, accept that it is here to stay, and just convert to nationalist welfarism a la Front National or Donald Trump. I’ll just say that I don’t agree, and that’s why I’m still calling for an end to the welfare state. I believe ending the welfare state will achieve the same goals you desire, i.e. an end to state-subsidized mass immigration, assimilation of the current immigrant population through participation in the labor market, and greater economic prosperity for all to boot.
The problem is we’re arguing from slightly different perspectives. I think identity is of elemental importance to human beings. You don’t, though you clearly place some degree of importance on it as you talk favourably about integration. I don’t want integration. I want separation. I believe in a race-based identity rather than merely a civic (values)-based identity. I think the latter is nonsensical because it ignores the thing that creates it. This really seems to be the blind spot for some libertarians, though I will grant not all.
However, I must emphasise that I am not saying libertarianism doesn’t work. It has worked in the past – Western Anglophone countries were once libertarian – so it can work again. I’m just saying that libertarianism can only have relevance if it takes account of reality. You’re right, I am a minarchist, and in more ideal circumstances, I would favour full-blown anarchism, but private law societies will not protect ethno-European civilisations against the non-European demographic explosion. There is, in present circumstances, a need for collective action and a strong physical perimeter. We need rough men to man our borders, and just as importantly, we need soft men to believe that rough men should do this. I make no apologies for believing these things.
I see what you’re saying. But the error I see in your reasoning is that it was precisely a homogeneous race-based community that abandoned liberty and gave up their rights to an overweening government. They lost their values and, I believe, they can regain them again, as long as they can be persuaded.
I don’t have a problem with racially uniform communities, provided they are organized on a voluntary basis. But a state that excludes people on the basis of race is arrogating to itself a power that it has no right to exercise. How does the state know which of its members want to associate with outsiders and which do not? Maybe a majority do, but what gives them the right to dictate policy to the minority? This can only be answered by restoring that right of discrimination to individuals and property owners who properly exercise that right.
I agree with you about this intellectually. My issue is with the practicalities. I suspect the difference between us is really more about the details, albeit the contested points are of some significant importance in that my ‘national-socialist’ minarchist high-tech agrarian society would have a small state for the purposes of defence and other essentials, whereas your society would be regulated under transactions governed by private law only. I also see my model as an ideal society, whereas you see libertarianism as something that can be practically implemented now.
Given present circumstances, I think we are still reliant on systematic coercion to make societies work. I can see the underlying idea, that it is the state that is the root of the difficulty. Remove the state and people would then rely on private associations and group together naturally. Great, and the logic is exquisite, but it can’t work in a situation where there is significant natural inequality between human populations, which gives rise to a need for borders and defence, or we would be overrun.
When I remarked that you were a minarchist I was actually just expressing my surprise. I got the impression that right-libertarians are all Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists these days, so it’s interesting to meet someone who still believes in government! I myself am not entirely persuaded of the wisdom of total statelessness, although I do think the anarchist position is more theoretically coherent.
As for the rest, I think we’ll just have to disagree about the necessity of exclusion of peaceful immigrants by the state.
[quote]”I’m a bit worried about the idea of sacrificing principles in the short term in order to achieve some long-term goal. How do we know how much principle to sacrifice? Maybe we just need to reformulate our theory in order to accommodate immigration restrictions, as Hoppe has done.[/quote]
I’m sympathetic to this, but the problem is that such a reformulation of your theory will remain just that: a theory, of no practical relevance. I sympathise with anarchists and libertarians theoretically. I think practically anybody must, really. I am not some scary ‘nazi’ archetype. My adoption of these racialist views is of necessity, reflecting reality as I see it.
[quote]”Otherwise, we will just slide into statism, since just about anything can be argued to be a public good and an area where freedom needs to be sacrificed to collective needs.”[unquote]
Yes, but:-
(i). we are already in a statist society and so while academic libertarians might not want to be statist, the reality is that any policy solutions axiomatically must be statist; and,
(ii). I am sure you would agree that sacrificing some freedom for collective needs may be desirable in circumstances where it is widely-acknowledged that the need for collective action is essential to the continuation of civilisation itself (in this case, the biological basis of our civilisation) and so must take priority over individual needs.
[quote]”I prefer to approach the problem differently. I think we should be able to articulate desirable social goals, such as ethnically homogeneous societies, without entailing state intervention to achieve those goals. Instead, as right-libertarians, we should be able to argue for ways to achieve such goals that respect individual privacy and freedom.”[unquote]
I think I understand what you are getting at here on an intellectual level: if we are going to repel forced integration, then there needs to be some shared understanding about values among people, which a sound understanding of libertarianism can provide. I imagine you would also point out that the legalistic, statist approach will always be of limited effect unless it can change the way that people think and live. So, yes, I’m not underestimating the power of the libertarian perspective. A society built on capitalist freedom is unlikely to attract certain types of immigrants, but I remain unconvinced that such a society would work to protect the collective goals I have in mind, which includes preserving the people who practice libertarianism in the first place.
[quote]”For example, speaking as an American, instead of militarizing our border and intrusively policing citizens in order to catch illegal immigrants, which attacks freedom of movement and association, we should restore powers to the states to discriminate against illegal aliens when providing benefits.”[unquote]
But isn’t that just statism in another form? You’re just reconstructing the state, or so it appears, but you’re saying that it is not ‘the State’ because it is local government of some kind (in this case, state-level government). I think this is where ‘academic libertarianism’ falls apart. That’s why this is such an important issue. There is no libertarian answer to the Knappian Paradox. Your ideas can’t defend civilisation, as you need something stronger that will defend the perimeter.
Even Hoppian private law societies would not protect the racial and cultural construct of Euro-America. You would simply be overrun without the coercive apparatus of borders, police and military. Your Quixotic libertarianism would kill us – literally.
Forget about the American example; I can see now that it’s confusing. Let’s just stick with the welfare state.
I see you are a minarchist: you believe a coercive state apparatus is necessary, at least to defend against external threats. I think the task now is to determine what constitutes a legitimate threat. Masses of armed invaders are clearly a threat, and it may be that small communities and private law societies are not equipped to resist them. They must band together and concede power to a state to organize their common defense.
But what about peaceful immigration? Is that really a threat to civilization? I’m not convinced that it is, at least not any more than other alleged threats that conservative statists try to outlaw, such as cheap foreign goods, drugs, sodomy and so on. I don’t think there is a principled reason for a libertarian to give the state the power to keep out peaceful immigrants who would otherwise find gainful employment in our society, and not also the power to control other supposedly harmful influences on society. At that point, we’re just not in the realm of libertarianism anymore, since we’ve abandoned the core libertarian belief that society can work out how to deal with harmful influences through voluntary association and without state coercion.
Yes, culturally alien immigrants might be a threat to civilization, even if they are peaceful and earn their living. Sexual deviancy may also be a threat, or recreational drugs, or opening businesses on Sunday. But if you want to argue for any of that, I think you’re in the wrong forum!
[quote]”Yes, culturally alien immigrants might be a threat to civilization, even if they are peaceful and earn their living. Sexual deviancy may also be a threat, or recreational drugs, or opening businesses on Sunday. But if you want to argue for any of that, I think you’re in the wrong forum!”[unquote]
That depends on whether you think yours is a philosophy or ideology that should deal with reality. If you think it should, then I am emphatically in the right forum and we should discuss these issues in a civilised way. If you think not, then at this stage in history, libertarianism is just an interesting academic exercise and exists only in the minds of its believers.
I do think that libertarianism deals with reality. I think that immigration without a welfare state is demonstrably not a problem; witness the rapidly increasing prosperity of pre-WWI Britain and America.
I should like to thank Keir Martland and the Libertarian Alliance for adding this posting of mine to their blog. Needless to say, any errors or misunderstandings are my responsibility alone.
We are committed to tolerance and diversity at the LA to the point that such arguably un-libertarian arguments can be found unmoderated in the comments section, and indeed occasionally posted, on our Blog.
If you’re not careful, Tom, you’ll be on the LA authors’ sidebar before long.
It happened to me…
No, Neil, not that….please….no…..I’ll do anything….I’ll even renounce coercion as a necessary evil and embrace voluntaryism.
I used to think the Economist was for the free market, but they really are statists of the worst kind.