Originally Posted by
helmuth_hubener
Here is another (potentially) convincing reason: The quality of a society is ultimately determined by the quality of the individuals in that society. Without good, quality people you cannot have a good, quality society, no matter how good (meaning libertarian) your institutions and laws may be.
If you have built a society with an average IQ of 98, and then decide to let in a flood of people with an average IQ of 87 (Mexico) or 79 (Guatemala), then the intelligence level of your society will be drastically altered. Regardless of how libertarian your laws are, you will now be surrounded by significantly stupider people. Perhaps that will be good for you personally, it could make you feel smarter by comparison, but perhaps it could be annoying to you to have to deal with unintelligent people on an everyday basis. To me, for my own personal preferences, I want to live around smart people. I think a more intelligent society is a better society.
That's just one metric. If you have a neighborhood that places a high value on work ethic, full of very hard-working, diligent people, that seems like a good thing to me. Hard work can be encouraged by being libertarian, by allowing men to keep all the fruits of their hard labor, but the character trait cannot be created. If you invite in a flood of people with a more lazy character, a "siesta" culture let's say, the nature of your neighborhood is going to change. It just is. It's going to be full of lazy people. Why? Because you just had a bunch of lazy people move in. It's simple physics.
Perhaps you value living in a city full of people with high skill and usefulness, pride in what they do, high competence. I certainly do. If you allow hundreds of thousands of low-skill people to move into your city, what will you have? A city full of low-skill people!
So, this simple fact of reality that the quality of a society rests upon the quality of its individuals -- a highly individualist insight that we as libertarians can readily understand and agree with -- leads us to the conclusion that it would be beneficial to have quality controls upon who can come into one's society. Not all individuals are of the same quality. Rational people who are interested in living in a high-quality society will invite people into their society that have something to contribute, that will raise the average and make the society a better place. They will not invite those who will lower the average and thus deteriorate the society they've worked so hard, for many generations possibly, to build.
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