The pathological libertarian cannot tolerate such a collapse of moral universality. "Not even in the face of armageddon. Never compromise," as Rorschach from Watchmen would say regarding a different moral absolute ("evil must be punished"). I have now been a libertarian now for 11.5 years, and my pragmatic self-preservation instincts spend their full-time job holding my moral idealism from the cliffs of insanity. In 2016 it was just a given that nobody could convince me to vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump if they had a gun to my head, and I think I meant it literally. I may still feel the same, and this is just a weak no-brainer starting point as far as many libertarians are concerned. Most morally self-conscious people have lines they simply will not cross, but as libertarians ours tend to be far more restrictive, especially in the political sphere.
The vast majority of the time, our consequentialist viewpoints merely reinforce our moral certitude. After all, a society that broadly adopted libertarian deontological ethics would maximize real-world utility in a way that a cacophany of 300 million screeching utilitarian voices simply never could. (They would disagree, but that's beside the point.) Directly pursuing utilitarianism generally just leads to a chaotic war of all against all, because everyone has different utility functions, most are poorly calibrated, and most are more instrumentally rational than epistemically rational to begin with (that is, most people are both short-sighted and self-centered). Libertarians are often criticized for sharing utopian thinking with communists, but this is a misconception: Unlike the ever-tweaking utopian statists, our general viewpoint is more that principled libertarian solutions are "as close" to a panacea for most socioeconomic problems as a succinct set of rules could ever get, where all but the most exceptional deviations would cause more problems than they solve. In other words, we don't want to undermine a system that works in 99% of cases to accommodate the exceptional 1% cases. We're willing to leave those to chance or charity or even accept a 1% failure rate, rather than risk tearing everything down in pursuit of that utopian 100%.
In general, our economic and social views align so nicely with our deontological ethics that we rarely have to question whether the non-aggression principle should be our categorical imperative, or if we care more about real-world outcomes. It rarely matters whether we rejected the gun in the room before or after we built our mental model of consequences; they have become deeply intertwined. We have to examine which one is more important so infrequently that I think most of us eventually subconsciously convince ourselves that no exceptional situations even exist. It's a comforting thought. We all recognize that any state action disturbs whatever the nonviolent path of least resistance would have been, and the effect generally (always?) has negative consequences that exceed the benefit and necessitate further tweaking to mitigate. Sometimes this opens the door to possible nightmare futures, like the idea of Trump's wall being used to keep us in, as the Berlin Wall was used to keep East Germans under Communist control. Why bother quantifying this risk next to the cultural and political risks of uncontrolled or excessive immigration? If we turn our moral principles into absolutes we'll at least dodge the risk of corruption, and we can always find consequentialist rationalizations that assure us uncontrolled immigration is more of an economic benefit than a political danger.
It is in this way, that we become deeply pathological and, I think, a danger to ourselves. In my heart of hearts I want to be an anarchist, but I've never been able to convince myself that such a system would be predictably stable and avoid catastrophic perverse incentives in practice. Neither have I been able to convince myself that I shouldn't care about the consequences anyway on moral grounds, because unconditionally upholding the NAP is the greatest possible moral good. It seems my commitment to deontological ethics is not absolute, or perhaps, that I have misidentified the precise deontological principles that should be my true categorical imperative. Maybe the NAP is a crude first-order approximation of a more accurate and nuanced universal moral principle, which takes a broader view of self-defense than I can narrowly articulate. I'd imagine that true moral principles are what they are, regardless of how easy or difficult it might be to twist their linguistic expression into a dangerously contradictory meaning. Universal laws are normally parsimonious, but on occasion they take labrynthine twists.
In any case, I never never been able to convince myself that American culture can survive uncontrolled immigration, or that the future of liberty can survive the death of American culture, or that such an outcome is acceptable. I believe the immigration issue is an actual exception where strict adherence to the NAP is at stark odds with our goal to see real-world outcomes produce more liberty. ("GASP! TRAITOR!")
The biggest reason has little to do with economics and everything to do with American culture and politics. Culture matters, and as Sarah Hoyt (a conservative blogger I mostly enjoy)
argues here, it is more than tasty food, fancy attire, and festival days. Those are just the superficial elements. The core of culture, which multiculturalist indoctrination has always obscured (on purpose I believe), encapsulates our deeply ingrained attitudes about how human beings should interact with each other:
- The structure of government, role of executive power, role of the legislature, principles of jurisprudence and common law, etc.
- The role of government in society
- The role of religion in government, and vice versa
- The acceptable uses of violence or coercion to enforce social or economic norms
- The definition and role of property in society
- The rights of individuals and their responsibilities to each other, their communities, and their countries
- Views on education, language, fatherhood, motherhood, and family, and on what the culture should encourage and discourage
- Views on how to handle disagreement, offensive or hurtful speech, etc.
- Morality: What is a virtue, and what is a vice? How should morality be enforced?
The power elite understand this in a way most of their followers do not: Culture matters, and they have worked long and hard to make Americans forget ours, so they could supplant it. How many times have you heard a leftist repeat the clueless sentiment, "America has no real culture, unlike all the other countries?" It becomes more true every day as we become more polarized and divided, but it was never true in the way they speak it. America has its skeletons, and it has become frighteningly corrupt and imperialistic, but what legitimate success it did attain -- greater than probably any other country in history -- it attained as a function of culture, most of it good. Our culture is not McDonald's, barbecue, and American football. The British common law system, Enlightenment ideals of individual rights and property ownership, Protestant work ethic, entrepreneurial spirit, and rugged individualism formed the backbone of the culture that built this country. The flame of liberty still survives in the remnant, but its ideological enemies are trying to extinguish it using every means at their disposal, and the immigration system is on the list.
Culture is not a hat that a person can swap on a whim. It forms the basis of a person's worldview, and how they interact with the world around them. If a handful of open-minded immigrants from a radically different and incompatible culture move to America to seek a better life, their cultural immersion will make them Americans before long. They won't just see that we live better than people in the countries they came from. They will see WHY. As they assimilate, they will come to understand our success as the direct consequence of our cultural differences (petrodollar hegemony notwithstanding), and they will gradually adopt our ways of thinking. However, if an enormous number of immigrants from a radically different and incompatible culture move to America to seek a better life, they will remain too segregated to assimilate. Instead of adopting traditional American values, they may see our success as mere turn of fate, and try to "culturally enrich" us with the sociopolitical attitudes that dominated their countries of origin. Worse, confronted with the leftist ideology that our success came from "stealing their resources," many will see no reason to adopt our culture or become American. Instead, they may instead agitate to "reclaim" what they're told was theirs, as "La Raza" -- "The Race" -- they will try to "reclaim" what they're told was theirs. Aztlan indeed.
Sure, the Cloward-Piven strategy to overburden the welfare state with immigrants is also at play, and the open borders libertarians have a valid point that it wouldn't be a problem if we simply eliminated welfare. That's all well and good, but that's a GOAL, not a strategy. The question is, how do we actually get there? We can't just snap our fingers and do it! Ron Paul supporters have been trying for 12 (or 30 in some cases), and libertarians in general have been trying for decades longer than that. In all that time, we've consistently lost more ground than we've gained. The key point to understand here is simple:
We are running out of time.
We don't have another 47 years to waste sparring each other as the Libertarian Party has done. We may not even have another 12 years to waste, as we here on this site have done, before it's too late. It may already be too late; many of us here argued the same a decade ago. What I think many people fail to understand is that it's not just going to be too late for the US government to turn around. It's going to be too late for American culture to survive, and if American culture dies, so does every link the average person has had or will ever have, to libertarianism or even liberty in general. If you think the gulf between you and the average American is too wide to bridge today, you have no idea how bad it could get.
Too many on the left are indoctrinated with Cultural Marxism, call-out culture, identity politics, and the virtue of dogpiling and personally destroying anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest. Too many on the right are indoctrinated with neoconservative imperialism. As grassroots conservatives and Trump supporters are mercilessly evicted from the public square by identitarian obsessives, they are becoming vulnerable to fascist and white nationalist extremes in their desperation to stop the next Bolshevik revolution.
At this point, spreading the light of pure libertarianism to the average American is already like proselytizing for a strange alien religion with orange and blue morality in an unknown and unpleasant-sounding language, with vaguely threatening hand gestures. Our education strategy thus far has been, "Let's start with Libertarianism 710 with Ron Paul and proceed to Libertarianism 896 with Walter Block." Our audience is not remotely ready for that yet. We need to focus on the preschool basics here like "Stop stabbing each other with scissors," because that's where everywhere else is at. We cannot achieve a future of liberty without first restoring or reinvigorating latent respect for American culture, and our window of opportunity grows shorter every day, and with every migrant caravan.
Traditional American principles lose more mindshare every year, and a significant contributor includes immigration from culturally opposed countries at a rate that exceeds our ability to culturally assimilate the immigrants. Many on this forum seem to argue, "Our fellow Americans are doing plenty well throwing away their own culture anyway." That may be true, but this is an obfuscating rationalization for inaction, not a mitigating factor. Bringing up a second problem does not make the first one go away. Both problems reinforce each other.
If we want any hope at all, we need to buy time.
We need to buy time!
I constantly read posts from fellow libertarians CaptUSA, acptulsa, Ender, PAF, SuperfluousMan, etc. scolding the libertarian-leaning conservatives like Swordsmyth and kahless about how the CORRECT approach is to "Just eliminate the welfare system." OH, WOW, WHAT AN INSIGHT! We could just eliminate the welfare system, and it won't be overburdened anymore! Holy cow, why didn't I think of that sooner? It's not like we've been trying to do that already for decades with only negative results to show for it, right?
As I said above, eliminating welfare is a goal, a destination, not a strategy. If we could do that, we'd have already won. That's probably the absolute last pillar of runaway statism that will ever fall, so how do we expect to get there? It's not even a "Plan A," and if our actual "Plan A" is "Just educate people," we've been doing that one long enough to estimate its time to success as well: At the current rate it will take roughly infinite eons, although I suppose we could more precisely describe it with a negative number of years that represents our opposite-pointing velocity vector.
Lately it feels like we're all on a ship headed for Liberty Island. We've been pointing our sails toward Liberty Island for literally decades, but it's still nowhere in sight, and all of the navigational signs indicate the wind has been pushing us backwards for quite some time. We're probably leagues farther from our destination than we started. Meanwhile, the creaky wooden ship is riddled with holes, and it's taking on water fast. Some of the uncultured pirates aboard start saying,
"Hey, there's a hole, and we're taking on water! Help me plug this up!"
Our more astute philosophers say,
"Wait! Don't touch it! You might make it worse! Just...just...just go to Liberty Island instead! That's what we need to focus on, going to Liberty Island. Just go there! That's the solution to our problem."
The pirates shout, panicked, "But no, seriously! We are going backwards and taking on water! There's no telling how long it will take to get to Liberty Island, but I can guarantee we'd all be dead before we get there if we don't stop the flooding! Why don't you help me plug up this hole?"
The great philosophers reply in their wisdom, "What's the point in plugging that hole? There are plenty of other holes anyway. Put that hammer down before you hurt yourself, and let's just go to Liberty Island instead!"
If "just educate people" is our "Plan A," and it appears like it will take literally forever, it seems like we have no choice but to support some "Plan B" which will help buy us more time (hopefully a lot). That's especially true when the bigger problem involves the culture shifting away from us in the first place. Slowing or stopping the deliberate dilution of American culture via heterodox immigration would give us at least a little bit of the breathing room we need, and we need every bit of it that we can get.
As it stands, any kind of border control requires one or both of these two things:
- Establish and maintain control of border ingress (if not egress)
- Deport illegal aliens already in the United States
Of the two options, method '1' is far superior. Deportations are horribly inhumane practices that destroy people's lives, and they provide a continued pretext for an ever-increasing police state and surveillance dragnet, combined with an enormous budget for the predictably ineffective results. No, thank you.
In contrast, tightening the border via almost any mechanism (wall, alert sensors, minutemen...) is far more humane, and putting a moratorium on unskilled immigration wouldn't hurt. Side note: Like virtually everyone else here, I vehemently oppose the 100 mile Constitution-free zone, etc. Acting as though reluctant border control supporters on Ron Paul Forums believe in a total police state is shamefully disingenuous. (If you dare accuse me of this, I will tell your mother, and you will be in so much trouble.)
As it stands, the conservatives and Trumpettes have presented us with a possible "Plan B" that could buy us more time. They're advocating for a wall, which is arguably the worst version of approach '1'. They've even already backed themselves into a corner where the stupid thing will only cover a fraction of the border and still costs $5 billion. As inane as that may sound, guess what? It still has far more traction than virtually anything we've ever done. I'm not going to lie here. I'm ambivalent about the wall. I'm willing to grudgingly accept it for the hope of a good outcome, but I don't want to want it, and I think the concerns that it could eventually be used to keep us in are valid. However, what other viable short/medium-term option do we have that doesn't involve continuing to drive off the same cliff?
The United States is likely the world's last stand for liberty. Either we revive American culture, or libertarianism dies with it. We don't have the option to enact our magic libertarian dream plan either. That's not in the cards for us any time soon, because we're only bit players. That means we can either form a coalition with the [ostensibly] ruling party on an issue of potential joint interest, or we can pound sand and continue helplessly dying in our armchair perfectionist irrelevance. Those are our options this year, as I see it.
If we support the wall as a dirty strategic compromise (by itself, without additional police state boondoggles attached), it might help us buy some of the time we need to turn things around. Our support might also be used to get a last-minute version with all sorts of horrifying extras attached as well. It could also just be immediately used to keep us in, and never benefit us one bit. Those are the risks we'd take by supporting it. They're terrible, but the option also provides a glimmer of hope that our time horizon may grow substantially. The alternative to taking a risk is to continue on the same path with the certainty that we'll go where we've been going.
My idealistic side desperately wants to believe that principled libertarian advocacy alone will save us, but I don't see a viable strategy at this late stage, and at the end of the day, I want to live. I did not sign up for a suicide pact. I want my unborn children to grow up in a world where some Enlightenment-inspired civilization still exists, however imperfect it may be. Unless someone can suggest an actual alternative (and mutually exclusive) strategy that is
within our power to realistically get us to Liberty Island alive in our allotted time under our present constraints, or that will buy us more time than the dunderheaded conservatives' idea, I have to side with the conservatives on the wall, notwithstanding my caveats.* I'll take that over impotently walking off into the ocean in despair, paralyzed by the NAP.
*Caveat: For the record, I do agree with Ron Paul, Rand Paul and Andrew Napolitano on the specific topic of this thread (though not always as strongly): Unilaterally declaring a national emergency over the border situation appears to be an unconstitutional executive overreach at this point, regardless of my views on the wall itself. johnwk has made a rather admirable effort trying to justify it in terms of the actual law, but the stretches of reasoning involved seem to go into "living document" territory where I dare not tread.
Even the federal power for Congress to control immigration itself rests on Constitutionally shaky ground. It seems to be a reasonable joint interpretation of the Commerce Clause, "repel invasions" clause, and "necessary and proper" clause, at least in such a manner that a wall along any state's border (for instance) could be construed as a reasonable exercise, given the appropriate magic words describing a congruent purpose. However, the wording does not explicitly encapsulate immigration. It's possible the power rightfully belongs to the states (and half-jokingly, perhaps the power of deportation from Texas to California still does), as it did in practice prior to the Page Act of 1875. Still, the Commerce Clause could have always interfered with the states in theory, and the Page Act made it a federal playground in practice anyway, for good or ill. At this point only strict constructionists would ever attack the Constitutionality of federal immigration control in good faith (even if leftists might attack it in bad faith, while interpreting the Constitution loosely everywhere else), so it is more the executive overreach that should concern us as a serious problem.
The left, neoconservatives, and power elite routinely act on larger leaps, but our joint cause uniquely rejects that "might makes right" opportunism as a selling point. Sinking to the same level of lawlessness would therefore uniquely delegitimize that cause. No good-faith independent observer outside our libertarian sphere would ever predicate their respect and attention on our rigidly pure adherence to a deontological libertarian ideology that's alien to them to begin with, but we must at least respect the rule of law to effectively demonstrate moral superiority over arbitrary statism.
Everyone here understands that we cannot permit a judge in North Carolina to invalidate voter-ratified Constitutional Amendments (or 18 months of legislation) for the entirely subjective rationale that a gerrymandered and therefore "invalid" legislature provided voters the option. For a similar reason, we cannot permit a President to subjectively redefine the contractual use of "invasion" in the Constitution to mean anything other than the plain meaning of the words to the two signing parties as the time of ratification.
That is not to say Trump is strictly wrong to call it an invasion though: The leaders of the left are indeed systematically encouraging an excessive amount of immigration, on purpose, to reshape politics by transforming the country's demographics. This also ties in with the Cloward-Piven strategy of overwhelming taxpayer funded safety nets to foment socialist agitation, but I believe that is secondary. Either way, I'd colloquially call it a treason-assisted invasion in principle, if not according to the precise meanings of the words as understood by those who ratified the Constitution. The precise legalities must matter here though, because if they don't matter to us, they may never again matter to anyone...maybe for hundreds of years, or maybe forever.
We are running out of time!
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Originally Posted by AuH20
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