Sad & Disappointed: Immigration
It is clear from the recent discussions that many people on this forum do not understand or care about freedom when it is their pet issue and are clearly not ready for a Gulch. The anti-reason, anti-objectivist positions followed three main threads.
1. Freedom: It is clear that many people do not understand that freedom is a set of ethical principles that apply to all people. It is clear that many of the people here seem to think their rights come from their government or being American. One absurd position being proposed by many was that somehow limiting someone’s right to travel is not limiting their freedom. Then we find the collectivist argument that government is nothing but a bunch of private people getting together and setting rules. These same people fail to recognize that this is exactly the argument for the welfare state. It also follows from these arguments that Kansas or some other state could stop people from other states from entering and in fact this is the goal of these people. Or we should be allowed to get together and agree to stone you to death, or sacrifice virgins.
Some people made the collectivist argument that somehow jobs are owned by the collective – this tribalist mentality is so despicable that I would support removing from the gulch anyone who made the argument twice.
What is particularly sad is when given a pro-freedom solution to immigration issues a number of people rejected it. The pro-freedom solution starts with something anyone who is allowed in the gulch should support, which is the elimination of welfare of all kinds including social security (overtime) and medicare. Next, it would eliminate all drug laws including the FDA. It would also of course enforce private property rights and be serious about crime. These changes would eliminate any legitimate concerns with immigrants entering the United States.
2. Eugenics/racism: It is amazing the number of people who tried to support their anti-freedom stance with the variations of the pseudo-science of eugenics. This puts them in the wonderful company of freedom lovers such Southern slave owners, racists more generally, the socialists of England in the early 1900s or earlier, Nazi Germany, and none other than Margaret Sanger
3. Logic: The opposite of the right to travel freely is imprisonment, no matter how big the prison or that sometimes the guards allow you outside or inside the walls. The inability to follow simple logic in this discussion was amazing. On the more innocent side was confusing immigration with citizenship. The two are not the same. Many people seemed to think that the requirement for IDs at the borders would not logically lead to IDs every time you travel. The Supreme Court has already ruled on this issue and yes they said you could be required to show ID for just walking down the street. That the need to monitor people at the border, will not lead to needing to monitor people everywhere. Oops that has already happened. That the need to monitor for terrorists will not mean the need to monitor everyone – again that has already happened. You cannot escape the logic of your positions. Require IDs for everyone else but not you. Monitoring for terrorists, but not you. Assuming other people are guilty until found innocent, but not you.
But what was perhaps the most chilling statement I heard was that we had to be practical, we had to deal with reality. Does this remind you of any conversation in Atlas Shrugged? The clear point of this statement is that being practical means abandoning reason, logic, and principles.
It was a VERY SAD week in the Gulch.
1. Freedom: It is clear that many people do not understand that freedom is a set of ethical principles that apply to all people. It is clear that many of the people here seem to think their rights come from their government or being American. One absurd position being proposed by many was that somehow limiting someone’s right to travel is not limiting their freedom. Then we find the collectivist argument that government is nothing but a bunch of private people getting together and setting rules. These same people fail to recognize that this is exactly the argument for the welfare state. It also follows from these arguments that Kansas or some other state could stop people from other states from entering and in fact this is the goal of these people. Or we should be allowed to get together and agree to stone you to death, or sacrifice virgins.
Some people made the collectivist argument that somehow jobs are owned by the collective – this tribalist mentality is so despicable that I would support removing from the gulch anyone who made the argument twice.
What is particularly sad is when given a pro-freedom solution to immigration issues a number of people rejected it. The pro-freedom solution starts with something anyone who is allowed in the gulch should support, which is the elimination of welfare of all kinds including social security (overtime) and medicare. Next, it would eliminate all drug laws including the FDA. It would also of course enforce private property rights and be serious about crime. These changes would eliminate any legitimate concerns with immigrants entering the United States.
2. Eugenics/racism: It is amazing the number of people who tried to support their anti-freedom stance with the variations of the pseudo-science of eugenics. This puts them in the wonderful company of freedom lovers such Southern slave owners, racists more generally, the socialists of England in the early 1900s or earlier, Nazi Germany, and none other than Margaret Sanger
3. Logic: The opposite of the right to travel freely is imprisonment, no matter how big the prison or that sometimes the guards allow you outside or inside the walls. The inability to follow simple logic in this discussion was amazing. On the more innocent side was confusing immigration with citizenship. The two are not the same. Many people seemed to think that the requirement for IDs at the borders would not logically lead to IDs every time you travel. The Supreme Court has already ruled on this issue and yes they said you could be required to show ID for just walking down the street. That the need to monitor people at the border, will not lead to needing to monitor people everywhere. Oops that has already happened. That the need to monitor for terrorists will not mean the need to monitor everyone – again that has already happened. You cannot escape the logic of your positions. Require IDs for everyone else but not you. Monitoring for terrorists, but not you. Assuming other people are guilty until found innocent, but not you.
But what was perhaps the most chilling statement I heard was that we had to be practical, we had to deal with reality. Does this remind you of any conversation in Atlas Shrugged? The clear point of this statement is that being practical means abandoning reason, logic, and principles.
It was a VERY SAD week in the Gulch.
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As soon as one accepts government's authority to deny rights to one person, much less one group, for any reason imaginable, history and simple logic teaches us that it will then deny rights to everyone, except themselves. Plus 1,000
I know what Ayn Rand's and the ARI's position on immigration are.
Their perspective is purely based on the position of the immigrant, and completely neglects the desires of the citizenry through their duly elected government. As an example, Ayn Rand committed perjury to land a tourist visa, as documented by Shikha Dalmia in Reason. http://reason.com/archives/2012/02/14...
That may have been moral in her eyes, but can it be viewed as moral in the eyes of the country she was immigrating to? I can even admit that I probably would have done the same thing in her position. However, while Rand herself turned out to be quite a boon for America, her case proves that the country must be cautious when admitting visitors.
An anti-Objectivist position is to claim that a visitor gets access to the privileges and prosperity of the country that they are immigrating without having to pay anything. Implicit in that position is that citizens of the country are expected to live for the sake of other men (visitors), which is fundamentally contradictory to Galt's oath.
Also implicit in this argument is that while individual visitors have rights, other individual (citizens) cannot delegate authority to a limited government to act on their behalf in immigration decisions. Or do I have to go to the border and consider each case on an individual basis myself, to the neglect of other productive activities?
Part of the problem is that everyone assumes an objective government. Setting aside how you implement that, and assume you can do so successfully. The other problem is that no form of government, no matter how logically structured, can survive if the majority of the people want "a new deal". They will simply ignore the old laws and make new ones.
So, if you allow unlimited immigration you might find that the moochers take over again because there are more of them. No legal system will survive the people occupying the position ignoring the rules.
No offense intended but the idea that 19th and 20th century models will not work today is BS. We can assume that the 19th and 20th century models will work. We can do so because Persia once followed a free model, as did the Greeks and the Romans during their periods of growth. It was only after they put controls in place that immigration became a problem.
Remove welfare, remove regulatory control of what can be purchased and I add a third not mentioned above, remove regulatory control of how big a company can get and get government out of commerce (IE remove Sherman law and everything that is derived from it) and immigration would not be a problem.
The only reason to come here would be to work. Every single person who comes here to be productive and does so will, by so doing, increase the standard of living for everyone here. New York could be expanded in height to 130 stories instead of 46 and it could be filled with people doing all kinds of work.
Detroit would not be a ghost town with a district of Arab Muslims who all ready control who goes in and out, and will one day kill those they disagree with but would become a center of production again.
In a matter of years, not even a decade, The US would have 70% of the worlds economy again because the people we would attract would be people who earn what they get by the sweat of there own brow. Such people build economies up and for everyone of those that come. Our cities would become bigger, more industrious and prosperous. We would be able to support however many people came to the US under these circumstances and a large and larger percentage of the worlds wealth would be found in the US as a result, until other countries figured out the same thing and changed their systems accordingly.
Even setting aside welfare and the social network, we can't assume that 19th century immigration models will work the same.
I don't actually know if we want to say "yall come", but I certainly know we shouldn't limit it to those who are willing to break the law.
The point of the statement is not that reason, logic, and principles should be abandoned. They should not. However, worse yet, the point of what I said is that hope for a return to American values like non-intrusive government that stays within its fiscal means in America should be abandoned.
President Zero ran on "hope and change". Most of us have neither hope nor change left.
For 150 years we had open boarders. My own ancestry was here for 5 years before filing any kind of paper work with the government. During that time they started to work, built up cash, learned English (we came from Austria) and then applied for citizenship. By the time they were citizens they bought a small farm and built up from that. That was largely the order that things were done in, and it was fine.
As you stated, the issue is that we have "free" expensive programs that attract the wrong kind of immigrants and that we attempt to control what products and services people have access too, period. Remove those and immigration is going to be resolved as well.
Because of the flawed nature of looking at it as an immigration problem I do not think it possible to have a rational discussion around immigration. The premises of the cause of the problem is all wrong, and only incorrect conclusions can be drawn.
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