Libertarianism today can accurately be reduced to little more than a paranoia of the ignorant, irrational masses taking matters into their own hands via the ballot box.
Read the whole comment.
For me, the purpose of the ballot box is to enable a peaceful transfer of power and to provide a check against tyranny. It is not to express the will of the people. I suspect that the popular will is not very supportive of the Bill of Rights or individual liberty (surveys largely bear me out).
What libertarians want is that no elite should exercise strong governmental power. This libertarian desire is itself elitist, and it probably cannot survive the broadening of the franchise that took place gradually in the decades following the ratification of the relatively non-democratic Constitution.
Recall that as of 1790 hardly anyone in the U.S. could vote and Senators were elected by state legislatures. The President was to be determined by the electoral college, and some supporters of the Constitution expected that deadlock in the electoral college would be routine, throwing the selection of the President into the House of Representatives.
As things stand, a large chunk of the elite is anti-libertarian. A large chunk of the public is anti-elite, making the populists the enemy of my enemy. But I do not see populists as reliable friends. Libertarians have no reliable friends.
I think the underlying difference between Kling and edgar comes down to a belief in the effectiveness of holding elites to account. Edgar indicates that this is necessary and desirable, and in fact is the meaning of “democracy”; Kling frequently quotes Martin Gurri whose view of the public is fundamentally negative (able to criticize but not able to agree on new course of action).
From Hotel Concierge: “The system is corrupt. The only solution is revolution.” You know which political group says that? All of them. No, literally—I’ve heard it shouted by the Tea Party and blackgirldangerous.org, on reddit and FOX, on Jezebel and the National Review. All of these people are revolutionaries, but they’re not talking about the same revolution. Why do you think your revolution is special? 100 million tugs in opposite directions has a net effect of zero.
Normative Libertarianism is framed by the impacts of the functions of governments on Liberty and thus to limit those impacts by limiting those functions.
Libertarians favor negative rights (freedoms from interference) and institutions that maximize the scope of voluntary interactions for mutual benefit and minimize coercion. How is that elitist?
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly. The rich have always objected to being governed at all. – G. K. Chesterton
Has anyone noticed that Edgar doesn’t seem to have the slightest idea what Libertarianism is?
I’m not sure why the commentor is connecting this to Libertarianism in particular. I think it’d be fair to view all political structures right now as trying to sway less-informed masses with cartoonish/ghoulish projections (e.g. mass wave of scary immigrants or the 12-year climate catastrophe).
I’m only 30 so I have limited historical reads on this, but to me the systems that enable this are a broken and biased educational system alongside with proud anti-education sentiment in some circles. If the pursuit of Truth was central to education and bought into by our culture, then rhetoric and governance would be, ideally, more centered on the rational extrapolation of strong principles (e.g. freedom of speech, equal treatment under the law, etc.)
The trouble with that idea is that many important kinds of truth aren’t findable, even after thousands of years of searching. I hate to quote Chesterton twice in a row, but: The riddle of life is simply this. For some mad reason in this mad world of ours, the things which men differ about most are exactly the things about which they must be got to agree. Men can agree on the fact that the earth goes round the sun. But then it does not matter a dump whether the earth goes around the sun or the Pleiades. But men cannot agree about morals: sex, property, individual rights, fixity and contracts, patriotism, suicide, public habits of health – these are exactly the things that men tend to fight about. And these are exactly the things that must be settled somehow on strict principles. Study each of them, and you will find each of them works back certainly to a philosophy, probably to a religion.
This goes toward Gurri’s idea that societies can only function when some elite is capable of imposing a viewpoint on the rest.
I am admittedly torn between this mindset Chesterton and Gurri outline versus, for lack of a better term, the Sam Harris view that morality can be independently derived.
But I guess the issue at hand here would be that even if Harris’s claim were true, could we count on society to arrive at it without coercion or guidance from an “elite.”
Just thinking out loud here, but can it be proven that the imposition be elites causes societies to function? Or is it that functioning societies end up “designating” an elite that represent their views with a lagging reactivity. Put practically – the elites of today represent those selected by the culture of ~20 years ago, but the resentment now is due to a shift in views that will just replace this elite with a new set (you could argue this is already happening) who will shape the next 20 years or so until they are replaced.
I certainly think that elites are conscious of public opinion if they know what’s good for them. But any time society does something complex, like build the computer I’m using now, it takes a lot of people working together, like the staff of a huge Dell factory in China. It also takes a much smaller number of people who make decisions about whether to make computers or, say, birdcages and what the computers (or birdcages) should be like. Those are the elites, and if they didn’t do their job right my computer might have had a parakeet port. Or my birdcage might have had a bird-annoying fan. (Which decision the elites make is often less important than how effectively the workers can be organized to implement the decision).
P.S. Chesterton was a Catholic. Although he recognized the sorts of problems that Gurri later wrote about, he thought that orthodox religion was the solution. I disagree.
If you’re a libertarian, what does that mean you should be doing? If I say I’m a Christian, there are some things I can say I ought to be doing. It’s not clear what being a libertarian even means.
Even Rand’s novels seem to hold up some ideal of people who invent, built, create, etc. “Be all you can be” and all that, with creative endeavor the focus. At least you’ve got Galt’s Gulch and its inhabitants to look at as a model.
Arnold says libertarianism big gains over the past two decades were legalizing pot and gay marriage. That’s a pretty pathetic list of accomplishments.
Being a pothead is the opposite ethos of being a Randian superman. And Arnold himself seems to think drugs are not losers.
I think I once found sources to calculate the number of gay marriages, it was really small. On top of that you can estimate the % that are monogamous and the % with children (monogamous married people with children is basically why we have marriage), and you were down to something in the thousands if I recall. In a country of 330 million. And most of those people whether you changed the law or not were still going to live together and do what they were going to do anyway without harassment. Even if you think it was a good thing (I don’t), it’s not much of an accomplishment in terms of scale or new liberties.
And I get the impression that Arnold’s view on sexuality, commitment, and family are the opposite of what we might term typical gay attitudes on these things, so raising the status of gay sexual attitudes isn’t some big win.
Some might say that libertarians made big gains on economics in the 1980s, and that was the reason for the original alliance with the “right”. But very non-libertarian places seem to have adopted the most import part of market economics without giving libertarianism much thought.
Then after the question of what is libertarianism for there is how to achieve it. Arnold wants to role back to 1790? How? Are individual libertarians obligated to bring that state of affairs back? What are individual libertarians obligated to do?
Are places in the world today where political power is concentrated in elitist hands libertarian? The CCP? The Middle East dictatorships? The “soft” illiberal various city states?
I think I “get” what kind of person LKY wanted you to be and what kind of society he wanted to create. I think you could explain to a person in that society what being a “good person” would mean.
Libertarianism is all over the place. Some people think it means Galt’s Gulch. Others think it means being a transexual prostitute high on LSD. Let’s not forget the actual libertarian offering in the last election, supposedly the best shot libertarians have had in a generation:
“Consider: McAfee—who fled his own Central American residential compound while under suspicion by the Belizean government for the murder of his neighbor; who openly admits that said compound featured a harem of teenage Belizean sex workers; who likes to talk about the time a 16-year-old Belizean prostitute tried to shoot him in the head at point blank range; who bounced around the hotel halls wearing a three-piece suit and a pair of Nikes like some kind of Mad Hatter on meth—had regularly polled in third place for the nomination in the lead-up to the convention and even seemed to have a puncher’s chance to win. Further consider: He was barely the weirdest candidate on the scene.”
Adam Smith. “The Wealth of Nations.”
I think what libertarians should be doing is promote ways to make our societies less and less illiberal rather than encourage a race to the bottom.
The big boo for libertarians is democracy. Libertarianism today can accurately be reduced to little more than a paranoia of the ignorant, irrational masses taking matters into their own hands via the ballot box.
No. The fear is not democracy per se, but collectivism, nannyism, busybodyism, a tyranny of the masses. Democracy does not sanctify anything and everything a government might do. If a government were to dictate that all citizens must wear uniforms, brush and floss twice a day, attend weekly religious services, or eat only vegetarian meals on weekdays, those laws would be tyrannical regardless of whether or not the government mandating those things was democratically elected. Libertarians want governments to be democratically elected and we also want those democratically elected governments to leave people to make their own choices, live their own lives, earn and spend their own money, and pursue happiness in their own idiosyncratic ways freely with as little government interference as possible.
Thus we have self-avowed libertarians admiring General Secretary Xi’s rule of China
We DO? Who would those be? I suppose anybody may call themselves a libertarian and spout nonsense, but I have certainly seen no ground-swell of ‘libertarians for Xi’. (I wonder–are we dealing with a hardcore Trump supporter who confuses opposition to Trump’s trade war with support for Xi’s authoritarian rule?)
Oh, and:
On the conservative axis, I don’t think that civilization-barbarism captures the essence of what attracts people to conservatism and more clearly delineates the conservative axis from the others is what I would characterize as playing by the rules vs ignoring the rules.
But when it comes to immigration, Trump doesn’t want people to play by the rules, he wants to tear up the rule-book and rewrite it. He wants to get rid of birthright citizenship and make it much harder to apply for refugee status. He doesn’t want to enforce follow long-established U.S. immigration rules, he wants to abrogate them (by presidential decree wherever possible). Conservative — know thyself! Recognize that this is not about ‘playing by the rules’, it is about changing the rules to keep out the poor, to keep out refugees, to keep out ‘anchor babies’ (and then maybe, at some later date, allowing in more of the wealthy and high-skilled).
Are you the asylum seekers are playing by the rules or gaming the rules?
Some of both surely. Which is to be expected (there’s no point in any kind of law enforcement if there isn’t a risk of some people trying to bend/break/game the rules). But the point is that when Trump pushes to repeal our our 200+ year old laws surrounding birthright citizenship and you cheer him on, you can’t claim to be a conservative who just wants to enforce our laws.
Birthright citizenship isn’t even something most of the OECD has. And the reason people want to change the law is because it’s being abused. Once someone crosses the border illegally they need only give birth and they have a legal child citizen. These new “citizens”, created by an originally illegal act, ought not even be considered citizens.
Or maybe what the U.S. Constitution actually says on the matter should count for more than “something most of the OECD has.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/08/birthright-citizenship-not-mandated-by-constitution/
The constitution also states that its for “ourselves and our posterity”, not a bunch of foreigners.
Leaving that aside a minute, let’s stop trying to interpret this like its a Bible passage.
When the nation could control its borders, the people having children within the United States were people who had immigrated legally. It makes sense that if you’re a legal immigrant your kids will also be legal.
When the United States lost control of its borders birthright citizenship started to be abused by illegal immigrants. Due to this new reality, it would make sense to change the law.
Obviously, normal people look at the experience of countries around the world to find relevant data with which to make evidence based decisions on what policy would be best for the nation. The immigration policies of the rest of the OECD, nearly all seeming to have superior results to those of America, are obviously things we should learn from.
Of course if you’re a libertarian then you’re a religious zealot and evidence and data don’t matter.
Birthright citizenship isn’t even something most of the OECD has.
Since when do conservatives argue that we should drop 200 year old U.S. traditions and adopt what’s being done in Europe? And think that’s a conservative approach?
Well, its not a thing in Asia either.
Chesterton’s Fence states that you need to know why you are tearing down the fence before you tear it down. It doesn’t say you can never tear down a fence.
I laid out my position. Birthright Citizenship was not a problem when giving birth inside this nation and being a legal resident of this nation were close to a 1:1 correlation. In rare exceptions where this wasn’t the case, as the national review article points out, then it wasn’t considered applicable.
Since we now have a problem with people illegally crossing the border en masse, having children, and using those children to anchor themselves to America (thus exploiting a legal loophole to break our laws with impunity) it is time to reconsider birthright citizenship.
asdf,
If you want to “reconsider” birthright citizenship you need a constitutional amendment to do it.
The exception for American Indians which the National Review article puts so much weight on was the result of treaties that purported to give them some real form of sovereignty over the reservations inside the USA they were being forced onto. There is no analogous situation for those people you view as too dark skinned or too low IQ to deserve the citizenship standard that has been in place since the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868.
By the way, I’m not a libertarian. You have a weird way of trying to shoehorn everyone into one of two categories. Makers or takers, high IQ or low IQ, good people or bad people, worthless brown people or more desirable lighter skinned people, etc. The world is a lot more complicated than that however limited you feel by your Dunbar number.
Once someone crosses the border illegally they need only give birth and they have a legal child citizen. These new “citizens”, created by an originally illegal act, ought not even be considered citizens.
Even after they have been here 18 years?
I think there should be some sort of statute of limitations on immigration law. If someone has been here 20 years, just give them legal residence already. If someone is born here and lived here since birth, they’re an American citizen.
We could change the law for people who were born here, but then lived in another country until adulthood, but someone who was here since early childhood, is, culturally, just as American as any other natural born US citizen.
Since we now have a problem with people illegally crossing the border en masse, having children, and using those children to anchor themselves
I don’t believe it. I don’t believe the numbers of people who have immigrated to the U.S. via ‘anchor babies’ are large — do you have good data to prove otherwise?
But note — even if hordes of nearly full-term pregnant women were swarming over the fences and swimming the Rio Grande, there would *still* be no need to end birthright citizenship to address the problem anyway, since changes to family reunification policies would serve just as well.
But first things first — show us the data.
@Greg
You’re dodging the question.
Does birthright citizenship make sense today?
What are its effects?
What evidence and experience can we use to make that decision?
An appeal to “conservatism” or “this is the way it’s been” aren’t good enough. Conservatism is a call for caution and humility, not blanket inaction under all circumstances. If there are good reasons to ditch birthright citizenship, then that’s just how it is.
One of the biggest advantages “conservatism” has is its based on real lived experience rather than abstract theorizing. But that’s exactly why the experience of the rest of the world is relevant. We aren’t trying to reinvent something in our heads. We are doing something reasonable based on what we can observe. The communists didn’t give up communism because of a libertarian think tank piece. They gave it up because our grocery shelfs were full and theirs were empty!
As to the rest of your tirade, you’ve never given any good reasons for any of your positions. You’ve called me a lot of names and given a lot of indignation, but I’ve always taken this as the inevitable output of one who has no good arguments.
You once asked about “civility” on this blog, but I don’t see much reason to be civil with you. I didn’t really “shoehorn” anything in here.
Slocum apparently decided that Trump wanting to address immigration was THE WORST THING EVER AND TEARING UP 200 YEAR OLD LAWS BLAAGGGH!
Harun pointed out that, you know, that’s all a little delusional and unfair.
Slocum doubled down that “conservatism” means something like “never changing anything”. As a general principle that’s kind of absurd, not what I think most conservatives describe as “conservatism”, and that his specific example on immigration is pretty absurd. If current circumstances are different then historical, and if the proposed reforms are based on successfully proven models from elsewhere, then it’s certainly something “conservatives” ought to seriously consider.
Radical demographic change and brazen lawlessness are hardly “conservative”, and if that is the status quo it’s hard to even argue that the status quo is particularly conservative.
Any subject, no matter what it is, you come in and go on a tirade. While I occasionally mention “brown people”, IQ, makers/takers, or anything else, it’s usually relevant to the topic, and 9 times out of 10 an inevitable reply to someone who thinks they’ve got some gotcha based on an incorrect set of facts that ignores those things. I didn’t do so here, nor in many of the other threads where you and others constantly want to bring it up.
Lastly, I owe you a reply from our main thread where you said I was uncivil. I didn’t think I would do so because it wasn’t worth my time, but here’s the abbreviated version.
Let me sum up what happened with opioids. I’ll use the CEOs own words that have come down from the lawsuits:
“There are:
Too many Rxs being written
Too high a dose
For too long
For conditions that often don’t require them
By doctors who lack the requisite training in how
to use them appropriately.”
The Rx counts, which you ought to have gotten from public sources if you were being responsible in writing your article, should already have been enough to easily determine that legitimate use can’t have been the reason for that many pills. NOT EVEN CLOSE! This alone should have been enough to not defend these people.
And it’s 2019, so we also have the lawsuits. We don’t have to guess if Purdue acted irresponsibly. It’s in the many court documents.
Building databases to identify doctors/pharmacies abusing the drug and then pumping them to push more pills. Check.
Covering up illegal pill mills, silencing your own sales force who is warning you about illegal activity and not going to the DEA when required by law. Check.
Funding bogus “pain research centers”, and then trying to silence them when your own hack doctors start to publish that your product is addicting. Check.
When I said it reminded me of cigarette doctor hacks, that wasn’t a metaphor. I mean it was the same tactics.
I wasn’t civil with you on this topic because I don’t think your position was worth being civil with. It is very very very hard to convict big corps even when they are stone cold guilty. Purdue is losing/settling in trial after trial because they are stone cold guilty.
Why are you defending these people?
I can understand/forgive almost anyone. It’s a nasty world out there. You’ve got to survive, provide for your family, whatever. I’m sure that Purdue sales rep that told his boss about the pill mill found himself in a really tough spot.
But there is just no reason for this. You don’t work for these people (I think). You don’t need to take up this topic. If you don’t devote part of your life to defending these monsters, it’s not like it’s going to set you back.
If the only reason is this sort of pro-drug/pro-liberty ideology…ugh. Of all the reasons to defend these monsters, ideology has got to be one of the worst.
Especially such a bad ideology. The druggie/hedonistic side of libertarianism is easily the least appealing side of the movement.
Dude just let this go. Move on with your life. Don’t defend obviously bad people doing obviously bad things on blogs because you like pot/LSD. Even if you think pain is a serious issue needing addressing, the very WORST thing anyone could do is muddy the waters the way Purdue did. They’ve blown all credibility in this space and they did it for greed.
If I were you I would rethink this opioid stuff.
If you need any final motivation, just know that the opioid epidemic played a huge role in electing Donald Trump, and that you are essentially defending the people who did it.
Slocum doubled down that “conservatism” means something like “never changing anything”
I think you’ve lost track of the original point. The original commentator criticizing libertarians claimed that conservative thinking wasn’t about civilization-barbarism (as Kling argues in Three Languages), it was just about ‘playing by the rules’. I think he’s wrong about that (and that Kling is right). I think Trump-supporting conservatives don’t care much at all about following and enforcing existing rules but do care deeply (perhaps more that anything else) about keeping poor, brown, non-English-speaking immigrants/refugees out and they’re willing to revoke any longstanding rules and tear down any number of Chesterton fences in order to achieve it.
When discussing immigration, Trump conservatives use language like ‘masses’ and ‘invasion’ and believe that immigration poses an existential threat to our society and way of life. All of this seems to me to be very much on the civilization-barbarism axis.
I think that Trump supporters, and huge swaths of all Americans, are worried about people breaking the law. After all, tens of millions of people have violating immigration law within living memory.
I also think that people understand that some of our laws are being exploited in order to break others. Anchor babies are used by illegal immigrants to get around immigration law, in what is clearly the exploitation of a loophole.
I also think people understand that asylum and refugee laws are being abused by people who are essentially economic migrants rather than actual refugees. This, like anchor babies, are easily provable points that are done on a huge scale.
It’s unclear to me that if someone wanted to stand up for “the rule of law” that defending the current set of laws, which have resulted in lawlessness, is the right way to go.
Of course the crowd for “this is an unjust law but we should follow it anyway because the law” has always been a pretty small one. At the end of the day, people’s opinions on immigration pretty much always come down to their actual thoughts on whether or not its a good thing. However, there are some people that care about the law abiding aspect, I think it’s wrong to dismiss their existence, even you’re right that for most people it’s just a proxy for their thoughts on immigration.
I think the point you’re getting at is that you don’t care they are breaking/exploiting the law, because you want more immigration. Hence, the rule of law is just something to be overcome. It would be nice to change the law, but if you can’t it’s OK to avoid it because its for a good cause.
And I think most conservatives now understand that is the leftist position. If there was good faith that the other side cared about the law, it’s gone. That’s part of why Trump was elected. It’s who you get when you think the other side is acting in bad faith.
Lastly, I suppose you think “follow the law” is some kind of “dog whistle”. I don’t really understand this concept of dog whistles myself (I mean as a real thing, not as a leftist tactic). When I encounter cuck-ish people talking about the rule of law and immigration, I see very nice people trying to address a real and important concern they have in the least racist and mean spirited manner they have available to them. They mean what they say! Take away this option and you are only leaving them with two choices:
1) Accept ever worsening conditions with no hope of reform or even a fair hearing for their concerns
2) Just up and be a racist because its the only way to protect yourself
Why you want to take these very nice people and force them into the #2 bucket is beyond me. Granted, I’m a cynical asshole and I think your exploiting their niceness hoping they will choose #1 so you can get your way, but either way there is an element of wickedness.
This dog whistle thing doesn’t have to be about race either. I see it a ton with my pro-life friends. Is my Ned Flanders friend who took his wives name really just dog whistling about the patriarchy when he says he doesn’t want babies murdered? Maybe he just means what he says.
Look, I gave up on that “rule of law stuff”. Your brazen breaking of the law is certainly part of why I don’t think my enemies are acting in good faith. I think it’s important enough of an issue that if you got to be racist you got to be racist.
But for those still trying to play nice I just find it utterly absurd that you think these people are playing a con of some kind. They are some of the nicest and most genuine people I know. You are going to break something in them with this bullshit of yours.
asdf,
First of all, that wasn’t me complaining about your civility in the opioid thread. I actually agreed with more of what you wrote on that topic than any other post I can remember. That was a Greg S.
I know telling all these Gregs apart can be hard what with the Dunbar number and all. You are lumper, not a splitter. You can be as civil or uncivil as you want to be. I don’t take much personally and my own views are heterodox enough to anger just about everyone somehow. To make it more confusing I’m not a conservative either. I suppose if I had to choose a label I would call myself a liberal centrist. I know, nothing could be more out of style.
I do think birthright citizenship still makes sense today and I don’t think its effects are very different from what they always were. Intelligence testers have always told us that the most recent mass immigrants have had lower IQ’s. That included Jews from eastern Europe back in the day before it was later discovered they weren’t really racially inferior. James Flynn has done a very good job of explaining why this happened just in case you are interested in something from a real intelligence researcher who is very much respected by your gurus Murray and Sailer.
I am not an open borders advocate but I do think immigration in general is good for the country. For as long as we have had immigration we have heard the same xenophobic objections to it. I’m not that much worried about the work ethic of someone who would walk the length of Mexico for a chance at a better life. I think immigrants tend to be more entrepreneurial than the average person and could easily become Republicans if Republicans weren’t so obviously hostile to them. I think demographic decline is the surest route to economic decline and your world view is remarkably zero sum for an economics blog.
The ‘rule of law’ argument is one of the least persuasive ones ever conceived. We all break laws every day. No one really believes in the enforcement of law for its own sake, everyone happily accepts that many laws on the books have become effectively dormant, and would be positively indignant to see them brought back out. So no, just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean it’s concerning; that just seems like a cop out to avoid having to argue why the act should be treated as illegal in the first place.
@Greg
I apologize if you’re a different Greg. It’s not like I can see your face or hear your voice. There is another “asdf” that occasionally posts here that isn’t me either. This is a general problem with the internet. I’m genuinely sorry for any misunderstanding in that realm.
As to the rest there is little to be gained from a rehash. I consider Murray-ish thoughts on genetics sufficiently proved. You don’t. I’m aware of Flynn and find his work not applicable to the matters at hand.
If we start from these different sets of facts, we are going to get very different conclusions about the world. There is nothing I can present in a blog comment that can really can really change anyones mind on these facts.
However, to the extent people become indignant at others who take different conclusions due to different (in my opinion more correct) facts about such issues, I’m not going to pushback any less.
@Mark
“that just seems like a cop out to avoid having to argue why the act should be treated as illegal in the first place.”
It is. But is it a cop out for some bad reason (they are evil racists trying to hide their evil racism) or a cop out for some good reason (they want to address some real problem they see without having to use racially tinged language, i.e. they are trying to be as polite as possible while still being effective).
I think the vast majority of this “it’s the law” stuff is an attempt by polite people to uphold rules of social ettiequte and maintain their values (including values of civility) while not totally capitulating on an important issue to their lives.
Trying to “call out” such people as racists is an attempt to exploit their good faith and good manners in order to achieve a political objective at the expense of making it all the more difficult for that good faith and good manners to endure.
I also think there is a sense in which people already feel like a political compromise on this issue was reached but one side cheated on it. So to an extent “it’s the law” is a way of saying “we don’t trust you because you didn’t hold up your side of the deal.” People wonder why more people aren’t on the amnesty bandwagon, and it’s because the last amnesty bandwagon was supposed to prevent just this situation.
asdf,
No problem. Apology accepted. I was amused, not offended.
You see, in light of the fact that our most foundational disagreement is about to what extent we are ethically obligated to view others as individuals rather than members of groups for which they carry some burden of collective guilt, I found my accidental lumping into the collective of all Gregs (and the specific errors of Greg S) to be a deliciously ironic but ultimately harmless illustration of the principles at stake.
It is a problem in internet commenting that some commenters inadvertently chose the same monikers others are using. And some trolls deliberately spoof other identities. But neither of those is what happened here.
You just failed to read carefully enough and didn’t notice that Greg G and Greg S were just two different Gregs with different last names.
On a different issue you have raised here, I agree that everyone’s outrage at lawbreaking varies with how they feel about the issue at hand.
But the Constitution is not just another law. It is the foundation for all our law. If you believe in constitutions at all then you believe that there is something special at stake in their violation regardless of your position on specific issues.
As regards to immigration it’s worth noting that it is NOT illegal to come to the U.S. and apply for asylum. Such applications can and should be denied in some cases but that doesn’t mean we are entitled to treat those applicants themselves as criminals by, for example, harming their small children in an attempt to deter more legal requests for asylum.
And let’s remember that many of those screaming the loudest about illegal immigration really also object to legal immigration from what they take to be “shithole countries.” In such cases we should be skeptical about whether the legality is really the issue.
asdf,
>—“I’m aware of Flynn and find his work not applicable to the matters at hand.
If we start from these different sets of facts, we are going to get very different conclusions about the world.”
But we are NOT starting from a different set of facts. Murray and Flynn (one of whom is a real intelligence researcher and the other of whom is a well educated political scientist) AGREE on “the data.” What they disagree on is how to interpret that data.
You are all about challenging people to argue about this stuff until we get to the best arguments against your position. Then you suddenly lose interest.
I think like most amendments of the time it was directly related to the aftermath of the Civil War. It was a direct answer to Dredd Scott.
Although this has been highly litigated and debated since, I don’t believe people who passed the 14th amendment intended it to be used as a loophole around US immigration law by tens of millions of people. Nor that they could foresee anything like the world that exists today.
As to the rest, it all comes down to your view of immigrants. Do you think their countries are shitholes because they themselves are shit? Or are they just like us but trapped on “tragic dirt” and just need to move to “magic dirt”? My view has been expressed, I think they are genetically doomed and that’s why their countries suck. If our country comes to match the genetic profile of their countries, I believe our country will also be a shithole. I think this is sufficiently proved based on the evidence, and those that deny it do so for non-evidence based reasons.
Given those stakes (having to live in a shithole), I don’t really mind harsh immigration restrictions or enforcement. I think if you want to avoid something like child separation, you need to avoid having immigrants trying to immigrate. You do that by credibly proving that
1) They will be caught
and
2) The outcome of getting caught will make trying to immigrate not worth it
If you do this credibly, they will never try to immigrate in the first place, and then you won’t often have to use such harsh methods. Singapore tortures illegal immigrants and those that employ them. Pretty harsh! But since everyone knows that they will get caught and that will happen, it doesn’t have to happen often, because people understand incentives.
I believe you average low IQ immigrant is akin to a thief. Trying to steal millions in welfare from the host country. If illegally immigrating successfully is like a winning the lottery, you are going to need strong disincentives.
asdf,
>—“Singapore tortures illegal immigrants and those that employ them.’
If that’s the principle then Trump himself should be tortured because he is a longtime employer of illegal immigrants.
>—“I believe you average low IQ immigrant is akin to a thief. Trying to steal millions in welfare from the host country.”
And I believe most are willing and eager to work and may in fact have a better work ethic than many native born Americans. Most of the immigrants to the U.S. for our entire history have come here for economic opportunity. And been regarded by nativists as a menace to proper eugenics. Same as it ever was.
I’m fine with punishing Trump for his actions.
I see ABSOLUTELY no evidence that low IQ immigrants have a “better work ethic” than natives.
Where could you find evidence of it?
We’ll just go ahead and use Hispanics as an example because we have statistics.
If they have a better work ethic shouldn’t it show up in something like unemployment rates? But the Hispanic unemployment rate is higher than the white rate, and that continues in 2nd+ generations.
Are they more productive? We should see that in income per capita. But Hispanic income per capita is less than whites and continues so in the 2nd+ generations.
Maybe they are more moral than native whites. Perhaps we could see that in things like crime, out of wedlock births, etc. But wait, those statistics are not much better in the first generation (much worse for Puerto Ricans) and they get significantly worse in the 2nd+ generation.
So what is it that gives you faith that these people are so much “better” than natives? What evidence? That the guy that did your landscaping seemed nice? The guy that fixed my HVAC was white, seemed nice, and I didn’t go out and draw a bunch of conclusions about the reality of the whole damn universe from it.
There is always, at the bottom of this, hatred of natives. They are, in some way, defective and inferior the their replacements. There isn’t actually any concrete EVIDENCE of these statements, but its taken as a matter of fact.
The reason for this assertion, in spite of evidence against it, is to justify the dehumanization of the native working class for the benefit of your set. There is nothing noble going on here. Malice, not empathy or love, is your driving force.
asdf,
>—“There is always, at the bottom of this, hatred of natives. They are, in some way, defective and inferior the their replacements.”
Nope. That is just your paranoia. I AM one of the natives. All my family and almost all of my friends are “natives.” I am pale enough and high enough IQ that I could easily slip into your fantasy HOA.
I think the fact that many immigrants eagerly take jobs it is hard to get native Americans to fill testifies to their work ethic. These observations do not “dehumanize the native working class.” It is you, not me, who refers to them as low IQ “white trash.”
Have you ever considered the possibility that immigrants don’t “replace” you, they just go about their business while you go about yours without being “replaced.” Didn’t you have ancestors who came here from some other country in search of more economic opportunity?
I am not claiming any particular nobility or virtue and I’m not attributing any particular vice to you. You strike me as someone who is more honest than most in describing the world as he sees it but also as someone who is very frightened with a bizarrely Hobbesian world view.
We see claims of this alleged conflict between libertarianism and “democracy”, by which people usually mean majoritarianism, a lot. Libertarians desire to limit the powers of government, regardless of whether that government is elected or unelected. If the government happens to be elected, then majoritarians claim that libertarians are opposed to democracy. That’s like saying that someone that prefers football over baseball must dislike the Boston Red Sox.
The claim that libertarians are elitist is also false. Libertarians do not believe that free speech rights, for example, should be limited to only the elites. Selective protection of rights is actually a common feature of non-libertarian ideologies.
Kling is correct though that populists are no friends of libertarians, but neither are aristocrats. Libertarians will find themselves in tension with whomever seizes control of government — populists, elites, the wealthy, the poor, elected officials, unelected bureaucrats — because those groups will all try to expand government’s, i.e., their own, power.
Why do they want to limit the powers of government? To what end?
Arnold thinks that in order to limit the powers of government you need to role things back to 1790 and get rid of the universal franchise. That seems a tall order! Why should an individual libertarian take that task upon himself? What is his motivation? Why is liberty that important to him as an individual?
Why is liberty that important to him? What an odd question to ask. Why do I not want others to compel me to do things I’d rather not do? What is so puzzling about that sentiment.
And why do you keep insisting libertarianism must want to do something, must have some positive moral agenda? Are you not familiar with the basic arguments for it? People are more more productive, less harmful, and lead better lives when left to their own devices to live as they please and choose their own communities than when dragged by force into a club they don’t want to join and locked in.
I can be libertarian when it suits me.
Libertarians would say nature often knows best, unless you think we exist because the force gives biology a nudge. I usually don’t, except in my psychotic moments, so nature generally knows best, and definitely better than government. History backs me up, government commits the most crimes against humanity, including the saintly puritan governments.
You might take a look sometime at the overall death toll from plagues (nature) vs. from genocide (governments). Nature knows best, for extremely bloodthirsty values of “best”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll
Libertarians have no reliable friends.
It is very obvious for the Founding Fathers they wanted the elite to run the country and I think their hope was someone like the Koch Brothers or Jeff Bezos would both be the economic and political of their state. (The explains why many of the early Presidents were slaveowners as they could run a profitable plantations and have time to be politicians.) And any reading of the US history we do see the company towns and often the factory owner often playing a big role in local politics and shaping the local church. Just watch It’s A Wonderful Life, and note the Founding Fathers devised a system that Mr Potter would be the leader of the town. (And if I remember right he was head of the draft board.)
Several reasons why this diminished:
1) We live in a globe economy and these economic leader have employees across the globe. So view as part of the community but not of the community anymore.
2) Increased specialization in jobs and it is hard to economic leader and then politician. Donald Trump is first business leader ever to become President.
3) It is hard to trust the economic elite and especially your boss.
Most libertarians are against the use of all forms of coercion in dealing with others, even democratically determined coercion through government. Libertarians who believe that there is a role for government typically think the purpose of government is limited to protecting our rights and freedom (as Thomas Jefferson suggested in the Declaration of Independence).
Libertarians aren’t concerned about the “ignorant, irrational masses” so much as being concerned about the masses imposing their values and beliefs by force against individuals. It doesn’t matter if the masses are brilliant and extremely well informed.
I agree that the purpose of the ballot is not to express the will of the people. Walter Williams explains very well “Why We Are a Republic, Not a Democracy”
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/why-we-are-republic-not-democracy
Yes, however, that level of support varies a great deal based on place, time, issue, and group membership. It can certainly get a lot worse, and indeed the U.S. still remains an outlier in many respects. But not for much longer if current migration trends continue, which many prominent libertarians foolishly want expanded dramatically, in what is certain political suicide for all their other causes.
The fact that even rich educated immigrants nowadays tend to lean disproportionately left should cast doubt on this assumption that its ‘their nature’ and not, I don’t know, the fact that the alternative is a side that overtly doesn’t want them here that motivates their voting habits as much as vice versa.
And libertarians would be every bit is foolish to imagine that poor/“working class”, entitlement-dependent natural born Americans are keen to preserve individual freedom. Tucker Carlson sounds as bad as Bernie Sanders these days.
edgar reads like some Tea Party type person who temporarily hung out on libertarian message boards thinking that libertarianism was just about opposing progressive control of government in the form of the Obama administration, but then got all pissed off when Trump came to power and he found out that libertarians actually opposed government in general and not just the progressive liberal kind. Thus the “OMG, my side won, are you against democracy?” shocked expression he conveys upon discovering that libertarians don’t like right-wing ignorant irrational masses seizing control over other people’s lives any more than ignorant irrational left-wing ones.
I suspect most conservative populists will rediscover their libertarian sides and skepticism of democratic decision making in about either 1 or 5 years.