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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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Neither does the EU occupy the entire world.

What makes the EU's photo/print requirement a violation of rights, but not an individual requiring the same thing for a smaller property?

Essentially all open-borders supporters on this site are libertarians. The standard model of libertarian ethics assumes that ownership of land is, as a matter of morally binding property rights, unitary except when limited by explicit contract, and that the current freeholder is the legitimate owner and the rights claimed by the State are usurped.

Libertarianism is largely an American movement, and in the American context this is justified by saying that the rights of landowners were mostly acquired by a series of voluntary transactions beginning with the natural-law title acquired by a homesteader (and that the exceptions can be ignored as a matter of expediency) whereas the rights of the State were acquired by usurpation under the threat of violence. Ignoring the historical argument about the nature of American homesteading, or about what fraction of US land has been subject to a nonlibertarian transaction that would break the chain of natural-law title, this theory is obviously false when applied to other countries.

So from a traditional libertarian perspective, the difference is that you own your land and the government does not own the country. The government has the right to exclude foreign citizens (or to admit them under arbitrary conditions) from land which it acquired by voluntary purchase, as does any other corporation which legitimately owns land, such as the one owning @celluloid_dream's data centre.

Within the classical liberal tradition, we make the analogous argument in terms of freedom of association. If I wish to associate with Jose, and he is willing to travel to associate with me, but the government won't let him, then my freedom of association is restricted. If we are able to associate in ways which don't violate generally applicable laws or impose large externalities on my fellow-citizens (i.e. Jose is not a criminal or a bum) then this is an unreasonable restriction on the freedom of association of a citizen.

You can make exactly the same kind of argument about private landlords - there is a reason why clauses in leases restricting the tenant's visitors are generally unenforceable except in situations like group houses where the tenant's visitors are inevitably going to be imposing externalities on the other residents.