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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13652 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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I think the standard argument is that saying "the government should have the same rights over its sovereign territory that you have over your personal property" proves too much.

In the ideal libertarian society, an individual, firm, or voluntary community would be free to forbid prostitution or gambling on its property, charge an annual fee for use of its property, do very nearly all of the things that libertarians currently regard as rights violations when the government does them. Since what we actually have is a society in which much property belongs to government…

What makes more sense is to explore ways other than immigration restrictions in which involuntary interactions with immigrants can be reduced even if not eliminated. Open borders do not imply instant citizenship. While there were no restrictions on immigration in the early history of the US, there were restrictions on naturalization. Such restrictions could be retained in an open-borders system. Libertarian theory does not imply that everyone who comes can vote.

Libertarian theory does not imply that everyone who comes can vote.

If they also can't receive social services, that solves some of the problem, but in the world as it exists today, it is not possible to have open borders and yet have the aliens be a permanent underclass who can't receive social services or vote, unless you're Qatar or a similar autocracy. If you really think this, you should hold off on the open borders until you can make this possible first. Libertarians invaribly propose that we open the borders immediately and leave the mitigation as a theoretical thing or not even bother with it at all, even though doing something halfway can easily be worse than either not doing it or doing it fully.

There's also the incentives issue. A foreign government should not be able to mismanage their country and leave the people poor, incentivizing them to come here and compete against locals, thus lowering their wages and in effect exporting some of their native poverty here. Libertarians are really bad at handling incentives, because the individual people who respond to incentives do so voluntarily, so the libertarians won't let us do anything to stop them from reacting to the incentives, even though the incentives are caused by a non-market force that we can't affect directly.

This is a spherical cow in a vacuum type of argument. What's the difference at the limit between a corporation in control of a large swathe of land, and a government? I think people have the right to buy land and assert sovereignty over it (including sovereignty over who can enter) which means that denying governments immigration authority denies individual human rights.

Your argument is wholly distinct from dailydogma's and more interesting, granted. But dd was saying that the prevention of a human from crossing a property boundary is a human rights violation. A very strange argument coming from a libertarian. I would like to know which human right that is, what it may conflict with, and the nature of the violation.

And while I agree that my analogy may not hold for various reasons, as it scales up and out, I argue that none of those reasons coincide with or support dailydogma's position. And I would be interested to know the scale at which dd believes it breaks down.

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