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He Gets Us, my
lord and saviorfavorite blogger Scott Alexander has written a piece about love and libertyScott is somewhat famously (formerly?) not a libertarian. Reading a piece by someone that understands my base impulse and aversion to state power was very refreshing. I feel like I have to bury that emotion deep down to have discussions with most of the people around me. The revulsion you might feel about someone proposing a government enforced redistribution of the benefits of beauty, is something I feel about most redistribution schemes. The revulsion you might feel about a government licensing scheme for dating is the revulsion I feel towards nearly all government licensing schemes (I only say nearly all, because I leave myself room to be surprised in the future, not because I can think of an exception in the moment).
As a libertarian I tend to end up arguing with everyone (even fellow libertarians). In the last few years the most important argument I keep having with the left is about the nature of corporations and the shared marketplace. I think money is the one value nearly everyone shares, so making it the center piece and main value of the market allows the maximum number of people to participate in it. Once they have their money, they can take it out and go spend it on other things they value (and being able to spend it is why so many people value money!). I think DEI initiatives, environmentalism, certain parts of the labor movement, and social justice have been trying to undermine this for many years. I also don't think too many people on this forum disagree with me there.
No, as the always arguing libertarian, my disagreement with the right is on the topic of nationalism and immigration. Due to the recent wipe I lost one of the posts where I laid out some of my specific disagreements with nationalism. I have a much longer history on this forum of arguing in favor of immigration. Usually only for a day at most, and only a few responses deep, since I encounter a great deal of disagreement. I don't think I have ever laid out an "ick factor" argument about immigration, or in other words why immigration restrictions kind of disgust me. Mostly, I don't think it convinces anyone, but as Scott's article points out it is as close as possible to the true reason why I support open immigration and open borders. And in the future if anyone ever bothers to say "you want immigration for bad reason X" I can refer back to this post, and say "no these are my motivations".
I'll choose my own friends, thank you very much.
Growing up you might remember a time when you had friends not because of who you liked, but because of who your parents liked. Before age 7 it felt pretty common. Most of the time this was ok for me. I didn't have strong preferences for the kind of people I wanted to be around, and I was at the whim of whatever my parents wanted to do anyways. Having a kid to play with at least seemed better than just being in a kidless situation while they hung out with adults. But I specifically remember one time when it was not ok. One of my mom's best friend's from college had two boys, nearly matching in age with myself and my older brother. One of those boys who was a year older than me had a kind of roughness in play that I always hated. If we wrestled it was never really as friendly as it was with other boys. He'd distract me and steal my halloween candy. He'd show me "fun" like how it felt to have your wrist skin twisted in opposite directions. None of these sound too bad in retrospect, but at the time he was literally the worst person I knew. My dad was drunk one time, saw the kid picking on me a little too much and spanked the kid. The parents didn't like that, they didn't believe in spanking, and that kind of ended the friendship between the moms. I assume other people have their own sorts of "forced friendship" stories.
I am lucky to not have many of the opposite types of stories of "forced non-friendship". Where some authority figure in your life doesn't like one of your friends for a reason that you don't care about. Maybe that friend's parents aren't rich, or aren't the right color, or they where in the wrong neighborhood. I think I would have rebelled mightily against this, and sometimes when I got a whiff of my parents doing it for my own good with bad friends, it would sometimes make me want to interact with those people more.
In general humans are social creatures and we like to make our social groups as much as possible. We like to pick our allies and close friends, and we like to exclude those we don't get along with. This is the equivalent of "dating" to me. So when people come in and intrude and insist that I must be friends and allies with some set of people, and enemies with another I feel reactively disgusted with their impositions.
The Policy Implications of choosing your own friends.
Some of the anti-immigration people reading this have already picked up on the first story and shouted "aha! you agree with us, I don't want to be forced to associate with immigrants, but that's exactly what progressives are doing with open borders". To some extent, I sympathize, I really do. When every media property must have a diverse cast, when every college insists on affirmative action, and when government positions at the very top are filled based on race and gender. It certainly feels like an example of some of the forced social interactions I hated as a kid. I like to tell progressives to stop doing that, and I do! Stop affirmative action, stop race based quotas, they are bad for just about everyone involved (they are often only good for the charlatans that gain money and influence by peddling race politics).
But doing the opposite of a bad thing, doesn't make that a good thing. The progressives say you must interact and be friends with these people, but the nationalists say you must not interact or be with these people. I chafe at both rules, or the single rule of "I get to decide your friends". Since we cannot have unlimited friendships, and we don't have unlimited options, the rules are two sides of the same coin.
And for all their many advantages, in this one area the progressives are often at a disadvantage. Because enforcing friendships is actually incredibly difficult, and forbidding them is easy. Progressives might want you to be nice to immigrants, but that process can be sandbagged and slowed down at all levels (if you don't think this is true, then I guarantee that you do not know anyone who has tried to legally remain in the united states. It is a pain in the ass.)
The nationalists have had much more success in enforcing non-interaction. Physically getting into the US and other counties has only gotten easier in recent times, simply re-enforcing natural barriers was one of the main ways of forbidding entry in the past. But lately the US government has started to forbid interaction with the people that are already here. E-verify systems for workplaces have popped up everywhere, and e-verify for renting has also started to pop up in some places (its rarely required by law currently, but I'm an eternal pessimist about the expansion of government powers).
E-verify is one of the largest impositions on the market in recent times. DEI rarely says "hire 100% [our favored people]", but e-verify says exactly that. It doesn't matter how much better a foreigner might be as an employee or a renter. You can't hire them. "Can I pay double the cost and pay two employees for the work of one just to satisfy you?" DEI says yes, e-verify says no. And I know e-verify isn't required everywhere for every job currently, but again I'm a pessimist about the expansion of government powers, and so far e-verify has only expanded in scope not shrunken.
Libertarianism is incompatible with democracy. I think this is the obvious realization that people like Hoppe had.
Libertarianism + democracy is the end of libertarianism for two primary reasons.
The first is that pretty much only (some) Anglos like libertarianism; the Swiss have their guns and direct democracy but they also call the police if you play music after 9pm or use the wrong recycling bin. Because Anglos have tended to establish the world’s wealthier major states, mass immigration to them if open borders should exist is inevitable. These other peoples are unlikely to have a particularly great fondness for libertarianism, and so will slowly dismantle it as soon as they get the vote (just as happened, to some extent, in the US from the 19th century onwards). You could limit citizenship to only descendants of some core population, but that in turn both eventually ends ‘democracy’ (certainly in the popular modern sense) and creates a huge resentful underclass prone to supporting upheaval, as happened in Liberia.
The second reason is that even without mass immigration libertarianism trends towards high degrees of inequality and thus creates a lot of ‘losers’ drawn to redistributive movements hostile to libertarian ideas. Unlike the capitalist welfare state and feudalism, both of which involve extensive patronage economies, libertarianism leaves the rich fundamentally exposed. The result is an unstable, high inequality, Latin American style political economy, in which rich libertarians routinely race off against socialists in both democratic competition and (low and high intensity) military conflicts that create huge instability and economic deadweight that stunts growth and productivity and often manifests itself as extreme corruption and high levels of violent crime.
“Libertarianism” / “classical liberalism” is a thought experiment, the outcome of which is rationally that the long-term best functioning societies typically involve elites that grant some receptivity to public opinion but do not chain themselves to it. Call it managed democracy, Venetian oligarchy, ‘Singapore style autocracy’ or whatever you want. (Democracy is political incelism etc etc). Even if it worked it would be a poor idea; one should consider the deeply tragic and deleterious effects of a lack of strong (compulsive) guidance on the underclass, as has been the case since the 1960s and which is the product of “social liberalism” ie social libertarianism.
One of Alex Nowrasteh's hobby horses is that we don't have a ton of evidence this is true, partially because it doesn't just matter how immigrants vote; it matters how the native population changes their own votes in response to immigration. America's government stayed unrecognizably small during our largest period of mass immigration in the 19th century. The period of 1921 to 1968 when America had its most restrictive immigration laws (and was 90%+ white and building a common national identity) also had the largest expansions of the government and the welfare state: the Great Society and the New Deal. After we reopened our borders government spending and union participation went back down, whether because xenophobic people don't like welfare going to foreigners, or language barriers make unionization harder, or maybe they're not related at all - point is more government doesn't necessarily follow from more immigrants.
Isn't the obvious objection here that during the first period, citizenship and power in institutions mostly rested with WASPs and similar demographics while in the second one, although immigration had been restricted, now a large share of the native born population consisted of (descendants of) Italians, Irish etc., i.e. ethnic groups that down to the present day have markedly different attitudes towards redistribution or even things like free speech in comparison to English- or German-Americans?
Unless the hope is that quasi-accidental effects like 'diversity reduces societal cohesion -> less unions form -> unions can't interfere with growth' outweigh this, I'd wager that continually adding more people who come from countries that practice more distribution and, when asked in surveys like the GSS, explicitly say that the government should intervene more and reduce income inequality, will in fact eventually result in a society that redistributes more and values economic freedom less.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you or you meant spending coming back down from the highs of WWII, this claim doesn't seem true, whether for overall spending or social spending in particular, both of which have a strong upward trend starting in the early 20th century.
I've seen people try to track with data that various European groups have consistent attitudes on policy over time, but I feel like it's pretty hard to square with how things actually worked in practice. Those same ethnic groups that supported the New Deal democrat party also supported the Democrats when they were the extreme laissez faire, anti-interventionist party, while the WASP-dominant Republicans were much more pro-intervention. I think an easier explanation is just that immigrants probably cluster around the pro-immigration party. The bulk of Irish and German immigration happened in the mid nineteenth century, but it wasn't till the better part of a century later than they (and southern whites and many other native demographics) were sold on more statist policies, so it's hard to draw a straight line from their entry into America towards larger redistribution.
This was the OP's wager as well and it's not unreasonable. But I don't think it's a claim we see much demonstrated in our own long history of mass immigration. Also worth remembering that immigrants are not perfectly representative of their own countries. The kind of person who crosses an ocean or a desert to start life all over is gonna be a little unique.
You're right, I overstated his actual claim, which was that the rate of growth of spending as a percent of GDP slowed.
From the Civil War till WW1, the heyday of mass immigration, federal expenditures as a percent of GDP stay barely above 0% and even fell over time.
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