Coyote Blog

Like your thinking Swami.

One problem is that many joes on the street seem to argue from some form of racist or eugenics point of view. So, I get Warren's point.

That said, the world is too asymmetrical to even get close to open borders, as Warren advocates.

The libertarian theory of free movement of people runs into the brick wall of human behavior and psyche.

Put it to the test with this thought experiment...if we set the doors wide open, as libertarian theory would suggest, we would surely see a surge of what, 300M, 700M, perhaps >1B people (still only 15% of world population) within a few years?

Human intuition says that even 300M (double our current one) would be overwhelming.

My biggest worry is how it would create political and societal chaos.,,

The shock would be difficult for the existing population to handle. Psychologically, can it, realistically?

Warren and advocates of open migration ought to outline the parameters and answer some basic questions so we are not just arguing the theory, but the reality.

Just a few of those questions...

Do all immigrants get a vote? If not immediately, when and how do they qualify? What is the likely impact on elections? How would the current population react? Would this all likely advance or regress libertarian causes?

Can the welfare system be sustained? Good riddance, we may say. But, how would the ones most dependent on it now react if it suddenly isn't?

And, can we (current population) live with the visible level of poverty we will be faced with (unlikely that many people will be financially able to live to our current "poverty level")?

With the sudden new supply of labor (both low and high skilled), how will everyone react to that level of competition? How will the many who would then face economic upheaval react?

Will there be any filter to keep out suspected spys or terrorists? If not, as theory would suggest, would our resources be able to handle a potential (probable?) surge in these types of people? If so, how will that work under open borders?

Can Law Enforcement even grow to meet the new scale and maintain integrity? How?

What will be the reaction if a "large scale terrorist event" happens?

These (and many other) problems and their potential solutions would suddenly upend peoples' sense what is "normal".

It is the type of scenario that would make people look for politically extreme answers, ones that could well make Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump look tame.

It is not all nightmarish. There would have to be some economic surge to house, clothe, feed all these people. To take advantage of the now very cheap labor factories will relocate back to the US. Building out all that capacity and related infrastructure would be enormous.

How would other countries react? With a sudden brain drain, would they open their borders too?

Still, the transition would be enormously disruptive, and it seems doubtful that we could survive it with a country that maintains the freedoms we do have, today, intact.

He's getting better at trolling us. A couple weeks ago he pretended not to know the difference between the Berlin wall and our border fence with Mexico.

I imagine the spectrum you are asking about looks more like a ring, each person pointing the finger at their neighbor. Whether they point left or right, they will tell you it is right. (Who is to say otherwise? Even the basic axioms can't be agreed on!)

I suppose the libertarians are different though. They have chained themselves to the pyre in the center, righteous and self immolating, accusing everyone else of hypocrisy. (They took the Pepsi Challenge! They tried New Coke! And they tell you: "It all tastes the same... there's no difference at all?")

Citizen sponsorship, with personal liability on the line, might be interesting.

There is an existing heuristic...the EU. One challenge with the isolated experiment approach can be seen with the Syrian refugees to the EU. Once in, travel within the EU is rather free and open. Not sure how this gets mitigated.

Thanks for elaborating. It certainly fits with the creative destruction concept inherent in capitalism (most new ideas flop).

Would not go so far as to say the libertarians are embarrassing, as they put forth something more coherent, consistent than most (think Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, etc). But they do operate in the realm of the theoretical, and so it is easier to criticize based on that standard, but hard to come up with a solution that gets us from here to there.

No country has a moral right to stop people from living and traveling where they want. But I'll take a special tax or a special bond over total prohibition, just like I'd argue a tax on alcohol is better than prohibition of alcohol.

Free movement isn't charity. Right now, there are billions of people in the world engaging in commerce or employment. You are not committing an act of charity to every other adult human by failing to arrest them for their participation in the free market. The free market is their right, and all you need to do is not obstruct them. Non-obstruction is not charity.

You are arguing for obstruction, not for an end to charity. I am arguing for an end to obstruction, without regard to charity.

Technically, if you let in workers and don't exempt them from the income tax, then they will be paying into various welfare programs. Over time, more and more Social Security and Medicare will be covered by bond payments from the general federal revenue. You can't really separate the two, since the government has done so much to entwine the finances.

I can see the positive side of compromise positions short of the ideal, which is laissez-faire individual choice. So racist or nationalist discrimination in regards to welfare or taxes is a less-bad alternative to discriminatory prohibition of movement.

I concede your point about income taxes. If people aren't being paid under the table, immigrants are doing about as much any other taxpayer to fund the entitlement burden to the extent they are paid by income taxes.

I guess when its all laid out I'm a unicorn hunter as well. I find most forms of taxation morally objectionable, income and property taxes being at the top of the list, so I hesitate to argue for more of it. Ideally those taxes would be abolished for everyone in favor of something that can't be as easily gamed by politicians for class warfare purposes like a one-rate national sales tax for all goods and services. But I suppose even then your point isn't really diminished.

Hmm. I'll have to think on this aspect more in relation to the immigration issue.

I part company with the "true" libertarians on immigration. As Milton Friedman noted, you can have open borders or you can have a welfare state, but you cannot have both simultaneously. Germany, Sweden, and the rest are finding that out.

Second, this wave of immigrants comes from tribal societies. They have neither the ability, interest, or culture to assimilate. We can see that with the Somalians in Minneapolis and the Muslims in their "no go" areas of Paris and the suburbs. The Somalian taxi drivers have refused passage to Americans carrying alcohol. Now, we have truck drivers refusing to deliver alcohol and the government just supported a $240k settlement from the trucking companies. That is outrageous. It is not accommodation. It is surrender to Sharia.

I don't know how you can be so fucking insulting, condescending, and needlessly and gratuitously off topic and accuse anyone else of being a troll.

The economic arguments lend themselves more to open borders than closed ones. Do you care about the economic arguments?

Did you ignore the quote he responded to or do you just want to change the argument? I'll blockquote it for you.

the influx of a population resistant to assimilation makes the current influx of aliens entirely distinct from historical immigrations

Specifically, jhertz wants to know why Tanuki thinks this is true. He's not "ignoring" welfare. He's focusing on the part of Tanuki's post that he finds objectionable. Perhaps you should conclude from that that he agrees or at least doesn't obviously object to the point about welfare, but does disagree with this particular statement.

The likelier scenario is that high immigration is likely to drown the welfare state, rather than thinking that the population will just allow cash transfers at the same rate. It's unlikely that people will continue to want high welfare levels under conditions of high immigration. And in any case, if the cost is high, then the government can always cap it. This happens even in blue states and cities that run out of money - they are forced to scale back programs, social spending, etc.

Note that the New Deal occurred more than a decade after they placed racial/national restrictions on immigration. In other words, make-work jobs and welfare were more popular 12 to 15 years into an immigration freeze.

It's not trolling. If the interests of the majority can justify arresting immigrants, then the interests of the majority can justify arresting emigrants. That's what democracy is without liberty, the utilitarian majority doing whatever is needed without regard to the rights and prerogatives of the minority.

The main difference is that most restrictionists refuse (at first) to admit that they want to restrict immigration for the sake of the majority's interests. But once they admit that, there's never a clear reason given to explain why emigrants have a right to resist the majority but immigrants do not. At some point, you hit intellectual bedrock and either get a flat assertion of "they are different" with no distinction clearly explained, or else a frothy pile of insults to camouflage the lack of any philosophical response.

So the entire country is a family? I suppose that Obama is the father and jail is being grounded and taxes are just doing our chores?

Moving across an international border shouldn't matter more than crossing a state border. If you support people moving from Rhode Island to Massachusetts, does that mean you have to be willing to let the entire population of Providence move into your basement? No, of course not. You're being silly. You do not own Massachusetts, and do not get to exclude Rhode Islanders from there. If they can find a house seller or a landlord in Mass, then they are allowed to move there.

Nobody needs nor wants your opinion on whether someone in Providence can move to Boston, and neither should someone in Windsor need your permission slip to rent a place in Detroit.

Wait, you're making a specious claim of tragedy of the commons to justify big government and more arrests? Are you sure you aren't a progressive? Do you have a Bernie sticker somewhere?

Tragedy of the commons refers to unowned property being poorly managed and poorly exploited. And the best solution is non-common ownership. It's ridiculous to say that letting private employers and private landlords hire and lease to immigrants is a degradation of private property. It'd only be a commons issue if immigrants were coming to camp in parks or public land, not if they are coming to rent houses and apartments.

You and I have been down this path before. Your claim is nonsensical. In essence, your plan is to shortchange Americans so that we can cover more of the migrants, illegals, and people that should never be here.

Never, ever forget that FDR and his new deal prolonged the depression, not shortened it. The panic of 1922, which was worse, was over in a short time and expansion went from there.. No one has ever claimed, as you seem to be doing, the immigration restrictions caused the depression. The best response would be that if we had more out of work immigrants, we would have had more "make work" jobs. Wow, you are plowing new ground now.

My argument is that all welfare should be voluntary anyway, and all labor should be voluntary too. Free markets.

Yes, FDR was a disaster in a million ways, and I agree he made it worse. The New Deal probably caused the knock-on depression in 1937, which was relatively severe.

My point is not at all that immigrants caused the depression (in fact, I think free markets and free migration could've stunted the length of the depression). My point is that people were willing to accept more welfare and more public works jobs because these benefits were not going to new immigrants streaming in from Russia and Italy and Greece. The evidence shows that, when your population has low diversity, like Denmark or Japan, you tend to see higher rates of welfare. When your population has high diversity, like the US or Brazil, you tend to see lower rates of welfare.

So by limiting diversity and limiting immigration, it probably made it politically easier for FDR to pass policies he presented as welfare. In other words, if more immigrants had been coming in, people would have been more skeptical towards some of the centerpiece New Deal policies. Limiting immigration in 1921-1924 made it easier to pass welfare policies in 1933-1937.

It is fair to say I've engaged in a bit of truculence of my own in the above statement. I do think that mass migration over a short period of time can be disruptive to a labor market, although I am willing to concede that the fears of invading polish plumbers ruining our day is likely overblown to a degree. I suppose under an open borders regime a rough equilibrium would eventually be established based upon comparative advantages for labor types. It is an open question as to just how much disruption would be caused by the transition from closed to open borders though.

So yes, economics has got to be part of the equation, but is not the totality of it. I also believe that there are genuine security and cultural concerns that should be factored in too. Unfortunately, it is that bit of the philosophy which is usually spun out to be racist when from my point of view it is merely happenstance of geography that we talk about mexican "maids and apple pickers" rather than "polish plumbers"

LOL. So your solution is to tax Americans to pay for people we import. As I said before, you are a political neophyte. Good luck selling that idea.

BTW, when people are drinking sewer water, it is almost always because of a corrupt government, which is exactly where our corrupt politicians want to take us as long as they can still get theirs.

Excellent question. Let me borrow a long quote from David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom which alludes to the two types of libertarians and begins an argument in favor of those, Like David, who are consequentialists.

Begin Quote:
"Our response to such questions demonstrates that we do not really believe in simple single values. Most libertarians, myself among them, believe that a libertarian society is both just and attractive. It is easy enough to claim that we are in favor of following libertarian principle whatever the consequences—given that we believe the consequences would be the most attractive society the world has ever known. But the claim that we put individual rights above everything else is, for most of us, false. Although we give some value, perhaps very great value, to individual rights, we do not give them an infinite value. We can pretend the contrary only by resolutely refusing to consider situations in which we might have to choose between individual rights and other things that are also of great value.

My purpose is not to argue that we should stop being libertarians. My purpose is to argue that libertarianism is not a collection of straightforward and unambiguous arguments establishing with certainty a set of unquestionable propositions. It is rather the attempt to apply certain economic and ethical insights to a very complicated world. The more carefully one does so, the more complications one is likely to discover and the more qualifications one must put on one's results.

there are a number of important values in the world. They cannot be arranged in any simple hierarchy, or at least are not going to be any time soon. Individual liberty is an important value in and of itself, not merely as a means to happiness, so we should not be willing to sacrifice large amounts of it in exchange for small amounts of happiness. But liberty is not the only value, nor is it infinitely important compared to other values, so we should not be willing to sacrifice unlimited amounts of happiness for small gains in liberty.

A third possibility is that the conflict between libertarian and utilitarian values is only apparent. Perhaps there is some deep connection between the two, so that libertarian ethics, properly understood, is the set of rules that leads to the maximum of human happiness. The counterexamples given in the previous chapter must then be interpreted as some combination of mistakes about what is possible—for some reason those situations could not arise in the real world— and mistakes about what is implied by a correct statement of libertarian principle. Something along these lines seems to be suggested by the arguments of those libertarian philosophers who claim to get their principles not by generalizing from what seems right or wrong to them but by deducing what set of rules is appropriate to the nature of man.

One argument in favor of this approach is that it fits the observation that libertarianism and utilitarianism, while quite different in principle, frequently lead to the same conclusion. Through most of this book I have used utilitarian arguments to justify libertarian conclusions. By doing so, I provided evidence that the potential conflicts between the two approaches which I discussed in the previous chapter are the exception rather than the rule. In Chapter 31 I tried to show that the institutions of anarcho-capitalism would tend to generate libertarian laws. A key step in that argument was my claim that the value to individuals of being able to run their own lives is typically greater than the value to anyone else of being able to control them—or in other words, that increases in liberty tend to increase total utility.

One argument against utilitarianism is that it cannot be a correct moral rule because there is no way we can tell whether we are following it. We cannot observe other people's utility and are therefore unable to judge what will increase it. Even if we could observe individual utilities, we do not know how to compare the utility of different people and so have no way of judging whether a gain in happiness to one person does or does not balance a loss to another.
I find this argument unconvincing. Consider the act of buying a present. If you really have no knowledge at all about what makes other people happy, then buying a present is pure guesswork.

Even if we were entirely unable to observe other people's values, that would not necessarily prevent us from constructing a society designed to maximize total utility. Each person knows his own values, so all of us put together know everybody's values. In order to maximize the total utility of the society, we would construct rules and institutions that utilized all of that information via some sort of decentralized decisionmaking system, with each person making the decisions that require the particular knowledge he has.

This is not, of course, merely an abstract possibility. One of the strongest arguments in favor of letting people interact freely in a market under property rights institutions is that it is the best known way to utilize the decentralized knowledge of the society— including the knowledge that each individual has about his own values. The field of welfare economics largely consists of the analysis of the rules that lead to optimal outcomes under specified circumstances, where the outcomes are evaluated in terms of the preferences of the individuals concerned. One originator of modern economics, including much of welfare economics, was Alfred Marshall, an economist and utilitarian who viewed economic theory in part as a way of figuring out how to maximize total utility.

Although I reject utilitarianism as the ultimate standard for what should or should not happen, I believe that utilitarian arguments are usually the best way to defend libertarian views. While most people do not believe that maximizing human happiness is the only thing that matters, most do believe that human happiness is important.

By adopting a philosophical position that I believe is false, merely because it makes it easier to answer a particular set of questions, am I not making the same error as the drunk who, having lost his wallet in the middle of the block, looked for it under the streetlamp at the corner because the light was better there?

I think not. Even if utilitarianism is not true it may still be useful. There seems to be a close correlation between rules that make people free and rules that make them happy; that is why it is the East Germans and not the West Germans who erect barbed wire fences and guard towers on their common border. Perhaps that correlation comes from some deep connection between freedom and happiness; perhaps it is merely an accident. In any case, it is there. I conclude that, by figuring out what legal rules would best make people happy, I may learn something about what legal rules are suitable for a free society.

Most people, myself included, are at least partly utilitarians. While a demonstration that a particular legal rule tends to increase the total of human happiness does not prove that the rule is a good one, it is a strong argument for it. Since I have no very good way to settle disagreements about values, it makes sense to base my argument on values that most people share.
The final reason is that, whether or not people care about the sum total of human happiness, most of us care a good deal about our own happiness. If a particular legal rule increases the average level of happiness there is at least a presumption that it will, on average and in the long run, make me better off. That is a reason, although not necessarily a compelling reason, why I should favor it.

For all of these reason, it makes sense to ask what legal rules tend to maximize human happiness."

End quote.

His entire book is available free online.

It is sloppy in oversimplifying reality to a set of foundational principles which can fit on a 3X5 card and then forcing every real world, complex decision involving conflicting values and interests to fit into the narrow set of principles.

Reality is easy, just maximize freedom and all our problems are solved!

No it isn't, and even if maximizing freedom is a good heuristic, we still have the issue of deciding how BEST to maximize freedom and whether allowing untold millions of potential political agents in would affect the rest of the system.

Again, I am arguing FOR immigration, not Against. The discussion is on how.

The justification for restricting immigration is that the restriction helps the majority. Why does helping the majority not also justify restricting emigration? You can't say "you can leave anytime" because that's not a moral argument, that's a statement of current law. We're arguing over ethics and what the law should be, not what the law is.

Restricting immigration is often justified because it hurts the community. Well what if a small, isolated community has one doctor and he decides to leave at the beginning of a disease outbreak. Nobody else can save the community in time, but the doctor wants to leave at the expense of the community. He has no employment contract, lease or agreement with anyone. Can the community compel the doctor to stay and save lives? That's restricting emigration for the good of the majority.

If the majority's interests can justify one thing (immigration), then the majority's interests can justify another thing (emigration).

That's also a great argument in favor of Jim Crow and apartheid. Can you differentiate your argument for cultural segregation along national borders with the Jim Crow / Apartheid argument for cultural segregation along racial borders? Because I don't see a meaningful distinction.