As a woman, I tend to make assumptions. I happily fly by the seat of my lacy pants when making broad pronouncements. Relying on intuition, a lifetime of experience and the simple commonsense that accompanies my attempt to see the world as it is, not as I wish it to be, guides my ship. It’s not an analytical or manly frame of mind that I bring to the table, but my soft path generally curves towards the rational and I’m usually right.
That said, I do not understand doctrinaire Libertarians. The big L, toe the company line guys. Some of their thinking seems malignantly skewed and most certainly not in their best interests if they ever wish to see their ideological governing position grow into any semblance of reality.
Take illegal aliens and immigration. Hardcore Libertarians are busy beating the band into a scathing heat against the Arizona legislation to check identification, arrest illegals and ship them out of the country. They consistently harp on open borders and a free flow of people, using dismissive terms such as racist and xenophobic to drive their point home with a flourish of guilt.
I think they’re showing an insane level of discognizance.
The illegal Mexicans and Central Americans they would see welcomed to the American table would never adopt their limited government mindset. In fact, they would overwhelmingly reject the Libertarian creed, choosing expansive government and all of its crippling entitlements with decisive brio in the voting booths.
Bush was a moron on this topic and so are the Libertarians.
If Congress manages to finally pass through an amnesty act for the 12 to 20 million of our southern born illegals, conservatives can kiss any hope of reigning in the federal beast a sweet goodbye. Democrats and corporatists will rule the land with ease and the foolish Libertarians can start digging their own quick graves, as their current nascent rise will be a short-lived, well deserved, suicidal blunder.
Our imported minimum wage class doesn’t view the world in conservative terms, their strong family values and devout Christianity doesn’t offset their liberalized, marxist views of governance. These south of the border people, the shadow class Libertarians and compassionate conservatives champion as worthy of legitimate citizenship, would happily throw their foolish asses under the bus once they possess a golden ticket.
As a Texan, I can tell you that we aren’t talking about Hispanics. These are third world denizens, they don’t come anywhere close to their American kissing cousin’s frame of mind and Hispanics are rightly offended when you make that simplistic comparison. My fifth generation Hispanic relatives, South Texas Hidalgos, could teach you the lesson of Mexican illegals in one easy word: Mojados.
They have no problem differentiating and don’t feel guilty for doing so, why do Libertarians and Bush conservatives refuse to make that same clear distinction? It’s insulting to Hispanics and mind numbingly dumb for their limited government political objectives.
A closing observation. Once you legalize these people, they’ll naturally start demanding higher wages, benefits and employment protections. What are these newly enfranchised folks going to do when they lose their jobs to the men and women still pouring across the border who are willing to work for much less?
I thought the Big L policy included no benefits for illegal aliens, zip, nada, nothing. Then, and only then, let them it.
It seems reasonable that they may come for the work but there is no reason to actually stay unless they’re willing to become citizens.
The Libertarians think these people want work. And most do. But the liberals want these people to merely vote, and will pay them richly to do so. So why work? They know our welfare system better than most of us bloggers ever will.
Plus, they bring with them the same Socialist mindset of our current administration. They have not experienced freedom (but plenty of license) and do not dream much of freedom, just better free stuff than the free stuff they currently suffer with. I lived with them for 5 years, in the thick of their country. They ALL want to move here for a better life. They know they can live under the radar, get free money, send money home, have two families even. They are not stupid people, and not lazy people. They will appropriate every advantage, moreso than our own homegrown government dependents.
My family includes people who came here (legally) from Mexico, and they are rock-ribbed conservatives who want the borders fenced and the immigration laws enforced. Why? Because of the ugliness and abuse and violence inherent in being illegal. Because they understand that providing for Mexico’s opportunistically reproducing poor will bankrupt America. Because they know that the Mexican government is utterly corrupted by drugs. Because they don’t want to be “deported in place” back to Mexico by having Mexico take us over!
Libertarians have some good ideas, as Daphne notes. But they run off the rails often, usually on issues that strike Americans where it hurts most. The inside-the-beltway, business-as-usual Republicans must go the way of the sell-out socialist Democrats, and the social meddling and moralizing of some Republicans has got to be slapped down hard.
But none of that can turn us to the Libertarians; our Overlord President is dismantling America at warp speed and there is no time to build up the too-small Libertarian party and seduce it into the right path. Tea Party inspired co-opting of the Republican apparatus is our best chance, in my opinion. Take a good look at what’s already happening – the fastest growing avocation in America is Tea Party newbies hustling the old guard GOP out of the way while their communities roar approval and throw buckets of money their way.
I was a lobbyist in DC for years and I know how this game is played. These are exciting times for Patriots, and I can’t wait to get roped in for some of the fun.
As one famous libertarian warned others, it’s just obvious you can’t have a welfare state and open immigration at the same time.
Worse, experience is showing us it takes only one generation in the welfare state for the new generation to lose the virtues of his parents and gain the vices of ours.
You could be right on the first point, Mr. Fast. I haven’t seen it, but that’s a negligible argument I might lose.
On the second point, I wonder how you resolve the disparities that will exist between workers who are afraid to claim rights and those that can. The people streaming across the border for any work whatsoever isn’t lessening.
Legalizing the latter doesn’t extinguish the waves of the former. It may be good for business, that doesn’t mean it’s good for American citizens en masse or the classical liberal view of limited governance.
How would you square the Libertarian stance on this issue? They have no problem supporting dollar a day third world Asian wages in exchange for cheap Walmart plastics. They aren’t bothered by our increasing lack of hard manufacturing capability, see no problem with our increasing outsourcing of blue collar and white collar technical employment.
Big “L” libertarians don’t seem to give a shit about America’s economic health.
I do.
The Libertariantards never think of MS13, they never think of no-go zones in parts of LA and they never ever seem to think about the kidnappings in Phoenix. They simply don’t understand that law without order is lawless disorder.
One of the odd jobs I do is to inspect grocery stores for the program that gives folks a nice card with which to buy food (yes, I’m being deliberately obscure). Once upon a time they got a booklet of scrip; now the clients get a card that works like a debit card.
I inspect a lot of small, immigrant-focused stores. Iraqi, Mexican, Ecuadorian, and so on. The proprietors are glad to see me, because when my inspection is done they’re one step closer to being able to actually make money.
Because, you see, these places do not make money without being able to accept government program money. They can be the nicest, friendliest store around with good prices and great tortillas or dried fish, and their customers will turn around and walk out when they find out their government card isn’t accepted.
Now I’m sure there are plenty of immigrants, legal or not, who don’t suck at the government tit. In fact, I know there are, because the other day I stuck my head in one ethnic grocery–a successful one–and asked the owner if he took the cards. He didn’t; he asked me if I thought he should. I told him if the customers aren’t asking for it, then why bother?
The name of the store? Desi Foods. It’s Indian. His customers work hard, live frugally, and might be insulted if you thought they needed or wanted government aid.
No offense, Ms. Daphne, but I don’t see what you’ve got against Librarians.
I remember sweet ol Missus Lamarr, the high school Librarian. I used to call her Hedy, because I was pretty clever at working in a pun or two.
She’d slap me upside the head with a book–I believe it was an atlas—and she’d say “Don’t you be sassy young Lance.”
And I’d rub my head and ponder her words. Mostly because I hadn’t anything else to ponder. We were THAT poor.
But Missus Lamarr was a good and true Librarian. You’d bring a book up to the desk and she’d say in that pleasant way of hers, “What the hell do YOU want?”
And I’d say, “More gruel?”
And she’d wallop me on t’other side of the head with a dictionary.
And I’d say, “No thankee, I’ll take the one I brung up here.”
And she’d put a stamp mark in the book and hand the book to me—with an affectionate smile, meaning “I could clonk you with THIS one, too, young Lance, but I like the cut of your jib.”
And I’d stagger out of the library holding my new book. I believe it was “Naked Brunch.”
And then I’d see Paulette Rosenberg walking down the hall to class, with her feet at 45 degree angles—-west northwest and east northeast—because she did ballet.
And I thought, “Man, I wouldn’t mind hoisting young Paulette a few times. She only weighs 90 pounds.”
Yup, Librarians.
Okay, since Lance started it:
We were camping with friends, a lesbian couple, at a county park. Across the road from us was a large group of Christians. They weren’t any trouble; we wouldn’t have even known if they hadn’t gotten together in a big prayer circle several times a day.
One morning I was making breakfast for all of us. The wife was sitting next to me, and the two gals were still in their tent. I noticed that the group across the road were all out cooking also.
In a very loud voice, I said, in the direction of the wife: “Lesbians? I thought you said they were Libertarians!”
At least two dozen heads snapped around.
It is an innaccurate comparison to claim that the choice is between blanket amnesty or Arizona’s approach.
The critical problem of illegal immigration doesn’t merit simple solutions, it requires substantive ones (which we seem to be less and less capable of obtaining on any issue as a people).
Blanket amnesty would be certified chaos, as impossible to achieve as blanket deportation. We couldn’t sustain either. Blanket amnesty also rewards violators and punishes those who are going through the system legally.
But allowing police the right to stop and question people (citizens and potential noncitizens) does raise legitimate libertarian objections (not to mention constitutional ones).
We need to regulate our borders wisely, and not with window dressing statutes to satisfy public frustration tha tdon’t actually offer real solutions.
A careful, measured, and fair approach is exactly the strategy favored by proponents of the status quo, like Obama and Harry Reid; a winning had for illegal immigration. Arizona does not have within its means to do anything as a state other than what it is doing; those are federal responsibilities being ducked by federales. Avoidance by one cannot lead to dictating standards on the other.
Just kidding. Of course it will.
James : Name-checking Obama and Reid will automatically convince some here that their approach is wrong, however, neither of those two politicians favors the status quo as you maintain.
That’s precisely why I’m a small-l and not a big-L libertarian. You hit the nail on the head.
James- I was delivering second babies to sixteen year-olds thirty-five years ago.
The problem with a guest worker program is the fourteenth amendment, if congress would amend it to exclude children born to non-citizens from being considered as American citizens, I would consider it more favorably.
Any type of amnesty for illegal aliens is wrong for a number of reasons, which I think any of us here could list with obvious ease, but the thrust of my point is the insanity of the Libertarian position – by endorsing free borders/free workers they are ensuring that none of their limited government positions will ever come to pass.
They’ll be out shouted and outvoted straight down the line.
Here’s the entire Arizona bill.
I don’t see where it violates civil liberties one damn bit.
We all deserve for this situation to get worse before it gets better. It’s our habit of demanding consistency out of those who are most dysfunctional, and raining destruction down upon those who are most productive.
Mexico’s government is unstable. If you simply want to stop the illegal immigration problem from getting worse, and demand checkpoints, then after you’re done contending with all the “racism” bullshit you have to deal with the compassion decent people have. We’re going to stop the illegals from scaling the fence — and then what? What happens to them? Naturally, people only think about the hard workers trying to make a new life for their families. They don’t think about the perverts and the murderers who are climbing the fence as well, although it’s easily demonstrated they’re in there.
Two nations side-by-side. One is a complete cesspool, the other one is more-or-less civilized, a thriving democratic republic, albeit one in serious debt. One of them just elected a guy who’s bragging about what a revolutionary magnitude of “change” He’s going to bring…gee, guess which nation did that, the functional one or the dysfunctional one? That’s what I’m talking about. There’s some flaw in our genetic makeup, we keep demanding the functional entities are the ones that must change to something else. The dysfunctional entities can stay the way they are.
Daphne – I suspect it will be challenged on the supremacy clause, the 4th amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable search and seizures and the 14th amendment’s equal protection grounds (for starters).
I do agree with your amendment regarding children born here. If not born to people legally in the country then they shouldn’t get citizenship.
They are asking for a driver’s license or other valid ID, big whoop. I know I better have one available if a cop asks.
This color blind race business is ridiculous, the majority of illegal aliens are short, brown Mexicans and everyone knows it. They don’t look anything like American Hispanics, they don’t dress like them, don’t act like them, don’t possess the ability to speak fluent English, etc.
The people who live in border states can point out the difference without blinking. Of course the police should be able to ask them for proper identification and deport them when can’t prove that they’re here legally. It’s just fricking common sense, not racist.
I’m glad you agree about the citizenship, now tell me why those rat bastard Republicans never even attempted to make that change when they controlled congress.
Daphne – Answering your last question first, the Republicans did not make that change because while they proclaimed a wish to have a wall built along the border, they knew the only people available to build it were illegals.
As for the common sense portion of your comment: we all know the target of the Arizona legislation – as there does not appear to be a huge problem with illegal Swedish immigrants in the Southwest. But that doesn’t make it constitutional or effective.
James : Name-checking Obama and Reid will automatically convince some here that their approach is wrong, however, neither of those two politicians favors the status quo as you maintain.
Yes, I figured I could fool some of those easily pursuaded here with that one. Which ones were those?
What Obi and Reid favor is worse that what they admit to.
Freeberg summed it up in two sentences.
James- why not start with thyself? Since the cryptic “what they favor is worse than what they admit to” is along the same line.
I think it might be effective, Mahons. It’s not like the feds have been big on immigration control since Bush took office.
I think the 2,000 mile border wall was a stupid idea, at least in my state. The terrain and the ranchers make it an untenable possibility. Put them at the major crossings and call it a day.
Bush and the GOP wouldn’t dare propose amending citizenship legislation because their big, fat corporate owners would have strung them up by their tiny gold plated balls.
I don’t think we’d see the civil rights issue gaining any traction if we had 20 million white Canadians processing our chickens or mowing our lawns that we wanted to deport.
The plain fact is, the Arizonians have not been stupid about this legislation. They knew what it was going to bring up the sewer from Washington. They have invented no law; they are enforcing existing federal law in every case.
Just for fun, in discussions of this subject with those of the liberal bent, I’ve suggested the use of land mines on the border.
Just to watch their heads explode.
Just for fun, then, move the border south one inch for every illegal. Right now that would be about 250 miles.
Or adopt the border enforcement that Mexico uses–on their southern border.
WWWebb – Instead of land mines, why not station Republican party operatives? They are less dangerous but more revolting. It could end the threat immediately.
Republican Party operatives are indeed revolting. They brought us McCain for President, and have dodged the immigration fiasco for forty years.
That is a scarecrow that impresses the liberal, not the illegals.
I kind of prefer crocodile filled moats, but if we’re going to use politicians I think they should have to run the gauntlet between Massa, Spitzer, Patterson and that toe tapping bathroom weirdo, whatshisname.
Daphne – Larry Craig. Perhaps we can at least get the Mexicans to agree to an exchange, we’ll keep who we have of their folk if they’ll take the folks you just mentioned.
James – Those damned things called elections and votes.
As a great Justice once said, Mahons, the Constitution was designed to remove a great many things from the vagaries of political discussion, not to put them to a vote. The closer we come to democracy, the closer we are to being the Athenian crowd that sentenced Socrates. It is the rest of that story that the Founders agonized over not repeating.
James – Thus let us look to the Constitution to overturn this law which clearly appeals to the Athenian crowd that sentenced Socrates. He may have drank hemlock, no need for us to drink Kool Aid.
Mahons, your espousal of the eschewal of Kool-Aid drinking is penultimately ironic.
I like Kool Aid (especially the red one, all icy cold from the fridge after a night of indiscriminate tippery), am tired of voting in fools, miscreants and imbeciles. I also happen to think I’d make a wonderful benevolent dictator.
Mahons was designated as my official Beer Czar some years back if I ever take over the country.
The rest of my advisory positions are still open if any of you would like to offer up your expert services to right the listing ship of America.
His irony is part of his charm, Webb.
WWWebb – I see we have a Scrabble player.
Daphne – Begin your dictatorship as soon as possible.
A lot of those Big L policies are where I part company with them. I think of my self as a small l libertarian.
I am not saying give anybody amnesty, or legalizing those that are already here.
If a temporary immigrant is working here legally, they shouldn’t be afraid to claim rights and due process. They should have just as much right to workplace safety, for example, as citizens.
Businesses have to be held accountable to. They can’t pay less than minimum wage, not pay taxes, etc.
At the same time we have a right to control our borders, keep the criminals out while we let people who want to work here in. But they’re only visiting, legally.
…and please call me Ride or RF.
Will do, Ride. So, what exactly do you ride fast? ;-)
All good points that I agree with.
Lawyerman, I think your lofty position of eminence in my dictatorship would be worth around $500k a year, but you’d have to let go of your bizarre Budweiser fetish.
I would insist on a land of no Bud. Miller Light would be nixed, too.
I would want – and certainly deserve – to be appointed Fast Car and Biker Bar Czar in the new improved United States of Daphne. Or Secretary of The Department of Cinnamon Rolls and Coffee; someone has to be sure the troops are back in liberal-baiting condition after those hard Tea Party nights.
It goes without saying that we’d have a 24/7/365 no-bag-limit hunting season on those who drink pisswater beer.
Open carry, of course, must be not just a right but an obligation.
Open borders? Every serious advocate of open borders should be freeze-dried and given about a hundred coats of poly, then stacked up like cordwood along the lines. Cracks in the wall can be plugged with impenetrable blocks of congressional verbage, cemented in place with slime from Rahm Emanuel.
Pesky little annoyances are easy to fix when you have the right leadership :)
Daphne, you’re great and I love this blog, but you just pushed the “Major Response Button”.
Here’s the deal. Libertarian (and I will use that term to encompass my personal heresy, anarcho-capitalism of the Rothbard school) theory is not concerned with “immigration” per se. Put simply, Libertarians just don’t care, because they have little interest in things that do not affect their lives. (One might summarize the Libertarian party as the “MYOB party”.)
Where small-l/big-L libertarians have the problem is with *laws* regarding immigration, and their objections fall, generally, into two categories:
(a) Argument from economic reasoning. Immigration is not a problem. Immigration is a symptom. Generally, the first and most painfully no-shit conclusion one draws is that an immigrant’s life in the new country is better than in the country he left, otherwise he has no reason to move. (We see few immigrants from the US to Cuba, for example, or from Zurich to Tijuana.) The major problem with the *current* patterns of immigration is that the social-welfare and inflated wages in this country are so attractive that a poverty-stricken indio from Chihuahua does not have to think long before he decides to head north of the border and start picking oranges.
The problem here is not the immigrant, then; the problem is the regulations that permit the immigrant to obtain benefits beyond his actual utility. Now, respondents will go “Yeah, but…”, and I’m going to stop you at the “but”, because *every argument you can make against this observation contains failure at its very core*. An argument that “we need the minimum wage” falls apart with rudimentary economic logic. (A lettuce-grower with fifty jobs picking lettuce for twenty dollars a day does not have fifty of the same jobs for two hundred dollars a day, for example.) An argument that tax-funded welfare schemes are a great idea goes away pretty quick, too, chiefly due to arguments about incentive, moral hazard, the natural effects of subsidy, and the failures of a “democratic” process when confronted with a tax-eating clientele class. *Everything that draws immigrants of the type you describe here is something that we decided to do to ourselves*, chiefly due to the moral cosseting and slavering power-hunger of leaders and bent academics who created from whole cloth arguments that “sounded good” to ensconce their pet Utopias into law, which projects we are still laboring under the excesses of today. The cure is not to put up a 2,000 mile fence, then; the cure is to *get rid of the damned programs* that draw these people here.
Will there still be immigrants? Yes. Will they be fewer in number? Probably. Will they do any damage to citizens of the country? No, because they then *by definition* do not possess the means to rob people with the power of the State. Will there be crime? Yes. The cure for that is a 12-gauge shotgun. I assure you that after the first couple of malfeasing mojados get blown in half by a 12-gauge slug, the next few will pause and reflect on the folly of attempting to make their living in their host country through theft and murder.
Which leads us to…
(b) The argument from natural rights. I doubt that anyone here would argue with a straight face that a man with a million dollars cannot, say, pile it up and burn it. It is, after all, his money… right? I doubt that anyone would argue that he couldn’t give it to whom he chose without checking with his neighbors – or Big Daddy – first to make sure it was “okay”. The notion that he would have to do such an insane thing strikes at the very heart of the notion of ownership. If somebody else has to sign off on you giving something to another person or destroying it outright, then it is by definition quite simply *not yours*. It’s *theirs*. They just let you play with it from time to time.
This works for property, too. Let’s say that I know this smokin’ hot redhead supermodel named Ivana Phukelott, who simply can’t get enough of me. Do you get a vote on whether or not she visits my property? Anybody? Bueller? I’ll add this observation: I live thousands of miles away from most of the readers of this blog. Why the hell *should* any of you get a vote? *It’s my property.* Does it matter, then, precisely *who* is visiting my property, or what they’re doing there? If I replace the identity of my (sadly notional) frisky supermodel with “Jose Fernandez, landscaper, who simply cannot get enough of mowing my lawn”, does that materially change whether or not it’s any of your goddamned business? Can anybody argue, again with a straight face, that it actually *does*?
The core of this argument is the following question: “Precisely who the hell do you think you are, telling other people what they may and may not do with their own property?” For those who occasionally evince a dislike of being told what to do with their *own* property, realize that any answer you give that is not substantially identical to “Nobody, I should be minding my own business” *simultaneously* provides the intellectual justification for the infringements on your rights that you dislike. It is not possible to have the one without the other. Efforts to do so always fail. ALWAYS.
Libertarians cut this Gordian knot by saying precisely that: “You know what? It’s *not* any of my business, so long as they mind their own and they’re not hurting anybody. If it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, it’s none of my nevermind. Simple as that.” There is a certain invincible moral rightness to this stance.
…
So, there’s your pocket guide on why libertarians have a problem with immigration laws. I won’t get into pseudo-libertarians – the left-leaning “I want my dope but don’t care about your guns” types – because they’re not really relevant to the issue.
“bienvenidos a america, amigos”
-SD
Daphne – You ban my Constituional right to Budweiser and your reign terror will be shorter than Evita’s. Those Tea parties are for lightweights, wait until you see my Beer Party!
Daphne,
2000 Triumph Tiger
2000 Buell Lightning – ‘cept I just sold it.
1988 Yamaha Vmax – currently the hanger queen, broke tranny.
You?
Just my husband, RF.
Okay, Okay Mahons, you can keep the Budweiser.
SD, I don’t disagree with a single thing you wrote. Well stated, sir.
The problem is we aren’t living in a country that operates in any way like that, which leaves us to deal with the reality that illegal immigration, and their subsequent citizen offspring, is not at all good for libertarianism or conservatism.
He can *have* the Budweiser. All of it.
Well, Hell. Beer Czar is taken? By someone who drinks Bud-frickin’-weiser? That ain’t right.
Be that as it may… I wanna apply for Grand Hussar of the Humidor.
The rest of the conversation, i.e., the serious bits, is something I’ve sworn off until late October or early November.
“they would overwhelmingly reject the Libertarian creed, choosing expansive government and all of its crippling entitlements with decisive brio in the voting booths.”
This is the natural state of government for all humanity: feudalism, a government that promises well-defined roles; promising care and concern for the less fortunate while failing to act; in which the rich prosper while admiring themselves for their mercy. It’s known by a lot of names: socialism, big-man economics, crony capitalism…, but they’re all repressive, disrespectful, and, alas, conforming to the animal politics underlying human nature.
People do not naturally wish to be free. They must be taught to wist to be free or learn freedom from centuries of abuse. That learning is not automatic; were it so China would be the freest place on Earth, having suffered the most and the longest. Even now, the Chinese do not wish to be free.
SD, I invite you to move to southern AZ and then tell me that the invasion of illegals isn’t ‘picking anyone’s pocket or breaking their leg.’ As it happens, I agree with using the best quote ever attributed to Mr. Jefferson to define the legitimacy of any given law, but the reason I believe you’re off base here is that nothing happens in a vacuum.
Open borders is fine in concept, but certain things have to be done first.
1) End the war on drugs. Not only is it unConstitutional and unAmerican, but it’s the reason drug cartels are making enormous amounts of money(and are prepared to use all manner of violence to hang on to it).
2) Stop pissing people off by trying to be the worlds’ policeman. Adopt a defensive-neutral position such as Switzerland’s(we don’t screw with you, you screw with us and we’ll kill you).
3) Dismantle the welfare state in all its forms. No free rides for anyone, citizen or not. Life sucks, get a helmet.
When these things have been accomplished, we can have a discussion about open borders. Until then, we either have and enforce immigration laws or we commit national suicide. Like it or not, that’s reality.