How Walter Block Changed My Mind on Open Borders

Whatever Hoppe’s fallacies, my argument is that at this point in time there are too many dictators, would-be dictators and know-best dictators with no concept of non-aggression in today’s world that will not heed to the NA P.
They would be only too happy to extend their borders. An absence of the State altogether, the ideal of anarcho-capitalism, may be achievable but as long as any State exists. There are too many Statists, socialists, progressives and collectivists around for that to be a reality.

**If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery they may indeed wait for ever.**

Should they then strike out with blunt force in ignorance? What is the path to liberty? Non-participation? Is non-participation, while you are living in a slave state, not just hanging around until the rest of the slaves become wise and good?

In reality, the State exists. What is the path to its dissolution? It will, left to its devices, eventually collapse but then what will rise out of its ashes? The libertarian, voluntaryist, society? I think not. The scramble for property arising out of such a scenario will not be without aggression. The individual in such case will be overwhelmed and a new State will establish itself by a collective agreement of how or if property should be owned and distributed.

While I see both you and Coralyn are hardcore anarchists. I still see no plausible road to the acheivement of that ideal. I’m not saying it isn’t a worthy objective. It is better than the visionaries of the total State.

There are libertarian arguments about several issues that continue. One of them is “open borders”, which equates to “no borders”. A concept I find anathema to private property.
Especially when you would harbor in your midst collectivists who would invalidate your ownership of property in any respect beyond what they dictate. Non-participation is another issue, participation argued as being legitimizing the State when, in fact, one’s existence in it is legitimizing it.
Would you favor non-participation? Not voting? No libertarian political party?

It is difficult to see, as is evident by the general population’s acceptance of the State, how one is being aggressed against by the State. It aggresses against the individual by means of “law”. One cannot use violence against the State as it holds the sole authority to use violence. The way the State must be eliminated is by the use of its own means - the law.
It won’t through wishful thinking or even its own collapse, which it would prefer to engineer under threat of the loss of power and control. Collapse of the State will not bring about a mushrooming of libertarianism.

Hoppe’s arguments for closed borders is agreeable to me on an initial basis. The State is controlling the borders now and has used an open borders concept to destabilize its society. In Europe, through the refugee crisis, in the States, through non-enforcement and in Canada and other countries through multiculturalism. It is a means to grow the State as new immigrants will vote for more privilege and largesse from government to grow government. If we are to defeat the State we must use law to do so. Violence and non-participation will not bring about a libertarian society.

The US constitution to me is a valid means to do so but it has been abused by government, disregarded in some instances and demeaned as a mere historical document. It can be a tool to bring government to heel and has kept the United States from following the global push to socialism and the leviathan State until recently.

I even accept Rockwell’s position on Trump. If anything, he is exposing the system, the establishment and even the media for the corrupt agencies they are and forwards another reason to downsize government. Trump may or may not do that but at least opens a wound that will fester in the hearts and minds of citizens who seem oblivious to how much they are aggressed against.

It is only through this process, in my view that the progressive growth of the State can be reversed - the use of its own force against it. A libertarian society will not come about through violence, confrontation, State collapse or non-participatory wishful thinking.

That’s all I have to say on the matter. I thank you and Coralyn for challenging me on this and your positions are not wrong but, in my view, idealistic. You’ve both enabled me to sort through my position and hopefully I have presented an argument that you too can see as a path to,at least minimize government and perhaps realize the ultimate ideal of the anarcho-capitalist society.

**The Amish and the Hutterites ALREADY live in peaceful colonies surrounded by the USA. Much can be learned from their example, but ONLY IF a person sheds the hopeless attitude of a slave and honestly seeks ways to become free on a personal level. You cannot possibly aspire to make a whole “country” free if you are unable to first make yourself free.**

Of course, what binds people together is what they can agree upon. If they cannot agree they will live separately. The Amish and the Hutterites live peacefully in their colonies. But are they free? Their common bond or that which they agree upon is contained in the scriptures. The fact they agree to those principles makes them free. Yet certain principles regarding freedom are missing. The concept of private property and acting individually. If I agreed to and was bound to them by those agreements I too would have freedom. If I agreed to the State’s laws I would have freedom, the problem being I don’t know what they all are and a lot of them are intentionally confusing. Therefore, I am not free and I have a problem.

A common bond is indeed necessary for any society to exist and thrive. The Amish have religion as their agreed upon common bond. Americans have their law as their agreed upon common bond. They have freedom in their societies as long as they agree to what forms the common bond. You’ll notice the Hutterites and the Amish have not progressed technologically or past what can be considered traditional. It works for the Amish and the Hutterites because they all agree on a common bond. What holds the bond in place? Adherence to laws deemed to be from on high. It also holds them in time.

There needs to be human progress and it is impossible under adherence to a common bond unless based upon the sanctity of person and property,
The individual and the fruits of his labour. Perhaps that is contained in the concept of:
**What *IS* the ABSOLUTE BARE MINIMUM that two people (or more) need to agree upon, in order to live together peacefully and productively?**
Communism and socialism fail because the bonds that form them are enforced and not agreed upon. The basic instruction of God is simple and easy to agree to, some might question they are from God but nevertheless they are a bond that is a strong one and requires commitment. Communism and socialism does not bring such strong agreement and if enforced it starts its own decay. The success of religious communes lies in the strong agreement to adherence in its beliefs. It also stultifies change. Enforcement of a bond, such as socialism, also stultifies change and history of communist regimes shows little change and lags democratic freer-market countries, technologically and in cultural development and progress.

The quote by Buckminster Fuller you have in your URL “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller”
is good. Of course, the way to fight a force is to use that force against the one who initiates it. And I interpret that to mean that in law, if that be the force the State legitimizes itself with then it must be the force that will eviscerate it as well and it is brought to its minimum to which all in a society can agree.

The concept of a nation as a household is propaganda intended to make state aggression upon individuals more palatable. The analogy casts the state as a paternalistic authority wisely compelling citizens to do what’s for their own good.

For example, say I come to where you live in Texas and I declare a 5-mile radius around your home a “protectorate.” I don’t obtain your consent. I tell you it’s implied by virtue of your continued presence within the protectorate.

In this protectorate everyone including you must pay me part of his income and obey my laws. I also erect border fences and control all movements across protectorate borders. I justify this by saying, “The true protectorate is a household, a family comprised of freely associating individuals, well defined and justly appropriated boundaries, and the right to defend it.”

Under freedom would birds of a feather tend to flock together? Sure. We see this right now in large cities where neighborhoods take on characters by virtue of so many like minded people with shared values and situations choosing to live in proximity to each other. But a truly free market would provide means of such interest clustering without demanding corresponding geographical clustering or governance clustering.

Supposing “national” status adds any value is a mistake. Thinking in terms of nations is collectivism. My team vs your team. My race vs your race. My collective vs. your collective. A lot of people are into that. It’s very off-putting to me. Let me respond to Rothbard in that link you kindly shared:

The “nation” cannot be precisely defined; it is a complex and varying constellation of different forms of communities, languages, ethnic groups, or religions

The dictionary says nation means “a large area of land that is controlled by its own government.” National identities are government identities. The concept of “nation” is irredeemable.

classical liberals should resist the impulse to
say that national boundaries “don’t make any difference.”
it is clear that our model could be approached, and conflicts minimized, by permitting secessions and local control, down to the micro-neighborhood level, and by developing contractual access rights for enclaves and exclaves.

I won’t resist. National boundaries don’t make any difference. Smaller ones as training wheels, as a transition path of lesser evil toward real freedom, sure. As an end state? Hell no because it makes no sense to optimal satisfaction of wants. Substitute “governance businesses” for “clubs” here:

…there are, and would be, a myriad of private clubs of all sorts….Undoubtedly, the best-run and most pleasant clubs are those run by a small, self-perpetuating oligarchy of the ablest and most interested…why should I worry about voting if I am satisfied with the way the club is run?…if I am unhappy about the way the club is run, I can readily quit and join another club, or even form one of my own. That, of course, is one of the great virtues of a free and privatized society, whether we are considering a chess club or a contractual neighborhood community.

Why stop at contractual neighborhood community? Why would I choose decisionmaking with respect to every aspect of my life in lock step unison with any monolithic group of people if I can go a la carte with multiple different groups who share my values and interests along each particular aspect of living?

Sure, I’ll compromise when the economics of doing so make sense. When the opportunities opened up by compromise make the sacrifices worth it. But if I must band with others to pick a particular road provider, must I pick the same adjudication service, restaurant cleanliness evaluation service, land traversal rights clearing service etc all within the same nation? Yuck. The concept of nation implies shared governance decisions across wide swaths of life. I don’t want to share my governance decisions any more than I have to.

Of course if people want to live in enclaves governed extremely consistently, that’s their choice that a free market in governance will respond to and provide. For example, the Amish. But such clusters of concentration and uniformity of living should not be sanctified or elevated with any rosy, special, status of “nationhood.” Its a meaningless designation.

My vision of a free society is not a plethora of micro-nation-state like neighborhoods all flying nationalist flags, singing nationalist songs, and goose step marching down main street to their unique national anthems. And then I find one that fits me and salute its flag. No, my vision is a patchwork of interwoven threads of shared interests and governance methods across many diverse people living in geographic proximity practicing many different beliefs. People commingling and then segregating themselves alternately at different venues throughout the day according to their personal values to optimize their path through and experience of life.

New York City offers a sense of this concept. A smorgasbord of beliefs. All in the same day a Muslim man might pray in a segregated Muslim-only mosque, shop in an Orthodox-dress-code enforced Jewish grocery store for middle eastern foodstuffs, sign a trade deal at the offices of Wei Liu Fong Contract Guarantor, and dance in a nightclub with the prettiest girls of all nationalities, while going home to his apartment in a neighborhood he chose to live in because it was quiet. What “nation” does he belong to? Pffft. An archaic concept he as a sovereign individual has no use for.

Majoritarianism vs. Unanimity.

Majoritarianism says there can only be one way of doing things for all people and the majority will violently overrule the minority to determine what that one way will be.

Unanimity says there can be an unlimited number of ways of doing things in segregated parallel operation, so any time even a single dissenter arises he may withdraw to join another way he agrees with or start his own way.

Which is more humane? Which does not require violence? Which has only winners and no losers?

“National identities are government identities. The concept of “nation” is irredeemable.”

To the former, not necessarily, as Rothbard has shown, despite Webster’s opinion to the contrary, and to the latter, perhaps. The term “nation” may indeed be inseparable from the term “state” at this point; I cannot predict the future of public vernacular.

The concept, however, of people uniting under a similar set of values, even if those values only go so far as the shared acceptance of the non-aggression axiom, is still viable, and in fact, as libertarians it is our only hope. Wresting our natural rights from the state and the public opinion on which it resides will never happen unless groups of people act in such a way as to bring it about.

“People commingling and then segregating themselves alternately at different plots of private property throughout the day according to their personal values to optimize their path through and experience of life.”

Sounds fantastic, but I don’t see how this scenario refutes the idea of nationhood. Perhaps a libertarian nation’s only defining or homogeneous feature will be that it is a group of people who have decided to leave all services to voluntary association, and people who prefer multiculturalism will congregate and celebrate each other’s culture, and those who prefer a more homogeneous experience can have theirs as well. I’m not saying one is better than the other, though I have argued that the only way to preserve multiculturalism, is to preserve the right of cultures to be homogeneous; otherwise, forced multiculturalism will meld into homogeneity only of a different sort.

If we consider the case of a nation state devolving (or evolving) down to individual sovereignty, we must still assume, depending on geography, that some people will share borders with a state and it will be in the interests of those who live nearer these states to secure insurance and protection from aggression by these neighbor states. I believe that this service can be provided by voluntary associations based on mutual benefit, but organizing this type of service for mutual benefit will be aided by and will also engender feelings of camaraderie or nationhood, and I believe that this identification will be if not essential then at least extremely helpful to preserving the rights of all within the libertarian territory to be their own sovereigns.

“They remain highly protective of their ways of life yet find this compatible with intermingling with others wherever advantageous.”

I feel like we’re standing on the same page of an obscure book arguing over the author’s intended meaning of one word while we are in total agreement of the entire rest of the book. Nations can intermingle while still conservatively preserving their own way of life, just as you point out in regards to the Amish. I see a libertarian nation as a group of people with common political norms (i.e nonaggression, natural rights) filled with thousands or perhaps millions of different groups with differing social norms, behaviors, or traditions.

I can appreciate your correct indictment of the character of nationalist groups in the past, since they have almost invariably been intertwined with the state and most often have been incomprehensibly dangerous and stupid. I just think the concept of nationhood can be separated from the dangerous and stupid with a libertarian dose of ethical consistency.

Did I imprecisely throw around the term? I believe I defined it as “a family of freely associating individuals”, which I think is sufficient to distinguish my concept from the nation-state concept. Granted, I could have been more precise, but then again I wasn’t writing a treatise on nationhood and libertarianism. It was Jeff Tucker would threw around the term lazily in his tangential attack on me.

As far as Locke and his labor theory of property acquisition being confused with a labor theory of value goes, I believe it is the fault of those who classical economists following him, such as Adam Smith, James Mill, and David Ricardo, who popularized this false notion of value based on their own Calvinist predispositions to exalt labor and the interests of the producer over those of the consumer. Locke shouldn’t be blamed for the incompetence of those that followed him.

“I believe you did, yes..” and “I say it’s not up to you or me to redefine words unambiguously defined by consensus among the dictionary, historical usage, and current usage.”

I immediately defined my term, therefore I was not ambiguous, and I certainly didn’t redefine the word. It is only the modern times which have mendaciously equated the two in order to give the state more legitimacy, an equivocation which you’ve fallen victim to. We can see the same thing if we look at the current definition of “inflation” which has been changed from its former straight forward meaning (prior to about the 1930s) of an expansion of the money supply above specie redemption to the more watered down, state-culpability-obscuring general rise in the price level.

Still not convinced about the separation of the nation and the state? Consider that you’d be in disagreement with both Mises and Rothbard, and several other sources I put together below.

Consider the following:

1. Ludwig von Mises

http://fee.org/articles/is-a-nation-something-that-can-be-built/

“What the nation-builders overlook is a distinction made by Ludwig von Mises almost 100 years ago: A nation is not necessarily the same as a “state.” In his underappreciated little book Nation, State, and Economy, Mises argued that “nations” are defined not by geography or by political institutions, but most fundamentally by language and other similar cultural institutions that provide a basis for “mutual understanding.””

2. Murray Rothbard

https://mises.org/library/nations-consent-decomposing-nation-state-0

“When the “nation” has been thought of at all, it usually comes attached to the state, as in the common word, “the nation-state,” but this concept takes a particular development of recent centuries and elaborates it into a universal maxim.”

and

“The “nation,” of course, is not the same thing as the state, a difference that earlier libertarians and classical liberals such as Ludwig von Mises and Albert Jay Nock understood full well. Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily
born into a family, a language, and a culture.”

3. Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state

“A state is a political and geopolitical entity, while a nation is a cultural and ethnic one. The term “nation state” implies that the two coincide, but “nation state” formation can take place at different times in different parts of the world.”

4. Consensus vote on stackexchange

http://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/517/what-is-the-difference-between-a-nation-and-a-state

“There are three different things to define here:

State: “A state is an organized community living under a unified political system, the government” (Wiki definition).

This is basically just a community (usually in a specified territory) that was ruled by a specific government.

It may or may not have been sovereign.

Nation: A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, or history (Wiki).

Note that a nation has no required geographical tie-in (as an extreme example, consider the nation of Roma, or post-Diaspora-pre-modern-Israel Jews). But they must/should, as a rule, share history, culture and language (never thought I’d quote Stalin on a Politics.SE

The idea of a nation and a state being the same thing (“Nation-state”) is fairly new in modern politics[1] (it came about as one of the consequences/results of Peace of Westphalia, which ended the 30-year-war in Europe, when the concept of “Westphalian sovereignty” was introduced).

Before that, a vast majority of people did not - per se - had a firm notion of a “nation”, at least in Europe. Your loyalties were either to your immediate locale (village, town, clan), or to your hierarchical ruler (feudal lord, usually, and ultimately whichever prince/Emperor ruled the whole territory of the state).

But you didn’t consider the territory ruled by that Emperor to be “your” state - the fact that they shared the ultimate liege lord was irrelevant both practically, AND philosophically/culturally.”

5. Webster definition of Nation-state

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nation%E2%80%93state

“a form of political organization under which a relatively homogeneous people inhabits a sovereign state; especially : a state containing one as opposed to several nationalities”

The above definition implies a difference between nation and state, since a state governing multiple nations is not considered a nation state.

“That’s damn well argued.”

Every dog has his day I suppose. 😉

“I see you are among those endeavoring to reclaim the word “nation,” as some libertarians endeavor to reclaim “liberal.” With all due respect to your choice, I don’t choose to join that battle.”

I can respect your reservations and your decision, but I think you’re giving me too much credit; I’m not much of a political activist, so I wouldn’t say I’m in the battle. I do enjoy the discussion and advancing the intellectual debate for liberty, and since I’m naturally a contrarian, it suits my personality to hold to arcane definitions, especially when those definitions shed light on the true nature of things before the state’s corruption of language.

My case for prying the term “nation” out of the maw of the state, is that it helps others get past the notion of libertarian “atomism”. It is an unfair characterization and a spectacular non sequitur to be sure that since libertarians want individual liberty we also must necessarily, according to all anti-libertarians, want to be atomistic, misanthropic, autarchic, hermetically sealed units of selfishness who despise altruism in all its forms. Precisely the reverse is true as you know, since libertarians (specifically austro-libertarian anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, etc.) embrace the division of labor, multiculturalism, voluntary association, and peaceful interaction more fully and consistently than any other brand of political ideology. I think the idea of a libertarian nation can help dispel this pernicious myth.

“Just look at the unnecessary grief that exact form of misunderstanding caused between you and Jeffrey, both well-read and well-educated exponents for freedom”

I appreciate you putting me in the same category as Jeff, but he has done much more for liberty than I have and is probably much more well read too. I respect him immensely even though I do disagree with some of his positions. Having said that, if you look back it was Mr. Tucker who used the term “nation” first without defining it, so I claim my innocence in sowing the seeds of confusion!

Always a pleasure to chat with you Coralyn.