This is the first in a series on immigration and freedom.
There seems to be a non-trivial number of people- even very high-profile folks such as Ron Paul- who identify as pro-freedom yet have huge blind spots concerning immigration. We don’t think the government should be used to violate our property rights, either through taxation or otherwise. We don’t think we should be subject to onerous government surveillance and tracking. We don’t support the government trashing civil liberties or destroying the environment. Etc. But bring immigration into the picture and suddenly you will hear a number of otherwise pro-freedom people calling for the government to commit all manner of harms and rights violations which they would normally agree are unacceptable. In the next few weeks through a series of articles on immigration and freedom, I hope to contribute to the dismantling of mental barriers that are driving some of us to back away from a full and passionate advocacy of liberty and justice for all. Today I’ll begin with the topic that brought this to the front of my mind- taxation and property rights.
Last October, Reason documented the process of legally getting into the United States. Skilled workers and adult children and siblings of United States citizens and legal permanent residents typically face a five to fourteen year wait just to get into the United States. For unskilled workers, it is virtually impossible to immigrate here legally. The problem of fence-hopping- to the extent that it is a problem- is the making of the United States’ anti-immigration policies. The fix to the problem is to undo these policies- not to extend and institutionalize rights violations committed indiscriminately against a huge and arbitrarily-grouped class of people.
When you own property, that means you may do with that property what you wish so long as you are not violating the rights of others. If a person sits at my dinner table with me, occupying space on my property at my invitation and of his own volition, neither he nor I are violating anyone else’s rights. It is my right as the property owner to decide whether or not he is allowed to be there. It is neither your right, nor any voter’s, nor any government agent’s right to decide otherwise for us. The same holds true regarding who I may employ on my property and to whom I may sell my property. As far as I am concerned, the discussion should be over right here. My property, my choice. Your property, your choice. We have no problem recognizing this in other relationships between peaceful and consenting adults, and this should be no exception.
Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Some folks believe that an exception should be made in this case. Until welfare is reduced, the argument goes, we must violate people’s property rights (as well as other rights) via taxation to fund policies and enforcement actions designed to keep out immigrants who, it is assumed, will significantly burden taxpayers through unjust wealth redistribution programs. I think this excuse is nonsense. It’s time to kick it to the curb.
Let’s start with the logic of the argument. Taken to its natural conclusion, it leads to some places I don’t think most of us want to go. The general idea, of which this argument is merely a specific case, is that it is generally wrong to violate someone else’s rights, but a vast class-based exception can be made arbitrarily against millions of people as a sort of mass collective defensive measure on behalf of taxpayers. We could similarly advocate a ban on junk food, tobacco products, alcohol, high risk sports, etc. After all, some people may suffer detrimental effects as a result of those things and wind up costing the taxpayers who are forced to fund their care. We could further support a ban on reproduction by people who do not meet some minimum level of government-approved preparation for parenthood. This would be a defensive measure to ensure that the taxpayers do not wind up paying for the care of children whose parents are unprepared to care for them properly. There would, of course, have to be penalties imposed on anyone who refuses to comply. We could all go on for quite a while with these sorts of analogous examples, but I hope we can see why this is a bad path to be going down. In fact, this is the sort of logic supporting the War on Drugs which I think most of us agree has been incredibly devastating in terms of property rights and other rights as well. I think we ought to ask ourselves, is this the direction we as pro-freedom advocates want to be going?
Next let’s look at a couple of common but faulty assumptions about the facts of the situation- the assumptions from which that bad argument proceeds. The first is that immigrants do not contribute significantly to public coffers. That may seem intuitive, but it’s incorrect. Even illegal immigrants pay more than just sales tax. They pay excise taxes such as fuel, alcohol, and tobacco taxes. They pay property taxes, primarily indirectly through rent. Millions of undocumented workers are having income taxes withheld and some even file income tax forms and pay additional income tax beyond what is withheld by their employers. The Social Security Administration estimates that about 3/4 of undocumented workers pay payroll taxes (Social Security/Medicare) to the tune of several billions of dollar annually.
The second is that immigrants are a significant burden on social services. That may also seem intuitive based on common stereotypes of illegal immigrants, but it’s also incorrect. Let’s look at some rough numbers and do a little back-of-the-envelope calculation.
On the “asset” side of the balance sheet, we have the money we would save by getting rid of three Department of Homeland Security Departments: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS). According to the Department of Homeland Security’s 2010 budget, these divisions add up to more than $20 billion (pdf) out of taxpayers’ pockets which they would be saved with an open borders policy. Additionally, a rough estimate of the tax contributions of illegal immigrants through payroll and federal income taxes alone is around $11 billion. By ending the closed borders policy, we’d have a net benefit of at least $31 billion. This, of course, does not account for all of the tax dollars currently paid by illegal immigrants as detailed above. Nor does it account for the additional taxes immigrants would pay when they no longer risked deportation for doing so. Nor does this account for the additional taxes that would be paid by immigrants who would certainly have a much higher standard of living if they were able to compete for wages on an equal basis with legal residents. Nor does this account for the taxes paid by legal citizens born in the United States who are children of illegal immigrants. This is clearly a lowball.
On the “liability” side of the balance sheet, we are looking at those public services Lance is worried about immigrants consuming. However, they are actually quite limited. In 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was signed into law effecting numerous changes to taxpayer-funded social programs. It had significant ramifications for immigrants. Since its passage, illegal immigrants have not been eligible for participation in most tax-funded social programs with the exception of emergency medical care and public education. Further, most legal immigrants are not eligible for any but these two social benefits for five years after they arrive in the United States. So what we are looking at on this side of the balance sheet are primarily emergency medical care and public education. I take the following rough numbers from two notoriously anti-immigration sources. (Note that the first organization is a spinoff of the second.) The Center for Immigration Studies’ current estimate for the cost to taxpayers of medical care at all levels of government to be $4.3 billion. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimated in 2005 that the national cost for K-12 education for minors in the country illegally plus minors who are citizens but whose parents entered illegally at $28.6 billion. This was the hardest number to pin down. I was unable to find more recent data, if it exists.
Now this is a little bit of a case of comparing apples to oranges due to the nature of data I was able to track down. The negative side of the balance sheet includes the costs of U.S. citizen children born to illegal immigrants but the positive side does not include the tax contributions of those same individuals- and yet the difference is still less than $2 billion. To put that into context, the projected 2010 budgets for the departments providing social services to United States citizens (Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, Veterans Affairs, and Social Security) total $251.8 billion meaning that a very conservative estimate for the impact of illegal immigrants on taxpayers is less than 1% of the total taxpayer social services burden. Evening the balance sheet a little bit, Shikha Dalmia of the Reason Foundation reports that the “National Research Council found that when the taxes paid by the children of low-skilled immigrant families — most of whom are illegal — are factored in, they contribute on average $80,000 more to federal coffers than they consume” over their lifetimes. In fact, numerous studies over the years since at least 1980 have found that immigrants on average contribute more than they cost.
I acknowledge that the numbers are rough here. Separating out money for unjust drug war actions and other things entangled with immigration issues is not straightforward. It’s a bit beyond the scope of this blog post to do an in-depth analysis, but I think I’ve built in significant generosity to the negative side of the balance sheet such that it errs quite a bit out of my favor. For instance, I believe the FAIR number for K-12 education assumes that all children of immigrants of K-12 age are attending school; that is hardly the case and makes for a ridiculous overestimate. If anyone would like to discuss numbers more specifically, I invite you to post your comments below.
The problem is not that immigrants aren’t contributing. Rather you can see the source of the problem from the cost/benefit data above: immigrants’ contributions primarily go to the federal government whereas the services they receive come primarily from state and local governments whose finances reflect this disparity. Immigrants are paying for benefits they will never receive leaving them with fewer resources to pay for what they do use.
Further, the ability of working illegal immigrants to raise their own standard of living through their own efforts is severely limited by the government policies and enforcement measures that force them to work underground or take away their livelihood altogether. Note that government enforcement actions are very pointedly focused on stopping immigrants from earning a living via voluntary market transactions. During the Bush administration, there were several high-profile raids that led to the deportation of hundreds of working immigrants- people who were not sponging off the system but rather whose wages, harder-earned that most folks’, were taken from them to provide to United States citizens benefits these workers are themselves to receive. The Obama administration has elected to continue raiding the pocketbooks of working immigrants. This past summer, ICE began an audit of 652 companies looking to weed out working immigrants whose employment is not government-approved. Minnesota Public Radio reports that in the last couple of months, for example, 1200 workers were fired in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota from janitorial jobs paying good wages. These workers were put out of their jobs after ICE reviewed their records and found them lacking. And the abuse extends to lower levels of government as well. For example, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, America’s Most Abusive Sheriff, is notorious for conducting worksite raids.
Undocumented immigrants must work underground thereby harming their standard of living through lower wages in exchange for employers looking the other way with regard to the paperwork. They pay taxes that go to fund benefits they are ineligible to receive further harming their standard of living and effectively subjecting them to one of the most regressive tax structures among all workers in the United States. And then in the face of all that, working immigrants are targeted by law enforcement through worksite raids and pressure on their employers to get rid of them. Who has a more legitimate claim to being cheated and abused by the system than these people?
The focus on social services paid for by taxpayers as an excuse for discrimination and rights violations by way of government against millions of people, citizens and non-citizens alike, would be laughable were it not so horrifyingly tragic for so many people who put their lives on the line time and again to make an honest living and take care of themselves and their loved ones. This excuse has worn embarrassingly thin at this point, and it should be abandoned immediately. It only serves to divert attention away from the rightful focus on wealth redistribution schemes and the vast majority of their dependents who are United States citizens. The way to deal with excessive taxpayer burden from public social services is not to compound the problem with additional violations via unjust border policy but rather to focus on undoing the rights violations that created that burden in the first place.
My thanks to Brad Taylor for reviewing and commenting on the draft of this post, and to the late Julian Simon whose work was the first to seriously challenge my assumptions about immigrants and immigration.
Kirsten blogs at 
That PRWORA that you speak of must never be enforced. Because I know plenty of people who aren’t citizens of this country who collect welfare ad unemployment benefits. I know a whole bunch of students from India here where I go to school who work part time and collect unemployment benefits in the summer time. They most certainly do collect welfare benefits, because I know of it first hand.
You talked about how if we eradicated certain programs, there would be at least a $31 billion benefit. But, you also said that they account for an estimated $4.3 billion for medical related expenses. You also said they account for over $28 billion in education related expenses. Those two estimates alone are over $31 billion.
If you think non-citizens are a significant portion of welfare recipients, let’s look at that. Show me something indicating that is the case.
On the rough numbers, you may have missed the part where I pointed out that the negative numbers are (a) from notoriously anti-immigration sources who have an incentive to inflate the numbers, and (b) that the larger of the two appears to be based on the HUGELY incorrect assumption that all children of immigrants of K-12 age are attending school. This indicates that this number is well over-stated and yet even significantly exaggerated numbers cannot make a good case for mass violations of these people’s rights, not to mention those of United States citizens. Further, this sanity check is consistent with the later report I cited and which you appear to also have missed indicating that immigrants on net contribute $80,000 to the system over their lifetimes even though most of them are at the significant economic disadvantage of being undocumented.
It’s kind of funny…… you would probably be the first one to complain if the government took 0.5% of your income to fund something like the CDC or a basic police force. But, if you let millions of people who have are responsible for taking upwards of $30 billion dollars from taxpayers, then you would be perfectly okay.
With all due respect, make up your mind already. Or at least start living in the real world where supporting some form of limited government (a downsized and less powerful military and a basic police force) doesn’t make you Joseph Stalin. You’re never going to effectively spread your word by telling someone that. Seriously.
I have to agree with you Brad. I have a lot of experience with illegal immigrants working in the construction field in Los Angeles. Almost all of my experiences have been positive. Of course the plural of anecdote isn’t data, so I wouldn’t want to take that as proof of anything. However since the rough numbers are coming up a wash, it makes me think that those experiences will jive with the numbers. I understand that you are trying to appeal to the pragmatists out there by pointing out that the financial argument doesn’t hold water. I think the best argument is what you touched upon at the beginning, that violating these people’s rights is just wrong and shouldn’t be done. Would you think that the rights violations are ok if the numbers worked out differently?
Doh, I mean Kirsten. I scrolled up for an author and the first italic I saw was Brad. Damn, Sorry.
Would you think that the rights violations are ok if the numbers worked out differently?
No. As I said at the beginning, for me meaningful discussion ends well before we get to the numbers. My thinking these days is very individualist. In this case, this manifests as the belief that it is not okay to violate the rights of group A supposedly to protect the rights of group B. And I think this is especially true when you compare the sorts of rights being violated in this particular instance.
However, I do know that wasn’t always the case and in my younger days it was really the Julian Simon publication I linked to that first made me reconsider my position. Once the economic excuse was off the table for me, I got to the point where I could give proper weight to other things.
All these years later, I think the data show that the welfare excuse is still just an excuse, and I think exposing it as such may be helpful in changing others’ mistaken thinking. Obviously, some people are going to cherry pick only the data that can be twisted to support their prejudices, but I do think that there are some people who are well-meaning but simply are looking at things based on faulty assumptions.
I generally think the “cost” argument is very dangerous when dealing with rights. There are just too many actions for which a public cost can be fabricated. It is an argument that holds quite a bit of sway with the public. I had a discussion with an acquaintance about seat belt laws, and the deferment of potential cost was completely compelling to her even if it infringed on the rights of others. I argued that if you are going to offer for instance, emergency care, you have to offer it to everyone. This wouldn’t get much disagreement here in L.A.. When you start levying fines on people that aren’t behaving in a governmentally sanctioned manner because they may create a specific cost, you are discriminating against behavior. Then you have to ask who gets to determine which harmless behavior is right and wrong. Would they find it acceptable to fine homosexuals because they might contract AIDS thus creating a cost to the health care system? I’m pretty sure that would get a fairly angry response here in L.A.. Personally, I think both would be a terrible restriction to freedom.
Lance argues that the immigrants are taking money from the taxpayers. If you want to discuss who is taking what from whom, I think this is the wrong way to frame the issue. The government is the entity doing the taking the immigrants would be receiving governmental largess. A subtle point, but I think it is an important one.
I can appreciate that criticism, believe me.
Thinking it over some more, I would not characterize the economic portion of my post as an argument for immigration but rather as an argument against a common faulty argument posed against open immigration.
Much as this is a minefield, I think it’s important to tackle it. I think this line of argumentation makes an easy smokescreen for bigots to hide behind. I believe this needs to be challenged again and again until it goes away. That is why I’ve asked Lance to show me where I’m wrong. If he has some numbers he’s basing his judgment on, let’s look at those in detail. If not, well, that’s telling me that he is not basing his judgment on facts but rather on prejudices and assumptions. Whatever the case may be, let’s get it out on the table and discuss it.
When you say “some form of limited government” are you saying that raiding private employers because they employ people not approved by the government is “limited” What specifically, relevant to the post you are commenting on, is “limited” about the enforcement of US immigration laws.
BTW, you’re the only one who brought up Stalin … can we dispense with the straw man stuff?
I see this as upholding property rights, not violating them. . .
(for the purposes of this posting, the word “Citizen” shall also mean Those Who Immigrated Legally And Are Working To Become Naturalized Citizens)
The example you give, “If a person sits at my dinner table with me, occupying space on my property at my invitation and of his own volition, neither he nor I are violating anyone else’s rights,” is analogous to being a legal immigrant who went through the process. They knocked on the door; you opened the door and invited them in for dinner. You’re correct, nobody’s Rights are Violated.
The others are Trespassing.
Let’s continue your analogy:
Some random guy (nobody you know), along with his extended family (none of whom you know), jumps the fence into your back yard, sets up camp, walks into your house and sits down for dinner. Meanwhile, one of the younger children is explaining to you (since none of the adults understands your language) that they’ll only be camping in your yard for 6 months or so while the parents are working, and that his dad will mow your lawn on the cheap. Oh, and that you’ll have to pay for the kids to go to school. And teach them in their language, not yours. And pay for their medical insurance. And learn to speak their language, they can’t be bothered to learn yours. And provide Day Care. And pay extra to print product packaging and voter info in their language (see “learning to speak” above). And buy them a car. And feed them.
“It is my right as the property owner to decide whether or not he is allowed to be there.” You’re not allowed to decide, he & his family decided for you. With the help of the Government and some of your neighbors who think it’s ok for them to live in your back yard even if you don’t.
Did I mention that, if you should be so despicable as to complain or try to remove (or have them removed) from your property, they’ll get together with all their friends who jumped the fences into other people’s yards, and stage protests demanding that their particular form of Trespassing (and no other) be made retroactively legal?
The source of the entire problem is collusion between Business and Government – Well, that and too many people promoting the Rights of Trespassers over the Rights of Citizens – Businesses that are afraid to “outsource” or simply pack up and move to some $0.37/day-sweatshop-country, hire the Trespassers for a fraction of what they’d have to pay a Citizen (and now, Citizens are expected to work for Trespasser wages), which gives more incentive for people to Trespass (and less incentive for Citizens to work). Duh Gubmint lets them. “We” let Duh Gubmint? Business makes more money – Duh Gubmint makes more money – We, the People, make less money. Everybody’s happy?
As for Social Services. . . $10,000 or $10,000,000,000 – it’s still wasted.
It works like this: Absent the collusion between Business and Government. . . Businesses would be forced, by the market, to pay Citizens better wages (and benefits) than Trespassers get. Fewer Trespassers = fewer people using Social Services. More Citizens working = even fewer people using Social Services.
More and more, people are growing tired of this de facto legalized Trespassing and Extortion, and want their Property Rights restored.
*facepalm*
Y’know, I live in Southern Arizona and I’ve never had Mexicans camping in my back yard. Yet the INS (or ICE, or whatever the hell the call themselves now) constantly violates my rights (including my property rights) at checkpoints.
Please, explain how that’s an example of upholding property rights.
And another question that arises from your analogy…
Most undocumented immigrants aren’t violating any individual’s property rights. They are employed by people who wish to employ them; they rent living space from people who wish to rent to them. The only theft they are involved in is when they receive government assistance; and anyway 1.)More “citizens” benefit from my tax dollars than “illegals” and 2.)the government programs they benefit from are illegitimate anyway, regardless of who uses them.
So… just who are they trespassing against?
The bit about being able to choose who is at my dinner table is not an analogy. It’s the actual reality.
If I choose to have someone to dinner (or on my property working for me) that’s between them and me. What’s happening (not analogy, real life) is government thugs busting into my workplace and dragging my guests off.
Unless you want to assert, and it sounds like you are, that the government of the US owns all the land in the US, I’m not sure how you think they are enforcing and not violating property rights.
J. Shaffer, as mentioned by others, you seem to be confusing public property and private property. You seem to be suggesting that you, through the government, have the right to tell me who I may NOT host on my property. Flip that around for a minute. Do I, through the government, have the right to tell you who you MUST host on your property? If not, why do you support the former and not the latter?
And to quickly touch on a point not mentioned by others above:
It works like this: Absent the collusion between Business and Government. . . Businesses would be forced, by the market, to pay Citizens better wages (and benefits) than Trespassers get. Fewer Trespassers = fewer people using Social Services. More Citizens working = even fewer people using Social Services.
Why do you assume that citizens would get better wages and benefits than non-citizens? (They are not trespassers if employed voluntarily by their employers.) I would think that absent government-enforced nationality-based discrimination, the system would tend toward merit/performance-based rewards rather than rewards based on the totally irrelevant characteristic of citizenship. Why do you think an irrelevant characteristic would dominate compensation decisions?
Let us suspend reality for just a moment, and pretend that thugs calling themselves The United States Government actually followed the rules as set forth by the Constitution (which is in and of itself illegal).
Said Constitution does not mention anything about immigration. The power to regulate immigration was left to the several states. The federal government can, according to it’s governing document, only regulate naturalization (how inhabitants become federal citizens)
See Section 8 of the aforementioned document, which reads: “To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;”
This is also evidenced by the original State Constitution of the state of Texas, when it was admitted to the Union of the several states. The Constitution of the State of Texas, when it was admitted to the union had a bureau of immigration, and thusly handled the immigration issue as a separate entity.
Wow. . . the analogy I put forth in my last post was so simple, even a trained monkey (minus the training) could understand. . . but I’ll elaborate for those of you without sufficient intellect to make the connection.
Immigrations laws are Trespassing laws, expanded.
By supporting and promoting the actions of the Border Jumpers, you’re supporting and promoting Trespassing. It has nothing to do with asserting that the US Government owns anything, and everything to do with the FACT that ALL of us own the property, by virtue of Citizenship.
Many of the co-owners of the property are saying NO TRESPASSING!!! KEEP OUT!!! VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSTITUTED!!! BEWARE OF DOG!!! ARMED SECURITY ON PATROL!!!
Would you still “invite” the guy who jumped the fence into your yard to dinner if your spouse and children said, “NO! DO NOT!?” If you answer “yes,” you’re no different than any other Authoritarian Statist Pig – what you want is all that matters, everyone else be hanged. Also to be considered. . . not only do your spouse and children not want them having dinner at the house, you forcefully took money, that THEY earned working, to pay for it – because you know if you ask them, they’ll say NO! to that too. And the violations become even more egregious. . .
“Sorry, son. . . You can’t have a new bicycle, because I took some of the money you earned with your paper route to help pay for the Trespasser kid to get one.”
“Sorry, wife. . . You can’t buy a car to replace the falling-apart one you drive now. . . I took the down payment money out of your wallet while you were sleeping, and gave it to the Trespasser wife so she can have a BBQ this weekend.”
“No, daughter, you can’t buy that new jacket you need for winter. . . I snuck money out of your piggy bank and gave it to the Trespasser girl so she can go get her navel pierced.”
“Sorry, Junior, my namesake. . . I know you really wanted to go to college and become an Engineer, but I took money out of your college fund so the Trespasser kids can go to school. It wouldn’t matter anyway, because so much of your education time would be wasted while the teacher spends extra effort on the Trespasser kids that have increased class sizes to the breaking point. I’m sure you’ll understand later, when you’re living in a homeless shelter.”
“Well, hell. . . I need a colonoscopy, but I took our health insurance payments and used them to buy health insurance for the Trespassers – I hope I don’t die of colon cancer before I can sneak more money out of my kids’ piggy banks to pay for our health insurance. Oh, crap, they don’t have any money in their piggy banks, I already snuck it all out!”
How many more violations are We, the Co-Owners, expected to take in order to soothe your bleeding hearts?
I don’t think people didn’t understand your “trained-monkey” explanation, they simply don’t agree with your interpretation/presentation of property rights theory.
This “co-ownership” you speak of is a farce that is used to sell the masses on the idea that a single organization, the institutionalized violence cartel known as the United States, should have complete monopoly control over certain sectors of the market, and be able to violate individual sovereignty to maintain it’s market share. The label-concept of “citizenship” is equally a farce, if one is to maintain a voluntaryist perspective.
I myself have concluded, as a voluntaryist and an individualist, that all *public* property is in fact *state* or *cartel* property, and while they routinely violate my rights through various forms of threatening activity, it does not change the fact they still own the land that has long been claimed/marked by them ( if previously unowned ) or released to them by voluntary consent, and as an ethical person it is proper for me to respect their right to control them in whatever manner that does not directly threaten the individual sovereignty of myself and/or others ( since most of those specific individuals whose rights were violated by the United States during property acquisition are long since dead along with the specific individuals who did the violating, it can be argued that nearly all U.S. assets now rightfully belong to the U.S. and still be consistent with voluntaryist principles ). Now I would also argue, from the individualist perspective, that the actual individual owner of any organization’s assets is in fact the head decision maker of that organization ( in the United States case, it would currently be President Obama – with everyone else being employees/contractors hired through various methods [ popular oppinion, appointment, employment interviews, etc. ] ).
( Personally, I would prefer that terms such as “public” and “private” be discarded in favor of “collectivist” and “individualist”, since the former have gained levels of abstraction in our culture that can and do confuse their meaning. )
As such, the immigrants ( generally speaking ) are not trespassing and violating our ( yous and mine ) rights. *The Cartel* violates our rights primarily by extorting portions of our earnings from us, and secondarily by coercing their ideal patterns of action in the marketplace upon us ( drug-prohibition for example ). The Cartel then turns around and gives away the money that it is has extorted from us. I don’t have time to properly discuss whether or not the Cartel has the right to give what it possesses away in this instance, but I will say that the receivers of such a gift have the right to accept it ( and the rest of us have the right to ostracize them for doing so ), and that the Cartel most certainly does *not* have the right to extort the money from us or anybody else in the first place. At this point I would argue that all the Voluntaryist can do ( while remaining consistent with his principles ) is be better prepared to defend himself against further incursions against his individual sovereignty, and make use of his social assets to discredit the offender.
What voluntary interactions the Cartel makes with others are of no concern to the Voluntaryist, or participants of a generally voluntaryist society. It’s the INvoluntary, the *coercive*, interactions that are of concern to the Voluntaryist; in particular those affecting him directly, followed by those of greatest value to him.
Even if we actually did “co-own” those areas of land that the Cartel rules over, you seem to be forgetting about those “co-owners” that don’t have a problem with people coming over to compete in the market, that in fact wish to use that property to that end. You’re saying that because one co-owner wishes to use the property in a way that is displeasing to another co-owner, the former is violating the latter’s rights, yet what about the rights of the former to use that property to invite laborers offering a competitive price over to work for them? Are the anti-immigrationists not using the land in a way that is displeasing to the pro-immigrationists?
Some of the problems you are pointing out just help to illustrate the inherent conflicts that come with all forms of *collective* ownership, as opposed to *individual* ownership. To call a husband a “statist-pig” because he wishes to allow a guest in a house despite the protests of his wife and child requires more details than were given in order to be justified in standards of voluntaryist principles. In traditional families, the husband usually provides all the material resources for the household to perpetuate, the wife usually trades in her labor to make use of those resources to further enable said perpetuation, and often the child assists in proportion to his ability, training, and parental demand. In such a scenario, the husband is the actual owner of the house, as he is often the one who actually made the exchange to acquire it. The wife and child are, in terms of individual property rights, guests who simply pay rent in the form of love and labor, as such, their opinion on who gets invited over ultimately does not matter.
The only right the wife and child have in such a scenario would be to leave without threats or acts of bodily injury with all their personal property in tow.
Now let us say instead that the husband and wife came to an agreement ( even if he made the initial exchange to acquire the house and land ) by which he chose to give half of his ownership interest in the property to his wife ( motive is irrelevant, but in this case we’ll just say he did it for the happiness he receives from her loving him ). In an individualist voluntary society, each equal owner would have the *right* to do with the land and house EXACTLY as each pleases. Obviously this could make things rather tricky at times as conflicts of interest are bound to arise. In the ultimate extreme: the husband could paint the house blue ( even if the wife hates blue ) and be fully within his rights; additionally the wife could bulldoze the house down ( presuming all the property inside the house was also hers ) and also be fully within her rights.
Something that must be kept in mind is that *value* is not a *right*, as value is entirely subjective to the preferences of each individual, which is probably the primary reason that conflict is so inherent in collective ownership, or even co-ownership. Having demolished the house, the wife has destroyed a significant amount of value that the husband held for the property, but for her, the value is still equal to what it was when he painted the house blue, her hatred and subsequent anger towards the color hypothetically being at such a level.
They both have equal interest in the property, they both have full right to tangibly manipulate it as each sees fit, so long as neither threatens or causes bodily harm to the other or to each others exclusive property. What they don’t have is the right to defend their respective subjective value interests in the property through threats and acts of bodily injury.
These I contend are are a couple of examples of property rights theory that is consistent with a voluntary society, which, by the nature of being human, is an inherently *individualist* society, as we all perceive and experience reality, as well as choose to act, exclusively at the individual level, *not* at the group level.
JC
It has nothing to do with asserting that the US Government owns anything, and everything to do with the FACT that ALL of us own the property, by virtue of Citizenship.
Help me out here. How do you and “ALL of us” own MY property? How are you a co-owner of MY property?
P.S. I have no spouse nor children.
And to get back to a couple of things I asked before that you haven’t addressed:
Do I, through the government, have the right to tell you who you MUST host on your property?
J. Shaffer: It works like this: Absent the collusion between Business and Government. . . Businesses would be forced, by the market, to pay Citizens better wages (and benefits) than Trespassers get. Fewer Trespassers = fewer people using Social Services. More Citizens working = even fewer people using Social Services.
Why do you assume that citizens would get better wages and benefits than non-citizens? (They are not trespassers if employed voluntarily by their employers.) I would think that absent government-enforced nationality-based discrimination, the system would tend toward merit/performance-based rewards rather than rewards based on the totally irrelevant characteristic of citizenship. Why do you think an irrelevant characteristic would dominate compensation decisions?
“The second is that immigrants are a significant burden on social services. That may also seem intuitive based on common stereotypes of illegal immigrants, but it’s also incorrect.”
Walk in to any ER in the greater Atlanta metro area, any time, any day, and then tell me with a straight face that immigrants are not a burden on social services.