In episode 994 of his show, Part of the Problem, Dave Smith made his case for what is commonly known as “closed border libertarianism.” This is a rebuttal to the arguments he made on his show. As a fellow anarchist, I find myself agreeing with Dave on nearly every topic. That said, this episode was probably the poorest attempt of any argument I’ve seen him make.
I pulled the transcript from the YouTube video, and edited it for clarity while being careful to present his ideas as closely to his original intent as possible.
Dave first describes the core of libertarianism:
What Libertarians believe is the core of libertarian philosophy is self-ownership. That is the very core of it – that you own yourself. And that to Libertarians, that’s what Liberty is really all about, and when we say “own” we just mean who has the moral right to exercise control over it. So you have the right to exercise control over yourself. We believe in self-ownership, we believe in the non-aggression principle and private property rights. So that’s basically libertarianism. Now if you follow that to its logical conclusion you will get to anarchism because the very nature of a state is on some level to violate the non-aggression principle. It’s going to be coercive in some way.
There are no objections there at all. Dave begins his argument with an analogy:
Imagine you have a private city block. It’s all privately owned, maybe there’s 30 or 40 houses, and the street and the sidewalk is owned by every house or maybe one guy owns the whole street, whatever, it’s privately owned. This is a Libertarian situation.
And let’s say a whole bunch of homeless schizophrenic drug addicts covered in their own feces decided they wanted to build tents on the street and they wanted to live there on the street. And then let’s say [the land owners] had private security and they kicked [the homeless] all out. [The land owners] were like, “You have to leave. You can’t live here, you can’t shoot up heroin here on this street there’s a little girl who’s coming walking to school and no one wants to see this. You gotta go.” and even if [the homeless] refuse to go, by force [the land owners] made them leave – physically removed them. That would be perfectly libertarian.
Agreed. This is a good place to start the analogy. Yes, Dave is perfectly correct here. Libertarians would agree with this. He moves on with an analogy to change the street ownership from private to government:
Now let’s say then the next day the the government came in and seized the the sidewalks and the street, and said, “You guys can still own your house but we own this property now and we’re gonna rob you to pay to maintain it.” And then they said, “We’re no longer going to enforce the rule that homeless people can’t sleep and shoot up on the streets.” So now you’ve got a bunch of homeless people shooting up, and now you as the property owners have been completely disenfranchised and you no longer have the right to exclude people who you didn’t want on your street. And now your daughter’s got to see you know homeless people covered in shit, shooting up heroin outside every day.
I believe this is a fair extension to his analogy. I will accept it for what it is. It describes the current situation many people actually face on a daily basis. Unfortunately, Dave then goes into what I call a “libertarian tautology,” and later uses a straw man.
You can see where the government doing nothing about that problem is also the government doing something to people, right? That’s also them doing something. It’s not them doing nothing, and in fact from the libertarian point of view the solution is fairly obvious that we would like this to be privatized so that the property owners have the right to exclude people from [where they live].
I’m not going to harp on this point, because it’s admittedly a bit pedantic, but what Dave described is, in actual fact, the government doing nothing. The “doing” that the government did was seizing the property. That is all. And declaring that the libertarian solution is to privatize the property is the “tautology” – it’s what all libertarians already agree with, so saying it adds nothing.
However, given the government owning [the street], it is not so clear that it’s preferable from the libertarian position for them to allow the homeless people to camp out there than to make them leave. Right? If those were your only two options – [the homeless] either stay there or [the state] make[s] them leave – I prefer [for the state to] make them leave because that is a closer simulation to what this would certainly be under a libertarian system. It makes sense to prefer that [the streets free of homeless] to the other outcome which is clearly not like when you see homeless people camped out all throughout cities Across America right now.
Here is where Dave goes into straw man territory. I’m happy to take it as a given that no rational person wants to have people covered in their own filth laying in the street in front of their homes or business. His straw man fallacy is when he uses a position that no rational person is making – that it’s preferable for homeless to live outside your door – in order to lay the groundwork for his overall argument, which is that it is the “libertarian position” to support government action to resolve issues on “public” land that violate your preferences. This conclusion is not only incorrect, but it is actually the exact opposite of libertarianism. (This will be demonstrated later when Dave dismisses ‘slippery-slope’ arguments.)
One problem getting Dave into trouble with his argument, is that he seems to have forgotten (at least on this topic) that other than the initiation of force, libertarianism does not speak to social preferences. For example, I do not prefer my neighbor playing loud speed metal music all day and all night. (Others might prefer that, I do not prefer that.) Even if I can’t hear it inside my home, the music makes it impossible for me to enjoy my own backyard. Let’s say I take the libertarian action and I peacefully purchase my neighbor’s home, but then the government seizes that property and no longer prohibits loud speed metal from being played all day and night. My preferences against speed metal don’t contribute in any way to what is or is not a “libertarian solution” to that problem.
This is a major problem. It’s a major reason why people are flooding out of cities. Talk to anybody who’s got a family who’s left a big city in the last couple years, and talk to them about why they left. I guarantee you this comes up pretty quickly in the top two or three reasons why – myself included. Now, where on private property is this permitted? Where is it permitted for homeless people to just set up camp? I mean okay there might be a couple private homeless shelters. I mean there might be places designed for that, but other than that, what store, what private home or business, what private piece of property is that ever tolerated on? None. Where does it all happen? On public property. By the government not enforcing these rules, this isn’t ‘more libertarian’ because they’re not doing anything to the homeless people. It’s a nightmare, and there’s no reason why Libertarians have to be like, “Yeah, we’re for the government not doing anything to those people.” We’re for the government not having the land to begin with.
Okay. That’s all very nice. Agreed: It’s a major problem. Agreed: It’s why people who are able to flee cities do so. Agreed: No private property has this problem. Agreed: It’s not “more libertarian” to give approval of the state when it allows homeless to camp out in front of your property…
But actually if they’re gonna have the land I have no problem with them exercising some reasonable control over it, and kind of somewhat the best approximation of what a private free society would look like.
If it’s not “more libertarian” for someone to be “okay” with the state taking NO action on its own land, then it’s absolutely not “more libertarian” for someone to be okay with the state taking action against people on its land, even if it’s your preference for them to do so, and even if you believe the outcome would more closely look like a libertarian world. With all due respect, Mr. Smith, your belief in what the world “should” look like is utterly irrelevant to what is or is not “more libertarian.”
The whole point of libertarianism, due to the a priori nature of self-ownership as Dave so eloquently described, is so one person is not required to act based on the preferences or beliefs of another.
To be absolutely clear, the reason I am making this specific point is not to be nit-picky about what is and is not the “more libertarian” position on things, but to show the faulty premise on which Dave is establishing his immigration position, which he begins in the next sentence.
This same principle applies to immigration. It’s not that it’s the exact same situation. I get this a lot. Logical analogies are not equations. This is like a basic IQ test. When I say this and then people [will] respond on Twitter and they’ll be like, “So you’re saying that immigrants are homeless drug addicts?” No, that’s not what I’m saying.
It’s okay. I’ll take the analogy as it was intended.
I’m saying the same principle applies: That essentially if Libertarians believe taxation is theft – as it is – well okay, so everything the government has was robbed from the domestic population. But it does not then follow that [government property] is owned by everyone in the world equally. The same way if someone mugs you, that wallet does not become everybody in the world’s wallet. The correct answer is that it should be returned to you. It’s yours and it’s been stolen.
This is correct, but it misses a key nuance. When a mugger takes a wallet, there is one mugger, one victim, and one wallet (i.e., everyone involved is easily identified). When the state takes unowned land as its own and then robs the population at large to maintain it, there are thousands of muggers and millions of victims.
“So essentially public land and anything the government owns is stolen from the American taxpayers so that does not mean that it belongs equally to citizens of the world.”
In this sentence Dave is making a definitional difference between the millions of American taxpayers as victims and the millions (billions) of other people in the world the US government has not stolen from via taxation. This is another straw man argument. Open-borders libertarians are not arguing that the land the US government seized belongs to everyone. They are arguing that it belongs to no one. (A point he later repeats from a Twitter conversation.) But even if they were making that argument, Dave is keenly aware of how many people around the world have also been victimized by the US government. I think there is a separate, strong argument that can be made that says “if victims of theft rightly have a stake in the property the thief owns, surely a murder victim’s family has a stake in the property the murderer owns.” In other words, IF being a victim of the US government is your criterion for being able to access “public” property, then a lot more people than just American taxpayers have a claim. (Again, that’s a separate argument that can be explored another time.)
Now, Libertarians who argue for open borders in a system where the government controls all of the property up to the doorstep of every citizen, they also have anti-discrimination laws, you can’t not hire someone based on their nationality or based on if they are an immigrant, you can’t not house someone, you can’t not treat someone in a hospital, you can’t not take their kids into the public schools. So we’re in a current system where now the domestic property owners who Libertarians believe should be the ones making these decisions have no choice.
Dave doesn’t really make a point here, but I’m going to steel-man two different things I think he’s getting at. The first is that “open borders” would create a situation where the state is simultaneously allowing people in and also forcing you to accept them (as workers, renters, customers, etc.), which is a violation of the right of association. The second point is that US citizens are forced to pay for things like hospitals and schools, and each extra person in an ER or kid in school is an extra cost.
The fact that the state violates your right to disassociate from immigrants doesn’t suggest the “libertarian solution” for that is to support an active state to close the border. It would be like arguing “because everyone who drives down the street in front of your business could potentially be a state-forced interaction (which in fact they are), the ‘more libertarian’ choice to solve that threat of force is to close off the street.”
As for things like hospitals, schools, public transit, etc. Most of those are paid by state sales and property taxes, which every immigrant pays merely by living here. For the rest, I have a solution outlined below.
It’s been a while since I looked at these polls. Over 90% of Americans oppose open borders. So by being for open borders under current situations you are forcing this on the vast majority of Americans. This is not a voluntary interaction. This is imposed on them and they have no means by which to resist these changes which obviously many of them don’t like.
This is nearing disingenuous levels of argumentation. Dave knows very well that when trying to find out who the aggressor is in any situation, you need to find the actual person or persons doing the actual aggressing. In the recent post-covid lockdown riots, police often stood by and did nothing as rioters destroyed businesses. Would Dave argue that the police were IMPOSING the damage onto the business owners because they decided not to stop the rioters? That’s ludicrous on its face. The rioters imposed themselves onto the business owners, and it’s the immigrants – likely driven by US policy to begin with – who are imposing themselves onto American society.
Also, Americans most certainly have a means to resist. It’s called voting. To be absolutely clear again, I am an anarchist. I do not vote, and voting is not my solution to this. I mention voting because if you are going to make statements like, ”If [the government] is gonna have the land I have no problem with them exercising some reasonable control over it” then you’ve ceded the entire point.
By definition, no anarchist is “okay” with the state “exercising control” that the state itself deems “reasonable.” Therefore, after assuming the existence of a state, IF you’re “okay” with them “exercising reasonable control” AND you want the majority of desires manifested (as 90% is certainly a majority), then you MUST be “okay” with having a mechanism by which the majority can dictate how the state is to control its property.
The only logical conclusion of Dave’s argument is, if we have a state, we must then have a direct democracy and allow the majority to dictate every government policy.
So the open borders is not a Libertarian solution to this. The libertarian solution is private borders, private communities, them being able to decide. But short of that you could have a much better system as Hans-Hermann Hoppe proposed, a sponsorship system. And we have some elements of that within our immigration system, but just like if you had to get sponsored – meaning that someone has to assume financial responsibility for you – then you can come. That would be a much better situation because then at least they’re not offloading these expenses onto the taxpayer.
There’s an even better solution IF your goal is to find something that works within the state apparatus. How about a free National ID based on biometrics? That way, all employers can hire whomever they want, withhold all the taxes and send it in. No more freeloading.
I sincerely doubt Dave would see this as a “better” solution, but it is certainly “more libertarian.” How so? Because there would be no physical restriction of anyone by the state, no more ICE raids on peaceful businesses, no preventing anyone from working – just make sure the state is taking the fair share from everyone – again, IF your objection to unrestricted immigration is that they’re not paying for their ER visits and kids in schools.
So one of the things that Libertarians will say is, ‘Well, that view could be applied in lots of other areas in very bad ways. You could say, “The taxpayers don’t want guns,” or you could say, “What if they don’t want unvaccinated people driving on the roads?” or something like this and there’s some truth to this. The thing is that these reductio ad absurdum arguments don’t disprove something on their own. When you take something to the farthest you can take it to make it seem ridiculous, you’re kind of attacking the underlying principle.
This is an unfortunate hand-waving away of what is a very important objection. Dave himself spent years raising awareness of the dangers of state power overreach, especially when that overreach is backed by “popular opinion.” That Dave is not only using a majority opinion to support his own position, but also using it to dismiss real counter-arguments is disappointing. Dave knows that even 99% agreement on a policy is no argument for that policy being correct. And just because only 1% believe in another policy doesn’t make it wrong. My guess is Dave would be the first one to argue against a mandate to show a cop your vaccination card along with your driver’s license if pulled over, even if 90% of people wanted that policy. If I’m right, then Dave will make correct arguments when he personally dislikes a policy. But in the case of immigration, by raising the point that 90% of people oppose open borders, he is allowing himself to rely on an appeal to popularity.
Libertarians are good on this stuff when it’s black and white. They get Goofy on this stuff when you’re in shades of gray. So this is the example I gave on Twitter the other day: If you eat five pounds of salt it will kill you. But that does not prove that you should never eat salt. Because if you just sprinkle a little bit of it on your food it could be actually very delicious. Not a problem.
This is a poor analogy. Is it okay if my house is a little on fire? Is it okay if the state uses “just the right amount” of force? State force is, in fact, black-or-white. Either it is acceptable or it is not acceptable.
So yes this principle could be applied in very bad ways. The major difference from the libertarian perspective over say not letting someone who’s unvaccinated travel, or whatever other policy you think about that’s anti-libertarian, is that it is different to violate someone’s natural rights than to not. One of the examples that people use [is], “If immigration restrictions are justified, then what about restricting someone from having a kid because that’s just bringing a new person into society?” Well the major difference there is that it’s a natural right to have a child. It’s not a natural right to enter property that you don’t own that you weren’t invited into. That’s not a natural right.
I’ll agree with Dave here: The analogy of having children is not a good one. A better example would be, since California gives away much more in social services than say, Louisiana, is it “more libertarian” for California to build a wall and exclude Louisiana residents from entry? (Setting aside the jokes that most people would prefer California to vanish from the country.) Again, Los Angeles County has a larger welfare state than neighboring Orange County. Is it the “more libertarian” solution for LA County to build a wall preventing Orange County residents from migrating? And before suggesting that this is actually closer to Hoppe’s idea of “10,000 Lichtensteins” it needs to be remembered that these are governments, not mutually-associated free neighborhoods, and it is just as easy to argue that these county and city walls would create a worse outcome for everyone, as trade would inevitably come to a standstill, than would completely open and free movement.
Furthermore, since Dave has brought up natural rights, and is already assuming a state, I will quote the US Supreme Court’s case Saenz v. Roe where Justice Stevens wrote, “The word ‘travel’ is not found in the text of the Constitution. […] Indeed, as Justice Stewart reminded us in Shapiro v. Thompson, the right [to travel] is so important that it is ‘assertable against private interference as well as governmental action… a virtually unconditional personal right, guaranteed by the Constitution to us all’.”
Now what Libertarians will say often is they’ll give examples (the open borders ones at least) they’ll say, “If I want to have my cousin from Italy over to my house what right does anybody else have to tell me I can’t have them there?” and fair enough. You’re right, that’s true. But what about when a hundred thousand people just show up at the border like they currently are? It’s literally happening as we speak. What about that? No one invited them. No one’s housing them. This is property that they do not own. Why do they have a natural right to enter it? You don’t have a natural right to enter into property you don’t you don’t own uninvited. It should be the decision of the domestic property owners whether they want to have you in or not in the same way that me or you can decide whether we want to have someone into our home or not.
By “domestic property owners” I’m presuming Dave means the “American taxpayers.” I’ve already addressed how there could be many more victims from those countries such as Venezuela where US policy has greatly contributed to mass migrations. The problem here is that there is one question that Dave never tackles directly that, when answered, will in turn answer all those questions about having the “right” to enter:
Does the state, as an organization, actually own what we call “public property” or not?
- If it does, then the state has as much authorization over how their land is used as any other owner has over their own property – be it letting people stay on it or kick people off of it.
- If it does not (which is my view), then the property is UN-OWNED and there is literally NO ONE with legitimate authority to grant or restrict access, and so advocating for a closed border is nothing less than advocating for the use of state violence against people freely walking across unowned land.
- Or perhaps it’s neither. Perhaps the state is merely a “steward” of the land which is not owned by anyone, but yet controlled by the state itself according to the wishes of the people under the state. If this is the case, then you’re back at needing to advocate for a direct democracy for every policy – a way to have the desires of the “90%” heard.
But they [the “domestic property owners,” the American taxpayer] can’t make that decision right now because the government’s monopolized that. But they are telling you the overwhelming majority of them don’t want it to just be a free-for-all anyone can come in, so why should that be imposed on them? There’s nothing libertarian about that.
The government most certainly should monopolize those choices if option 1 above applies.
The rest of this argument was already made and shown to be incorrect. While it’s not libertarian to impose things onto anyone, that’s not what is actually happening. I’m not sure how much clearer I can make this: Taking no action is not the same as imposing on others. This is the equivalent of saying “silence is violence.” In a closed border situation, the state is in fact imposing restrictions on individuals. So unless you’re going to argue that the state legitimately owns the land, this cannot be argued to be a “more libertarian” solution than the state taking no action at all.
Now back to the reductio ad absurdum point. You can also do it the other way. This is the point that I often make – that if you’re really going to say that there can be no restrictions on public property, okay fine. But take that to its logical conclusion.
Wait, now we’re doing a reductio ad absurdum? I thought those didn’t prove anything.
In a weird defense of some of these open borders Libertarians, I posed this question the other [day] because someone said to me “there can be no restrictions on public property. It’s unowned land and therefore everyone has a right to it.” So I posed the question which has been my go-to hypothetical on this. I was like “Okay, so tomorrow at a public school, a 50 year old drug addict wants to walk into the school. He wants to go into the girls locker room and smoke meth. Should he be allowed in?” And he said yes. And he goes, “Yes because then people will realize how horrible public schools are and they’ll be more libertarian.” And when you get to that point, I mean he’s trying to be consistent so I at least give him credit for that. But when you get to that point just think about how ridiculous and evil what you’re saying is. You’re saying we will endanger these children’s lives, put the most vulnerable innocent members of our society – children – in jeopardy, so that I can hold onto my abstract principle? And then to have this ridiculous view that this is going to make people more libertarian? Schools have gotten shot up [and] it didn’t make people more libertarian. What makes you think this is going to make people more libertarian? There’s no reason to think that. But of course I think for the vast majority of people they’d realize – once you actually start thinking about this there’s no way you can just have no restrictions on public spaces. It just doesn’t work, and there’s no reason for Libertarians to marry themselves to that. That’s not what we stand for anyway.
Nearly none of this – either from the Tweet or Dave’s response to it – adds to an argument of what immigration policy is or is not “more libertarian.” It is nothing but an Argument from Incredulity fallacy. Essentially saying “I cannot believe anyone would accept the opposite of my position, therefore I’m right.”
What we stand for is reducing or abolishing the state, not making sure that they allow all the areas that they’ve stolen to be completely destroyed and degraded. That’s not what we stand for. We don’t need to marry ourselves to this wildly unpopular view that will make it impossible for us to ever sell our ideas on a mass level. Go try it. Go right now start talking to the average American who’s completely turned off by this whole system and tell them. Start going, “Hey these wars are all bullshit.” They’re like, “Yep I’m with you.” “Hey, the government’s completely corrupt.” “Yep, I’m with you.” “Hey, the Deep State is the shadowy cabal of unelected rulers who’s interfering with everything and doing this evil shit.” “Yep, I’m with you.” “Hey, the Federal Reserve is totally destroying the value of the dollar.” “Yep, I’m with you.” “Also, open the borders tomorrow.” Good luck. You’re done now. You’re not in the conversation anymore, and for nothing. For a policy that isn’t even the correct libertarian policy to have. So like just drop all this goofy shit.
So anyway in closing yes the reductio ad absurdum, this principle can be applied in bad ways. Correct. Also the other way, if you have zero restrictions you’re living in a goddamn nightmare so yeah you can’t have zero and you don’t want to have awful ones. What you want to have are some reasonable standards. So a War on Drugs? No. Insane. You’re violating people’s private property, all of this awful shit. You’re throwing people in cages for non-violent crimes, no, that’s bad. A rule that says you can’t smoke meth in the government Courthouse? Reasonable. That’s not something Libertarians should be upset about. ‘Would you believe that they won’t just let you masturbate in the middle of the library?’ Yeah that’s right, you can’t. That’s good. And when it comes to immigration it’s reasonable to say that the domestic population gets some say in it – some say over whether or not they want to be flooded by a number of people that we don’t even know and especially under current circumstances.”
(That’s the end of his statements.)
I agree completely that libertarians, on a strategic level, should not be making a stink about immigration, in the same way that they should not be going on about “age of consent.” It’s a strategically poor choice when there are countless atrocities the state is committing that are much, much worse to rail against. That said, to be clear, being able to “sell” an idea is not an indication of it being a “more libertarian” idea.
One thing Dave does during this entire argument is make the assumption that his proposed outcomes are objectively good, without even entertaining the potential long-term damage his position has already created in today’s society. He says open borders would be, “a goddamn nightmare.” I will grant the argument that in and of itself, no homeless people on your street is objectively better than homeless people on your street. That does not translate, however, to no immigrants being objectively better than open immigration. There are lots of economic arguments, including from Murray Rothbard, that closed immigration is nothing but state protectionism, which harms both local residents and would-be immigrant workers. Dave can go to mises.org for more.
https://mises.org/library/immigration-roundtable-murray-rothbard
Also, Dave knows very well that if you are “okay” with the state “controlling” “public” property, they will not, and have not stopped with just removing homeless drug addicts. They will enact stop-and-frisk. They will remove peaceful protesters like Occupy Wall Street types. You cannot have it both ways: You cannot expect the state to accomplish your personal preference and not believe it will turn around and violently act against you.
In summary, his argument was a complete failure: He presented no evidence that even thousands of immigrants would produce an overall negative effect on the country. He began with a straw man to lay his groundwork, relied on appeals to popularity, and made arguments from incredulity to support his position that closed borders – an overt state action – is “more libertarian” than open borders – state inaction.
The most correct thing Dave said here is that libertarians do not have to “be happy” with how horrible the government is running things, and that they should not obsess over state actions that result in locally good outcomes (even IF they are by technical definition “statist”).
But in this monologue Dave did nothing less than deny anarchism. It’s one thing to not obsess over a state action, but no anarchist argues for state action against peaceful people under any circumstances, and certainly no anarchist supports the use of state force to accomplish his own preferred social outcome. State force is always a black-and-white issue. Either it is being wielded or it is not. Either you want it wielded for your own preferences, or you stop arguing for its use.