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Another Take on Immigration

By Andrew Kern of the Principled Libertarian

Immigration is a controversial subject in libertarian and anarcho-capitalist circles. Usually when there is a question of what people should be allowed to do or what policies we should support we can turn to property rights. We can ask “who owns this?” Unfortunately, the borders of a nation are not that clear cut. Governments specifically prevent individuals from exercising full ownership of the property along the border, and even seize additional property through eminent domain or similar programs.

Both open and closed government borders are not free market answers. Restricting movement of people over property that you do not own infringes on their rights. Alternatively, the government disallowing private acquisition and thus private decision-making of the land surrounding a nation distorts the amount of immigration that would otherwise occur.

Borders, in part, define the nation-state. It is within those borders that the coercive territorial monopolist of ultimate arbitration exists. So while the strict libertarian/anarcho-capitalist position on borders is to privatize them, to do so means to end the state. Until that happens we are forced to choose a 2nd best option as an immigration policy.


The federal government setting the rules for the entire border is the worst possible route for people who care about respecting the wishes of individuals. It amounts to a few politicians and bureaucrats setting the immigration policy for millions of square miles and hundreds of millions of people.

Outside of full privatization, there is another option which can unite libertarians of many stripes: decentralization. Continue reading “Another Take on Immigration”

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True Libertarianism Is Colorblind

By Steven Clyde

If your first thought is “well libertarians surely care about green!”, I’ll concede and state that this is the point of this article.

Humans, each with their own individual goals and interests, seek a better life for themselves and other people they care about. We are born into an impossible situation though, having signed a supposed “social contract” at birth which guilts us into thinking we owe something to future generations because of the sacrifices made in the past.

Lysander: “Where in the world is the Social Contract?”

And thus lies the root of the problem: the confusion between positive and negative rights. Negative rights, justifiably, state that you as an individual have the right not to have force initiated against you and not  to have your property confiscated from you, while positive rights, which state that things are owed to you or other people, is a fallacy of the highest degree and should be abhorred by anyone familiar with logic.

The logic for positive rights proceeds as follows:

Person A of the past, did something to help or to hurt person B in the past, and therefore person C in the present who either gained or lost because of person A and B’s interactions in the past, owes something to or gets to take away something from person D in the present or the future.

It should be obvious why this doesn’t make sense, because if it’s true that I’m a user today of say the internet and its true I’m a benefactor of this past invention, then it would seem to imply that I “owe” something to the internet. But I pay for my internet services because I value its use, so in what sense am I a free rider?

And furthermore, any argument could be thought up to imply I owe something to somebody or I get to take away something from somebody, because of someone’s actions in the past. Its so nonsensical that’s its difficult to sum up into words, because it can imply almost anything.

Libertarianism however gives the individual a voice though because they are not responsible for things of the past, only their actions in the present. It allows for people to be judged by their character, and not by a collective (namely the state). The core aspect of communism is egalitarian in nature, seeking total equality in horrors that’s have been lived through by millions in which attempts to banish individualism not only goes against human nature (people having dreams and goals) but specifically uses violence to achieve its means, an impossible means to achieve at that.

There have been several articles circulating stating that white nationalism (which I won’t be facetious and leave out that some were written by an Asian guy) isn’t incompatible with libertarianism, which on the surface of it appears to be true in that libertarianism does not tell you that you can’t exclude people from your own private property, whether it be a business or your private home. The reasons for exclusion can be grim or nonsensical even, but the logic still follows that private property allows for inclusion and exclusion. Continue reading “True Libertarianism Is Colorblind”

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Physical Removal – Separating the Facts from the Perversions

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Augusto Pinochet, and the Alt-Right Trolls

By Anarcho-Viking

The meme warriors from 4chan have revolutionized the art of meme warfare, and in the process of doing so; prominent libertarian scholars have appeared frequently together with fascist leaning military dictators, in what I would call the “alt-right meme circus”.

Memeing Gone Rampant

The helicopter is warmed up, photoshoped into the image are the faces of Augusto Pinochet (the former Chilean dictator) and Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Austrian economist and libertarian theorist) replacing the original caricature faces. Loaded onto the helicopter are a few communists or antifa social justice activists. Pepe the frog furthermore drags the commies onto the helicopter, and the helicopter carries the flag of Kekistan (an invented kingdom).

The text on the meme reads, “Hoppe’s physical removal service”, or “The Hoppean helicopter ride”, or “Free Kekistan!” Does this scenario sound familiar to you?

If you identify yourself as an anarcho-capitalist libertarian then you have certainly been exposed to the literature of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and you might laugh in amusement at this type of weaponized autism put forward by the alt-right internet trolls.

While the perversion of Hoppe’s argumentation ethics is entertaining in a warped sort of way, it is understandable that some people could be deceived by this distortion of Hoppe’s arguments, and as a consequence obtain a twisted interpretation of one of the greatest heroes for the cause of liberty.

Physical Removal

In order to clear up the confusion regarding the controversy around Hoppe, we need to look closer at his argumentation ethics, and frame the issue given the presumed conditions from which Hoppe derives his reasoning. In his masterpiece, Democracy – The God That Failed, Hoppe famously claims that:

“in a covenant…among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists”

because some people might promote ideas that would disturb the naturally established covenant and destabilize the covenant’s asserted protection of private property, concepts such as “democracy and communism”.

Hoppe furthermore goes on to argue that “there can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order” and the conclusion is that the alleged enemies of private property preservation “will have to be physically separated and removed from society”, so to speak.

The idea of “physical removal” is coming from the aforementioned statements. These statements, when taken out of context can be widely misunderstood. Continue reading “Physical Removal – Separating the Facts from the Perversions”