Good Sense about Property

I highly recommend Less Antman's essay on property here. A teaser:

I believe that property is a problem solver, a useful tool for achieving social peace and economic efficiency that benefits society enormously. However, it is a useful social convention, not a an absolute right derivable from self-ownership: there is no reason that a person born in the year 2100 should have fewer rights than a person born in the year 2000, but if all the world becomes private property, and property owners can establish all the rules for their property, then every person born after that date will be born a slave, and self-ownership will become a joke....

All anarchy requires is that we accept the idea that other people are not our property. With that alone, we’ll create whatever order and organization is needed in an environment of mutual respect. When we have disputes we can’t resolve, we’ll create tools for resolving them. History tells us that private property is one of those tools, but we shouldn’t raise it to the level of a fetish that overrides our common sense and our humanity.

The Logical Flaw in Immigration Law

Apart from the obvious rights violation, I see a serious flaw at the very root of immigration law. Let's begin with an indisputable point: no law passed by Congress and signed by a president applies to people on the far side of a US border. Logically, that must include laws against entering the US. Since the US government has no jurisdiction over people in, say, Mexico, someone who crosses the southern border cannot do so illegally because the law in question did not apply to that person when he or she was crossing. No jurisdiction, no illegal entry. That's just logic.

Well, the immigration-control enthusiast may respond, we can change the law to say that no one can stay in the US without papers signifying permission to do so from the proper authorities. (Leave aside the general question of proper authority.) Now we have a new problem. According to this position, Person A, having been born here, needs no permission, but person B, having been born elsewhere, does need permission and can be expelled without it.

But that's discrimination by the government and thus a violation of equality under the law, a core liberal value (as long there are governments making laws). On what basis is that discrimination perpetrated? On the basis of birthplace -- hardly one that can withstand rational scrutiny. No one is harmed -- in the sense of having his or her rights violated -- merely because someone who was not born here resides in the US without government permission. No harm, no foul. The policy is simply vicious discrimination.

I remind the constitutionalists that their beloved document makes no reference to birthplace in its clauses related to rights. Rights and protections against their violation are said to apply to persons, not citizens. See the Fourth Amendment. All persons, no matter their birthplace, have the same rights.

Therefore, all legislative diktats relevant to immigration control fail the test of reason and should be stricken forthwith. No US law could have been broken by the entry, and on the matter of who can stay here, the government has no good grounds to discriminate between people who were born here and people who were not.

TGIF: Immigration in an Nth-Best World

We live in an nth-best society. It's neither fully libertarian (though libertarians disagree over exactly what that would mean) nor totalitarian like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Maoist China, or North Korea. It's somewhere in between, closer to libertarian than many other places but not close enough.

One challenge for libertarians is knowing which proposals to favor and which to oppose in an nth-best society. Merely reciting the nonaggression obligation is not enough if our goal is to persuade many people that the freedom philosophy is both right and practical.

A mixed economy, the system combining markets with heavy doses of government interference, produces problems that libertarians need to address to be relevant. Many problems concern so-called public property, government-controlled land and buildings, many of which are presumptively open to all U.S. residents. Roads, parks, museums, and courthouses are examples. Libertarians would privatize most or all of it. (Roderick Long notes that nongovernmental publicly owned property can exist and has existed.) However, simply proclaiming the pure libertarian vision based on private property fails to address today's acute problems involving public property, such as the obstruction and defilement of sidewalks and parks by disorderly homeless, jobless, and troubled individuals who prevent civil self-supporting taxpayers from using those facilities as intended.

It is equally unreasonable to address those problems by giving politicians and bureaucrats carte blanche to regulate "the people's" property.

If this sounds relevant to the immigration issue, go and buy yourself a cigar. There's a view floating around social media and elsewhere that free immigration, or open borders, is not a libertarian position because "we the people," the true owners of government-controlled property, have the same right as any private owner to set rules for entry and use. Therefore, non-owners properly could and perhaps should be excluded. This rule-setting presumably would occur through the democratic process, that is, voting.

Right off the bat, that seems odd. The democratic process is majority takes all  -- the bloc of minority "owners" would lose out. If 50 percent minus one welcomes new arrivals to deal with and 50 percent plus one does not, the smaller group loses out simply because it is smaller. If a member of the minority persists, he is punished.

This would seem like Rousseauian "general will" libertarianism, except that's a contradiction in terms.

This position is presented as the grown-up libertarian position in today's world. I disagree.

Bear in mind that this proposal is intended to answer naive, immature, likely new social-media libertarians who believe that in today's mixed economy, the government must not set any rules whatsoever for public property. I'm sure such libertarians exist, but libertarians are not logically or morally obligated to favor the no-rules position. On the other hand, a better version of libertarian theory also does not entail restrictions on people's nonaggressive freedom of movement.

Those who think otherwise prove far too much. If "we" through the democratic process may shut immigrants out by keeping them off "our" public property, why can't we make other rules? How about a rule that says if you hold certain political or social views, you can't drive on the roads or use the courts and libraries? Why the distinction between the native-born and the foreign-born? A country is not a country club.

Making rules for today's public property requires nuance and reasonableness. There is a difference between excluding drunken, unwashed, screaming people without clothing from the DMV and excluding civil people without government permission papers from the roads and sidewalks. Forbidding homeless people from defecating, urinating, and discarding drug paraphernalia in public differs from forbidding Americans to hire, sell to, rent to, or live with, and otherwise associate with any peaceful people they choose regardless of where they were born.

The first instances disrupt taxpayers' peaceful use of public property; the second do not. Is the nondisruption principle a distinctively libertarian standard? Not specifically, but so what? We're in an nth-best society, remember. Culture, convention, and context help determine exactly what constitutes disruption, but the spirit of individual liberty never disappears. We can expect hard cases, but that doesn't make the principle worthless.

Is the principle arbitrary? No. In a partially free society, public property is presumptively open to the public: if someone makes it impossible for others to use it as intended, that person can properly be excluded. (Not by any means, of course.)

Could the nondisruption principle be used to justify any government restriction, such as closed borders? No. The case for any given rule should not rest on hypotheticals or highly unlikely events not intrinsic to a situation. That's why a border wall is different from a stop sign. There is no necessary connection between immigrants freely coming here to look for jobs, sellers, buyers, houses, apartments, friends, lovers, spouses, etc. and the disruption of public property. We can easily imagine the orderly movement of people over the border if residency and work were legal and entrepreneurial Americans were free to create businesses that match newcomers with opportunities. If a specific disruption occurs, law enforcement should be directed at actual disrupters, not at whole classes of people just because they might be disruptive. Americans might be disruptive too.

What about the tax burden, which is a different sort of potential problem from acute disruption? For a full discussion, see Bryan Caplan's graphic nonfiction work, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. Caplan is a libertarian, but more importantly here, a solid social scientist who knows the immigration data as well as anyone. (The Cato Institute also has examined the data closely. For example, here.)

The story revealed by that data is not what most people imagine. Caplan writes: "Free immigration with a U.S.-style welfare state is not a recipe for fiscal disaster. Even under open orders, the burdensome immigrant would be the exception, not the rule.... Most immigrants pull their own weight -- and then some. A few don't [just as with the native-born]. But that's a flimsy reason to ditch the principle of free immigration." (Nor would we ditch the principle of free reproduction because some Americans will produce future net tax-consumers.)

Libertarians would better use their time working to shrink and repeal welfare-state programs than trying to save them from the stresses and strains they're bound to encounter. Despite hard cases in the world as we find it, the presumption should favor liberty for all, even newcomers. How can that not be the libertarian position?

Open borders are moral and desirable because prohibiting free movement necessarily aggresses against nonaggressors, including Americans; condemns the most wretched people on earth to poverty and tyranny; and keeps us all from getting richer. Strictly speaking, the right at stake is not the right to immigrate. Rather, it's the right not to be subjected to initiatory force. The right to immigrate, as Roderick Long might put it, is just one of many specific applications of that one right.

TGIF: To Be or Not to Be a Jewish State: That Is the Question

Israel’s champions owe us an explanation. First, they insist that Israel is and always must be a Jewish state, by which most of them mean not religiously Jewish but of the “Jewish People” everywhere, including Jews who are citizens of other states and not looking for a new country. To be Jewish, according to the prevailing view, it is enough to have a Jewish mother (or to have been converted by an approved Orthodox rabbi). Belief in one supreme creator of the universe, in the Torah as the word of God, and in Jewish ritual need have nothing whatever to do with Jewishness. (We ignore here the many problems with this conception, such as: how can there be a secular Judaism?)

The definition of Jew has been bitterly controversial inside and outside of Israel since its founding. The point is, as anthropologist Roselle Tekiner wrote, "When the central task of a state is to import persons of a select religious/ethnic group -- and to develop the country for their benefit alone -- it is crucially important to be officially recognized as a bona fide member of that group." (This is from the anthology Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections, which is not online and is apparently out of print. But see Tekiner's article, "Israel's Two-Tiered Citizenship Law Bars Non-Jews From 93 Percent of Its Lands.")

Second, Israel's champions insist that Israel is a democracy -- indeed, the only democracy in the Middle East. They vehemently object whenever someone demonstrates how Israel-as-the-state-of-the-Jewish-People must harm the 25 percent of Israeli citizens who are not Jewish, most of whom are Arabs.

Yet Israeli law uniquely distinguishes citizenship from nationality. The nationality of an Israeli Arab citizen is "Arab" not Israeli, while the nationality of a Jewish citizen is "Jewish" not Israeli. Are citizens of any other country distinguished in law like that?

This has consequences. For example, the prohibition on marriage between Jews and non-Jews. This is not the result of political bargaining with religious parties but of a desire to protect "the Jewish people" from impurity. These contortions are required by Israel's self-declared status as something other than the land of all its citizens. Early Zionists said they wanted Palestine to be as Jewish as Britain is British and France is French -- a flagrant category mistake that has had horrific consequences for the Palestinians.

The insistence by Israel's supporters -- that Israel can be both Jewish and democratic -- thus is puzzling. What does it mean for Israel to be a Jewish state if that status has no real consequences for non-Jews? If all it meant was that the Star of David was on the flag, we might hear far fewer objections to Israel. But of course it means much more.

To see what it means, one has to look beyond Israel’s Declaration of Independence, Basic Law (its de facto constitution), and specific statutes, which contain language that on its face forbids discrimination against non-Jews. We should know better than to take official documents at face value. What matters in any society is the "real constitution," the principles that underlie commonly accepted behavior. The old Soviet Union’s constitution listed freedom of the press among the “rights” of Soviet citizens, and the U.S. Constitution says that only Congress may declare war and that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

More pertinent, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, wherein the British government “view[ed] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” also stated that “it [was] clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” We know how that worked out.

So what’s the story inside Israel? (I’m not talking about the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel has occupied for 52 years and where Palestinians have no rights whatever.)

After doing an interview recently about my new book, Coming to Palestine, I was challenged by a listener over my statements that the Israeli government treats Arab and Jewish criminals differently depending on whether they shed “Jewish blood” or “Arab blood” (no such distinction actually exists) and that political parties can’t call for changing Israel from a Jewish state to a state of all its citizens.

Who is right?

Regarding criminal justice, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy shows anecdotally that Arab Israeli citizens who kill Jews can spend more time in prison than Israeli Jewish citizens who kill Arabs. “Arab blood is cheaper in Israel,” Levy wrote in 2014, “and Jewish blood is thicker.” He says things are the same today. Over the years, many articles have been published documenting this de facto, though not de jure, disparity. Indeed, Haaretz reported in 2011 that

Arab Israelis who have been charged with certain types of crime are more likely than their Jewish counterparts to be convicted, and once convicted they are more likely to be sent to prison, and for a longer time. These disparities were found in a recent statistical study commissioned by Israels Courts Administration and the Israel Bar Association…. The [unpublished preliminary] study is unique in that it is the first of its kind to be commissioned and funded in part by the courts administration, and in that it sought to examine claims by attorneys that Israeli judges deal more harshly with Arab criminals than with Jews.

Note that government discrimination against non-Jews across the spectrum of issues is not usually written into the law, although it may be. Mostly flagrantly, discrimination is legally applied to the "right of return." People defined as Jews, no matter where they were born or live, can become Israeli citizens/nationals virtually on arrival, while Arabs driven from their ancestral homes in 1947-48 and 1967 may not go back, much less become full-rights citizens/nationals. Put concretely, I, an atheist born in Philadelphia to Jewish parents born in Philadelphia (with roots likely in the vicinity of the Black Sea), can "return" [sic] to Israel and become an Israeli citizen at once, while my friend Raouf Halaby, a naturalized American citizen born to Arab Christian parents in west Jerusalem three years before Israel was founded, may not. The only difference is that my mother was Jewish, making me, a Spinozist, a Jewish national in Israel's eyes, and Raouf's mother was not.

Regarding restrictions on political parties, the Basic Law: The Knesset states:

A candidates' list [party] shall not participate in elections to the Knesset, and a person shall not be a candidate for election to the Knesset, if the objects or actions of the list or the actions of the person, expressly or by implication, include...:

1. negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state;... 

Before proceeding, let us note a conundrum. The issue I'm raising here is whether a state be both Jewish and democratic. The root of the word democracy is demos, people. So if the raison d'être of Israel is the welfare of only some of its citizens and millions of certain others who are citizens and residents of other countries, how can Israel be a real democracy? Strictly speaking, considering that word and, the law's language legitimizes a party that "negat[es] the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish ... state" but not as a democratic state. Would the Israeli election authorities accept that distinction? I don't think so.

In the past the Israeli Supreme Court has reversed government bans on a party’s or candidate's inclusion in an election. Particular cases will revolve around the exact wording of a party’s mission statement or candidate's platform, and legal language is subject to endless, unpredictable, and political interpretation. But, regardless, the government has the power to ban at its disposal, and future Supreme Courts may not be so liberal. So the threat of a ban always looms. Incidentally, a party or candidate that engages in “incitement to racism” is also ineligible to participate in elections, yet this provision has yet to be applied to Jewish parties and politicians, such as Likud and Benjamin Netanyahu, that routinely spout racist rhetoric.

Israel's champions also deny that Arab Israelis -- citizens, mind you -- have grossly inferior access to land, most of which is owned by a “public” authority and the Jewish National Fund (very little is privately owned); building and village permits; public utilities; education; roads; and other government-controlled services and resources. The Israeli government has carried out programs in the Galilee and Negev, known as Judaization, from which Arab Israelis, especially Bedouins, have been cleared to make way for Jewish Israelis. Such restrictions inside Israel have the stink of apartheid.

In his book Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy, Ben White documents that the Israeli government allocates resources -- unsurprisingly -- just as one would expect, considering that Israel by its founding doctrine is not the land of all of its citizens but only of some. This doctrine was reinforced last year in the Nation-State Law, which declares that “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”
So, as Israel's champions say, all Israeli citizens are indeed equal. It's just that some -- those whose nationality is "Jewish" -- are more equal than others -- those whose nationality is "Arab" or anything else but "Jewish."

TGIF -- The Goal Is Freedom -- appears occasionally on Fridays. This also appears at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF: Immigration and Liberty

Forbidding freedom of movement to aspiring migrants strikes at the liberty not only of those individuals but also of citizens and legal residents of the United States. That's the way it is with immigration. Indeed, that's the way it is with freedom. The government can't violate the freedom of some peaceful people without also violating the freedom of others.

Ilya Somin, who teaches law at George Mason University and is a constitutional scholar with the Cato Institute, makes this point in "Three Constitutional Issues Libertarians Should Make Their Own." (The other two issues his title refers to are zoning and racial profiling.) Somin also wrote the book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.

"Immigration restrictions," he writes, "massively restrict liberty and degrade human welfare. By barring entry to hundreds of thousands of people who seek freedom and opportunity in the United States, the federal government massively restricts the liberty of would‐​be immigrants and American citizens alike."

The harm to aspiring migrants is obvious. People seeking to escape crushing poverty and/or oppression are denied the freedom to move to a safer and more productive place. They are condemned to deprivation, misery, and pain at the hands of the government and gangs. (The U.S. war on drug makers and merchants in Latin America is the big reason for this.) By what right are they condemned? "Legal" immigration is more of a theoretical fiction than a real thing. Somin writes:

In theory, they can join the “line” and wait to enter legally. But for most, that line is either decades‐​long or nonexistent. And for the most part, these exclusions are based on arbitrary circumstances of parentage and place of birth, of a kind libertarians and others in the liberal political tradition consistently reject in other contexts.

He goes on: "Less widely appreciated, even by many libertarians, is the massive negative effect of immigration restrictions on the liberty of current American citizens." We don't usually think of immigration this way. (Political philosopher Chandran Kukathas does.) But every person represents an American's opportunity for gains from trade, friendship, and more intimate relationships, all the things that promote flourishing. Immigration controls control Americans too. As Somin writes:

Immigration restrictions bar millions of Americans from engaging in economic and social transactions with potential immigrants. It closes off Americans from hiring immigrant workers, getting jobs at businesses founded by immigrants (who establish such enterprises at higher rates than native-born citizens), renting property to immigrants, and benefiting from scientific and economic innovations to which immigrants also contribute at higher rates than natives.

Those who lament the government-made mess at the border have never understood that constructive responses to the new potential employees, buyers, tenants, etc. would privately and spontaneously arise if border crossing was legal.

Somin adds that "No other current U.S. government policy restricts liberty more than immigration exclusion does—and that’s true even if we focus solely on the liberty of native‐​born citizens, especially economic freedoms."

The prevention of gains from trade has profound and negative consequences for the production of wealth. Somin: "Economists estimate that free migration throughout the world would double global domestic product. That’s an enormous chunk of lost wealth for immigrants and native‐​born citizens alike."

Think of the abundance of goods, the new things, and the low prices that we're all missing out on! (See Bryan Caplan's Open Borders for details.)

Somin also sees constitutional problems with the restrictions that he laments has been neglected by even most libertarian legal scholars (including himself), not to mention others, such as conservatives, who claim to be staunch constitutionalists. "It’s far from clear," he writes, "that the original meaning of the Constitution even gives the federal government a general power to restrict immigration in the first place."

Nothing in the text specifically grants Congress or the president such authority, and leading Founding Fathers—including James Madison—argued that no such power existed. It took more than a century for the Supreme Court to rule—in the 1889 Chinese Exclusion Case—that the federal government does in fact have this unenumerated power. And that decision is based on highly dubious reasoning and tinged with racism.

Somin does not foresee an imminent overturning of the ruling, but he would like to see assaults on "extensions of that ruling that have largely immunized immigration restrictions from constitutional constraints that apply to virtually every type of government policy." For example:

Immigration detention and deportation proceed with far weaker due process protections than other severe deprivations of liberty. Due process is so lacking in the system that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies have detained and sometimes even deported thousands of American citizens before they figured out their error. Such detention with little or no due process would not be tolerated elsewhere.

But do "illegal" immigrants have rights supposedly protected by the Constitution? Somin replies: "A few constitutional rights are explicitly confined to U.S. citizens. But the vast majority are phrased as general constraints on government power, and protect citizens and noncitizens alike." Thus, "[t]he exemption of immigration restrictions from many normal constitutional constraints on government power has no basis in the text or original meaning of the Constitution."

So he wants an end to the many double standards. That "would curtail many of the worst abuses of the current migration regime, and perhaps set the stage for further progress. Even incremental improvement could make the difference between freedom and oppression for many thousands of people."

Hear, hear!

Prioritize!

Much anti-immigrant sentiment, even among some libertarians, appears fueled by resentment that non-citizens might get tax-financed welfare benefits. This gives a curious amount of offense, especially when it concerns so-called "illegals," whom I prefer to think of as residents without government papers. (Like that's a big deal.)

I can only say this: There are things that offend me far more than foreign-born people's going on welfare. Here are two in no particular order:

1. Native-born Americans' going on welfare. (They were born in the "land of the free" and are supposed to know better.)

2. State-police tactics, including the witch-hunting of employers who have the audacity to hire "illegals," designed to catch or prevent the migration of people who are merely exercising their natural liberty.

Let's get our priorities straight.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

TGIF: "You Didn't Build That"

Remember Barack Obama's profound 2012 campaign speech about success? Here's part of what he said:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed [!] you to thrive.  Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together.... We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President—because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.

Obama was no outlier. Plenty of people would be willing to give that speech today, maybe even Donald Trump.

Where to start? Obama said that he knows wealthy people who want to "give something back." Why? Presumably because of their wealth and success. That makes no sense. If these people made their wealth by producing attractive goods for consumers (which is how most wealthy people get wealthy), then what's to give back? We consumers did not give them money as a favor. We engaged in voluntary exchange. We gave up $X to get product Y because we prefer what we got to what we gave up. They benefitted and we benefitted. Double profit, double "thank you," as John Stossel says. That's how trade works when it's uncoerced. No debt; nothing to give back. End of.

Second, superstar entrepreneurs likely are smarter and more perceptive about the future state of the market than most other people. I doubt they go around bragging about it or minimizing the role of "good breaks." They surely know that things other than sheer intelligence figure into success. But let's not be unrealistically egalitarian about it. Some people are better suited to be entrepreneurs than others. Many of the outside factors that Obama named were also available to others. Why didn't those others succeed?

Next, what's this buncombe about all of us rising or falling together? When a business fails to satisfy us, it falls. Its owners, managers, and employees have to find other work. Its investors lose out. But the rest of us have not fallen. The failed businesses's material factors are now available to produce things we want. The discharged employees are now available to make other things we want. Where's the general failure? Obama spoke collectivist nonsense. Something does—or should—unite people, but it's not what Obama had in mind. They have a stake in a free society, that is, a society in which the government does not try to manage their lives and market relations.

The rest of the passage is Obama's elaboration of this thesis: "If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own." Was he so ignorant of the case for laissez faire that he thought this was news for defenders of the unmolested market economy? Was he having a laugh? Ludwig von Mises, one of the 20th century's premier champions of individual freedom considered calling his economic treatise "Social Cooperation." That is the second most common phrase in Human Action, right behind "division of labor," which Mises sometimes called the "social division of labor."

So Obama was tackling the scrawniest of strawmen. He was being a demagogue. No market advocate ever suggested that lucrative businesses were built in isolated shacks in rural Montana. Businesses were always described as embedded in the complex network we call the market economy.

I modestly suggest that Obama and every one of his ilk read I, Pencil. That's Leonard E. Read's 1958 essay explaining why no one person can make something as commonplace as a pencil. On the contrary, it takes incredibly complex worldwide cooperation, and it happens without a central authority. The price system, rooted in private property in the factors of production and in trade, directs the myriad self-interested activities that entrepreneurs, under no one's orders, combine to produce the pencil. No kidding. I. Pencil was written three years before Obama was born. Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, had a different lesson in mind from Obama's ignorant message. The former president had a collectivist, interventionist message. Read's was an individualist, free-market message. Read for the win.

Obama named particular things, such as the internet, which got started or built under government auspices. But, as usual, he overlooks what is not seen. (Also see "I, Website.") Obama thinks that if the government does not do something, it does not get done. But if the government did not build roads, bridges, airports, ports, schools, and the internet, would those things never have come into being? That's beggars belief. We know it's not true. People privately built public infrastructure before the government did. It didn't happen "on its own." Profit-seeking individuals and their free associations made it happen.

Businesses that relied on the infrastructure paid for its services. "Take what you want, said God, and pay for it," the Spanish proverb says. That's the market; no need for coercion. Why the mystery? Obama ignored all of the amazing things that free and private enterprise has created over the centuries, not without any assistance, but without government assistance. If he knows better, he's a demagogue.

Here's how Ludwig von Mises addressed the issue in Human Action in 1949, long before Obama  was born (but the year I was born):

The interventionists and the socialists contend that all commodities are turned out by a social process of production. When this process comes to an end and its fruits ripen, a second social process, that of distribution of the yield, follows and allots a share to each. The characteristic feature of the capitalist order is that the shares allotted are unequal. Some people—the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and the landowners—appropriate to themselves more than they should. Accordingly, the portions of other people are curtailed. Government should by rights expropriate the surplus of the privileged and distribute it among the underprivileged.

Now in the market economy this alleged dualism of two independent processes, that of production and that of distribution, does not exist. There is only one process going on. Goods are not first produced and then distributed. There is no such thing as an appropriation of portions out of a stock of ownerless goods. The products come into existence as somebody’s property. If one wants to distribute them, one must first confiscate them. It is certainly very easy for the governmental apparatus of compulsion and coercion to embark upon confiscation and expropriation. But this does not prove that a durable system of economic affairs can be built upon such confiscation and expropriation.

Before the interventionists dispense more advice, they might learn some economics.

 

Leap Day

Seeing as today is February 29, we should ruminate on this odd practice of adding a day to the calendar every fourth year. In that spirit, I turn to William Schwenck Gilbert, who took up the matter in his and Sir Arthur Sullivan’s opera The Pirates of Penzance. The background to this song is the Pirate King’s wish to inform his apprentice, young Frederic, that since he was born on February 29, he was not, as he thought, 21 and hence eligible release from his pirate apprenticeship, but in fact only “five and a little bit over.”


PIRATE KING.

For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, 
I've no desire to be disloyal,

Some person in authority, I don't know who, 
very likely the Astronomer Royal, 

Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty, 

One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as 
nine and twenty. 

Through some singular coincidence -- I shouldn't be surprised if it were owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy --  

You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, 
having been born in leap-year, on the twenty-ninth of February; 

And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you'll easily discover, 

That though you've lived twenty-one years, 
yet,  if we go by birthdays, 
you're only five and a little bit over!

RUTH. and KING. Ha! ha! ha! ha! Ho! ho! ho! ho!

FRED. Dear me! Let's see! (counting on fingers) Yes, yes; with yours my figures do agree!

ALL. Ha! ha! ha! ho! ho! ho! ho!

FRED. (more amused than any) How quaint the ways of Paradox! 
At common sense she gaily mocks! 
Though counting in the usual way, 
Years twenty-one I've been alive, 
Yet, reckoning by my natal day, I am a little boy of five!

RUTH and KING. He is a little boy of five! Ha! ha! ha!

ALL. A paradox, a paradox, A most ingenious paradox! Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!, etc.


Happy Birthday, Frederic!

TGIF: Birthright Citizenship and the Constitution

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States....

—U.S. Constitution, Amendment XIV

Donald Trump says he wants a "revolution of common sense." If he means it, he will abandon his unilateral attempt to cancel birthright citizenship, which the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, expressly acknowledges. The opening words of that amendment have a common-sense meaning that requires grotesque mental contortions to evade.

Opponents of birthright citizenship will seek refuge in the amendment's legislative history and case law, but I don't see how that trumps the plain meaning of words. The amendment says that if you were born in the United States, you are a citizen unless a parent was a foreign diplomat. It's worth remembering that the debate over birthright citizenship is merely one part of the all-out assault on the freedom to move and work that Trump is spearheading. Since violations of this freedom affect foreigners as well as Americans, the controversy is worth paying attention to.

The Constitution does not instruct its readers on how to interpret its clauses. Common sense is called for, and no one applied common sense to the law more clearly than the 19th-century libertarian and constitutional scholar Lysander Spooner. Spooner was also an abolitionist during the slave era. He insisted, contrary to his fellow abolitionists, that the constitutional text did not sanction slavery. He spelled this out in The Unconstitutionality of Slavery.

Spooner insisted that the language of a constitution must not be interpreted contrary to the very purpose of the document itself unless the language was so unambiguous as to preclude any other interpretation. In the American case, a pro-liberty reading is required if it is not expressly ruled out. He proceeded to show that the purportedly pro-slave language of the Constitution had to be construed in a way that was consistent with individual natural rights and natural law because the purported aim of the Constitution was to protect natural rights. Nowhere in the original Constitution were the words slave or slavery used. He wasn't arguing that the framers did not intend to protect slavery. Rather, his point was that no one was bound by what the framers meant but did not say. That makes perfect sense. If those men wanted to say something, they should have said it. What stopped them? We have no obligation to perpetuate injustice.

"[I]n the interpretation of all statutes and constitutions," Spooner wrote, "the ordinary legal rules of interpretation be observed. The most important of these rules, and the one to which it will be necessary constantly to refer, is the one that all language must be construed 'strictly' in favor of natural right." (Spooner's emphasis.)

Also: "The legal rules of interpretation, heretofore laid down, imperatively require this preference of the right, over the wrong, in all cases where a word is susceptible of different meanings."

And "[A]n innocent meaning must be given to all words that are susceptible of it."

Surely, Spooner would have applied this principle to the opening words of the 14th Amendment. It's unclear what meaning, other than the natural-right meaning, could possibly be given to those words. Some will argue that the post-Civil War amendment was only meant to recognize the citizenship of the freed slaves. So why didn't they say that? We are not bound by a meaning that contradicts natural law if the text can be read otherwise. .

How do we know the plain meaning is consistent with natural rights and natural law? We know because only under the plain meaning will the state leave people alone who have violated no one's rights. That was the original American way. If you did not aggress against persons or property, you were unlikely to come into contact with government officers.

If Trump has his way, people who have harmed no innocent persons or property could be rounded up by armed government agents and exiled. That would violate those people's rights. Therefore, the pro-liberty meaning is the common-sense meaning and must prevail if the Constitution is to fulfill what we are told is its purpose: "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity"

As Spooner put it, "[I]n order that the contract of government may be valid and lawful, it must purport to authorize nothing inconsistent with natural justice, and men’s natural rights. It cannot lawfully authorize government to destroy or take from men their natural rights: for natural rights are inalienable, and can no more be surrendered to government—which is but an association of individuals—than to a single individual."

The case presented here might seem to justify no more than legal residency. What about citizenship? To take that step, one need only consider that a legal resident is subject to the government's power to tax and regulate. Since his bid for exemption from U.S. government impositions would not be recognized, we are forced to the second-best disposition, namely, that the legal resident ought to have a say—as small as it is—over government policy, that is, the privileges and immunities of citizens. Those who are concerned that this could bring growth in an already overgrown government should turn their attention directly to the size and scope of the state, rather than seeking to limit individual rights. Besides, the offspring of American citizens have not exactly been genetically or culturally predisposed against big government, have they? Immigrants are not responsible for America's falling score on the world indices of freedom.

Ironically, anti-immigration action is what would make the government bigger and more intrusive. If you ask the state to "protect" the culture from foreigners, don't be surprised when you wake up in bed with a monster.

The Constitution has serious basic flaws, as Spooner himself would later elaborate in "The Constitution of No Authority," but as long as it's the supreme law of the land, liberty's advocates are obliged to push the interpretation that most constrains the state and expands freedom.

Two Decades Since the Fall

From "Perspective," The Freeman, November 2009:

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall effectively ceased to exist. Remember the sequence: Communist Hungary started letting people pass into Austria and to freedom. Captives of the Soviet bloc left in droves. East Germans, too—thousands of them. The Hungarian government tried to stanch the flow, but the dam had been breached. With one dictator having resigned, a panicky East German regime began making concessions, hoping to mollify the people. They would not be placated. Thousands—and in one case, a million—took to the streets, shouting, “We want out!” Things were getting out of hand. So, on November 9, the government fumblingly announced it would lift travel restrictions to West Berlin and West Germany. It was all over but the demolition.

I don’t know why it seems so much longer ago that we saw those inspiring celebrations, when East Berliners, joined by their countrymen from the western side, danced on the wall while others whacked at it with axes and sledge hammers. The crowds, the singing, the joyful cries of “Freedom!”, the sections of wall toppling—I remember watching the scenes on television with my then-six-year-old, Jennifer. If you can watch them on YouTube today without tearing up, I don’t know what to say.

It’s hard to believe that today’s 19-year-olds were born into a world without a Berlin Wall and 17-year-olds were born into a world without the Soviet Union. When my generation was growing up, the Iron Curtain and USSR seemed like permanent fixtures of life.

Yes, we really did have air-raid drills in school. (Looking back, I can see they were insidious, ridiculous propaganda stunts.) Some of us wished, at most, for what was called peaceful coexistence. Others thought “we” could roll “them” back. War—which a few, amazingly, actually welcomed—would have been catastrophic beyond imagination. We dared not hope for a bloodless dissolution of totalitarianism. Yet that, more or less, is what we got.

Those of us who believe in full individual liberty have been dismayed to learn that revulsion with dictatorship does not equate to a wholehearted embrace of freedom. None of the former Soviet-bloc countries has thoroughly foresworn state-capitalist welfarism, and some have traveled only a short distance along the road from serfdom. Central planning is dead as an ideal, but the regulatory state lives, as does what Thomas Szasz calls the Therapeutic State. This is disappointing, but it would be difficult for a resident of the United States to criticize others for failing to resist overbearing government. The longing for security, combined with the absurd notion that only ignorant and force-wielding bureaucrats can provide it, dies hard.

The fall of the Iron Curtain has been heralded as the failure of socialism, but this is a more complicated matter. Strictly speaking, there has been much less socialism in the world than it might appear since Lenin gave it up for the New Economic Policy in 1921. Remember, Marx envisioned the abolition of the market, including money and exchange. The economy was to be centrally planned—literally. But when the Bolsheviks tried it, they ended up, as Trotsky said, “staring into the abyss.” Lenin was savvy enough to back away from oblivion and reintroduce aspects of the market, including a gold ruble. What followed for the next seven decades was a heavily bureaucratized, de facto quasi-market economy, existing in a world of prices in which The Plan was adjusted ex post to reflect reality and black-market “corruption” kept things going. Ludwig von Mises could not have been surprised.

Such an economy was doomed to fail, but perhaps with a little less intervention and a dollop of political freedom, it might have muddled through a bit longer. The market can put up with a lot of harassment, which means people can resourcefully get around a lot of government obstacles when they want to. Look at the U.S. economy.

TGIF: Reverse Scapegoating in the Immigration Debate

In the controversy over immigration we can spot a phenomenon I call "reverse scapegoating." According to Merriam-Webster, the scapegoat is "one that bears the blame for others." With reverse scapegoating, others bear the blame for one. Both are unjust.

Reverse scapegoating is clear in the demagoguery about "migrant crime," occasioned most recently with the murder Laken Riley. As the Associated Press shouted in a recent headline, "Killing of Laken Riley is now front and center of US immigration debate and 2024 presidential race." The 22-year-old Georgia nursing student's body was found after she had been beaten during a morning run. Very sad indeed.

Based on surveillance-camera footage, the AP reported, the police arrested "Jose Ibarra, 26, a Venezuelan citizen. Immigration officials say Ibarra entered the U.S. illegally and was allowed to stay. He unlawfully crossed into the U.S. in 2022, authorities said." Ibarra faces murder and other major charges.

Opponents of immigration are having a field day, none more than Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate. Even people who would have nothing to do with Trump echo his words. Trump reacted by saying, according to the AP roundup, “Crooked Joe Biden’s Border INVASION is destroying our country and killing our citizens! The horrible murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley at the University of Georgia should have NEVER happened! [Ibarra is] an animal that came in.” Naturally, Trump believes Ibara wouldn't have entered had Trump been in charge of the border.

In other words, the murder of this innocent woman allegedly by a migrant who entered the country without government permission papers proves that what's going on at the Mexican border is an existential threat to America and must be stopped by any means necessary.

The problems here should be obvious. First, it's not an invasion. Everyone knows that the word refers to a foreign military entering a country uninvited -- you know, as the U.S. military did in Iraq and Afghanistan or Russia in Ukraine.

Moreover, why should a horrific act allegedly committed by one person without papers tar others who had nothing to do with the crime? We know that most people who enter the country with or without papers commit no crimes. Rather, they produce value in the marketplace, benefitting us all, and strive for better lives. Why should the U.S. government condemn them to life sentences in the poorest, most war-torn, and least free countries when they could make up to 20 times as much money here? Of course, criminal suspects should not be immune from prosecution because of their immigration status.

Some statistics show that legal and illegal immigrants commit proportionately less crime than native-born Americans. I know many people won't believe it, but it seems to be true. (See, for example, Bryan Caplan's Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, pp. 91-92. And Cato's Alex Nowrasteh's discussion here.)

We all know from historical experience that most immigrants are a net plus to us as they help themselves. A few commit harm, but native-born Americans harm innocent people every day. Some Americans, who freely travel from state to state and city to city without papers, commit horrific crimes. Should we ban or closely monitor interstate migration? How about freedom of reproduction? After all, some couples will produce future criminals. 

A response might be, "If we can save one life...." But they don't mean it because if they did, they'd propose licensing reproduction, restricting domestic travel, reducing the speed limit to 10 miles an hour, and outlawing left turns. Many other intolerable ways of saving lives can be imagined. "But that would be extreme!" someone might say. And sentencing innocent people to lives of poverty, war, and tyranny is not?

As economist Benjamin Powell points out, as long as America is a magnet for those seeking better lives, and as long as legal immigration is virtually ruled out for all but a few, a border problem will exist -- complete with traffickers' vicious exploitation. The source of the problem, however, is not immigration but bad policy. Again, as Powell says, this is like the prohibition of booze and drugs. When people want to do something peaceful that's against the law, they'll find a way to do it -- even if it's with the help of bad people who otherwise never would have gotten involved. Prohibition creates the crisis that politicians and voters are then determined to stop by any means no matter how cruel.

You don't like illegal immigration? Legalize it! End reverse scapegoating!

(For more, watch Bryan Caplan's excellent video presentation of the case for open borders.)

TGIF: Birthright Citizenship - Just and Justified

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” 

So says section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. With the impeccable timing we’re accustomed to, Donald Trump says he will sign an executive order to nullify this constitutional provision by denying citizenship (which today includes the right to make a living among other important things) to persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof if their parents were in the country without the permission of the government.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

Become a Free Association patron today!

Ben Carson Inserts Foot in Mouth

Ben Carson, a conservative hopeful for president, made headlines last week by proclaiming that being gay or lesbian is "absolutely" a choice. His evidence? "A lot of people who go into prison, go into prison straight and when they come out they're gay," Carson said on CNN. "So, did something happen while they were in there? Ask yourself that question."

QED, apparently.

TGIF: Ahad Ha'Am's Prophetic Warning about Political Zionism

Ukrainian-born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (1856-1927), whose pen name was Ahad Ha'Am (Hebrew for one of the people), was a proponent of Spiritual, or Cultural, Zionism, which made him a rival to Theodor Herzl and Political Zionism, the movement dedicated to creating a nation-state in Palestine for all Jewish people worldwide. Ahad Ha'Am remains relevant to understanding the roots of the conflict in Palestine and Israel that has cost so many innocent lives. Hans Kohn, a Bohemian-born American writer, shed light on Ahad Ha'Am's thinking about the "Arab problem" for Herzl's movement in "Zion and the Jewish National Idea," published in Menorah Journal, Autumn-Winter 1958. (The journal ceased publication in 1962.) Here's part of what Kohn wrote. Pay close attention to the quotes from Ahad Ha'Am:

In 1891 Ahad Ha-'Am laid his finger on the problem which, for practical and ethical reasons alike, was the fundamental though neglected problem of Zionism in Palestine -- the Arab problem. To the eyes of most Zionists, the land of their forefathers appeared empty, waiting for the return of the dispersed descendants as if history had stood still for two thousand years. From 1891 on Ahad Ha-'Am stressed that Palestine was not only a small land but not an empty one... He pointed out that there was little untilled soil in Palestine, except for stony hills and sand dunes. He warned that the Jewish settlers must under no circumstances arouse the wrath of the natives by ugly actions; must meet them rather in the friendly spirit of respect. "Yet what do our brethren do in Palestine? Just the very opposite! Serfs they were in the lands of the Diaspora and suddenly they find themselves in freedom, and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination." That was written in 1891 when the Zionist settlers formed a tiny minority in Palestine. "We think," Ahad Ha-'Am warned, "that the Arabs are all savages who live like animals and do not understand what is happening around. This is, however, a great error."

This error unfortunately has persisted ever since. Ahad Ha-'Am did not cease to warn against it, not only for the sake of the Arabs but for the sake of Judaism and Zion. He remained faithful to his ethical standards to the end. Twenty years later, on July 9, 1911, he wrote to a friend in Jaffa: "As to the war against the Jews in Palestine, I am a spectator from afar with an aching heart, particularly because of the want of insight and understanding shown on our side to an extreme degree. As a matter of fact, it was evident twenty years ago that the day would come when Arabs would stand up against us." He complained bitterly that the Zionists were unwilling to understand the people of the land to which they came and had learned neither its language or its spirit....

In a letter of November 18, 1913 to Moshe Smilansky, a pioneer settler in Palestine, Ahad Ha-'Am had protested against another form of nationalist boycott proclaimed by the Zionist labor movement in Palestine against the employment of Arab labor, a racial boycott: "Apart from the political danger, I can't put up with the idea that our brethren are morally capable of behaving in such a way to men of another people; and unwittingly the thought comes to my mind: If it is so now, what will be our relation to the others if in truth we shall achieve 'at the end of time' power in Eretz Israel? If this be the 'Messiah,' I do not wish to see him coming."

Ahad Ha-'Am was in the prophetic tradition not only because he subjected the doings of his own people to ethical standards. He also foresaw, when very few realized it, the ethical dangers threatening Zion.

Ahad Ha-'Am returned to the Arab problem in another letter to Smilansky, written in February, 1914. Smilansky had been bitterly attacked by Palestinian Zionists because he had drawn attention to the Arab problem. Ahad Ha-'Am tried to comfort him by pointing out that the Zionists had not yet awakened to reality. "Therefore they wax angry toward those who remind them that there is still another people in Eretz Israel that has been living there and does not intend at all to leave its place. In the future, when this illusion will have been torn from their hearts and they will look with open eyes upon the reality as it is, they will certainly understand how important this question is and how great is our duty to work for its solution."

...In 1920 (three years after the Balfour Declaration) Ahad Ha-'Am warned against exaggerated Zionist hopes. "The Arab people," he wrote, "regarded by us as nonexistent ever since the beginning of the colonization of Palestine, heard [of the Zionist expectations and plans] and believed that the Jews were coming to drive them from their soil and deal with them at their own will." Such an attitude on the part of his own people seemed to Ahad Ha-'Am unthinkable. In his interpretation of the Balfour Declaration he stressed that the historical right of the Jews in Palestine "does not affect the right of the other inhabitants who are entitled to invoke the right of actual dwelling and their work in the country for many generations. For them, too, the country is a national home, and they have a right to develop national forces to the extent of their ability. This situation makes Palestine the common land of several peoples, each of whom wishes to build its national home there. In such circumstances it is no longer possible that the national home of one of them could be total.... If you build your house in an empty space but in a place where there are also other homes and inhabitants, you are an unrestricted master only inside your own house. Outside the door all the inhabitants are partners, and the management of the whole has to be directed in agreement with the interests of them all."

How different things would have been if the Political Zionists had paid heed to Ahad Ha'am.

TGIF: Come and See the Anarchy Inherent in the System!

Donald Trump says the presidential election is "rigged." Although he provides no evidence for his charge, lots of things can be said about it. For one thing, he equivocates over the word rigged to include voter fraud along with news-media/polling bias -- two very different things. The former suggests that the outcome is predetermined, the latter only that influential organizations try to move voters in a particular direction. (Ignoring third parties is one flagrant way to do this, but that may redound to Trump's benefit in some cases.)

I might also point out that Trump has helped "rig" the election against himself with his inveterate estrangement from the truth and his braggadocio about and apparent penchant for sexual assault. These flaws have overshadowed what otherwise would have been damaging information about Hillary Clinton's political career and the WikiLeaks disclosures. Compared to Trump's antics and outrages, dry emails about Goldman Sachs speeches and the Clinton Foundation just aren't sexy enough to grab the electorate's attention. Cable TV's quest for ratings may adequately account for the seeming bias; viewers are more likely to reach for the remote when they hear about transcripts of speeches to Wall Street than when they hear "locker-room banter" and insults. Considering that Trump is partly a creature of the media, without whom he might not have won the Republican nomination, the case for sheer anti-Trump bias is not so straightforward.

Trump is also buffoonish, so let's face it: he makes better TV than the robotic Clinton does. A candidate without Trump's abundant baggage might have had an easier time prosecuting the case against his deeply flawed, state-worshiping opponent, even in the face of media bias.

But there's another side to the "rigged election" charge that's bound to go unnoticed. The American political system, like all political systems, requires a good deal of peaceful cooperation to operate. This is obviously relevant to the transfer of power, which gets so much attention nowadays. This cooperation goes on in two respects: first, between the government and the subject population -- government cannot rule purely through force because the ruled always substantially outnumber their rulers -- and second, among the many individuals who constitute the government's branches, agencies, and bureaus. Again, we cannot explain this process purely by the use of force. Even totalitarian states understand this, which is why they invest so much effort in propaganda ministries. Ideas, not force, rule the world.

Why does one government branch or agency or bureau or officer carry out orders from another? The answer cannot be the threat of force alone, for that would only set the question back a step: why would anyone carry out an order to use force against a defiant officer of the government? We can't have an infinitely long line of people with each person forcing the next one up to obey orders.

What ultimately explains compliance, or cooperation, with government is not coercion but ideology: government officers carry out orders because they and a critical mass of the community in which they operate believe the orders are legitimate and ought to be carried out. That's a matter of tacit if not explicit ideology. If those officers and enough members of that community came to have different ideas, the orders might be defied with impunity, if anyone were still giving them. On the other hand, if a private individual started giving the same kind of orders the state gave, no one would regard them as legitimate and sanctions against defiant persons would not be respected. (I briefly explore this idea in "Subjugating Ourselves". Michael Huemer has written the book: The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey.)

When enough time is added to ideology, the result is custom -- another reason that people comply with the state without the need for force. As Étienne de La Boétie wrote in The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (1576):"It is true that in the beginning men submit under constraint and by force; but those who come after them obey without regret and perform willingly what their predecessors had done because they had to. This is why men born under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery are content, without further effort, to live in their native circumstance, unaware of any other state or right, and considering as quite natural the condition into which they were born…. [I]t is clear enough that the powerful influence of custom is in no respect more compelling than in this, namely, habituation to subjection."

The point is that government requires an unappreciated degree of cooperation, without which it would break down. Force may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. If enough people refused to regard the outcome of an election as legitimate, it would not be treated as such. Why does a chief justice swear in a president-elect? Why does a former president vacate the White House and make way for his successor? Why does a president order the enforcement of laws passed by Congress? Why are those laws enforced by the people with the guns? The answer to all these questions and more is ideology. This is not to say that no one ever refuses to obey a government order. But an isolated defiant government officer would not herald a change in society's ideology; hence, someone else would be easily found to execute the order and the public would regard this as legitimate.

Now this of course does not mean that anarchists have achieved their goal of a society based purely on cooperation. An individual who refused to cooperate, say, by resisting taxation or regulation, would be subjected to aggressive force without real recourse because the state would be the judge in its own case. Besides that, the "consent" that the state enjoys is manufactured by its tax-financed virtual school monopoly, among other institutions, bolstered by a mystical nationalism and secured by the problem of collective action. (How many people would defy the state if they were fairly certain that many others would do so?) So although the political system can hum along without routinely using force, dissenters can "legitimately" be put back into line violently if necessary. That most people would passively watch this happen believing it was proper, only confirms that the state depends on something other than force for its day-to-day operations. If a freelance would-be tyrant were giving the orders, no sense of legitimacy would hold bystanders back from helping victims to resist.

Thus the much-touted peaceful transfer of power in the United States, which Trump is now said to jeopardize, is not the result of force or the threat thereof, but of ideology and custom.

Why bring this up now? It's relevant to the case for anarchism. Most people who reject anarchism do so largely because they believe (like Thomas Hobbes and to a lesser extent John Locke) that without the state as an enforcer of at least last resort, internally generated cooperation would be inadequate to sustain a peaceful and efficient society. Thus an ostensibly external agency -- the state-- is necessary to impose the minimum degree of cooperation required for society to run smoothly.

We've seen, however, that government also supposes internal cooperation -- there is no superstate to police relations between the government and the people, or among the many individuals who constitute the government. Government is not external agency to society. The standard objection to anarchism is thus blunted by the fact that it applies equally to statism, including minimum statism (minarchism). Ideology and custom are immensely powerful in both contexts. If the public's implicit or explicit ideology can sustain a state, we have no reason to believe it could not sustain a stateless society. If the real constitution of a society is its widely accepted code of conduct and resulting incentives (regardless of words on a piece of parchment, if that even exists), then a stateless society has a constitution fully as much as any other society with a state. The pertinent question, then, is not whether a society has a constitution, but whether the constitution is grounded in natural justice. (I have more to say about this matter in America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited. Also see Roderick Long's "Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism.")

Finally, I think we can say that the elections are rigged but not as Trump would have us believe. They are rigged in the sense that the outcome is predetermined for power and against liberty. It'll take a change in ideology to change that.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

TGIF: Israel and Jabotinsky's Iron Wall

Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was a key figure in the development of the Zionist movement, which led to the founding of Israel in 1948. After breaking from mainline Zionism, Jabotinsky, born in Odessa (Ukraine), established Revisionist Zionism, a more openly militant version.

 What is Revisionist Zionism? Even fellow Zionists saw similarities with fascism. According to Ramzy Baroud and Romana Rubeo, "Before the opportunistic alliance between Germany’s Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, and Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, in 1936,... a degree of affinity existed between Zionist and Fascist leaders in Rome." Baroud and Rubeo went on:

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, of which Israel’s current Likud party and other right and far-right groups are the offspring, saw in Italy “a spiritual homeland.”

“All my views on nationalism, the state, and society were developed during those years under Italian influence,” Jabotinsky wrote in his autobiography, referring to his ideological formation years in Italy.

In return, Mussolini had expressly spoken in support of Zionism and of Jabotinsky in particular: “For Zionism to succeed, you need to have a Jewish State with a Jewish flag, and Jewish language. The person who understands that is your fascist, Jabotinsky,” Mussolini said ... in November 1934.

TGIF: Trump's Operation Police State

If elected president, Donald Trump says he would create a "deportation force" to carry out his pledge to expel more than 11 million people from the United States merely because they lack government permission to be here. "We have no choice if we're going to run our country properly and if we're going to be a country," he said during the Republican debate Tuesday night.

Wrong on both counts.

The Abduction of Mahmoud Khalil

The Trump administration's abduction and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old green-card holder and permanent legal resident of the United States, is horrifying not just for him and his pregnant wife, a U.S. citizen, but as a sign of things to come. Khalil, who is a Syrian-born Algerian of Palestinian descent, has been detained pending deportation without being charged with any crime against persons or property, but because he engaged in speech and other peaceful activities on behalf of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. He was a graduate student at Columbia University at the time.

The government says Khalil's "presence or activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States." That's absurd. It also says Khalil supports Hamas but provides no evidence. That is all outrageously vague, which is how authoritarian governments always operate. Even speech supporting Hamas is protected under the Supreme Court's 1969 Brandenburg decision (not to mention natural law). If he's suspected of committing a specific crime, the government should charge him and give him his day in court. Instead, Khalil was handcuffed and seized at his New York City home and taken to Louisiana where he is to appear before an immigration judge.

However, the system of checks and balances is not dead yet. According to Reuters, "U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman had temporarily blocked Mahmoud Khalil's deportation [last] week, and extended the prohibition on Wednesday in a written order following a hearing in Manhattan federal court to allow himself more time to consider whether the arrest was unconstitutional."

It should be noted that the Trump action is a predictable result of the premises that free-immigration opponents subscribe to. Defenders of the action like Secretary of State Marco Rubio hold that Khalil never had a right to be in the United States but was merely permitted initial entry as a guest. Therefore, Rubio and others argue, the government can revoke that permission retroactively, notwithstanding his change in status from student-visa holder to green-card holder.

That's where bad premises take you.

Op-ed: The Dishonor of Militarism

[T]he U.S. government has committed the greatest imaginable betrayal of American values as professed in the Declaration of Independence: Born in rebellion against an empire, America now is the empire against which others rebel.

The rest of my op-ed, "The Dishonor of Militarism," is here.

TGIF: When History Didn't Begin

I agree with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. I've never written those words before. But on Oct 24, Guterres said to the UN Security Council (emphasis added):

The situation in the Middle East is growing more dire by the hour.

The war in Gaza is raging and risks spiralling throughout the region.

Divisions are splintering societies. Tensions threaten to boil over.

At a crucial moment like this, it is vital to be clear on principles -- starting with the fundamental principle of respecting and protecting civilians.

I have condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel.

Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets.

All hostages must be treated humanely and released immediately and without conditions. I respectfully note the presence among us of members of their families.....

It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.

The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.

They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.

But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people....

What was the reaction? Israel's government demanded that Guterres resign for justifying (sic) Hamas's crimes. According to statements from Israeli UN ambassador Gilad Erdan and foreign minister Eli Cohen, Guterres therefore is unfit for his job.

According to the officials, Guterres's offending words were these: "the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum." Those words preceded Guterres's reference to what the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank endured under Israeli occupation since 1967.

Beyond doubt, Guterres condemned Hamas's mass atrocities of Oct. 7. He clearly said that killing civilians cannot be justified. And he unequivocally called for the immediate and unconditional release of the hostages. Look at his remarks. But he has been vilified by Israeli politicians for saying in effect that history did not begin on October 7, 2023. Of course, the statement is true, but some things just may not be said.

Strangely, the Israeli government says Guterres did not condemn the horrendous Hamas violence against Israeli civilians. Israel's position apparently is that even to remind people that history did not begin on October 7 is to justify murder, kidnapping, and mayhem. It's as if trying to comprehend is to justify. But those are two different mental operations. 

The Israeli officials also presumably objected to Guterres's condemnation of the collective punishment that Israel was inflicting, again, on the rightless Palestinians in the crowded Gaza Strip, most of whom are not members of Hamas and most of whom could not have voted for Hamas almost 20 years ago because they were too young or had not even been born yet. Almost half the 2.3 million Palestinians of tiny Gaza are under 18.

So Israel is gaslighting. If we can't believe the Israeli government on something we can so easily check, how can we believe it on anything else? Just the other day U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said something similar to what Guterres said, but so far without consequence: "Ultimately, the only way to ensure that this crisis never happens again is to begin setting the conditions for durable peace and security, and to frame our diplomatic efforts now with that in mind." In his requests is that Israel not reoccupy Gaza and that it end the 17-year blockade. That sounds like another way of acknowledging that the October 7 attacks "did not happen in a vacuum."

Why is Israel going after Guterres for his unexceptional statement? It wasn't just the timing. Yair Lapid, a former prime minister of Israel and a former journalist, gave the answer when he said, "If the international media is objective, it serves Hamas. If it just shows both sides, it serves Hamas... My argument is that the media cannot just claim to bring both sides of the story. If you do that, you are only bringing one – Hamas’s side...."

Really?