[ExI] Just some thoughts, nothing new really

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 11:06 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I always thought you were a libertarian but I guess I was mistaken because
> libertarians believe people have the right to live how they want where they
> want as long as they're peaceful, and today the USA has the lowest crime
> rate its had in many decades
>

### Oh but yes I am libertarian! The most compact expression of what it
means to be a libertarian is "Live and let live", although the full
explication could take tomes of text. The right of free association is the
foundation of libertarian thought and most sharply differentiates us from
collectivists of all stripes.

Of course, free association implies free dissociation. Anybody can live in
my home - if and only if they are invited and come voluntarily. Obviously,
I do not invite hostiles to my home and, since it's *my* home, on a whim I
can bar even nice people from entering. A libertarian homeowner's
association, a small, voluntarily formed group of people, can legitimately
decide to exclude some specific persons, or groups of persons, for any
reasons or no reason at all. In a libertarian country, a racist homeowner's
association may legitimately bar any persons of a disfavored race from
purchasing a home that belongs to the association. More importantly, a
libertarian would never demand that a minority group, such a Jews,
vegetarians or Hungarians be forced to accept Nazis, carnivores or
anti-Hungarians into their own associations, clubs, homes, neighborhoods or
whatever areas or spheres they legitimately own.

So this is the libertarian deontological position. There are of course
other considerations - questions of efficiency, various trade-offs,
libertarian preferences towards polycentric, decentralized decision-making
- but my position on immigration, and especially hostile, illegal
immigration boils down to the following:

As a libertarian I explicitly renounce the right to dictate to others who
they should associate with.
--------------------------------------------------------


> Even the libertarian think tank The Cato Institute concluded that illegal
> immigrants in Texas committed fewer crimes than native born Americans:
>
>
> https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-policy-brief/criminal-immigrants-texas-illegal-immigrant
>
>
> ### TL:DR. Don't believe it. Illegal immigrants tend to be less
intelligent than legal immigrants, and they live in the penumbra of the
law. Less intelligent people are more likely to commit crimes. People
living outside the law are more likely to commit crimes and less likely to
report them. I was not born yesterday, I know how a piece of propaganda
sounds like, and I am willing to come out on a limb and derive conclusions
from more basic facts rather than to believe whatever shows up in a
political mass media discussion.
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