Tag: libertarians

The Absurdity of “Open Borders”

Some libertarians argue that libertarianism requires support for “open borders,” but this is a mistake. “Open borders” is the view in the existing world of states, the state ought to admit as many people who want to come to the United States as possible. Of course, you don’t have the right to occupy property that is privately owned. But much of the property in the United States is “public,” which means that it is up to those who run the state to decide what to do with it. Of course, this is an unsatisfactory situation and we should do what we can to bring about a world with no “public” property and no state, but for now the question is what to do: open borders or not?

The answer is quite clear. “Open borders” would be a. disastrous mistake. The policy would subject the United States to hordes of people with alien ideologies and cultures. As the great Ludwig von Mises pointed out, it would have made no sense to allow immigration from Germany and Japan during World War II. “Neither does it mean that there can be any question of appeasing aggressors by removing migration barriers. As conditions are today, the Americas and Australia in admitting German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants merely open their doors to the vanguards of hostile armies.” We face exactly the same situation today. We have a hard enough problem coping with the alien ideologies and cultures that are already here. Why compound our problem?

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Orwellian Tactics? Libertarian Party Fears Targeting By FBI After Letter

The Libertarian Party has questions for the Department of Justice after the FBI claimed that a “foreign threat” had accessed its Facebook account. A preliminary analysis by the LP was hindered by Meta, which has offered little clarity on the incident.

In a statement published on Friday, LP chair Angela McArdle shared a letter the party received from the bureau warning of the alleged breach. “The FBI maintains active investigations that seek to identify the activities of hostile foreign governments and their intelligence services who target the US government, private sector, and political processes,” the letter says. “The FBI recently obtained information showing that one of these foreign threat actors was in control of various IP addresses that the group used to log into a Facebook account controlled by your organization. The group accessed the account sometime between August 2023 and February 2024.”

One LP employee with knowledge of the letter told the Libertarian Institute that roughly 10 people have access to the Facebook account. The party has not changed access to the page within the past two months.

The employee said the LP was unable to access the user archive for its Facebook account to determine if it had been hacked and has so far received no assistance from Meta in resolving the issue. The organization plans to do what it can to learn more about the supposed “foreign threat actor” and why the FBI was surveilling the account in the first place.  

While the source acknowledged that the letter could be the result of “good police work,” the party is concerned the move could amount to a veiled threat from federal agents. Those worries are significantly heightened as two members of the party’s leadership have been contacted by the FBI within the past year, the employee added. 

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Why Elite Libertarians Failed so Miserably on COVID

A priest friend of mine has been writing for three years against his fellow clerics who went along with the COVID regime, shut their churches, masked their parishioners, and then pushed shots on those who didn’t need them. He said that they forgot the first principle: be not afraid. And the second principle too: put not your faith in princes.

An academic friend of mine has been blasting his colleagues for just as long. He is even the author of a book “Treason of the Experts.”

Many conservatives who had sound opinions on lockdowns and vaccine mandates have gone after National Review and the Trump administration for their apostasies that gave us the biggest expansion of government power probably in world history.

Naomi Wolf has been relentless in calling out the left for their attacks on free association and free speech, in addition to their acquiescence to Big Pharma.

Each of these people say that they have a moral obligation to call out their own tribe.

Now to my own tribe: the libertarians.

For three years, I’ve been reluctant to say anything about the elephant in the room, the near-complete failure of libertarians to stand up to the lockdown and mandate regime. It was a moment in history that was tailor-made for them. Everything in their training taught them to be suspicious of government power and relentless in the defense of liberty.

Instead they mostly went silent. Worse, they became the Praetorian Guard of the lockdown Caesars, giving them cover when they deserved it least. The “radical” libertarians defaulted to a completely conventional careerism, even to the point of manufacturing rationales for terrible attacks on the most vulnerable.

Most organizations associated with the Atlas Network said nothing at all and still have said anything. The Mont Pelerin Society couldn’t muster the words either. Plenty of Twitter libertarians (and Reason Magazine) cheered masking as privacy-protecting disease-spread inhibitors while blasting me for criticizing them. Not even the Libertarian Party spoke out in 2020, a failure which led to a total upheaval in the party last year. Now, the anti-lockdowners are running the show.

Many if not most of the top intellectuals in the libertarian space were completely wrong and totally flopped when it mattered most. A book could be written on all the ridiculous excuses they marshaled to defend the worst attack on liberty in our lifetimes. Yes, many came around later and today pretend like that were right all along but the receipts are everywhere on what they said and did when it actually mattered.

Why haven’t I called them out? I convinced myself that they don’t really matter, so such a focus on internal strife achieves nothing. Maybe that’s right. It seems more true now than ever since they simply made themselves irrelevant by staying silent when voices of liberty were most needed. Now no one seems to care about them even as donor dollars are rightly drying up. My perception was that they (once we) mattered once upon a time, in any case.

In addition, my level of fury about the situation has been so intense that I did not think I could even pen a calm and persuasive article (even if I’ve attacked experts in general).

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