Libertarian Open-Borderites Refuted
30th April 2011
Dean Ericson speaks for the adults.
You kids don’t get it. You sit here splitting libertarian hairs, counting angels on pinheads, spinning out your abstract theories as if they mattered. Listen; in your open-borders fantasyland libertarianism is dead, dead, DEAD! And you and yours are dead. What the hell do you think happens when 100 million foreigners from around the world come pouring in here? They all sit around sipping espresso while discussing the finer points of libertarianism? — it’s laughable! Listen; they wage a merciless politics of my-group-against-all-others, a savage struggle of competing peoples to see who comes out on top and garner the spoils and who shall be plundered and ruled. For pete’s sake use your imagination, try to see what would actually happen, try getting your thinking out of the lazy rut of your precious ideology and *imagine* the reality.
Unfortunately, ‘movement libertarians’ (such as those who run–and inhabit–tReason magazine) are intellectually arrested adolescents, whose concerns are adolescent concerns — I want sex! I want drugs! I want rock & roll! — rather than the concerns of adults, and whose perspective is correspondingly narrow. Perhaps equally unfortunately, our civilization has produced a society so rich and secure that they have the room to bloviate in this fashion without being brought up short by reality, as would quickly happen in a more primitive state of society, full of evil men who think that others exist for their own profit and amusement. People like Mohammed, for example.
MORE: Yes, what would you do? Cut a road through the law to get after the Devil?
ROPER: Yes. I’d cut down every law in England to do that.
MORE: And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned on you … where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted with laws from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s, and if you cut them down … do you really think you could stand upright in the wind that would blow then?