Libertarians Should Never Join Up with Statists to Support Statism
Reminder: Our online Zoom conference on open borders continues this Monday evening, November 4, with Don Boudreaux, former president of The Foundation for Economic Education and current professor of economics at George Mason University. 7 p.m.-8 p.m. Eastern Time. Register here.
Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the JFK Lancer conference and also at the CAPA conference, which are being held on November 22-24 in Dallas. There is also an excellent third JFK conference on the same weekend sponsored by the JFK Historical Group. All three of them are fantastic JFK-assassination-related conferences. I highly recommend registering for all three and then picking and choosing which sessions you would like to attend at all three conferences. The registration prices are moderate and it’s a great way to support three great conferences. I will have some of my JFK books at my presentations to autograph and sell at a discounted price. I hope to see you all there!
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Libertarian supporters of America’s socialist system of immigration controls often quote Milton Friedman, who said that you can’t have both open borders and a welfare state. The notion is that foreigners will come to America to get on welfare, which will result in higher taxes for American citizens. Therefore, the argument goes, we libertarians have no effective choice but to abandon the libertarian position in favor of open borders and join the statists in support of immigration controls until the welfare state has been brought to an end. As soon as the welfare state is terminated, they say, we can then return to advocating our libertarian principle of open borders.
To that, I respond: Nonsense and balderdash! We libertarians must never permit the statists to manipulate us into joining up with them in the support of any aspect of statism, including immigration controls. The minute that statists succeed in maneuvering us into joining them, they have won. Our goose is cooked with respect to achieving a genuinely free society. After all, who can have any respect for a movement that permits itself to be manipulated into abandoning its principles and supporting statism?
If we are to ever achieve the genuinely free soc
Article from The Future of Freedom Foundation
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