“Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people.
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.
Both lessons hit home.
Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing. This concentration is seriously impairing the economic effectiveness of private enterprise as a way of providing employment for labor and capital and as a way of assuring a more equitable distribution of income and earnings among the people of the nation as a whole.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt, On Curbing Monopolies
It was true then, and it’s true now
Democracy and personal liberty as we know will cease to exist upon the finalization of open borders policy as dictates to western nations by international corporate interests.Of this we can be sure.
http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/11/greg-johnson-interviews-vox-day-2/
VD: Well, the most important one, as we are now seeing, is the free movement of peoples. What really changed my thinking and it was a process, you know, it wasn’t an immediate thing, although it was a fairly quick process now that I think about it . . . I grew up on Milton Friedman. My father had me reading Free to Choose when I was fairly young, and so I was a big free trade dogmatist and around the time of NAFTA and all that sort of thing I could recognize some of the problems but I bought into the line that the problem is that it’s not real free trade. It’s a free trade agreement, but it’s not real free trade.
Then I read a really good book by Ian Fletcher, and he directly addressed the concept of Ricardo’s comparative advantage, and he really destroyed it. I think he had something like seven major problems with it, and that got me interested, so I started looking into it. I’m very fortunate in that I have a pretty active and intelligent blog readership and they really like to engage and they have absolutely no respect for me so they’re quite happy to argue with me.
Most of them were free-traders as well so we ended up having an on-going two or three week debate about free trade, and it got pretty detailed to the extent that I went through Henry Hazlitt’s entire chapter on free trade just to look at it critically rather than just reading through it and accepting it. Just looking at the arguments. I found that the free trade arguments were just full of holes. Not just Ricardo’s, but also Hazlitt’s. That’s what got me realizing that Ricardo’s argument was totally dependent on the idea that capital could move but labor couldn’t and so what that got me thinking about was the fact that a libertarian society – even if we could convince everyone in the United States that libertarianism was the correct way to approach things – would rapidly be eliminated by the free movement of peoples as people from non-libertarian societies, people from cultures where they have absolutely no ideals that are in common with the Founding Fathers or with libertarian ideals, would rapidly be able to come in and end that libertarian society in much the same way that the Californians have gone into Colorado and completely changed the political climate there.
So, Ian Fletcher’s book is what really triggered that whole shift in thought process. Now I look at the concept of the free movement of peoples, free trade, and those sorts of concepts with a considerable amount of skepticism. Of course, in Europe we’re seeing some of those problems related to the idea of the free movement of peoples just as you see it in the States with the Central Americans coming across the border.
GJ: Right. What is the name of the Fletcher book?
VD: Let me see here. Actually, I have it right here. It is Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why.
GJ: OK. That’s going to go right on my reading list. Thank you.
There were two things that really undermined my libertarianism. One was very much what you were talking about. It simply occurred to me that a libertarian society requires people that are willing to play by that ethic, but if a libertarian society doesn’t exclude people who will exploit that ethic then it will be destroyed. If you have open borders, and anybody can come in and basically they can come in and take your stuff or take your society from you, that will be the end of libertarianism. Therefore libertarianism requires that you exclude the free-riders, exclude the people who don’t play by those rules. But you can’t do that by libertarian means. You can’t draw borders around people, you can’t say, “You have to leave because you won’t play by the rules of our game.”
“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.”
Wonder what Franklin would have said about, say, the bailout of GM and Wall Street?
flash,
I think Hoppe answered the problems you raised in a 1998 essay, focusing on the distinction between goods, which cannot move without an invitation, and people, who can. Basically in a libertarian society there are no public spaces or public property, no rights to fair housing or employment or non-discrimination, everyone that enters and stays basically has to have a sponsor, and if an immigrant does sufficiently offend cultural norms, he can be ostracized; this is how free societies can protect themselves.
Hoppe, “The Case for Free Trade and Restricted Immigration”
https://mises.org/sites/default/files/13_2_8_0.pdf
Thanks AP. I’ve used that same essay to argue that for libertarian to succeed on any level it has to accept a shotgun wedding with potent nationalism…after all without the latter , the former will cease to exist.
Libertarian Nationalism Vs. National Libertarianism – Ex-Army …
ex-army.blogspot.com/2014/…/libertarian-nationalism-vs-national.html
Jul 12, 2014 … I (and others) call it Libertarian Nationalism, while Vox Day calls it National Libertarianism. Whatever you call it, it’s essentially a policy of …
link here: http://ex-army.blogspot.com/2014/07/libertarian-nationalism-vs-national.html
Regarding Ian Fletcher’s book, “Free Trade Doesn’t Work”, it seems to me all of his arguments against free trade are basically collectivist, while the methodology and epistemology of the Austrian school are, as you know, staunchly and starkly individualistic. Some excerpts from one writer’s response:
“Ian Fletcher … wants us all to cower behind tariff barriers because, as he says, free trade doesn’t work. My own take on that argument is ‘doesn’t work for whom?’.
It works just fine for consumers, works just great for those who are better than others at what they produce and doesn’t work very well at all for people facing competition from foreign producers who are better at whatever it is than they are.”
“…when considering trade I simply do not consider the position of the producers at all. As Smith pointed out, the aim of all production is consumption. I take that to mean that what we should be interested in, care about even, is consumption. We should care that a pair of shoes for a child to go to school in is $10 or $15. Not whether the producer is within the same national boundaries as ourselves or not. Just to continue in this vein, I tend not to think of ‘national economies’ either. I just don’t think they’re relevant to any of the interesting questions. And it’s most certainly not true that countries trade with each other either. Individuals do, companies do, but outside those poor benighted places where the government owns the industry, countries do not trade.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/09/01/in-response-to-ian-fletcher/
flash, didn’t see your latest posts before I posted, but it looks like we mostly agree, except that you’re probably more nationalistic than me. The key question, in my book, is whether it’s proper for the majority of the nation to impose their opinions on the minority within the nation who disagree.