In my forthcoming graphic novel, I argue that all leading moral theories strongly support open borders. Only yesterday, though, did I learn that philosopher Joseph Carens covered the utilitarian, Rawlsian, and Nozickian cases in a single 1987 article. The piece: “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders” (Review of Politics). EconLog readers may particularly enjoy the Nozickian section:
One popular position on immigration goes something like this: “It’s our country. We can let in or keep out whomever we want.” This could be interpreted as a claim that the right to exclude aliens is based on property rights, perhaps collective or national property rights. Would this sort of claim receive support from theories in which property rights play a central role? I think not, because those theories emphasize individual property rights and the concept of collective or national property rights would undermine the individual rights that these theories wish to protect.
Carens continues:
Would this minimal state be justified in restricting immigration? Nozick never answers this question directly, but his argument at a number of points suggests not. According to Nozick the state has no right to do anything other than enforce the rights which individuals already enjoy in the state of nature. Citizenship gives rise to no distinctive claim…
Note what this implies for immigration. Suppose a farmer from the United States wanted to hire workers from Mexico. The government would have no right to prohibit him from doing this. To prevent the Mexicans from coming would violate the rights of both the American farmer and the Mexican workers to engage in voluntary transactions. Of course, American workers might be disadvantaged by this competition with foreign workers. But Nozick explicitly denies that anyone has a right to be protected against competitive disadvantage. (To count that sort of thing as a harm would undermine the foundations of individual property rights.) Even if the Mexicans did not have job offers from an American, a Nozickean government would have no grounds for preventing them from entering the country. So long as they were peaceful and did not steal, trespass on private property, or otherwise violate the rights of other individuals, their entry and their actions would be none of the state’s business.
The “right to exclude” is a right held by individual property-owners, not governments:
Does this mean that Nozick’s theory provides no basis for the exclusion of aliens? Not exactly. It means rather that it provides no basis for the state to exclude aliens and no basis for individuals to exclude aliens that could not be used to exclude citizens as well. Poor aliens could not afford to live in affluent suburbs (except in the servants’ quarters), but that would be true of poor citizens too.
Individual property owners could refuse to hire aliens, to rent them houses, to sell them food, and so on, but in a Nozickean world they could do the same things to their fellow citizens. In other words, individuals may do what they like with their own personal property. They may normally exclude whomever they want from land they own. But they have this right to exclude as individuals, not as members of a collective. They cannot prevent other individuals from acting differently (hiring aliens, renting them houses, etc.)
What about the “utopia” part of Anarchy, State, and Utopia?
Is there any room for collective action to restrict entry in Nozick’s theory? In the final section of his book, Nozick draws a distinction between nations (or states) and small face-to-face communities. People may voluntarily construct small communities on principles quite different from the ones that govern the state so long as individuals are free to leave these communities. For example, people may choose to pool their property and to make collective decisions on the basis of majority rule. Nozick argues that this sort of community has a right to restrict membership to those whom it wishes to admit and to control entry to its land. But such a community may also redistribute its jointly held property as it chooses. This is not an option that Nozick (or any other property rights theorist) intends to grant to the state.
Summing up:
This shows why the claim “It’s our country. We can admit or exclude whomever we want” is ultimately incompatible with a property rights theory like Nozick’s. Property cannot serve as a protection for individuals against the collective if property is collectively owned. If the notion of collective ownership is used to justify keeping aliens out, it opens the possibility of using the same notion to justify redistributing income or whatever else the majority decides. Nozick explicitly says that the land of a nation is not the collective property of its citizens. It follows that the control that the state can legitimately exercise over that land is limited to the enforcement of the rights of individual owners. Prohibiting people from entering a territory because they did not happen to be born there or otherwise gain the credentials of citizenship is no part of any state’s legitimate mandate. The state has no right to restrict immigration.
I would add that if a whole country was collective property, there would be a mighty case for strictly regulating it as a dangerous monopolist.
READER COMMENTS
Hazel Meade
Sep 19 2018 at 2:18pm
An excellent summary of why the “collective property rights” argument made by many anti-immigration commenters is contrary to libertarian political philosophy. You just can’t be a libertarian and make this argument. You can make it if you’re a socialist tho. There’s no contradiction between advocating nationalized health care and collective control of immigration.
Philo
Sep 19 2018 at 2:34pm
I don’t think an international-socialist, for whom “the people” are all the people, not just the citizens of a particular country, can make this argument. A national-socialist, who confined his socialism within national borders, could make the argument—but what would be his argument for nationalism?
Hazel Meade
Sep 20 2018 at 11:18am
One of the arguments that many of our modern nationalists make is that social trust declines as diversity increases. In other words, socialism works better when people are ethnically homogenous. So it’s actually quite consistent to marry socialism to ethnic nationalism.
P Burgos
Sep 19 2018 at 4:20pm
TLDR; A libertarian minimal state is a national suicide pact, especially in the face of other nations that don’t have a minimal state, as nations without a minimal state can use state power to build larger, more effective armies. Any state that cannot maintain its own existence even in principle cannot be considered a legitimate state. Therefore, any libertarian theory of a minimal state cannot provide a satisfying theory of a legitimate state, as libertarian theory fails to prove that such a state can actually exist, we don’t have examples of such a state, and we have good reason to think that such a state, if attempted, would very quickly be conquered by a more powerful, less libertarian state.
All of that seems like a reductio ad absurdum of a property rights theory as a justification for a state. That is to say, no state can actually exist that would be so limited, because any old non-libertarian state would easily conquer it.
If you all you have are individuals with property rights and no collective (and no collective rights), how are you going to assemble an army large enough and powerful enough to fend off other states with no such compunctions about collective rights? Why would someone want to fight for the property rights of someone who lives hundreds of miles away? Wouldn’t a state with some collective rights be able to assemble a much larger and more powerful army?
Once you admit that you need an army to fend off other states, and that you need an effective army, you start running into the need to start limiting people’s property rights. For example, a nation can very rationally prohibit its citizens from selling their land to a foreign nation, and it can restrict immigration sponsored by that foreign nation to establish a base in which to, say, train soldiers. Nor does the state, under Nozick’s view, seem to have any right to keep out “little green men” who were not born in the country. It would also seem that the state, if it wants to survive, should be seen as legitimately having the power to compel individuals to sell land that is strategically very valuable in defending the country against attack. It could also, say, tax citizens to build roads necessary to transport soldiers. Really, the list goes on and on and on when you realize that no state can be viewed as legitimate that cannot resist being conquered by another nation, and that a lot of things that libertarians do not condone actually do make nations stronger militarily, such that the arm’s race between nations compels any legitimate state to do things that aren’t libertarian.
Hazel Meade
Sep 20 2018 at 1:35pm
You can make many of these arguments against internal threats to the state, as well. For instance, wouldn’t the state have to be able to prevent itself from being overthrown from within? If so, then why shouldn’t it’s legitimacy as a state rest on it’s ability to restrict freedom of speech, or the right to bear arms, or the rights of ethnic minorities, or of political participation? If you look around the world, there are actually many strong states the do this for explicitly that reason – dissent must be suppressed in order that the state not succumb to internal opposition – otherwise it’s not a state (or that would be the argument). Indeed, why even be a democracy? One could easily look at the ruling establishment party as the legitimate representative of the people, and of opponents to that establishment as enemies of the state – so that ceding power to them in election would be equivalent to surrendering to an invading enemies. If the state must have all these rights of collective power to prevent a foreign invasion, why should it not have the same powers to prevent internal uprisings?
P Burgos
Sep 21 2018 at 9:38am
“If the state must have all these rights of collective power to prevent a foreign invasion, why should it not have the same powers to prevent internal uprisings?”
I believe that you have just hit upon one of the key insights that animates Russian and Chinese political thought. A state must effectively have all of those rights or it will not survive, even a liberal or libertarian state. Just look at the US during the civil war. Not that it is a good idea to continually exercise that power, especially when you are not facing the threat of invasion. Don’t forget that Brits used to pride themselves on being free and living on an island, two facts that in their mind were strongly connected.
Thomas Sewell
Sep 20 2018 at 9:44pm
What you appear to miss in your three comments on this topic is that you don’t need to have a monopoly all-powerful government in order for services of various types (roads, fire, hospital, contract resolution, military defense, police, etc…) to be provided. There are already many service areas where people don’t typically bother with the official “government” solution because it’s too inefficient and costly compared to available private solutions, even while still paying additionally for the government version of the service. If the government weren’t competing with a “free” (not really, of course) solution, even more could be done.
People at our current social technological level are capable of organizing competing/cooperative police and military forces more than sufficient to defend a nation while remaining voluntary in participation and eschewing a forced monopoly provider.
P Burgos
Sep 21 2018 at 9:48am
“People at our current social technological level are capable of organizing competing/cooperative police and military forces more than sufficient to defend a nation while remaining voluntary in participation and eschewing a forced monopoly provider.”
I disagree. Another name for “competing/cooperative police and military forces” is a gang, or a mafia. The problem isn’t finding a theoretically morally legitimate state (that is impossible in practice), the problem is actually building a state that makes minimal use of violence and coercion against its own citizens, and also minimizes violence and coercion between its citizens. That is to say, libertarians should stop tilting at windmills, and get on with the really important thing, which is to make actually existing states more libertarian. I suspect that this is why Brink Lindsey and Will Willkinson now call themselves “liberaltarians”. They looked around the world, realized that democracy is the best system we have to keep governments in check (but still strong enough to survive), saw that no developed democratic nation has ever rejected a welfare state, and realized that is something akin to a sociological law of nature that democracies will have welfare states, and instead of fighting nature, decided to fight where they could win.
Thomas Sewell
Sep 21 2018 at 7:28pm
The problem with that argument is that it proves too much. The additional name for that is also “government”. We already have competing organizations, they just currently tend to compete and divide based on geographic borders. I don’t intend to write a book here in the comments, but there are only a couple things special about geography which would need to be addressed in order to compete in other ways instead.
What if I told you the majority of the police power in the United States is already held by more than 50 competing governments, which manage to cooperate in other ways at the national level? That those 50 competing governments have sub-units which also compete with each other?
This isn’t a new concept. The only thing new about it is to arrange things so that organizations are able to compete and cooperate based on other factors than simple lines on a map.
In the meantime, yeah, I agree with you that the best time investment is spent pulling the existing stuff towards a more libertarian direction than they otherwise would be, because you need a longer track record to convince people things are possible and you need more convinced people in order to try more things they aren’t already used to.
P Burgos
Sep 24 2018 at 3:46pm
I think that it is important to note that the 50 US states do not compete over who has jurisdiction over certain territory, nor do the sub-division political units of states. Also, I would agree with you that government is another name for that, and my impression from reading history is that contemporary governments evolved from organizations that in many regards were like gangs or mafia. Given everything that is at stake, I would rather we move consistently, but incrementally in a more libertarian direction. What we have really is so much better than what came before that we should be careful with it, and to a certain extent treasure it.
P Burgos
Sep 19 2018 at 4:34pm
Another way to put my question; how could a libertarian minimal state defeat China’s army, without public hospitals, without public sanitation, without roads, highways, and railways, without schools to make sure that the nation had citizens educated enough to make decent soldiers, without taxing and devoting resources to develop weapons systems and military technology, without regulation of natural monopolies, without some form of border control to limit the ability of hostile nations to send spies and saboteurs, without eminent domain to ensure that the military has control of the most military strategic portions of land, without regulations to ensure that food and consumer products don’t poison or sicken the populace (because poisoned and sickened people don’t make for the best soldiers) and so on, etc., etc.?
How could you convince someone to die for, and kill for, such a nation?
How do you keep a foreign nation that wants to conquer the country from turning the unfortunate in the libertarian minimal state into a fifth column by offering them a guarantee of a social welfare state?
P Burgos
Sep 19 2018 at 4:54pm
Also, as Machiavelli points out, if you want to have a stable state, you need a balance of power that keeps the wealthy and powerful from being too predatory, and the masses invested enough in the system to keep from burning it down. Machiavelli also held that such a balance of power was likely to lead to public virtue, as the ambitious would need to somehow or other act in the public interest in order to succeed, as they otherwise would not get enough support to succeed.
Suffice to say that I am frustrated with any account of government, and what makes it legitimate, that doesn’t grapple with political economy and war between states.
Jay
Sep 19 2018 at 6:07pm
Your university is located in Virginia, so it’s a pretty good bet that the title to your house traces back to a land grant by the British crown. There are no property rights without states; the power to enforce property rights is inextricably entwined with the power to ignore them or redefine them to your liking.
Also, everything P Burgos said.
Russell Nelson
Sep 20 2018 at 4:50pm
Where do people get these goofy ideas from? Thought experiment: what would happen a state refused to enforce private property rights? Obviously the landowner would need to do it themselves, with a gun, or a hired gun. The hired gun is going to be cheaper, because they’re not going to actually patrol and defend your land. They’re going to enter into an agreement with your neighbors not to enter your land. Then they only need to defend the neighbor’s land. Etc, etc. Probably somewhere in there the various hired guns will enter into an agreement to defend each other’s land.
Same effect as a state, but no state. Isn’t it funny how defenders of states cannot conceive of any alternative to a state when I can do it in five minutes? It’s almost as if their brains can’t conceive of a stateless society. Surely there’s a drug which can help them.
Jay
Sep 20 2018 at 6:27pm
They tried something like that with the khrysha system after the fall of the Soviet Union. They almost immediately became the Russian gangsters you’ve seen at the movies. It turned out that the hired guns had very little incentive not to rob you.
Jay
Sep 20 2018 at 6:38pm
Also, if you want to see how humans function without a state in practice, there are many current and historical examples of regions with very weak states. Post-Soviet Russia, Yemen, Liberia, post-Roman Europe, etc. They aren’t generally known for being bastions of liberty (not even Liberia, unfortunately). They’re more the sorts of areas where armed teenagers with AK-47s follow guys with nicknames like General Butt Naked (yes, that’s a real person).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Butt_Naked
Ben Kennedy
Sep 19 2018 at 10:17pm
“I argue that all leading moral theories strongly support open borders”
Isn’t this just not true on it’s face? One simply needs to point the billions of people that seem to think closed national borders are perfectly compatible with their moral theories of choice. I’m with Haidt on this point, people generally choose their moral theories in order to rationalize their moral impulses. If you are concluding that billions of people are expressing beliefs contrary to their moral theories, let me suggest that you don’t really understand what their moral theories actually are
Max More
Sep 21 2018 at 2:06am
Ben says: “If you are concluding that billions of people are expressing beliefs contrary to their moral theories, let me suggest that you don’t really understand what their moral theories actually are”. Let me suggest that you have no idea how inconsistent the vast majority of people are. This reminds me of way back when I taught Philosophy of Religion. Most of my students (Pasadena, CA) were Catholic. Me: “Do you accept the official Catholic doctrine that the Pope’s pronouncements are infallible when made ex cathedra?” (Explanation provided.) Students: “Yes.” Me: “The Pope has said that it is immortal to use contraceptives. Do you agree with this?” Students: “No.”
Ben Kennedy
Sep 23 2018 at 12:53pm
If you have to explain the doctrine, I don’t think it is truly incorporated into their moral system. And even within Catholicism, there is a significant degree of variance as to what “Papal Infallibility” actually means. One might split that hair that the Pope is authoritative and matters of theology (e.g. the declaration of the Assumption of Mary in 1950) but not authoritative on what precisely constitutes a temporal sin. I also suspect there is strong correlation between those Catholics with more liberal views toward contraception and skepticism toward Papal authority – it is not uncommon for people to change their religion when their moral impulses come into conflict, like how the PC-USA and numerous other Protestant denominations have evolved in response to the social acceptance of homosexuality
Alex
Sep 19 2018 at 10:38pm
“American workers might be disadvantaged by this competition with foreign workers. But Nozick explicitly denies that anyone has a right to be protected against competitive disadvantage”
Nozick can explicitly deny anything he wants. I explicitly deny that I have to pay my rent, and according to Nozick I’m right because anyone can explicitly deny anything he or she wants without proof.
Iskander
Sep 20 2018 at 12:23am
Bryan, have you written down your thoughts on ASU anywhere?
Iskander
Sep 20 2018 at 5:58am
Wrong place!
Bedarz Iliachi
Sep 20 2018 at 1:48am
National territories are not analogous to private property at all, not even collective property.
The national territory is more usefully considered as a possession of a particular nation. A possession differs from property in that while a property is secured through laws, the possessions are secured though brute force.
There is no national right to any national territory–centuries of German building and possession of East Prussia, the cities of Konigsberg and Memel did not avail against the failure of German might against Soviet might.
Private property can exist, in its fullness, not in the state of nature, but in the state of law that is produced by states. Hence, possession of national territory, secured by national might, is essential prerequisite for private property. Again, ask the evicted Germans of East Prussia.
Hazel Meade
Sep 20 2018 at 11:51am
I like this argument, but it leaves open the question of how you can have a legitimate state – a state whose laws are aligned with moral theories of justice. One could opt to abandon the idea of a legitimate state altogether and just say might makes right and so there are no true rights because there are no legitimate states. But that is not really the project that liberalism is engaged in. We’re not in the business of throwing up our hands and abandoning the concept of justice – we’re in the business of devising rules for what legitimate states may or may not do. For defining what makes a state legitimate.
Bedarz Iliachi
Sep 20 2018 at 10:55pm
Legitimacy of a state depends on an internal matter-its relation with the people that constitute it.
It has nothing to do wigh the external matter of asserting and securing its territory against other states. As Locke has it, the princes are in a state of nature with respect to each other.
The theory says that property is acquired by mixing personal labor with an unowned thing but it does not specify how much labor is required to be mixed with any particular thing. States produce local consensus on this point thus enabling property rights
Hazel Meade
Sep 21 2018 at 9:46am
<i>its relation with the people that constitute it.</i>
Right. I think that provides an answer to P Burges objection above. The state needs to protect the property rights of individuals within the country and part of that duty entails keeping out hostile foreign invaders. But in doing that, the state is acting as a proxy for the protection of individual property rights, it is not empowered to claim collective ownership of the entire country and use that power to keep out peaceful immigrants. It may only do what is required to defend the individual property rights of the individual owners. If some Americans want to employ or rent to those immigrants, barring them from doing so would go beyond the states mandate to defend individual liberty.
P Burgos
Sep 21 2018 at 10:45am
“It may only do what is required to defend the individual property rights of the individual owners.”
I think that in reality, what is practically required to defend individual property is a vastly larger set of actions than most, or perhaps any libertarians would admit. I would argue this mostly flows from democracy being the best form of government at defending property rights that we have come up with, as well as the need to maintain fairly large, technologically advanced standing armies, and in addition the existence of ideologically opposed regimes that are always working in some way or another to sabotage democracies.
However, if libertarians are willing to concede that you need democracy to protect individual property rights, and that democracies don’t seem to be willing to countenance open borders (or the lack of a welfare state, etc.), then I think I would not think so much of libertarian thought is a bunch of baloney. It would be nice to see some libertarians willing to admit that their commitment to property rights as the legitimate basis of government commits them to view democracy as having some degree of legitimacy, and then to grapple with the problem that democracy, the most legitimate form of government from the point of view of libertarians, often (and perhaps universally in regards to some issues), delivers some policies at odds with libertarian theory while still protecting individual property rights.
Hazel Meade
Sep 21 2018 at 2:49pm
I think that in reality, what is practically required to defend individual property is a vastly larger set of actions than most, or perhaps any libertarians would admit.
Well if those vastly larger actions include violating individual property rights then that would defeat the purpose, no? What is the point of having a state that will not only defend me from a foreign army, but also prevent me from overthrowing it and take my property for public use in order to defeat that foreign army? Heck, I might welcome invaders if their philosophy promised to be more libertarian!
P Burgos
Sep 21 2018 at 9:57pm
I think that is a really good point about government facing the problem that their populace might prefer another, foreign ruler that offers them a better deal. It turns out that people seem strongly to want to live in nations with a welfare state and national control of borders and immigration. This is true in Latin America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, etc. So, if you want a state that at least protects property rights to some extent, you have to take the good with the bad. That is the best deal on offer in the world, from a libertarian perspective. Just because democracies do stupid, unjust things does not make democracy illegitimate. What other system of government better protects property rights (even if democracies do regularly infringe on those rights)?
Weir
Sep 20 2018 at 5:49am
“Poor aliens could not afford to live in affluent suburbs (except in the servants’ quarters), but that would be true of poor citizens too.”
Maybe this explains the resentment that people in affluent suburbs feel towards people in rural America, the rust belt, the poorer parts of the country?
If you’ve moved to an expensive city and taken out an expensive mortgage then you’ve played by the rules and done everything right. You’re a respectable, hard-working American. You did what you were always told you needed to do. You stayed in school, got a degree, got another degree, built up a lot of debt.
You did all this for your future and for your children. You paid for good schools and you want to keep it that way. You kept your kids away from the kids who smoke cigarettes and use offensive terms and drink sugary water. Keeping our kids and their kids apart is what it means to be middle class.
So you paid your dues and you want the government to keep its side of the bargain. You paid to live within an acceptable commute to the office. You paid for your medical care. And now you hear people from coal country and the failed states of America talking about how they want a free ride from the government.
They want the same stuff you paid for through all your hard work, getting certified, taking on all that debt, your expensive degrees.
They don’t want to pay for good schools. That kind of real estate is more than they can afford. They don’t want to wait in the queue in a crowded emergency room, but they’re not willing to pay the kind of money that you’ve paid to get your kids looked after promptly and professionally by the family GP.
So of course you’re resentful. You’re angry. You paid and paid and paid to separate yourself and your kids from America’s poor. You never asked the government to build a literal wall between us and them the way these rural voters talk about keeping the genuinely poor people of the world out of the entire country.
Keeping poor kids out of “good schools” is the core and key to American middle class existence. Keeping our part of town the way it is, keeping our kids from slipping down to their level, this is what the white collar professional works so hard to achieve. But voters in ruined factory towns and the decaying part of the country want a literal border wall as a government-provided alternative to college and career and kale and quinoa, all the keys to success that you had to earn and learn, step by step the hard way.
Hazel Meade
Sep 20 2018 at 11:39am
This is kind of a classic case of projection. The upper middle class does not resent the poor. It is the poor which resents the upper middle class for having all those nice things. Nobody talks about keeping poor kids out of good schools. They talk about keeping good kids out of poor schools.
Russell Nelson
Sep 20 2018 at 4:52pm
People get these weird ideas in their heads, and the only way they can get them out is by writing them down. I’m sure that Weir no longer thinks this is true. He just had to get it out of his head and into writing, before he could stop thinking it.
Weir
Sep 20 2018 at 8:24pm
Further reading.
Mitchell Stevens: “Formal schooling is only part of a much larger and more complicated process called social reproduction: the transfer of knowledge, cultural perspective, and social position from one generation to the next. Social reproduction takes place in classrooms, but it also happens in family rooms and on playgrounds, at parties, and in bed. It includes all the things parents do to ensure that their children will have good lives. It includes all the things that schools and congregations and summer camps do to ensure that their charges are safe and happy. Formal schooling is the infrastructure that organizes this varied process and lends it cultural legitimacy. Think of the many different kinds of things people do for kids that sound better when they are described as ‘educational,’ and you get a sense of how this legitimation process works.”
William Voegeli: “The consuming concern with privilege and oppression, with confronting and correcting historical wrongs–social justice, in short, the ideology of preeminent colleges–has moved outward to less eminent ones and downward to secondary and primary schools. Many parents are eager, and many others are willing, to entrust their children to an educational system that inculcates this deep solicitude for the downtrodden, albeit just that portion of the downtrodden meeting certain demographic criteria. But the system, especially its most exalted institutions, is also expected to transmit the aspirations, expectations, and advantages of the uptrodden, those who started or climbed high and want their children to start and climb even higher.”
Adrian Wooldridge: “A creed that started off as a critique of the existing power structure–that, indeed, has suspicion of concentrations of power at the molten core of its philosophy–is being misused as a tool by one of the most powerful elites in history. Liberalism has, in effect, been turned on its head and become the opposite of what it was when it started out.”
William Deresiewicz: “The culture of political correctness, the religion of the fancy private colleges, provides the affluent white and Asian students who make up the preponderant majority of their student bodies, and the affluent white and Asian professionals who make up the preponderant majority of their tenured faculty and managerial staffs, with the ideological resources to alibi or erase their privilege. It enables them to tell themselves that they are children of the light–part of the solution to our social ills, not an integral component of the problem. It may speak about dismantling the elite, but its real purpose is to flatter it.”
Reihan Salam: “More than one Dumbo parent has tried to explain to me how they’re totally different from other people who fight against integration. They explain that what they really want is a better world in which we spend far more on our public schools, not mentioning, or perhaps not knowing, that New York city spends $20,331 per pupil, almost twice as much as the national average of $10,700, and that much of this money is spent very inefficiently. Of course they want integration, they’ll tell you, but only if it entails no sacrifice on their part. ‘It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children,’ says one Dumbo parent. Well, yes, it is more complicated, and that is exactly what every parent believes, whether they are in Brooklyn or South Boston or Kansas City.”
Bonus from Dean Baker: “Protecting doctors from foreign-trained competition costs the United States close to $100 billion a year (around $700 per family) in higher medical costs. There are similar, if less rigid, protectionist barriers in place for other professions. For example, all dentists used to have to get a degree from a U.S. dental school; degrees from Canadian schools just became accepted as of 2011.”
Warren Platts
Sep 21 2018 at 2:03pm
If there are no collective property rights, then publicly held corporations cannot have property rights. That is, a piece of land owned by a corporation cannot exclude individuals from trespassing on that land. Conversely, if you insist that corporations can have collective property rights, then the nation must also have collective property rights, including the right to exclude trespassers.
Hazel Meade
Sep 21 2018 at 2:52pm
Corporations are voluntary contracts between individuals. Nations are not.
Thomas Sewell
Sep 21 2018 at 7:40pm
Collective property rights and delegated property rights are two slightly different concepts.
If you have a government which was created by a delegation of rights and powers from the citizens themselves, then it can only have what was already possessed to be delegated to it and those who did the delegating don’t “lose” what they delegated. When you grant someone a power of attorney to represent you and make decisions for you in some matter, you don’t lose the power yourself to also do so.
That’s also how a corporation works. Individuals grant it the right to hire people on their behalf, pay them money from the capital they’ve provided, enter into additional contracts in pursuit of the goals outlined in the corporate charter, etc… None of those things prevents those individuals from doing similar activities with resources they didn’t allocate to the corporation to use on their behalf.
Claiming collective property rights existing as part of the government implies the government, by virtue of it’s collective nature, has some sort of right or power over and above what the citizens have and therefore may have granted them. There is some additional source of property rights for the government, i.e. comparable to the divine right of kings, as an example, which the people themselves aren’t allowed to exercise.
As the U.S. Constitution explicitly talks in terms of the powers being granted by the people to various branches of government and also has an amendment which is careful to spell out that every other right not granted is reserved to those who already had it, it’s clear from the document itself as well as the writing of the founders which sort of government they were forming. It had nothing to do with collective rights, but rather with individual rights being delegated. In other countries, YMMV.
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