The Nine Circles of Libertarian Hell

I already pointed out that, and why, my argument was neither a comparison nor a metaphor. And you are still arguing on the basis of your own false and disproved belief that it is a comparison and a metaphor.

Suppose that I want to visit the state of New York. I get in my car and drive there. If someone prevents me from entering New York, he is violating my rights. If he needs to see my passport and will let me through only on condition that my passport is valid, he is violating my rights whether or not he ultimately lets me through, because placing a condition on my passage violates my rights. If he needs to hear my plan for my future and will let me through only on condition that he likes what I'm telling him, he is violating my rights. If he defends his conduct by saying that he is reacting to the welfare state in New York, he is nevertheless violating my rights.

These are trivial truths that require mainly a mental resistance to the pressure of the familiar. The only reason we have come to expect and live with passports and visas and taxation and the drug war and government control of banking and so on and so forth is that we adjust to the impositions on our liberty small and large. Try not to let the familiarity, the everydayness, of the violations blind you to what they really are.

But regardless of your view on whether these are trivial truths, the particular argument offered in defense of Ron Paul's policy fails. If you agree with me that restrictions on movement are a violation of rights - i.e., if you believe that the state has no right to restrict movement - then in particular, the government has no right to quiz travelers about their plans, any more than Bob has a right to quiz Mary before she enters Jack's house. It is simply not Bob's place to be Jack's doorman or bouncer.

If, however, you disagree, and you believe that the government has a right to play doorman or bouncer for the territory of the United States, then - in the absence of further explanation as to the scope and nature of this right of the state to control who comes and goes - it follows from this general right that the government in particular has the right to base its policy of refusal on any criterion it likes. It might selectively allow attractive travelers, as bouncers are reputed to do at nightclubs. Bringing up the welfare state in this regard is superfluous, pointless, moot. If you think government has the right to bar entry, which implies that the government has some special proprietary relationship to the territory, then there is no need to bring up the welfare state as an excuse.

What I am saying here is that bringing up the welfare state does not create a right to stop people at the border. Either this right already exists - in which case the welfare state might constitute a reason for doing this but would not create a right since it already exists - or else this right does not exist, in which case the fact of the welfare state does not create the right. So the welfare state simply does not work as an excuse for Ron Paul's position.

In comments following up on your initial comment, you seemed to try to portray selective admission as some sort of crime fighting measure. But the crime in question has not occurred yet at the time of the travel. It is a future crime, and so you are talking about pre-emptive crime prevention. Whether or not you like pre-emptive crime-fighting, it is not very libertarian - specifically, it is not very open-borders. And the issue here wasn't whether Ron Paul is right or wrong in his Bush Doctrine-like approach to crime fighting (i.e., pre-emption of crime). Maybe George W. Bush is right about the rightness and effectiveness of pre-emption of evil and maybe Ron Paul is right in following in George Bush's footsteps on this matter. But regardless, Ron Paul isn't being very open-borders.

I suppose that Ron Paul can nevertheless be rescued as an open-borders type if he advocates pre-emptive crime-fighting generally and if he advocates the presumption of guilt and the responsibility for the individual to prove his innocence (which is what your description of Ron Paul's border policy amounts to). In that case he is not targeting people crossing the border. So if Ron Paul believes in universal the presumption of guilt for future crimes (e.g., if Ron believes that you should be by default considered a future rapist and that it is up to you to prove that you are not going to rape anyone in the future), then I will retract my comments regarding his border policy.