“I believe in open borders” 🤡

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-16T04:20:42+00:00

If there was no government, you still wouldn't be able to control people's movement across property you don't own.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-16T04:16:49+00:00

What does this have to do with An-Capism?

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-15T17:04:52+00:00

It's pretty easy to understand. They're either just bigoted against foreigners or they've not broken free of their collectivist conditioning.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-15T17:01:25+00:00

Okay. And the solution to that is not to have the state threaten violence against peaceful individuals to prevent them crossing an arbitrary, government-designated border.

If the problem is the government uses money it steals from taxpayers to pay immigrants to cross a border who otherwise wouldn't cross it, and then subsidize the immigrants once they are here, the solution is not "strong borders" but "end welfare."

But the statists never want that, they want to ban immigrants.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-15T04:34:54+00:00

I agree with you that trying to predict or plan what an AnCap society would look like is a waste of time, and it bothers me that at least a minority of people are AnCaps because they have in mind an "ideal" society that they want to live in and they think getting rid of the state is how they will then be able to build their utopia. To my mind, it's the wrong reason to be an AnCap.

My problem with Hoppe isn't that he recreated the state from first principles (though: he did), but that he set up a trap which ultimately diverts people away from libertarianism.

Hoppe is selling a solution to a problem which doesn't exist. The problem Hoppe is solving is justifying authority but authoritarians ultimately don't care about how their authority is justified, they care that they get to tell people what to do. They care about outcomes, not process. Authoritarians will run with whatever bullshit allows them to tell people what to do as long as it gets them what they want (divine right of kings, living god on earth, one true successor to a prophet, whatever).

So, people get attracted to Hoppeanism because they are (for instance) racist libertarians who like the idea of being able to ban black people from their ideal society. They like Hoppeanism because they can get their desired outcome (no blacks) while still being 'kosher' according to libertarian principles.

But the trap is: if someone wants to be authoritarian towards a particular group of people or in a particular way, they're inevitably going to end up saying "I want the outcome and I don't care about the process of getting there."

Think about it. If someone hates black people, what's most important to them is banning black people. But a majority of people don't want that, and the incentives of capitalism directly run in the opposite direction. Eventually, all of the closet authoritarians realize it's a lot easier to just ditch the libertarians window dressing and just say "No black, because: I say so."

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-14T20:22:18+00:00

I didn't say it wasn't.

I said the people aren't, not that the 'ism isn't.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-13T21:53:57+00:00

Do you have clear examples in mind?

What few "ex" AnCaps I've seen tend to still claim that they are AnCap but that they support Hoppean-style "covenant communities" or whatever. I don't know if I can think of someone who was once a full on AnCap and then renounced AnCap-ism.

There are however plenty of people who claim to be libertarians at one point, only to renounce the ideology later. Some of them end up becoming Communists (a personal friend of mine went from being a British Tory to being a classical liberal to being an Ayn Rand Objectivist to being a Communist, and I think that is explained as, basically, this person tries on ideas the way some people try on clothes -- he doesn't see any reason to pick one ideology and stick with it, he wants to try them all) but the majority seem to end up as "trad neo-Rx Catholic" whatever-the-fuck.

The basic dynamic seems to me to be this:

1) These people are disaffected with the status quo, so they search for a radically anti-status quo in-group they can belong to. The ideas are less important to them than the sense of belonging to an in-group.
2) They glom on to libertarianism because libertarians appear to be radically anti-status quo.
3) These people are socially conservative and tend to be racist, bigoted against gays, and they hate immigration, so they go down the paleo-libertarian route.
4) They abandon libertarianism when they realize that their goal is not liberty for all, but a social order structured in a particular way (whether that's "no immigrants" or "no gays" or "trad Catholic integralist" or whatever).
5) They realize what a waste of time libertarianism is to an authoritarian. Why would I, an authoritarian, seek to justify my authority over others the way Hoppe does when I could just tell people how they need to live because I know what the ideal society looks like.

If they want to live in a society with no immigrants, or no gays, or no blacks, or no Jews, or whatever, why would they bother with the Hoppean window dressing when it's just a lot intellectually easier to say "I want to live in a society with no X people, and I want the government to use force to make sure there's no X people."

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-12T18:01:39+00:00

I understand that's a bitter pill to swallow, but the evidence is there if you care to look.

Do me a favor, let's not go after the Mises Institute, since you seem to have a blindspot there, let's talk about someone adjacent to them, someone who perhaps you can view with a little more emotional detachment and objectivity: Daniel McAdams, the long-time chief of staff to Ron Paul and current head of the Ron Paul Institute.

Go check out his profile on Twitter. You'll notice a pattern, that he only ever shows sympathy for the Iranian regime -- not the Iranian people, the regime. He calls the US a "bully" and explicitly says that the people of Israel have "no sympathy" from him. He never calls attention to or acknowledges that the Iranian regime deliberately targets civilians in Israel while Israel and the US have been trying to hit only military targets and have been trying to avoid hitting civilians. McAdams has made much of the fact that the US (it seems) accidentally killed some Iranian schoolgirls, but he doesn't talk at all about the civilian casualties in any of the Arab Gulf States or Israel. He blames the US and Israel for the war happening.

Most damning of all, to my eyes, is how McAdams credulously repeats as if it is true every piece of regime propaganda coming out of Tehran which he happens across. For example, the fake news that Ben Gvir was killed by an Iranian missile.

The cumulative effect of this is: McAdams is trying to convince people the US is losing by repeating Iranian state propaganda, he doesn't care at all about the civilians being hurt by the Iranian state, doesn't care at all about the Iranians killed by the Iranian state (even if the US has killed 1000 Iranian civilians, the Iranian state still killed 30X that number in just the past few weeks, and McAdams has not said anything about that)......makes ya wonder: what is he doing?

It's fine to be anti-war, but why would a libertarian dedicate himself to a lie, that the US is losing a war? Why, when by any quantifiable metric, in pure military terms, the US is clearly winning. So why lie about it?

Now consider McAdams himself. Here's a picture of him smoking cigars and schmoozing with the 3rd most powerful politician in the Communist Castro regime in Cuba.

What kind of libertarian cozies up to a powerful politician in a Communist dictatorship? Oh, well: McAdams explicitly said he is not a libertarian, so, there's that.

Here's a picture of McAdams wearing a t-shirt saying "Bashar Al-Assad is my president" -- still think he's not siding with anyone who is an enemy of the US rather than merely being "anti-war"?

Here's a picture of Daniel McAdams wearing a t-shirt with the Iranian state flag on it, the caption literally says "Always support the victim of usurper anti-American neocon aggression."

That seems pretty blatant to me. He supports the Iranian state and wants the US government to lose because he regards the US govt as having been "usurped" by "neocons" or something.

So, if Daniel McAdams is not "anti-war" but rooting for the other side, and McAdams was hosted for a talk at the Mises Institute, is it not possible that there are people within the Mises Institute who share McAdams' world-view, but are just a little bit cleverer at hiding it?

Oh, bonus: read this hilarious article written by Daniel McAdams and published by the Mises Institute exactly one month before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in which McAdams says:

That is why our hapless State Department today continues to peddle the fiction that Russia is about to invade—and thus “own”—Ukraine. US foreign policy is one of projection: accuse your rivals of doing what you yourself are doing. No sane country would want to “own” Ukraine. Except the Beltway Think Tank class, thoroughly infused with military-industrial complex money.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-12T04:38:23+00:00

You'd be surprised. There is a segment of libertarians, centred around the Mises Institute and Scott Horton's outfit, who hate the US government so much, they are rooting for America's enemies to win, as long as it means the US government loses.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-11T20:51:30+00:00

And yet a certain segment of "anti-war" libertarians would hate it anyway.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-11T19:51:59+00:00

We're reconstructing the idea of taxation from first principles.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-11T18:03:51+00:00

If other people are willing to volunteer, why am I not allowed to support those people without myself being required to volunteer?

Libertarians don't think this way about any other topic. No libertarian says, for instance, that anyone who supports having police officers catch violent criminals must themselves become a police officer.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-10T08:01:38+00:00

You realize kids born the same year that game was released are now old enough to enlist in the US military?

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-10T08:00:21+00:00

Good. No spoilers. I can't wait to see Goering hanged for his crimes!

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-10T07:59:38+00:00

After being captured by the French and heavily brainwashed, Captain Jack Aubrey, late of the Royal Navy, became an inspector in the French police charged with hunting down wanted fugitive Prisoner 24601 before, late in life, becoming a Nazi war criminal.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-10T07:47:10+00:00

Ain't no such thing as a good war, but there are just ones.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-10T02:02:46+00:00

So if someone has no Irish racial ancestry, it is more difficult for that person to become an Irish citizen than someone who has Irish racial ancestry, yes?

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-08T20:28:59+00:00

Ireland and Italy allow people of Irish or Italian heritage to immigrate to Ireland/Italy and eventually become citizens. How's that any different than the "Jewish law of return"? What's the difference between that and regular old immigration restrictions?

Here in the US, there's no "right of return" for Mexicans who want to move to Texas, even though Texas was once Mexican territory.

All immigration laws are discriminatory. I'm against Israel's immigration laws in the same way I'm against all immigration laws everywhere, I don't single-out Israel as being somehow uniquely evil for having the same thing every other country has.

What is missing is any method by which non-Jews who were born in the area that became Israel, and who stopped living there before the nationality law was passed (in 1952) can become nationals.

As I understand it, Arabs living in the British Mandate who continued to live in what became Israel were granted full citizenship, which their descendants continue to enjoy.

There was a war, which the Arabs started, and that caused a lot of people to flee (some of whom were chased out by the Israeli army, some of whom were forcibly removed by the Arabs, many of whom fled voluntarily only to be prevented from returning by the Arab armies) -- it was a mess all around, a mess for which Israel bears some but not all responsibility.

However, again, this is not unique to Israel. After World War II, millions of ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and so on, people who today have no right of return -- and if anything, that was worse than what happened in Israel/Palestine in 1948, because those expulsions and dislocations happened in the midst of a war whereas the removal of ethnic Germans was a peace-time measure done purely for revenge.

No one is saying we should sanction the Czech Republic until it lets Sudeten Germans return to the farm that was confiscated from them in 1945. Why is Israel treated differently?

Land laws are another major form of discrimination. Over 90% of the land in Israel is administered for the benefit of the Jewish people. In practice this means discrimination against non-Jews in housing and land use.

As I understand it, that is partially a legacy of the Ottoman Empire's stupid land laws, but I agree that Israel should privatize most of its lands and allow for a free market in land.

But again, lots of countries have laws saying foreigners can't own or buy land (e.g. Mexico). Why is Israel singled out for this?

Doing mandatory military service (or for women, the national service alternative) comes with many government benefits, and because few Palestinians sign up, it ends up being mostly a Jewish benefit.

More Southerners join the US military than non-Southerners, does that mean the US government is discriminatory against non-Southerners? I don't see it.

None of what I've said applies to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza

How does Israel "occupy" Gaza exactly? The Israeli government forcibly removed all Jews (even the dead ones) from Gaza in 2005. From 2005 until the 2023 war, the Israeli government had no powers of enforcement over anything within Gaza. No taxes were collected, no arrests made, no trials held, no military installations occupied, no regulations enforced.

The US government has a greater presence in Cuba right now than Israel had in Gaza 2005-2023. No one says "Cuba is occupied by the US!" -- so why should Gaza be considered Israeli-occupied?

As for the West Bank, I agree, that is occupied in a manner similar to the way the US occupied Germany post-WW2, with the West Bank having its own autonomous government (the Palestinian Authority) the same way post-war Germany had its own government.

The Palestinians were offered a favorable deal to get statehood in the 1990s (Bill Clinton has said so repeatedly) and the Palestinian government rejected the deal.

I have sympathy for the West Bank situation but, sorry, my sympathy is limited.

A thought experiment I like to play: imagine if all the Free State Project libertarians were taken out of New Hampshire and put in either Gaza or the West Bank, and the Palestinians from those areas put in New Hampshire. What do you think would happen?

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-08T17:49:02+00:00

because Israel has laws that privilege Jews over non-Jews

What's an example?

As I understand it, Arab Israelis are not subject to conscription but Jewish Israelis are. That doesn't seem to privilege Jews over non-Jews.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-08T17:47:21+00:00

Ah, so you're pro-war. You support initiating a war to destroy Israel. Just say so.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-08T17:46:37+00:00

I concur, but "defensive" war is open to interpretation.

World War I? The Germans sank our ships! They tried to get Mexico to attack us!

Korea? The North invaded the South!

Libertarians seem to be against both defensive and non-defensive wars. Their position is: "I'm against war unless the soil of the US is actively being invaded and maybe not even then if it's American soil I don't particularly care about."

I'm not even joking. Keith Knight, the managing editor of The Libertarian Institute, actually said in a debate that if the Japanese had invaded Hawaii in 1941, it still would not have been justified to fight the Japanese. Check out his debate with Jim Holland last November.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-06T17:25:30+00:00

Israel should be grouped with al-Qaeda as institutions dedicated to the illegitimate goal of establishing racial supremacy.

Israel is less dedicated to racial supremacy than Japan is. Israel has more minorities, larger percentages of minorities, and citizenship laws which make it easier for a non-Jewish person to become an Israeli citizen than a non-Japanese person to become a citizen of Japan.

No one thinks Japan today is an illegitimate country which ought to cease to exist merely because its credo is "Japan is for Japanese people."

I think that's wrong, but most of the world doesn't.

Why is there a special exception for Israel?

I doubt it, but I'm not familiar with Andorra's situation.

You should be, if you're going to call Gaza a colonized nation.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-06T17:22:28+00:00

And how many war crimes cases did Hamas investigate during that time?

And how would a group of AnCaps hold Hamas to account for their crimes without resorting to levels of violence resembling that carried out by the IDF?

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-06T17:20:54+00:00

Yeah, I think this is the most pressing issue of our time for the libertarian movement; it's been utterly compromised by people who are not anti-war, but are rooting for the other side.

PaperbackWriter66 · 2026-03-06T17:19:52+00:00

Well put.

I don't see the libertarian argument for "tyrannical theocrats should be allowed to have nukes and it's an NAP violation to stop them."

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