DEBATE: Does Libertarianism Entail A Right To Immigrate? - Chris Freiman vs. Simon Laird

Affirmative: Professor Chris Freiman, West Virginia University

Negative: Simon Laird, PhD student in economics at George Mason University

Moderator: Patrick Carroll, former Managing Editor at the Foundation for Economic Education

Patrick: Hello my name is Patrick Carroll and today I’m going to be moderating a debate on immigration between Simon Laird and Chris Freeman. The proposition for today’s debate is libertarianism entails a right to immigrate. Chris will be taking the affirmative on this proposition and Simon will be taking the negative. Before we get started I wanted to give both debaters a chance to introduce themselves so Chris you can go ahead

Chris Freiman: Sure. So I’m Chris Freiman. I’m a professor at West Virginia University in the John Chambers College of Business and Economics. And I work on ethics, political philosophy. I’ve written a lot about immigration. I’ve written a lot about libertarianism. And I’m interested in a wide range of other topics as well, but that probably enough for now.

Patrick: Awesome. Simon.

Simon Laird: I am Simon Laird. I am a student in George Mason University’s economics program.

Simon Laird: And I would like this debate to be part of the first installment in a series of debates between people in different factions of the libertarian movement. So we can explore the philosophy behind our different ideas and hopefully find some common ground.

Patrick: Awesome. Cool. So the format for today’s debate, we’re going to be experimenting with a slightly new format. So we’re going to begin with introductory speeches, three minutes each, first from Chris and then from Simon. Then we’re going to be moving into a cross-examination period where each side will have two sets of five minutes to cross-examine the other side, so a total of 20 minutes. After that, we’re going to move into a more open-ended discussion where we’re going to be trying to find statements or propositions that both sides can agree on to try to find some common ground. That discussion will be approximately 30 to 60 minutes, and then once that wraps up, we’re going to go into two-minute closing statements. So again, the proposition is libertarianism entails a right to immigrate. Chris, arguing for the affirmative, you have three minutes for your opening statement.

Chris Freiman: Thank you. I also didn’t realize this is the first installment. That’s a lot of pressure. We better do well here. I’ll try not to drag us down. So I think the libertarian case for the right to immigrate is pretty straightforward. If you’re a libertarian, you recognize that people have private property rights and you recognize that people have freedom of association. These two rights, the right to private property and the right to freely associate, entail the right to emigrate. So very, very simple cases. Imagine that you own a business. It’s your property. If you want to hire somebody to work in your business and they agree to the terms of the employment contract, most libertarians would say that is between you and the potential employee. You own your business, you can hire who you want, assuming that they agree to the terms. And there’s no particular reason why this right would stop at a border. Again, particularly if you’re a libertarian who believes that rights to private property and free association are in some sense natural rights or pre-institutional rights, they’re not simply granted to you by the state. So the rights of private property entitle you to hire people to work in your business, even if they live on the other side of a border. They entitle you to invite people to stay in your home, even if they live across the border. They entitle you to sell them housing if you want it, to rent them housing if you want it and so on. And similar points apply to free association. Libertarians recognize that people have the right to freely associate in their homes and private spaces in religious congregations and so on. The state would be wrong to interfere if you wanted to invite somebody to stay in your home or join your religious congregation or your political party. That’s between you, the other members of the association, and the person who would like to join. It’s not the state’s business. And so essentially the libertarian argument for open borders or freedom of movement is that The rights that libertarians all recognize imply that the state ought not interfere with people’s free decisions to hire, to fire, to associate, to take a job and so on. And your right to sort of exercise these freedoms does not end where a state-defined border begins.

Patrick: Awesome, thank you very much. Simon, you now have three minutes for your opening statement arguing for the negative.

Simon Laird: All right. Well, I think there are several libertarian arguments against immigration, particularly mass immigration. One of the most common ones that you hear is the fiscal argument that immigrants are going to be a fiscal burden. And I think that’s actually not one of the stronger ones for a couple of reasons. First, it is true that immigrants from some part of the world are a fiscal burden, but immigrants from East Asia tend to be net contributors. So if your only concern was the fiscal stability of the US government, maybe you would want tens or hundreds of millions of East Asians to come here, which I think is not what most immigration restrictionists want. And the other reason this is not a great argument is because I’m actually not sure we should want the US government to be fiscally sound because the government’s going bankrupt anyway. And I think there’s a strong case to be made that the sooner it goes bankrupt, the sooner we can start rebuilding. And it’s actually not clear that we should want to prolong the inevitable. So for me, the libertarian case against immigration is really all about property rights. I think that What’s imagine that there’s someone who goes around robbing people at gunpoint and they rob 100 people and then they use the money to buy a farm. Well, who legitimately owns the farm? Is it the property of no one? Is it the property of everyone in the world? Well, no. I would say that the farm rightfully belongs to the 100 people who were robbed in order to raise the money to purchase it. And if the 100 people therefore should get to decide how the farm is used. So, or another example, let’s say that you and nine other shareholders own a candy shop and the son of one of the shareholders is traveling through town and he wants to sleep in the room above the shop to avoid having to buy a hotel room. Well, I think that the shareholder can say, yeah, I think my son should be able to sleep here because it’s my property. It’s my property as much as it’s anyone else’s property. But that doesn’t mean that anyone off the street can go into the shop and then demand to sleep there. So there’s kind of a club ownership thing with the country. Unfortunately, we were taxed and our ancestors were taxed to produce an enormous amount of of property, both the physical roads and things like that, but also the institutions. You know, the institutions of America are very valuable and many of the immigrants coming here are coming here precisely because they want to use these valuable institutions. And since these institutions are our property, we should have the right to say who does and doesn’t get to use them.

Patrick: Awesome, thank you very much. Okay, we’re now going to move into the cross-examination portion of the debate.

Simon Laird: Thank you.

Patrick: So Chris will have five minutes to cross-examine Simon, then Simon will have five minutes to cross-examine Chris, and then we will do that again for another two sets of five minutes. When cross-examining, try to mostly ask questions of the other person, and then if you are the person being cross-examined, try to mostly make statements and responses to the questions because you’ll have your opportunity to ask questions in your cross-examination period. So with that, let’s begin with the first cross-examination. Chris, you have five minutes to cross-examine Simon.

Chris Freiman: Thank you. And I agree. The fiscal argument is not great. I think I have different reasons. I don’t know. I think maybe I do want to prolong the inevitable a little bit. Maybe that’s me getting more conservative in my old age. I’m not sure. Yeah. So this is interesting. So the idea as I take it is that in some sense, taxpayers own or have something analogous to ownership rights over certain things in the country, although I think that there’s maybe some question about what exactly taxpayers are supposed to be owners of or analogous to owners of. For example, sometimes this argument is just restricted to public property. The idea being tax payers pay for the roads, pay for the schools, pay for the parks and so on. As a result, they have something like ownership rights over public property. And like property owners, they’re allowed to set their own terms of inclusion and exclusion. So, you know, I co-own my house and, you know, my wife and I get to determine who can come in and who’s not allowed to come in. And so maybe the country’s a little bit like that. So I’m not persuaded by that argument in the case of public property or private property. Although I do think the public property case is a little bit more plausible, and I realize I’m not really asking questions, but I guess I’ll raise some concerns as food for thought, and I’ll try to pose them as questions. So one is, I think it’s really, really implausible, and also very non-libertarian, to think that taxpayers have a claim on private property. So for example, so, okay, good.

Simon Laird: I agree with that.

Chris Freiman: So yeah, so just to spell it out a little bit, you say, okay, you know, suppose I own my house and, you know, suppose I’ve got a spare room that I want to rent out, I have the property right to rent that out to whomever I choose. And so it seems like at first blush at least, that gives me the right to rent out that room to an immigrant. And my neighbors don’t get to say, even if they pay taxes, because it’s my house, okay. So then there’s this, so I think we’re in agreement on that. So they say, okay, maybe here’s the problem or here’s the issue. When I invite an immigrant to rent my spare bedroom or work in my business or something like that, presumably they’re traveling on public roads, maybe they’re making use of public parks and other public spaces. And if taxpayers get together and they say, no, we want to restrict their access to public roads, then that, in some sense, really not quite nullifies, but it really kind of weakens their freedom of movement. So they could, if they could find a way to get to my property without using public property, rent this spare bedroom. But that’s just sort of infeasible if the people who own the roads don’t want to let them use the roads. I think there are a couple of issues with this. And so I guess I would just say, you know, I’m sort of curious about what your thoughts are about a few objections. So one is it seems as though many citizens would not qualify as owners on this view in virtue of let’s say not being net taxpayers. So they consume more in tax-funded services than they contribute in taxation. So that would mean a lot of citizens actually wouldn’t get a say over how public property gets used. I think that’s one more.

Simon Laird: I’m very comfortable saying that.

Chris Freiman: Oh, okay. So another issue too, I think is it leads to very non-libertarian conclusions about what could be done in public spaces. So let me just give you an example and see what you think of it. So suppose the taxpayers get together and they say, all right, we do not want any car to travel on public roads if it’s transporting libertarian literature and 51% of the taxpayers agree. And so they say ban on Robert Nozick’s anarchy, state and utopia on public roads. I’m not happy with that conclusion. I think that’s a very bad conclusion and we should strive to avoid it. However, if taxpayers are the owners of public roads, it seems like it’s very difficult to avoid that conclusion.

Patrick: Simon, do you want to quickly respond?

Simon Laird: I will, yeah, we can take a little, we don’t have to strictly adhere to the clock, so I’ll respond to that.

Patrick: Yeah.

Simon Laird: I also don’t think that’s a good conclusion. I think that whether someone should be free to drive around copies of Robert Nozick’s books on public roads depends entirely on whether the person is an American or not. I think that Americans should be able to carry around whatever kind of literature they want. That doesn’t mean that other people can come into America and start using our roads to transport their literature, whatever literature they want. And the analogy here I think is closest to, I would make the analogy to the candy store case. If you are one of the shareholders in the candy store, you have as much right to decide how the store is used as anyone else. But that doesn’t mean that other people have an equal right to do whatever they want in your store. And libertarianism is not merely a philosophy about strict property rights. I think we also think that even within clubs and military associations, we should err on the side of allowing a range for personal I don’t know what you want to call it, positive freedom. And so I think as libertarians we can say, yeah in this candy store and a voluntary club that people joined, sure you could permissively make a bunch of strange rules that limit people’s behavior like limiting the kinds of literature they can read. But as libertarians we think that even in these associations that everyone agreed to be a part of, we still have a presumption in favor of positive liberty. And so we should have a presumption in favor of the taxpayers allowing other Americans to transport whatever literature they want on American roads.

Patrick: Excellent. OK, so let’s move into the next portion. So Simon, you have five minutes to cross-examine Chris.

Simon Laird: All right, I want to find Find an extreme case where you might agree that border enforcement is okay. So do you think that Ukrainians have a right to use force to stop Russian soldiers from crossing the Russian-Ukraine border?

Chris Freiman: Okay.

Simon Laird: So if the answer is yes, then why do they have that right?

Chris Freiman: Sir. Okay. So should I, am I, maybe I’m getting the format wrong. Should I jump in or should I wait?

Patrick: Uh, so yeah, you should respond.

Simon Laird: I’m like leading, so I’m asking the questions, but I want to hear how you would answer this question.

Chris Freiman: Okay. Okay. All right.

Patrick: Yeah.

Chris Freiman: Good. Sorry. That’s okay. I was, yeah.

Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. So, so please respond to his questions.

Chris Freiman: Okay. Good.

Patrick: Yeah.

Chris Freiman: Okay, well, my apologies then for my first, I think I got it wrong.

Simon Laird: No problem.

Patrick: It’s all good.

Chris Freiman: Yeah. So I mean, I think that, you know, pretty much any view, not just libertarianism, but certainly including libertarianism says that you have the right to use proportionate defensive force. And so a soldier in a war who is crossing the border becomes liable to coercive interference.

Simon Laird: Well, but wait a minute. Suppose there’s a Ukrainian landlord in Kiev who has some empty apartments, and he says, hey, I heard about these fine Russian fellows who are happened to be part of the army, and I want to rent them my apartments, and I want to invite them into Kiev to rent these apartments for me.

Chris Freiman: Right. So the difference is that a soldier is compared to sort of an ordinary peaceful citizen is the soldier is, I suppose, intending to use or initiate coercive force against Ukrainians in this scenario. And so that’s why this.

Simon Laird: Well, but in a modern military, the majority of soldiers, someone who’s been in the military, maybe I could correct you on this, but I believe in a modern military, the majority of soldiers are actually support troops rather than frontline combat troops. So does that mean that you can’t shoot a Russian soldier in Ukraine until you have verified whether they’re a combat troop or a support troop?

Patrick: Oh.

Chris Freiman: Well, I guess you’d have to tell me more about the particular case of the person that you’re inviting in then. If the person’s just on vacation. Okay.

Simon Laird: Well, here’s the scenario I have in mind. You’re a Ukrainian soldier, and you’re in the trench with some other Ukrainian soldiers, and you see some Russian soldiers like you see them, but they haven’t seen you yet. And you’re about to shoot at them, and then your comrade says, hey, aren’t you a libertarian? Why can you shoot this guy when you haven’t verified that this particular guy wants to shoot you? You don’t know that yet.

Chris Freiman: Well, if somebody’s pointing a gun at you, do you have to wait until they fire before you can fire on them?

Simon Laird: So I would say that the fact that they’re wearing a Russian uniform makes them complicit in the Russian nation’s act of aggression against Ukraine. But I would also say that a person who votes for socialism makes them complicit in all of the crimes of the Socialist Party. And to me, a support troop in the Russian army seems almost exactly analogous to anyone who votes for big government. in a democracy. Both of them are participating in an act of aggression, not as like the frontline committer of violence, but they’re still participating in the act. The act of aggression could not happen if not for all the socialist voters and support troops.

Chris Freiman: I don’t know, would you be in favor of jailing socialist voters in virtue of their promoting aggression?

Simon Laird: Yes, if there were some... So in practice, no, because I think that giving the government a blank check to imprison people based on their beliefs is a slippery slope and we’ve seen how that goes before. But if there were some actually realistic way to identify people who had voted for some horrible thing and at the very least prevent them from ever voting again, but maybe putting them in prison if that’s what it took, then yes, I would support that.

Chris Freiman: What about distributing socialist literature? Oh, okay.

Patrick: Let’s try to have Simon ask the questions for this section.

Simon Laird: No, so distributing socials literature. I think that, no, that’s not the same. And for the same reason, we have laws against murder, but we don’t have laws against distributing pro-murder literature. Like there’s a book that I’ve, I think there was a book a hundred years ago called like, Might Makes Right. And it was this book all about how the strong should oppress the weak. And I don’t think it should be illegal to own copies of that book. I don’t even think you should be able to sell it on Amazon. I don’t think that we should have a book banning. But if someone actually acts on that and starts committing murder, then they should be put in jail. So the distinction is committing the act versus just promoting literature that promotes the act. Well, I guess we have a few seconds left. Do you have any other idea about a difference that could exist between someone who votes for aggression versus something that would distinguish them from a support troop in a formal army?

Chris Freiman: Well, I guess I’m struggling to see how this relates to the question of peaceful migration.

Simon Laird: Oh, well, I’m saying that it just is a fact that the majority of immigrants in their descendants vote for very anti-libertarian policies.

Chris Freiman: Well, should we shift to me being the interrogator at this point?

Patrick: Sure. We can do that. Okay. So Chris, your five minutes starts now.

Chris Freiman: Okay, so I guess here’s my initial question. If you find out that somebody votes for the Socialist Party, would you deport them?

Simon Laird: um maybe i i think that if they if the person who voted for the socialist party is a of people who paid taxes to build up the property that we share as Americans, then you are kind of violating their right as a shareholder of that property. But on the other hand, they were trying to violate your rights by voting for socialism. So I think it’s sort of a complicated case. I think it’s not at all complicated that, yes, I would deport immigrants who were voting for socialism. If it was a person who is a shareholder in America who’s voting for socialism, that’s a bit more complicated, but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. I think that there should not be any kind of presumption that voting is protected behavior. I think that voting to do something horrible to someone is not that different from being part of a mafia that does someone horrible to that person.

Chris Freiman: So maybe we should back up a little bit. What specifically does it take to be, or at least become a shareholder in USA?

Simon Laird: I think that they are shareholders in the institutions and public property, like roads and national parks, rather than the USA as a whole, because the USA as a whole includes a lot of private property. But I think that paying taxes and having parents and grandparents who paid taxes as part of it, like a 17-year-old, might have been individually in a tax recipient.

Simon Laird: But if their parents were paying taxes the whole time and their ancestors back-managed generation were paying taxes the whole time, it seems like they’re still part of the shareholder group. Some people would say maybe fighting in wars. There’s an idea that if you serve the country, you have some kind of ownership. I personally oppose most of the recent wars, so I’m not sure I would accept that. But certainly paying taxes, you know, a lot of the property was built and maintained with tax revenue. So if anyone legitimately owns it, it would be the people whose money was confiscated to pay for it.

Chris Freiman: So if somebody is an adult and they have not paid taxes on net over the course of their lifetime, let’s say nor have their parents, are they a shareholder?

Simon Laird: I would go back to maybe grandparents and great-grandparents as well, but if there was an entire four generations of not contributing at all, then I would say no, they are no longer shareholders. And I think that’s not even very controversial. I think it’s pretty uncontroversial to say that people who have contributed a lot really should have more say in how the country is governed than a heroin addict who’s been homeless for his whole life.

Chris Freiman: Well, it doesn’t even have to be a case like that. It could just be somebody who, like I said, receives more in government funded services than they pay in taxes. And I guess my follow up question would be, so could you deport that person?

Simon Laird: Could you deport any person who receives more benefits than taxes?

Chris Freiman: Well, right, could you deport anyone who has not contributed to public property on net via tax payments?

Simon Laird: Well, if it was neutral, like their net contribution was $0, then definitely not. If their net contribution was enormously negative, I would rather just cut off their welfare. So I guess I would say in some kind of hypothetical political situation where the only way to stop them from stealing other people’s money is to deport them, then sure, I would deport them. But it’s much more politically realistic to say I would just cut off the welfare.

Chris Freiman: Well, so we don’t even have to go to the voting issue. So if they are not shareholders, then they have no claim to public property. And so couldn’t American taxpayers kick them out for whatever reason they want, just as I can kick someone out of my house for whatever reason I want?

Simon Laird: Well, I guess in this case you’re talking about cutting them off from the roads and the like the court system rather than actually removing them from their own privately owned home. I don’t think it’s ridiculous to say that people who have never contributed should just not have recourse to the court system. Frankly, a lot of the court system is a socialist imposition that subsidizes dysfunctional people who are using a criminal justice system that most of the people, the net taxpayers who fund the criminal justice system are almost never the ones, you know, on trial for crimes or never the ones using the system. So I think that You are asking me if I think it’s okay to deport them? I’m not sure. To me, that seems like a really extreme way of dealing with a problem that could be much more easily solved by just cutting them off from the court system or more easily just cutting off their ability to use welfare.

Chris Freiman: Well, but can we say you’re not allowed to use any public roads?

Simon Laird: I would have to think about it. And for the analogy to immigrants, I don’t think that their use of public roads is the biggest deal. I think it’s really their voting and their impact on the institutions that’s the bigger deal.

Patrick: Awesome. And with that, we’ll move to our final cross examination. So Simon, you have five minutes to cross examine Chris.

Simon Laird: Do you think that immigration 100 years ago was a good thing?

Chris Freiman: Yeah.

Simon Laird: Have you seen the research that claims that those immigrants produced the New Deal and made the welfare state much larger than it otherwise would have been?

Chris Freiman: I’ve seen that, but I’ve also seen contrary research that suggests that actually a massive wave of immigration actually sort of stemmed the tide of socialism in the US. But look, I’ll even grant you. I’ll grant you the empirical point that they increase the odds of New Deal legislation.

Simon Laird: To me, implementing the New Deal seems like a really terrible thing. I think the entire world is much worse off because that was implemented. And so in my view, the nativists of 100 years ago were right. They should have stemmed the tide of Eastern Southern European immigrants earlier than they did. So here’s another question. Why do you think that Northwestern European countries had the Industrial Revolution and became rich before the rest of the world?

Chris Freiman: This is a very complicated story. I don’t know if we can get all the way through it, but I mean, if you want to continue, because I’m happy to grant most of these empirical claims. So I think the issue is what can the state permissively do to prevent bad political outcomes? So yeah, so let me hear a little bit more.

Simon Laird: Um, okay, well, if it’s if the issue is what could the state do to prevent it? It sounds like you you’re saying there could be a situation which you would agree has bad outcomes, but you still don’t think the state should use force against immigrants to prevent it. Is that right?

Chris Freiman: Sure, and I assume you would agree with that in many cases too.

Simon Laird: I think that in with the new deal and the success of Northwestern Europe 400 years ago we’re talking about the world’s biggest outcome so then I’m less sure but in principle I agree that there could be some cases where in many cases you know you can’t always use state action to prevent a bad outcome. So what about this? What if you lived in a city that had a very active mafia that controlled the police and all the other, the mafia kind of dominated society, but you want to change things. And so you and your friends make an anti-mafia society.

Chris Freiman: Okay.

Simon Laird: Do you think it’s a violation of anyone’s free speech rights if you say that you won’t admit any mafia supporters into your society?

Chris Freiman: Is that a violation of the, it’s a private association? Yeah, you can say pro mafia folks don’t have to come, they’re not allowed in.

Simon Laird: Yes. Okay, what about a society? There are many societies in the world that are very violent and oppressive and this seems to have something to do with having an Islamic majority. because there are, in many parts of the world, there are Muslim groups which advocate for pretty barbaric practices. If you’re a person living in that society and you say, I want to change things, I’m gonna start a society of non-Muslims, are you within your rights to start the society and totally ban Muslims from your group?

Chris Freiman: So there’s a big difference between a private association and the state because private associations are allowed to restrict people’s liberties in a lot of ways that states are not. So suppose I have my you know, Philadelphia Eagles fan club and we get together at my house to watch football every Sunday. And I say, if you come into my house during these football games, you are not allowed to wear a Dallas Cowboys jersey. And if I see you wearing one, I’m going to kick you out of the house. I’m allowed to do that. It’s my house. But if the state suddenly said, you know, anybody who wears a Dallas Cowboys jersey on private or public property, must take it off or be fined or be thrown in prison or whatever the case may be, the state wouldn’t be allowed to do that.

Simon Laird: Right.

Chris Freiman: So I’m very cautious about trying to move from cases about private associations and what they can permissively do. to cases about what the state can permissively do because private associations can restrict freedom in all sorts of ways that states can.

Simon Laird: The issue, I think the core issue here, I want to get at the point where something transitions from being a private association to being a state. Because if you and your group, your group of like the fellow non-Muslim club, if you go and all settle in the same village and then buy some land and then start having a community of a thousand people there, it seems like there is a fuzzy boundary where it goes from being a private association to being a state. This is also So like any libertarian is going to agree, of course you have the right to kick someone out of your house if they’re wearing a sports jersey that’s not for your team. And, but I think that libertarians need to think about where this boundary between private association and state is. I like it. I think anyone is going to intuitively say that you have the right to shoot at the Russian soldiers, even if they’re support troops, because that’s clearly a state. Do you have the right to shoot at MS-13 members? They have the tattoo on their face that indicates they’re part of a gang that murders people. And then there are groups that are smaller than the MS-13 gang. And if we say, it seems like if, The problem that I see with your view is that it seems to suggest that a private association can never really expand and control a large amount of property without being judged to be a state and then losing all of their private association rights. Because in a group that grows to include many people, I think that, well, I’ll just, a matter of times I’ll leave it there. I think that the core issue is where exactly is that boundary between private association and state?

Patrick: Excellent. Chris, do you want 30 seconds to respond to that or should we move on?

Chris Freiman: I mean I could just say a little bit so I mean I think you know yeah at a certain point maybe the boundary becomes blurry but I think in in sort of the real world it’s not particularly blurry because just taking the United States as an example it’s not as though current inhabitants of the United States discovered unoccupied land, started homesteading it, or that there’s a chain of transactions that was all voluntary that led to all or the vast majority of property in the United States being private. So like I could imagine you have like a community where it’s like a commune or something like that and everything’s privately owned and like the group sets religious rules about what can be done and so on. And if it gets big enough, that starts to look like a state. I say, yeah, okay, fair enough. But that’s just not the, in like, there might be interesting questions about how much control they can exert over membership. But I would just say the United States is not like that. So in some sense, we don’t have to worry about those sorts of cases for real world immigration policy questions.

Patrick: Awesome. Well, this is a really good discussion so far. And now we’re going to move into the more open-ended part of the discussion. And I’ll play a little bit of a role in this as well. So the idea here is that we’re trying to find common ground statements. So statements or propositions that both parties can agree on. And hopefully by pursuing these common ground statements, we can both figure out where these areas of agreement are And also where the areas of disagreement and specifically the more fundamental disagreements are. So I’ll start off with a statement to see if this is something we can both agree on. I think often immigration, in the immigration debate, the whole concept of trespassing comes up. And people say, oh, well, then shouldn’t I have a right to burst down your front door and come sleep in your house? So I was wondering if a common ground statement that you both might be able to agree on is that a right to immigration does not imply a right to trespass.

Chris Freiman: I would say it does not apply a right to trespass on private property. Public property might be a more complicated discussion, but I do agree just as non-immigrants can’t just walk into my house without an invitation. The same principle applies universally.

Patrick: Simon, what do you think about that?

Simon Laird: I don’t agree because I think that the term immigration almost implies a formal trespass because it’s the idea it’s the reason why a person from from France moving to Texas is considered an immigrant and a person moving from Massachusetts to Texas is not considered an immigrant. is because there was some idea that both the person from Massachusetts and the person from Texas are shared owners of some common project that the person from France is outside of.

Patrick: OK, what about a more basic statement like immigration and trespassing are different concepts? Would we agree on that?

Chris Freiman: I agree.

Simon Laird: No, because we would have to define it much more carefully. So of course, any libertarian would agree that you can’t trespass on my private property. And I think any libertarian would agree that you can’t trespass inside Walmart, for example. Now, if you are the owner of Walmart, it doesn’t really count as trespassing. If you’re one of the major shareholders of Walmart, does it count as trespassing? If you’re walking around in a Walmart store without the explicit consent of the manager, I’m not sure that is trespassing. So I think that, I think that the relevant issue here is what is and is not trespassing.

Patrick: Do you have a common ground statement? Sure.

Chris Freiman: Well, can I propose a case and see what you think about this?

Patrick: Yeah.

Chris Freiman: All right, suppose I privately own a plot of land right on the border. And I see someone across the border and I say, hey, come on in, hang out in my house, chill out for a while. And they don’t use public property at all. That is, I mean, it depends on what we mean by immigration exactly, what we take that to encompass.

Simon Laird: Are they going to, you said hang out for a while, are they going to leave and go across the border again on their way out or are they permanently staying in your house?

Chris Freiman: I’ll say, you know what, you rent a room from me and help me out my business, which I run from home. So they’re never using public property. I’ll pay the wage that we agree on, et cetera. And look, you can stay here for five years. And the person says, yeah, this is great. And then five years passes, and then they go back to the other side of the border, but they’ve stayed on my private property the whole time, even though that’s okay.

Simon Laird: I think that’s fine.

Chris Freiman: But so the net at least seems to suggest that there are different concepts, that there can be a case of immigration without a case of trespassing.

Patrick: Okay.

Simon Laird: I think that really stretches the meaning of the term immigration. I think we could say that I think if we could say that if there was a person who was going to Let’s say you had a giant ranch and there were people from India who you invited to your ranch and they were going to stay on your ranch and never leave the ranch and never vote in an American election. I would say that’s fine. It’s your private property. You can invite whoever you want to it. But with immigration, it always involves people. They’re never just staying on their landlord’s property the whole time. And crucially, they’re voting in the election, which I think is the most important part.

Chris Freiman: Well, so actually, this might take us a little bit of field. And so if you don’t want to go down this road.

Simon Laird: That’s fine.

Chris Freiman: But so I’m curious. So there is a distinction between, let’s say, movement and movement plus granting citizenship rights. And so when I think about, I mean, it’s tricky and it’s complicated. But when I think about things like free movement or open borders, I think this is just kind of the right to move across the border and stay there given certain conditions. And then the question, like you could be a permanent resident or something like that. But then there’s this extra question about, do you receive citizenship? What does it take to receive citizenship? And so on. But so I guess one question is, because I think this would address the voting issue, which is let people move back and forth across the border as they see fit, but just place really rigid restrictions on their ability to vote, for example. So like there are lots of economists. I mean, Brian Kaplan is all over this stuff about keyhole solutions. And so like the keyhole solution here would be, yeah, you can come work on the ranch, but you can’t vote or, you know, whatever. And you know this ahead of time. So it’s informed consent, yada, yada, yada. Would that be okay by you?

Simon Laird: Well, as you stated it in this hypothetical, yes. But in practice, it just never works that way. So even if an immigrant never gains the right to vote, they’re going to have children who will be able to vote. And I guess it’s You could say, okay, well, maybe none of their descendants will ever have the right to vote. We’ll have this permanent class of non-voting people in the country. But in practice, that just seems to never happen. It seems like the grandchildren are going to say, hey, I was born here. Why don’t I have the same rights as everyone else? And it doesn’t seem like it has really ever been a long-term solution to have It seems like the grandchildren and the other descendants of the immigrants are inevitably going to be integrated into society and have political power. And outside of some pretty tough measures, you would have to have some very tough measures to prevent them from having any political power. And I don’t think it’s possible to stop it in the end.

Patrick: So I think there’s kind of two questions here. There’s the question of what is politically possible, and then what is theoretically consistent. So maybe it would be worth distinguishing, OK, in the ideal libertarian world, if it were politically possible to execute such and such a system, would that system be consistent with libertarian theory? And that’s kind of maybe a separate question from, well, would we ever be able to get that system put into place in practice? Do you concede that? Or like, Simon, do you agree that those are two separate conversations that are both worth having?

Simon Laird: Yes, I do.

Patrick: Cool.

Simon Laird: I thought of maybe a common ground statement could be, I think that the United Arab Emirates immigration system is a good thing for the United Arab Emirates because they’re a monarchy, the guest workers they have from India really do seem like they will never have any political power over the people who run the country.

Patrick: Mm-hmm.

Simon Laird: And so if those guest workers are contributing to the economy, that’s a good thing. But I think immigration is fundamentally different from being a guest worker.

Patrick: Yeah, so let’s try to move towards our first common ground statement. Do we want it to be on UAE or this border question or voting?

Chris Freiman: So I don’t know enough about the details of that specific immigration policy, although I mean, I will say I think that, you know, guest worker programs, assuming that the guest workers themselves are provided with adequate information to make an informed decision, are, yeah, they’re perfectly permissible. And certainly if this goes back to the in principle versus in practice distinction, if in practice the alternative is no movement versus some movement, but it’s like guest worker programs. I would say guest worker programs are certainly better than nothing in a non-ideal world.

Patrick: So how would we word maybe a statement that you could both agree on?

Simon Laird: I would say guest worker systems are compatible with libertarianism in monarchies or in a system where the guest workers will never have political power, like Dubai.

Chris Freiman: I don’t know if I would say, but I don’t know monarchy is compatible with libertarianism. I don’t think I don’t think I can find common ground on that. And so never have voting power. So here again, I’m still sort of at a loss on the voting power thing. So I mean, one thing I will say is like, Voting and libertarianism, that’s like a complicated combination, because voting, unlike other sorts of rights, gives you authority to not unilaterally coerce people, but contribute to this course of apparatus, which is probably going to violate people’s rights. So I think they’re really interesting and hard theoretical problems about what libertarians should say about what justifies the right to vote, if anything.

Simon Laird: you

Chris Freiman: Maybe there is no right to vote. I mean, there are certainly some libertarians who think that. But I would say if, you know, American citizens who have not paid taxes are still allowed to vote, let’s say vote badly, then guest workers should eventually get the right to vote, even if they’re gonna vote badly. So if the issue is the tax payments, so if what makes an American a co-owner of let’s say parts of America, is that they’ve paid into the system, then that seems to imply that Americans who have not paid into the system, or let’s say their parents also have not paid into the system, they’re also not co-owners. And I think then one cost of this view that says, well, guest workers can never get to vote, because we’re worried about the political outcomes that they might promote. Then it seems like we have to say, not actually,

Simon Laird: It’s not just about the outcomes though, because if you’re voting to install socialist tyranny, it’s not that you’re doing a morally neutral thing that happens to have bad outcomes. Voting for the socialist takeover and being part of the socialist takeover is intrinsically, deontologically wrong.

Chris Freiman: Okay, but then why not? I mean, maybe maybe maybe you’re just going to bite the bullet here, but you have the I mean, I’m not even sure if the tax payment stuff even has to factor in here, but I’ll just put it in for the sake of argument. The non tax paying American. Do they have the right to vote for a socialist?

Simon Laird: I don’t think there’s any moral right to vote for bad things to happen. So no, no one has a moral right to vote for a socialist. Now, should they be imprisoned for voting for a socialist? I think there are strong pragmatic arguments to not start throwing people in prison for how they voted. But I don’t think they have a moral right to do it, no.

Chris Freiman: OK, well, if you don’t like prison, and I’m with you, I don’t want to imprison people for running for socialists either. What’s the enforcement mechanism?

Simon Laird: Well, I think that enforcement is tricky and this is why I don’t want the socialist voters in the country in the first place. But if we’re brainstorming enforcement mechanisms, it would be quite easy to just identify counties with very large pro-socialism results from the last election and say, okay, now no one in that county can vote from now on.

Chris Freiman: So then why not just do that and let as many immigrants in as we want?

Simon Laird: Well right, that’s similar to the, so if the immigrants are only staying temporarily, then that’s similar to the system that Dubai has. They have these guest workers who go on and work and then they leave. The problem is if the immigrants are going in and then having children who have the right to vote and staying there permanently, then they’re, you know, after a few decades they’re going to have political power even if we disenfranchise the first generation.

Chris Freiman: Well, I guess what I’m saying is you’re willing to let Americans, American socialists stay in America, but you’d say, you know, what I would really want to work towards is a system that sort of identifies hotbeds of socialist voters and just restrict their ability to vote. I say, let me grant you this.

Simon Laird: I think that would be a great plan. I just don’t think it’s politically realistic.

Chris Freiman: Okay. So you would not, well, but do you think it’s just?

Simon Laird: Do I think it’s just to remove voting rights from people who vote for socialism?

Chris Freiman: Right.

Simon Laird: Yes.

Chris Freiman: OK. So then would you agree that it’s just if we could have a system where immigrants are permitted in, but if there are certain areas which have lots of socialist voters, maybe both native-born citizens and immigrants, you just restrict their ability to vote directly, but let immigrants come in? So in other words, if you’re letting Americans stay in and vote socialist or rather you let them stay in and restrict their ability to vote socialist, why not let immigrants come in and just restrict their ability to vote socialist?

Simon Laird: I think in theory that’s a perfectly fine, that’s a perfectly just thing to do. I just don’t think that it’s realistic in practice.

Chris Freiman: So one worry I have, sorry, this might be my last word on this, but so I think there’s a worry about appealing to infeasibility considerations in this discussion.

Patrick: But.

Chris Freiman: So, and it’s just this, like 98% of libertarianism is infeasible. So if I were like, should we have zero income tax or whatever, completely deregulated markets? I would say, I like the idea of zero income tax. That sounds pretty good. but are we gonna get there? That’s probably infeasible. And so I guess if we’re not worried about...

Simon Laird: Well, there’s a difference of degree there. We could have much, much, much lower income tax. And if we had 100 immigrants a year, that would be fine. I’m fine with a non-extreme solution. We don’t have to go to zero immigrants. If there was a much lower number of immigrants, that would be fine.

Chris Freiman: What would you say? Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. Does libertarianism entail zero income tax to try the main topic here? I would say yes, it entails no income tax.

Simon Laird: I would say yes. Yeah.

Chris Freiman: But then you can’t be like, well, yeah, but we’re never going to get there. I say, yeah, no, I know. I know we’re not going to get there. But that’s just libertarianism apply.

Simon Laird: Okay, well, here’s another analogy. Suppose that you’re the Ukrainian libertarian again, and you say, you know, libertarianism is anti-war. And so, yeah, these Russians are invading, but we can’t shoot at them because that’s against libertarianism. And, yeah, I know it’s infeasible because our country’s gonna be taken over anyway. But, you know, we can’t appeal to feasibility. The libertarian position is still to be anti-war, so we can’t fight back against the Russian army.

Chris Freiman: I would just say that libertarianism doesn’t tell right to fight back against invading army.

Simon Laird: Wait a minute, what about some innocent Russian mechanic who’s just a support troop when he’s not shooting anyone and he’s just fixing the tanks and not doing anything else?

Chris Freiman: So I think

Simon Laird: He might be killed and that’d be a very sad thing that this basically innocent person was killed because some people decided to do the pragmatic thing and shoot back at the Russian soldiers.

Chris Freiman: I think that’s more a question about the contours of a libertarian theory of war and self-defense rather than a feasibility consideration. So I guess what I’m saying is, libertarianism entails a commitment to all sorts of unrealistic policies, unrealistic in the sense that there’s just not the political will to make them happen. Zero income tax, like massive deregulation, full legalization of drugs, et cetera.

Simon Laird: Wait a minute. So there are two different forms of infeasibility. You’re saying one is that maybe the policy would just never work ever and the other is it’s infeasible just because there’s not enough political will right now. Which one are you talking about?

Chris Freiman: Right. Well, so I was thinking more about political will. So if the idea is something like, well, we just, you know, so just to take the like the restricting a restriction of voting case, you might be like, well, I would be like totally fine with a ton of immigration if it just meant that there were like restrictions on like these keyhole solution stuff. So like temporary or non-temporary restrictions on the right to vote or to access public funded services and so on. So like, again, the sort of Kaplan thing where it’s like you have more or less

Simon Laird: and the requirement to leave after five or 10 years and definitely not have children in the country. See, I think those keyhole solutions are much more extreme than having closed borders.

Chris Freiman: Can socialist Americans have children?

Simon Laird: Well, they are part owners, assuming they are part owners in the country, sure.

Chris Freiman: No, they never pay taxes. They never pay taxes.

Simon Laird: I am of the old-fashioned view that people on welfare really should not have more children than they should afford.

Chris Freiman: So socialist Americans who have not paid taxes should be prohibited from having children.

Simon Laird: I mean, I’m open to arguments that prohibiting them from having children is too invasive, but I would be very sympathetic to someone who wanted to say, you have to have an IUD or a vasectomy if you want to keep receiving welfare.

Chris Freiman: But if it’s too invasive in the case of non-tax paying American socialists, why isn’t it too invasive in the case of immigrants?

Simon Laird: Because having the agents of the state like hold you down and do something to your body is more invasive than telling someone that they’re not allowed to cross the border, in my opinion.

Chris Freiman: No, they just say, look, if you wanna have kids, you gotta leave the country. You can’t stay in America if you wanna have kids if you’re a socialist.

Simon Laird: But they’re already in the country. So how does that happen without some kind of extreme bodily intervention?

Chris Freiman: Well, how do you restrict people coming into the country without bodily intervention? You gotta block them somehow.

Simon Laird: Well, that’s a good point. I was thinking you would have some kind of wall or just like not open the gates at the port. But you’re right, if someone did sneak through, you would physically apprehend them and remove them. Although in my opinion, yeah, in my opinion, arresting someone and taking them to another place is less morally complex than physically holding someone down and implanting an IUD in them.

Chris Freiman: Is that for me? No, I’m saying in the case of the American, forget that. Forget the IUD. You just say, look, if you’re going to have kids, we’re going to coercively deport yet to a different country because we can’t have American socialists having their kids in our country.

Simon Laird: In principle, I don’t have an objection to that because we’ve specified that they have never paid any taxes and their parents didn’t pay any taxes and they actively support socialist tyranny in America and they’re spreading those values to their children. In that hypothetical that you’ve spelled out, I think that deporting them and their children would not be the most efficient policy. It’s not the policy I would adopt, but as a matter of justice, I don’t think there’s something wrong with it.

Patrick: Yeah, really interesting discussion. I’m wondering if we can try to get back to a common ground statement out of all of what’s been said. Do either of you want to propose something that you think both parties would be able to agree with?

Chris Freiman: Yeah, I mean, maybe, well, they use public, I don’t know, I don’t know, we don’t like.

Patrick: We can start really simple.

Simon Laird: Well, I agree with Chris’s hypothetical that if he invited someone into his house who never used any, who never voted and never used public property, then that’s okay.

Patrick: Start with a totology. even if it was across a border, a national border.

Simon Laird: Yes.

Patrick: Okay.

Simon Laird: Yes, if you have a ranch on the border and you want to invite your friends from Mexico to go visit your ranch, that’s fine.

Patrick: So maybe something like libertarian entails a right to invite. Yeah.

Chris Freiman: Maybe to move across entirely publicly owned property with the permission of the property owner, something like that.

Patrick: You mean privately owned.

Chris Freiman: Or owners, privately owned. Yeah, to move entirely privately owned property with the permission of the property owners.

Simon Laird: Sure.

Patrick: Even if it’s in a different country.

Simon Laird: Even if it’s over a national border, as long as they are not voting.

Patrick: Yeah. I don’t know if Chris would be able to agree with as long as they’re not voting.

Chris Freiman: Yeah, I would not say as long as they’re not.

Simon Laird: Well, but would you agree with the, would you agree with that as an at least statement? You maybe think they should be allowed to vote as well, but would you agree at least that they can do it whether or not, you would agree that they could do it whether or not they’re voting. So you would also agree that they can do it if they’re not voting. Is that right?

Chris Freiman: Right.

Patrick: Okay, so let me say that libertarian at least implies, at least entails a right to move to entirely privately owned property with the permission of the property owners, even if it is over a national border without voting or something like that.

Chris Freiman: Yeah, without voting.

Patrick: East entails a right to move to entirely privately owned property with permission of the property owners, even if it is over a national voter with no voting. So at the very least, and I think this is really interesting because I think that looking outside of libertarianism, just to conservatism more broadly, there are probably a lot of conservatives who would not agree, who would not want this, who would see this as allowing immigration. although I suppose there’s some debate about what exactly constitutes immigration, but it seems like both parties here are agreeing that there is something about libertarianism that implies a right to cross a national border, to kind of disregard a nation-state’s boundary lines, as long as you’re not voting, at the very least if you’re not voting, if you’re not using public property, I think that’s kind of what this statement is getting at, yes?

Chris Freiman: Well, I mean, I think you raise an interesting related point, too, which is, suppose we have the scenario that we laid out, it’s the ranch, immigrants never going to vote. But suppose that the law says no movement across borders. I’m still fine with it. I don’t know. What do you think about that, Simon?

Simon Laird: The law says you can’t invite your friend from Mexico to cross the border onto your privately owned ranch.

Chris Freiman: Right.

Simon Laird: Yeah, I wouldn’t care what the law says about that example.

Chris Freiman: All right, there we go. We got some movement here. I mean, maybe it could be an entirely separate statement where it’s something like the permissibility of immigration is not a matter of what the positive law says or something like that.

Patrick: Okay, libertarianism at least entails a right to move to entirely privately owned property with the permission of the property owners even if it is over a national border without voting. Yeah. Legality. Yeah. Okay, let’s just confirm this one first and then let’s move on to that one. Anyone want to propose amendments before I add it?

Simon Laird: I agree with this one.

Chris Freiman: Yeah, that was good.

Patrick: Awesome. Okay. So yeah, so you were saying something about libertarians, libertarians view of what is just does not change depending on the positive law, something like that. How would you like to phrase that?

Chris Freiman: Yeah, I don’t know, the permissibility of immigration is not a matter of the content of the positive law, maybe.

Patrick: Simon, any thoughts on that?

Simon Laird: I agree with that.

Patrick: Excellent, we have two.

Simon Laird: I have a question for Chris. Would you agree that there is no moral right to vote to restrict free speech? And we can define free speech, you know, the canonical examples of someone being prevented from saying something that they should be allowed to say.

Chris Freiman: What do you mean by moral right? Like is so.

Simon Laird: Oh, well, I think that I think that I have if I went around and shouted obscenities at people. Well, that’s not an example. If I went around and was deliberately rude to everyone in the grocery store, I don’t think I could actually be arrested for that. So I have a legal right to do it.

Chris Freiman: Right.

Simon Laird: But I think that libertarianism is also a moral theory. I don’t have the right to... Maybe this is a bad example again. But there are certainly times when Let’s say you have three young kids and you love doing incredibly dangerous skateboard tricks. Legally, you can do that. But morally, do you really have the right to risk your family’s welfare, risk the interests of people who are dependent on you to do these skateboard tricks? I’m not so sure. So I think that there’s the concept of a moral right to do something and also a concept of a legal right to do something.

Chris Freiman: Okay, yeah, so it was about what was it voting for socialist policies in particular? Was that the... Oh, we’re struck with these, right.

Simon Laird: voting to restrict free speech. And we can define free speech however you would like in line with the canonical examples.

Chris Freiman: Yeah, so I would say, the way I would put it is it is morally wrong to sort of knowingly vote for free speech restrictions, something like that.

Simon Laird: I would agree with that.

Patrick: Okay. It is morally wrong to knowingly vote for free speech restrictions. But then Simon, I, yeah, go for it.

Simon Laird: I have another question for Chris. Do you think that the police may permissibly, or maybe not the police, do you think someone can permissibly arrest members of the mafia even if those individual members have not been proven to have assaulted or killed anyone?

Chris Freiman: I think I would need more detail. Is there evidence that they’ve done these things, but it’s not conclusive?

Simon Laird: There is evidence that the mafia has murdered lots of people and it can be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that this person is a friend, not just a friend, but like an active associate of the mafia guys. But you can’t prove, you can’t individually tie him to any particular murder. And maybe he’s not even, maybe he’s more like a logistics guy or a runaway or a getaway driver rather than the gunman.

Chris Freiman: Right. Yeah, so I think it’s going to depend heavily on the individual case.

Simon Laird: Well then how about the getaway driver? Can you arrest the getaway driver even if he’s not the gunman?

Chris Freiman: And he knows what he’s getting into, eating in a bed, and yeah, I would say he can arrest that guy.

Simon Laird: Yes. Yeah.

Patrick: Yeah, so my comment on this would be like, this is all aiding and abetting questions. And I think what makes libertarianism distinctive is that we don’t have a double standard for the government. And so in the same way that we would say, oh yeah, someone aiding and abetting a mafia is equally guilty or is liable to prosecution, in the same way someone helping a tyrannical government is in a way aiding and abetting. And then the question becomes, where do you draw the line on what counts as aiding and abetting? I think, obviously, a police officer who is actually executing force is very clearly committing the crime. But then it’s like, OK, what about a politician? What about a bureaucrat? What about someone who donated to a political campaign? What about someone who voted for that politician, but then nothing else? And I think that it comes down to this question of, how the aiding and abetting theory works, which I think is a very complex legal question that legal scholars have been debating for centuries.

Simon Laird: I might even say that the politician is more culpable than the individual policeman. Similarly, I would say that the top boss in the mafia is at least as culpable as any of the foot soldiers.

Patrick: Even if they never pulled a trigger.

Simon Laird: Yeah, the more powerful person who had more ability to stop it from happening, I think they would have to be maybe not more culpable, but at least as culpable.

Patrick: And I think, so there’s not only the question of like, is it morally wrong, but specifically what is prosecutable?

Simon Laird: you

Patrick: Like, at what point do we cross the threshold where it is legitimate within libertarian theory to use force against this person for doing that, activating and abetting?

Chris Freiman: Yeah, and I think that there are going to be issues too though with using these cases and drawing an analogy to voters, for example. So one is just any individual voters decision is causally inconsequential in a way that the getaway driver is not causally inconsequential, which

Simon Laird: How about the Russian support soldier? Is anyone support soldier in consequential?

Chris Freiman: No, I would say there’s certainly more consequential than a than an individual voter. And I think there are also questions to about. So, I mean, I’m not an expert on what makes somebody legally culpable for a crime. But I think part of it is going to have to be like part of it is going to be something like knowingly violating someone’s rights and conceiving of it correctly is a rights violation whereas like so like you know when the mafia robs a bank or whatever like they know they’re they’re stealing um but like for for whatever reason that’s that’s not how most people think of like taxes for example even though libertarians tend to think of tax

Simon Laird: I’m not sure that really matters. We can imagine that there’s someone who’s raised in a bank robbing cult who thinks it’s morally right to rob the bank. But if you are guarding your bank with a shotgun and you shoot that guy as he’s trying to rob you, it still seems legitimate to me, even if he has strange moral views.

Chris Freiman: So, well, if he’s brainwashed, I think that does diminish culpability. I mean, so you might say, well, if he is in the act of trying to rob you, yeah.

Simon Laird: Even if it diminishes his culpability, it still seems like it’s permissible to use force against him if he is in the act of trying to rob you.

Patrick: So we’re kind of teasing out some of the questions raised by the first common statement. And we’ve been going down the voting line a little bit. I think it might also be valuable to go down the public property line, right? So we seem to be in agreement that for private property, certain principles apply. But for public property, Chris, you mentioned that you think that’s more of a gray area. And Simon, of course, was specifically pressing this idea of a community of shareholders and so for public streets and parks and whatnot. And so there’s a few...

Simon Laird: Yes, although to be to be clear, I think that by far the most important piece of property is the institutions and court system and government, which we own as net taxpayers.

Patrick: Right.

Simon Laird: That’s more consequential than our ownership of the streets and parks.

Patrick: Right, right. So yeah, I’m wondering if we could find a common ground statement on the question of public property. Another line of inquiry that might be worth pursuing is if the government were to privatize a certain piece of public property, then Would that be legitimate? Would we just go on as if that was totally legitimate private property? Yeah, any common ground statements that we think we could achieve on that area?

Chris Freiman: I mean, one interesting question is if all of the relevant public infrastructure were privatized. I mean, I’m fine with open borders without that happening. But Simon, I’m curious if we could privatize it all, then presumably you would be fine with open borders.

Simon Laird: Well, to me, privatizing it all would mean also privatizing all the courts and schools and all other functions of the government, in which case, yes, if we had anarcho-capitalism, I would be fine with open borders, and I would live in a gated community that would not have open borders, and other people who want to live somewhere else can do whatever they want.

Patrick: And our co-capitalism. Yeah.

Chris Freiman: Why don’t I vote for orders?

Simon Laird: Although also I will say in that sense, I mean, if we had privatized court systems, nobody would actually operate their court system by allowing, nobody would organize their gated communities governance by just allowing anyone to walk in off this street and have as much power as a resident.

Chris Freiman: I mean, I don’t have open borders in my house. But yeah, again, I think a gated community and a house are very different from a state, at least given the status quo. We could talk about the anarcho-capitalist version, but yeah. Yeah, so I mean, although this may be a bit of a digression, but I think some of the things are a little bit different. So because it seems like, for example, avoiding I don’t know, like a public school or something is much easier than just saying, like say, oh, you can’t use a public school or like for 10 years or unless you pay taxes or whatever. That’s that that seems easier to pull off than saying you can’t use public roads. It seems like your life is essentially non functional if you can’t use public roads. And so

Simon Laird: Well, okay, I would agree that if, I just don’t think this is possible in practice, but if there were some way to ensure that they never, you know, never used the court system and never voted and never used any public schools, I’d be okay with allowing them to use public roads, assuming that they are, I mean, I’d rather privatize the roads, but right now they would be paying for the upkeep of the roads through, you know, payroll taxes or sales taxes or whatever it else the immigrants would be paying.

Chris Freiman: So it wouldn’t even need full privatization. You could just have the government institute tolls on all the roads and that would be permissible too, I assume.

Simon Laird: Well, it depends entirely on who’s receiving the toll revenue. If all the revenue is going to someone who was... I think that all the American shareholders should receive the benefit of privatizing the roads and should receive ownership of the roads. Like in Russia, I believe... I don’t know a lot about this, but I believe that some of their privatization was just people who were connected to the old Soviet elite just gaining private ownership of all the resources of Russia, which seems very unjust to me.

Chris Freiman: Why was just think of like an easy pass situation where the government still owns that road, but they basically charge you for use? And so if you had a system like that that were universalized, it seems as though that would address your objection to use.

Simon Laird: Is the revenue from the tolls, does it go entirely to maintaining the road? It’s not funding other things.

Chris Freiman: I don’t know what it’s doing an easy pass, but we could stipulate it for the sake of the example. The revenue is used to maintain the roads, to pay road workers, etc.

Simon Laird: Okay, well I would prefer to have ownership of it as a shareholder, but if we’re stipulating that it’s this great system where they only set the price to the level that’s necessary to maintain the roads, then I would agree with that system.

Patrick: Um, Simon, I think it was you brought up earlier, uh, like if I’m a shareholder in a business and then like I wanted my son to stay in the room upstairs, like that would be permissible.

Chris Freiman: Thank you.

Patrick: Um, but then on this analogy, like if we’re all shareholders, all net taxpayers are like shareholders in like the public property of the country, then could I have my immigrant friend come and use the road because I’m a part owner of the road as a net taxpayer in the country?

Simon Laird: Yeah, that’s a good argument. And that’s one of the reasons why I think the ownership of the roads isn’t the most relevant thing. It’s really the big problem with immigration is that the immigrants are going to come in and vote to implement tyranny in America. They’re going to destroy our good institutions, which made America a nice place to live in the first place. And so it’s the institutions and our core system. And as much as I don’t like the government, we have a better government than most other countries in the world. That’s the property that the immigrants are going to destroy. And that’s a much bigger deal than whether they use the roads.

Patrick: Okay, so would you have a common ground then on as long as they don’t vote using public property is entailed by libertarianism? The right to use public property?

Simon Laird: Well, we have to specify that they also won’t have children who vote and they will never get naturalized in their whole lifetime, which is why I brought up the example of Dubai, where I think there’s a five year or 10 year, I don’t know, but they have some kind of year limit on how long people can stay.

Patrick: Sure. Yeah.

Simon Laird: So I would agree with the guest worker program. If we could be completely sure they would never have political power, then I’d be fine with a guest worker program.

Patrick: OK. Maybe there’s a common ground statement there to clarify that there’s nothing wrong with them even using public property.

Chris Freiman: minute.

Patrick: It’s specifically the voting. And as long as they don’t vote or they don’t have children to vote, then libertarianism entails.

Simon Laird: Well, assuming that they’re paying for the upkeep of that public property, like Chris suggested, through the Easy Pass system, or I believe that, I don’t know the numbers on this, but I believe that immigrants are still paying for road upkeep through gas tax and sales tax.

Patrick: Mm-hmm

Chris Freiman: I mean, maybe this is too broad to be interesting, but maybe something like it entails the right to use some public property.

Simon Laird: No, because it also has to be, like Patrick said, you have to have at least some Americans who invite you. If Americans were unanimously against every single American opposed people from France coming and using our roads, then it would be wrong for them to use our roads.

Chris Freiman: Well, what if everybody says they don’t want me using the roads and they all vote me? Can they do that?

Simon Laird: Well, but you’re a shareholder. So it’s sort of like the candy shop analogy.

Chris Freiman: Yeah, but I get outvoted. I get outvoted by the other shareholders.

Simon Laird: Well, but suppose that you own the candy shop with nine other shareholders. Can the other nine just say, okay, we’re confiscating Chris’s share too bad for Chris? I think no.

Patrick: depends on the bylaws of the shop.

Simon Laird: Right. So, but you know, even if they like sneakily put that into the bylaws without your knowledge, that seems like a scummy thing to do. But can the 10 shareholders say, we don’t want some other guy being in the candy shop? Obviously, yes, it’s their property.

Patrick: Well, this is where I wonder if the shareholder analogy starts to break down, because the way a company works is there’s an agreed upon set of bylaws. And by buying shares, you’re agreeing to write if they say majority share is going to govern the country.

Simon Laird: Yeah, but the agreement to the bylaws, the moral standards there are not totally relevant to the, they’re not totally dependent on the agreement to the bylaws.

Patrick: Whereas with a country, there is no social contract.

Simon Laird: You know, if one person wrote up the by, most people are not like, If two friends like buy a brewery, a micro brewery together, do each of them comb through the bylaws seeing if the other one was trying to trick them? Usually that’s not really how it works. There’s some assumed good faith at the beginning. And if someone violated that good faith and just tried to steal the business from the person who didn’t read the bylaws carefully enough, that seems like a scummy thing to do, in my opinion.

Chris Freiman: But the shareholders or the taxpayers could vote to, you know, if somebody’s not paying their taxes, they can be prohibited from using the public roads.

Simon Laird: Yeah, if someone was not contributing and seemed to never be a tax contributor in their life, I think banning them from the roads would probably be okay, although there is, it’s sort of like the question for libertarians, like what if someone buys a circle of land around your house? And then they say, you can never cross my circle of land. Yeah, I guess the strict property rights answer is you can never cross the circle of land, leave your house and you can, if you’re an attack recipient, you can never use the public road. In practice, I don’t think that’s a realistic thing that’s going to happen. And maybe more to the point, The efficient way that people choose to do things when they have private property rights does not result in these things in these situations where there’s a circle of land around someone’s house or where So the reason why it would be bad for someone to be banned from the roads is because for decades we’ve had this situation where it’s just assuming everyone has access to the roads and if they lose access suddenly that’s going to be really bad for them. Now if they knew if they had like a five-year warning this is going to happen then property values would change and there would be opportunities for those people to move to their own you know places out with cheaper housing where they would have their own private roads.

Patrick: Just so you guys know, we’ll spend up to maybe 10 more minutes on this section and then move to closing statements.

Chris Freiman: I mean, I think that common ground statement, yeah, if you’re invited by local, yeah. So it’s not only if you’re invited by it, but at least on my view, but yeah, if you’re invited, that’s certainly good enough.

Patrick: Simon, what do you think about this statement?

Simon Laird: I think you have to be invited by more than one local. I think if there are 100 million shareholders, you need to be invited. Well, I would say a substantial fraction. But I think that’s actually going to be fine for a crisis position on immigration to the United States, because there are substantial fraction like more than, I’m sure it’s more than 10% of Americans are okay with increasing immigration.

Chris Freiman: So just so this is, I think, yeah, this is interesting to mention the bait. Do you think that you need a substantial fraction of locals to be permitted to do other things on public roads? So do I need 10% of people saying I’m permitted to put libertarian literature in my trunk and drive it around town?

Simon Laird: Well, we talked about this at the beginning. I would say I would certainly vote for you to be allowed to do that, and I would vote for the socialists to be allowed to have socialist literature. I don’t think they have a right to vote, but I do think they should have a right to sell the literature, just like you don’t have a right to murder, but you do have a right to distribute pro-murder literature, if that’s what you want to do.

Chris Freiman: you

Simon Laird: The strict property rights answer is that, yes, they could prohibit you from doing all kinds of things on public roads. But the more expansive vision of libertarianism is that even within private associations where you technically have the right to restrict behavior, most of the time as libertarians, we want there to be some latitude for individual variance and initiative within those private associations.

Chris Freiman: Okay, but so if 97% of my neighbors said no libertarian literature on the car in the cars on our roads, they’re within their rights to do that.

Simon Laird: I would say yes, and it’s a good thing we don’t live in a country where 97% of people want to do that. And we should maintain the super majority of people of Americans who support free speech by not allowing immigration from places where people would vote for such a thing.

Patrick: I think Chris is sensing a contradiction in like trying to say, do you have property rights? Can you exercise your property rights in such a way that like denies people freedoms to do certain things?

Simon Laird: Well, to me, this sort of sounds like, oh, well, what if one day 97% of your neighbors wake up and want to murder you?

Patrick: Especially when it’s like. Mm hmm.

Simon Laird: Well, if 97% of people in Fairfax, Virginia suddenly wanted to murder me, I would be in trouble. I have no defense against that.

Chris Freiman: But they wouldn’t have the right to. They would not have the right to murder. They might do it, but they wouldn’t have the right. But you’re saying they have the right to restrict libertarian literature.

Simon Laird: I mean, I think it’s, maybe this is getting back to illegal versus moral, right? I think that there are, How about this? Would you say that if you have the candy shop that you co-own with nine other people, and then one day, one of the other shareholders says to you, hey, Chris, I snuck this phrase into the bio, as it says, we can kick Charlie out and steal his share. And he didn’t notice it. Haha. Do you have the right to kick Charlie out and steal his share? I mean, I’m like a strict property rights sense. Yes, you have the right, but I still think you maybe don’t have the moral right to do that. And I think that’s exactly the same thing that I would say about banning people from carrying libertarian literature on the roads. I think under a very strict property rights interpretation, sure, they could do that, but I think it’s immoral and I would not support it.

Chris Freiman: I’m not sure about the, I mean, I don’t know. It sounds like there might be fraud involved in that, but I’ll set that aside. I mean, yeah, so I mean, I take the point that, and this is not just among libertarians. I think this is among anyone who’s liberal broadly construed is that you will have the right to do things that are wrong to do. So, you know, you don’t have to be a libertarian to believe in bodily autonomy. And you say, there’s this person who needs your blood. You really should give me your blood, but you have the right to say no. The state can’t force you to say yes. So I think that’s fair. But I’m inclined to say, and maybe this is just a bottom line difference in intuitions, that even if every one of my neighbors says, no libertarian literature in your trunk on the public roads, I say, yeah, they don’t have the right to do that. They don’t have the right to do that. It’s not just that they have the right, but they shouldn’t exercise it. It’s they don’t even have the right to tell me no.

Patrick: And Chris, would you say that the reason that’s your intuition is because you don’t fully buy the shareholder analogy, that it’s not perfectly analogous to like a business and shareholders?

Chris Freiman: Yeah, I think that’s a big part of it. I think also there is this so I mean there’s this really interesting question and you know it’s there might be work on it that I’m not really familiar with because it’s not exactly my area, but I do think like there are just really interesting questions that libertarians should work out about public property in terms of use. um so you could say all right we privatize everything or almost everything in the ideal libertarian world okay that’s cool uh but that’s not the world we live in and so it does kind of seem like we need a theory of public property and as far as I know there’s not one that’s super well developed and I think that’s like a gap in the literature that would be very interesting to investigate but I think something so I do think there are problems with the shareholder argument And also, I think, too, there is just a general presumption in favor of liberty and of letting people do things that are not right violations. So you say, you know, I own my car, I own the book, and so I can put the book in my trunk and I can drive my car. And now, of course, if you really buy the shareholder there, you’re like, yeah, okay.

Simon Laird: I want to say one more thing about this. Now, I think it’s certainly conceivable that there might be limits on what one shareholder can demand of another shareholder.

Chris Freiman: Yeah.

Simon Laird: So to me, the other shareholders prohibiting you from carrying the book in your car is very morally different from prohibiting someone

Chris Freiman: Yeah.

Simon Laird: from outside who had no role in constructing the road from carrying something there in your car. Well, what about this? What if you go to a small town where there’s a road that was privately built, but like everyone in the town uses it and the guy who built it is getting kind of old now and he tells you, I don’t want anyone transporting any marijuana on my road. So if you have some in the trunk of your car, you have to take a different road. I would say he has the right to do that.

Chris Freiman: Yeah, if he’s the private owner of the road, he can do it in the same way that if you say, look, no marijuana in my house. Yeah, all right, that’s fine. But like I said, but again, there are lots of restrictions you can impose on people in your house that you can’t impose on roads. So again, I could say no socialist literature in my house. If you wanna come in, you can’t have socialist literature, okay. But again, it seems like no socialist literature, no libertarian literature, whatever the case may be in public parks. Or public roads or like the post all these things. I think that’s kind of a tough pill to swallow

Simon Laird: I think it depends entirely on who owns the road. And I do think there are limits on what one shareholder in the road can demand of another shareholder in the road, but I think they have the right to make pretty much any demands of someone who is not a shareholder in the road.

Patrick: We’ve got a pending common ground statement here. Do we wanna see if we can both sign off on this?

Chris Freiman: That’s fine by me.

Simon Laird: I’ll say if it does not, if it doesn’t destroy the property. So the other people who own the property can also use it.

Patrick: How about that?

Simon Laird: Destroy or damage maybe.

Patrick: OK. The paternism at least entails the right to use some public property if you’re invited by a substantial fraction of locals and if it does not destroy or damage the property. Awesome. And I think, go for it.

Simon Laird: I have one more question for Chris. So you presumably don’t think this is happening today, but suppose that tomorrow we discover the continent of Satan land in the middle of the Pacific. And there are one billion Satan landers who just love murder and they love, you know, assaulting people and stealing stuff. And, but they love doing this through the law. So they always vote for how politicians do this stuff on that behalf. Would you say that we can prohibit Satan Landers from moving to America? They like to declare, wow, you guys are so gullible. You’re letting us move in so that we can vote for rape and pillage. They declared this openly. Can we prevent them from moving to America?

Chris Freiman: So the idea is that they want to move here and they won’t murder immediately, but they’re going to vote to make murder legal. And then once that happens, they will start murdering people.

Simon Laird: And there are like 400 million of them who are going to move. So there’ll be a majority really quickly.

Chris Freiman: Yeah, so I would say we can stop them from moving. But I also think that, so just to give a little more context, I think every right has something like a disaster avoidance exception to it. So this is not just about movement. I think this is true of any right. So for example, you know, this is something that I know libertarians debate, but it’s like, You know, an asteroid is coming towards Earth and it’s going to extinguish all life on Earth. And the only way to stop it is to confiscate someone’s laser beam, press it once and destroy the asteroid. And the person who owns the laser beam says, no, I’m not going to let you do that. Are you permitted to confiscate it from him and use the laser beam to save Earth? I say, yeah, of course. Why?

Simon Laird: Well, okay, what if we changed the scenario so it’s not a disaster? What if these people just want to steal $1,000 from every American? So no more rape and pillage, well, maybe they’re pillaging, but it’s only $1,000 per American. And they’re openly saying, yeah, we’re going to vote to take your money and send it back to Satanland, haha, you’re so gullible for allowing this.

Chris Freiman: I mean, I don’t know, $1,000. I mean, look, we allow politicians to say, I’m going to raise our taxes.

Simon Laird: But we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t allow that.

Chris Freiman: We shouldn’t, well, we allow them to say it and we allow people to. So I guess this comes back to the voting thing. We do allow people to vote for it. And so I am not.

Simon Laird: I think if you’re an anarcho-capitalist you have to say that people should, you look forward to a future where people will no longer be allowed to vote for that.

Chris Freiman: Do I look for, well, I’m not sure if I’m an Erica capitalist. I’m not sure what I am. You know, it’s like Milton Friedman had something where it’s like, what do you think about government? And he says, like, I think it should be smaller or something like that. I think that’s, I think that’s where I’m at. I’m not sure what the end game is. I would say, I mean, look, yes, it would be ideal if people were not voting for socialist policies. I can agree with you there.

Patrick: Awesome. And I think we’ll wrap it there unless anyone has any final comments for this section. Excellent.

Simon Laird: These statements are fine with me.

Patrick: Yeah. I think it’s good. And we really got to some of the heart of the matter and some of the fundamental disagreements, I think. And these statements are really good ways of clarifying at least

Simon Laird: Actually, would it be able to add one more common ground statement to what Chris said that, in principle, if you were going to avert a disaster, it would be OK to prevent immigration?

Chris Freiman: Yeah.

Patrick: Sure.

Chris Freiman: Yeah.

Patrick: It would be permissible to, well, let’s say to prevent immigration.

Chris Freiman: I would say if it were the only way to averted disaster.

Patrick: it would be permissible under libertarian principle to prevent immigration if it were the only way to averted disaster.

Chris Freiman: Yeah, that works.

Patrick: Simon?

Simon Laird: That works the same.

Patrick: Awesome. And I think that one will also be controversial among some libertarians as well because some are like very hardline NAP and the whole disaster and like emergency ethics question is also hotly debated within libertarian circles.

Chris Freiman: Yeah.

Patrick: Awesome. Okay. So we’re going to move on to our closing statements now. So these will be two minutes each. And Chris, you can kick it off.

Chris Freiman: Sure. Well, first of all, thanks to you both. I had a lot of fun. I think this was very productive and thank you for having me. Just to sum up, I would say on their face, it looks like the rights to private property and the rights to freely associate imply something like open borders or the right to move. So you can invite people to stay on your property. You can sell them housing that you own. You can invite them to join you in private associations and so on. And that’s not the sort of thing that the state should interfere with. I worry about difficulties and problems that arise from thinking of taxpayers as sort of shareholders in at least pieces of the United States. I think probably most prominently, the concern is that if we think of things that way, it’s going to entail a lot of restrictions on freedoms that libertarians would want to avoid. So we’ve been discussing these cases about what literature you can transport on public roads, you know, can you protest in public spaces, these sorts of things. And if we look at public spaces as something analogous to private property where taxpayers are sort of the co-owners, it’s just not clear why these restrictions wouldn’t be permissible. But it looks like to me that these restrictions are impermissible or at the very minimum, not consistent with libertarianism. And so the worry is that these arguments for restrictions on movement will end up justifying restrictions on other liberties that libertarians would not want to restrict. And I think I’ll just leave it there.

Patrick: Awesome. And Simon, you have two minutes.

Simon Laird: All right. Thank you, Patrick. And thank you, Chris. So I think that the.

Chris Freiman: Thank you.

Simon Laird: The libertarians who say there is a right to immigrate are actually making kind of the same error as people who support the state because they have a double standard for the government. I think that when anti-immigration people like me see a bunch of foreigners move from one country to another against the wishes of the people in the host country and then start rioting and tearing down statues and start stealing from the natives, we look at that and we say, invasion. We’ve heard of this throughout history. This is invasion. But people who support immigration say no, it’s an invasion because it was sanctioned by the state. It’s like, you know, an individual going to another country and tearing down statues there. It’s one thing if they wear a uniform and it’s a totally different thing if they’re not wearing uniform and not part of any organized state’s army. But I think that we, I mean, obviously, I think there’s not a meaningful difference because I don’t think that the state has special moral status. And I think that if you agree that Ukrainian soldiers are justified in shooting at Russian soldiers, even if those Russian soldiers might be support troops who are not directly violent, then you’ve agreed that you’ve agreed in principle that you can you can take action against people as members of an invading tribe and you know maybe that individual person isn’t going isn’t attacking you right now but if you have good reason to believe that they are coming to vote to steal from you or vote to take away your right to free speech or vote to hurt you in some other way then they’re really kind of an enemy combatant and you’re justified in defending yourself against them. I also said at the beginning that I wanted to go with the property argument rather than the fiscal argument but I think my real argument is is maybe not quite the property argument. It’s really that I am concerned about immigrants coming to the country and voting for bad things, which is maybe slightly different. And I do think that we own the institutions of America, but maybe the concern about immigrants voting isn’t exactly the property argument, as it’s usually stated.

Patrick: Awesome. And that concludes our debate. Thanks so much to anyone who’s watching for taking a look at this. I’ll just finish by giving our two participants an opportunity to plug any channels where you can find more of their work. So Chris, if you want to go first.

Chris Freiman: Well, so you can find me on Twitter, sub-stack. I have a professional web page, I think just Google me. And I’ll plug a couple of books, actually. So I got a book that just came out called Libertarianism the Basics, where we talk about immigration among many other things. It’s just a very, it’s an overview of libertarianism. And I’m working on a book that should be out at some point in the not too distant future, but I’m not sure exactly when, called Should We Have Open Borders? And it’s a debate book with me and another philosopher, Rishi Joshi at the University of Arizona. He’s one of my favorite philosophers. He’s great. I take the pro open border side. He takes the skeptical side. And we actually cover a lot of the same ground that we discussed here. So we talk a little bit about, you know, the state’s right to exclude and we talk about fiscal arguments and things like that. So when that comes out, if you’re interested in these questions, take a look. Take a look at it, yeah.

Patrick: Awesome. And Simon, where can people find you?

Simon Laird: Thanks. Well, I have a cleverly named substack called Simon Laird’s Newsletter, so people can check that out. And I have a separate substack page that this interview will be posted on.

Patrick: Awesome. Thanks so much. And thank you Chris and Simon for participating.

Simon Laird: Thanks, Patrick. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Freiman: Thanks, thanks to you both.