Old but gold.
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by AntisocialMisanthropicPessimist
I think immigration, as a subset of private property, is one area where the AnCaps have a serious practical issue, that is assuming AnCaps have enough clout to matter anyway.
Basically, if you didn’t personally appropriate something, you don’t own it. Nobody owns the vast majority of the USA, or ANY unowned land. I reject the ‘commons’ as a concept, although I acknowledge some sort of customary-use and the possibility of joint ownership, etc. The problem is that none of these ‘immigrationist’ schemes would be possible on anything other than an individual community level. Between any two towns there are almost always large tracts of uninhabited land. If you try to stop some random Mexican from settling there, you deserve to be shot, and I don’t really have an inclination to budge on that.
Pluralism only extends as long as people are self-inflicting their stupidities. As soon as they try to extend their crazy notions of property beyond the boundaries of their creepy community they’re just gangsters with a religion, and fuck ’em.
So I really think the AnCaps are somewhat correct when it comes to slapping down over-eager pluralism. The fact is that a lot of these people – GeoLibs or Anarcho-Borderists – are going to have real potential, if not actual, conflict with a libertarian notion of law.
I also think that most alternative formulations of property rights and entities like ‘nations’, etc. are just mystical bullshit that don’t deserve to be taken seriously. I can accept communes and syndicates, etc. as long as they confine themselves to their own hippy-dippy bullshit, as soon as they start trying to ‘homestead’ my corporate farm I’ll gladly invite the Pinkertons with Sharpes rifles to welcome them.
People like Hoppe and Kinsella, or even Machan and Reisman, are correct that there is a limit to how pluralistic you can get with property rights and legal concepts. Basically anything that goes beyond individual procedural rationalism is grounds for blowing people away, I don’t give two shits how much their community of half-witted petty despots and priests agree with it. In my view, civilization and industrial capitalism are worth more than most people, anyway.
In the meanwhile, one might find common cause with certain left-libertarians in opposing specific issues of state power and the general principle of electoral politics, but I actually believe that people who are going around imposing their stupid racialist schemes and bad property systems should be militarily crushed, insofar as they fail to recognize private ownership and contract. Peace stops where your stupid ideas start to impose on my lawn.
I think it’s important to recognize how central the question of private property is to social organization. There are many different customary norms for deciding what specific property has been appropriated, cultural Schelling points such as a signature, etc. That doesn’t mean that all property systems are equally valid or all compatible. The *internal* communist state is only acceptable with reference to an *general* acceptance of individual capitalist property. Once they start attacking that, i.e. chasing off the Mexican homesteader, or trying to squat on the logging company’s mountainside, there is no more question of ‘tolerance’ and either they need to back of and go back to their Spartan Hellholes or get blown up by the guns of capitalism.
You can’t just treat these ‘communities’ like they have independent existence or are in some pocket dimension of their own. If they have bad property systems then you’ve just replaced the State for Somalia. Maybe it’s an improvement, but frankly they’re just going to have to accept international finance capital and landlordism to develop huge lands – including all those oil deposits you live near, if you wanted them you should have started drilling – or too bad for them. Nobody has a ‘right’ to practice Geo-Libertarianism with someone else’s Geo.
There are three senses in which this doesn’t bother me. One, I’m not an activist and this isn’t happening on my timetable or intent, so who cares. Two, who cares what happens to left-libertarians? Three, these Commies and Tribalists would be in a 1000x worse situation pissing off laissez-faire technophiles than they are fighting with the American government. They just wouldn’t stand a chance.
Number 3 is probably why most left-anarchists are actually so terrified of accepting anarchic capitalism: it will bury them.
My conception of pluralism and tolerance is one of having better things to worry about. Once the primary threat is no longer gigantic super-states, but stupid tribes of atavistic savages and thieves, I will have no problem railing on them as hard as I rail against the gub’ment.
I’m not exactly a Universalist but I also don’t have any problem spitting on the crazy bullshit Lefties and Right-Os want to make into the law. A and B can have any system they like between themselves, but as soon as C is involved the only standard of judgment and arbitration I will accept is the minimal principle of individualist anarchism. If someone wants to set up a zoophilia porn studio on the outskirts of town, and your local syndicalist labor union doesn’t like it, too bad for them. I hope they get shot up the same as these pigs who do drug busts. You don’t have to like gang-bangers to think they’re in the right.
As I said earlier, I frankly consider a fairly hardline property-and-contract system to be more valuable than most human beings. I don’t think ‘tolerance’ is worth putting up with their stupid shitty ideas. Of course one would distinguish between people holding bad ideas and people acting on them. Being a Nazi does not mean you kill Jews. But once they cross that line there really is no ‘tolerance’ possible. This is the core of how we decide who can do anything, and it has to be framed in some coherent manner that allows forward-planning and backward-evaluation. All their moralizing and hand-wavy belief in ‘owning dem tribal lands’ is a crock of shit and should be laughed off in court. And if dem and dey kin try to enforce it anyway, they’re just asking to be tread salsa.
