One thing I don’t fully understand about libertarians is their passionate defense of property rights and their utter disregard for national borders. Both are inventions of sorts, creations of communities to secure certain individual and collective benefits. They are creatures of law, and they depend upon government enforcement to have practical effect. More important, both deprive people of unrestrained rights of movement and activity that would be available in a state of anarchy.
Even under libertarian theory, there once was a state of nature, when we all could roam freely. Historical events such as the fencing controversies in the American West’s cattle herding days show that strict property rights and liberty of movement can conflict. They are almost always seen by trespassers as arbitrary “lines in the sand.”
In response to a federal immigration raid, Radley Balko writes that “[t]hese people risk their lives to come to this country, work hard jobs with low pay, and endure endless hate and bigotry[!], all because–like every wave of immigrants before them–they want to make a better life for themselves and their families. Their ‘crime’ was crossing a damned line in the sand.” Wouldn’t many people who violate property rights–including these stalwart immigrants who trespass upon ranches in South Texas while in transit–also merely be “crossing a damned line in the sand?” Wouldn’t a raid to arrest and detain such people be highly desirable under libertarian theory? Aren’t libertarians fond of suggesting you should be allowed to use deadly force to protect private property?
We know that real property rights are desired largely for economic reasons and that to have value they must often be restricted in the form of voluntary restrictions. Even these restrictions are ultimately enforced through tax-funded government courts, court orders, and police. Since we can’t easily combine to have a nationwide homeowners’ association, instead we have a nation, with laws, borders, immigration restrictions, and other forms of collective action subject to democratic decision-making (like HOAs). These arrangements are only possible through the use of organized force, including the institution of border control. To dismiss borders as a mere line in the sand, or to presume that libertarian theory prohibits them, suggests some other motive: a passion for equality and a desire to socially engineer America into a multicultural nation.
After all, a consistent libertarian should spend at least some time railing against Title VII and other restrictions on rights of voluntary association. Indeed, the most libertarian American rhetoric historically came from the owners of slaves and the oppressors of Southern blacks, defending their prerogatives from federal “tyranny.” John Randolph of Roanoke famously declared, “I am an Aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality.” Did the DC hipstertarians skip over these volumes from Randolph, Calhoun, the Dixiecrats, and others quite unlike today’s Cato Institute staffers available in the Liberty Fund catalog? Radley Balko, the Institute for Justice, and other DC libertarian outfits are embarrassed by this heritage no doubt. So, in response, they frequently champion libertarian causes that help minorities: DC hair-braiding salons and Mexican illegal aliens. They are afraid of any application of libertarian theory that might support some retrograde personal choice like racially restrictive covenants, religious freedom for conservatives, or discriminatory admissions policies at schools. Yet, historically speaking, this is exactly what “liberty” meant to a large plurality of its most passionate defenders. It is worth pondering why liberty and equality cannot easily be reconciled, what kind of additions to libertarian theory are needed to make a free society also a just society, and what this hodge-podge of liberal ides floating around Washington DC denominated “libertarianism” really amounts to.
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I’d suggest that the problem is a two step cultural problem. One is the creeping anarchism found among the less intellectually rigorous linbertarians, which, honestly, is fun the way most (intellectual) irresponsible bomb-throwing is fun. The other is that they unconsciously picked up many of the taboos of their blue-state environs.
There’s nothing wrong with defending hair-braiding salons. Someone should, after all. But one’s principles should, though they rarely do, prevail over one’s desire to be in the right sort of photograph – at least if one is to be a thorough-going intellectual partisan or ideologue.
Amen to that. Modern libertarians are just leftists who like money. I doubt that too many of them think that dueling, or as you say, racially-restrictive covenants, should be allowed.