Stefan Molyneux repeatedly pulls a dishonest trick. He says that people should stop fretting about the burgeoning white nationalist movement in the United States and Western Europe, because it has a precedent in . . . Israel and Zionism. He proclaims,
This is the basic fact [for] everybody who's shocked and appalled about the potential for white nationalism: OK, well, if you are opposed to white nationalism, then you must of course be enormously opposed to Israel, which is an ethno-state. If you are not opposed to, and criticizing, Israel for being an ethno-state, then shut up about white nationalism, because you are a racist, a coward, and a hypocrite.
To him, if alt-right leader Richard Spencer has his way and the United States becomes a "homeland" for white people that repels nonwhites from immigrating, that is no worse than what Israel already does.
Here is a 96-second video montage of Molyneux regurgitating Richard Spencer's propaganda.
Actually, the claims of Richard Spencer and Stefan Molyneux are false. Israel is more diverse -- ethnically, racially, and religiously -- than Molyneux lets on. According to the CIA World Factbook, no more than 77 percent of Israel's citizens are Jewish. Over 20 percent of Israel's citizens are non-Jewish; over 16 percent is Muslim.
In terms of ethnicity and race and religion, Israel is more diverse than Japan, Finland, and Norway.
And contrary to much propaganda from both the Left and the Right, the Israeli government's policy is that Arabs in Israel are to be treated as first-class citizens with the same rights as Jewish citizens. As the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise points out,
Arabs in Israel have equal voting rights; in fact, it is one of the few places in the Middle East where Arab women may vote. Arabs in 2011 held 14 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. Israeli Arabs have also held various government posts, including one who served as Israel’s ambassador to Finland and the deputy mayor of Tel Aviv. Oscar Abu Razaq was appointed Director General of the Ministry of Interior, the first Arab citizen to become chief executive of a key government ministry. Ariel Sharon’s original cabinet included the first Arab minister, Salah Tarif, a Druze who served as a minister without portfolio. An Arab is also a Supreme Court justice. . . .
Arabic, like Hebrew, is an official language in Israel. More than 300,000 Arab children attend Israeli schools. At the time of Israel’s founding, there was one Arab high school in the country. Today, there are hundreds of Arab schools.
The sole legal distinction between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel is that the latter are not required to serve in the Israeli army. This is to spare Arab citizens the need to take up arms against their brethren. Nevertheless, Bedouins have served in paratroop units and other Arabs have volunteered for military duty.
This is not to deny the all too many instances of tensions between Jews and non-Jews within Israel. And there are many policies in all the aforementioned countries -- Israel, Japan, Finland, and Norway -- that I don't like. I don't approve of conscription in Israel or anywhere else.
But the fact remains that if Stefan Molyneux got his way and the USA became a "homeland" exclusively for white gentiles, this would not be an emulation of Israel. Richard Spencer and supposed anarchist Stefan Molyneux would have it that statutory law in the United States discourage racial mingling; that Israel is intended to be a safe haven for Jews does not mean that Israel is all about statutory discrimination against Arabs.
Executive Summary Here is a 46-minute video montage demonstrating that Stefan Molyneux parrots and cites the anti-Semite conspiracy theories of Kevin MacDonald, praised as an ally by David Duke himself. The first 8 1/2 minutes allow Kevin MacDonald to explain his deranged conspiracy theories about Jews. From the 8:34 mark onward, the video flips back and forth between MacDonald and Molyneux. First it lets MacDonald explain more of his conspiracy theories. Then it switches to Molyneux repeating those same talking points about Jews, in general, engaging in shadowy plots against "white Christians." At the 18 minute, 12 second mark, Molyneux cites MacDonald by name.
Molyneux: Spreading Bigotry Against Jews, Too
I have previously written about Stefan Molyneux's citation of the Pioneer Fund's antiquated eugenicist pseudoscience to provide a scientific veneer for his bigoted pronouncements about blacks, Latinos, and Arabs. While listening to some of his podcasts I got a whiff of anti-Semitism about Molyneux as well, but the anti-Semitism was not as overt as the out-and-out hostility toward the aforementioned ethnic categories. Yet looking further into this I have discovered that my suspicions about the anti-Semitism are confirmed . . . and more virulent than I had anticipated. Molyneux parrots conspiracy theories about Jews most infamously propagated by retired Californian psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, a proven anti-Semite and close associate of David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. As MacDonald wrote on his own website on July 1, 2016,
I have been appearing on the David Duke radio show as a regular guest, every two weeks or so, for quite a while. This was a difficult decision at first, but I am very comfortable with it. . . . After watching David Duke’s videos and reading his writings, I decided that I agree with the vast majority of what he is saying.
And Molyneux cites MacDonald by name in disseminating this paranoid propaganda, as if MacDonald is a scrupulous academician and reliable source of information.
David Duke starts a Skype interview with MacDonald by introducing him as "my good friend and an incredible academic" -- no ironic pun intended with incredible. Unsurprisingly, MacDonald himself cites dubious sources, as in the case of MacDonald citing, as a credible source, J. Philippe Rushton, the known eugenicist and white supremacist who in his lifetime led the Pioneer Fund (one of the few remaining eugenics thinks-tanks in the USA). As you can see here, as of this writing David Duke has interviewed MacDonald over twenty times. Why does David Duke cherish MacDonald so much? It is because of MacDonald writing pseudo-scholarly works to provide the illusion of academic credibility for his conspiracy theories about Jews. The main video where Molyneux cites and repeats MacDonald, "The Truth About Immigration: What They Won't Tell You!," had been uploaded onto YouTube seven months prior to MacDonald becoming a regular guest on David Duke's podcast. Still, by that time -- July 2014 -- MacDonald had already been well-known for his propaganda against Jews.
First I will describe MacDonald's conspiracy theories. Once done with that, I will go over how Molyneux largely repeats them -- again, citing MacDonald by name -- and modifies them only slightly.
1.MacDonald insists both (a) communism and (b) the activist campaign for liberalizing immigration laws are conspiracies concocted by Jews. As of this writing, I haven't yet heard MacDonald say that the push for more open immigration is necessarily a communist conspiracy. Rather, MacDonald seems to be saying that initially Jews invented communism as a conspiracy but then, decades into it, lost interest in communism, despite remaining mostly on the political Left (he also derides the allegedly right-wing neo-conservatism of the Kristol family as a Jewish conspiracy). After having squeezed all they could get out of communism, MacDonald continues, Jews then cooked up a new conspiracy: lobbying for more open immigration into the United States and Western Europe.
2. MacDonald says that Jews advocating any ideological position is indeed a conspiracy because Jewish intellectuals who profess to believe sincerely in any political viewpoint are lying; they are masking their actual exploitative endgames. MacDonald says that a disproportionately large percentage of the early advocates of communism were Jewish, that a large portion of the advocates of open immigration are Jewish, and that the postwar advocates of neoconservatism are mostly Jewish. That evaluation is not very controversial. The Jerusalem Postquotes Yaron Brook making a similar observation about how various competing philosophic movements often have Jewish leaders. Indeed, Ayn Rand came from a Jewish family and so did many early students of the Objectivist philosophy. I won't be surprised if MacDonald says Objectivism is another Jewish conspiracy.
What is inflammatory is MacDonald's accusation concerning intent. MacDonald says that when a large number of Jewish intellectuals argue for any ideological viewpoint -- be it socialism, neo-conservatism, or libertarianism -- those Jewish intellectuals are, perforce, not sincere in agreeing with what they are saying. Rather, MacDonald continues, this is a ruse -- ruse is the exact word he employs -- to mask what Jews really want. Regardless of whether Jewish intellectuals are arguing for capitalism or socialism, says MacDonald, Jews are only trying to gain political and/or economic power for Jews at the expense of the gentiles around them, especially Christians of Western European descent. That is, if a Jewish intellectual argues for free trade, he does not genuinely believe that free trade will benefit gentiles; this is just a ploy whereby Jews can manipulate and exploit those gentiles. Likewise, MacDonald continues, if Jewish intellectuals argue that the U.S. federal government should liberalize immigration from Mexico, then the Jewish intellectuals are merely trying to manipulate Mexicans for their own ends, mostly to the material detriment of non-Hispanic gentiles.
3. MacDonald says Jews, communism, and the liberalization of immigration laws are all linked, since both communism and open immigration are Jewish conspiracies. Again, I don't know of MacDonald saying that open immigration is a communist conspiracy. He sounds like he is saying that communism was an earlier Jewish conspiracy and then, as Jews were losing interest in communism, they eased into the newer conspiracy that is immigration liberalization. As MacDonald puts it on the white nationalist website VDare (cited on Stormfront),
In my research on Jewish involvement in shaping immigration policy, I found that the organized Jewish community has been the most important force favoring unrestricted immigration to the U.S. In doing so, the various entities involved have consistently acted to further their own perceived collective interests—interests that are arguably in conflict with those of the majority of Americans.
4. MacDonald condemns the 1965 Hart-Celler Act as a left-wing elite Jewish globalist conspiracy. MacDonald talks first about the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and then the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. The Johnson-Reed Act established national quotas for immigration on bases that were explicitly eugenicist and explicitly racist. By MacDonald's own admission, the argument for the bill was that southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans were genetically, racially, and culturally inferior to the native-born majority of Americans at the time, who mostly descended from people of western and northern Europe. Of course, many of those Eastern Europeans blocked from immigrating were Jews. MacDonald says that there wasn't much good reason for native-born Americans to fear gentiles from Eastern Europe, but that they were indeed right to want to keep Eastern European Jews out of the USA.
The national origin quotas favored immigrants from Western Europe over those from Eastern Europe, allowing for a larger number of people from Great Britain to enter the USA than, say, those from Poland. However, MacDonald bemoans, this system was undermined by efforts of left-wing elitist Jewish (globalist) activists (elite is exactly the word he uses) who lobbied for a more liberalized system of immigration. According to MacDonald, left-wing (globalist) Jews wanted more "Third World immigration" (that is, immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America) coming into the USA because it would do more to make Western-European-descended Christians a minority. Moreover, continues MacDonald, left-wing (globalist) Jews could form a political "coalition" with activists from these other ethnic groups and then it would be more difficult for Western-European-descended Christians to gang up on them.
Then MacDonald wails that the (globalist) Jewish activists succeeded with the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which Ted Kennedy championed. MacDonald says that Ted Kennedy assured (racist) doubters that the bill was OK because it would not change the demographics of the country (that is, WASPs would maintain a majority). Then MacDonald points out that over the past half-century the demographics have indeed changed. MacDonald therefore insists that Ted Kennedy very consciously chose to lie, as it was his conscious intention to alter the racial makeup of the country, and that it was the globalist Jewish lobby that very decidedly put him up to it.
We are to believe from MacDonald that by removing the explicitly racist national origin quotas, the Hart-Celler Act made it easy for dark-skinned people from poor countries to enter the USA, opening the floodgates for a barbarian horde. In reality, MacDonald's characterization of the Hart-Celler Act as near-anarchic deregulation is misleading. The Hart-Celler Act created the present system, which says that to immigrate to the USA for the long term, you may do so to seek higher education (student visas), work (H-1B visas), or reunite with family members (family reunification visas). While the explicit national origin quotas are gone, there remain caps on the number of visas that can be issued per country. Since Mexico adjoins the continental USA, it is not surprising that 30 percent of visa applications come from Mexico. Yet no more than 7 percent of all visas issued annually can go to Mexican nationals.
If you are a Mexican who is a spouse or minor child of a permanent U.S. resident, you will have to wait an average 6 years to obtain a family reunification visa -- and that's one of the categories with one of the shorter waiting periods. If, as a Mexican, you are the sibling of a U.S. citizen, the estimated waiting time for a visa is 16 years (see the first page of this PDF). Moreover, H-1B work visas are accessible almost exclusively to persons who hold university degrees (as Melania Trump's case reminds us, a rare exception is made for fashion models). Since impoverished people in impoverished countries still mostly have to farm for their food, they rarely ever scrimp together the resources needed to obtain university educations. For that reason, contrary to MacDonald's disingenuous claims, the present system created by the Hart-Celler Act still stacks the deck against (dark-skinned) penurious people from the "Third World." The 1965 law did not unleash any type of mass migration.
In any case, MacDonald's points here are (a) the national origins regime from 1924 to 1965 was wonderful, (b) everything went to hell from 1965 onward when the Hart-Celler Act allowed for a barbarian horde of non-white people to flood into the USA, (c) this is the result of a left-wing elite Jewish globalist plot, and (d) this happened because Ted Kennedy let himself be a pawn of this left-wing elite Jewish globalist plot.
5. MacDonald condemns Jews (not particular individuals who happen to be Jewish, but Jews in general) as hypocrites.This is a favorite talking point of Stefan Molyneux and other anti-Semites, such as Ann Coulter (see here and here), and these anti-Semites apparently adopted it from MacDonald. The talking point is as follows: most Jews in Western Europe and the English-speaking countries argue for more liberalized immigration into the countries of their present residence (MacDonald doesn't want to admit that the United States is the home country of a Jewish-American). MacDonald (and then Molyneux after him) particularly takes offense at Jewish intellectuals who stand up for the rights of Mexicans to enter the USA peaceably and who have expressed revulsion at Donald Trump's proposal to build an enormous wall to keep them out. MacDonald says that Jews who argue for liberalizing immigration are hypocrites, because the state of Israel itself has border walls to keep out enemy troops from Hamas, and Israel itself has restrictive immigration laws.
That is whacking at a tremendous straw man. First, Israel remains officially at war against Hamas, Syria, and other adjoining states. A legitimate purpose of national borders is to repel military threats. By contrast, the United States is not in a state of war against Mexico, and undocumented Mexicans who enter the USA for work are not military threats. Even if a Mexican acted in consistency with the bigoted stereotypes -- even if that Mexican came to the USA fully intending to benefit from welfare and to put his children into taxpayer-funded government schools, that still would not be an act of war against the United States. The comparison between Israel's border walls against Hamas and Trump's proposed border wall against Mexico therefore fails.
Secondly, the Israel-policy-makes-Jews-all-hypocrites assertion fails to make a distinction between Jews and the Israeli government. It's sad that something so obvious has to be explicated: a Jew doesn't have to agree with every policy of the Israeli government. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute, originally from Israel, for instance, has mentioned that he is not happy about Israel's border walls.
I am not Jewish but, for what it's worth, should there come a day when military hostilities cease -- and that would be very good -- there won't be any worthwhile reason for Israel to maintain the border walls.
Anyhow, Stefan Molyneux "adapts" these same talking points from MacDonald, citing him by name, and the differences between Molyneux's version and MacDonald's are merely superficial.
1.-2.Molyneux agrees that communism is a conspiracy concocted by Jews. Says Molyneux,
Communism doesn't particularly come from the Greek, Roman, Western, Enlightenment tradition [true --S.H.]; it generally comes from Jewish tradition [highly misleading claim; communism, as with other forms of collectivism, is a systematized codification of collectivist traditions that go back to the days of hunter-gatherer clans, predating all these other cultures --S.H.]. Certainly, of course, the founders of communism were Jews [misleading; Karl Marx came from a Jewish family but denounced Jews as selfish capitalists --S.H.]. Jews were less than 2 percent of the Russian population but were more than 50 percent of the leaders of the Communist Party, and, of course, a lot of them were in charge of concentration camps and so on, later on under the Soviet regime [note Molyneux's conspicuous insistence on using the term "concentration camps" and saying that Jews ran them --S.H.].
Whereas an important part of MacDonald's conspiracy theories is that he says that Jews are seldom sincere in expressing any political convictions, I have yet to hear Molyneux say that explicitly. Nonetheless, MacDonald's other accusations -- particularly about Jews obsessing over domination of gentiles -- remain crucial to Molyneux's accusations in the "Truth About Immigration" video. When you look at Molyneux's typed-up source notes, the reference for Molyneux's announcement that Jews ran concentration camps in the Soviet Union is none other than an essay by Kevin MacDonald called "Stalin's Willing Executioners: Jews As a Hostile Elite in the USSR," which is a review of a book by Yuri Slezkine titled The Jewish Century.
3.Molyneux, like MacDonald, says that Jews, communism, and immigration liberalization are all connected, though he does not phrase this exactly in the same way that MacDonald does. Molyneux is more roundabout in trying to put these together. We remember that Molyneux said that communism is predominantly Jewish. Then he says that immigration restriction from 1924 to 1965 was indeed wise and well-justified because Eastern Europeans were communist agents, and when such communist agents entered the USA, they would commit terrorism, espionage,and other acts of violence. Hence, says Molyneux, it was good for the U.S. federal government to ban from the United States any immigrant who might potentially be a communist agent. Since Molyneux said previously in the same video that communist agents were predominantly Jewish, the deductive conclusion the audience is to draw from this is that Molyneux believes that the U.S. federal government was right to block Jewish immigrants in particular.
This, he insists, "was a justified fear, given how rapidly communism had spread throughout the world." Unfortunately, he adds, there was "Jewish opposition" to legislation that very reasonably tried to ban Eastern European Jews who might turn out to be communist agents. But, Molynuex goes on, U.S. Congressman John Rankin laudably pushed back against these Jews.
In attempt to maintain some plausible deniability about whether he agrees fully with this opinion, Molyneux conspicuously employs the "passive voice" in proclaiming:
So there is this concern -- and the degree to which this is valid is certainly arguable -- there is this concern in the minds of a lot of Christian Americans, and this was of course the case in Germany[!!] as well, there was this concern that communism equals Judaism and when communists, a.k.a. Jews, get in power, then a lot of Christians are not long[-lived] for this world, so this is sort of what he [John Rankin] is talking about, and this is all vanished from history [bowdlerized and scrubbed by a politically-correct globalist cabal] and not because it's entirely false. Again, the degree of [Jewish] influence is arguable; we'll talk about more facts [sic] here, but I guess Christians aren't quite as good at telling stories [as allegedly conspiring Jews are].
In this particular video, Molyneux does not repeat MacDonald precisely in proclaiming that Jews lobbied for the Hart-Celler Act primarily to undermine white gentile culture. However, like MacDonald, Molyneux does say that Jews favoring the Hart-Celler Act wanted to get more Jews in particular into the USA. Moreover, Molyneux does repeatedly state that a left-wing globalist conspiracy is pushing for liberalization of immigration in order to undermine white Christian culture in the West (not using the word Jew in that isolated context). And since Molyneux also says that left-wing people who argue for liberalizing immigration are predominantly Jewish, one is to deduce that Molyneux is intimating that this supposed left-wing elite globalist conspiracy to maintain power through "importing"dark-skinned immigrants from "the Third World" is indeed a conspiracy orchestrated by Jews. After conveying that he considers multiculturalism to be synonymous with immigration liberalization, Molyneux says, "Jews, through communism, promote multiculturalism -- and, of course, multiculturalism is promoted by non-Jews, of course [sic; the repetition of of course is Molyneux's] as well -- and this causes problems within the host countries," that is, countries receiving dark-skinned immigrants.
4.Starting here, Molyneux repeats all of MacDonald's favorite talking points about the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act's eugenicist quotas, the 1965 Hart-Celler Act supposedly opening up the USA to "Third World immigration," and of Ted Kennedy lying about demographic change on behalf of a globalist (Jewish) cabal.
5. Here Molyneux repeats the talking point about how any Jew who stands up for Mexican immigrants and against Donald Trump's proposed border wall is a hypocrite on account of Israeli policies.
Final Notes
Molyneux's denunciations of Jews go back more than a decade. On April 9, 2005, he said that
mental health has always been defined in social terms – a combination of sustained relationships and productive work. In other words, a popular Auschwitz guard with a long marriage is the very definition of mental health. Moral considerations do not form the basis of mental heath – a compliant Nazi is considered more ‘healthy’ than an outcast one. This form of ‘social ethics’ is largely due to the Jewish influence over psychology. It would be hard for a Jew to say that individual morality is more important than social acceptance, since to be ‘Jewish’ is to automatically place the authority of the group over the conscience of the individual – just as Christians, socialists, Muslims and soldiers do.
MacDonald says "major anti-Jewish movements throughout history have been the result of real conflicts of interest. . . . I wrote a book called The Separation and Its Discontents. It deals with various anti-Semitic movements, anti-Jewish movements. All of them were deeply involved with Jewish domination [over non-Jews] of one kind or another."
Molyneux agrees that Israel is all about Jewish domination over Palestinians and Arabs of neighboring states:
What is often described as a civil war between Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine was, in fact, little more than an ethnic cleansing campaign carried out by Zionists. ...if the horrors committed by the Nazis continue to live on in the minds of the Jews, how can we expect the Palestinians to forget what was done to them? I'm not equating the Jews with the Nazis [obvious lie] but, from the standpoint of the victims, there are obvious similarities.
It is not a mere suspicion that Molyneux is interested in disseminating anti-Semite propaganda. He repeats conspiracy theories about Jews, conspiracy theories transmitted by David Duke acolyte Kevin MacDonald, and Molyneux cites this same Kevin MacDonald repeatedly.
Again, here is the 46-minute montage where you can hear Stefan Molyneux and his anti-Semite conspiracy-theorist source speak for themselves.
UPDATE from Tuesday, November 22, 2016: Stefan Molyneux repeatedly makes the disingenuous claim that Richard Spencer's explicitly eugenicist white nationalism is no worse than Zionism. He says Israel is an "ethno-state" for excluding gentiles. What renders the claim so mendacious is that Israeli statutes are not about exiling gentiles, such as Arab Muslims, and Israel is more diverse than Stefan Molyneux and Richard Spencer would have people believe. See the follow-up posting refuting Molyneux over here.
There are two types of people generally considered to be part of the political Right -- especially in the United States -- who are thought of as being in the same category. This is due to a superficial similarity. Yet they are fundamentally different in philosophy. This is not a mere difference in degree that many on the Left assume it to be. It is a difference in kind.
The two types are thought to be in the category of: mean-spirited right-winger who wants to cut tax funding to government programs.
Here, there are two wholly different groups of people who are slapped together into this package deal: principled free-marketers versus fiscal tightwads.
The Free Market Is Necessarily Ideological -- And That’s Good
A genuine free-marketer is a principled ideologist -- what normally gets denigrated as an ideologue. In fact, Napoleon Bonaparte coined the term ideologue to disparage free-marketers who opposed him, namely the Enlightenment philosophe Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy. Tracy described his own philosophic approach as ideology, and there was nothing pejorative about it. It meant “the science of ideas.” Napoleon was the first to say that if you had a philosophy based on consistently applicable principles, it meant you were just some fanatic applying dogma deduced from arbitrary premises. The next big historical figure to attach derisive connotations to ideology was Karl Marx, of all people.
Principled Free-Marketers
Anyhow, the principled free-marketer has a specific endgame in mind: he wants a government limited only to retaliating to the initiation of the use of physical force, which means that the government’s duties are limited mostly to the police, military, and the courts. There might also be some government functions limited to helping people define private property rights as new technologies are developed. Rather than Herbert Hoover’s approach with the FCC, for instance, a principled free-market government would have helped define private property rights with respect to which party owned which part of the electromagnetic spectrum at which to broadcast. A free-market government would also help define intellectual property rights clearly, such as in the case of the U.S. Department of Agriculture recognizing intellectual property in sexually produced plants with Plant Variety Protections. (And no, abolishing intellectual property rights is not the true freedom position, but that’s a topic I have tackled elsewhere.)
The principled free-marketer’s endgame is the sort of constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State that Auberon Herbert championed. Principled free-marketers care staunchly about this because they comprehend that “taxation is theft” is not mere political rhetoric or hyperbole; it is literally true, and therefore they want to do what it takes to minimize such violent threats. In the end, to achieve this minimization requires a constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State.
Principled free-marketers understand, though, that there is no way to achieve this overnight. Contrary to what some people might fantasize about, there will be no disaster that allows us to wipe the slate clean and start over with a constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman utopia (the notion that principled free-marketers would rejoice at this prospect is one of Naomi Klein’s many delusions). But though we cannot obtain this dream overnight, we use this end goal as a standard by which we measure our progress. We know that we cannot privatize Social Security in the course of a day, but, because we have a good idea of what perfection looks like, we know that legislation that expands Social Security is bad, whereas legislation is good if it respects the liabilities owed to elderly people who already paid into the system while the legislation simultaneously allowing young workers to opt out and seek private retirement accounts.
Principled free-marketers do make moral judgments but they recognize that, in peacetime, there is no good reason for the law to discriminate against people based on arbitrary distinctions. They understand that if it is wrong to pay tax money to the foreign-born for their health care, then it is no better to pay tax money to the native-born for their health care.
Principled free-marketers very much want to cut government funding for many services that people now believe, mistakenly, can only be provided by the government. For instance, principled free-marketers say that there should not be tax-funded municipal libraries. At this, many people react in horror; their assumption is that if the municipal government does not use tax money to maintain libraries, there will be no public libraries. To this, principled free-marketers point out that public libraries were actually invented by private entrepreneurs like Benjamin Franklin. What happened was that a group of people pooled their money together to purchase many books and store the books in one location. If you paid a periodic fee, you could check out books when you wished.
Principled free-marketers also point out how private entrepreneurs invented firefighting departments, and of how it was not due to the inadequacy of privatization, but of changes in liability laws that misunderstood property rights, that eventually misled officials to conclude that firefighting could be done adequately only by municipal governments. In any case, whereas the straw-man depiction of principled free-marketers is of those trying to leave you in the jungle, bereft of libraries and roads and schools, the principled free-marketers simply point out that any enterprise that can succeed in the absence of threatening violence can succeed in the absence of direct government involvement. Principled free-marketers thus explain that private individuals, peaceably cooperating on their own accord, can provide public goods that are falsely assumed to be the rightful exclusive province of the State.
That is a very different approach to that of the fiscal tightwads with which the principled free-marketers are lumped.
Fiscal Tightwads
Whatever lip service fiscal tightwads might give to the rhetoric of principled free-marketers like Ayn Rand and Auberon Herbert, the fiscal tightwads agree with welfare-state leftists, at least on an implicit level, that all assets that exist actually rightfully belong to “Society as a Whole,” and that the objects you believe to be your absolute private property are merely objects you are borrowing from "society." They therefore hold no qualms about the welfare state in principle. They have other reasons for wanting to reduce tax funding for various government services.
Unlike many of their more radical, more explicitly left-wing counterparts, the fiscal tightwads recognize that there is necessarily a limit to how much wealth the government can spend. The fiscal tightwads, unlike those farther to the political Left, understand that government coffers can run out. Therefore, when the government is heading toward bankruptcy, the fiscal tightwads sound the alarm and say, “Yes, as painful as it is to admit, we have to make cuts.” Mind you that the fiscal tightwads do not acknowledge that this tax spending is wrong in principle -- they do not cohere, deep down, that taxation is theft. Instead, they believe that the government has merely gone overboard in spending tax money on the welfare state, and therefore the government should exercise more restraint in the spending -- so that there will still be some units of tax money left over to spend in the long-term future. That is, they do not disapprove morally of tax spending on supposedly peaceful enterprises -- they merely think that the government should be more conservative in how it disperses the tax money, another reason why the word conservative is associated with cuts in tax spending. They believe that being conservative with tax spending is the way to be a responsible steward of what is the collective heritage rightfully collectively belonging to society.
Moreover, fiscal tightwads are similar to the radical Left in wanting to apply the altruistic ethic, but they have a different interpretation of how this should be applied. Fiscal tightwads believe in the Puritans’ application of altruism.
How the Far Left and the Fiscal Tightwads Try to Impose Altruism Differently
Suppose that you are wealthy and I am not; I am needy. The radical Left says that morality requires that the State takes that money from you by force and then gives it to me. Then the radical Left tells you that you, as a rich person, ought to accept that. Your accepting that would be a most unselfish and therefore moral gesture; your acceptance of this policy would help you be honorable by practicing the virtue of self-sacrifice. If you, as a rich person, balk at this, you commit the sin of selfishness.
By contrast, the fiscal tightwads flip this around, accusing the other side of being too selfish. In a more Puritanical sort of tradition, the fiscal tightwads believe that virtue is found in suffering from privation. They believe that if I go through a period of material want and get through it, learning to scrimp by on scraps, that builds character. Therefore, if I ask the State to take money from a rich person like you and give it to me, I am the one being selfish.
As an example, Lawrence W. Reed of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) told John Stossel that in the Bible, Luke 12: 13–15, Jesus reproached a man for desiring coercive wealth redistribution for being selfish: "And one of the company said unto him, Master [Jesus], speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me. And He [Jesus] said unto him, Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you? And He [Jesus] said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." Jesus even goes as far as declaring to anyone desirous of wealth redistribution, "And He [Jesus] said unto His disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on. [ . . . ] And seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind" (Luke 12: 22–29).
Indeed, say the fiscal tightwads, if the government provides for everyone in poverty so that people are no longer in poverty, that makes them decadent and spoiled and soft and lazy -- all these material comforts are manifestations of the selfishness of the persons receiving these benefits. If I receive these amenities from the State, the State is depriving me of the opportunity to practice the virtue of . . . austerity. This idea is the reason why, when European governments finally began to cut funding for services that never should have received tax funding in the first place, these measures were given the misleading label of austerity -- the assumption being that you will necessarily be poor and Spartan simply if you don’t have the State giving you stuff.
Why Fiscal Tightwads Are Nonobjective About What Needs Cutting
Thus, we find that one major reason why the fiscal tightwads want to reduce funding for various government programs is that they think “too much money” in general is spent by the State. They also object that the State spends tax money on particular enterprises rather than others. For example, when he was mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani expressed outrage that tax money was spent on such a hideous and offensive and sacrilegious artwork as “Holy Virgin Mary.” However, he had no objection to the idea of tax money being spent on what he deemed genuinely tasteful and inoffensive (maybe even beautiful) art, such as, say, a more Grecian-style depiction of idealized naked human bodies. Fiscal tightwads will often wail that too much tax money is dispersed to highly unionized government schools and not enough to charter schools that have more autonomy from the unions.
Thus, the fiscal tightwads say (1) that “too much tax money is spent” in general and (2) that “too much tax money is spent” on unworthy social services instead of on worthy social services. They do not give a lot of thought to the considerations (A) the very institution of compulsory taxation is at least as morally problematic as any other form of extortion, or (B) that the institution of private property should be recognized as consistent, an absolute, which means that when it comes to anything other than defense against violence, there is no “common good” that justifies pooling everyone’s money together and deeming it public property. Note that because they do not have a well-thought-out principle in mind, they have no objective definition for what constitutes “too much spending.”
They have no objective criterion for saying that, say, federal welfare spending as 14 percent of GDP is too much whereas federal welfare spending as 0.014 percent of GDP is ideal. Nor they do have objective criteria for judging which nonviolent enterprises are deserving of tax funding and which are not. Fiscal tightwads have no qualms about how Dick Cheney’s wife had a job at the National Endowment for the Humanities transferring funds to relatively inoffensive art; they only squawk at sacrilegious material. The idea that everyone should be free to keep her own money or spend it on whatever art she likes -- beautiful or ugly, sacrilegious or not -- is hardly a consideration; that is more a concern of ideologues in the principled free-marketer camp. It is also the fiscal tightwads who keep saying that immigration should be curbed because immigrants getting taxpayer funding deprives citizens who are native-born -- and somehow therefore necessarily more deserving -- of that same tax funding. Such people are not objecting to the taxpayer funding on principle, and the New York Times is right to refer to this rather arbitrary distinction as “welfare chauvinism.”
Principled free-marketers and fiscal tightwads both talk about how they want tax expenditures reduced, and therefore the Left assumes they are all the same, and that differences between these people are differences merely in degree. They think of Ayn Rand as simply a more extreme version of Robert Taft. Indeed, almost every famous politician of the twentieth century who has been denounced as a laissez-faireist ideologue was merely a fiscal tightwad who finagled with the left-wing radicals over how national tax spending should be increased only by 7 percent and not 30 percent. Definitely we principled free-marketers consider a spending increase of 7 percent to be less severe than that of 30 percent, but it does not follow that we are actually in fundamental philosophic agreement with the fiscal tightwads. Probably the twentieth-century president who was most consistent in reducing spending was Calvin Coolidge, but he, too, was a fiscal tightwad who simply was more effective at being tight-waddish than all other U.S. Presidents of the twentieth century, especially Ronald Reagan; he was actually a Progressive who voiced mitigated support for the regulatory-entitlement state policies that Theodore Roosevelt championed.
Ever since Ayn Rand became well-known, some people have seemed to overlap in the two categories. Some people call themselves libertarians for natural rights and yet they fall back on saying the State should curb immigration so that tax money will focus on native-born citizens instead of on immigrants. What category a person is in is determined more by his actions than by any vague lip service he gives to natural rights. If someone claims to agree with Ayn Rand and Auberon Herbert but then falls back on “welfare chauvinist” talking points about native-born citizens deserving the tax spending that would otherwise go to grubby immigrants, that person is not being a principled free-marketer in this capacity.
Of special note are the "libertarians"(?) who say that a universal guaranteed [sic] minimum income, paid for through tax money, should "replace [sic] the welfare state." To say that a guaranteed income "replaces" welfare is disingenuous; a taxpayer-funded guaranteed income is welfare. What these libertarians mean, though, is that they would favor having a guaranteed income instituted if it meant that the other presently existing welfare programs, such as Social Security, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), be repealed. They proclaim that the advantage of this is that it would result in a net reduction in taxation and government spending.
A net reduction in spending, by itself, would not be objectionable, but principled free-marketers are far from impressed by these libertarians' (?) concession to the Left's assumption that everyone's money is ultimately public property and that every possession in your custody is merely a gift from the social collective. Those who say that the guaranteed income is somehow fiscally responsible simply because it would waste less money than do other welfare programs, are definitely not principled free-marketers. That position is, at best, more in line with that of the fiscal tightwads (and even to put such advocates in that classification is to be generous).
They All Just Want to Cut Tax Funding? The Difference
Here is the difference. Fiscal tightwads want a cut in taxpayer spending for the following reasons:
Taxes are annoying
Taxes disincentivize economic productivity, which will result in a net loss in economic productivity for society as a whole
Taxpayer funding makes you decadent and lazy and therefore selfish, depriving you of the opportunity to undergo some humbling privation and learn the virtues of unselfish austerity
Too much spending will drain the coffers and there will be no tax money left to spend in the long run
This tax money is going to something morally debased when it should go to a loftier state-sponsored enterprise
This is the principled free-marketer’s concern:
Morality requires that you be free to live peaceably without other people threatening violence to control you. Government spending involves compulsory taxation, and compulsory taxation is a form of extortion and violent control over you, as violence on the part of the State is the recrimination against you if you do not hand over your wealth. Compulsory taxation therefore ought to be driven to the minimum. Period.
On January 17, 2017, I added to this post the mention of Lawrence Reed's citation of verses from Luke 12in the Bible.
My drawing is supposed to be of Chernabog from Disney's "Fantasia." Of course, Chernabog is a demon, not a ghost. ^_^
I recognize that, by definition, everything that exists, exists within the natural universe and operates according to the principles of natural law. Even that which is man-made is natural in the sense that it functions according to scientific principles and cannot contradict or suspend them. Anything that exists has natural attributes. According to that understanding, to say that the "supernatural exists" is a contradiction in terms. To label something "supernatural" is not to say that it is "extremely natural," but that it is above and beyond natural -- that it is outside of what is natural (i.e., that which exists). To proclaim that something has an existence beyond, apart from, and outside of Nature is to proclaim that it has an existence beyond, apart from, and outside of existence.
I find it no contradiction that I continue to be fascinated by stories about the paranormal and the occult. I do not take those stories literally anymore, as I did when I was ten; they now interest me as a sort of psychological phenomenon. I am interested in the significance and the symbolism of ghost stories. Here, I will not so much discuss people's motivations for why they listen to and tell ghost stories, but about why I think certain famous ghost stories remain well-remembered.
It's About More Than "I Just Like to Feel Scared"
Briefly, I think that it is an incomplete explanation to say that people like ghost stories because they like to feel scared. As horror movie mogul Wes Craven once pointed out in USA Weekend, no one really likes feeling scared as such. Rather, people expose themselves to scary stories and movies in order to make themselves feel brave. When they encounter such scary stories, they feel all of the primal sensations of fear and alarm. But, by the end of the story, they remain safe and alive, while they feel somewhat brave for having "survived" the simulation of terror. In Craven's words, "Why do we want to see a hero fight impossible odds and somehow prevail? Because all that fighting of impossible odds puts you in a state of fear for the hero or for yourself. But the payoff is worth it. . . . People don't pay [to see scary movies] to be scared. They pay to have the fear that they walk into the theater with dealt with."
I think that if people listened to ghost stories and watched scary movies solely for the sensation of fear -- without any interest in the other emotions involved in the story -- then they wouldn't have much memory about the details of the story. I surmise that the details of certain ghost stories touch upon emotions other than fear. When people have strong memories about a certain ghost story, it is not merely because they empathize with the protagonists who encounter the ghosts, but empathize with the ghosts themselves.
The Rules of a Certain Ghost-Story Template
There is definitely a lot of variation, and what I am about to say doesn't perforce apply to every famous urban legend about ghosts. However, many famous ghost stories follow a particular template.
First, the ghost is territorial; he or she inhabits a specific location; there are geographic parameters the spirit cannot breach. Some ghosts, such as the one I will describe later in this essay, are capable of traveling long distances. However, even in the case of these exceptions (as I will detail below), there remain thresholds the apparition will not cross.
Secondly, the ghost has some sort of "unfinished business"; there was something that happened to the ghost when he or she was alive; the ghost feels that this matter remains unresolved. This aspect of the ghost-story template is integral to my theory.
The third aspect is that insofar as the ghost conveys that he has "unfinished business," the ghost will betray this information in only the most indirect fashion. This is seldom purely by the ghost's own choice; there is always some involuntary (usually unexplained) aspect of the spirit realm that precludes the ghost from very directly expressing to the living what issues of the ghost remain unsettled. The story usually goes that when some living human encounters a ghost, the ghost communicates by nothing more than cryptic clues that the living investigator has to piece together. (This is seen in the supposedly based-on-truth movie The Changeling.)
In many respects, a living human trying to investigate the story behind a ghost's unrest is very similar to a psychologist trying to uncover the reasons behind the mysterious behavior of someone who is mentally ill and in denial about the mental illness. If you very directly ask a mentally-ill-person-in-denial about the reasons for his or her condition, you will seldom receive a direct, straightforward, earnest answer. This is especially true if that person is still going through his or her "episode." By the same token, if the living human enters the haunted domain and asks the spirit, point blank, what it wants and what needs to be done for the hauntings to stop, the ghost will seldom provide a direct, lucid, coherent answer. Usually, the ghost cannot give a coherent answer, just as a mentally-ill person will feel that he or she cannot.
The fourth rule is that a ghost that haunts a place engages in some sort of repetitive behavior. I have heard stories about some horrible mass murder committed on some famous spot. Supposedly, every anniversary the ghosts of the victims and murderer will reappear and, behaving and reacting as if they are still alive, will re-create the entire massacre before living spectators. When I give this example, one might say to me, "Aha! The murder results in death; therefore, the ghosts' re-enactment of events necessarily has to involve their death." I dispute that. For instance, there are some ghost stories (both presented as fiction and as "true") about some hospitals, schools, or orphanages where patients or children were mistreated. According to the legends, the mistreated ghosts will re-appear and whimper, and re-enact the mistreatment, even if the mistreatment did not result in their physical deaths.
The repetitive behavior is another trait that haunting spirits have in common with living people who suffer particular mental illnesses. As I mentioned before, many people, who have a certain context-dropping image of "life, as it really is," insist on going through the same self-destructive behavioral patterns over and over again, despite their always getting the same dismal results. An example would be an insistence on getting into one abusive relationship after another. The pattern only changes when the living human chooses to commit to changing with it, and sticks to that commitment. Likewise, a ghost that haunts some place will usually repeat the same pattern until the "unfinished business" is resolved. Unlike a real-life living person, however, the ghost cannot change the pattern on his own; he necessarily needs a living human being to help him; he needs the living, lucid human to initiate some new action that alters the course of events and gives him peace.
Next, I will give an example of a famous ghost story that I think follows these conventions. After that I will explain why I think that people find the story scary not primarily on account of it reminding them of death, but primarily because it reminds them about the regrets that living people have about their lives.
The Vanishing Hitchhiker
Here is a story that is almost always told as true, and goes at least as far back as the 1970s. Commonly the storyteller says it happened to a friend of a friend. A motorist minds his own business driving along some area that isn't very familiar to him. Along the way, he finds a rather benign-looking hitchhiker. The motorist stops and asks the hitchhiker where he wants to go. The hitchhiker gives a very specific home address. The motorist replies, "Hey, that's on the way to my destination! Hop in!" The hitchhiker probably doesn't ride in the front passenger seat, but in the back, where the motorist cannot see the hitchhiker unless he turns his head. Along the journey, the two get to talking and form an emotional bond. After a while, though, they stop talking.
Eventually, during the silence the motorist reaches the home address. He turns around and says, "We're at your stop!" But the hitchhiker is nowhere to be seen. The motorist looks everywhere and cannot find his companion. Puzzled, he says to himself, "I deserve an explanation." He goes to the residence and rings the doorbell. Some old person answers it. The motorist says, "This is going to sound very strange, but I picked up a hitchhiker who asked me to take him to this address. But now I can't find him." At this point, the motorist sees the hitchhiker in a photograph on the wall and exclaims, "That's him!"
The resident explains that that hitchhiker is a relative or some family friend, and has been deceased many years. Sometimes the story goes that the hitchhiker had some falling out with the house's residents, and they always missed each other. The hitchhiker died before any reconciliation could take place. In some versions of the story, the hitchhiker was going to the house to make amends, but on his way he was hit and killed by a drunk driver . . . and he died on the very spot where the motorist picked him up. In some versions, the resident says that there were many occasions on which other motorists picked up the hitchhiker at that exact same spot and the hitchhiker gave the address, only for the hitchhiker to disappear before arriving at the destination.
At this point, someone who hears the story for the first time (usually a child), gets goosebumps. I find that a very interesting reaction. Why would you find that story scary when the ghost's intentions are completely harmless? The hitchhiker isn't trying to kill anyone. He isn't trying to possess or enslave anyone. He just wants to return to a certain location -- a place to which he could not return while alive. My first impulse might be to say, "People find the story scary, despite the ghost's benign intentions, because the story reminds of them of death." But now I think differently. I think that the story is scary because it reminds people of regrets about actions people have taken while alive -- the story is scary even when it reminds you of people who still are very much alive, at least physically.
My Analysis of the Hitchhiker Story
First I want to point out the areas where I think the hitchhiker tale fits the template I mentioned. At first it might seem that the hitchhiker is not territorial; he is able to travel by motor car. But note that he always follows the same path and his mobility remains limited. Whenever he is picked up by a motorist, he is picked up at the same basic spot. In some versions, that spot is where he died, and, according to some odd rule, his dying there renders it his default location. The hapless motorists usually take the same route. Finally, the hitchhiker always tries to get to the same address, and, presumably, he always disappears from the car at roughly the same area on the road.
Second, that the ghost has some "unfinished business" is very obvious. He keeps trying to reach a particular residence, and he never succeeds. Back when he was alive, he wanted to get there to try to resolve some personal matter. Because he died before that could happen, the matter will forever remain unsettled.
Third, the ghost's method of communicating his basic problem is indirect. The ghost could have told the motorist from the beginning, "I'm a ghost and I want to reach this street address because there is someone there to whom I never properly said good-bye before I died." But the ghost doesn't say that; his pain is conveyed to the living person in a roundabout fashion.
Fourthly, there is the repetitive behavior. There are versions of the story where the house resident tells the motorist that many other motorists in the past have picked up the hitchhiker in the same location, only for him to disappear in the same location. Thus, like many people with Borderline Personality Disorder, the hitchhiker keeps replaying the same pattern of behavior, only to wind up with the same dismal results (or non-results).
I believe the story strikes a chord with people for reasons quite apart from the aspect of the hitchhiker being dead. I think lots of people remember that story because they have empathy for the hitchhiker. They think, "Isn't it tragic that the hitchhiker died before he could truly settle the matter? Isn't it tragic that the hitchhiker will not be able to give his final message to the house resident face-to-face?" Then they think, "I have lots of unresolved concerns going on right now. What if I died before my dreams were fulfilled, before I could resolve the troubles in my life? What if I die with similar unfinished business?" That's a very unpleasant thought, and I think that is the real reason that the story's ending gives people goosebumps.
I think that the tale of the vanishing hitchhiker evokes a fear much greater than the fear of death. It reminds people about regrets. It reminds them of how so many living people, today, engage in regretful actions -- or regretful inaction -- and lots of them are going to die before the situation can be made right. That is, those wrongs will never be righted. A possibility such as that is what is truly frightening. This is the probable root of a common American expression. When someone continues to be bothered by unpleasant memories, he can say, "I'm being haunted by the ghosts of my past."
Haunted
That metaphor is given a lot of meaning in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. As he is being literally(?) visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, Ebenezer Scrooge is pressured into facing all of the regrets of his past. When talking with the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge faces his present insecurities, particularly his loneliness. Finally, when stalked by the Ghost of Christmas Future, Scrooge contemplates the possibility that he will die before all of his present insecurities are reconciled -- that when he dies, it will be in a state as lonely as he has been in the present and the past. The ghosts are a metaphor for (1) Scrooge's regrets and (2) Scrooge's fear that those issues will never be rectified.
I think the principles I have explicated even apply to ghost stories involving ghosts that re-enact their own murder. When those tales evoke fear, I don't think the fear mainly comes from the realization that the victims have died, but mainly from the horror of contemplating the fact that real, living people are capable of performing an act as monstrous as murdering other human beings. That's why people will find a ghost story scary if dead children in an orphanage, mental hospital, or school reenact physical or psychological abuse they have endured. Even though the re-enactment doesn't involve the characters' death, it evokes fear and revulsion because it reminds us that people can inflict forms of cruelty that don't even result in anyone dying. That, too, is regretful.
And as the vanishing hitchhiker story exemplifies, the ghost story doesn't have to involve human evil in order to be disturbing. The common thread in these stories is that, back when the ghost was alive, people made highly regretful choices and they were never corrected -- nor will they be. Very few of these stories end with the living eyewitness finding a way to finish the ghost's unfinished business.
I have been thinking long and hard about this symbolism, because I know someone who spent time in Hawaii with me -- and returned to Tromsø, Norway -- who has suffered with suicidal tendencies and self-mutilation for years, and could be very happy, but, to my knowledge, has refused to return to psychiatric care. In one of her more lucid moments, my friend warned me that in social relationships she repeats the same dysfunctional pattern -- first it starts well, but she does something to sabotage it later on. Just as it would be with a ghost, my attempt at conversing about the matter in a straightforward way are frustrated; but, like a ghost, my friend lets out indirect cries for help. Many people assume my friend is confident and business-savvy. But, conspicuously, my friend insisted on looking like a ghost, wearing black almost every day and trying to be very pale. She even went as far as uploading -- in the absence of providing any context behind it -- pictures onto the Web where she was very realistically photoshopped to look like a dead body, complete with pallid gray skin. Later she finally stopped uploading the corpse pictures but that hasn't stopped the public morbid gestures entirely -- she legally changed her name to match the last name to that of a patriarch whom she and other relatives of hers have cryptically hinted to be a source of abuse. My worries about the matter have led me to be very openly agitated and jumpy, just as I would be if a supernatural entity were visiting me. As there is with every ghost story, there are elements of regret: I regret that my attempts to help my friend are stifled, and that my friend's inner torment -- like any specter's -- goes on and on and on. You can say that I'm very much haunted by this. And until I find a way to stop worrying about it, this remains a demon yet to be exorcised.
Screen shot from the video "Consuming Hypocrisy"by Rhys Southan and Eliza Wren.
You may recall that earlier I said something about this. If you and Mr. X argue over a controversy, and Mr. X's identity and self-image are not connected to his having a particular conclusion about that controversy, he can change his mind in the face of new evidence. But if Mr. X's identity and self-image are wrapped up in having a particular conclusion about that controversy, despite the evidence contradicting that conclusion, you will have a difficult time changing Mr. X's mind. This is especially the case if Mr. X's belief is tied to some group wherein he holds some affiliation; maintaining the belief signifies loyalty to that group. I learned from Adam Conover's Election Special on TruTV that there is a name for this phenomenon: Identity Protective Cognition.
Paul Slovic and a team of psychologists did the following experiment. For the control, people were quizzed on a particular math problem, and they got the correct answer. For the experiment, all the people have particular strong stands on the issue of gun control. They were presented with the same math problem, except they were told that this related to the issue of gun safety. This time, the people experimented on did not get the correct answer, as the answer contradicted the positions they had taken on this controversial issue.
This is a big reason for the futility of "flame wars" over Facebook. Imagine I am a Young Earth Creationist and my parents taught me to be such (no, in reality I am not that). If you and I get into an argument about this, you may think that you are simply correcting me on a simple issue of fact. But, for me, it is deeper than that; I pride myself on being a Young Earth Creationist; it is part of my identity. Therefore, if you tell me that I am correct on everything in my life except this one area, I will still interpret that as your telling me my whole life is a lie. Worse, you're telling me that my parents fed me lies since I was a baby.
When people get out of lifelong beliefs such as Young Earth Creationism, it is almost never because someone argued them out of it. What happened was that something happened in their experiences that gave them some impetus to question their long-held beliefs. Then, in the privacy of their own time alone, they decided to look into other viewpoints, such as reading atheist blogs. The hard sell is no way to get around Identity Protective Cognition.
Why You Have a Natural Right to Immigrate Stuart K. Hayashi
He [the impoverished refugee seeking asylum from enslavement and violence] shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him.
—Deuteronomy 23:16
Screen shot from the motion picture "Born in East L.A.," prod. Peter Macgregor-Scott, dir. Cheech Marin, (Universal Pictures, 1987).
In the comments section of a website I often frequent, I was struck by this comment, as it demonstrates so much of what so many "immigration skeptics" either do not understand or wish not to understand:
I really don’t see what facts of reality give rise to the idea that one has a natural right to cross a foreign border. That’s about as correct as thinking he has a right to a roof over his head. I hate to start from an abstraction here, but to short cut, I think we all agree at least that a man has a natural right to his life. That is not a right to my life or to any of those that make up my group, America.
The presumption in that statement is that your peaceable immigration imposes a burden on other people, comparable to demanding that other people provide you shelter at their own expense. It implies that your ability to immigrate to the United States must be incumbent upon everyone else -- or, more accurately, the State -- granting you permission. Mark Steyn states this more explicitly, "...immigration has to benefit the people who are already here. ...there are too many unskilled Mexican peasants flooding into a country with ever diminishing social mobility and no hope of economic improvement..." (emphasis Steyn's).
No, there is but one constraint that can rightfully be placed upon the implementation of your plan to immigrate: you must do it peaceably. Were someone to immigrate to the United States for the conscious purpose of commencing a planned terrorist attack, of course that person has no right to immigrate. This is because the sole condition that a constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State can morally place on any action is that the action must be peaceful, not initiating the use of force upon anyone else.
Presuming That Immigrants Are Violent Is What Justifies Restricting Immigration? A Presumption of Guilt Is Not Enough
Many people try to stereotype immigrants as rapists or terrorists, and say that this presumption of guilt would justify the United States banning immigration from countries with which the USA has not so much as declared war. In actuality, the legal presumption of innocence that all U.S. citizens deserve does rightfully apply to non-citizens from nations at which the U.S. is not at war. Note that the United States Constitution properly recognizes that if someone suspects a would-be immigrant of desiring to commit a crime, that the would-be immigrant deserves the same legal presumption of innocence as a native-born citizen. The Fifth Amendment states,
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger;...nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use... [emphasis added].
Observe the second word. The Bill of Rights does not say "No citizen shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime...nor deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process..." It says no person. That includes non-citizens: human "aliens."
To those who insist that the U.S. Constitution's first Ten Amendments are to protect only U.S. citizens and not aliens within the U.S. jurisdiction, it should be pointed out that the word citizen does not appear once in the Bill of Rights (read it here).
We know that the U.S. Founding Fathers interpreted the Fifth Amendment as applying to non-citizen, non-slave foreigners, and not merely U.S. citizens, because Thomas Jefferson himself stated this. The Alien Friends Act of 1798 was supposed to give the U.S. President sweeping powers to deport allegedly dangerous foreigners residing in the USA. Thomas Jefferson opposed that, saying:
The imprisonment of a person under the protection of the laws of this commonwealth, on his failure to obey the simple order of the President to depart out of the United States, as is undertaken by said act intituled [entitled] "An Act concerning aliens" is contrary to the Constitution, one amendment to which has provided that "no person shalt be deprived of liberty without due process of law," and that another having provided that "in all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to public trial by an impartial jury, to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation, to be confronted with the witnesses against him, to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense," the same act, undertaking to authorize the President to remove a person out of the United States, who is under the protection of the law, on his own suspicion, without accusation, without jury, without public trial, without confrontation of the witnesses against him, without heating witnesses in his favor, without defense, without counsel, is contrary to the provision also of the Constitution, is therefore not law, but utterly void, and of no force.
Again it is said, that aliens not being parties to the constitution, the rights and privileges which it secures, cannot be at all claimed by them.
To this reasoning also, it might be answered, that...it does not follow, because aliens are not parties to the constitution, as citizens are parties to it, that whilst they actually conform to it, they have no right to its protection. Aliens are not more parties to the laws, than they are parties to the constitution; yet it will not be disputed, that as they owe on one hand, a temporary obedience, they are entitled in return, to their protection and advantage. . . .
If aliens had no rights under the Constitution, they might not only be banished, but even capitally punished, without a jury or the other incidents to a fair trial. But so far has a contrary principle been carried, in every part of the United States, that except on charges of treason, an alien has, besides all the common privileges, the special one of being tried by a jury, of which one-half may be also aliens. ... Alien friends [meaning foreigners from nations that the USA has not declared war against] except in the single case of public ministers, are under the municipal law, and must be tried and punished according to that law only.
That is, if the United States has not formally declared war against a country, the U.S. government must treat those born of that country with the same legal presumption of innocence as it does its own citizens. That Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) incessantly tosses people into detention centers, absent of carefully obtained warrants, is not consistent with the Bill of Rights.
And James Madison went farther. He stated that if a foreign national is from a country at which the USA has declared war, and remains in a state of war with the USA, then that foreign national is what he called an "alien enemy." Madison concluded that the U.S. government is authorized to deport such "alien enemies." By contrast, he said, if a foreign national within the USA is from a country at which the USA has not declared war, and is not in a state of war with, then that foreign national is an "alien friend." In today's political context, persons from Mexico are what Madison would categorize as "alien friends." And, in the same line of argumentation, Madison explained that if an immigrant within the USA is not from a country at which the USA has declared war, then the U.S. government has no rightful business at all in deporting that immigrant.
It is said, further, that by the law and practice of nations, aliens may be removed at discretion, for offences against the law of nations; that Congress are authorized to define and punish such offences; and that to be dangerous to the peace of society is, in aliens, one of those offences.
The distinction between alien enemies and alien friends, is a clear and conclusive answer to this argument. Alien enemies are under the law of nations, and liable to be punished for offences against it. Alien friends, except in the single case of public ministers, are under the municipal law, and must be tried and punished according to that law only. . . .
Nor is the act of Congress, for the removal [deportation] of alien friends, more agreeable to the general practice of nations, than it is within the purview of the law of nations. The general practice of nations, distinguishes between alien friends and alien enemies. The latter it has proceeded against, according to the law of nations, by expelling them as enemies. The former it has considered as under a local and temporary allegiance, and entitled to a correspondent protection.
A proper application of the principle that Madison explicated is that since Congress does not acknowledge that the USA is officially in a state of war against Mexico, the U.S. federal government has no rightful business in its deportation of Mexicans.
Freedom Means That, Legally, You Need No One Else's Permission to Do What Is Peaceful
Yes, you do have a right to cross over the parts of a national border that are not private property. Much of the U.S.-Mexican border on the south of Texas is private land (more about that below), and the border splits the community of Nogales in two, the northern part being in Arizona and the southern part being in Sonora, Mexico. But most of the border on the edges of California, Arizona, and New Mexico is federal land that is wilderness area. Because most of the border is wilderness area hardly used by humans, it is not very practical to think of border-crossings in these spots as trespassing. For practical purposes, the very-temporary crossing over this land treats this wilderness area as if it is terra nullius or res nullius, meaning that it is not privately owned or used much by any private party.
In a free society, freedom of action is the default. The default is: non-involvement on the part of the State. If someone wants to use State violence to restrict your freedom, the onus is upon that person to justify the exercise of State violence upon you. If the migrant is intruding upon your private plot and trying to be a squatter on your private property, that is a trespass against you, and you would have the moral right to call the police and ask the police to dispense force to protect you. But if the migrant crosses into my private plot and I consent to that, it is not incumbent upon me or the migrant to beg for the permission of people outside of my private plot that the migrant be allowed by third parties to lodge on my private plot.
Here is the fallacy in how the first quotation conflates my right to immigrate with a demand on my part that the State compel you to provide me shelter and other forms of wealth. If I said I have a right to a roof over my head at your expense, that would be initiating the use of force to compel action on your part. If I cross the national border and find refuge on the private plot of someone who consents to me being on the private plot, that does not violently compel any action on your part. It actually happens without your help.
It saddens me that, throughout 2017, I saw so many slurs on Twitter and Facebook against "Third World migrants." Those "Third World migrants" are explicitly welcomed by a sign next to an important statue associated with the United States. It is not an accident that the statue that welcomes impoverished immigrants is called Liberty. Liberty and the freedom of migration are inseparable.
What About When People Cross Over Private Plots That Are Along the Border?
There are private plots along parts of the U.S.-Mexican border in Texas, though, and sometimes impoverished people from south of the border do have to resort to a quick crossing over the landholders' private plots in the absence of the landholders' permission. Some landholders consider this intolerable and demand federal action to stop it. In most cases I would side with the landholders. However, there are important considerations in these cases that merit attention.
First is the "coming to the nuisance" doctrine. That is the legal doctrine stating that if a "public nuisance" already existed in a particular location, and then you choose to move yourself to that location, you implicitly consent to the nuisance and thereby rightfully forfeit the legal authority to take action against that. Suppose there is a factory emitting soot; it has been there for fifty years. Then, last year, I chose to move next to that factory, failing to anticipate how much the air pollution would bother me. I would be forfeiting the authority to sue the factory's owner, as I was the one who "came to the nuisance"; the factory's actions have been grandfathered in. In the case of private homes on the U.S.-Mexican border, those border crossings have already been numerous since 1965; this has already been recognized throughout the 1980s. were it the case that I moved to one of those plots in the year 2004 and only then started to notice the border crossing, I would be coming to the nuisance, and it would be silly for me to demand State action only now.
Second, there are cases of emergencies where the law should take the emergency into consideration and grant leniency where it would otherwise judge that someone violated private property rights. Suppose that you were on the continental United States in winter in the wilderness and, through a rare error in judgment, you found yourself caught in a snowstorm. However, you find a secluded cabin and recognize that the one way for you to survive the night is to enter the cabin. You find that no one is in it. If you break into the cabin and stay there for the night, that would normally be recognized as violating private property rights. However, if this is an unusual occurrence for you and the cabin's owner, the law should take into consideration both that rarity and the urgency of the situation.
Ordinances and statutes are not deontological categorical imperatives that the State is duty-bound to enforce for their own sake. Ordinances and statutes must exist and be enforced only for the greater end that is maximizing each person's ability to live freely in the long term. For you to demand that other people always provide you food, shelter, education, and health care over the course of years is an entirely different matter -- that is not a sudden emergency situation. For people in Third World kleptocracies, the choice is either to immigrate to a freer country or die. In the cases of impoverished people in Ecuador and Syria, they are in an emergency situation. I don't find it proper for any government to demand that people give them long-term housing and social services. But considering that their choice is to migrate or die, their decision to cross borders -- sans any government's approval -- is reasonable. Also reasonable is that they have resorted to using fake Social Security numbers to find employment (this is also why they put money into the Social Security system but are unable to collect from it).
To the degree that impoverished, desperate people -- people who would otherwise die early if not for the migration -- are resorting to trampling over private land to reach the United States and resorting to using fake Social Security numbers, the long-term solution is to make it easier for such people to enter the USA legally so that they can do so over no one's private land and can find employment without providing any Social Security number. That would involve removing the cap on the number of visas issued annually or, better yet, abolishing the visa system altogether.
And, again, much of the U.S.-Mexican border on the southern edges of California, Arizona, and New Mexico is not private property.
The Right to Migrate Is the Right to Live
Hence, the first commenter contradicts herself with these two statements: (1) "I really don’t see what facts of reality give rise to the idea that one has a natural right to cross a foreign border" and (2) "a man has a right to his own life."
A man's right to his own life is the very fact of reality that gives rise to the idea that one has a natural right to cross a foreign border.
That is, the right to immigrate peacefully is a logical corollary to the right to live peacefully. Peaceful immigration is a noble enterprise, and to deny free immigration is to deny free enterprise.
Recall that in an earlier post, I asked you to imagine the following: that you are a slave in the early 1800s but have a relatively benign master. For the most part, the master lets you do what you want: the master lets you open your own business on the side and you can keep most of your own money. The master allows you to read and write. The master allows you to speak your mind and argue back at him without violent reprisal. The master lets you do what you want in ways similar to a permissive parent permitting adolescent children to do as they please.
This would raise the question over whether your situation would be considered relative freedom, and the answer is no. You do what you want, but this is merely at the master's mercy. If the master undergoes a change of heart, or if legal control over you changes hands to another party, it may be the case that you won't have as much leeway in the future. Even if we assume that your master will outlive you and will not change in temperament, it is unjust that what you do, you do merely at the master's permission. A free man or woman is free to do what he or she wants peaceably in the absence of anyone's permission -- that is what it means to have a right to one's own life.
To live is to take peaceable action. That is, in order to live, you must take peaceable actions -- you must find a means of obtaining food, either as gifts from willing givers, or growing your own food, or exchanging your services for such food. You must make choices on whether you will marry and, if you enter a marriage, with whom it will be. You must make choices on whether to have children and, if you do have children, you must make choices on how to rear them. And, if you were born in a country that is impoverished due to a kleptocratic government discouraging long-term entrepreneurship and investment, you must make a choice on whether to remain in this danger or to immigrate to a freer place such as the United States. Insofar as your legal ability to perform these actions actually hinges on permission from the State, you are not free to perform these actions. Nay, you are free to perform these peaceable actions insofar as other people are unable to request that the State veto these actions of yours.
When you immigrate, that is no less of an action that you take to live than is your choice to start a business or to write a poem or to marry. The right to start a peaceful business -- even without anyone else's permission -- is an implementation of the right to live. The right to express oneself freely -- even without anyone else's permission -- is an implementation of the right to live. The right to immigrate -- even without anyone else's permission -- is an implementation of the right to live. And to deny my right to peaceful immigration is to deny my right to live.
For the benefit of someone like the first commenter, that cannot be stated often enough. To have freedom does not mean that, as a consequence of other people continually approving your requests, you are largely able to go through life doing what you want. To have freedom means that your legal authority to perform any peaceable action required no one else's permission in the first place.
What this means is that if I want an immigrant to stay on my land, and that immigrant travels from his own country to my plot of land, the immigrant has a moral right to do this -- regardless of what the federal laws are concerning visas -- no matter how much that first commenter disapproves and wishes the State would quash this action. That is really not any of the first commenter's business.
As Ayn Rand wrote in her Textbook of Americanism, "If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society -- you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission" alone. That applies to peaceable movement across borders. If I peaceably invite a Mexican to lodge on my own piece of real estate, and other people proclaim that they should have the authority to call upon government force to rescind my invitation if they deem appropriate, then those other people do not respect anyone's right to take actions to sustain one's own life -- they do not respect the Mexican's right to live, nor my own -- even if they ultimately grant their precious permission to the Mexican and me to follow through with our arrangement. To respect anyone's right to live peaceably means acknowledging that one should have no authority at all to call upon the State to overrule, veto, or suspend any party's peaceful action, of which migration qualifies.
Immigration Making the Difference Between Violent Death and Human Flourishing
Do not forget that laws are ultimately enforced at gunpoint, and the U.S.-Mexican border is enforced by the threat of violence toward the undocumented immigrants. From 2010 to 2016 -- this was under the Obama administration -- thirty-three would-be immigrants, such as Sergio Hernandez Guereca, were shot dead by the Border Patrol. James Tomsheck, who was chief of internal affairs at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for much of that duration -- brought this matter to the attention of National Public Radio. The Obama administration claimed it fired Tomsheck for failing to investigate these deaths, but Tomsheck alleges the exact opposite: that he was fired on account of his investigating these deaths, as he found that at least seven of them were under suspicious circumstances. On May 23, 2018, a 19-year-old Guatemalan named Claudia Patricia Gómez González was shot dead in Rio Bravo, Texas, by a border agent because she was in a crowd of undocumented border-crossers defending themselves against the agent with blunt objects (here and here).
For those who have not yet read Ayn Rand's We the Living, I caution that I will provide a spoiler in italics:
when Kira Argounova decided that she would attempt to cross a national border illegally, she implicitly and properly recognized that the justness of that action required no one else's approval. She sought no one else's permission; the idea did not so much as enter her mind. Nor should it have. Her survival and freedom are what mattered. That was a direct consequence of Kira Argounova cherishing her right to her own peaceable life as paramount. Also observe the injustice inflicted on her as a result of government agents successfully enforcing that border.
When the federal government manages to deport impoverished South Americans to the kleptocracies from which they fled, it often precipitates tragedies not unlike what Ayn Rand described in that novel. Steven Sacco elaborates,
One study found that between January 2014 and September 2015 eighty-three deportees who were sent back to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador were murdered after their return. They were people fleeing the killers who eventually took their lives. People like José Marvin Martínez, who fled violence in Honduras and made it to the U.S. when he was 16, but was deported and four months after his forcible return was shot to death. Or Juan Francisco Diaz, also deported back to Honduras, where he too was murdered a few months later. Or Giovanni Miranda, who, after spending most of his life in the U.S., was deported to El Salvador to be murdered in front of his wife and son in June 2015. Or Edgar Chocoy, 16, who ran away from a gang to the U.S. only to be murdered by that same gang seventeen days after he was deported back to Guatemala in 2004. Or an unnamed teenager who was shot to death hours after being deported back to San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Moises, 19, was murdered after he was deported to El Salvador. And there are too many more names we’ll never know.
What’s more, the number of deportees delivered directly to their killers does not include those who survive attempted murder or other violence because of their deportation — a number no one knows. Isais Sosa, who was 19 when the Los Angeles Times covered his story in 2014, survived being shot by a gang days after his deportation. The 19 year old daughter of Dora Lina Meza fled to the U.S. from the same gang that, after she was deported back home, raped her at gun point. After Juan Ines Alanis was deported he was kidnapped and held for ransom while his fingers were smashed with a hammer.
By contrast, what goes unconscionably overlooked are the exhilarating cases of migrants from south of the U.S.-Mexican border not merely surviving, but living and thriving to the greatest extent. Consider that decades ago, Alfred Quinones-Hinojosa of Mexico illegally hopped a fence into the USA. As one would probably expect, he got by as a low-paid migrant farm worker. He also saved his money and eventually sent himself to medical school. As I type these words, he is among the planet's top brain surgeons, a man who has saved the lives of native-born Americans. Decades earlier, numerous Mexicans arrived legally under the the bracero program to labor on California's vineyards. They, too, saved their money. Some of these families eventually purchased vineyards for themselves and have become the entrepreneurs running them. You can read Amanda Machado's profiles of ten such vineyard-owning Napa Valley families.
Similar to the Dreamers, Mexican-born Julissa Arce came to Texas illegally with her parents when still a child -- in her case, at age eleven. She has since risen to the role of one of Goldman Sachs's vice presidents. And the younger generation is no less promising. In 2004, Christian Arcega and three other Mexican-born Arizona-based Dreamers at Carl Hayden Community High School prevailed over mighty MIT in a competition to build the most effectively operating underwater robot.
Nor is Mexico the lone impoverished Spanish-speaking country that serves as a source of productive go-getters. Both Jose Wilfredo Flores and Carlos Castro arrived illegally from El Salvador. Flores started W Concrete, which grossed $6.6 million in 2011. As for Carlos Castro, the firm he started, Todos Supermarket, brought in $18 million in 2012. We are all better off as a result of federal immigration restrictions being unable to thwart the efforts of these people to come to the USA and realize their potential more freely than would have been possible to them had they been confined to their nations of origin.
Such realities expose the injustice of Mark Steyn's presumption that a person's right to immigrate to another country -- that is, a person's right to live -- must hinge on whether the people in that country believe that this will be of benefit to them. If I want an immigrant on my land, and that immigrant agrees to lodge on my land, that immigrant is living justly even if it is widely believed that the immigrant is benefiting no one but himself.
Poor people migrate to freer countries because they are trying to avoid an early death -- that is, they migrate to freer countries to live. To say that they have no natural right to do this peaceably -- that their ability to migrate must be at your mercy -- is to deny them their right to their lives.
On Monday, January 30, 2017, I added the quotation from Ayn Rand's Textbook of Americanism and the rest of the paragraph in which I quote that. On this date, I also added the infographic about how the land of the United States is not all a socialist commons, but instead consists of many plots adjacent to one another, many of which are private parcels owned by separate private parties that can decide for themselves whether they will lodge the foreign-born or not.I actually made that infographic on August 26, 2015. The original draft already quoted Mark Steyn, but, on February 12, 2017, I added the part of the quotation about "Mexican peasants." Also on February 12, 2017, I added the quotation from James Madison about the legal presumption of innocence applying to resident aliens just as well as to U.S. citizens. On March 9, 2017, I added the quotation from Thomas Jefferson citing and explaining the Fifth Amendment. On December 31, 2017, I added the paragraph about immigration and the Statue of Liberty. On January 20, 2018, I added the quotation from Steven Sacco about people dying violently soon after being returned to their kleptocracies of origin, and I added the paragraphs about the success stories from those who came from Mexico and El Salvador. On Wednesday, January 24, 2018, I added the point that the word "citizen" does not appear once in the Bill of Rights. I also added more of the quotation of James Madison. on January 26, 2018, I added the quotation from Madison about alien friends and, for the original quotation about constitutional protection, I changed the link from the Google Books book to a link to the Founders Archives website. On February 21, 2018, I added the mention of most of the border on the southern edges of California, Arizona, and New Mexico being federal wilderness area, in contrast to the border that Texas shares with Mexico, and I added the paragraph about James Tomsheck finding that the Border Patrol shot dead 33 aspiring immigrants. On May June 6, 2018, I added the sentence about the 19-year-old would-be migrant Claudia Patricia Gómez González being shot dead in Rio Bravo, Texas, by a border agent. On Monday, January 12, 2026, I added the quotation from Deuteronomy..
