When your ideology leads you to an illogical or self-defeating conclusion, it's time to check your premises, as Ayn Rand would have said. At least, you have to conclude that there's something seriously wrong with your ideology.

Let's say that your ideology reasons that some things that you might eat could poison you, and that therefore you shouldn't eat anything at all. Makes sense, as far as it goes. But then you take that to its logical conclusion, and realize that not eating anything at all will surely kill you. A true believer would go ahead and starve to death, but a rational human being would try to rework the basic ideology so that it doesn't inevitably kill him.

And that brings us to the flaky-libertarian dogma that borders are imaginary yadda yadda yadda and that not allowing someone to cross a border is the initiation of force, etc., and therefore open borders is the only possible philosophical position that a real libertarian can have. And if you oppose open borders you're a statist, fascist whatever, and, as one flaky libertarian recently said, you "want to beat up and kill people."

I've pointed out many times on this blog that open borders will of course result in floods of immigrants who will vote themselves all kinds of free stuff and wipe out what freedom the country might still have. Even if you did the impossible, and somehow eliminated the welfare system, immigrants would still come simply because this country is more prosperous than wherever they came from, and they will proceed to re-establish the welfare system, even if you had already eliminated it.

Sadly, there still seems to be a great deal of confusion both inside and outside of libertarian circles about libertarianism’s relationship with the immigration issue. This is no mark against someone who has simply not had it explained to them, of course. The position is not entirely obvious to the casual onlooker. The persistence with which some insist on clinging to falsehood however, I find quite troubling.

The layman’s assumption would be that libertarians favor open borders. This is an understandable mistake. Libertarians are not big on having the government do pretty much anything, and since governments do control political boundaries at present, it makes sense one would assume we favored their abolition. This is not a completely incorrect assumption, but it requires some important details many seem to leave out. It would be more accurate to say we favor privatizing borders, than to say we favor their abolition.

When termed as privatization, the question turns to whose control the property once making up the border in question will then be under. The idea that a government would cease to exist, or cease to perform the function of immigration control, and that this would open the floodgates for waves of low quality, poverty stricken, potentially dangerous people is understandably off-putting to the sane men and women of a prosperous society.

The libertarian wh

----- snip -----

read full article at source: http://ex-army.blogspot.de/2016/02/christophe-cantwell-on-open-borders.html