Posted by
Playful Walrus on Thursday, March 27, 2008 3:36:31 PM
...but we need to deal with reality.
We don’t live in a libertarian country. Any move towards a libertarian policy needs to be weighed against what will remain "non-libertarian", at least until it gets addressed, too.
For example, I think people should be free to offer their services on a daily basis unencumbered, and anyone who wants to hire them should be able to do so, unencumbered. And it really doesn’t matter to me at all if that person who is being hired is here legally or not. But I also think that 1) there should be a lot less public property – places where day laborers tend to congregate; 2) there should be stronger private property laws, so that if someone wants to host day laborers, they can (AND they can set the conditions, such as “no littering”), and if others want them off of their property, they can remove them; 3) government should not regulate the workplace (aside from actual crimes like fraud), nor collect payroll taxes; 4) there shouldn’t be tax-funded public assistance programs and thus no illegal aliens getting my tax money; 5) there should be separation of state and school, so that I can choose whether or not to pay for the education of the children of illegal aliens; 6) the federal government should control of the national borders so that terrorists, criminals, and their tools don’t make it here.
Under those conditions, the complaints that many people have about day laborers would be addressed.
Libertarians often argue that even illegal aliens greatly contribute to our society, because of their inexpensive labor. I heard this once from a libertarian guest on KFI’s John & Ken Show. The hosts couldn’t believe it; they kept describing how illegal aliens were ruining neighborhoods, schools, and other things. The hosts and the guest were kind of talking past each other. Although I understood what was going on, the conversation never got to the point where the guest explained that in “his” world, the negatives of illegal aliens would be largely eliminated – in his world, the schools and roads and such are private property and not funded by taxes or controlled by government bureaucrats, and illegal aliens don’t get public assistance. That’s something the hosts didn’t seem to catch, and something the guest never explicitly explained.
In a libertarian world, there are no tax-funded schools, so it doesn’t matter how many illegal aliens are in our schools. In a libertarian world, infrastructure is paid for by users, not by taxpayers. In a libertarian world, there are no social welfare programs paid for by taxes.
Take another example - “drugs”. I would find legalizing them more tolerable if I have the right to freely fire (or not hire in the first place) someone who does them, and to protect myself and my property from someone who is high, and if I had other libertarian freedoms, such as not paying for the health care of druggies.
Legalizing prostitution is more tolerable if I can own the sidewalk in front of my business and bar streetwalkers from standing there.
Get the picture?