December 3, 2018
An Open Letter to the libertarian movement
By Perry Willis
I’ve heard it for forty years: “Libertarians have a marketing problem.” Never mind that…
- 30-million Americans now self-identify as libertarian.
- Another 30-million hold mostly libertarian views.
- Opinion polls routinely show majority support for libertarian stances on most issues.
Even more incredible — all of this was achieved with little visibility and despite outright hostility from the media and academia. Yet somehow libertarians still think their ideas aren’t being accepted. That’s because…
- The media tells us so.
- Libertarian Party candidates continue to score single-digit vote percentages.
- Congress continues to pass one horrible law after another.
But that third thing is a consequence of the second thing which is a result of the first thing!
The media only covers the Left and the Right. People then vote defensively between those two choices — for the “lesser of two evils.” Even most libertarians vote this way! It’s a natural “game theory” consequence of “media agenda setting” and “winner-takes-all” elections.
So we libertarians are judging our progress by what our enemies say about us. That’s like the Boston Red Sox deciding they’re no good because the New York Yankees say so. Meanwhile…
The entire country has actually moved in our direction!
It bears repeating…
- Many millions self-identify as libertarian.
- Many millions more hold mostly libertarian views.
- Majorities agree with the general libertarian approach on most issues.
We libertarians are winning the intellectual war without even realizing it.
Then, having misdiagnosed the disease we apply the wrong cure. Every libertarian “doctor” has the same basic idea: better marketing. This means different things to different libertarians, but a few ideas are evergreen…
- Ditch our most unpopular positions
- Drop electoral politics
- Get more serious about electoral politics
- Run in the major parties
- Don’t run in the major parties
- Use only utilitarian arguments
- Use only moral arguments
- Use both utilitarian and moral arguments
- Use less logic and more emotion
- Adopt a new name
- Be more positive
- Use simpler language
Taking them one-by-one…
Ditch our most unpopular positions
Drug legalization used to be the main position we were supposed to drop. We emphasized it instead. And opinion moved in our direction!
Now we’re supposed to abandon open borders. Wrong. Learn from history. We should emphasize open borders!
Tom Paine was right, “Time makes more converts than reason.” Fifty years of being consistent and persistent has led to 30-60 million libertarians, plus movement toward the libertarian position on most issues, including drugs. The same thing can happen with open borders and our overall philosophy, if we realize that….
Consistent persistence is the best marketing stance we have!
Don’t run in the major parties
But we now have more libertarians in Congress than ever — Justin Amash, Thomas Massie, and Rand Paul. All of them ran as Republicans. We should do more of this, not less.
Give-up on the Libertarian Party
But the LP is a huge entry point for many new libertarians. It gave a powerful platform to people like Harry Browne. It’s attracted people like Gary Johnson, William Weld, and Laura Ebke away from the establishment parties. Why throw that away?
Only use moral arguments
Well, the movement has mostly used utilitarian arguments for the past half-century, during which time the entire culture has slowly moved our direction. Why should we stop doing something that works?
Could we benefit from using the moral argument more? Absolutely. That’s why Jim Babka and I created the Zero Aggression Project. But…
Most people who accept our moral argument will still want to test the practical consequences. This means utilitarian arguments can’t be avoided.
Use less logic and more emotion
This is another popular idea. When I hear libertarians propose it, I ask for examples. They usually respond with some logical argument that provokes an emotion. Sorry, but that doesn’t meet the claim. The proposal was to use emotion more and logic less. Wedding logic and emotion together is something different! Here’s what I think…
Libertarianism joins thinking and feeling together in a unified whole.
Things like the Golden Rule, the Zero Aggression Principle, the self-ownership principle, and the equal liberty rule are all logical constructs. But violating them provokes emotion. This intellectual-emotional holism differentiates us from doctrines like Fascism and Communism, where logic and emotion are divorced from each other.
But there’s no new marketing scheme to try here. Libertarians already excel at deploying 
logic, emotion, and humor in a potent blend. If you don’t think so, spend a few hours reviewing the clever memes libertarians post on Facebook. No one does it better. No one!
We need a new name!
Does it help to close the barn after the cow escapes? Surveys and studies show that 30-million people have already embraced the word libertarian. Should we really use scarce resources to persuade them they made a mistake?
And will it really help us persuade statists if we keep having to admit that our new coolitarian label is what they used to call libertarian?
We should be more positive
I’ve heard this one a thousand times: How come libertarians are always against stuff? Why do we use negative terms like aggression and abolish? Well…
- How did the anti-slavery movement ever triumph using downer terms like “anti-slavery” and “abolition?”
- How did Volkswagen gain market share for the Beetle with ads that asked “Lemon?”
- How did Avis succeed by admitting they were only number two?
- Why did 7-Up spend millions calling itself the “un-cola?”
- Why are political ads so harsh? Don’t campaign consultants know negativity doesn’t work?
In reality, the negative position can be smart marketing. And being against bad things is often the most positive thing you can do. The intuition to use only positive words sounds right, but it fails the market test.
Use simpler language
This has been the marketing Holy Grail for libertarians since I joined the movement. But after four decades I’ve yet to see any “simple explanation” achieve special results. I’ve personally gained some traction with my own “simple pitch”…
Don’t use state aggression to impose your personal preferences on others.
But it’s not a magic bullet that ends the need for further conversation, let alone lengthy
utilitarian debates.
Statists have many reasons for being statists, and they want those reasons addressed, one-by-one. There’s no way to shortcut this process. It’s inherently complex and time-consuming.
It’s also possible to make our language too simple. Consider the current most popular super-simple libertarian explanation…
Don’t hurt people or take their stuff.
Any child can understand it, and everyone agrees with it. But that’s precisely why it fails. Because any statist can accept it without changing a single position. They can even claim that the statement perfectly describes their own politics. They want to protect people and give them stuff! To counter this you must then show them all the ways that they don’t protect people, and the hidden costs of the things they give. Insto-presto, your super-simple libertarian presentation is no longer simple.
The idea that we can use words that everyone likes to better persuade people is attractive but wrong! New ideas often require new formulations to make them memorable. A phrase like “initiated force” can impart a new idea in a way that “don’t hurt people” simply can’t. Indeed, we must use words that a statist would not use, so as to clearly differentiate our product. In short…
Words that will conquer must first divide!
So, given all of the above…
Are there no new trails to blaze for libertarian marketing?
Yes, there are new trails to blaze.
Step one — Learn to take “Yes” for an answer.
Realize that more than half-a-century of consistent, persistent effort, using multiple tactics and strategies, has brought us to the following situation…
- 30 million Americans self-identify as libertarian.
- 30 million more hold mostly libertarian views.
- Huge portions of the statist population agree with us on enough things to make our position the majority stance on most issues.
All of these people are saying yes to us in a variety of ways. We need to accept, embrace, and celebrate this. It represents incredible progress! We should feel good about it. And we need to stop judging our progress based on…
- How the media treats us.
- How LP candidates fare in a system designed to punish third parties.
- All the bad laws being passed in Congress (change on the political front will be the lagging indicator).
Step two — locate every person who agrees with us.
Create a database of the 30 million who self-identify as libertarian, and the other 30 million who hold mostly libertarian positions.
Better yet, create a database of the entire country! Take note of each person who holds any view that would move things in a libertarian direction. It’s a big project, of course. But the major parties have already done this. They have massive “get out the vote” databases. We must do the same.
Step three — activate as many of these people as we can.
Use every tactic we can think of to cause action — jury nullification, grassroots lobbying, initiatives, running in major party primaries, or supporting Libertarian Party campaigns. Every tactic and marketing approach should be deployed because they all have something to contribute.
Step four — gain visibility parity with the Left and Right.
We won’t start to persuade statists to any significant degree until we achieve this goal. Our ideas must be heard at the same volume as statist ideas.
Step five — keep pushing the moral argument.
This will move our libertarian recruits in a more voluntaryist direction, and American culture will eventually follow.
So the libertarian marketing myth boils down to this — there is no magic bullet.
There is no one best way. We will succeed in the future the same way we have in the past. 
We gained the agreement (total or partial) of 30-60 million Americans through strategic and tactical pluralism, using marketing diversity and principled consistency wedded to persistence. As it was in the past, so shall it be in the future. Now go forth and conquer.
I live in California which is very, very blue. We are going to use the courts to hold elected officials to their oaths of office via a civil action. We will gain a verdict from the state court that the government official, by not answering our affidavit, has publicly violated her oath. The affidavit and the court ruling will be part of a criminal complaint in the federal court. We will use these court case as a springboard to launch a recall measure. We will diligently take the names and addresses of all who believe that the oath is important enough to hold the official accountable. By the direction and mercy of God, we will win. But IF Not…duty is our, results are God’s.
Why is politics necessary?
The political system governs how people interact, the social system. People can’t thrive in chaos. Interaction requires order. Without order, society breaks down, death and destruction prevail. Politics supplies order, if the political paradigm is rational, production is achieved by cooperation and competition. If the paradigm is irrational, conflict and social unrest grow, order disintegrates and the society collapses.
All the worldwide paradigms are based on authoritarianism, i.e., the initiation of violence, threats (law), and fraud (propaganda, lying politicians). The unproven, irrational assumption is that rules require rulers who enforce them with violence. Therefore, people vote to create rulers.
But no one has ever solved the problem of who would enforce the rules against the rulers. The rulers become the source of social chaos, e.g., Asset Forfeiture Law, NDAA. the ’08 Bank Bailout. No order comes from the anti-intellectual initiation of violence, threats, fraud.
But the majority believe otherwise. The majority believe in being ruled to achieve order. This has failed everywhere tried but it remains the paradigm and it is responsible for the rise and fall of empires as recorded throughout history. History should instruct. It doesn’t. People ignore it. They choose to believe in authoritarianism. They suffer from it but choose to ignore the cause of their suffering. Who blames the coercive political paradigm for war, poverty, injustice, crime, and social unrest? Very, very few.
The few who do are called voluntarists, libertarians, or anarchists. And they are dismissed by MSM without thought, without consideration, without respect. “Thank God” for the internet.
KirK: “We are going to use the courts…”? Are you going to use the political paradigm in a new way that achieves goals sought in vain for 200+ years? Why? Do you assume tyranny is the result of a mistake, an incompetent use of the initiation of violence? The paradigm creates the problems you want to be solved. And you seem oblivious to this fact.
No accountability is possible once you forfeit your sovereignty by authorizing rulers to initiate violence.
But you must sense that. You have already thrown yourself on the “mercy of God” and declared that failure will be in God’s hands. Why not cut to the chase and just pray if you truly believe “man proposes, God, disposes”?
I believe that politics is violence no matter the make, model or flavor and yet people persist in voting. Go figure. Someone once said there is not a nickel’s worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican political parties. Amerikan politicians, mostly Democrats, have passed “laws” that impose the 10 Planks of the Commie Manifesto.
Listen to Ted R. Weiland’s message on the fallacy of politics:
http://www.kingdompromises.org/kingdompromises_audio/1052.mp3
Politics is a false god. When people worship false god-politics, they get disasters of wars, recessions, inflation and taxation (murders, economic ruin, theft of wages, debt slavery, welfare “statism” based on looting A to satisfy B and extortion).
Read Lysander Spooner’s No Treason No. 6, The Constitution of No Authority. And then check out The No State Project by Marc Stevens on YouTube where he asks: What factual evidence do you, judge, prosecutor, politician, IRS agent or anyone, have that the constitution and law apply to me just because I am physically present in some state such as commie/socialist Democrat dictatorship corruptifornia? It doesn’t exist and never has else we would be stinkin’ slaves on the plantation state run by masters/politicians and their overseers/judges/ enforcers in the “land of the free and home of the brave.” Why weren’t the Spooner and Stevens points taught in government schools? Conflict of interest? Prejudice? How diabolically ironic is that? Factual evidence would come in the form of a sworn affidavit of truth stating what, when, where, why, how and by whom one was made subject to the jurisdiction thereof. It was never brought up in any school I attended. I have never heard any MSM commentator produce the “factual evidence.” I have asked judges in court and on record to provide the factual evidence and not one of the six I have challenged could produce factual evidence thus failing to provide proof of jurisdiction.
I recommend Ted R. Weiland’s books:
Bible Law vs. The United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective
http://www.missiontoisrael.org/blvc-index.php
Law & Kingdom: Their Relevance Under the New Covenant
http://www.missiontoisrael.org/law-kingdom.php
If Christian Americans ever expect God to fulfill his half of 2 Chronicles 7:14, they must first repent of their national idolatry their love affair with the humanistic, pluralistic, polytheistic, and antichristian United States Constitution.
I also recommend the Jehovah Witness website publications: https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/lv/r1/lp-e/0/5487
The hate speaking, commie/socialist, Democrat, SJWs, snowflakes, MSM and politicians are clearly unethical, immoral. They play the emotions game but most people know that the first casualties of emotion are reason, logic and morality.
Take a look at how Milton Friedman explains to Phil Donahue the fallacy of commie/socialism. This video should be viewed by all and then asked why they are voting for any politician that is commie/socialist.
https://www.glennbeck.com/2014/01/14/the-blunt-truth-about-greed-and-freedom-was-delivered-over-30-years-ago/
Politics is not the solution. I believe in getting at the root cause of defects and avoid wasting time on treating symptoms as that only wastes precious time. I am not convinced that men and women can rid us of political governments,
The larger the govt., the more likely it will sell itself out.
Yes, evil often is its own undoing. Sadly, people vote for wicked politicians.
Perry, Willis, you’ve done it again. Excellent points throughout, very well presented.
One little thing (picky, picky):
“How LP candidates fair in a system designed to punish third parties”
Make that “fare”, as in Fare thee well.
Fair with a letter “I” is for other stuff (even when the system is not “fair”).
Other than that, I didn’t notice a thing wrong with the logic nor feel of the whole thing.
Author
Thanks for the kind words Richard, and the proof reading. I’ve corrected the error.
Good article. I agree with most of it, but for now, I’m just going to comment on a couple of the points with which I agree.
“Step two — locate every person who agrees with us.
Create a database of the 30 million who self-identify as libertarian, and the other 30 million who hold mostly libertarian positions.
Better yet, create a database of the entire country! Take note of each person who holds any view that would move things in a libertarian direction. It’s a big project, of course. But the major parties have already done this. They have massive “get out the vote” databases. We must do the same.”
This is a great idea, and I had this same idea myself, and I have in fact been trying to implement this idea in the Libertarian Party for the past 8 years or so, and I’ve actually been met with resistance, and an overall “Who cares?” attitude about it from people who are in leadership and/or management positions in the Libertarian Party.
I joined the Libertarian Party (at a young age) after stumbling upon Harry Browne speaking at the Libertarian National Convention on C-SPAN back in 1996. During the 2000 election, the national party sent out an email to the national email list saying that they were looking for Libertarians to work as paid petition signature gatherers to get the Libertarian Party on the ballot in various states. I answered the call, and this was how I got started working in the world of ballot access.
Since then, I have worked on many Libertarian Party ballot access drives, as well as petition drives for pro-liberty ballot initiatives, referendums, recalls, etc,., and I also worked on obtaining ballot access to the Republican presidential primaries for Ron Paul for the 2008 and 2012 elections (there are some states where even Republican and Democratic party candidates have to petition their way onto the ballot).
Sadly, most of the people who do this type of work, including for the Libertarian Party, are not libertarians. Some of them are Democrats or Republicans or of some other variety that is not libertarians,
but most of them are unphilosophical mercenaries who just out to make money. Some of them are pretty unethical, as in they will use dirty tactics like lying to get people to sign (so they can make more money/and they rarely get caught, and they also rarely get punished or terminated when they get caught), and some of them are incompetent, but even for the ones who are not completely unethical or incompetent, they rarely engage in any kind of political outreach and only to the bare minimum to get the signatures.
There are however a small handful of people who do, or have done, this type of work that are actual activists, and a very tiny handful of these people are libertarians. There could be a lot more libertarians doing this type of work than there are, but the problem is that the Libertarian Party puts little to no effort into recruiting people to do this. That email from the national Libertarian Party way back in 2000 where it said that they were looking for Libertarians to work as petition circulators was the only one of its kind that the national party sent out until the year 2016. I know, because I have been on the LP national email list during all that time period, and I in fact had to badger them for several years to get them to send out an email to the national party email list to try to hire Libertarians to work as petition circulators.
A few years ago, I went through the Libertarian National Committee’s FEC filings to see how all of the ballot access money was being spent, and I found that around 76% of it went to people who were non-libertarian mercenaries. This does not include money spent for ballot access by state parties, or by individual candidates, but the situation is about the same with them. This has been the situation for a long time. So most of the money that the Libertarian Party spends on ballot access, goes to pay people who are not libertarians to interact with the public, on behalf of the Libertarian Party, to try to get them to sign petitions so Libertarians can appear on the ballot. Most of the public has no idea who any Libertarian Party candidates are, and they certainly have no idea who is on the LNC or who works at the LP national office, or who is on the state LP committees. Lots of people don’t personally know anyone who is a libertarian. So for a lot of the population, the public face of the Libertarian Party IS the Libertarian ballot access petition circulator, and most of these people are not even libertarians, and some of them misrepresent the party, either because they intentionally lie (with the hope that it will make them more money), or because they are ignorant (the party has actually had paid petitioners out representing it who don’t even know what a libertarian is), and even out of the ones who are not completely unethical and/or incompetent, they do little to nothing to spread the Libertarians message or to build the party and movement.
Several years ago, myself, and a couple of other Libertarians who have done a lot of ballot access work, came out with a contact list in order to get names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and/or email addresses of people that petition circulators encounter while in the field gathering signatures for Libertarian Party ballot access who say that they are interested in the Libertarian Party. and who want to be on the party’s contact list. Nobody told us to do this, and we did not get paid for this. We collected a bunch of contacts and DONATED them to the party for FREE, and guess what, nobody really cared. We suggested to several people in LP leadership positions, including LNC members, and LP national office staffers, that they put a downloadable version of the contact list on the national party website, and encourage Libertarians to gather contact information from anyone they meet, either while gathering petition signatures for ballot access as volunteers, or while at events, or just going about their day, and to donate them to their state party, and to the national party. I suggested that they may even want to give out prizes to the people who gather to most contacts. I also suggested that they organize volunteers to make phone calls to everyone who provides their phone number on the contact list in order to invite them to a Libertarian Party meeting or event or to engage in outreach activities. The people in LP leadership positions and national office staffers that I pitched these ideas to sat there and nodded their heads, acting like they agreed with me, and that these were good ideas, but guess what, NONE OF THEM ACTUALLY EVER DID ANYTHING TO IMPLEMENT ANY OF THESE IDEAS. Apparently, even putting a pdf of the contact list on the LP.org website, and suggesting that party members download it and get contact information from people they encounter who say that they are interested in the party who are not already on the party’s contact list, and then sending that information to the national party, and to their state party, was too much work.
The other two Libertarians who launched this contact idea with me ended up quitting it after they saw the general lack of appreciation from those in LP leadership, and the fact that there was no follow up, and the fact that nobody in LP leadership ever bothered to implement this concept on a wide scale. I was just as disgusted as the other two, and I thought about not doing it anymore myself, but I decided to persist, with the hope that perhaps if I continued to set an example, that eventually, others would follow. So I continued doing it for several more years, including earlier this year, but guess what, most people still did not care, and NOBODY else was ever bothered to do this, and a few even acted like it was a big hassle to enter new names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses, into the party’s database. I responded by saying that I only ask people to sign the contact list who appear to be the most interested, and who either self identify to me that they already are a libertarian (most have never been LP members, or been on the LP’s contact list, but a few have been lapsed members whose contact information had changed), or, who identify as a libertarian after I explained to them what it is (often times, after I had given them them a World’s Smallest Political Quiz). I pointed out that what I was doing what is known in sales as lead generating, and that I was giving them a hot list, that is a list of people who have said that they are actually interested in the product that the Libertarian Party is selling. I said that I don’t expect everyone who signs the contact list to rush out and join the party as dues paying members, but I think that some of them would, and that it is still valuable information to have even if everyone on the list does not end up becoming a dues paying member of the party, because the Libertarian Party has no way of communicating with all of the small “l” libertarians in this country, I asked how the Libertarian Party is to ever get ahead if it can’t even communicate with, or gain support from, the small “l” libertarian base in this country, Nobody rebutted anything I said, but nobody followed up on anything I said either.
Incidentally, I have worked around political campaigns for a long time now, and I have come in contact with lots of Democrats and Republicans, and guess what, they actually value and want the type of information that I was providing the Libertarian with for FREE. Democrats and Republicans want to know who and where their supporters are, so they can contact them, and so they can conduct Get Out The Vote campaigns, and so they can ask them for donations, and so they can ask them to put political signs in their yards, and so on and so forth. The Democrats and Republicans have way more funding, and get far more coverage in the mainstream news media, as compared to the Libertarian Party, yet they are apparently more serious about doing “boots on the ground” field activism than most of the people running the Libertarian Party are. One would think that a political party that is largely shut out of mainstream media coverage, and that does not have the funding for big advertising campaigns, like the Libertarian Party is, would be even more serious about engaging in “boots on the ground” field outreach than the two major parties are, but sadly, this is not the case.
It does not cost much money to carry a freaking piece of paper for people who say that they are interested in the Libertarian Party to fill in their name and contact information on, and it does not take a lot of effort to get people to fill it out. Like I said, I never asked random people if they wanted to be on the contact list, I only asked people if they said they were a libertarian, or if they said that they supported Ron Paul, or if they made comments that made them sound like a libertarian, or if they responded favorably after I explained to them what a libertarian is, or gave them a World’s Smallest Political Quiz, and they scored in the Libertarian Quadrant of the Nolan Chart. Over the course of several years, I donated a few thousand contacts to the Libertarian national party, and to various state parties, myself, and when the other two guys were doing it during the same time period I was, we were able to generate more contacts, I know that some of those contacts were used by college campus groups to help get libertarian clubs going, or enlarged, on college campuses (in these cases, we made copies of the contacts from a college, and gave them to somebody on the campus who wanted to start, or who already had, a libertarian campus club).
Unfortunately, my level of frustration and disgust with the way the Libertarian Party operates has gotten to the point where I don’t know if I am going to bother doing this anymore. I MIGHT still do this and donate contacts to the state parties (I am still holding some contacts I gathered this past summer which I donated to a state party, but I have not bothered sending a copy of to the national party), and/’or perhaps I should start up my own email list, or maybe I just won’t bother doing it anymore at all.
Part of the reason that the Libertarian Party is not more successful is because of the state, and the apathy of much of the public, but part of it is also because of the shortcomings of Libertarians themselves.
I’d be interested if you have anything for Montgomery County, PA. In fact, if you do, you’re just the guy I’m looking for.
If you are replying to me, yes, some of the contacts I gathered in Pennsylvania in 2016 and in 2018 were from Montgomery County. I already donated these to the Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania. I assume that they added them to their database, but who knows? If you want them directly from me, I think I still have them, so let me know. Note that these lists are from all over Pennsylvania, as in it wss basically a shotgun approach.
Andy, Your story is compelling, and we may want to use parts of it, with your permission.
I will say, it doesn’t surprise me. The fact is that the party is a collective, and at the time I left, they had just finished a massive “five year plan” (metaphorically speaking). The decisionmakers/budget-setters have no actual skin in the game. There’s no penalty for them, personally, when they’re wrong — no feedback mechanism. Pet theories end up ruling the staff (who actually do have some skin in the game). And the committee people with the pet theories won’t be there for long — so there’s little institutional memory. The staff won’t be there to remind them because either they’re either worn out or politics got ’em.
It is our feeling, Perry’s and mine, that these activities needed to be done entrepreneurially. It is a violation of our principles to think some far off institution will do what we can do for ourselves. Markets, pluralism of tactics, these are the things that we believe in. Let 1,000 different ventures bloom addressing these issues. Interestingly, this is how the D’s and R’s do it. They actually don’t expect much from their parties. An army of consultants and vendors and non-profits do all the hard work — oh, yeah, and candidates too. One thing they do get, as you point out, is access to massive amounts of data. But even that can be done in a more plural, marketplace way.
Let me know how liberally we can quote you and if we can (mildly) edit your work to fit our mission. Email me, directly, at JimBabka at DownsizeDC dot org, please.
You can use anything I said in regard to this, and we can discuss this further off the site if you want.
I think your plan is a great idea, and it is about damn time somebody steps up and does the things you are suggesting.
Political party committees have their place and serve some important functions, but going through the frustration of dealing with the political party committees in the LP for many years, I think that there ought to be multiple competing Libertarian Political Action Committees to supplement areas where the Libertarian Party is falling short.
Political party committees are often mired in dysfunction.
“Step three — activate as many of these people as we can.
Use every tactic we can think of to cause action — jury nullification, grassroots lobbying, initiatives, running in major party primaries, or supporting Libertarian Party campaigns. Every tactic and marketing approach should be deployed because they all have something to contribute.:”
This is a great idea as well, and I have in fact done some of these things myself, and I have in fact also made suggestions to people in leadership positions in the Libertarian Party, as well as to national party office staffers, about implementing things like this, and sadly, I was met with similar responses to to my suggestions about the Libertarian Party increasing its database of small “l” libertarians and libertarian leaners, as in people nodded their heads and acted like they agreed with me, yet the never did anything to put any of these ideas into action.
I have long said that Libertarians ought to promote action items that people can implement in their regular lives that would move society in the direction of more liberty, but which do not require Libertarians to win elections to implement. Raising awareness about jury nullification of victimless is one of those things (promoting the use of cryptocurrency and other alternative currencies is another, along with promoting home schooling and gun ownership, to name a couple of others), and if Libertarian Party officials, along with Libertarian Party candidates, would simply talk about jury nullification, and mention it on the party’s website, and on party outreach material, a lot more people would know about it, and the more people that know about it, the harder time the government will have prosecuting people for victimless crimes.
I suggested that Libertarians hand out jury nullification information to the public while gathering ballot access signatures, and I have in fact done a lot of this myself, One of the Libertarians who launched the Libertarian contact list idea with me in fact spent his own money printing up thousands of cards, which he designed, that contained information about jury nullification of victimless crimes, and which also had Libertarian Party contact information on them, and he handed out thousands of these cards to people in various states. Did anyone in LP leadership, or from the national office, who were made aware of this, ever get the party involved, or even say thanks for doing it? HECK NO! I suggested that the party come up with official Libertarian Party outreach material (cards, pamphlets, door hangers, etc…), that explained what jury nullification is, why jurors should engage in nullification when the government was trying to prosecute somebody for victimless crime. I also suggested that jury nullification be mentioned on the LP.or website, and I suggested that the party should have downloadable fliers or pamphlets on jury nullification, and that the national party should encourage its people to hand them out, and I even suggested that the party have a contest where people video record themselves engaging in jury nullification outreach, and give out a prize for the best video (perhaps members could vote on which video is the best). Once again, people acted like they agreed with me, and that these were good ideas, but NOBODY ever did anything to implement any of these things.
I also suggested that Libertarians get involved with pro-liberty ballot initiative, or referendum, or recall petition drives, in the places that have them. I said that Libertarians should go out and collect signatures on them, and use them as a way to get people to stop and talk to them, and that once they are stopped, they can talk to people about the Libertarian Party, and they can hand them some Libertarian Party outreach material, and ask people if they are interested in being on the Libertarian Party’s contact list, and even ask people if they’d register to vote under the Libertarian Party’s label (in the states that have partisan voter registration). I even pointed out that Libertarians could GET PAID to do this, since most groups that conduct petition drives have to hire people to do it, since it is hard to unpaid volunteers to gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, so if there happened to be a petition drive going on in their area to say legalize marijuana, or to reduce or eliminate a tax, or to stop eminent domain abuse, or to put spending limits of government, or for some other cause that Libertarians would support, that they could GET PAID for their activism (if they desired to get paid, and if they feel that they don’t need or want the money, they could always turn their petition signatures in to the proponent for free as volunteers), even if they just did it on a part time basis, and that they use this as an opportunity to promote the Libertarian Party. I suggested that the Libertarian Party, at both the national and state level, encourage Libertarians to do this, and to look for opportunities where they could do this, and to let Libertarians know about these opportunities. Did anyone ever actually do this? NO.
Another suggestion that I made was that Libertarian Party members file pro-liberty ballot initiatives or referendums, or at least join committees where a coalition of people are doing this. If Libertarians did this, it could help the party get more publicity, and if they pass, Libertarians could take credit for it. Libertarians could also be the ones who actually write, or help draft, the legal language of ballot initiatives. Ever wonder why a lot of marijuana ballot initiatives are chocked full of provisions that aren’t not inline with libertarian principles? It is because these initiatives are being written by people who are not libertarians! If Libertarians wrote and filed these ballot initiatives, they could write them to be inline with libertarian principles, or to at least be as libertarian as possible while having a good chance to pass. I suggested that the Libertarian national party, as well as the state parties, encourage their members to do this, and that the national and state parties publicize these efforts. Did anyone ever actually do this? Once again, NO, and like with the other suggestions that I made, people nodded their heads ad acted like they agree with me, and that these were good ideas, but NOBODY ever did anything to implement them.
Sometimes it is hard to say who is a bigger obstacle to Libertarian success, Democrats and Republicans, or fellow Libertarians.
Andy: I joined the LP, NV, in 1973 at 30 because the chairman and vice chair told me they were anarchists and anarchists represent 20% but did 80% of the work. That fact plus my frustration with mainstream politics and the desire to “do something” to promote a better society, a freer society, a society that valued reason, rights, and choice, was why I agreed to use the present political system to educate only, NOT to gain power.
I became very active ’75-’78 working on two presidential campaigns, running for state senator, and getting the LP of Nevada on the ballot by getting signatures. I spent $thousands when the dollar was worth 8x.
I observed LP members quickly abandoned education as a primary goal to gain political power, claiming power can be used to educate. Playing to the mob, they claimed, was not selling out, but “tactics”. I disagreed. When LP spokespersons lied to the press about the total LP delegates at the NY convention it opened up a big divide. A major LP figure (I forget who) quipped, “If lying works, I say lie.” I believe honesty is the best policy so that was “strike 1” for LP leadership. Later, a vice-president candidate was not allowed to run because he said he was a gold smuggler. That was considered too controversial. I stopped the vote when I cast all 3 NV votes for “none of the above”. Immediately, other states requested to change their vote to the same. How did this trend stop the vote? Before “none…” could win the voting was stopped by the person in charge. Was this legal? I’m no parliamentarian but I know it’s not fair to kill a vote you don’t like. Strike 2 for the national LP. Karl Bray (a close friend) was there to speak on the need for a tax revolt. He was well received by the convention. It was clear this would be the main theme of the NLP and Karl would be our spokesman. I met him at a big tax resistance convention in San Deigo where he was the main speaker to thousands of extremely conservative Republicans. He was very popular there, just as he was all over the country. There was a grass-roots movement that fit with the libertarian philosophy and Karl was a libertarian. It was a no-brainer to marry the two movements, to educate millions.
Karl was invited to a secret meeting with the famous LP leadership. He was honored and in awe. Afterward, he was disappointed and sullen. They had convinced him to drop the tax issue because “this was not the right time”. When did the right time come? NEVER. Strike 3. I have no respect for LP “leaders”.
Read, “Neither Bullets Nor Ballots” by Wendy McElroy and George Smith. That was the pub that made the argument that the political system is inherently authoritarian.
An authoritarian system can’t be fixed using that system. It must be repudiated completely. Then a new political paradigm can be created, a system based on NOT force, but reason, rights, choice.
I find it rather ironic that Ron Paul never left the Libertarian Party, and that the most libertarian members of Congress happened to be Republicans.(BTW, a shout out to former Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is in order, because he held to libertarian principles in a bright red state, and was likely the first to put up a debt clock). Yet the current Libertarian Party seems to prefer to reach out to the left wing of the DNC instead. I watched the 2016 Libertarian Debates, hosted by John Stossell, and was deeply disappointed. (Not with the debates, they were well hosted by Stossell. He kept to the issues, unlike the D & R debates which touched few substantive issues, and Mr, Stossell was also even-handed). My disappointment was seeing two political novices, McAfee and Austin Petersen out principle the two-time nominee of the LP, big time. If one’s freedom of conscience is up for debate, then what value are your other freedoms? Gary Johnson, if you recall, answered Austin Petersen’s question in the affirmative: yes, a baker should be forced to bake a cake for a same-sex ‘wedding’, and it wouldn’t matter if the cake-baker was a Jew and Nazi Party members wanted the cake to represent their repugnant view. How Statist is that?
I worked hard to get the LP on the ballot in NV. About a half dozen of us did most of the work. This was a grassroots effort, not the LNC. The LPN meeting had about 6-8 people at meetings. Every idea was discussed to death, then getting tabled, never tried. I took the treasurer out to a bar and after getting him drunk talked him into funding a project I had come up with and developed. It was tee-shirts with “CLARK” that we paid $2.50 for and sold for $5. It was the only campaign idea that made a profit. Everything else was a total loss. And it was very popular. Our chairman was mad as hell at me at first because it was never approved. He had kept telling me to exercise more “due diligence” until I answered all questions, was all ready to go, and then said “thanks” and tabled it at the last meeting it could be feasible. I think he expected me to give up on it and never expected me to actually set it up. After all my work I was pissed and worked around him. But I learned to not get involved in working with committees. Nothing of merit is ever done.
Many people these days get their news and information from streaming sources.
Perry, I heard your guest spot on YouTube, on this same topic, Marketing:
The Think Liberty Podcast – Episode 55 – Libertarian Marketing – A Discussion with Perry Willis
I never watch what’s “Trending” on Youtube, but many people do. I believe the number of hits a video gets immediately after it’s posted, makes a huge difference: hits/time . I wonder… If the DownsizeDC army were to hear about such a video at the right time, how many would it take to make the right video(s) Trending, or at least go higher on the list than some terrible hits that are there now?
Just standing up to be counted, here…
“Learn to take YES for an answer!”. That’s brilliantly put.
Shorty after Charles Darwin died, his nephew decided to cash in on the family name by inventing a political idea, which he called Eugenics. Some people, said the nephew, were “more evolved” than others. The State must intervene in matters of marriage and childbirth, to ensure that the less-evolved do not reproduce, was the Eugenics position. Harvard University quickly became a magnet for the Eugenics group. Based on zero evidence whatsoever, the group systematically attacked the right to vote, by arguing that the “less-evolved” people needed to undergo a process of “advancement” before they could fully participate in Democracy.
Now that scientists actually know a little bit about genetics and how our brains process information, the scientific consensus is that Darwin’s nephew had it completely backwards. Humans have stopped evolving genetically because we can evolve faster culturally. We can copy ideas that work. We can forget about ideas that fail, Ants and butterflies cannot change their neural programming because it is hard wired into their pin-sized brains by genetics, Evolution by mutation takes lifetimes for ants and butterflies. For we humans, genetic variation is what causes a diversity of perceptions, interests, talents, and disabilities. The diversity itself accelerates cultural evolution. New ideas are constantly being discovered. People are constantly saying YES to good ideas.
The Eugenics idea that democracy was an ideal, attainable only when “inferior” people had died out, became a disastrous argument for the expansion of State power. Elitists who cling to this thinking continue to fail. They’ve built a State that destroys all available resources trying to expand itself and control everything. Their States are rapidly bankrupting themselves. Most of the arguments for all of this State control, are illusions. The existential threat to the United States Government is bankruptcy, and few non-libertarians will admit that fact in public.
Learning to take YES for an answer is an important skill. The Eugenics Elite wasted the last century trying to evolve humans by force, into people whom they dareed to recognize, as having the capacity to say YES. Meanwhile, ordinary people have been saying YES repeatedly, assimilating new technologies.and new products regularly. Our real strength as Libertarians, is our ability to team up with anyone who says YES, to any of our ideas.
Learning to take YES for an answer is more important than any other skill, in growing our brand and persuading people to accept our ideas and ideals.
“Now we’re supposed to abandon open borders. Wrong. Learn from history. We should emphasize open borders!”
I disagree with you here. Why? Because “open borders” is not a legitimate libertarian position. Libertarianism is about property rights, and if you take libertarianism to its logical conclusion, it leads to a society without a coercive government (ie-a state), but this does NOT mean open borders, it means PRIVATE PROPERTY BORDERS. This means that property owners would decide who gets to enter their property and on what terms, and that property owners would have the right to discriminate for any reason, including because the property owner is a racist or a xenophobe (two buzzwords leftists like to throw around to try to silence debate).
We don’t live in a libertarian anarcho-capitalist society. We live in a defacto democratic welfare state with forced association laws and lots of taxpayer funded property and infrastructure. Given this reality, the government is acting as a steward of the taxpayer funded commons. The government has a MONOPOLY on the function of regulating borders and immigration. The private sector, or what remains of it, is PROHIBITED from doing this, and in fact, if the a private actor even attempts to be involved with this, they will be hit with things to prevent them such as anti-discrimination lawsuits.
Just because the government monopolizes a function, it does not necessarily invalidate the function. There’d still be demand for many of the things that the state does in a libertarian anarcho-capitalist society, it is just that these functions would be handled in on a voluntary basis rather than on a coercive basis. The state currently monopolizes fire fighting. Yes, there are a small handful of private fire companies, but for the vast majority of the population, fire fighting is in the domain of government. So if one’s house catches on fire, and there is no free market fire department alternative (which there is not for most people), I don’t think that there is anything wrong with using the government fire department to put out the fire. Government also currently has a monopoly on roads, and we all rely on these roads, and given that libertarians do not have enough political influence the government to privatize the roads, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with saying that while the government monopolizes the function of roads, that the roads ought to be properly maintained.
Given that we currently live in a defacto democratic welfare state with forced association laws and lots of taxpayer funded property and infrastructure, who enters the country and what they do while here is quite relevant to government policy. The state declaring “open borders” and saying that anyone can waltz in with no questions asked, or the state just allowing for large numbers of immigrants, including many of whom are clearly welfare seekers (note that the Refugee Resettlement Act actually uses taxpayer funds to bring people into the country, and once here, it signs them up for a bunch of welfare programs, and that the statistics show that the vast majority of these people remain on welfare for many years after they arrive), to enter the country, and for them and their offspring to be able to gain American citizenship (and a very strong case can be made that Birthright citizenship is not meant to apply to the offspring of non-citizens, particularly those who entered the country illegally), is in fact enacting a state policy, and is initiating force and fraud against the existing population, who, numerous surveys indicate, oppose this policy in super-majority numbers (one of the most recent surveys I have seen indicated that 81% of Americans want to see immigration reduced), so such policy is FORCED ASSOCIATION (as in the state is forcing immigrants onto people who do not want to associate with them), in addition to the fact that statistics indicate that a super-majority of these immigrants and their offspring get on welfare and use a disproportionate amount of government services in general (such as, many of them have higher birthrates than most of the existing population, so this means greater use of taxpayer funded healthcare and greater use of government schools). Statistics also indicate that a super-majority of these immigrants and their offspring, after gaining American citizenship and becoming registered voters, vote in favor of expanding the welfare state, higher taxes, and for more gun control laws. Another thing that statistics reveal is that some of these immigrant groups have a higher crime rate than that of most of the existing population. So the current mass immigration policy is INCREASING the level of force and fraud being perpetrated on the existing population, and this should be clearly apparent when one considers that mass immigration supported by Marxists and globalists (as in the political elite who want to get rid of the US Constitution, not because they a libertarian anarchists, but rather because they want to replace it with a global totalitarian government).
Whether we like it or not, the world is presently arranged into states, and every country in the world has a government that controls its borders and immigration policy. Who enters the country means who gets access to the taxpayer funded commons and infrastructure, and who is granted citizenship in a country that has elections impacts who can gain political power and effect public policy. You won’t have a libertarian society if you are surrounded by people with Marxist or theocratic or other totalitarian ideologies. Opening the door so Marxists, theorcrats, welfare seekers, criminal thugs, and people with communicable diseases can waltz in with no questions asked, is not going to increase the level of freedom and happiness and prosperity in your society.
Some libertarians make the claim that shutting the aforementioned people out means that you’ll have to have a big police state. I do not believe this to be true. The small European countries of Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, are not being overrun by hordes of destructive foreign migrants, unlike Germany, France, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and some other countries in Europe, and it is not because they have created big police states (if anything, the countries that are being overrun by destructive foreign migrants are the ones creating the big police states), they simply do not invite these people, or entice them to come with the lure of welfare programs and an easy path to citizenship. Poland and Hungry are also not being overrun by destructive migrants from third world countries. So just not offering taxpayer funded welfare and other benefits to immigrants, and making the citizenship process more difficult, and having some basic border patrol, pretty much eliminates the problem.
I do not believe that it violates any libertarian principles to say that while the state exists and is monopolizing the function of regulating borders and immigration, that its policy should not invite or encourage Marxists, theocrats, welfare seekers, criminal thugs, or communicable disease carriers to come here, and if they sneak in anyway, that these people, and any offspring they have while here, should not be rewarded with taxpayer funded benefits, or American citizenship, and that if caught, they should be deported (or physically removed, so to speak). No sane property owner would want these people on their land if we lived in a libertarian private property anarcho-capitalist society, and in such a society, property owners would be able to defend their land via private security guards, private walls or fences, or by the property owners being armed.
Some libertarians will acknowledge that lots of immigrants are putting a drain on the welfare system and on other government services, but they act as though this is a good thing, because then they will collapse the state, and this happens, we will live in a libertarian society. I think that this is absurd, because this assumes that all of these immigrants and their offspring hold libertarian ideals, as if they are going to magically become free market economists and libertarian philosophers if the state collapses. Reality is that most of these people are far from being libertarians, and even if they were to cause this government to collapse, they’d just replace it with a government that is bad, or probably worse, than the one we have now. The far more likely scenario, which is backed up by a mountain of evidence, is that they will just help push the government we already have further into totalitarian socialism.
Now to be clear here, when I say immigrants, I am not talking about all immigrants. Yes, there are some good immigrants. I am talking about statistical averages, and, like I mentioned above, the statistical averages indicate that a super-majority of modern day immigrants use and support the welfare state, and advocate more gun control laws, and that some groups of immigrants do in fact have higher crime rates than that of most of the existing population.
If the country you live in has an immigration policy that is attracting people who hold Marxist and/or theocratic ideologies, and/or who are non-ideological welfare seekers, and/or who are criminal thugs or communicable disease carriers, this is a sign that there is something wrong with your country’s immigration policy, as such a policy is destructive to the liberty of the existing population. Also, most people to do wish to be demographically replaced. If the policy in place is inviting in such a large influx of people, particularly from alien and often hostile cultures, that it leads to wild shifts in demographics, including to where the people who founded the country are at risk of becoming a minority, then there is something wrong with the immigration policy.
So called “open borders” is a misinterpretation of the libertarian philosophy. The true libertarian position is that the function of regulating borders and immigration should be handed over to private property owners, but to properly implement this, it would mean completely abolishing the state, so there’d be no government welfare programs (since there’d be no taxes), no democratic elections (unless they were held by voluntary organizations, and the results of which on applied to the people who voluntarily consented to the election), and there’d be no “public” property since all taxpayers held land or infrastructure, and there’d also be no anti-discrimination laws, which means that property owners would be able to associate, or disassociate, with whoever they wanted for whatever reason they desired. Basically, this would only work if a libertarian anarcho-capitalist society were already established, and reality is that we are far from having this. Libertarians do not even have majority control over one city or county (the only time this ever happened in LP history is in a really small town in Utah called Big Water back in the 1980’s, and Libertarians only had a majority there for a couple of years), so I think that it is premature to act as though Libertarians are going to privatize all land and infrastructure and eliminate the state and turn the function of regulating borders and migration over to private property owners.
The late Murray Rothbard agreed with me on what the correct application of borders and immigration should be from a libertarian perspective. I give him credit for having intellectual integrity.
“This is from Murray Rothbard’s Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation-State. It was published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1994.
Full quote & context below.
IV. THE PURE ANARCHO-CAPITALIST MODEL
I raise the pure anarcho-capitalist model in this paper, not so much to advocate the model per se as to propose it as a guide for settling vexed current disputes about nationality. The pure model, simply, is that no land areas, no square footage in the world, shall remain “public”; every square foot of land area, be they streets, squares, or neighborhoods, is privatized. Total privatization would help solve nationality problems, often in surprising ways, and I suggest that existing states, or classical liberal states, try to approach such a system even while some land areas remain in the governmental sphere.
Open Borders, or the Camp of-the Saints Problem
The question of open borders, or free immigration, has become an accelerating problem for classical liberals. This is first, because the welfare state increasingly subsidizes immigrants to enter and receive permanent assistance, and second, because cultural boundaries have become increasingly swamped. I began to rethink my views on immigration when, as the Soviet Union collapsed, it became clear that ethnic Russians had been encouraged to flood into Estonia and Latvia in order to destroy the cultures and languages of these peoples. Previously, it had been easy to dismiss as unrealistic Jean Raspail’s anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints, in which virtually the entire population of India decides to move, in small boats, into France, and the French, infected by liberal ideology, cannot summon the will to prevent economic and cultural national destruction. As cultural and welfare-state problems have intensified, it became impossible to dismiss Raspail’s concerns any longer.
However, on rethinking immigration on the basis of the anarcho-capitalist model, it became clear to me that a totally privatized country would not have “open borders” at all. If every piece of land in a country were owned by some person, group, or corporation, this would mean that no immigrant could enter there unless invited to enter and allowed to rent, or purchase, property. A totally privatized country would be as “closed” as the particular inhabitants and property owners desire. It seems clear, then, that the regime of open borders that exists de facto in the U.S. really amounts to a compulsory opening by the central state, the state in charge of all streets and public land areas, and does not genuinely reflect the wishes of the proprietors.
Under total privatization, many local conflicts and “externality” problems-not merely the immigration problem-would be neatly settled. With every locale and neighborhood owned by private firms, corporations, or contractual communities, true diversity would reign, in accordance with the preferences of each community. Some neighborhoods would be ethnically or economically diverse, while others would be ethnically or economically homogeneous. Some localities would permit pornography or prostitution or drugs or abortions, others would prohibit any or all of them. The prohibitions would not be state imposed, but would simply be requirements for residence or use of some person’s or community’s land area. While statists who have the itch to impose their values on everyone else would be disappointed, every group or interest would at least have the satisfaction of living in neighborhoods of people who share its values and preferences. While neighborhood ownership would not provide Utopia or a panacea for all conflicts, it would at least provide a ‘second-best’ solution that most people might be willing to live with.
If you haven’t read Raspail’s ‘The Camp of the Saints’ that Rothbard referenced, you should at least read about the book to understand what influenced him and what he was referring to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Camp_of_the_Saints “
Here are a couple more good article on this subject.
Lew Rockwell: Open Borders Are an Assault on Private Property
https://mises.org/library/open-borders-are-assault-private-property
Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The Case for Free Trade and Restricted Immigration
https://mises.org/library/case-free-trade-and-restricted-immigration-0
Author
Neither of these posts have anything to do with the article. So having said…
Mr. Rockwell is wrong. Consider two people who own property side by side on the border. One wants Mexicans on his property and the other does not. Both are within their rights.
I think my previous post is stuck in moderation, because I included two links in the post, so I’m going to re-post the article links separately.
Lew Rockwell: Open Borders Are an Assault on Private Property
https://mises.org/library/open-borders-are-assault-private-property
Also, Andy… I DIRECTLY replied to Lew Rockwell, on this article in January 2016. I requested he publish my response. As was his right, he declined. Students for Liberty took it, but redesigned their site. So now, it’s stored on ours. I Want Lew Rockwell to Be Libertarian on Immigration
Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The Case for Free Trade and Restricted Immigration
https://mises.org/library/case-free-trade-and-restricted-immigration-0
I don’t think it is possible to have a truly libertarian immigration policy unless it is done in the context of a private property anarcho-capitalist society.
Dismantling governmemt is like dismantling a bomb, pull the wrong wire out at the wrong time, and the bomb will blow up in your face.
Declaring “open borders” into a democratic welfare state with forced association laws and lots of taxpayer funded property and infrastructure is like detonating a bomb that will destroy liberty, which is why it is a policy that is advocated by Marxists and globalists.
Turning over borders and migration policy over to private property owners is probably the last vestige of statism to eliminate if a transition from a statist society to an anarcho-capitalist society were to be made, and given that libertarians do not even control one local government in this country, we are a long way from this becoming reality.
Andy: Each voluntaryist controls himself, the government of himself, and that’s as “local” as it gets. That’s a reality for millions of us that is available to all if they only knew it.
I’d be content to see the other-governed just stop trying to force their way on me, to self-enslave and leave me alone.
Perry, I disagree with your hypothetical of saying that if one property owner in the USA wants Mexicans (or whatever other foreign national) on his property and the other does not, that this is a justification for declaring “open borders” under our present conditions of living in a democratic welfare state with forced association laws and lots of taxpayer funded property and infrastructure, nor would this even necessarily be valid in an anarcho-capitalist society. There are condominium associations and apartment buildings and hotels/motels that have restrictions about bringing guests onto property. A society based on anarcho-capitalism could have private cities/towns/neighborhoods, that could have restrictions for entry, and they could take the form of covenant communities, as in where in order to live in or visit these places, one would have to sign a contract, which, if they violate, they get kicked out. A covenant community could even ban people they do not like from entry.
Under our present reality, where people entering the country gain the use of all of the taxpayer funded property and infrastructure (roads, sewage, water, electricity, libraries, parks, public schools, hospitals, etc…), and government welfare programs, who enters the country is quite relevant as to the allocation and use of such scarce resources. Acting as though everyone on the planet is somehow entitled to unrestricted use of scarce resources goes against property norms. Property rights indicates the right to exclude people. Furthermore, it is highly relevant to the political system we live under who gets granted American citizenship, because this impacts elections, as well as what issues get pushed. If a bunch of people who hold Marxist ideologies enter the country and gain citizenship and vote in elections, they will move the country in a Marxist direction, and this is exactly what is happening now, where Democrats have even admitted that they are importing voters to sway elections so they can ram through their welfare state and gun control agendas (look at California for a good example of this).
If we all lived in a condominium association, and the condo had a pool, tennis courts, a picnic area, and other commons, these would be for the use of the people who live in the condo association, not the general public. Guests could use these things, but their access would be restricted, as they would not have the same right to use the facilities of the condo association as do the members, and the condo association could set rules for members bringing in guests, and if the rules are broken, condo association security could “physically remove” (so to speak) the guests.
Disney World operates as a defacto private city (not a perfect example, but good enough for discussion). There is no right to use the roads or any of the infrastructure in Disney World (like the rides) unless you go through their “immigration checkpoint” (ie-their ticket booth) and buy a ticket, and once in the Magic Kingdom, you have to follow the rules of the park. If you violate the rules of the park, or if somebody sneaks in without buying a ticket, or if they buy a ticket, but overstay their ticket time (like over-staying a VISA), Disney World Security will throw the offenders out if they catch them, and rightfully so.
I am not saying that foreigners should not be able to visit the present day USA, or that there should be no foreign workers, or no immigrants, I am saying that while we live under the present conditions, with the government managing the borders and immigration, that the policy in place a) should not threaten the life,
liberty, and property of the existing population by enticing people with Marxist or theocratic ideologies to come here, and the same goes with welfare shoppers, criminal thugs, and communicable disease carriers, and if these people sneak in anyway, the government should not reward them, and b) the level of immigration should not overwhelm or displace the existing population with wild shifts in demographics or replacement. The problems I described would not be tolerated by property owners in an anarcho-capitalist society, but since the function of regulating borders and immigration is being monopolized by government, the government ought to manage it as a market actor would, or at least as close as possible, and numerous surveysindication that the vast majority of Americans do not like immigrants sucking up welfare money and other public resources, and they want to see immigration reduced.
If we lived in an ancap society and a property owner wanted to turn their land into a refugee camp for foreigners, they could do that, so long as they do not violate the person or property of others in the process.
The ancap society is not our present reality. The world is presently divided into states, and states regulate borders and migration. I went to Mexico last year, and when I entered Mexico I was greeted by Mexican government officials with guns who wanted to see my passport, and who wanted to know how long I was going to be in Mexico, and where I was going to stay, and I had to go through a Mexican version of the TSA. When I got to my hotel, it had armed security guards, and these guards would check to see if people lingering around the hotel were really guests there. So the Mexican government regulates its border and migration, and the hotel regulated its border and migration with security guards.