Marotta says, "Steve's essay expresses his fears, but does not solve the problem." That's really not accurate. There aren't any "fears." My post wasn't a screed about dangers. My post listed a few of the logical problems inherent in some of the common approaches to the issue of borders. And the most important point I tried to make was about the treatment of aspects of our system of laws as commonly-held property. Understanding that it is the citizens who, in common, own things in our nation is helpful. We, the people, own the Capital building, for example. I'm a citizen, but my property rights in that building are very limited - mostly because of the huge number of citizens with whom I share ownership. Understanding that property rights do adhere in this way illustrates why laisse faire Capitalism and Objectivism have a moral/legal approach to maintaining border security and control over immigration. An example of this is in voting. I have a right to vote (not just the legally defined civil right, but a derivative of my moral right of self-determination that flows from my basic individual rights. But this widely shared ownership of our government is exercised such that I have an equal right to vote, but not the right to have my vote count for more than the votes of others.
---------------- The fallacy of "sealing the borders" should be apparent to anyone who admires the works of Ayn Rand.
Then Marotta quotes me where I wrote: "...the government - should have declared war on Islamic Fundamentalists, and then stopped immigration from those parts of the world till it no longer carried a risk." And he says, "By that logic, Ayn Rand would have been denied a visa, coming as she did from the USSR, our sworn enemy. The same would be true of millions who came here from monarchies." How could he read what I wrote, then quote it, and not see that I tied stopping the immigration from an area to a declaration of war? And he does know that we were NOT in a state of declared war with the Soviet Union at the time that Ayn Rand immigrated. What I said, and should be very clear, is that we must shut down immigration (legal or illegal) from an area that we are a state of armed conflict with - for obvious reasons - until the war ends or the risks are gone. His logic would lead to claims that the government has no right to defend against invasion with the military.
---------------- ...America is a nation of immigrants, of necessity from places that do not share our traditions. Even Merrie Olde Englande is not American: in a court of law, you are guilty until proved innocent there. In short, nowhere in the world can you find any place like America, except here in America. So, you cannot exclude people who come from "danger zones."
Such sloppy, even absent, logic. The difference between "do not share our traditions" and "are at war with us and are killing us" is significant. Next he alludes to our restraint on our government whereby we declare that people in our jurisdiction are innocent of a crime, for legal purposes, till they are convicted. Note the following: 1.) They may in fact be guilty, 2.) We do this as part of purposely maintaining a system that protects all of rights from a government, 3.) it applies not to all of humanity, but to those of us who fall under the jurisdiction of the government - i.e., those inside of the borders, 4.) It would be foolish in the extreme to assume anyone who was coming from a country with whom we are at war, and who breaches our borders, is not going to harm us and unless they are proven guilty of something (like the suicide bombing of civilians) they are to be treated as innocent.
---------------- You cannot punish people (plural) for what they (plural) might do. You can only act on the basis of what a person (singular) really does...
Again, this is the misapplication of an aspect of our legal system to people who currently live in, say, Syria or Iraq. If we have the right to defend our borders, and if we have the right to determine who we will allow into the country, then we are not punishing them. We are exercising a property right. It is not punishing someone who has no right to come into your home to tell them that they can not come into your home.
---------------- Marotta addresses my statement that aspects of America are owned in common by the citizens. He says: The argument that "we" all "own" America is compelling, but flawed.
He offers up to counter aruments: 1.) That we, the individuals, don't get to control what the 'managers' do. The way that any form of joint ownership is exercised can vary. There may be a partnership agreement. There are government and corporate rules expaining the exercise of ownership of a publically held corportion where people can vote their share proxies to influence the managers. A private club, owned by its members, will likely have a charter. Some rules are conveyed by contract. There are co-ops where the commercial participants are the owners. Control of property is always about a bundle of right which will have some mechanism that connects the 'owner' to the 'object.' The more shared the ownership is, the less direct control a single owner is likely to have. We, the American citizens, own our legal system to the extent that is owned by anyone. We exercise our very limited individual control, but which, in common, does have massive effects over time. The government isn't the owner of the legal system, just the manager. Saying it isn't owned by anyone is silly. That would be like saying it not only isn't property, but couldn't even be considered property. That would be too much like the anarchists who claim that there might be such things as property rights to physical objects but not to intellectual property.
2.) Marotta says: "We do not own it [America]: we share it. Steve Wolfer has no more (or less) right to demand that we keep everyone out than I do that we let everyone in." If you share something where you have to have permission to share it, then clearly you don't have a right to do what it is that is being done in the sharing. But if you are doing something in the sharing, where you have a right to do that, there is a property right involved. It is not a valid argument to say that there is no common ownership just because one of the owners can't demand their own way. If I have a couple shares of Microsoft stock, can I then tell them to move out of Seattle? Of course not. Does that mean I'm not one of the owners of the company? No.
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That gets back to the original problem with the libertarians: everyone has a utopia in mind; no one is going to get their own. ... unless... Steve does have a boat. That is a place he can control.
I sold my boat. And the issue of property rights is about control. It is control over actions, as all rights are about actions. And the relationship of any person to anything else, no matter what it is, can be viewed as an answer to the question, "What actions, if any, can this person take, without the permission of others, relative to that thing?" I had the right to exclude people from my boat. I still have the right to exclude people from my house. I have the right to vote in elections. The government, acting to protect my rights, can legitimately arrest and try and convict and imprison criminals. They can close the border to all except those that our representatives have decided to let come in. Even if I were the sole owner of my boat (which I was), I could not do things with the boat that its ownership didn't give me the right to do. And if I had shared the ownership of the boat (I could have sold shares of some sort), I would have ended up with less control, fewer actions I could take, but the boat would still be owned... it would still have owners. Government has no individual rights. But it does have legal rights and those legal rights are moral if they are derived from individual rights. This is how we arrive at the understanding that the government has the legal right to control the border. Government is acting as the representative of the citizens in maintaining the border, just as it is acting as the representative of the citizens when it maintains a military force. But this an argument that will never be accepted by anarchists.
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