Libertarianism in One Country?
Top
libertarian pundit Jacob Sullum wrote recently in Reason
Magazine Online:
You can move from Nome to
Key West or from Honolulu to Bangor in search of a
better life without getting official approval from
anyone. Not so if you want to move from Tijuana to San
Diego or from Toronto to Buffalo. The standard
explanation for such distinctions revolves around the concepts of citizenship and sovereignty. But these
terms seem to do little more than restate the puzzle:
"Citizens" are the privileged ones who get
to live and work in a particular place, because the
government that exercises "sovereignty"
there says so. …If there`s a compelling reason
why a different standard should apply to immigration
between countries, I haven`t heard it yet.
Jacob
Sullum, "Moving
Targets"
Well,
as a free market fellow-traveler, perhaps I can supply
the reason.
A
free market economy has two main advantages over a
highly politicized system. Of course, it produces more
wealth. But
equally importantly, it doesn`t corrupt people as much
as any system that uses the state`s monopoly on
violence to take money from one person and give it to
another. (As illustration of the perverting power of
combining normal human greed with politics, observe
the career of the Rev. J. Jackson.)
The
potentially fatal weakness of free markets, however,
is that they increasingly foster inequality.
Within
America, income inequality has grown significantly
since 1973, for a variety of reasons.
-
The modern information-industrial economy offers fewer
and fewer rewards to a strong back and more and more
to a strong mind. In 1952, factory workers made 67% as
much as engineers. By 1988, they earned only 29% as
much. Today,
if you look at young adult siblings raised in the same
households, the ones
in the top quarter of the IQ scale earn almost twice
as much as their brothers or sisters in the bottom
quarter of the bell curve. -
We corrupted America`s poor back in the 1960s by
(temporarily) offering enough welfare for an unmarried
woman to feed herself, her kids, and a boyfriend or
two. -
We`ve been importing large numbers of people from the
less productive classes of the less productive
nations. And we haven`t come close to the bottom of
the barrel yet. Only recently, for example, have
non-Spanish speaking Indians from Chiapas and similar
downtrodden regions in the south of Mexico begun to
show up in America. Andean Indian peasants, favela-dwellers
from the scenic slums of Brazil, and Africans (other
than the wa-Benzi elites) have yet to figure out how to get to America. But,
unless we make the effort, they eventually will. -
By increasing the supply of low skilled labor, these
immigrants drive down wages among America`s less able
citizens. -
Population growth, which these days is wholly a
product of current and recent immigration, drives up
land prices. This makes it harder for working families
to afford their own homes in immigrant gateway states.
In the West, this drives native-born families out of
the lush coastal regions and into the harsh deserts of
the interior. -
We haven`t been importing many competitors for our
homegrown verbal elites, so their earnings remain
strong. American lawyers, for example, are
overwhelmingly native-born. With the exception of a
few British Commonwealth journalists, media workers
are almost all American-born. Laws restricting
government jobs to citizens protect federal
bureaucrats. Politicians, of course, face little
competition from hungry immigrants. So it`s hardly
surprising that the American establishment has year
after year rejected overwhelming public support for
limiting immigration.
It`s
time for us good guys to take a lesson in prudence
from the bad guys. As you may recall, Trotsky and
Stalin had a little falling out. Trotsky wanted to
pursue "permanent worldwide revolution." In
contrast, Stalin thought it wiser to concentrate on
"revolution in one country," and only pick
off buffer states as circumstances allowed. Stalin won
the debate with Trotsky through the penetrating power
of his logic (and ice pick), and went on to be the
most enduringly successful of the 20th Century`s
sizable cast of monsters.
This
is what libertarians must realize: There is
staggeringly too much inequality in the world for
America`s love affair with capitalism to survive
importing massive amounts of it.
In
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So
Rich and Some So Poor, Harvard economic historian David S. Landes wrote, "The
difference in income per head between the richest
industrial nation, say Switzerland, and the poorest
nonindustrial country, Mozambique, is about 400 to
1." (For my review, click
here.)
It`s
crucial to understand that a hankering for equality is
not some fad instigated by Marxist college professors.
It is deeply rooted in human nature. Just see what
happens when you try to give one of your kids a
smaller slice of the pie than you give the others.
America`s
exceptional devotion to free enterprise was based on
our being blessed with a nearly empty continent,
populated only by Indians who, while brave and
tenacious, were ultimately too thin on the ground to
hang on to their property. Throughout American
history, cheap land and high wages made possible a
degree of equality of land ownership impossible to
achieve in Europe without heavy government
intervention. Even though 19th Century Great Britain
enjoyed a higher degree of social mobility than was
typical in Europe, around 250 families owned about
3/4ths of the real estate in the entire country.
Today, after generations of punitive death duties, the
Duke of Westminster still owns about 10% of London.
Socialism
didn`t happen here because we didn`t need it to
happen.
The
eternal temptation of the wealthy, however, is to try
to acquire cheap labor in order to grow even richer.
Plantation owners imported and bred millions of
slaves. After the Civil War, Gilded Age capitalists
needed factory hands. They could have found them among
the millions of oppressed blacks of the Jim Crow
South. But they believed, no doubt rightly, that
European immigrants were cheaper relative to their
productivity.
As
a nation, we`re still paying for the slave trade,
slavery, and the failure to incorporate the freedmen
into the national labor market. One of the indirect
costs is the vast prestige of liberalism even today,
after decades of disastrous policies. The single most
important reason liberals maintain their dysfunctional
moral cachet in 2001 is because they were on the side
of the angels in 1964.
In
1965, however, Congress changed the law to once again
allow the importing of large numbers of cheap
laborers. This has helped solve the servant problem of
the current generation of the rich, but at the cost of
slowly creating a new proletariat of voters who suffer
from expensive land and low wages.
History
shows that people in these conditions tend to vote for
the Left. And who can blame them?
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]
March 19,
2001


