In related news, Butler Shaffer is puzzled as to why gay-marriage advocates “want to have the state certify [their] relationships with others” as opposed to just “perform[ing their] own ceremony of marriage without getting the state’s approval.” The answer, obviously, is that the state imposes special burdens on couples who don’t marry in the approved [...]
Lew Rockwell argues that since marriage and immigration are “mentioned nowhere in the constitution,” it follows that each is “no business of the federal congress.” Hence “no federal judge has authority” to strike down either California’s ban on same-sex marriage or Arizona’s harassment of immigrants. I disagree. The 14th Amendment states: “nor shall any State [...]
I quote (with the authors’ permission) a great pair of comments on immigration policy from the LeftLibertarian2 list: Joshua Katz: If you think you can shoot people crossing an imaginary line because they might ask for welfare, why not deport people who already are on welfare? What the hell is the difference? Scott Bieser: What [...]
Walter Williams asks (CHT LRC): There are close to 7 billion people on our planet. I’d like to know how the libertarians answer this question: Does each individual on the planet have a natural or God-given right to live in the U.S.? … I believe most people, even my open-borders libertarian friends, would not say [...]
Two things conservatives like to say: Our constitutional rights aren’t granted to us by government. Our rights come from God, and the Constitution simply recognises them. Illegal immigrants and terrorist suspects don’t have constitutional rights because they’re not American citizens.
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer explains why we shouldn’t worry that her state’s new law (allowing the police to demand identity papers from anyone who looks like they might be an “illegal” immigrant) won’t lead to racial profiling or other abuses (as if “the thing itself” were not abuse enough …): We have to trust our [...]
In the wake of the earthquake, a number of countries – including the u.s., France, and the Dominican Republic – are calling a temporary halt to the deportation of Haitian immigrants. While this falls far short of the freeing-up of the borders that justice and compassion alike demand, it represents a little bit of very [...]
Peter Watts writes: If you buy into the Many Worlds Intepretation of quantum physics, there must be a parallel universe in which I crossed the US/Canada border without incident last Tuesday. In some other dimension, I was not waved over by a cluster of border guards who swarmed my car like army ants for no [...]
Apparently Vin Suprynowicz is one of these guys who deletes comments from his blog as soon as he realises he’s losing the argument. But you can read the unexpurgated version of his debate with Charles over immigration rights here.
Charles’s Las Vegas Anarchist Café is in the news. (CHT François Tremblay.) Of the two standard tones newspapers take toward anarchists (condescension and alarmism), the story takes the former, which I guess is preferable to the alternative. At any rate, hey, it’s free publicity. (Also, check out the comments section for the usual mixture of [...]
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
Recent Comments