Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Nothing's Going to Change My World(view)

Stephen Cox is a self described libertarian who makes a sensible argument against open borders here (courtesy of Tory Anarchist). His isn't a libertarian argument so much as an appeal to his philosophical fellows to recognize that they live in a world that is nowhere near being guided by their principles, and will be no time soon. It is therefore disastrous to inflict the libertarian ideal of unrestricted borders on ourselves while we still grapple with the pathologies of the welfare state, multiculturalism, jihadism, and a world of vastly different cultural norms. Refusing to account for these things because one opposes them will not make them go away. As Cox points out, the libertarian will sometimes say that these are not problems of immigration per se, as if that should be the end of it; this imagined comparmentalization of the world, as if one massive social factor doesn't impose on another and the vagaries of human existence can be swept under the rug of dogma makes some very smart people sound like fools. He ends with an apt refutation of such a willfully blinkered world-view:

Alexander Pope once parodied authors who had no sense of reality, authors who wrote things like:
Ye Gods! annihilate but Space and Time, and make two lovers happy.
The libertarian equivalent would be:
Ye Gods! annihilate but the facts of life, and make our dogmas triumph.

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