I Don't Understand The Border Debate Among AnCaps
I haven't talked about anything political in a long while. It's mostly been art and dungeons and dragons. But I wanted to just give my quick two cents on this border debate that seems to be so huge.
Recently, there was a debate between Christopher Chase Rachels and Larken Rose about weather borders should be opened or closed. You can watch that here:
To me, I found the debate completely boring. Really. Am I the only AnCap that finds the whole border debate to be totally boring, pointless, and a complete waste of time? Perhaps it is a fantastic mental exercise in figuring out the "most principled position" but when I hear the debates on this topic, the only conclusion I can come to is that the state has made a colossal mess of the issue. I really feel that the whole debate is a giant red herring. This talk of getting a "close approximation to the ideal" and what not is fine and dandy for the closed border people, but I don't think they will ever get it.
I think most AnCaps can agree that the US government has made a colossal mess of currency through it's central banking schemes. Under the logic I see put forth from some, not all, closed border people, in order to fix our continually devalued money, we need to give more power to the Federal reserve to fix it.
Isn't that what they are saying? Government has made a mess of national borders so we should give government more power to fix the mess that it made?
Lets' think about this.
This doesn't even make any sense from a limited government/minarchist perspective where the main goal is to roll back the state. Government has a terrible track record of ever delivering anything good. Just ask the almost 262 million people killed in the last century that were indeed killed by government.
This is why I think that advocating for the State to do something more, which is what most closed border arguments come down to, is a waste of time. Think about the leftists that wanted to use government to end poverty. It hasn't worked out so well. Just think about the Republicans that wanted to use government to "spread democracy in the Middle East". It worked out terribly. What makes these people, who should know better, think that borders will end up any differently than any other government program?
But I'm sure the response from them is that I'm just a cuck. No, I'm just skeptical and I think our time could be better spent talking about private property and spreading the ideas supporting that... Which are generally in opposition to saying "the state should do 'X'".
Really, and this may seem very cynical, but I don't think we can do much either way about borders. The State is unsustainable like most states are. It will fail. All we can do is educate ourselves and those we care about about this and prepare and plan for it as best we can so that we do not get caught up in the death throws that state will possibly have upon its collapse.
I would say, if you more commentary on the issue, check out what my buddy @kafkanarchy84 has written. Links below:
Good point. I also don't get this border porn thing.
Let's not forget that the last best and deadliest wall was torn down because some government buffoon had a freudian slip and told everyone they were free to go. (For the youngsters on here, I'm talking about the DDR or East Germany).
My point is tear down all fucking walls and let everyone work where they wanna work. There is no "least statist" argument for us ancaps to make. That's the liberals job.
We need to find practical solution for real problems, not for political ones.
It is particularly disheartening to see people who supposedly stand for liberty make excuses for these very things. Muh Border = Muh Roads. A few months back I published an article on how the government is handling clean energy in Nevada. It is abysmal. I hope more of the AnCap community can band together and fight the stupidity of "Statist Anarchy."
There should be no borders. There will never be real free trade while borders exist. And free trade always implies free labor force transit.
Well Jon, I think it is really a debate between AnCaps and Libertarians. If you advocate for state control of anything, are you really an Anarchist?
This is the same reasoning I use when debating "AnCom" people. If you claim to be anarchist, how can you advocate for a centralization of power of any form? Does Not Compute
Obligatory "cuck" remark followed by blocking you from social media.
The sad thing about that tongue in cheek reply is how accurate it is. I certainly hope the debates on here are a little less harrowing.
I am also confused by this. I wrote about it way back in November. Seems that things haven't changed much, which is pretty sad.
On Borders and Anarchist Nationalism
I have a theory that it's just a celebritarian thing used to pull in a wider audience. But yeah, it makes no sense to me.
There is something that sometimes I think AnCaps (I mostly consider myself one) forget. The idea is a long term goal. It wouldn't work today. Education (especially in areas of critical thinking) is insufficient for people to be responsible, own up to their mistakes, see mistakes as a learning opportunity, etc. These days it is always SOMEONE ELSES fault.
So I see AnCap as a long term goal likely not achievable beyond my generation and perhaps several.
I view anything we do as potential stepping stones towards one day it possibly being a reality. I hold no delusions that it would work today if we just suddenly flipped a switch and said "let's try Anarcho-Capitalism". That would be a disaster. In fact, it proves to be a disaster historically regardless of which ideology you push, and which you think is the closest to the concept of Utopia. Ultimately I think all ideologies that sound good in speaking, and on paper end up being plagued by the same thing. Human nature and the fact that we are individuals and we all think in very different ways. This throws an element of chaos into ANY plan. Furthermore that education problem is a very big problem for ANY of these to work.
I am not an advocate for communism, in fact I dislike it quite a bit. As far as I'm concerned if we go that way we might as well embrace replacing us with robots so we can all act the same, think the same, and agree to believe the same things. For communism is not about tolerance. In fact it is extremely intolerant when you get down to it. It's birth movements are about as intolerant as one can get. Yet, I digress (easy for me to do).
Walls and talking about them from an AnCap perspective TODAY are largely irrelevant in this current climate as far as I am concerned. From a purely philosophical point of view go for it, but to try to push those ideas into the current environment is not realistic. There are many other stepping stones that need to fall into place first before that is even feasible.