DemocracyThe God That Failed (36 page)

VI

A popular government that wants to safeguard its citizens and their domestic property from forced integration and foreign invaders has two methods of doing so: a corrective and a preventive one. The corrective method is designed to ameliorate the effects of forced integration once the event has taken place and the invaders are there. As indicated, to achieve this goal the government must reduce the quantity of public property and expand that of private property as much as possible, and whatever the ratio of private to public property may be, the government should help rather than hinder the enforcement of a private property owner's right to admit
and
exclude others from his property. If virtually all property is owned privately and the government assists in enforcing private ownership rights, the uninvited immigrants, even if they successfully crossed the border and entered the country, would not likely get much further.

The more completely this corrective measure is carried out (the higher the degree of private ownership), the smaller will be the need for protective measures, such as border defense. The cost of protection against foreign invaders along the United States-Mexico border, for instance, is comparatively high because for long stretches no private property exists on the U.S. side. However, even if the cost of border protection were lowered by means of privatization, it would not disappear as long
as there are substantial income and wage differentials between highand low-wage territories. Hence, in order to fulfill its basic protective function, a high-wage area government must also engage in preventive measures. At all ports of entry and along its borders, the government, as trustee of its citizens, must check all newly arriving persons for an entrance ticket; that is, a valid invitation by a domestic property owner; and anyone not in possession of such a ticket must be expelled at his own expense.

¹⁶
See on this Hans-Hermann Hoppe,
A
Theory
of
Socialism
and
Capitalism
(Boston: Kluwer, 1989), chap. 3; idem, "Desocialization in a United Germany,"
Review
of
Austrian
Economics
5, no. 2 (1991); idem, "The Economic and Political Rationale for European Secessionism," in
Secession,
State
and
Liberty,
David Gordon, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ :Transaction Publishers, 1998).

Valid invitations are contracts between one or more private domestic recipients, residential or commercial, and the arriving person.
Qua
contractual admission, the inviting party can only dispose of his own private property. Hence, similar to the scenario of conditional free immigration the admission implies that the immigrant will be excluded from all publicly funded welfare. On the other hand, it implies that the receiving party must assume legal responsibility for the actions of his invitee for the duration of his stay. The invitor is held liable to the full extent of his property for any crimes by the invitee committed against the person or property of any third party (as parents are held accountable for crimes committed by their offspring as long as these are members of the parental household). This obligation, which implies that invitors will have to carry liability insurance for all of their guests, ends once the invitee has left the country, or once another domestic property owner has assumed liability for the person in question by admitting him onto his property.

The invitation may be private (personal) or commercial, temporary or permanent, concerning only housing (accommodation, residency) or housing and employment, but there cannot be a valid contract involving only employment and no housing.
¹⁷
In any case, however, as a contractual relationship, every invitation may be revoked or terminated by the
host; and upon termination, the invitee—whether tourist, visiting businessman, or resident alien—will be required to leave the country (unless another resident citizen enters into an invitation-contract with him).

17
In the current legal environment wherein domestic property owners are essentially barred from engaging in any form of discriminatory action, the presence of foreign guestworkers would inevitably lead to widespread forced integration. Once admitted, based on an existing employment contract, these workers would then be able to use the courts in order to gain entrance also to housing, schooling, and any other form of "public" establishment or accommodation. Hence, in order to overcome this problem employers must be required to offer their guestworkers not just employment but housing and other things such as shopping, medical, training or entertainment facilities, i.e., the amenities of an entire self-contained factory town. For a discussion of the much maligned institution of factory towns see James B. Allen,
The
Company
Town
in
the
American
West
(Norman: Oklahoma University Press,

The invitee, who is at all times subject to the potential risk of immediate expulsion, may lose his legal status as a nonresident or resident alien only upon acquiring citizenship. In accordance with the objective of making all immigration (like trade) invited-contractual, the fundamental requirement for citizenship is the acquisition of property ownership, or more precisely the ownership of real estate and residential property. In contrast, it would be inconsistent with the very idea of invited migration to award citizenship according to the territorial principle, as in the U.S., whereby a child born to a nonresident or resident alien in a host country automatically acquires U.S. citizenship. In fact, as most other high-wage area governments recognize, such a child should acquire the citizenship of his parents. Granting this child citizenship involves the nonfulfillment of a host country government's basic protective function and actually amounts to an invasive act perpetrated by the government against its own citizenry. Becoming a citizen means acquiring the right to stay in a country permanently, and a permanent invitation cannot be secured by any means other than purchasing residential property from a citizen resident. Only by selling real estate to a foreigner does a citizen indicate that he agrees to a guest's permanent stay, and only if the immigrant has purchased and paid for real estate and residential housing in the host country will he assume a permanent interest in his new country's well-being and prosperity. Moreover, finding a citizen who is willing to sell residential property and who is prepared and able to pay for it, although a necessary requirement for the acquisition of citizenship, may not also be sufficient. If and insofar as the domestic property in question is subject to restrictive covenants, the hurdles to be taken by a prospective citizen may be significantly higher.
¹⁸
In Switzerland, for instance, citizenship may require that the sale of residential property to foreigners be ratified by a majority of or even all of the directly affected local property owners.

VII

Judged by the immigration policy entailed by the objective of protecting one's own citizens from foreign invasion and forced integration and of rendering all international population movements invited and
contractual migrations, the Swiss government does a significantly better job than the United States. It is relatively more difficult to enter Switzerland as an uninvited person, and it is more difficult to stay on as an uninvited alien. In particular it is far more difficult for a foreigner to acquire citizenship, and the legal distinction between resident citizens and resident aliens is more clearly preserved. These differences notwithstanding, the governments of both Switzerland and the U.S. are pursuing immigration policies that must be deemed far too permissive.

¹⁸
See on this also chap. 10, sect. 6, and Spencer H. MacCallum,
The
Art
of
Commu
nity
(Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970).

Moreover, the excessive permissiveness of their immigration policies and the resulting exposure of the Swiss and American population to forced integration by foreigners is further aggravated by the fact that the extent of public property in both countries (and other high-wage areas) is substantial; that tax-funded welfare provisions are high and growing and foreigners are not excluded; and that contrary to official pronouncements even the adherence to free trade policies is anything but perfect. Accordingly, in Switzerland, the U.S. and most other high-wage are
as, popular protests against immigration policies have grown increasingly louder. It has been the purpose of this chapter not only to make the case for the privatization of public property, domestic laissez-faire, and international free trade, but in particular for the adoption of a restrictive immigration policy. By demonstrating that free trade is inconsistent with both unconditionally or conditionally free immigration and requires instead that migration be subject to the condition of being invited and contractual, it is our hope to contribute to more enlightened future policies in this area.

9

On
Cooperation,
Tribe,
City,
and
State

I

Ludwig von Mises has explained the evolution of society—of human cooperation under the division of labor—as the combined result of two factors. These are first, the fact of differences among men (labor) and/or the inequalities of the geographical distribution of the naturegiven factors of production (land); and second, the recognition of the fact that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than work performed in self-sufficient isolation. He writes:

If and as far as labor under the division of labor is more productive than isolated labor, and if and as far as man is able to realize this fact, human action itself tends toward cooperation and association; man becomes a social being not in sacrificing his own concerns for the sake of a mythical Moloch, society, but in aiming at an improvement in his own welfare. Experience teaches that this condition—higher productivity achieved under division of labor—is present because its cause—the inborn inequality of men and the inequality in the geographical distribution of the natural factors of production—is real. Thus we are in a position to comprehend the course of social evolution.
¹

Several points are worth emphasizing here in order to reach a proper understanding of this fundamental insight of Mises's into the nature of society—points which will also help us realize some first, preliminary conclusions regarding the role of sex and race in social evolution. First, it is important to recognize that inequalities with respect to labor and/or land are a necessary but by no means a sufficie
nt condition for the emergence of human cooperation. If all humans were identical and everyone were equipped with identical natural resources, everyone would produce the same qualities and quantities of goods, and the idea of exchange and cooperation would never enter anyone's mind. However, the existence of inequalities is not enough to bring about cooperation. There are also differences in the animal kingdom—most notably the
difference of sex (gender) among members of the same animal species as well as the difference between the various species and subspecies (races), yet there is no such thing as cooperation among animals. To be sure, there are bees and ants who are referred to as "animal societies." But they form societies only in a metaphorical sense.
²
The cooperation between bees and ants is assured purely by biological factors—by innate instincts. They cannot
not
cooperate as they do, and without some fundamental changes in their biological makeup, the division of labor among them is not in danger of breaking down. In distinct contrast, the cooperation between humans is the outcome of purposeful individual actions, of the conscious aiming at the attainment of individual ends. As a result, the division of labor among men is constantly threatened by the possibility of disintegration.

¹
Ludwig von Mises,
Human
Action:
A
Treatise
on
Economics,
Scholar's Edition (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1998), p. 160.

Within the animal kingdom, then, the difference between the sexes can only be said to be a factor of attraction—of reproduction and proliferation; whereas the differences of the species and subspecies can be referred to as a factor of repulsion—of separation or even of fatal antagonism, of evasion, of struggle, and annihilation. Moreover, within the animal kingdom it makes no sense to describe the behavior resulting from sexual attraction as either consensual (love) or nonconsensual (rape); nor does it make any sense to speak of the relationship between the members of different species or subspecies as one of hostility and hatred or of criminal and victim. In the animal kingdom there only exists interaction, which is neither cooperative (social) behavior nor criminal (antisocial) behavior. As Mises writes:

There is interaction—reciprocal influence—between all parts of the universe: between the wolf and the sheep that he devours; between the germ and the man it kills; between the falling stone and the thing upon which it falls. Society, on the other hand, always involves men acting in cooperation with other men in order to let all participants attain their own ends.
3

In addition to an inequality of labor and/or land, a second requirement must be fulfilled if human cooperation is to evolve. Men—at least two of them—must be capable of recognizing the higher productivity of a division of labor based on the mutual recognition of private property (of the exclusive control of every man over his own body and over his physical appropriations and possessions) as compared to either self-sufficient

²
See on this Jonathan Bennett,
Rationality:
An
Essay
Toward
an
Analysis
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).

³
Mises,
Human
Action,
p. 169.