One question I hadn’t anticipated in yesterday’s PJTV interview about libertarians was whether libertarians have regional differences. It’s such a universalist (and predictable) philosophy, I said, that the answer is basically no, but I added that southern ones, like Texan Ron Paul (and the paleolibertarians at LewRockwell.com) may be more prone to right-wing worries about policing the border, while we East Coast types are (rightly, I think) more interested in Wall Street and more comfortable with cosmopolitanism [UPDATE: Synthesis achieved! Ron Paul blogs at the New York Times Freakonomics blog today!].
I will say this for Lew Rockwell’s site, though: That’s where I learned about this amusing, anthemic Obama-as-Soviet-leader video from libertarian TV commentator Glenn Beck.
On the other hand, I think these videos serve as a partial argument against anyone, like Ron Paul, who fears the creation of a “North American Union” that blurs together Canada, the U.S., and Mexico: Canadian rock band the Stars and Mexican rock band Hello Seahorse! would then live in the same country, as aesthetics clearly dictates they should — though I admit the Stars come from a Broken Social Scene (and while I don’t know if they commit crimes, they do “Almost Crimes”).
That Mexican band was recently praised by Goldwater-admiring Michael Malice, himself born in Ukraine and fond of the America-loving Ayn Rand, who emigrated from Russia to go to Hollywood, so you see what I’m getting at, immigration-wise.
But if it’s specifically Latinos that have people here worried, I’d like to point out again that most of those who are worried about them, at least critics of a paleoconservative or paleolibertarian bent, tend to think secession and old historical ties are good things, so isn’t letting southern California go back to being a Latin American country the decent thing to do anyway? Or would we be betraying the legacy of President James K. Polk?
3 comments:
Glenn Beck — libertarian? Uh, no.
He describes himself as “libertarian-leaning,” at least, and seems to keep leaning more strongly, showing sympathy for Bob Barr, etc.
But I guess we could in one sense call him a Fusionist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Magazine_(political_magazine)
(Ha ha.)
The problem isn’t secessionism, but balkanization.
Read Victor Davis Hanson’s Mexifornia, which is still relevant five years after it was first published.
Immigrants and widgets aren’t interchangeable. They are not simply economic factors that you can insert or remove according to the laws of supply and demand. Immigrants come with children, and class hatreds-justified in most cases-racial prejudices, and a mismatched skill set.
When people analogize the current immigration crisis to the wave of immigration that took place between the last two decades of the nineteenth century and first two of the twentieth they neglect to mention the fact that those immigrants were more skilled than their native-born counterparts.
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