Border Restrictions Are Closer to Property Rights Than Open Borders
Dear communists… And libertarians,
Submitting to the collective will doesn’t magically produce post scarcity. Which means you can’t complain when the will of the collective must act on your behalf to restrict access to your collectively owned scarce rivalrous resources.
This act of restriction isn’t an act of philosophical purity among your communist leaders. It’s an act of survival resulting from a internally flawed socioeconomic philosophy. Border restrictions by statists/communists, simply put, are an attempt to mimic private property norms as close as possible. Border restrictions will ALWAYS be more aligned with purpose of property rights than NO restrictions.
People that think that they can just globe trot willynilly (certain anarcho-capitalists, who shall remain nameless) without restrictions, are delusional about reality and they don’t understand property rights. They’re especially delusional if they think that absent a state that their wish will come true. Conversely, its because of the state that there aren’t as much restrictions on movement as there would be without the state, because the state prevents individual members of a nation from restricting access to invitation only.
It could be argued that believing in the freedom of movement by LIBERTARIANS, is a throwback to a time when the first outspoken anarchists, were the ones that vehemently opposed restricted access. They blamed the state for upholding the property rights that kept them excluded from necessary resources. They weren’t explicitly socialist *yet*. But there was a socialist aspect built into their premise, that it is morally wrong to exclude access to resources. But rather than blame individual property owners directly, which would be costly, they shifted that blame on the state. A reification fallacy. The state became a “catch-all” for anything that was bad happening in society that they lacked control over.
When communists talk about bringing about a stateless society, they mean a society without restrictions to access scarce resources. They DON’T mean a society absent a coercive territorial monopolist. This needs to be understood. They mean a society where there is freedom of movement. They don’t mean a society where movement is brutally restricted. But this is a FANTASY, and a fantastic manifestation from misidentifying the problem. And as such, every communist society must acquiesce to some property rights at an attempt to survive the failure of their policies to adequately distribute resources. Amid massive failure, a new communist was born. The Democratic Socialist. And for the same reason. Communists needed to implement some private property norms in order to gain access to resources that otherwise would be in short supply absent private property rights.
Just because communist governments once implemented border restrictions, doesn’t mean that border restrictions are statist. Border restrictions prevent a tragedy of the commons from occurring. It makes no difference who is doing the restricting. There will never be land in a state of post scarcity. This is why the freedom of movement is a delusional pipe dream. You either restrict access, or suffer the consequences.
Closed borders doesn’t mean NO access. It means access by invitation only. Closed borders puts the power of invitation more closely back into the hands of individual property owners or owners associations. And it’s because the purpose of property rights in the first place is to restrict access to scarce rivalrous resources. It then becomes obvious that restricted access to border lands, are far more aligned with property rights than that of open/no restrictions borders.
