Three years ago on this date on my Facebook page. Redacted and improved.
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Suppose you want a massive expansion of the welfare state. You want, among other things, a college education to be free to anyone who wants one. In addition, you want free health care for all, and perhaps a guaranteed minimum income. Suppose further that you want your socialist government to work and not go bankrupt. To will the end is to will the means. Among the means: A stemming of the tide of illegal immigration. So here you have the makings of a socialist argument for border control, an essential component of which is a physical barrier at the southern border. An essential component, not the only one. Mirabile dictu: A socialist argument for a conservative conclusion.
You can't have both open borders and socialism. I say to the libertarians: You want open borders? Go for it, but ONLY AFTER you have stripped the government down to its Lockean functions and instituted something like a Nozickian 'night watchman' state. (See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.) But of course that strip-down is not in the offing: the libertarian dream is u-topian. It's like Nowheresville, man, as Maynard G. Krebs might have said.
The welfare state in the USA is here to stay. The only question concerns its size and scope. Will it metastasize unto the collapse of the nation?
An equal but opposite utopianism to that of the libertarians is the utopianism of the Green New Dealers. To them and their democratic socialist fellow travellers, I say: you are going to have to become what you call 'xenophobes' and 'racists' if you want to implement a workable socialist scheme. You are going to have to become like us conservatives: 'nativists' and 'white supremacists' who hate the Other simply in virtue of his being Other.
Of course, none of these epithets apply to us. You only think they do in your perversity, ill-will, and deliberate self-enstupidation.
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