[VerminLord]

I have stumble across this ideology called libertarian nationalism.

Apparently, it is an attempt to combine individual rights and laissez-faire capitalism with a moral and patriotic society.

I mostly agree with the writer of the article. I am pretty libertarian when it comes to economy, private property, drugs, gun rights, free speech, etc, and I support a small government for the most part. However, I think the libertarians, at least the American ones want it to be too small.
The government should provide the common good, but we should do away with the bureaucracy we have here.

I also support some authoritarian policies such as stricter immigration laws (or at least enforcing the currently existing laws) so the illegals do not take our jobs and harm the American economy.

The goal of the libertarian nationalist is to uphold the individual rights that are advocated by libertarianism and classical liberalism, while saying that the state should be large enough to protect those rights and do what is necessary to keep the economy healthy.

Here is the link to the article, I think it can explain better than I can.

http://libertariannationalism.blogspot.com/

[Rei Murasame]

What happens when a company from a country other than your own, bids on taking over the private company that manages the water supply in some region of your country? If you're doing things the libertarian way, you have legal mechanism through which to prevent that from happening, right?

[VerminLord]

What happens when a company from a country other than your own, bids on taking over the private company that manages the water supply in some region of your country? If you're doing things the libertarian way, you have legal mechanism through which to prevent that from happening, right?

Could you clarify that please? Are we talking about free trade here?

[Rei Murasame]

Could you clarify that please? Are we talking about free trade here?

Yes, talking about free trade. That would be part of libertarianism I assume, since I'm pretty sure that libertarians are against protectionism in all times and places.

[SueDeNîmes]

I suppose if you start with a moral crusade for selfishness, it shouldn't be surprising that people start tacking on all sorts of other contradictory nonsense.

[quetzalcoatl]

This is from the platform of the Libertarian Party:

"3.4 Free Trade and Migration

We support the removal of governmental impediments to free trade. Political freedom and escape from tyranny demand that individuals not be unreasonably constrained by government in the crossing of political boundaries. Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders. However, we support control over the entry into our country of foreign nationals who pose a credible threat to security, health or property."

That's pretty clear, no?

Offhand, it's hard to imagine a branch of libertarianism that strays too far from this, and still has any credibility for being actually, well...libertarian.

My original diagnosis of right-libertarian seems to be wrong, then. You're looking more like paleo-Conservative, if you want to control immigration.

"Paleoconservatism (sometimes shortened to paleocon) is a conservative political philosophy found primarily in the United States stressing tradition, limited government, civil society, anti-colonialism and anti-federalism, along with religious, regional, national and Western identity.

Paleoconservatives in the 21st century often highlight their points of disagreement with neoconservatives, especially regarding issues such as military interventionism, illegal immigration and high rates of legal immigration, as well as multiculturalism, affirmative action, free trade, and foreign aid, all of which they oppose."

[SolarCross]

However, we support control over the entry into our country of foreign nationals who pose a credible threat to security, health or property."

That isn't immigration, that is invasion. They don't mean to control civilian migration, only military invasion. At least that is how I read it.

[Saeko]

The goal of the libertarian nationalist is to uphold the individual rights that are advocated by libertarianism and classical liberalism, while saying that the state should be large enough to protect those rights and do what is necessary to keep the economy healthy.

These two things are mutually exclusive.

[quetzalcoatl]

These two things are mutually exclusive.

I would rather say that they can be combined (with the appropriate tradeoffs), but the result is volatile and unstable. These problems are not unique to libertarian politics either. No matter what arrangement you start off with, it will be immediately be subject to pressures that will cause your ideal system to evolve and mutate. If you look at it from a systems point of view, the main challenge will always be metastability.

[Truth To Power]

The goal of the libertarian nationalist is to uphold the individual rights that are advocated by libertarianism and classical liberalism, while saying that the state should be large enough to protect those rights and do what is necessary to keep the economy healthy.

These two things are mutually exclusive.

That's true if you are talking about feudal "libertarians" who somehow imagine that forcibly removing people's rights to liberty through appropriation of land as private property can be reconciled with individual liberty and a healthy economy. The geolibertarian paradigm, however, recognizes the individual right to liberty in use of land and reconciles it with rightful property in the fruits of labor to produce a just and healthy economy, as well as liberty. Crucially, the geolibertarian system can reconcile full individual liberty rights with a fairly large government, because the government is funded purely voluntarily, through recovery of the value its spending on desirable infrastructure and services creates at the local level, augmented by seigniorage on issuance of legal money at the national level.

[quetzalcoatl]

Crucially, the geolibertarian system can reconcile full individual liberty rights with a fairly large government, because the government is funded purely voluntarily, through recovery of the value its spending on desirable infrastructure and services creates at the local level, augmented by seigniorage on issuance of legal money at the national level.

National governments are not funded by taxes (in any system where debts are denominated in a sovereign national currency).

The actual functional purpose of taxes (as opposed to the oft-cited rhetorical purpose) is to act as a feedback control (thermostat). Raising taxes destroys money in the economy, while lowering them frees up money. Taxes do not act to "fund" government operations, they are entirely unnecessary for that purpose. So the voluntary nature of government funding is an illusory problem (so far as the federal government is concerned). Similarly, debt is issued in order to provide interest bearing savings for the private sector; there is not functional requirement, per se, for deficit spending to "finance" government operations. Debt issuance to offset 'deficits' is a legal and institutional arrangement, of course, but it is not functionally necessary to accommodate government spending. Government could, under a system such as you describe, simply issue enough debt to accommodate private savings demands irrespective of budget issues.

Since decreasing spending is functionally equivalent to raising taxes, it would in principle be possible eliminate taxes altogether - simply by using national spending as the sole feedback mechanism. To do so would, obviously require dispensing with legislatures determining spending levels and turning that function over to a technocratic agency able to act quickly to raise or lower spending as inflation increases or subsides. (The legislatures could still control where money is spent, just not how much.) The present system of central banks controlling interest rates, and also functioning to "stimulate" spending is not workable. This latter function should be dispensed with entirely.

Unfortunately libertarians are joined at the hip to Austrian economics, so they are cognitively blind to such realities.

[Truth To Power]

Crucially, the geolibertarian system can reconcile full individual liberty rights with a fairly large government, because the government is funded purely voluntarily, through recovery of the value its spending on desirable infrastructure and services creates at the local level, augmented by seigniorage on issuance of legal money at the national level.

National governments are not funded by taxes (in any system where debts are denominated in a sovereign national currency).

That claim is absurd. National governments are indisputably funded by taxes to the exact extent that those taxes transfer purchasing power from the private to the public sector.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." -- Voltaire

The more interesting corollary of Voltaire's penetrating observation is that those who would make you commit atrocities first try to make you believe absurdities.

The actual functional purpose of taxes (as opposed to the oft-cited rhetorical purpose) is to act as a feedback control (thermostat).

Another absurdity. The purpose is to transfer purchasing power directly, openly, and with minimal disruption, rather than indirectly, surreptitiously, and destructively through inflation.

Raising taxes destroys money in the economy,

It does no such thing. Where money has been created as debt, repaying that debt destroys money. Though "Modern" Monetary Theory correctly describes the creation of money as debt to private commercial banks, it totally misunderstands the relationship of money to taxes.

while lowering them frees up money.

No, it doesn't. It simply changes who gets to spend the money next.

Taxes do not act to "fund" government operations, they are entirely unnecessary for that purpose.

More absurdity. Taxes fund government operations to the exact extent that they transfer purchasing power from the private to the public sector. Of course, you could just print money, but that would quickly result in hyperinflation. Or you could do everything with corvee labor and expropriation, avoiding the hyperinflation. But those are very harmful and inefficient alternatives. Taxes are just a more efficient and convenient way to ensure government can operate without excessively disrupting the private economy.

So the voluntary nature of government funding is an illusory problem (so far as the federal government is concerned).

Nonsense. Government needs purchasing power, and it has to come from somewhere. Inflation surreptitiously transfers purchasing power from creditors and money holders to debtors and money issuers, but it would be dishonest to say that transfer is effected voluntarily.

Similarly, debt is issued in order to provide interest bearing savings for the private sector;

Garbage. The money banks lend to governments is not saved up by anyone, it is created by the bank when it is lent into existence. The debt issuance is to give banksters money for doing nothing.

there is not functional requirement, per se, for deficit spending to "finance" government operations.

True: the debt is to provide interest income to private banksters in return for nothing.

Debt issuance to offset 'deficits' is a legal and institutional arrangement, of course, but it is not functionally necessary to accommodate government spending.

True, the money could be issued by the government instead of private banksters, but the inflationary impact would be much greater, unless the banks' money multiplication privilege were removed.

Government could, under a system such as you describe, simply issue enough debt to accommodate private savings demands irrespective of budget issues.

You mean, to satisfy the wealthy's desire to get interest income in return for nothing, without taking any risks or bothering to identify productive avenues of investment?

Since decreasing spending is functionally equivalent to raising taxes,

It's only equivalent in its effect on government debt.

it would in principle be possible eliminate taxes altogether - simply by using national spending as the sole feedback mechanism. To do so would, obviously require dispensing with legislatures determining spending levels and turning that function over to a technocratic agency able to act quickly to raise or lower spending as inflation increases or subsides. (The legislatures could still control where money is spent, just not how much.)

Presumably that would be through establishment of an independent Mint whose sole mandate was price stability (or consistent low inflation), which would print money as needed to maintain price targets, and ship it to the Treasury for the executive to spend into circulation. This is the same as the Greenbackers' proposal as far as it goes, but if it were the ONLY source of federal government revenue, it would mean, in effect, limiting federal government spending to the amount of money needed to accommodate economic growth plus the allowed level of inflation. I.e., in practice, a much smaller federal government. That might be possible and even desirable, but although it would provide a nice negative feedback to the monetary system, the mechanism you propose would result in a federal government unable to budget, as it would not know how much money it had to spend from week to week. Just in the interest of stability and being able to budget, the federal government should probably levy some taxes that are inappropriate for local jurisdictions, such as luxury consumption and excise taxes, which are otherwise easily avoided by moving the tax base to a friendlier jurisdiction.

The present system of central banks controlling interest rates, and also functioning to "stimulate" spending is not workable.

Or at any rate, the debt money system is inherently unstable, its positive feedback loop effectively making the boom-bust cycle inevitable.

Unfortunately libertarians are joined at the hip to Austrian economics, so they are cognitively blind to such realities.

Feudal "libertarians" are, but geolibertarians are not, which is why they -- uniquely -- are capable of knowing and understanding reality.

[nucklepunche]

Libertarian Nationalism seems to be the default ideology of a lot of Republicans these days. It is fairly common to find Republicans who are libertarian on economics, neoconservative on foreign policy/military spending and paleoconservative on immigration.

The difference is traditional paleoconservatives are often isolationist and protectionist.

[Dystopian Darkness]

I don't know if it's possible to combine libertarianism (I'm assuming it's right wing capitalist libertarianism) with nationalism given that libertarians are frequent supporters of free trade and by definition globalization, thus it's incompatible with a patriotic traditionalist and nationalist society. The idea itself isn't bad though, but if someone advocated for relatively libertarian economic policies and nationalist I'd call the person a conservative of some sorts.

[Pants-of-dog]

A society where corporations have more rights than people of colour. That sounds awful.

[Nunt]

I would not agree with the wording in libertarian nationalism. Just because someone believes in a free economy does not make that person a libertarian. A libertarian beliefs should at least be based on the freedom and equality of all people. This contradicts with nationalism. You can't believe in libertarianism for a select group. You are libertarian for everyone or for nobody. I think a bettter wording would be (Neo)-conservative.

[nucklepunche]

Libertarian Nationalism is obviously not pure libertarianism. It is possible to combine aspects of both. Libertarianism adheres to the non-aggression principle. Libertarian Nationalism does not because any immigration law at all violates this principle. The OP says illegals "take our jobs" which sort of goes against most free market economic reasoning.

I am not a Libertarian and "nationalism" is a hard to pin down term. I am not an ethnic nationalist by any stretch, a civic nationalist who believes in certain small "r" republican virtues, yes. I also recognize that valuing these things is a function of culture which requires assimilation to be promoted among immigrants.

It isn't because I want to make them "white" because I could not care less if they keep eating their ethnic food and adding aspects of their culture to the American melting pot. The British gave us ball and bat sports (what's more American than baseball?), the Germans made us lager drinkers instead of ale drinkers (although it is going in the other direction), Italians gave us pizza, blacks gave us the blues and by extension most other derived popular music, the Dutch are why we call "cookies" what the British call "biscuits," Jews gave us so much more to our culture than their small number represents and so on. The issue is not things like this.

I am not a libertarian but I have libertarian views on some things. I value a general "culture of liberty" where liberty is placed on a high pedestal. Some cultures value this more than others, not because of DNA but because of years of historical development. The Anglosphere more than any other place developed a high concept of liberty. I do not view this as a result of superior Anglo-Saxon DNA or that Anglo-Saxon culture is superior in all areas, but in this area it is.

This is why we need to have an immigration policy that at least considers a cultural component. If you open the borders it is harder to assimilate people who come in such large numbers that they can create separate societies apart from the mainstream. This is the danger of unchecked immigration and why there can be a case for restricting on grounds of liberty, even if not on grounds of pure libertarianism (because as was established purist libertarianism would reject immigration laws).

Now imagine the opposite direction. Americans value individualism more. Asian countries value conformity more. There are exceptions but in a general sense Asians tend to be more willing to give up certain things for the common good. Japanese aren't allowed to own guns at all for the most part and drug laws are very strict, Americans generally favor the right to own guns and a slight majority favors legal marijuana.

Now imagine Japanese don't want these things in their backyard. One million Americans a year move in and suddenly they start eroding this and loosening gun and drug laws, if it isn't by voting at first it is simply by ignoring the laws and then a consensus builds that such laws are "unenforceable" and in an individualist culture they are. It can cut in the opposite direction.

Immigraiton in and of itself cannot change culture. If anything the wider variety of cultures the more assimilation there will be. The problem is when you have one culture that becomes dominant in certain areas, balkanizing society. This is why I think there is a case for granting a certain number of visas per nation, so that various cultures are sort of balanced.

I am not speaking in favor of favoring one culture over another, but keeping cultural balance. Minorities are not a problem if each minority is kept in balance, but if you get to a point where there one, two or three major ethnic blocs that is where you have problems.

Imagine you have a society of 75,000 natives. 25,000 people move in from a bordering yet culturally different society. Soon 25% of the society adheres to that culture and it becomes a major voting bloc. Now imagine you have 1000 people from 25 different societies, in theory society is more diverse yet it actually makes balkanization less likely since these minorities are too small to assert real power.

This keeps ethnic conflict with the majority down because xenophobic elements in the majority cannot just blame one group for all society's ills, on the other hand minorities cannot forge one major power bloc and eventually assimilate among themselves and the natives, intermarrying culturally trading etc. They don't have the option not to learn the language and adopt the customs and political values of the main culture.

This is sort of the main argument for restricting immigration from a libertarian view. We have a culture where the concept of liberty and individual rights are placed on a high pedestal. Immigrants moving in from a wide variety of nations will eventually assimilate into this by osmosis because they will not have the option of isolating themselves.

In the USA we have an issue with Mexican-Americans in the southern USA isolating from the mainstream of society. This may or may not cause problems, but it will certainly bring different priorities into politics. Mexico is not a nation known for its libertarian political traditions. Now Arab-Americans are much more well assimilated in the USA than they are in Europe, the reason being is that they haven't had the option of isolating themselves because they simply do not make up a large enough bloc. This is better for both Arab-Americans and the mainstream population.

In essence it is a case for having immigration restrictions as a "safety valve" to limit immigration from overwhelming the culture too quickly and finally maintaining balance. Perhaps the solution is to cap a certain number of visas per nation. For instance immigrants perhaps each nation gets a maximum of 50,000 slots (for larger nations) and a minimum of 100 slots (for the smallest), if not all these are filled (you may not have 100 people from San Marino) it either remains unfilled or allocates up to the next highest.

This is so we get a wide variey of the world's population. Either way each group will be too small to have a major impact of itself, but society will be more diverse. Diversity is not the problem, division into major ethnic blocs is. In America you no longer see major conflicts among whites. Polish-Americans and German-Americans generally do not end up arguing. Nor do WASPs and Irish-Catholics seem to have a problem. You never hear of Slovak-Americans and Hungarian-Americans in street brawls. The reason why is because Europe contributed so many groups major ethnic blocs no longer exist.

Many American whites are part-this, part-that, you might be Ukrainian-Polish-German or English-Irish-French or Swedish-Italian-Russian but most just see themselves as "white". It isn't that case in Europe. There were more ethnic conflicts when we had fewer major ethnic groups among white Americans representing larger sections. The Anglo-Saxon Protestant voting bloc was against the Irish-American and German-American blocs, as Irish and Germans were the two major groups in early America outside of Anglos (Dutch and Scottish tended to blend into the Anglo-Saxon population).

If 20% of Americans are Mexican specifically it might pose an issue because you will have such a huge ethnic bloc of Mexicans, many of them clustered on the southern border. It might allow xenophobes to blame America's problems on Mexicans, making it worse for Mexican-Americans in the long run. Do you think there is more racism against blacks lingering in Mississippi or Maine? The irony is the minorities in democratic societies are sometimes better off the more minor they are.

This is not to say we need an America which is 99% white, just not an America that is 60% white, 30% Hispanic and 10% everyone else. We would be better off if we were 5% each Caucasian, East Asian, Hispanic, Sub-Saharan African, Arab, Native American, Pacific Islander, Indian etc. because no group would be able to isolate itself. If the former Yugoslavia was 100 ethnicities instead of seven it might have been better off because they would have simply absored Yugoslav identity instead of breaking off into seven separate nations.