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Where they disagree is who counts as a stranger.

Another way to look at this is they disagree on who gets to decide who counts as a stranger. Libertarians think individuals should decide who is a stranger to them and who is not. Non-libertarians tend to think (federal) government should decide.

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The difference Robin, is that you are engaging in moral reasoning, while Steve Sailer is engaging in moral rationalization.

Just like the lefty who accuses libertarians of rationalizing economic injustice and preventable human suffering.

Whatever gets you through the night, dude.

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lots of people from other nations have fought on “our” sides of wars

People from other nations will sometimes fight to help defend your borders. That's nice but not terribly reassuring.

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Steve more or less answered this over here:http://econlog.econlib.org/...

You guys are assuming all the benefits of a property rights enforcing Leviathan without thinking about how it got there in the first place.

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Dude, his whole point is that by eliminating borders, you make those smaller scale tribes more important rather than less. Its never going to be just you and your close family and friends.

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If you had no nations,that would not eliminate the interests that groups of people now called nations have.Nations function to address these interests,not to create themImagine an ancient Greek making the same argument about poleis, or an 18th century Italian or German making the same argument about the many small states those regions were composed of. They would no doubt mock the idea that thinking of people from other poleis or provinces as "their fellow countrymen" would change anything. They would find the idea that uniting their country into a nation-state to be silly, since poleis/provinces exist to address interests, not create them. They would ask what possible reason you would have for them to think of everyone in the country as part of their tribe, instead of everyone in the polis.

Nation states exist to serve certain interests, but they also create new ones that didn't exist before. And weakening the role of the nation-state would not leave those interests unfulfilled. Cities still work to serve their inhabitants' interests, even though the city-state is no longer the main method of human organization.

A non- nation is more like Somalia or Afghanistan thanThe whole reason those areas have problems is that they think in the same way nationalists do, only on a smaller scale. If you told an Afghan or Somali that their region would be a better place if they formed a nation-state, they'd make the exact same argument you did, except they'd replace the word "nation" with the word "ethnic group" or "tribe."

If it's okay to say "this region is messed up because of tribalism and lack of national unity," what makes it so wrong to say "this planet is messed up because of nationalism and lack of planetary unity"?

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The difference Robin, is that you are engaging in moral reasoning, while Steve Sailer is engaging in moral rationalization. You are concerned with getting your readers to think about moral questions. Sailer is focused on reassuring his readers that the stuff they already want to do anyway is right. (in general at least 90% of Sailer's work consists of elaborate rationalizations for why science and ethics justify every single tenet of paleoconservatism)

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My intuition is that large nations (USA, China, India, EU) nicely straddle the balance between the benefits of large scale coordinations and overall global diversification.

Overall, though, I think nations are their own algorithms -as human individuals and small groups we can adopt various postures towards them, but they have their own mechanics, stabilizing, and persistence mechanisms. It's not clear to me that people can destroy the nation state system any more than we can solve mortality or any other relatively far goal. It might be a romantic notion that you and I are anything more than observers regarding nation states and other macrosocial phenomena.

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Drat, the submit comment fired off spontaneously. Forgive the typos.

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The notions discussed here only apply to abstract nonexistent entities.The underling goal is to determine what is right in a cosmic sense using only the imagination and logic. Since the evils caused by tribalism and nationhood are viable for all to see but the benefits are concealed by the fact that nations are universal, it is possible to entertain universalism without nationhood.

Where the rubber hits the road is in actual policy decisions that are put onto effect. When you read discussions by actual policy decision makers, you do not have discussions about whether nations should exist. The decisions are based on perceived national interest. If you had no nations,that would not eliminate the interests that groups of people now called nations have.

Nations function to address these interests,not to create them.People exscersize power through natiohood but A non- nation is more like Somalia or Afghanistan than

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If you think a monocultural U.S. or Canada is totalitarian then God help you. Anyway, the most likely result of letting in more immigrants is more subordination to larger groupings not less. In a modern society, you just aren't going to be left alone with your immediate family, but are going to be forced to join up with your co-ethnics to advance your collective interests. That means much less freedom to do your own thing and think your own thoughts.

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Libertarians limit “my tribe” to close family and small chosen communities, much as did our forager ancestors, who were free to change bands at any time.

Libertarians assume the assent of the population to a central state Leviathan with a monopoly on violence as a given. But that assent is based on the feeling that the state represents the tribe. It is decidedly not a given.

Again, this is classic assume-we-have-a-can-opener thinking. Good god, when the chips are down, nobody is loyal to the rule of law as an abstract principle. In other words, patriotism is a strategy for getting around the very real collective action problems which stand in the way of putting relatively libertarian policies in place over relatively large scale political entities.

P.S. My guess is foragers would only switch among closely related bands. Kinda like Canadians and Americans.

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in history and today small tribal units tend to exist without monetary systems and subject to far stricter limits on freedom inside the small tribe

And in prehistory, too, during most of our evolution, which is probably most relevant. Our genes are designed to live in totalitarian groups of several dozen people, our happiest social connections are totalitarian groups of several people, why wouldn't we want to run our societies as totalitarian groups of several hundred million people? There the fact that political power on that scale keeps failing in one bloody disaster after another, of course... but that's just logical data; it doesn't change that what *feels* right is for Mom and Dad and The Leaders to protect the family and the tribe and to punish all the outsiders and the outcasts.

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Since I brought the median IQ argument in the previous thread maybe I should respond. For private sector, IQ hardly matters. I say hardly, because probably high IQ correllates with economic efficiency but private sector can mostly internalize external costs. On the net, the gains for economy from mass immigration are massive or at least can be massive (order of double the GDP said by some estimates).

Public sector is a different case. With mass immigration, you'll probably end up with more Detroits. Now free market has a way to solve these problems, but I think its a bit too confident to say these solutions come as all-around Pareto-optimal. There are Coasean solutions to environment problems aswell but saying that such solutions are the only sensible solutions to eg. AGW, is pushing it. You should also remember that its not going to be the tenured professors who are going to live in the bad neighborhoods and suffer the consequences.

At least here has been some discrimination by shops, because certain ethnic groups were more likely to steal stuff. State outlawed and fined such shops of course.

Also here are some papers by anti-immigration economist, although I'm not really convinced; I think most arguments against immigration stem from a) completely irrational arguments like arguments against free trade b) irrationally high risk aversion (given eg. cardinal utility functions). A win-win solution would to use a prediction market with calibrated values, and see what kind of immigration policy you end up. Most likely it would be much much free'er than US is accustomed to.

p.s. someone who wouldn't mind working in the US

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As is mentioned above, the liberal ideal does go as far as the whole of mankind. Some environmentalists go farther to include various amounts of plants and animals in that group. As an avid Star Trek fan, I would extend my tribe to aliens, higher dimensional beings, etc.

I don't think Ezra Klein would stop at our nation as our tribe -- he would support paying for health care for everyone who wanted in on the Galactic Health Insurance Program. He likely does not think that would be a practical desire, though. The utopian ideal would just cost too much and meet too much opposition to talk about at this point -- the global tribe is rarely discussed as you mention.

However, what I think is interesting is the mainstream advocates of libertarianism don't stop their advocacy at practicality. They believe in the utopian ideal of near zero government and they advocate it even though it is likely to meet too much opposition at this point.

The other thing I think is interesting is that in history and today small tribal units tend to exist without monetary systems and subject to far stricter limits on freedom inside the small tribe. The libertarian ideal of market provided goods and services to family groups whose children are free to do what they want seems totally alien.

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> our forager ancestors, who were free to change bands at any time.

Skeptical of this one. I have the impression that hunter gatherer tribes are often, maybe usually, hostile toward one another.

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