Is Freedom of Movement a Natural Right? Libertarians Split 51-49
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freedom of movement is a natural right this one is a little bit underspecified i actually asked three different ais what freedom of movement means to make sure i understood to make sure my meaning was uh correct uh you know so basically it's it's it's it's debated whether freedom of movement includes um basically implies open borders right uh that's sort of so it's it's kind of it's a little bit i don't know if this is a proper use of question begging i said agree basically with the caveat that it's a right to exit not a right to enter yeah so freedom of movement tends to involve i have a right to exit and i have a right to return to my nation yeah um but it doesn't necessarily the default meaning doesn't necessarily until the right to enter other places although some open borders people would say it does yeah so this is this is kind of a um maybe not the best prompt because how you what you think freedom of movement means would depend would be your answer but um yeah my i said i did say agree but without a right to enter so i have a right to exit i have a right to return i don't have a right to enter other places yeah it's kind of like a lot of the other things in the libertarian movement where you you know you
have a right to do all kinds of sort of crazy things and you said agree yeah i did as long as you don't harm somebody else so so somebody else's right to you know you have a right to freedom but you don't have right of freedom movement into someone else's private property you know for sure um so so they're right and and government does have property you know and and they should have some controls that they can exercise based on what the will of the people is so i think that yeah you have a right to to you have a right to move anywhere you want and leave your country and return but that doesn't mean that other people don't have a right that trumps that which is you don't have a right to go to on their private property without permission and you don't have a right to uh you know go on a sovereign nation and do whatever you want yeah well i think even that private property and then again i i always like the idea of how your private property maximalism even if you started though from a right of pure local private property right you know my my neighbors and i and we can debate how big the scales get but you're going to want scales beyond my house right you know around who is or not welcome in my neighborhood or yeah i'm i'm quite fine with drawing a little line around the state of new
hampshire uh and and saying this is the policies we might want you know here which um that is part of why i'm done a couple changes i thought to but that's part of why i really like this conversation or why i'm interested in this topic is you know how i do believe as we continue to succeed in new hampshire we will have the chance to do something far better than anything that exists in the world and so we have to think positively well what would our immigration system look like yeah you know if we if we got to do whatever we wanted what would that actually look like and i don't want to be naive i don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past but i also want to accomplish a whole you know again markets work there's gains to be had and so how do we how do we how do we do you know get that get that right um we're definitely a little bit off topic from just the prompt at this point uh what i don't know what else do what else do you have to say uh about this is a classic libertarian argument so i felt like it deserved a proposition yeah no i think i think i think you covered it well i mean it depends what you mean by freedom of movement and i think that um you know like i said you know it i want to have
maximum freedom for everybody but i but but i also want people to have their own life liberty and property protected and have have their own controls and it is it is a great conversation because you want to think about like what you know who do you want in your community you know what what kind of people do you want um and i probably lean more towards you know there was a lot of issues with people you know people were worried about catholic immigrants and they were worried about italian immigrants and i mean people that are that are alive today you know there's people that are 80 years old who will tell you that you know they grew up being taught that the catholics and the irish and the italians were the worst possible people that could ever come here and you got to stop them or they're going to destroy our way of life and of course those immigrant groups ended up being some of the very very very very best americans that we have and uh and we see that now with with other groups that you know are as established now you know where where you know they've come in and they've been productive so i i will i will say uh and i'm i mostly by what you're saying there at the same time my understanding is it's true that i this is one of my more contentious takes the catholics haven't
fully integrated uh uh i'm i'm i'm obviously not the person to be getting this argument but uh if you look at the if you look at the data like there are measurable differences between catholic and and protestant but aren't they in that positive i'm not just i would agree that i would agree that i i think we've got a lot of great catholics here in new hampshire i think the average catholic is a basic better than average american so i'm not trying to knock the catholics but they're like this idea of like well so so i because i think it's this really interesting question it's like to what degree is integration actually what does integration mean you know we we've had these communities in different places in america where you have entire towns that are like you know 85 percent german and a lot of them speak german and they kind of do their own thing and you see the differences today but you have the mormons in in uh you know salt lake to this day and utah is different than wisconsin is different than maine is different than you know these places were settled by different types of people and i i do agree that to some extent we've integrated into this larger whole of america at the same time it it it hasn't been perfect like and i'm not saying that and maybe this is the best you
can do or whatever but like everyone is not there there are real differences like we can we can see uh there's a great um book named um albion seed which actually traces through uh the various uh factions and areas of england and the united kingdom and where um you know uh people from the scottish highlands moved here and and people from the cities moved here and and the book argues that you can see you know 200 or 300 years later you can see all of these artifacts you know and and that these these these artifacts persist today and so you know i do like the idea to some degree like america people like to debate whether america is a propositional nation or an ethnic nation and to me it's both uh there is a proposition there are propositions that we selected for but the ethnicity hasn't and we have one on