Do You Have a Right to a Shared Culture? The Libertarian Case

Okay. An individual has no right to a nation with a shared culture. We'll keep taking turns, so you can go first. Okay. Um so this one maybe is like a semantics question because when I read it, it says an individual has no right to a nation with a shared culture. And like my definition of right is sort of like it's a mandatory and it has to be provided by uh everyone else has to respect your right. I wanted to, so I wanted to riff off of and I we were doing nationalism, not just culture, but Brian Kaplan has been who I have a lot of respect for, uh, accomplished economist, but a big open borders guy. And he uh recently wrote an e-book, uh, You Have No Right to Your Culture, and has been going around on uh on on this sort of subject. Uh and so I was it was a little this one was intended as a little bit of a wing to him.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that I think that you do not have you probably don't have a right to anything that you can't defend. You probably don't have a right to anything that you can't defend. You can say you have a right all day long, but if you're sitting in a prison cell and you can't exercise it. Well, so this gets semantic, but generally with the word right, I tend to take it as it's a sort of like a universalizable moral law. You don't have the right to murder me, you don't have the right to do these things. We're saying that no person. So when we're saying that you have some right to a nation with a shared culture, then I am entitled to some at least to some degree, and we can debate to what degree, but that would imply that I do, I am acting in a morally correct way. It is a moral universal that I can desire to live in a nation with a shared culture and can take actions to, you know, to be right uh affecting that.

I think we have a legitimate interest in preserving our culture. And that culture is the culture that makes self-governance possible, meritocracy, right? For example, uh do you have a right to a meritocracy? I don't, you know, again, I don't think so, but you have an interest in here here here's here's a way to crystallize it a little bit. Okay. Um so suppose that uh, you know uh a large company or uh some kind or just some person for some reason is uh through through voluntary means uh you're bringing in many people from some other place. And these could be Americans, these could be people from outside of America, uh, you know, but they're doing it. Well, you know, uh, you know, one actor in a community or in a state is doing it in such a way with uh your clear massive spillover to the surrounding area.

And so all these people are saying, You're changing my culture, you're changing my place. You know, do they is that is that a legitimate complaint, or do they have no say whatsoever? Because it's that person? Legitimate, yeah. That's his property, and the spillover effects. Well, but you didn't have the right, you know, you didn't have the right to uh to have any concerns about that. It's a it's a it's a legitimate concern. But the problem, of course, you know, the outliers in the situation are people are gonna say, Well, Epstein's Island is my culture, right? And therefore, I want to defend that, right? So, so the question is like it I remember when I went to Ellis Island because I was researching my ancestry with my family, we were very proud to see our our family name that uh on my father's side they came over in the early 1900s.

And the first question, and this was when I was really toying with with Rothbardianism at the time, and I remember the uh they were asking the questions, they said the first question they asked before you came to the United States was, Are you an anarchist? And I was kind of like, Oh shit. I was like, Oh no, I might not have made it into my country at that time. And then I started to read uh more anarchist theory, and I I realized that you know the legitimacy of of government is is government. Without getting into like a long diatribe, I do think we uh that it's a right to exclude. I do think we have a right to exclude. Uh and and and then we have a right to, just like the declaration of independence says, once we throw off these governors, we have a right to appoint new governors, and through our elected representatives, we have a right to vote to say that we wish to exclude people who are incompatible with our culture of self-governance.

And I think we should. I think we should stand up and we should say this is what our culture is. And if you are, they say an anarchist, or let's say you're a communist, or you're uh a violent Islamist terrorist or a Somali pirate who wants to steal from this taxpayers in Minnesota at all, that we can exclude you for that reason.