Blaming Freedom

Freedom is nearly always blamed for the bad consequences of unfreedom, that is, of government intervention. Take immigration.

We hear these days that migrant gangs are killing, terrorizing, and stealing from Americans. Some immigrants without government papers have definitely committed heinous crimes. Opponents of immigration say that migrants join violent migrant gangs to pay off debts incurred in the process of traveling to the United States. If that's true, we can see that it's not freedom that leads to crime, but rather the black market. Black markets by definition are products of unfreedom, that is, of government prohibition of peaceful behavior. Freedom is not the culprit.

Because legal migration is next to impossible, desperately poor and oppressed people pay thousands of dollars to coyotes to get them from Latin America to the United States. If migrants can't repay the money, they might be forced to work off their debts by joining a migrant gang. Their creditors are likely nasty people because that's what prohibition does. It doesn't make an activity disappear; it simply turns the activity over to organized crime. Think of U.S. alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.

Just as repealing drug prohibition would break the backs of the drug cartels, repealing immigration prohibition would break the backs of the coyote and migrant gangs. Under legal immigration, people would apply at U.S. consulates, gain approval if they weren't violent criminals, buy their plane tickets for a few hundred dollars, and come to America. End of.

Pretending that free immigration causes crime is like thinking that Al Capone was a free-market entrepreneur.

TGIF: The FDA's Assault on Tobacco Consumers, Part 3

Early one morning last December, Jeff Gracik was heading to his southern California home garage-workshop where he makes his living when he heard a loud, hurried knock on his front door. Thinking it might be a rushed UPS driver, he quickly opened the door. But it wasn’t UPS. Standing on his doorstep were three badge-flashing inspectors from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. They had come to inspect Jeff’s business.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF -- The Goal Is Freedom -- appears Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

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TGIF: The FDA's Assault on Tobacco Consumers

We’ve all heard horror stories about the run-amok regulatory state. Enabled by open-ended statutes passed by Congress and signed by presidents, regulatory agencies have acquired virtual carte blanche to write rules governing peaceful behavior. Even when a seemingly narrow purpose has been set out, regulatory rule-making has engaged in mission-creep with alarming regularity. 

Here’s an example that gets little attention because it directly impinges on the freedom of only a small number of Americans.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

Become a Free Association patron today!