Nick Gillespie, editor at Reason.com has an article at The Daily Beast that provides a perfect example of libertarian concern trolling on immigration enforcement.
The Rational Wiki says that “A concern troll visits sites of an opposing ideology and offers advice on how they could ‘improve’ things, either in their tactical use of rhetoric, site rules, or with more philosophical consistency.”
The Daily Beast isn’t a conservative site, and Gillespie already has a platform at Reason where he (and other writers) can bang the open borders drum.
Instead, this is concern trolling targeted at a general audience of non-Republicans, pointing out supposed inconsistencies in Republican rhetoric on immigration.
Here are two quotes that should establish what Gillespie is trying to do.
“Yet with a Senate majority in plain sight, the GOP faithful is crying that ‘Amnesty=Suicide’ and Republican leaders are calling for massively invasive new rules that will only increase the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. And this is the party of small government? No wonder the country is so screwed.”
“Republicans insist that the federal government is too inefficient and incompetent to deliver the mail or to oversee health care, but it’s nonetheless qualified to police thousands of miles of borders and run employment checks on hundreds of millions of workers? Come on guys, get your story straight.”
The basic gist of this argument is to get the reader to the conclusion that if the GOP were only more libertarian, then they would be consistent. It is not about actually improving the GOP argument on enforcement. Even libertarians acknowledge that law enforcement and protecting national security is a legitimate function of government. (In the eyes of some libertarians, it is the only legitimate function of government.)
2 Comments
Oh really? Checking the already in place e-verify system to see if someone is here legally is “massively invasive”? How so? Any more than supplying your SS to get a job? Personally I have no problem with anyone checking my legal status. Nor is it near as costly as libertarians like to contend. It’s their usual disingenuous argument for open borders.
Actually, the United States’ Constitution Only Authorized Taxation to Pay for It’s Military
Then a mountain of Ammendments changed that rule forever.
I’d add too, that was then, this is now…hades our DOD budget puts more foreigners to work in Manufacturing than Americans….we don’t make hardly any aerospace parts for military/commercial aircraft anymore….last I heard, Japan gets a lion’s share of the 767 Tanker commercial A/C parts from this $15B DOD contract, that American taxpayers fund….the foreign corporists smile….