Immigration, Trespassing, and Socialism

> Socialism is a internally consistent doctrine. You can’t sway the true believer with moral counter-examples.

And of course, you can’t sway the libertarian true believer with problems either: the logic you use for the illegal immigrant can be applied to any crime short of coercion. No matter what godawful thing can be committed without immediate coercion, the libertarian can..#1…#2 ah forget it, you can substitute in the various values yourself.

(Bullets don’t taste very good, whether you bite libertarian-sold bullets or socialist-forged bullets.)

Surely, a polity can be a club good. And one can trespass on a club’s territories.

I think we’re approaching a tautology here. The entity that has the ability to control the resources of the country *is* the government. How it chooses to use that power is a different matter.

If there’s some dream that some greater authority prevents the government from exercising that authority over resources, then that greater authority is the government…

The government is the entity that sets the rules, so by definition, there cannot be a limit on government – be it a government that is currently choosing to rule within a constitutional framework, a Libertarian framework or a socialist framework.

This post is long on semantics and short on actual arguments for the merits (of which there are many) of permitting more immigration.

People want to immigrate to rich countries because they have good institutions. It’s much better to live under the laws and rule of the United States and its electorate, or Singapore and the PAP, than it is to live under most systems of governance.

It’s not the geography, or just the skills of particular people one deals with on a day to day basis, that is most valuable to immigrants. The U.S. government was set up by Americans for themselves and their posterity, with procedures for regulating the admission and naturalization of additional citizens where this was the desire or interest of the existing citizenry.

What’s so shocking about a polity deciding who gets the benefit created by living under its rule, especially when different entries may improve or damage that institutional quality, and may help or hurt the aims of the people who set up and sustain the institutions?

Pharmaceuticals are developed because governments use their monopoly of force to enforce patents, preventing willing makers of illegal knockoff drugs from employing willing workers to sell to willing customers. But without patents we wouldn’t have the huge pharmaceutical formulary that we do, and a lot of people would be worse off.

If the law sets limits on the fish that can be taken from a fishery, to prevent catastrophic overfishing destroying the resource, fisherman who fish without quotas have to be stopped by state force. Even if they employ willing workers and sell the fish to willing consumers.

Any attempt to solve a collective action problem has to deal with holdouts and those who would like to make a profit by violating the rules. But most of our wealth depends on such solutions.

A libertarian or anarcho-capitalist extremist can condemn them all, or demand that the benefits exceed costs by ten times, as Bryan has suggested. That is a standard so demanding that it could destroy most of our prosperity: a policy that was responsible for 90% of GDP but inflicted costs of 12% in violation of libertarian norms would fail Bryan’s test. And much of our wealth is built up from the accumulation of many non-libertarian policies with sub-10x gains.

But for the rest of us, if states with the power to enact laws that affect holdouts, including immigration laws, make most of the residents much better off while leaving plenty of land elsewhere (which is comparably good in respects other than the very government institutions being called into question) they have a pretty good case to justify their existence and authority.

Now, one could move away from the libertarian deontology and argue about facts and consequences, and whether the world as a whole or various electorates making decisions would be better off under different institutional arrangements (which I would be more interested in), but this appeal to libertarian axiom is not very compelling.

In our post-Soviet age, fortunately, socialism has become extremely morally implausible to almost everyone.

This will certainly come as a surprise to every developed economy in the world which mix market and socialized structures to serve popular preferences. Meanwhile there isn’t one “Universalist Libertarian” nation, nor could such a far-fetched oxymoron sustain itself.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

“What do you call a worker who is involuntarily confined to his employer’s property?”

“A slave.”

An illegal alien occupies his place of work for several hours each day with his employer’s consent (and at his employer’s risk), then, if he is not a slave, he may leave his place of work and occupy his residence with his landlord’s consent, or occupy someone else’s residence without her consent…

The point isn’t the crime rate of illegal aliens,* the point is that people are autonomous actors.  They don’t just disappear when they are not at work, they hang around creating externalities and risks which their employers do not bear. So all Caplan’s huffing and puffing about “trespassing” or the injustice of interfering with “willing workers” striking bargains with “willing employers” is nearly irrelevant:  if Caplan thinks employers should confine and utterly control their workers then he is calling for slavery (which seems rather un-libertarian to me, not to mention un-pacifist) and if Caplan is not calling for that, then everyone else in society still has to deal with those “willing workers” all the hours they’re off their employer’s clock– and it may still be the case that the best way to deal with them is to exclude them from the country altogether.

*In America today, illegal alien workers are not very criminal on average, but their children and grandchildren are much more criminal than non-minority natives, possibly due to reversion toward the mean.

“The government has a right to use the nation’s resources however it wishes” isn’t necessarily socialist. It is statist. Socialism is one type of statism, but so is traditional European monarchy. In this view, “private property” within a country is simply shorthand for a perpetual lease subject to the country’s terms and conditions. Indeed, this is exactly the same view that led to the term “real estate” (royal estate) in reference to assets tied to land.

It’s even consistent with libertarianism, if you simply view the government as the private owner of a mixed-use property called a “country”. In this view, the occupants of the country are tenants, and are free to leave if they wish (although, weirdly, most other country owners won’t let them in – a fact that suggests the owners are colluding to constrain migration, probably both to limit the poor from coming in to claim benefits, and to limit the middle class from using the threat of exit to improve their bargaining position vis a vis taxes and benefits).

To paraphrase E.O. Wilson, “Marx had the right idea, he just picked the wrong species.” Marxism is a better match for ants, bees, or naked mole rats than it is social primates. There is too much intra-group competition to make Marxism feasible among humans.

The same could be said for libertarians. They should have picked cougars or bears or other creatures that live alone or with offspring and that have a simple idea of territory. There is too much of a demand for cohesion and a shared moral space in human life to make all out libertarianism feasible among humans.

You’d think a guy who wrote the “The Myth of the Rational Voter” would understand that the emotional life and cognitive biases of humans aren’t likely random, but an adaptive product of evolution, and they cannot be safely be ignored. It appears that libertarians, likes Marxists, still haven’t come to grips with the fact that we’re, in fact, social primates and that excessively spergish, legalistic libertarianism is not highly congruent with a communal human nature.

I don’t agree with the comments arguing that immigration restrictions are okay because government owns the roads. That won’t persuade many libertarians like Bryan. All it does is bring up the question of why should the government own our roads? See Walter Block’s books and articles, for example.

It’s not just socialism, in any sovereigntist theory of government, –fascism, feudalism, monarchy – the state is the real owner of all property within its zone of military control.

If you think that anarchy or libertarianism does not achieve objectively better governance you could make exactly the same argument as you,

1) Each person has the right to do whatever they want with their property.

2) In case of doubt see #1

But why should the point be to decide who has the proper right to do a particular thing and then assume that good things happen as long as these rights are not infringed? Should not the purpose be to understand which governance models result in objectively better outcomes?

Funniest unintended correct argument of the day: ” the logic you use for the illegal immigrant can be applied to any crime short of coercion.”

Wow, lots of statist stuff here, but BK was most long-winded so I’ll take on the challenge of responding to him:

People want to immigrate to rich countries because they have good institutions. It’s much better to live under the laws and rule of the United States and its electorate, or Singapore and the PAP, than it is to live under most systems of governance.

It’s not the geography, or just the skills of particular people one deals with on a day to day basis, that is most valuable to immigrants. The U.S. government was set up by Americans for themselves and their posterity, with procedures for regulating the admission and naturalization of additional citizens where this was the desire or interest of the existing citizenry.

You’re confusing citizenship and residency. Or how do you explain why prior to the 20th century there was no such thing as passports? You might say that immigrants’ children “dilute” the culture, but back in the day that used to be called racism.

What’s so shocking about a polity deciding who gets the benefit created by living under its rule, especially when different entries may improve or damage that institutional quality, and may help or hurt the aims of the people who set up and sustain the institutions?

Now you’re confusing majority rule with unanimous consent, and treating a nation of individuals as a single-minded body. The marginal person does not set up or sustain official institutions, and quite often the aims of those institutions are in direct conflict with the aims of the individual.

Pharmaceuticals are developed because governments use their monopoly of force to enforce patents, preventing willing makers of illegal knockoff drugs from employing willing workers to sell to willing customers. But without patents we wouldn’t have the huge pharmaceutical formulary that we do, and a lot of people would be worse off.

The pharmaceutical patent trope – classic. How come this wasn’t the case with Italy? They had weak patents for years and were a source of lots of innovation.

If the law sets limits on the fish that can be taken from a fishery, to prevent catastrophic overfishing destroying the resource, fisherman who fish without quotas have to be stopped by state force. Even if they employ willing workers and sell the fish to willing consumers.

Any attempt to solve a collective action problem has to deal with holdouts and those who would like to make a profit by violating the rules. But most of our wealth depends on such solutions.

Such solutions already apply to citizen and non-citizen alike. Unless all you can afford to the defense of immigration laws is a tautology, these last two paragraphs are irrelevant.

A libertarian or anarcho-capitalist extremist can condemn them all, or demand that the benefits exceed costs by ten times, as Bryan has suggested. That is a standard so demanding that it could destroy most of our prosperity: a policy that was responsible for 90% of GDP but inflicted costs of 12% in violation of libertarian norms would fail Bryan’s test. And much of our wealth is built up from the accumulation of many non-libertarian policies with sub-10x gains.

Where do you get the idea that some non-libertarian policies produce 90% of GDP? Classical economists have been saying for centuries that more liberty precisely leads to more prosperity. Most people are too economically illiterate to care about that, so Bryan is appealing to people who (rightly) condemn socialism, and attempting to show that anti-immigration policies rest upon the same assumptions as a socialist state.

But for the rest of us, if states with the power to enact laws that affect holdouts, including immigration laws, make most of the residents much better off while leaving plenty of land elsewhere (which is comparably good in respects other than the very government institutions being called into question) they have a pretty good case to justify their existence and authority.

Again, you’re assuming that immigrants who are not here under the auspices of the state are holdouts, and the only way to say that is to tautologically state that they are illegal because illegal immigration is illegal. If not, why don’t we strip the citizenship and legal residency away from anyone who is a “holdout”, as I’m sure many citizens are. And if you argue that illegal immigrants are holdouts because they don’t pay taxes (even though they pay sales taxes, property taxes through rent, and presumably up their employers’ profits and corporate tax bill, as well as increasing capital gains for investors), remember it’s the federal government who prevents them from paying taxes by refusing to recognize them.

Now, one could move away from the libertarian deontology and argue about facts and consequences, and whether the world as a whole or various electorates making decisions would be better off under different institutional arrangements (which I would be more interested in), but this appeal to libertarian axiom is not very compelling.

I didn’t read this as an appeal to libertarian deontology at all, but rather an appeal to anti-socialist sentiment.

P.S., to those who bring up the “they use the roads!” argument, remember that roads are supposedly paid for by gas taxes and local property taxes, which even illegal immigrants pay for by buying gas and paying rent.

There’s really only one way: If the government – and not landlords, employers, and merchants – is the true owner of the nation’s homes, businesses, and stores. If the government is the legitimate owner of all the property in the nation, then and only then do you become a trespasser simply by entering any piece of property in the nation without the government’s consent.

The name for the view that government (or “the people” if you prefer) rightfully owns everything, of course, is socialism.

No it isn’t. What you have discovered is merely what the rest of us non-anarcho-capitalists call sovereignty. A sovereign entity can recognize private rights in certain property while at the same time maintaining restrictions on how that property can be utilized. It is able to do this because the title holder is reliant on the sovereign entity to enforce his claim on the property. The relevant questions, it seems to me, when it comes to such restrictions are a)are they morally justified and b)are they optimal from a public policy standpoint (ie, do they achieve some desirable end and do so at the minimum cost as compared to alternative policies)?

We know where you stand on these questions, of course. I, of course, disagree. But calling people who do not share this perspective with you socialists is a)wrongheaded and b)not likely to really convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.

Consider the period from the 1920’s to 1960’s, when immigration was drastically curtailed in the U.S. What do you suppose was a more pleasant place to live…the United States, or an actual socialist country like Soviet Russia?

I’ll jump in to defend Bryan Caplan against Vipul Naik. Yes, if you establish that government doesn’t own all the factories, shops, and houses in the country, and therefore has no right to prohibit immigrants from entering them, you could still claim that the government owns the streets and open spaces, and can prohibit immigrants from using them. This is a kind of loophole in the case for open borders which restrictionists can exploit, and my theory of streets which Vipul referenced closes that loophole. (In brief: streets aren’t government property, rather they’re zones where overlapping private transit rights exclude development for purposes inconsistent with transit but do not justify the exclusion of anyone who is only using them for transit. That’s why segregation is wrong, and also why the government doesn’t have a completely arbitrary right to regulate migration. What it has instead is a right to prevent armed invasion, because that threatens its citizens’ human and property rights.)

But if you did try to close the borders via the “government owns the streets” loophole, it seems you’d have to have a different system of laws than today’s governments do. Property that was on the border or the coastline would be a free-access zone for immigrants. Immigrants who dropped out of helicopters or something would be all right too. (When I go flying in my uncle’s power parachute, I don’t need permission from the owners of the land we fly over, even when we’re flying pretty low.) They could then go from one patch to another of private land, with the owners’ permission. It would be entirely legal to establish internal charter cities with fly-in access for foreigners, say on large ranches in Texas or Montana. Immigrants wouldn’t be allowed to leave the property except by plane. We’d also need to establish WHICH roads were owned by WHICH levels of government. Roads built by a local government with local tax revenues would be owned by the local government, and the federal government would have no right to prevent immigrants from using those. Sometimes, if immigrants not authorized to use federal roads were found in places they could not have arrived at except by using these roads, the federal government might be justified in arresting them even on private land. It might even be justified in prosecuting employers who knowingly abetted them in trespassing on federal land. But very often it could not be established whether immigrants not authorized to use federal land had done so– even if they in fact did so habitually– so many cases would have to be dropped.

Of course, I think the government does not own the roads. I believe my theory of streets. But that’s not a huge hole in Caplan’s argument. “Government owns the streets” could justify *some* sort of migration control, but nothing like what we have today.

The government does hold allodial title over all land. You don’t have to be a socialist to agree.

So that as long as the state owns a piece of land on the border (highways inculded) free immigration is inefficient, because the owners of that land (every american) have not voluntarily agreed to letting the immigrants enter.

Ken B – no, it doesn’t vitiate Bryan. Public ownership of land is a basic principle of socialism.

I thought the state is supposed to have a monopoly on the power in a given teritory. That doesn’t mean it is the owner, right? If I am the strongest in my community, that doesn’t mean I am the owner of everything. It depends on how I choose to use/abuse my power. It seems to me the commentors who say that the state is in fact the owner of everthing are in fact saying, that it is not abuse of power, if the government does anything; that the strongest one never can abuse it’s power, because he is the law. The opposing (libertarian?) view is that the government can either act as a protector of the law or as an abuser. If it can protect the low then even for government there are some limits as to what is appropriate and what isn’t. And the article argues that limiting immigrants is over the limits.

As for government being an owner of all land – I think Roderick Long somewhere addressed this:
I think that the person who makes this argument is already assuming that the
government has some legitimate jurisdiction over this territory. And then they say, well,
now, anyone who is in the territory is therefore agreeing to the prevailing rules. But
they’re assuming the very thing they’re trying to prove – namely that this jurisdiction
over the territory is legitimate. If it’s not, then the government is just one more group of
people living in this broad general geographical territory. But I’ve got my property, and
exactly what their arrangements are I don’t know, but here I am in my property and they
don’t own it – at least they haven’t given me any argument that they do – and so, the fact that I am living in “this country” means I am living in a certain geographical region that they have certain pretensions over – but the question is whether those pretensions are legitimate. You can’t assume it as a means to proving it.

This was about social contract, but I think it applies to government owning everything rather well.

Yes, you are legally entitled to have recently released ex-convicts from San Quentin over at your house every weekend for barbecues just because you like to hang out with guys you perceive as tough and cool. If you should exercise such poor judgment, then don’t be surprised if you get your teeth knocked or you get a bullet in your head if one of your dinner guests decides to rape your neighbor’s daughter. It may not be right and it’s certainly not legal, but get a clue.

And don’t be too surprised if other people in your neighborhood, on getting wind of your hobby, would act to prevent your weekend gatherings, their possible outcome, and the subsequent retaliation by any legal means afforded to them, even if rather underhanded. Surprisingly, social primates seem to believe that there are some risks and conflicts taken by individuals on behalf of the entire community that are worth preventing when the perceived benefit belongs to the individual alone, and especially when the benefit appears very small or like no benefit at all. This may not be in line with austere ideological tendencies, but it makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective, and it wasn’t the relentless pursuit of untainted ideology that made our species or built civilization. Rather than pursue libertarian ideals to an extreme from which humans naturally shy away, might it not be better to formulate a more pragmatic program that argues the benefits of libertarianism and is sustainable for more than the blink of an eye?

If not accepting an immigration stance that would invariably shift the country in the direction of California makes one a socialist, then I plead guilty.

Of course, I think the government does not own the roads. I believe my theory of streets. But that’s not a huge hole in Caplan’s argument. “Government owns the streets” could justify *some* sort of migration control, but nothing like what we have today.

The way I view it is that government owns the improvements it makes to roads. But the roads — or at least some subset of roads wholly connected to all accessible property — are rights of way and are as such unowned commons.

It is longstanding common law that property comes with well defined rights of way. The government cannot abrogate those rights of way solely because it chooses to claim the right of way as its road or to improve the road. To do so would be to render property rights virtually meaningless.

So the government cannot legitimately prohibit travel on the road, but it can (should!) charge for the improvements it makes to the road. Considering the monopoly power the government is claiming in improving a right of way, this charge would of course need to be reasonable and fairly applied.

Forget the public infrastructure argument, that’s an obvious objection, lets restate the libertarian case: if your next-door neighbor wants to synthesize and store a few tons of explosives, highly sensitive or otherwise, in his house, and he’s got reasonable hazardous waste disposal and ventilation protocols in place so that you’re not harmed in the event it all goes as planned, whose rights is he infringing upon? It’s his house, damn it!

I suppose only a socialist could argue that society ought to prevent such a risk. (We must, of course, exclude any middle position between libertarian and socialist as ideologically unsound, as there is nothing more important than maintaining such purity.) Besides, if it all goes wrong, and you don’t make it, your estate can always file a lawsuit so no big deal.

Yet, sadly, social primates are, for reasons we can’t begin to fathom, big into this collective risk mitigation stuff. It’s just not very rational.

“By the way, Bryan, how has your theory that illegal immigration will just make voters more libertarian been holding up over the last week? Any new evidence?”

A few months ago, I said that the decline in immigration might put Republicans in trouble.

‘Say what you will about national socialism, at least there’s an ethos…’

One could make the argument that the government owns the land “at the border” of the country (say a “strip” one millimeter wide). Then anyone who crosses that land without permission has at that moment committed a tresspass, regardless of what may happen later between the immigrant and their landlord, etc.

“It is interesting the original post chose to frame this as trespass. Trespass is a strict liability offense – if you are on the land of another without privilege or permission, you have trespassed. Intent and effect are immaterial. So it matters not if the trespasser is there to bestow a benefit on the possessor of the land; without permission, the trespasser is in the wrong.”

Try that one in court sometime when the police stick a camera on your property (but outside the curtilage) or you ask the prosecutor to bring criminal trespass charges against the girl scout who knocks on your door and/or the police who chases somebody on foot across your front yard.

@Steve Sailer

By the way, Bryan, how has your theory that illegal immigration will just make voters more libertarian been holding up over the last week? Any new evidence?

Obama won by a lower percentage of the popular vote than he did in 2008. The Democrats also performed less well in congressional elections than they did in 2008. Could this be for reasons unrelated to illegal immigration? Maybe. But it’s some small bit of evidence.

Also, I’m pretty sure that immigration was one of the big issues the Republicans focused on when they won big in 2010. True, they focused on it in an ugly and restrictionist manner. But if the point we’re trying to establish is that the presence of immigrant populations turns voters rightward, then it shouldn’t matter whether the voters turn into low-quality or high-quality right wingers.

So actually yes, it could be argued that there is some new evidence for Bryan’s theory.

@tommy

The same could be said for libertarians. They should have picked cougars or bears or other creatures that live alone or with offspring and that have a simple idea of territory. There is too much of a demand for cohesion and a shared moral space in human life to make all out libertarianism feasible among humans.

Very few libertarians, except for the most extreme Objectivists, disagree with you. The majority of libertarians believe that various types of group interaction and cohesion are positive things. What they don’t approve of is making the government the primary institution responsible for maintaining these positive things.

You are actually making another common socialist fallacy, equivocating opposing government enforcement and promotion of a good with opposing a good’s existence. Socialist and social democrats frequently claim that libertarians and conservatives are heartless monsters. The justification for their claim is that since libertarians and conservatives oppose government programs for the poor and unlucky, they must want those people to die. Libertarians and conservatives protest that they support various non-governmental ways of addressing these problems, such as private charity. However, socialists typically ignore these protests. They cannot comprehend how one can simultaneously believe something is a good thing, and oppose the government doing it.

@Sonic Charmer

I wonder, does Bryan pay his property taxes? Why? Doesn’t he “OWN” his house and land? What gives a local or state government the right to charge him (effectively) rent on something he “OWNS”?

Bryan has stated in the past that he pays his taxes out of fear of punishment by the IRS, not because he thinks they own his house (relevant passage is in point 1 of the linked post).

@Arthur_500

Not all invasions are military in nature.

Yes they are. Using the term “invasion” to refer to anything else is what Thomas Sowell called “verbal inflation.”

Referring to illegal immigration as either “trespassing” or an “invasion” are both forms of the Noncentral Fallacy – the worst argument in the world. This argument essentially goes: “X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even X differs from the archetypal member in many important ways.” The problems with such an argument are obvious.

“To trespass is to enter a piece of land without the owner’s consent. What should we infer, then, when people argue that illegal immigrants are guilty of trespassing?”

The above is correct, and does apply to the United States. The US is a republic, which comes from two Latin words, res and publica, meaning thing of the people. In other words, the US belongs to its citizens. As such, we have the right to admit who we want in our country the same as we have the right to admit who we want into our homes. It simply blows my mind that Americans have let themselves be convinced they have no right to their own country.

It simply blows my mind that Americans have let themselves be convinced they have no right to their own country.

Indeed. I don’t think such people deserve a country. I think we need to divest ourselves from them ASAP.

@ Nathan
I disagree because I don’t see the logic in calling what we’d have in a state of nature “rights” in the Lockean sense. In economics terms, I think it’s more accurate to say our agreement with another is what brings a right into existence than to say we’re negotiating away our endowment in some sort of bargain. To follow the property meme, we’re creating a piece of intangible property, not trading it away for insurance.

The upshot of this is that the folks who negotiate themselves into a citizenship/state arrangement don’t have to completely or permanently surrender anything. The terms of the deal could take on a wide variety of forms, no? Independent of natural law. So, to get to the crux of the matter…

I can delegate to the state my right to avenge injuries against myself because I possess that right in natural law. I cannot delegate to the state the right to exclude foreigners from the territory of the United States because I did not have that right in natural law. Neither did anyone else have it. Therefore no one can delegate it to the state. Therefore the state does not have such a right, either.

… and say that if there is no natural law or rights, what we, as citizens, create is recognition of each other’s claims to property. But what about folks that aren’t party to the agreement? No, we don’t have a natural right to exclude them, but we don’t have anything at all telling us how we should treat them. We have an ability to recognize rights in them, and they have an ability to recognize rights in us. But that mutual recognition, that agreement, needs to actually happen. Without it, we’re not endowed with anything.

Now we need to think about what sort of rights we recognize in each other. Among those most everyone thinks essential is the right to associate and enter into agreements freely, and since our rights are coming into being only through association and agreement in the first place. So it defies logic that the seminal act in forming a society would be surrendering a right you’re busy bringing into a meaningful existence.

If you’re aware that many or most people are permanently excluded from legal immigration to the US based on the circumstances of their birth, then it makes no sense to blame them for not following a legal immigration process which was not available to them.

A legal process for seeking admission to the “club” is available. That does not, however, mean the outcome of that process must go in their favor and the group must accept them. I’m excluded from all sorts of groups based on the circumstances of my birth, but it doesn’t mean those groups must include me, or that I can legally force them to admit me into membership of the group.

That’s the unfortunate thing about freedom, isn’t it? It’s great, but people routinely exercise it in terrible, mindless ways. It might defy logic to you and I that most societies are the functional equivalent of the No-Homers Club, but to deny them that right means denying us the right to (potentially) do something good.

I see only one mention in the comments of the word “externalities,” which is obviously relevant to this issue.

MikeDC,
If you start with Lockean premises, you end up with libertarianism and no nations.
That is, if individuals are prior to nations and societies are formed by contracts among free individuals then of course, it is possible to re-order any society to any extent for better individual fulfillment.

Only if. you reject the Lockean and Hobbesian premises, and start with the Nation or the Tribe, you get the conclusions that you want.
Otherwise, you will have to make an unprincipled exception in favor of Nation.

Re: Peter’s response,

“It is interesting the original post chose to frame this as trespass. Trespass is a strict liability offense – if you are on the land of another without privilege or permission, you have trespassed. Intent and effect are immaterial. So it matters not if the trespasser is there to bestow a benefit on the possessor of the land; without permission, the trespasser is in the wrong.”

Try that one in court sometime when the police stick a camera on your property (but outside the curtilage) or you ask the prosecutor to bring criminal trespass charges against the girl scout who knocks on your door and/or the police who chases somebody on foot across your front yard.

Those examples all fall under the privilege exception in my post.