1) The first page or two totally — and deliberately — talks about illegal immigration without any context. Then later you only mention welfare reform as a similar issue of liberty, and add one throwaway line about incentives. Then you’re back to talking about immigration in isolation.
2) It is not ignoring or abandoning ‘principle’, or mere utilitarianism, to argue — based on common sense reality — about the *order* in which liberty (and better policies based on those principles) should be reasserted and applied. It is not unprincipled to say that *dismantling* a statist, command system is highly path dependent, and is in some ways vulnerable to the same knowledge problem that those who want to command and control face. FWIW I am *not* proposing a libertarian precautionary principle (funny how progs/libs never apply that to social engineering), but rather common sense care in how we proceed with reform.
Examples:
In the legal and regulatory environment we actually live in, would you go for marijuana reform *without* first also ensuring stoners don’t become a protected class and employers can’t be barred from, or sued for, firing them?
Would you vote for drastically curtailing the powers and cutting back budgets of the police without first guaranteeing/confirming 2nd Amendment rights, and the individual’s sovereign right to defense of person and property, including deadly force and no requirement to retreat?
3) Right here in your response to me you betray a certain incoherence, contradicting yourself with acknowledging my historical example of the S&L crisis then retreating back to simplistically ignoring the larger context of any specific liberty issue in the name of principle.
Taking you at face value, after ceding the facts and relevance of my S&L example, you return to the shallow approach under which you would have to say that the unbalanced policies in that case were just fine and dandy — a local, short term win is a win, regardless of the overall impact (in that case innocent people losing their money, taxapayers on the hook for those that were fully covered, and a black eye for deregulation).
Make up your mind.
P.S. I was a subscriber to Liberty and Reason, and an actual dues paying LP member back when you weren’t shaving yet, so you can skip the earnest lectures about the basics of principles.
