ICE has now announced the end to its recent immigration enforcement “surge” in Minnesota, after its tactics resulted in the death of two people. As ICE tactics continue to undermine due process rights, the New York Times editorial board and kindred others have reflected on the role ICE plays in a broader challenge the Trump administration poses to democracy.

Trump’s immigration policies are dramatically unjust. But meaningful reflection on what’s wrong  with them means recognizing an uncomfortable fact: they are not “undemocratic” but all too much a product of democracy.

It’s an uncomfortable fact that Donald Trump won the 2024 election, not just in the electoral college but by 2 million in the popular vote. And he did it by loudly campaigning for his immigration policy. He promised to carry out “the largest deportation effort in American history,” and his running mate suggested starting with deporting 1 million people.

Remorseful Trump voters have no excuse for thinking they voted for something else.

The signs of Trump’s democratic roots are often hidden behind critics’ evasive relabeling: his “populism.” His immigration policy aims to scandalize a broad class of voting citizens by demonizing the non-citizen minority. “Populism” is just another name for the democracy that certain elites don’t happen to like. They go back to calling it “democracy” when the majority targets the rights of minorities they happen to despise, like businessmen.

In its basic, original meaning, “democracy” just means majority rule unconstrained by checks and balances designed to protect individual rights.

Remember: the Athenian democracy voted to put Socrates to death. The governments of southern U.S. states — and of the Confederacy — elected politicians and passed popular laws that enslaved millions of African Americans. Even abolition didn’t stop Southern majorities from restricting their rights and tolerating lynch mobs under Jim Crow. Majority rule unconstrained by the rights of individuals is majority tyranny. 

Many have characterized Trump’s policies and ICE’s tactics as autocratic or even fascistic. They have a point. But democratic fascism is no contradiction. Remember, the Nazi party first rose to power in Germany after being freely elected in 1932.

Trump is not the only one to blame for the rise of fascistic immigration policies. The laws that classify 10 to 15 million people in the U.S. as “illegal” have been on the books for decades. They were passed by duly elected representatives — including the Democrats. It’s these laws that mandate treating immigrants as having no right to travel, work, or live peacefully among us. 

The current labyrinthine set of foreign worker quotas that dispenses jobs by permission of the government was first adopted in 1952 by a Democratically controlled Congress and finalized in 1965 during the heyday of LBJ’s Great Society. Even when “progressive” Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House in 2009 and 2021, they didn’t prioritize changing the laws.

Democrats have evaded their responsibility for these laws by choosing not to enforce them, as in Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. But lax enforcement only played into the hands of “law and order” politicians. When Republicans decided to enforce the laws on the books, of course it required massive fascistic intrusion into and destruction of the lives of immigrants and citizens alike.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we should recall that the Founders themselves warned us against unconstrained majority rule (see Madison’s Federalist #10). They gave us a system in which our elected officials are constrained by law with checks and balances designed to limit their ability to violate individual rights. 

This is sometimes what people mean by our “democracy,” but that’s a misnomer. The Founders gave us not a democracy, but a constitutional republic, a system premised on limiting government’s function solely to protecting the individual’s rights. 

The laws Trump is enforcing are not “undemocratic.” But they do violate constitutional rights. Even non-citizens have a right to liberty. Laws restricting immigrant labor violate the freedom to work and engage in trade. But these are freedoms Democrats long ago sold down the river when they sought ever-increasing regulations on the freedom of businessmen. 

If Trump’s ICE now assaults procedural rights like due process, it’s because he like so many other Presidents have habituated action by executive order. This is enabled by a Congress that has delegated so much power to the executive through laws (like the immigration laws) aimed at achieving collectivist policy goals that ignore individual rights. Such laws require the oversight of a massive and intrusive administrative state. And the Supreme Court tolerates it all because it is unwilling to apply “strict scrutiny” to any but the most blatantly anti-liberty laws. It recently described the concept of “liberty” as too “capacious” to define clearly, treating with deference any laws adopted through . . . the “democratic process.”

When a president enforces popular laws passed by Congress, and is unconstrained by a docile Supreme Court — the chaotic, tyrannical presence of ICE thugs on our streets “is what democracy looks like.”

Voters made this possible. They need to reflect on the consequences of their past decisions and try to reverse course. Paradoxically, they need to vote for politicians and policies who commit to protect individual rights as sacrosanct — even in the face of what voters demand. 

Ben Bayer, Ph.D. in philosophy, is a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.

Soon Brits will need Starlink + VPN to read the news. Like Iran

– Douglas Carswell

They kicked me out of Mises Institute for saying this | Walter Block

When does kidnapping a dictator become an act of liberation? When does violating sovereignty protect freedom? These aren’t hypothetical questions for ivory tower philosophers; they’re the urgent dilemmas posed by President Donald Trump’s recent Venezuelan adventure.

The case against

First, Trump is, with his Venezuelan adventurism, violating his campaign promise of avoiding foreign wars. That alone constitutes a breach of his social contract with the American electorate.

Second, Trump has made, in effect, a contract with the people of his country. They will pay their taxes, and he will use his office to protect them from foreign and domestic enemies.

Was Nicolás Maduro threatening to use the limited power of the Venezuelan military to invade the United States? He was not.

Therefore, this traditional justification for military intervention does not hold water. This tyrant was using his armed forces to brutalize his own citizenry, not Americans.

Third, Trump did not respect the niceties of the Constitution, stating that only Congress may declare war. The president may do so if the US is under direct attack, but that is not the case here.

The case for

There is no reason a state cannot ally itself with friendly counterparts. A Venezuela-absent Maduro, replaced as president perhaps by someone such as María Corina Machado, might well serve American interests.

It requires no leap of imagination to think that the Venezuelan people would vastly prefer her leadership to his tyranny. If so, this would constitute another defense of Trump’s recent initiative.

The Venezuelan military would offer negligible assistance to US defense needs. It has proven effective at brutalizing its own citizens but would contribute little in confronting genuine external threats.

Consider this by analogy to contractual obligations. A security contractor hired to protect one client abandons that post to defend another. Is this justified?

At first glance, no; it appears to violate the original contract. But yes, it is, if protecting the first client optimally requires securing the cooperation of the second, which this action achieves.

Rescuing innocent people from the totalitarianism imposed by Maduro must surely count favorably in this calculus.

The hypocrisy of selective outrage

Now for the delicious irony. The very same voices now shrieking about Trump’s “illegal” snatch-and-grab of Maduro are often the ones who have spent years demanding the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Let that sink in for a moment.

Maduro presided over the systematic destruction of Venezuela’s economy, transforming a once-prosperous nation into a humanitarian catastrophe. He rigged elections, tortured political prisoners, and drove millions into exile and starvation.

Netanyahu, by contrast, leads a democratic nation defending itself against terrorist organizations sworn to its destruction.

Yet somehow, in the inverted moral universe of contemporary international discourse, the Venezuelan dictator deserves due process and sovereignty protections, while the Israeli prime minister deserves to be hauled before the International Criminal Court.

The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant on November 21, 2024, alleging “responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

The ICC has no jurisdiction over the US (which wisely never ratified the Rome Statute) or Israel.

Yet this hasn’t stopped self-appointed global arbiters from demanding Netanyahu’s arrest while expressing outrage over Maduro’s perfectly legal capture by US forces conducting a legitimate military operation.

If international law and sovereignty matter so profoundly when extracting a South American strongman, where was this principled commitment when protesters blocked highways demanding Netanyahu’s arrest for the alleged crime of defending his country against Hamas?

The cognitive dissonance is breathtaking. Apparently, sovereignty is sacred when it protects socialist dictators but disposable when it shields democratic leaders fighting terrorism.

This hypocrisy extends far beyond Netanyahu. It reveals a deeper pathology in how international norms are selectively weaponized.

Dictators who brutalize their own people receive every protection of sovereignty and international law, while democracies defending themselves face impossible standards and prosecution threats.

The same voices that champion the ICC’s pursuit of democratic leaders suddenly discover profound reverence for national sovereignty when the target is an actual tyrant.

Strategic considerations

The contrast becomes even starker when examining America’s strategic relationships. Nothing in limited-government libertarian philosophy precludes cooperating with other democratic states to advance American security interests.

Some allies contribute more substantially than others. A friendly, democratic Venezuela under leadership like Machado’s would be diplomatically beneficial but hardly a strategic transformation.

Other American allies, however, possess genuinely formidable military capabilities that could prove invaluable in serious conflicts.

Israel’s military, for instance, ranks among the world’s most powerful and is listed by US News & World Report’s 2023 analysis as fourth globally, behind only Russia, the US, and China.

The principle remains consistent: strategic alliances that genuinely enhance American security are perfectly compatible with minarchist thinking, provided they serve defensive purposes rather than imperial adventures.

Trump has proposed transforming Gaza into a Mediterranean resort, describing it as a potential “Riviera of the Middle East” and envisioning “really good quality housing, like a beautiful town.”

While this may sound fanciful, it illustrates a broader principle: transforming conflict zones into prosperous economic centers serves both humanitarian and strategic interests.

It demonstrates that peace and prosperity offer superior outcomes to endless warfare and martyrdom.

A tale of two snatches

We titled this essay “A tale of two snatches” for good reason. The first snatch: Trump’s operation to capture Maduro, conducted openly, targeting an actual dictator who brutalized his own people.

The second snatch: the ICC’s legal machinations to arrest Netanyahu, pursued through international tribunals, targeting a democratic leader defending his nation against terrorism.

The first provokes international outrage and accusations of illegality.
The second receives acclaim as justice is finally served. This inversion reveals everything wrong with contemporary international discourse.

From our anarcho-capitalist perspective, both operations represent state overreach. From our minarchist framework, however, the distinction becomes stark. If we must choose between snatching dictators and snatching democrats, between capturing tyrants and prosecuting defenders, the choice should be obvious.

Trump’s Venezuelan intervention may violate libertarian purity and his own non-interventionist promises.

But the ICC’s pursuit of Netanyahu violates something more fundamental: the basic principle that justice should target the guilty, not shield them. When international institutions reserve their outrage for operations against dictators while championing prosecutions of democratic leaders, they forfeit all moral authority.

The hypocrisy is far from subtle. The same voices condemning Maduro’s capture as illegal have spent years demanding Netanyahu’s arrest as justice. Apparently, sovereignty protects socialist strongmen but not democracies under siege.

International law shields tyrants but prosecutes their victims. At least in Trump’s snatch, the right target got grabbed.

Oded J.K. Faran is the director of Faran and Co. International Translation Ltd., based in Tbilisi, Georgia, specializing in legal and technical translation for international clients.

Walter E. Block is the Harold E. Wirth eminent scholar endowed chair and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans and author of walterblock.substack.com.

Originally published here.

I was sitting peacefully at my kitchen table in Vancouver, happily eating breakfast, when I was intellectually assaulted by the milk container sitting there on the table. It stated as follows: “By Choosing an Agropur Product, you are Choosing to Contribute to the Canadian Economy.” I was affronted.

Read more

A member wrote:

The burden of proof is on him who claims to know.

Yes, I cover this in How We Know. I think the articles published under Ayn Rand’s editorship, in her publication, are correct. But there is no need for a distinction between “positive” and “negative” propositions. If you get rid of that invalid distinction, it comes down to: an assertion needs support; an assertion made without evidence is arbitrary and is to be dismissed.

It’s not as though when someone comes up to you and says, without having evidence, “Donald Trump is in the pay of the Mafia,” that you have your cognitive position changed in any respect.

To know, even to know that something might be the case, is to have formed a valid mental product; it takes the means of doing so. Evidence is that means. No evidence, no means of cognition. No means of cognition, no cognition.

The positive/negative distinction does apply to acts of consciousness: not accepting an idea (a negative) isn’t an act at all. It’s the commitment of your consciousness that needs justification. The not making of that commitment isn’t a disguised commitment.

Atheism is not the belief in non-God. It’s not a belief in anything; it’s the rejection of belief.

The usual way of defending atheism is wrong. The defense is not: “I don’t need a reason to accept atheism, but they need a reason to accept theism.” The deepest explanation is: atheism isn’t a belief; it isn’t something you accept. Atheism is the refusal to accept nonsense stories.

It’s not that atheism asserts a negative about the world; rather, it’s that atheism is a negative about consciousness—i.e., about accepting something.

Analogy: you don’t need a reason not to buy a given good; you need a reason to buy it.

The defenders of God and the arbitrary are like salesmen who say, “You have to prove to me you shouldn’t buy this.”

P.S. You might think that there’s a case for atheism: aren’t there contradictions in the very concept of God?

But that relies on the rejection of the arbitrary. Otherwise, the theist simply says: “How do you know your argument doesn’t have a mistake?” and “It seems contradictory to you but after you die, you’ll see that it makes sense from a divine perspective” and “Omnipotent, omniscient being is only one conception of the Transcendent; how do you know that there aren’t other conceptions that are consistent?”

If you accept the principle that some propositions (“positive” or “negative”), can be accepted or hypothesized without rational grounds to do so, you are lost.

Look up my more careful formulation of this in How We Know, pp. 278-290.

By the way, it was Shrikant Rangnekar, my writing coach, who suggested the idea that the burden of proof is on the one who makes an assertion–i.e., to asserting per se.