Imagine you are a partial owner of a shop that sits next to a border. The border is closed, so the only shoppers are those from one side of the border. The shop is popular with these shoppers, but the shop's pricing model is all messed up. They sell items for $5 that cost $10 to make. As a result they lose money on every sale.
Suppose someone then suggests opening the border. Is this a good idea or not?
One could certainly debate this from many angles, but the salient one is that a shop with a broken pricing model, losing money on every sale, may end up losing even more money, and doing so more quickly, if it had many more customers. That downside might override other positive aspects of the open border.
Until we have entitlement reform and reduce the deficit, the federal government is the shop losing money on every sale. Encouraging new "customers" without fixing this underlying problem is asking for disaster. However, once this is remedied, I think almost all libertarians would support open borders. So libertarians do not oppose open borders, but they are not entirely ignorant about the relationship of open borders with entitlement reform. Look at the recent immigration crisis in Europe, for example. Open borders instantly lead to immigrants heading for the states with the most generous benefits. This is simply a question of incentives.
Read other related questions on Quora:
- Why are so many libertarians anti-abortion?
- Why do libertarians want open borders?
- Are people not voting Libertarian because they're OK with open-borders immigration and pro-choice abortion?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2dhvjVe
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