“Let them come”

New Zealanders and Australians like to think they are charitable folk. They like to think they are caring, sharing and good hearted towards others. They sit warm and self-satisfied in that thought, right up until the point that those “others” come to our places by boat—and right at that point these good-hearted folk are happy to have these other folk, these other human beings escaping desperate situations, held up at the point of a gun and thrown into detention centres that are little more than concentration camps.

So much for the virtue of benevolence.

It seems benevolence ends where the welfare state begins.

The Welfare State forces every person to be responsible for every other person, whether they like it or not. And like it or not, those who pick up the cheque for New Zealand's welfare state resent that forced imposition.

The Welfare State dehumanises people—forcing us to view another human being as either a wallet or a mouth—upsetting those with the wallets at the prospect of many more mouths being fed at their expense.

The existence of the Welfare State means that instead of seeing every other human being as a potential gain to ourselves, which is what they are, instead we see them as just another mouth to feed and a family to house.

This is criminally wrong.

This is the way the Welfare State is. It is a State in which every human being is set against every other human being.

What we should abhor is not the existence of “boat people”—people in a desperate situation yearning to breathe free, whom we dehumanise by that disgraceful epithet—but the existence of this “forced charity.”

It is all force, and no charity.

There is a better way to deal with immigrants and refugees than with guns, camps and a death sentence.

As author Robert Heinlein suggested, successful immigrants demonstrate just by their choice and gumption in choosing a new life that they are worthy of respect. So why can’t we?

Why not simply let people look after them voluntarily?

This shouldn’t be difficult. Every time an issue like this comes to light, many charitable New Zealanders and Australians raise their voices in support of the embattled minority; so why not take these calls literally?

Instead of announcing that New Zealand is about to buy into Australian inhumanity, Prime Ministers Key and Gillard could instead have announced that between them they will accept whoever arrives on our shores, but only as long as a sufficient number of charitable Australians and New Zealanders can be found to take full responsibility for them until they are on their feet. People who will offer their own voluntary welfare and 'naturalisation services' to help these people start their new life.

Who could possibly, or reasonably, object to that?

Finding a sufficient number should not be a problem. Even the numbers gleefully posted every week by xenophobes like new-Australian Andrew Bolt  only measure in their hundreds--a “flood” of several-hundred souls at most trying to “pour” into a country of 20-million people and a thousand-million empty acres.

And given the initiative refugees will have already shown in getting down here, I would expect that getting on their feet will not take them very long.

This solution demonstrates the stark contrast between generosity and enforced charity, and the simple benevolence at the heart of the libertarian philosophy.

Compulsory 'charity' is a misnomer - it dehumanises both taxpayer and recipient. But when charity is voluntary, people are set free to be benevolent again.

The Welfare State is a killer for benevolence, for the human spirit, for open immigration, and a literal killer for immigrants and refugees braving dangerous waters and the integrity of unscrupulous people-smugglers.

I say set these people free through the generosity of benevolent New Zealanders—while taking a good hard look at what the Welfare State does to people.

I say that the simple libertarian philosophy be adopted with all immigrants, including refugees: that until the Welfare State we endure is permanently dismantled we simply allow all peaceful people to pass freely just as long as they make no claim at all on our enforced charity.

I say Let Them Come.

The principle of individual rights demands it.