Two open-borders ancaps react to a Hoppean restrictionist. They win the narrow question (is entry aggression?) because Mentis concedes it in minute 10. But the whole exchange runs on one unexamined move — “the state is illegitimate, so its territory is unowned” — and once that is challenged, the border question turns out to be a homesteading and abandonment question. That is exactly where LZ’s ch. 3 is weakest, and where common law already has tested answers.
Source: YouTube — LiquidZulu, 2025-07-01, 3:59:42 · transcript (auto-captions, cleaned) Participants: LiquidZulu, Monarco Hoppian (hosts, open borders), reacting to Mentis Wave’s borders video. The second half (~2:10 on) reacts to a Dave Smith vs. Andrew debate (libertarianism vs. Christian populism). It is name-calling and is ignored here (Chris). Links: LiquidZulu hub, ch. 3 — Homesteading, ch. 5 — Children’s rights, Common Law as Discovery, Constructed ≠ Arbitrary, Mass Deportation (Charsky vs. Ruelas)
Mentis: (1) state borders are illegitimate, so crossing them is not aggression; (2) but borders are “contested land” that would have been homesteaded without zoning; (3) X + Y ≠ X: open borders combined with democracy and welfare yields property violations; (4) a communist who crosses intending to vote for handouts is aggressing, so the policy is “open borders for libertarians only,” screened by proxies (degree, wealth, security checks); (5) the open-borders side commits a Nirvana fallacy.
Hosts: concession (1) settles it; rights claims need a specific victim and aggressor, and “taxpayers” or a counterfactual homesteader is neither; immigration law applies to the whole interior, so “contested” would have to mean every square inch; in the democracy-plus-immigration overlap, the violation sits in democracy; why does guilt start at the crossing rather than at waking up?; presumption of innocence rules out screening; “open borders” is a null policy (it removes state action rather than adding one); and newborns also vote and draw welfare (birth parity).
First-pass read (vault): on the narrow question the hosts win. Their weak spots: they beat the weaker restrictionist case (Hoppe’s public property held in trust for taxpayers is never engaged); the dismissal depends on ch. 3 §4’s no group ownership, which the vault disputes; Monarco’s “immigration ≠ citizenship” is the decisive point and is dropped after one sentence; and LZ’s detour against pragmatism answers an argument nobody made.
(Chris) Calling everything the state does “illegitimate” and then dismissing the consequences ignores how society actually exists. Even ancaps split on what follows from it: Rothbard says state property is unowned and homesteadable; Hoppe says it is held in trust for the taxpayers. The hosts silently take Rothbard’s view as given. So trace what the immigrant is actually entering:
(vault) Two edges. (a) The roads in between: an invitation is worthless if whoever owns the intervening land can block the guest. That is the ch. 3 donut at national scale. It is unsolved, but it gets the same answer for immigration as for anything else. (b) Children: parents usually transfer chattels, not land, so a child whose permission is revoked is a trespasser by this logic. That is the eviction problem in ch. 5. It survives if guardianship carries a duty to house, but that is a positive duty, and strict trespass logic cannot generate one.
(Chris) If I build a house and keep a lawn, that is homesteading even by LZ’s criteria. Is the dirt patch abandoned? How long can land go unattended before it is abandoned, and can someone take a property I don’t visit often? He says the rules exist to avoid conflict but never says where the line is. Letting someone use what another person has claimed, merely because it is idle, cuts against his own first user principle. (vault, corrected) On the yard LZ is closer to Chris than it first seemed. In this stream he rejects the mutualists’ “keep using it” standard and makes a persisting visible boundary the test; his abandonment example is a castle “in ruin for many, many years”; and his donut answer gives the encloser the unused interior. Chris: fair enough. But the duration and the test are never stated. “Visibly decayed over many years” is a platitude, not a rule, and it is the same gap as the ch. 3 stalemate rule.
Chris’s rule: title is lost only by explicit declaration, or by death without transfer. Checked against common law, it is largely what the law already does. Under US law, ownership of land outright cannot be abandoned by non-use, and an estate with no will or heirs passes to the state (escheat). The exception is adverse possession. I first defended it on grounds of evidence decay and repose; Chris: why is a late claim a problem? Did the person who moved in check whether it was owned? That holds up. Adverse possession requires occupation open and visible to the owner, which puts a duty to check on both sides. And where land is registered, the law has moved Chris’s way: under England’s Land Registration Act 2002, a squatter can apply after 10 years, but the registered owner is notified and can block it. Non-use never forfeits title is workable with a good registry; adverse possession mostly covers gaps in the records. Only acquiring title in the first place (the pointing-at-mountains problem) stays with ch. 3.
The through-line: this is ancap theory vs. centuries-tested reality, and the irony is that common law is decentralised, judge-made and built case by case, close to the bottom-up order ancaps say they want. It already answers the cases the course leaves open: easements of necessity (the donut), adverse possession and registries (abandonment), escheat (death without transfer). See Common Law as Discovery.
(Chris) Every participant disavows democracy, so this is points-scoring, not substance. Within the ancap framework the best available answer is that citizenship comes with acquiring property in the area, at which point you can vote. That is not one house, one vote: ownership is proof of residency. Co-ownership is fine (Chris accepts it; ancaps don’t). Historically, renters were transients, and the gap appeared as renting became permanent. Modern citizenship carries far more than this. The more interesting reverse question (open): if paying for residency qualifies, does a renter vote? An invited immigrant charged $1 to stay? A hotel guest? These are line-drawing cases for common law, and still unsettled today. Federal elections in the US are already citizens-only, so Mentis’s real target is citizenship policy, not the border.
On is entry aggression? the hosts win. On the whole question they rest on two unearned steps: “illegitimate” ⇒ “unowned,” and an abandonment rule that is never stated. Chris’s frame of entry, staying and voting all reducing to title, and title lost only by declaration or death without transfer is cleaner than both sides, and is closer to existing law than either. What is left unresolved belongs to the queued shared-ownership work: the donut / access-across-owned-land case, and the residency-for-franchise lines.