As a pragmatic libertarian, I'm fine with the free flow of capital across borders, but people are not mere capital. We are agents with opinions about how the wo

As a pragmatic libertarian, I'm fine with the free flow of capital across borders, but people are not mere capital. We are agents with opinions about how the world should be, who reserve the right under certain circumstances to back up those opinions with force. Unless you're willing to have a nightmare police state like North Korea, you can't maintain a civilized society by fiat. You have to have consensus among the governed. Hence nationalism: the principle that political borders should coincide with cultural ones. If you break that, if you try to impose a single state on people of different cultures who have different ideas about how things should be, you end up with, as has been demonstrated over and over again, misery at best and genocide at worst. How many times does history have to teach us that lesson before we learn it? The real solution is to move on from this 19th-century idea that having a job has to mean locating your body in physical proximity to your employer. The round-trip delay for a lightspeed signal across the Atlantic is less than a tenth of a second. Being located in Belfast should not be an obstacle to working for an American company.