Small Thoughts
I have a stupid reason for why I don't post more often. I hope you are now asking yourself, "How stupid?" and not muttering, "And this is surprising how?" And that reason is this: I do not have the luxury of pursuing lengthy trains of thought. While individually, my wife, son, three daughters, dog, cat, work, natural catastrophes, neighbor kids and Global Warming may only interrupt me only occasionally; collectively they are derailing my lengthy trains o' thought on average about every three milliseconds.
So the Grand Thoughts that I wish to think remain unthunk. Which pisses me off a little.
Because I feel that a lot of the stuff I think about is just this close to congealing into something more than a pile of unordered ramblings. I sense the outlines of order and coherence, but can't get it down on paper, or pixels.
So, I am making a conscious decision to: a) stop leaving things in my feed reader in the now obviously futile hope that I will get back to them and write something about them; b) prune the feed reader so that I have less to obsessively read; c) read more books; and finally, d) post smaller bits as they occur to me.
In aid of d), there's this: Aretae talks about immigration. Some of this has now been addressed in his comments, and he's updated his post a little from when I read it this morning.
To lay it out Aretae-style, my thoughts went roughly like this:
- Anti-Immigration summary: fair. If something is hurting us, well, maybe stopping is a good idea.
- That's a good argument for letting that one Haitian dude in. When you're confronted with one guy, you could even say, hey, I'll personally take a haircut of $2 a day (a substantive, if not crushing loss of almost $500 a year) to help Jean-Paul or whoever get a real life in the home of the free and the land of the brave. That's charity.
- Wait a minute, where's Hati, where these Hatians are coming from?
- But, in the world of freely-entered contracts and libertarian (left- or otherwise-) why does Jean Paul get to come here and unilaterally cut my income and take $500 out of the mouths of my Children? Do I get a say in this?
- Put another way, am I really morally obligated to give up my income and so reduce the prosperity of my family to help others? More to the point, if I decide that I don't want to, is it right for others, like Jean-Paul, to force me to lose that income?
- Stalin said that quantity has a quality of its own, or something like that. One Jean Paul - hard working, thrifty and pious - he's okay. But what about five million of his less upright, smelly compatriots who have made a wonderland of their homeland in the 200 years of their independence? Does their collective presence in this country make it less likely that immigrant n will get the same benefit from moving here? Does it make it more likely that subsequent income loss to American workers will be more than $2/day?
- Aretae talks monkeybrains™ about everything except left-libertarian issues. There is no tribe of all humanity. As commenter Lurking Apple put it, "You seem to be assuming a spherical immigrant on a frictionless border..." People are different. Different tribes have different abilities, beliefs, and attitudes. If we allow too many in, we cease to be what we were. That may be good, but most mutations are not beneficial. What we are - or at the very least, were - was very good at creating staggering amounts of prosperity from the nothing but hard work, ingenuity and the occasional tariff. Add tens of millions of (to pick just two) notably prospering Mexicans, notably peaceful Muslims - we might just end up with a shit sandwich on rye.
- It seems to me that while we should assiduously and strenuously hope that other places - backward, poor, disease infested, Global Warming-afflicted, trounced by Colonialism and the Man (you know where they are) - might adopt our miraculously effective package of property rights, innovation, and win! to rework their lives in a way that seems best to them, but in any event a richer version than what they have now. We might even offer classes or something. But it is probably not our job, as a nation or a people, to provide that life for them there, and it certainly isn't our job to provide that life for them here.
Anywho, that's my small thought for today.
[wik] And here is this amusing, if harsh, take on Libertarianism.
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This is made of win.
I would add that while I'm not impressed with cross-cultural IQ measurements, there's no doubt that culture matters. Whether it's moral or immoral that we benefited from the splintering of European power, devolution of power from the center to the periphery, and the corresponding focus on individual and property rights, it's a cold dead fact that this is what made the West the dominant power that it is.
Nobody in A.D. 1000 would have picked Europe as the future world dominating power. By 1500 A. D. it was even money, and 200 years later it was all over. For better or worse, that's what we are, because that's where we came from.
The suspicion is that many of the same people who say we need to open our borders out of "fairness" are the same ones who say that the cultural differences that made us the power that we are - those differences are evil and need to be obliterated. The suspicion is that these people see open borders as a way to implement that policy.
Quite frankly, this all seems like something we should talk about, and every time the Usual Suspects holler "racist" at someone asking questions like these, it simply increases the suspicion that there's an ulterior motive.
It would be a very different discussion if, say, increased immigration came with enforced assimilation. Instead, we see increasing balkanization. Monkey Brains explains that nicely, too, if you see that some of the Usual Suspects see themselves as leaders of particular Balkan principalities.
Call me nasty and suspicious, but when it's impossible to have an honest discussion, I *do* get suspicious.
@Borepatch - OK, since you…
@Borepatch - OK, since you asked: you're nasty and suspicious.
And I completely agree with you.
Diving in a bit deeper, I'd…
Diving in a bit deeper, I'd add that as smart as Aretae is, there's a huge hole in the thesis that arises from its utter lack of scalability.
Boiled down to one guy, it's no hard decision to make. Add even a couple zeros to that, and you're getting way past the thesis that all these people want a better life and we should just cut our own quality of living to give it to them. [wik] (not because economies are a zero sum game, but because absent actual assimilation, such as that undertaken by Aretae's Irish, Jews, and Polish, social constructs become a negative sum game)
Carried to even a minimalist's version of extreme, we'd have swapped lives with the person we're trying to make ourselves feel good about helping.
I consider myself to be a highly moral and empathetic person, but I feel no compulsion to trade circumstances with every swinging dick (or that swinging dick's enabler) who thinks it's unfair that I was lucky enough to be born in this country.