Ban The I-Word?

[Epoetker]

Mods, the I-word is definitely too triggering and inexact a word for this sensitive time, please wordfilter all instances of "immigrant" with the more correct term "invader".

[fm93]

Do you know what the term means? Please define each term in writing, using only forensic terms instead of emotional pleas, and then tell me which is worse.

I know what it means. That said, you can call plenty of people "mother[bleep]er" and elicit little reaction, whereas slurs can strike a deep, resounding chord. Words that are simply crude in nature are lot easier to shake off than you might think.

Are you not aware that Obama used the term in 2009? Or Joe Biden using the term to his fellow anti-NRA friend John Walsh? Or Barbara Ann Mikulski using it just this past year?

No, I wasn't. I'm not a particularly political person.

No more so than any other criminal.

And there's the author's case in point. That's (evidently) the first thing that comes to mind when you think of them. Not "immigrant" or "person in need," but "criminal." Someone can be passively sitting somewhere, having done nothing harmful to anyone or anything, but they're given the identity of "criminal."

Cough *IRS Scandal* Cough...

Careful about that cough. You should consider using medical insurance to get it checked out and treated it need be. If only certain immigrants could have that luxury.

No more so than "oppressing" other criminals. And words can't oppress anyone. They are just words.

I said that words are indicative of an attempt at oppression, not that the words themselves do that.

It is used as a pejoritive towards a candidate to curry favor with those who are considering voting for a Republican. If you can't observe that effect, then you aren't looking.

That's news to me, considering that it refers to the Tea Party, which isn't the Republican Party.

And I refuse to be offended by ANY word. That's what Eleanor Roosevelt meant.

Good for you. I'm not sure what your personal feelings have to do with other people's feelings, though.

No, it's SYMPATHY

Actually, no. It's empathy. Some people have the ability to understand and share the feelings of another group, just as your link says. But either way, quibbling about definitions doesn't change my point.

Bologna. We should tell them that words can't hurt them at all without their consent. The only reason they are offended is because they are allowing themselves to get offended.

You have no qualms about telling other people how THEY ought to feel? Or with portraying the issue as if their immediate emotional reaction was a deliberate choice akin to deciding between ice cream flavors?

If the word is accurate, and forensically so to boot, then no we shouldn't.

I presume that you also use the word "retard" towards people who have intellectual disabilities.

What?

I have black friends who don't personally feel anger upon being called the n-word. But they would never say it's okay for people to use that word in derogatory ways. Even though they aren't personally hurt by it, they still want it eradicated from society.

[Jedidiah]

And there's the author's case in point. That's (evidently) the first thing that comes to mind when you think of them. Not "immigrant" or "person in need," but "criminal." Someone can be passively sitting somewhere, having done nothing harmful to anyone or anything, but they're given the identity of "criminal."

And the point is?

[Darth Executor]

And there's the author's case in point. That's (evidently) the first thing that comes to mind when you think of them. Not "immigrant" or "person in need," but "criminal." Someone can be passively sitting somewhere, having done nothing harmful to anyone or anything, but they're given the identity of "criminal."

People earn the identity of criminal by breaking laws, "giving" them that identity is just a formality. And it's not true that they haven't done anything harmful. Their mere presence gives power to the psychotic left wing open order nutjobs, and regardless of whether they stay or go they will cost legal American residents money.

[Darth Executor]

Perhaps. (As as side note, business owners generally let strangers waltz into their stores, where the owners store large quantities of valuables.)

But I would argue that generally we are talking about private property, and not federal property (and thus your analogy doesn't work). E.g., suppose a man lives on his property on the national border. Suppose he wants to invite someone (say his neighbor, or even a stranger) from across the border over for dinner. I'd say it is up to the private owner to judge and to decide whether he wants to risk inviting the guest over. And not up to any busybodies in D.C. (or state capitol, or city council).

I am talking about property Whether it's federal or private doesn't matter. The point of the analogy is that you don't allow strangers who could compromise your safety in if you can help it.

With regards to your example, it's not just the guy who's taking the risk. If the person he invites over cuts his throat then does a driveby from there to Chattanooga he endangers everybody else as well. I would love it if illegal immigrants were all dropped onto the property of open borders nutjobs and sealed there because it would cure open border nutjobbery on the spot, but the way it plays out in reality is that the invitees cause damage and trouble for everybody else too because nobody wants to create military perimeters around the house of every liberal and libertarian with no sense.

I meant long-term, when the market adjusts. Freedom of exchange is mutually beneficial. And cutting it off (or otherwise restricting it) thus makes both parties worse off. If Colorado (or a city or a small neighborhood) were to blockade trade (or just some things, like mobility of humans) across state lines, it would make Coloradans (and those who would have exchanged with them) worse off than otherwise. Even after the market adjusts, it would make people better off to lift the barriers to exchange. And if they don't think it will make them better off, they won't trade, so the barriers would be superfluous. (E.g., they wouldn't sell or rent housing to immigrants or hire them. There would be no economic reason for anyone to immigrate.)

There was an old worry (like 200 years ago) that if one person (or group) were superior at producing every good than some other, then they would not be able to profitably (at least not mutually) exchange with one another. The idea was that the superior producer would be better off producing everything itself. In the early 1800s the economist David Ricardo proved that even in that case both parties will be better off exchanging, because the inferior producer will still have what's called a "comparative advantage" in certain goods, and it will be profitable for the superior producer to purchase that good from the other.

I have no idea what would happen if Colorado would blockade trade (which isn't what I'm proposing anyway, trade, particularly of raw materials you don't have but need, is obviously beneficial). The problem with your comment is that human society is interconnected and trade doesn't affect just two parties, unless you irrationally include the entire state as one party even though the primary, and depending on what is being trade, possibly only beneficiary is the person doing the trading.

I don't know about that. From what I understand, Sweden, prior to the welfare programs, had very low taxes and was one of the most prosperous and growing in the world. Then the welfare programs were put in place which virtually ran the country into the ground in the 1990s. They've had to cut back substantially on the welfare programs, and keep doing so. And they are judged insufficient. Always a 'lack of funds', shortage of welfare resources, and long lines. The programs are also falling in popularity among the people.

Sweden's spending as a % of GDP appears to have remained stable since the 90s.

Also the people are largely making the choice to switch over to purchasing private medical care. I hear that your competent Swedish politicians make use of private medical care. They seem to understand that it's superior.

Of course private medical care is superior when you have money (which politicians always seem to have). I'm not sure why libertarians keep bringing up this canard

If you look at the details of how that category is calculated, you find that it doesn't include international mobility of labor. But deals with things like minimum wage laws; regulations on hiring/firing, hours; and the like.
http://www.heritage.org/index/labor-freedom

Immigration policy is included in their "Trade Freedom" factor, which includes barriers to international trade in general.

Japan gets a green on trade freedom and they allow almost no immigration. Doesn't seem to be weighted very highly.

These indices aren't perfect.

That's an understatement. Setting immigration (and particularly, mass migration) as a mere subsection (and minor ones at that by the looks of it) makes it pretty worthless.

And I've heard various people say they prefer the other one I linked to (Fraser Institute). But they seem useful if they generally correspond to how laissez-faire vs restrictive they are, and that these indexes correlate well with measures of living standards seems relevant.

Taking a bunch of random factors and lumping them together as "laissez-faire" isn't very useful. Particularly in a debate about a specific subsection.

Looking at the sub-categories can also be interesting. Going back to Sweden, for instance, although Sweden's government spending is higher than the U.S. due to their welfare state, Sweden is rated better at the other categories: less restriction on business generally, and sounder money. Combined with the fact that Sweden is not spending such vast amounts on military bases and operations around the world, such things balance out Sweden's welfare spending, somewhat.

None of the other indices really matter since we were discussing the sustainability of a welfare state. I would argue that any indices that minimizes the effect of mass migration as a subsection of a section is worthless anyway. As for economic
stagnation, stagnation is inevitable for peaceful post-industrial societies, for reasons I don't see the point in repeating.

To some extent. But there will always be unavoidable inefficiencies, such as the deadweight loss of taxation or the inevitable extra layers of indirection.

But even with an imaginary 100% efficiency, it still takes a certain amount of spending to give everyone 'free' medical care, 'free' education, and to give a dole to all the poor.

And then it has consequences that exacerbate matters. The depressant to the economy makes the average person poorer than otherwise, most likely making people more needy of welfare. It tends to trap people in poverty exacerbating the problem of poverty. It creates disincentives to being self-sufficient, thus increasing the need for welfare spending, it tends to help pay the cost of the poor having children thus incentivizing the poor to have more children, creating more mouths for welfare spending to feed. It taxes people more during good years so they have less to save so they are more likely to require assistance in harder times. It tends to make people less charitable (as well has to have less to give). All those kinds of things require yet additional welfare spending (a feedback loop), even assuming a 100% efficiency of taking from some and giving it to others.

None of this has happened to the Swiss. Actually a lot of libertarian dire warnings seem to play out sporadically (if at all). Almost as if the entire libertarian world view is so grossly inaccurate that it's indistinguishable from just guessing.

I agree that GDP is not a great measure. I mean an increase in productive capacity and productive output (of goods that raise living standards--e.g. base necessities and what "makes life comfortable" as you say), which is also connected with increased demand for labor (and thus higher wages).

Productive capacity and productive output are not connected with increased demand for labor. Technology has long advanced to the point where we can produce far more with far less labour.

As I pointed out, we've actually been moving in the opposite direction since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The trend has been that the increase of labor-saving devices has increased the productivity of labor, increasing demand for labor, increasing wages/incomes.

And as I pointed out, it doesn't matter what happened 200 years ago (or 100 years ago, and to a lesser extent, even 50 years ago). You see a perpetual incline when in reality the line is a bell curve. It'll grow, hit a plateau, then come crashing down again.

What I'm saying is that total demand will increase. Your comment about "quantity of labor necessary to match demand" assumes some fixed demand.

No, you are inserting that unjustifiably. My comment does not require fixed demand and I don't understand what makes you think it does. Quantity can match demand even as demand grows simply by having quantity growing faster than demand.

Demand as a whole is unlimited--or rather, it is limited only by supply.

Actually the relationship depends on scarcity. With abundance of production it's supply that depends on demand, and demand is decided by the people who have money to buy the product.

This too goes back to old mercantilist ideas. The fear was that if productive output increased (supply increased) the supply could exceed demand which was assumed to be limited by some fixed ability to pay or purchasing power. But what limits that? Economist Jean Baptiste Say proved that that was nonsense. That total demand always equals total supply. When productive capacity increases via the additional means of production, total human desires will prompt the increase in both supply and demand. This increase in demand includes increasing the demand for labor, including hiring the specific jobless man you refer to, and increasing wages.

The problem with quoting another two hundred year old mummified corpse (and your post in general) is that it refuses to deal with the reality of people who no longer have any use whatsoever to the economy. It doesn't matter what Jean Baptiste Say says because Jean Baptiste Say did not have to deal with the upper end of the human usefulness bell curve. In his world there would always be jobs for even the dumbest to adapt to. In Jean Baptiste Say's world you can take a man off a plantation and have him saw wood, or even build cabinets. In ours, you can't take a bricklayer and have him write C# libraries and even if you could there are only so many C# libraries the world needs.

[Bill the Cat]

I know what it means. That said, you can call plenty of people "mother[bleep]er" and elicit little reaction, whereas slurs can strike a deep, resounding chord.

The former will get you kicked out of far more places than the latter. And I see no defense of Christians when we are called "bigots", or my favorite imaginary term "homophobes", from the left or from those who whine about a label they are called.

Words that are simply crude in nature are lot easier to shake off than you might think.

Calling an illegal an illegal is not crude. It is a very accurate and forensic description of their immigration status. What I find funny is that the term "homophobe" is not only crude, but forensically inaccurate, yet the left uses it like a carpet bomb with no regard for the hypocrisy they commit when they use it.

No, I wasn't. I'm not a particularly political person.

Well, now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

And there's the author's case in point. That's (evidently) the first thing that comes to mind when you think of them. Not "immigrant" or "person in need," but "criminal."

Because they ARE a criminal. They are not immigrants because they have completely eschewed the immigration processes and laws of a sovereign nation, and the only reason they are in need while they are here is that they are here illegally. We have about 7 stray cats that live in the sewer beside the Wendy's by my house. My wife and I saw them the other day, and this thread came to mind. She called them strays, and I told her (trying to keep a straight face) that they weren't a pack of strays, they were simply unlicensed homeless migrant felines.

Someone can be passively sitting somewhere, having done nothing harmful to anyone or anything, but they're given the identity of "criminal."

That reminds me of the time I was driving on Hwy 58 from Emporia, VA to Newport News, VA at 2 AM. It was back when the first Gulf War was going on, and I was stationed at Langley AFB. Well, I had went to North Carolina to visit the girl I was dating at the time, and I was heading back to base. I hadn't seen anyone for over a half an hour. I was going 66 MPH. There was no one around for me to bother, and I clearly wasn't harming anyone, but the police officer that pulled me over didn't see it that way. I was breaking the law, and I got what I deserved for it. A ticket. No one can be "passively sitting somewhere" that it is illegal for them to be at. Try just "passively sitting" in the President's chair at the White House without legal permission to do so and see how that turns out.

Careful about that cough. You should consider using medical insurance to get it checked out and treated it need be. If only certain immigrants could have that luxury.

I work for a living and I pay for medical insurance. I am also a legal resident of this country. If only certain illegal invaders had done what was necessary to earn that legal status...

I said that words are indicative of an attempt at oppression, not that the words themselves do that.

So, do you then agree that the term "homophobe" is an attempt to oppress?

That's news to me, considering that it refers to the Tea Party, which isn't the Republican Party.

Since you aren't a political person, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. The left claims that the tea party "runs" the Republican party. And the two biggest leftist strategies on the campaign trail are to claim that the Republican candidate is a tea partier or a previously unknown third Koch brother (Sarcasm alert)

Good for you. I'm not sure what your personal feelings have to do with other people's feelings, though.

To show that it IS possible to not be offended by words, and to further reinforce Eleanor's words that one chooses to be offended.

Actually, no. It's empathy. Some people have the ability to understand and share the feelings of another group, just as your link says. But either way, quibbling about definitions doesn't change my point.

Sorry, but no. It's sympathy.

You have no qualms about telling other people how THEY ought to feel?

Honestly, no. I have no qualms forcing them to admit that their response to a word is nothing more than an emotional outburst that they allowed to happen. In this case, I'd ask the illegal if they were here illegally, then when they say yes, I'd ask them if they stole, would they be a thief. Then I'd ask them if they killed someone intentionally, would they be a murderer. Then I'd ask them why the term "illegal immigrant" was inaccurate

Or with portraying the issue as if their immediate emotional reaction was a deliberate choice akin to deciding between ice cream flavors?

Because it is. Are they out of control? Are their emotions the master of them?

I presume that you also use the word "retard" towards people who have intellectual disabilities.

No. I call them, including my niece, disabled, or that their mental development has been retarded.

I have black friends who don't personally feel anger upon being called the n-word. But they would never say it's okay for people to use that word in derogatory ways. Even though they aren't personally hurt by it, they still want it eradicated from society.

No, they want the derogatory feelings eradicated. The n word just gives them a target for their hostility. Is there really a difference in derision between calling them "dumb niggers" or "dumb good for nothings"?

[Darth Executor]

I work for a living and I pay for medical insurance. I am also a legal resident of this country. If only certain illegal invaders had done what was necessary to earn that legal status...

The really dumb part is that Mexico has an universal health care system so if they wanted free healthcare they could have just... stayed in Mexico. Nobody who isn't well off goes to the US for the health care.

[Joel]

I am talking about property Whether it's federal or private doesn't matter. The point of the analogy is that you don't allow strangers who could compromise your safety in if you can help it.

With regards to your example, it's not just the guy who's taking the risk. If the person he invites over cuts his throat then does a driveby from there to Chattanooga he endangers everybody else as well. I would love it if illegal immigrants were all dropped onto the property of open borders nutjobs and sealed there because it would cure open border nutjobbery on the spot, but the way it plays out in reality is that the invitees cause damage and trouble for everybody else too because nobody wants to create military perimeters around the house of every liberal and libertarian with no sense.

Who is the owner of the property is the most morally relevant issue.

As for the guest going on a murderous rampage, that could just as well happen if the property owner invites his neighbor on his other side (i.e., not across the border). Or be done by the guy across the border without an invitation. Or be done by the property owner himself. because we're talking about persons who have no known evidence of being a mass murderer. In which case it seems you are insisting on prejudice based on where someone is from. And an argument for prejudice based on statistics could equally be used to argue for locking up all teenage males. or any group that happens to have a statistically higher incidence of violent crime.

The problem with your comment is that human society is interconnected and trade doesn't affect just two parties, unless you irrationally include the entire state as one party even though the primary, and depending on what is being trade, possibly only beneficiary is the person doing the trading.

Ricardo's argument applies equally well to groups, such as countries. In fact countries was his primary focus.

And, yes, a market is interconnected, and so people tend to benefit from the benefits of others. The merchant who imports cheap goods benefits people domestically (especially the poor) with increasing the supply (and lowering the price) of goods. The merchant who exports goods benefits laborers domestically via the increased demand for their services. The one who accumulates capital increases the productivity of labor and thus increases wages/employment. The one who imports productive resources benefits people domestically by increasing the production and thus supply of goods. And removing the restrictions to international trade means removing the legal barriers to people engaging in that trade directly. Producers allocating resources (e.g., across borders) according to profit-loss signals too increases productivity and the supply of goods. And, again, Ricardo's argument shows how trade increases the supplies of goods due to utilizing comparative advantage. The market is also an engine for disseminating and communicating information required for organizing a complex system of mass production (e.g., via profit and loss signals), and wider trade increases and improves that communication of information.

Sweden's spending as a % of GDP appears to have remained stable since the 90s.

That's just government "purchases of goods and services", which it lists in the high 20s. But purchases would not include transfer payments, or mandates on employers, for example. Sweden's total government spending is closer to half of GDP. And has been trending down since 1992 (from about 68%) (see the first line graph here: http://www.economics21.org/commentar...nts-equal-size).

Looking at total spending would not necessarily tell us the size of welfare spending either. As the Heritage site says, "The government is attempting to expand investment in infrastructure and research while reining in welfare spending." (http://www.heritage.org/index/countr...ted-government). For example, if the fall in total spending is due to cuts in welfare, and other areas of spending are increasing, then the cut to welfare was larger than the drop in total spending.

Japan gets a green on trade freedom and they allow almost no immigration. Doesn't seem to be weighted very highly.

That's an understatement. Setting immigration (and particularly, mass migration) as a mere subsection (and minor ones at that by the looks of it) makes it pretty worthless.

Taking a bunch of random factors and lumping them together as "laissez-faire" isn't very useful. Particularly in a debate about a specific subsection.

None of the other indices really matter since we were discussing the sustainability of a welfare state. I would argue that any indices that minimizes the effect of mass migration as a subsection of a section is worthless anyway. As for economic

As for weighting factors, I believe they make their data available, and I know the Fraser institute encourages people to use the data and try different weightings on your own. They say in their latest report,

"In the past, we investigated several methods of weighting the various components, including principle component analysis and a survey of economists. We have also invited others to use their own weighting structure if they believe that it is preferable. Our experience indicates that the summary index is not very sensitive to alternative weighting methods." (emphasis mine)

I don't know what you mean by "random factors and lumping them together as "laissez-faire"". How do you think they are random or not having to do with laissez-faire? My understanding is that the goal is to take all (or at least the biggest?) factors of laissez-faire vs not, and to combine them into some measure of how laissez-faire the market is overall.

And the reason I originally brought up these indices was not regarding immigration laws but in response to your comments on welfare programs. The argument is usually something like how Sweden's economy isn't much worse off than the U.S. for having a bigger welfare state. The response is that there are other factors that tend to offset the difference--e.g., that Sweden seems to have less oppressive business restrictions, sounder money, and less government corruption. At the very least, the existence of other factors, means the economic size/growth alone can't tell us the effect of the welfare programs.

None of this has happened to the Swiss. Actually a lot of libertarian dire warnings seem to play out sporadically (if at all). Almost as if the entire libertarian world view is so grossly inaccurate that it's indistinguishable from just guessing.

None of this has happened to the Swiss? Where is your information on that?
Your comment here is in response to me listing some ways in which welfare programs make more people more in need of assistance. So you are saying that welfare programs in Switzerland do not make more people reliant on assistance (than there would be in the absence of those welfare programs). I'm curious how you come to that conclusion?

And as I pointed out, it doesn't matter what happened 200 years ago (or 100 years ago, and to a lesser extent, even 50 years ago). You see a perpetual incline when in reality the line is a bell curve. It'll grow, hit a plateau, then come crashing down again.

What you said was "it's been slowly moving in that direction". I countered that, no, it has been moving in the opposite direction. So here you seem to backtrack on your previous statement, agree with me that it has been moving in the opposite direction, but that you believe that it will change directions in the future. If you want to make a prediction of the future not based on the historical trend fine, but it's not reasonable to dismiss my talking about the historical trend when I was just correcting your claim about the historical trend.

Productive capacity and productive output are not connected with increased demand for labor. Technology has long advanced to the point where we can produce far more with far less labour.


No, you are inserting that unjustifiably. My comment does not require fixed demand and I don't understand what makes you think it does. Quantity can match demand even as demand grows simply by having quantity growing faster than demand.


Actually the relationship depends on scarcity. With abundance of production it's supply that depends on demand, and demand is decided by the people who have money to buy the product.

Okay, we seem to be misunderstanding each other here. Just to give us something concrete to discuss to perhaps help us figure out the miscommunication, let's consider a hypothetical example:
Suppose in a given industry, 10 people working on the existing machinery for a week produce 100 widgets.
Then there is some change, (more machinery, better machinery, new techniques, or the like) after which
2 people can produce the same 100 widgets in a week (produce the same with less).
But that's just one way of expressing the effect. We could equivalently phrase it as:
The same 10 people can now produce 500 widgets in a week (produce more with the same).
or: 8 people can now produce 400 widgets in a week (produce more with less)
or: 14 people can produce 700 widgets in a week.

You agree that demand for widgets is not fixed. So there's no reason to assume that the producers will simply cut the workforce by a factor of 5 and leave output the same. On the contrary, the marginal productivity of labor services has increased 5-fold (or looking at it from another direction, the labor cost per widget has fallen by 80%). So the incentive will be for businesses in the industry to want to hire more labor services (tending more to something like the "14 people produce 700 widgets in a week" case).

Let's further suppose that similar changes happen to every industry. The overall demand for labor goes up. The labor demand curve(s) shifts to the right, the quantity demanded and the price paid for labor services goes up.

This is the opposite of creating your supposed "people who no longer have any use whatsoever to the economy".
Increasing means of production (technology) makes people more valuable. It even tends to enable people to be economically productive who in past times would have been unable to contribute (say, due to a physical disability).

[One Bad Pig]

The really dumb part is that Mexico has an universal health care system so if they wanted free healthcare they could have just... stayed in Mexico. Nobody who isn't well off goes to the US for the health care.

The current wave of children is mostly coming from parts south of Mexico. Mexico itself tends to be rather anti-immigrant, but that doesn't seem to stop people from passing through on their way here.

[Epoetker]

That's enough.

Who is the owner of the property is the most morally relevant issue.

I should say so. Who owns this country?

As for the guest going on a murderous rampage, that could just as well happen if the property owner invites his neighbor on his other side (i.e., not across the border). Or be done by the guy across the border without an invitation. Or be done by the property owner himself.

No. This is a stupid argument. 99% of "property owners" tend to let people they know and trust and can communicate with to their house, usually under well-understood and usually enforced conditions.

because we're talking about persons who have no known evidence of being a mass murderer. In which case it seems you are insisting on prejudice based on where someone is from.

Please do search the Vdare.com archives for "Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome." It's generally a much, much higher risk factor by orders of magnitude among people who have left all the people they know and been placed in a foreign country. Alienation is an actual psychological problem, much more so for people who've been taught to lie as part of their first actions in their new country.

And an argument for prejudice based on statistics could equally be used to argue for locking up all teenage males. or any group that happens to have a statistically higher incidence of violent crime.

And again, you compare apples(teenagers in general) and oranges(violent minorities) while ignoring about 90% of the shared cultural history that mitigates the first and does absolutely no good to the second (a few policemen can handle a single wild party, whereas everyday black hostility requires 24-7 presence simply wherever any large numbers of black people are present.)

Libertarianism is enstupidating you and causing you to make arguments without even trying to pretend that you've considered all the cofactors in your presentation, whether in practice or in statistics. It causes you to completely drop incalculable but no less relevant things like "culture," "upbringing,""relative intelligence," "crime propensity," and other things that economists have difficulty measuring but have very clear real-world consequences. Abandon it if you wish to be taken seriously.

[Joel]

I should say so. Who owns this country?

The individual private land owners. Though there is some land being unjustly held as state or federal lands, which should be homesteaded by private owners.

No. This is a stupid argument. 99% of "property owners" tend to let people they know and trust and can communicate with to their house, usually under well-understood and usually enforced conditions.

I don't disagree. That doesn't conflict with anything I said. If anything it supports it.

because we're talking about persons who have no known evidence of being a mass murderer.

Please do search the Vdare.com archives for "Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome." It's generally a much, much higher risk factor by orders of magnitude among people who have left all the people they know and been placed in a foreign country. Alienation is an actual psychological problem, much more so for people who've been taught to lie as part of their first actions in their new country.

First of all, the hypothetical is indeed talking about a person who has no known evidence of being about to go on a murderous rampage. If it were otherwise for the individual in question, then it would be a different hypothetical.

Secondly, there are studies that have shown that immigrants in the U.S. actually have a lower violent crime rate than non-immigrants in the U.S. There have been other studies finding the opposite. The results for the U.S. are inconclusive. Also the violent crime rate in the U.S. has been falling for decades, while immigration has been increasing (annual immigration, number of immigrants in the U.S., and as a percentage of the population have all been growing for decades).

Thirdly, as I said, judging an individual according to a statistic about a group is prejudice.

Fourthly, even if it is true that most mass murderers are immigrants, mass murderers are still a tiny percentage of violent crime, and an even tinier percentage of the population. Thus it would still be the case that the average immigrant is extremely unlikely to be a mass murderer. (And that statistic would not necessarily contradict immigrants having a lower violent crime rate overall.)

[Darth Executor]

Who is the owner of the property is the most morally relevant issue.

Not really. Owning property does not make everything you do on it moral. If I invite a man to my house for a cup of coffee then slit his throat when he unties his shoes I'm a murderer, even though he was on my property.

As for the guest going on a murderous rampage, that could just as well happen if the property owner invites his neighbor on his other side (i.e., not across the border). Or be done by the guy across the border without an invitation. Or be done by the property owner himself. because we're talking about persons who have no known evidence of being a mass murderer.

Yes, but none of these have anything to do with immigration.

In which case it seems you are insisting on prejudice based on where someone is from.

I disagree that judgement based on data is prejudice. We all have to make judgement calls about people we don't know, in which case biometric data can help us improve our odds of walking out of a situation without being penetrated by bullets/unwanted genitals.

And an argument for prejudice based on statistics could equally be used to argue for locking up all teenage males. or any group that happens to have a statistically higher incidence of violent crime.

You are muddying up issues. I am not suggesting all Mexicans be rounded up and locked away just because they're one of the most murderous and all around criminal people on the planet. I am saying that they should not be allowed to immigrate unless they are needed and can prove themselves useful. Since nobody is entitled to immigration, the analogy with locking people up misfires since one is an assault on innocent people whereas the other is a perfectly reasonable denial of entry into your space. Basically, locking people up constitutes punishment, whereas denial of entry does not. Then there is the issue that locking up all teens would destroy a nation whereas carefully filtering out which Mexicans it will allow in has the opposite effect.

Ricardo's argument applies equally well to groups, such as countries. In fact countries was his primary focus.

His argument can only apply to countries if the countries are at least partially centrally planned. But generally countries themselves don't trade, entities within the countries trade.

And, yes, a market is interconnected, and so people tend to benefit from the benefits of others.

Which people? If the US ships all computer manufacturing to India, its previously American workers don't benefit (since the job pool in the field just got more packed, lowering wages and reducing opportunity). Indian people benefit, but since I don't make public policy to benefit countries whose people aren't my concern, who cares? Rich liberal trash like the currently roasting in hell Steve Jobs benefit, and then use that money to prop up progressive degeneracy, so Satan benefits I guess. I fail to see how me and anyone I care about benefits though.

The merchant who imports cheap goods benefits people domestically (especially the poor) with increasing the supply (and lowering the price) of goods. The merchant who exports goods benefits laborers domestically via the increased demand for their services. The one who accumulates capital increases the productivity of labor and thus increases wages/employment. The one who imports productive resources benefits people domestically by increasing the production and thus supply of goods. And removing the restrictions to international trade means removing the legal barriers to people engaging in that trade directly. Producers allocating resources (e.g., across borders) according to profit-loss signals too increases productivity and the supply of goods. And, again, Ricardo's argument shows how trade increases the supplies of goods due to utilizing comparative advantage. The market is also an engine for disseminating and communicating information required for organizing a complex system of mass production (e.g., via profit and loss signals), and wider trade increases and improves that communication of information.

It's easy to rewrite things so that they look less rosy:

The merchant who imports cheap goods hurts people domestically (especially the poor) with a labor reduction and lowering the minimum wages they have to accept. The merchant who exports goods goods hurts people domestically via decreasing the supply (and increasing the price) of goods. The one who accumulates capital increases the productivity of labor and thus pours millions of dollars into transsexual bestiality porn. The one who imports productive resources buys them from African warlords who have 13 year olds digging them out of the ground with whips cracking at their backs. They are then send to India and China who manufacture them into cheap dollar store trash for your 3 year old to choke on.

That's just government "purchases of goods and services", which it lists in the high 20s. But purchases would not include transfer payments, or mandates on employers, for example. Sweden's total government spending is closer to half of GDP. And has been trending down since 1992 (from about 68%) (see the first line graph here: http://www.economics21.org/commentar...nts-equal-size).

Looking at total spending would not necessarily tell us the size of welfare spending either. As the Heritage site says, "The government is attempting to expand investment in infrastructure and research while reining in welfare spending." (http://www.heritage.org/index/countr...ted-government). For example, if the fall in total spending is due to cuts in welfare, and other areas of spending are increasing, then the cut to welfare was larger than the drop in total spending.

Well, looking at their GDP since 1992 it doesn't seem to have changed much

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/sweden/gdp-growth

According to the Heritage it hasn't changed much either:

http://www.heritage.org/index/visual...=sweden&type=4

And according to this article Sweden has increased welfare efficiency by letting private companies handle some of the actual tasks (like providing health care) while still paying for it:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/20...welfare-state/

So Sweden appears to mostly be an example of what I was talking about to begin with: very high efficiency and fiscal flexibility rather than rigid economic doctrine promoted by libertarians and communists.

I don't know what you mean by "random factors and lumping them together as "laissez-faire"". How do you think they are random or not having to do with laissez-faire? My understanding is that the goal is to take all (or at least the biggest?) factors of laissez-faire vs not, and to combine them into some measure of how laissez-faire the market is overall.

I mean taking stuff like reduced bureaucracy and claiming it as the domain of laissez-faire when in reality I hate both laissez-faire and useless bureaucracy. There is no need for laissez-faire to have private property, or low corruption, or a ton of other crap that has nothing to do with this discussion.

And the reason I originally brought up these indices was not regarding immigration laws but in response to your comments on welfare programs. The argument is usually something like how Sweden's economy isn't much worse off than the U.S. for having a bigger welfare state. The response is that there are other factors that tend to offset the difference--e.g., that Sweden seems to have less oppressive business restrictions, sounder money, and less government corruption. At the very least, the existence of other factors, means the economic size/growth alone can't tell us the effect of the welfare programs.

But the Swedish government sucks up more than half the capital in their country. How would factors like a little less corruption override that behemoth, unless the behemoth is actually more of a chihuahua? It seems to me that if big government was inherently destructive than a colossal 60% of GDP government should bring a country to its knees. And libertarians can claim how much better it would be if a country was fully libertarian, but they have yet to actually produce such a successful country. They did ruin the British Empire with free trade though.

None of this has happened to the Swiss? Where is your information on that?
Your comment here is in response to me listing some ways in which welfare programs make more people more in need of assistance. So you are saying that welfare programs in Switzerland do not make more people reliant on assistance (than there would be in the absence of those welfare programs). I'm curious how you come to that conclusion?

That's exactly what I'm saying. The Swiss have very low unemployment rates. Their human capital is of such high caliber that their people simply don't need, or choose, to spend much time on welfare. The presence of welfare only causes welfare abuse if your country has high levels of moral degeneracy or poverty to begin with, so that people either don't care or have no choice other than to live on welfare.

What you said was "it's been slowly moving in that direction". I countered that, no, it has been moving in the opposite direction. So here you seem to backtrack on your previous statement, agree with me that it has been moving in the opposite direction, but that you believe that it will change directions in the future. If you want to make a prediction of the future not based on the historical trend fine, but it's not reasonable to dismiss my talking about the historical trend when I was just correcting your claim about the historical trend.

No, you just don't understand what I meant by "it's been slowly moving in that direction" and it's honestly getting exasperating trying to get this point across.

Okay, we seem to be misunderstanding each other here. Just to give us something concrete to discuss to perhaps help us figure out the miscommunication, let's consider a hypothetical example:

Yes, this seems like an excellent idea.

Suppose in a given industry, 10 people working on the existing machinery for a week produce 100 widgets.

Then there is some change, (more machinery, better machinery, new techniques, or the like) after which
2 people can produce the same 100 widgets in a week (produce the same with less).
But that's just one way of expressing the effect. We could equivalently phrase it as:
The same 10 people can now produce 500 widgets in a week (produce more with the same).
or: 8 people can now produce 400 widgets in a week (produce more with less)
or: 14 people can produce 700 widgets in a week.

Sounds good so far. Of course, what they can do and what they will do are entirely different things.

You agree that demand for widgets is not fixed. So there's no reason to assume that the producers will simply cut the workforce by a factor of 5 and leave output the same.

Absolutely. Of course, just because the demand is not fixed doesn't mean it's infinite.

On the contrary, the marginal productivity of labor services has increased 5-fold (or looking at it from another direction, the labor cost per widget has fallen by 80%). So the incentive will be for businesses in the industry to want to hire more labor services (tending more to something like the "14 people produce 700 widgets in a week" case).

The problem with this is that it assumes infinite demand. IE: previously you produced 100 widgets, but now your 10 people can produce 500. But what if people don't want any more widgets? What if the previous price of widgets was low enough that anyone who wanted one could get one, and decreasing the price won't do much to increase your sales. What if there simply is no point in producing the 500 widgets? The answer is that the widget workers are now also useless, just like the old machinery you just replaced.

Let's further suppose that similar changes happen to every industry. The overall demand for labor goes up. The labor demand curve(s) shifts to the right, the quantity demanded and the price paid for labor services goes up.

If every industry is meeting peak demand then there is no more extra demand for labor.

This is the opposite of creating your supposed "people who no longer have any use whatsoever to the economy".

Only in a fantasy land where there are billionaires on every corner waiting to buy your 700 widgets.

[Darth Executor]

Thirdly, as I said, judging an individual according to a statistic about a group is prejudice.

Fourthly, even if it is true that most mass murderers are immigrants, mass murderers are still a tiny percentage of violent crime, and an even tinier percentage of the population. Thus it would still be the case that the average immigrant is extremely unlikely to be a mass murderer. (And that statistic would not necessarily contradict immigrants having a lower violent crime rate overall.)

You are missing the point. The reason why Mexican group statistics are relevant is because you insist that any Mexican who wants to go over the border should be allowed to. This this isn't about judging individuals, but judging groups. The way one would judge an individual is through a sane, closed borders immigration system where the value of the immigrant can be discerned on an individual basis and group statistics are a lot less relevant.

[Epoetker]

Even lewrockwell.com is joining in the basic refutation of Joel on libertarian grounds. Best excerpt so far:

The current situation in the United States and in Western Europe has nothing whatsoever to do with “free” immigration. It is forced integration, plain and simple, and forced integration is the predictable outcome of democratic – one-man-one-vote – rule. Abolishing forced integration requires a de-democratization of society, and ultimately the abolition of democracy. More specifically, the authority to admit or exclude should be stripped from the hands of the central government and re-assigned to the states, provinces, cities, towns, villages, residential districts, and ultimately to private property owners and their voluntary associations. The means to achieve this goal are decentralization and secession (both inherently un-democratic, and un-majoritarian). One would be well on the way toward a restoration of the freedom of association and exclusion as it is implied in the idea and institution of private property, and much of the social strife currently caused by forced integration would disappear, if only towns and villages could and would do what they did as a matter of course until well into the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States: to post signs regarding entrance requirements to the town, and once in town for entering specific pieces of property (no beggars or bums or homeless, but also no Moslems, Hindus, Jews, Catholics, etc.); to kick out those who do not fulfill these requirements as trespassers; and to solve the “naturalization” question somewhat along the Swiss model, where local assemblies, not the central government, determine who can and who cannot become a Swiss citizen.

I happen to think the solution a bit more wishful than I'd like when I contemplate the ways it can be abused, but, unlike in your examples, his heart and its goals are most definitely in the right place.

[Joel]

Owning property does not make everything you do on it moral.

Agreed. Rather it is that the owner, and no one else, may morally decide how his property is to be used.

Yes, but none of these have anything to do with immigration.

The point is that the argument in the one case applies in the other cases as well.

You are muddying up issues. I am not suggesting all Mexicans be rounded up and locked away just because they're one of the most murderous and all around criminal people on the planet. I am saying that they should not be allowed to immigrate unless they are needed and can prove themselves useful. Since nobody is entitled to immigration, the analogy with locking people up misfires since one is an assault on innocent people whereas the other is a perfectly reasonable denial of entry into your space. Basically, locking people up constitutes punishment, whereas denial of entry does not. Then there is the issue that locking up all teens would destroy a nation whereas carefully filtering out which Mexicans it will allow in has the opposite effect.

They are both assaults on innocent people, just of different kinds/degree. It's a matter of freedom of property and of association that is being "assaulted". The domestic person and the foreign person want to engage in some innocent interaction (e.g., having a dinner party, renting property, selling property, employment), and both parties' rights are violated by forcibly preventing it. And you are advocating this force based on the presumption of guilt of one of the parties, and requiring proof of not only innocence but some measure of worth.

You are missing the point. The reason why Mexican group statistics are relevant is because you insist that any Mexican who wants to go over the border should be allowed to. This this isn't about judging individuals, but judging groups. The way one would judge an individual is through a sane, closed borders immigration system where the value of the immigrant can be discerned on an individual basis and group statistics are a lot less relevant.

So then in your plan you are judging individuals.

As for "any Mexican who wants to go over the border should be allowed to", I've already agreed that evidence on the individual of violent criminality is a different matter, and I'm only talking about individuals who are at least presumed innocent (it seems our only difference here is that you want to presume guilty until proven innocent). Such a statement would need other qualifications too: E.g., if the border crossing involves trespassing on private property then that's not acceptable. Or what if, hypothetically, there's no one in the country who wants anything to do with the individual; if nobody is willing to sell or rent housing to the individual or otherwise invite the individual onto their property, then the individual would seem to have no choice but to turn around and head back across the border.

I disagree that judgement based on data is prejudice. We all have to make judgement calls about people we don't know, in which case biometric data can help us improve our odds of walking out of a situation without being penetrated by bullets/unwanted genitals.

It may be reasonable to walk out of a situation based on statistics. But on the other hand it is prejudice to judge an individual guilty (to justify the use of force) merely on stats regarding his race.

His argument can only apply to countries if the countries are at least partially centrally planned. But generally countries themselves don't trade, entities within the countries trade.

Which people? If the US ships all computer manufacturing to India, its previously American workers don't benefit (since the job pool in the field just got more packed, lowering wages and reducing opportunity). Indian people benefit, but since I don't make public policy to benefit countries whose people aren't my concern, who cares? Rich liberal trash like the currently roasting in hell Steve Jobs benefit, and then use that money to prop up progressive degeneracy, so Satan benefits I guess. I fail to see how me and anyone I care about benefits though.

It's not a matter of thinking the country being an entity that trades. It's just about drawing lines delineating two groups of people (e.g., geographical lines).
If for example there is trade of wine and cloth across that line, the result will be that the supply of wine and cloth will both be greater on both sides of the line (as compared to the case where neither cloth nor wine cross the line).

The direct benefit to Americans in your example is lower prices for electronics (increased supply). It's not certain that the short term fall in domestic wages is more than proportional to the fall in prices of consumer goods. It's even possible for it to be an increase in real wages, if cpi falls more than proportionally to wages. In the longer run the supply of capital goods will tend to grow, pushing wages up.

It's easy to rewrite things so that they look less rosy:

The merchant who imports cheap goods hurts people domestically (especially the poor) with a labor reduction and lowering the minimum wages they have to accept. The merchant who exports goods goods hurts people domestically via decreasing the supply (and increasing the price) of goods. The one who accumulates capital increases the productivity of labor and thus pours millions of dollars into transsexual bestiality porn. The one who imports productive resources buys them from African warlords who have 13 year olds digging them out of the ground with whips cracking at their backs. They are then send to India and China who manufacture them into cheap dollar store trash for your 3 year old to choke on.

The first two things are not what happens. Because of comparative advantage, the result of trading is that production on both sides of the line increases, and the supply of all the goods traded increases on both sides of the line.
I'm not sure what your reasoning is on the porn one. And didn't you say those foreigners (Africans) aren't your concern? And don't give small things to your 3 year old.

Well, looking at their GDP since 1992 it doesn't seem to have changed much

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/sweden/gdp-growth

According to the Heritage it hasn't changed much either:

http://www.heritage.org/index/visual...=sweden&type=4

And according to this article Sweden has increased welfare efficiency by letting private companies handle some of the actual tasks (like providing health care) while still paying for it:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/20...welfare-state/

So Sweden appears to mostly be an example of what I was talking about to begin with: very high efficiency and fiscal flexibility rather than rigid economic doctrine promoted by libertarians and communists.

We were talking about government spending as a percent of GDP.
Here your first link is GDP growth rate, and your second is Heritage's score on government spending (on a scale of 0 to 100), which looks like it went up over time, has limited data, and appears to perhaps have clamped at 0 in the past. According to their formula, a spending rate of 60% of GDP would have clamped the score to zero (http://www.heritage.org/index/government-spending).
I didn't deny before that if there are inefficiencies that some gains could be made by making it more efficient.

I mean taking stuff like reduced bureaucracy and claiming it as the domain of laissez-faire when in reality I hate both laissez-faire and useless bureaucracy. There is no need for laissez-faire to have private property, or low corruption, or a ton of other crap that has nothing to do with this discussion.

But the Swedish government sucks up more than half the capital in their country. How would factors like a little less corruption override that behemoth, unless the behemoth is actually more of a chihuahua? It seems to me that if big government was inherently destructive than a colossal 60% of GDP government should bring a country to its knees. And libertarians can claim how much better it would be if a country was fully libertarian, but they have yet to actually produce such a successful country. They did ruin the British Empire with free trade though.

Where specifically does "reduced bureaucracy" come into those indices?
For libertarians private property rights are identical with laissez-faire. Libertarians want protection of property rights, enforcement of contracts, an impartial justice system.

You complain that there isn't currently a fully libertarian country. But the point would be that indices which seem to generally correspond with libertarian policies (at least for economic things) correlate well with living standards. Thus it seems that if facts of the existing countries points in any direction it is that more libertarian economic policies overall tend to correlate with higher living standards.

According to the graph, Sweden's government spending dropped from about 68% in 1992 to a little under 50% today. And it seems that the high spending in the 90s did nearly tank Sweden.

And again my point was that "At the very least, the existence of other factors, means the economic size/growth alone can't tell us the effect of the welfare programs."

That's exactly what I'm saying. The Swiss have very low unemployment rates. Their human capital is of such high caliber that their people simply don't need, or choose, to spend much time on welfare. The presence of welfare only causes welfare abuse if your country has high levels of moral degeneracy or poverty to begin with, so that people either don't care or have no choice other than to live on welfare.

If the low unemployment and low poverty is due to their different 'human capital', then it's not necessarily due to (or unaffected by) their welfare programs. The comparison between two countries doesn't tell you whether one factor is the cause, if other factors (such as human capital) are also different.

The question here is whether, given the Swiss people that exist, would the number of needy people be greater or smaller without their welfare programs. That's something that is going to be difficult to impossible to actually measure. It is only by reasoning based on some theory that we judge how things would be different in the alternate universe where they didn't have that welfare program.
The fact of low unemployment for example doesn't tell us whether the unemployment in Switzerland would be higher or lower without the welfare programs.

Welfare abuse is related to only two of the factors I listed of the ways that welfare programs can increase neediness. And even they aren't necessarily matters of moral degeneracy.

Finally, Switzerland has relatively small government spending overall (33.8% of GDP as compared to U.S.'s over 40%). It seems likely that the Swiss welfare programs are smaller than, say, Sweden's, and thus the existence of the Swiss programs will tend to have a smaller effect.

Yes, this seems like an excellent idea.

Suppose in a given industry, 10 people working on the existing machinery for a week produce 100 widgets.


Sounds good so far. Of course, what they can do and what they will do are entirely different things.



Absolutely. Of course, just because the demand is not fixed doesn't mean it's infinite.

The problem with this is that it assumes infinite demand. IE: previously you produced 100 widgets, but now your 10 people can produce 500. But what if people don't want any more widgets? What if the previous price of widgets was low enough that anyone who wanted one could get one, and decreasing the price won't do much to increase your sales. What if there simply is no point in producing the 500 widgets? The answer is that the widget workers are now also useless, just like the old machinery you just replaced.

If every industry is meeting peak demand then there is no more extra demand for labor.

Okay this is what I was arguing against earlier--the idea that there is some peak demand for every industry simultaneously. If that were true, and production were at that point, then increasing the output of any good would make supply exceed demand, and goods would go unsold--not sell at any price. That hypothetical occurrence is referred to as a "general glut", where supply of all goods combined exceeds the demand of all goods. But that can't happen. It would mean that either total human desires have been exceeded (which is absurd) or that total purchasing power in the economy has been exceeded. But purchasing power is always identical with the total supply of all things to be sold, because the sale of X for Y is at the same time, the purchase of Y with X. Thus there is always sufficient purchasing power in the economy to purchase all the existing goods. Because human wants are unlimited and purchasing power grows with productivity of the economy, total demand always grows with the growth in production.

Now it can happen that a particular good is overproduced relative to other goods. Suppose, for example, that productive capacity increased across the board so that output of every good doubled. It's not necessarily the case that that's what consumers wanted. Between the following options:
a) supply of widgets doubles and supply of beef doubles
b) supply of widgets increases negligibly and supply of beef quadruples

it might be the case that consumers desire (b) much more strongly. In that case, the doubling of both supplies will (via consumer demand) make widgets overproduced relative to beef. In which case, the price of widgets will dramatically fall (the price of beef relatively rise). This will be fixed in a market correction, as resources are shifted from widget production to beef production. In practice the doubling of everything doesn't happen overnight. As the economy grows over time, the profit and loss signals will tend to direct the new resources to beef production and not much to widget production.

The point is that total production in the economy can grow, and total demand will grow with it, with the growth being directed to those industries where increases in supply are most urgently demanded. The economy as a whole never hits a peak demand. The increase in capital goods that we are discussing increases the total demand for labor as total production (and demand) grows. The greatest increase in labor demand will be in those industries where increases in supply are most urgently demanded by consumers.