ajax18 wrote: ↑Sun Jul 09, 2023 1:30 pm
Alright Res Ipsa, tell me exactly what you would do with the border if you were king for the next 20 years. Do you think your policies would be in the best interest of native born American citizens? Perhaps that's the difference between Trump supporters and Chamber of Commerce Republicans. Trump offered an America first agenda and economic nationalism. Whereas establishment Republicans offered global capitalism and supported whatever is best for the employer. I still think those who support cheap labor on the right an cheap votes on the left are in the minority. Most Americans want a border and want it enforced. They want everify. They want control of how many immigrants are brought in.
Or give up on capitalism and move somewhere with a government run command economy.
We don't have a pure capitalist economy. We've got socialism mixed with open borders and crony capitalism. Even Trump said he would be happy to put a big door on the wall for people to come in legally. With the economy Trump had, we were going to need people to come in because a certain amount of immigration does help the economy and US standard of living. All we're saying is that we think the voters have the right to decide how many come. Immigration should be based upon merit not on who is most willing to break the law and get here first. And yet this is viewed by the elites as a threat to "democracy." It seems like the threat to democracy is the elites who want to usurp the will of the people on immigration.
The difficulty you've had in finding your friend a job is not evidence that there aren't enough jobs.
Than what is it in your view?
Both grandparents lived in the same tiny town in southern Alberta -- one of three either founded or heavily populated by Mormon immigrants from the U.S.: Cardston, McGrath and Raymond. Didn't you ever wonder why one of the earliest LDS temples was built out on the windswept prairies of nowhere Alberta? It's a fascinating little bit of history, should you take the time to read up on it. But it's more complicated than that: my father's father was born in Smoot, Wyoming -- a small rural town in Star Valley. When he was just an infant, his family emigrated to Canada. So, that's two successive generation of immigrants -- once to Canada, once to the U.S.
I definitely enjoyed hearing your early Mormon history. Maybe for another thread, but I'd be interested to hear your view of the Missouri/Mormon war.
Well, firstly, I would give no preference to the interests of "native born American citizens" and "American citizens." There is only one class of American Citizens. Period.
Literally hundreds of people smarter than me have tried to resolve the immigration dilemma, without success. I can guarantee that it would be something between closing the border and leaving the border wide open. The trickiest part of your question is figuring out what is in the best interest of Americans. Because literally everything is a trade off.
If you were to adopt a "pure capitalist, free market" economy today, you would have to open the borders and drop all impediments to foreign trade. Because, if you drink the free market kool-aid, any action by government that affects the economy at all will make everyone worse off. But you don't want that. What you want is protectionist policy that makes the U.S, better off than the rest of the world. So, you're for tariffs on foreign trade. And you're for using border policy to raise wages in the U.S. for its citizens.
But there's a problem. the U.S. Economy isn't isolated from the world economy, and it never will be. You live in a world where capital (owned by the elites you hate) can flow pretty freely from country to country as the owners of capital continually seek to maximize their profits. Under pure capitalism, the owners of capitalism get to do just that -- conduct their business operations in any way they choose for the purpose of maximizing profits.
So, under pure capitalism, if you use government action to raise wages in the United States by restricting immigration, the cost of labor rises relative to every other country in the world. If the cost differential is sufficient, the owners of capital will move their business operations to countries where they can maximize their labor costs. Why does Apple use circuit boards made in China? They cost less because the labor is cheap. You can complain about Apple all you want, but by using circuit boards made in China, Apple is acting just like we would expect a business to act in a capitalist system.
Although you aim your grievances at liberals and democrats, most of your actual objections are to free market capitalism. Economic Nationalism is anti-capitalist. And until you appreciate that your main grievances are anti-capitalist, you're going to continue to take wildly inconsistent positions. (I know you've heard this before -- I think EAllusion pointed it out first.)
The only thing that free markets care about is efficiency, which in market theory results in the greatest good for the total population. But it doesn't care at all how that good is distributed. Markets are perfectly happy with any distribution of income and wealth. Let's say that the entire world adopted free market capitalism at the same time. The result would be the immediate fall of all wages in the U.S., as countries with cheaper labor competed with the U.S. without any government-imposed interference. If that results in wages that are too low to live on the in the U.S., markets don't care. In fact, markets are happy to let people starve to death in order to raise wages everywhere to the point that workers can subsist.
So, lesson one. You are not a free market capitalist. You advocate government taking away the freedom of both owners of capital and providers of labor in the interest of nationalism. That's the government taking away people's freedoms just as much as making them wear masks. Nationalism is anti-capitalist, and that makes you an anti-capitalist. So, you can stop screaming about government taking away people's freedom because you are in favor of it.
Lesson two: it doesn't matter whether we have pure, free market capitalism. As long as there are markets, they will exert forces in the form of economic incentives no matter what you do. If you use government action to restrict the supply of labor, wages will go up, but so will inflation. Businesses will move away in search of cheaper labor. If you try to use the government to prevent businesses from moving away, owners will close up shop and move to another country that will welcome them. If you enact knee-jerk changes economic issues like immigration, you're highly likely to end up with the opposite of what you wanted.
Lesson three: You can sneer all you want about globalism, but whether you like it or not, the United States is part of a global economy. You can't change that, regardless of how you label yourself. Pretending that the United States can maintain or improve its standard of living by isolating itself from the rest of the world is pure fantasy. Pretending that tariffs on China improve the lives of Americans is pure fantasy. Regardless of what comes out of Trump's pie hole, tariffs are a tax paid by U.S. citizens. They make U.S. products less competitive, with the wave of farm bankruptcies initiated by Trump's tariffs being a good example.
Lesson four: there are no simplistic solutions to immigration. Period. Build the wall is a slogan, not a serious policy. Screaming about "open borders" that aren't open borders is demagoguery, not policy.
Lesson five: when government action creates an underground, illegal economy, it's time to change the policy. You say that you want people to work. You want them to work until they die. Yet, you are also in favor of putting people who want to work in jail. You want to turn people into criminals because they want to work and improve their lives and those of their families. That's insane, and it is having and will continue to have completely predictable results: an illegal, underground economy that will, all by itself, create crime and violence.
So, let's put our heads together, drop the grievance theater, and try to design an approach to immigration that doesn't involve turning workers into criminals. Take seriously the likely response by market forces. And design something smart that addresses two problems: people entering the United States to work without a workers visa going forward and people who are already here who have been working, maybe for years. Start with what we know from experience -- turning people who want to work into criminals creates both crime and violence.
Unemployment at below 3% is a signal of too many available jobs, not too few. That's why I suggested you read up on the relationship between unemployment and inflation. Conservative economist Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize for it (along with others, I think). The notion is that, even at what should be considered full employment, there will not be zero unemployment as we define it. There will always be some "friction" in the economy, represented by things like people who voluntarily or involuntarily leave a job and are searching for another. Thus, the economy has a theoretical "natural" rate of unemployment, which exists but is not necessarily stable over time. There was lots of work done on how people's perception of the economy may affect the natural rate of unemployment at any time. The consequence of unemployment going below whatever the natural rate is at at any given time is inflation. I've seen lots of estimates of the natural rate of unemployment, but I don't think I've ever seen on at less than 4%.
So, the current historically low unemployment rate is a signal that there are too few workers to satisfy the demand for employment. Or, to phrase it another way, there are too many available jobs. Employers are bidding each other up for workers, which raises nominal worker wages to the point that the economy experiences inflation. that's the fed has raised interest rates. It's solution to inflation is to decrease the number of available jobs and throw people out of work. The interest increases haven't affected unemployment that much to date, so that's why I say your friend's problem is not evidence that their aren't enough jobs. Only the employers that he has submitted applications to so far know why they did not hire him. But one job-seeker's experience is not evidence of the state of the economy.
One thing that you have to keep in mind if you don't want to sound delusional about economic issues. 2008 was a massive economic failure. We were lucky that it wasn't catastrophic. The recovery that started during the Obama presidency and continued through 2019 during the Trump presidency was largely enabled by something neither of them can take credit for: the fed kept interest rates extremely low for a period of time that would have been unthinkable in the past. That's clearly as sign that the economy was badly damaged by the 2008 failure and a recovery was possible only through interest rates that would have resulted in extreme inflation in previous years. So, yammering on about the Trump economy simply says that you don't understand economics. Obama and Cpngress jump started the recovery in 2008, but it was the fed that kept it going. Obama, Trump and Congress just didn't screw it up in the following years. And despite your hysterics, the economy has recovered from 2020, and most definitely is not the disaster you keep claiming it is. The pandemic severely disrupted the global economy, and it takes some time for supply and demand to get back into anything resembling a balanced state. Our employment is half of that in the EU and Great Britain, and I believe inflation is comparable. Per capita GDP continues to increase at rates comparable to the rates before the pandemic rates, which means we're all better off, right?
I haven't attempted to learn the details of the Mormon-Missouri war, so I don't have much of an opinion other than that the whole thing was a cluster whatever fueled by the insanity of the time around slavery. But what would you do if a bunch of liberal bluestaters moved from their urban clusters to take over the government in Florida? Would you shoot? Or would you just let it happen? Given today's political polarization, I'll bet some Floridians would shoot. And that's without slavery being an issue. So, I can understand why it happened. But I certainly don't approve of what happened. Americans killing Americans over political differences is bad, regardless of motive.
I'm happy to talk about my family, and I'm glad you found it interesting. I'm proud of my heritages, both Canadian and American.
