1) Foreign aid and open borders are intensely unpopular in first world democracies.
2) Running on these platforms will cause leftist parties to lose elections while not passing the preferred policies.
3) When leftist parties lose elections the first world welfare state will be smaller then otherwise.
This seems like the most obvious line of argument. The goal of leftists is to transfer resources from rich first worlders to poor first worlders because poor first worlders can vote and thus have he actual political power necessary to take from rich first worlders, while poor third worlders don't have political power.
Now, if you think poor first worlders stealing from rich first worlders is bad, this won't be appealing, but I think you are starting from the viewpoint that they are leftists, so they view it as a good thing.
If you put a gun to his head and forced Matt Yglesias to choose between the welfare state and One Billion Americans, he would choose the welfare state, at least in his role as a pundit.
This is, broadly, my view. If you could guarantee a policy would happen, and made me pick welfare state or fairly open borders, I would pick the open borders every time, for essentially the reasons Caplan lays out.
I don't believe it to be politically possible almost anywhere, however , and certainly not in a democracy.
In particular, residents of a democracy wouldn't vote to give up their own welfare rights, or that or their children, which leaves the position of migrants' children very unclear. Assuming we retain a welfare state for natives, do we have a two tier semi-feudal system in perpetuity? Yes, this is effectively what we have already, just across borders, but I can't see people accepting it, least of all the grand children of the migrants who will (fairly justifiably) feel cut off from their own country.
1) Political stability tends to require some degree of equality. Even if not currentely a democracy, there is still going to be political pressure.
Especially if you have a productive economy at scale based on human capital (you can always find some weird city state, but a real sizable country at the frontier of human accomplishment).
2) Equality is very hard to maintain if the populace has wildly different levels of human capital.
3) The world as a whole has far greater variance of human capital then the modern first world.
So let's say we implemented Bryan's solution and imported a bunch of Africans. I think what would happen is what happened to Detroit when it imported a bunch of Africans. Except it would be writ large and there would be no fed bucks or suburban taxes from outside to keep it afloat.
More like South Africa, another country where the two tier feudal system didn't hold up. You'll note that the worlds richest man and most successful immigrant has basically figured out he doesn't want America to become like his native South Africa.
4) Social Insurance amongst a populace with universally high human capital is fine. It's very nice to live in, creates economic growth that trickles down to the rest of the world, and is politically stable. The OECD model could basically go on forever if we just get people to have kids.
I'm substantially more optimistic than you that environmental factors (pollution, nutrition, education, etc) could very materially reduce the observed global gap in human capital... But I can't see how that would happen in Caplan's deregulated, non-welfare society! At least on a reasonable timeline.
"If you put a gun to his head and forced Matt Yglesias to choose between the welfare state and One Billion Americans, he would choose the welfare state, at least in his role as a pundit."
Hmm... I don't know about Yglesias. My prediction is that he would definitely choose 1 billion Americans but I suppose I can't know for sure.
2) Has admitted he lies in public strategically to achieve political objectives
I would view "One Billion Americans" as marketing and vibes, not necessarily what he believes in. We don't really know what he believes, because the truth is just an instrument to him.
"It's ok that we have no children because we are going to replace ourselves with Africans" isn't really a great idea anyway. It's underwhelming on multiple fronts even if you don't think there is a human capital differential.
I think you're right. In my review of Yglesias's book, in which I was generally favorable, I pointed out that he put way more effort (though not thought) into the idea of subsidizing Americans to have children than he put into the details of how to get more immigration, even though the latter is far more likely to get us anywhere close to 1 billion Americans.
2) Has admitted he lies in public strategically to achieve political objectives
I would view "One Billion Americans" as marketing and vibes, not necessarily what he believes in. We don't really know what he believes, because the truth is just an instrument to him.
"It's ok that we have no children because we are going to replace ourselves with Africans" isn't really a great idea anyway. It's underwhelming on multiple fronts even if you don't think there is a human capital differential.
the leftist generally does not believe that poor americans are better off than poor botswanans because of economic growth, because he believes that market economies do nothing but capture the surplus created by the productive classes. therefore, in the leftist mind, the american welfare state (as well as unions, regulation, and other forms of coercion) are the sole reason why the american poor are better off than the congolese poor
or, in other words, the leftist believes that poor Americans are poor because they are exploited by the upper class, and poor Congolese are poorer because they are more exploited
so to the cosmopolitan leftist, eliminating the welfare state and opening the borders does little or nothing to help the economic situation of the world's poor; the vaults are thrown open but the treasure is already gone. the trade you offer, in his mind, is for the relatively poor to become absolutely poor, in exchange for allowing foreigners the privilege of being exploited here instead of there
the relationship of this view to reality is left as an exercise for the reader
Not sure if you missed a /s flag there but if not, amen. The problem you are missing though is Bryan is a lifelong avowed global Utilitarian, i.e. he believes borders are a counterproductive social construct nor should one respect the rights of people not living in a libertarian Utopia, i.e. a failed state, to continue to live in said functional state and be oppressed by a semi functional government that provides people things they want, i.e. non libertarian nightmares like Liechtenstein which still has an absolute monarch.
I've had some say that, wealth/income inequality leads to crime and that the absent welfare the poor will revolt or clog the streets and they don't say it but they don't want to see what they perseverance as poverty.
Bottom line, so some admit to selfish reasons to help the poor near them.
Most people want to avoid seeing problems because they feel bad. Sometimes they advocate things that actually solve the things, but a lot of the time its just optics
Many people are also simply tribalistic and empathic, and engage in politics mostly via emotions (they assume that the emotions and consesus of it means its reasonable).
And if you go too high level with them, their emotional circuits fry out.
So they have an interest in limiting what they care about
But maybe a more searing indictment of welfarism is that a normal adult human's pursuit of happiness requires one's own moral and intellectual autonomy and a sense of personal responsibility for one's own well-being and for upholding the integrity of mutually beneficial social relationships one is engaged in as much as it requires the consumption of food, water, shelter, healthcare, etc. A system that violates the autonomy of potential donors and that transforms dependency of potential recipients into a legal entitlement is spreading human misery, not curing it.
The maxim that charity begins at home makes sense because the vast majority of people who have trouble earning a living require more than just receipt of material stuff to solve their problems. Real charity derives from a sympathetic and knowledgeable understanding of a recipient's plight, which in turn is something that only comes from a voluntary choice to be charitable and from having a reasonably close personal relationship with the recipient, not from distant, anonymous bureaucrats playing Santa Claus with other people's money.
Prior to the welfare state, immigrant communities traditionally relied on things like fraternal mutual aid or religious charities to provide a "safety net" for themselves. Immigrants and native-born alike were also more strongly incentivized to assimilate to each other's language and norms, since the welfare state's destruction of personal responsibility also reduces the need to bridge differences of identity with bonds of reciprocity.
How practical is the concept of “open borders”? That seems like a hypothetical argument with no basis in reality. How do you get the peoples of all countries in the world to enact/allow open borders?
Would people in your country accept open borders?
So what can you do instead? It seems wealth redistribution via taxation is something that each nation-state can at least enact on its own.
If you can’t do the perfect, by helping all the global poor (by letting all of them come to your country), you shouldn’t let that be the enemy of good, which is helping some of your local poor.
What Bryan doesn’t understand is the actual motives of the leftist-altruists. He should re-read Ayn Rands’ Atlas Shrugged. The altruists don’t care about helping the poor. If they did they would be advocates of laissez capitalism, for nothing has done more for the poor than political freedom and self-reliance. The moral standard for Leftist-altruists is not human flourishing, or evening the flourishing of the poor, it’s *self-sacrifice*. They are focused on whether the rich are sacrificing for the poor and if they are not then they demand more sacrifices. Just look at Mother Theresa as an example of this. Although she is religious she is held as a moral exemplar, even among the secular left, why? Did she raise the living standards of the poor more than anyone else? No! Because that is not what altruism preaches. It would be selfish for the poor to benefit and succeed. The leftist-altruists want to hurt the rich, productive and successful and use the moral code of altruism to guilt the rich so that they can control them psychologically.
The problem though, and one I'm intimately familiar with unfortunately recently, is without a welfare apparatus what happens to those that aren't able to "work for willing employers, rent from willing landlords, and patronize willing merchants", I.e. you are making a presumption there is a willing employer, a willing landlord, or a willing merchant, i.e. a right is meaningless if you can't successfully take advantage of it. To butcher Bastiat, "the right to not sleep under a bridge and own a mansion while working as a CEO and shopping at Tiffany's is magnificent in its equality of opportunity to rich and poor alike.".
At some point a country is rich enough to afford a little inefficiency for the sake of human dignity to do things like mandate a slum lord is required to fix a broken furnace in -50F Milwaukee, force employers to pay someone in a timely manner, or not let the sole local utility provider refuse to provide your house sewage service because you aren't transgendered unicorn willing to pay some approving account middle manager there in kind with sexual currency". Likewise I've lived in third world countries, I don't wish how Somalis with end stage ALS are treated on anyone compared a US welfare state that gives them the dignity to not starve to death or have their families euthanize them regardless of their wishes.
We can gripe all we want but taking that US$70 billion in foreign aid to help poor Taiwanese or Ukrainians would be better spent back home where increasing the SNAP budget by that same amount would have life changing positive effects on nearly a million more Americans.
And that isn't a Leftist argument. You fail to acknowledge even within libertarianism there is a split between near and far and I'd argue in my experience your camp, the universal utilitarian one, is the extreme minority in practice and one that's morally wrong. The market place of ideas does not mean we need to impose libertarian beliefs on communities practicing other ideas, we can simply protect our own and others can come around via emulation and marketing. That said, open borders should exist to facilitate that marketing BUT at no point does a libertarian have any moral duty to consider, much less help, anyone outside our own community even if that's a nation-state.
1. The best thing we who prefer more to less consumption inequality can do for the poor abroad is maintain low restrictions on trade and immigration and make sure our domestic redictribution does not harm growth.
2. Greater domestic equality is beneficial (I claim) to those on top prevents cultural fracture on class lines, promotes political stability
3. Having MORE regard for countrymen than foreigners is not hypocrisy unless you define it that way.
1) Foreign aid and open borders are intensely unpopular in first world democracies.
2) Running on these platforms will cause leftist parties to lose elections while not passing the preferred policies.
3) When leftist parties lose elections the first world welfare state will be smaller then otherwise.
This seems like the most obvious line of argument. The goal of leftists is to transfer resources from rich first worlders to poor first worlders because poor first worlders can vote and thus have he actual political power necessary to take from rich first worlders, while poor third worlders don't have political power.
Now, if you think poor first worlders stealing from rich first worlders is bad, this won't be appealing, but I think you are starting from the viewpoint that they are leftists, so they view it as a good thing.
If you put a gun to his head and forced Matt Yglesias to choose between the welfare state and One Billion Americans, he would choose the welfare state, at least in his role as a pundit.
This is, broadly, my view. If you could guarantee a policy would happen, and made me pick welfare state or fairly open borders, I would pick the open borders every time, for essentially the reasons Caplan lays out.
I don't believe it to be politically possible almost anywhere, however , and certainly not in a democracy.
In particular, residents of a democracy wouldn't vote to give up their own welfare rights, or that or their children, which leaves the position of migrants' children very unclear. Assuming we retain a welfare state for natives, do we have a two tier semi-feudal system in perpetuity? Yes, this is effectively what we have already, just across borders, but I can't see people accepting it, least of all the grand children of the migrants who will (fairly justifiably) feel cut off from their own country.
Yes, it's a nonsense solution.
1) Political stability tends to require some degree of equality. Even if not currentely a democracy, there is still going to be political pressure.
Especially if you have a productive economy at scale based on human capital (you can always find some weird city state, but a real sizable country at the frontier of human accomplishment).
2) Equality is very hard to maintain if the populace has wildly different levels of human capital.
3) The world as a whole has far greater variance of human capital then the modern first world.
So let's say we implemented Bryan's solution and imported a bunch of Africans. I think what would happen is what happened to Detroit when it imported a bunch of Africans. Except it would be writ large and there would be no fed bucks or suburban taxes from outside to keep it afloat.
More like South Africa, another country where the two tier feudal system didn't hold up. You'll note that the worlds richest man and most successful immigrant has basically figured out he doesn't want America to become like his native South Africa.
4) Social Insurance amongst a populace with universally high human capital is fine. It's very nice to live in, creates economic growth that trickles down to the rest of the world, and is politically stable. The OECD model could basically go on forever if we just get people to have kids.
I'm substantially more optimistic than you that environmental factors (pollution, nutrition, education, etc) could very materially reduce the observed global gap in human capital... But I can't see how that would happen in Caplan's deregulated, non-welfare society! At least on a reasonable timeline.
White people in South Africa and Bermuda seem to do reasonably well.
"If you put a gun to his head and forced Matt Yglesias to choose between the welfare state and One Billion Americans, he would choose the welfare state, at least in his role as a pundit."
Hmm... I don't know about Yglesias. My prediction is that he would definitely choose 1 billion Americans but I suppose I can't know for sure.
Keep in mind too that Yglesias:
1) Lies in public
2) Has admitted he lies in public strategically to achieve political objectives
I would view "One Billion Americans" as marketing and vibes, not necessarily what he believes in. We don't really know what he believes, because the truth is just an instrument to him.
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-toady-class-on-average-is-over/
"It's ok that we have no children because we are going to replace ourselves with Africans" isn't really a great idea anyway. It's underwhelming on multiple fronts even if you don't think there is a human capital differential.
I think you're right. In my review of Yglesias's book, in which I was generally favorable, I pointed out that he put way more effort (though not thought) into the idea of subsidizing Americans to have children than he put into the details of how to get more immigration, even though the latter is far more likely to get us anywhere close to 1 billion Americans.
Keep in mind too that Yglesias:
1) Lies in public
2) Has admitted he lies in public strategically to achieve political objectives
I would view "One Billion Americans" as marketing and vibes, not necessarily what he believes in. We don't really know what he believes, because the truth is just an instrument to him.
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-toady-class-on-average-is-over/
"It's ok that we have no children because we are going to replace ourselves with Africans" isn't really a great idea anyway. It's underwhelming on multiple fronts even if you don't think there is a human capital differential.
Frederic Bastiat wrote (and I paraphrase - he wrote it in French, anyway).
The state is that institution by means of which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
He is considered to have been an economist, in retrospect. Whatever he was, he was great (veneration!).
Lol two Bastiat references in the same post on the Internet, a first in history:)
the leftist generally does not believe that poor americans are better off than poor botswanans because of economic growth, because he believes that market economies do nothing but capture the surplus created by the productive classes. therefore, in the leftist mind, the american welfare state (as well as unions, regulation, and other forms of coercion) are the sole reason why the american poor are better off than the congolese poor
or, in other words, the leftist believes that poor Americans are poor because they are exploited by the upper class, and poor Congolese are poorer because they are more exploited
so to the cosmopolitan leftist, eliminating the welfare state and opening the borders does little or nothing to help the economic situation of the world's poor; the vaults are thrown open but the treasure is already gone. the trade you offer, in his mind, is for the relatively poor to become absolutely poor, in exchange for allowing foreigners the privilege of being exploited here instead of there
the relationship of this view to reality is left as an exercise for the reader
Ending the welfare state is the beginning of a better world, not the end of it.
Huh? The obvious answer is that foreigners don't count. Duh. Why would you be concerned about a bunch of foreigners???
(Not that I am for the welfare state either. But this answer is soooooooo obvious)
Not sure if you missed a /s flag there but if not, amen. The problem you are missing though is Bryan is a lifelong avowed global Utilitarian, i.e. he believes borders are a counterproductive social construct nor should one respect the rights of people not living in a libertarian Utopia, i.e. a failed state, to continue to live in said functional state and be oppressed by a semi functional government that provides people things they want, i.e. non libertarian nightmares like Liechtenstein which still has an absolute monarch.
Well, it doesn't matter what he believes. The answer to his question is obvious. He should be smart enough to get it.
I've had some say that, wealth/income inequality leads to crime and that the absent welfare the poor will revolt or clog the streets and they don't say it but they don't want to see what they perseverance as poverty.
Bottom line, so some admit to selfish reasons to help the poor near them.
Most people want to avoid seeing problems because they feel bad. Sometimes they advocate things that actually solve the things, but a lot of the time its just optics
Many people are also simply tribalistic and empathic, and engage in politics mostly via emotions (they assume that the emotions and consesus of it means its reasonable).
And if you go too high level with them, their emotional circuits fry out.
So they have an interest in limiting what they care about
But maybe a more searing indictment of welfarism is that a normal adult human's pursuit of happiness requires one's own moral and intellectual autonomy and a sense of personal responsibility for one's own well-being and for upholding the integrity of mutually beneficial social relationships one is engaged in as much as it requires the consumption of food, water, shelter, healthcare, etc. A system that violates the autonomy of potential donors and that transforms dependency of potential recipients into a legal entitlement is spreading human misery, not curing it.
The maxim that charity begins at home makes sense because the vast majority of people who have trouble earning a living require more than just receipt of material stuff to solve their problems. Real charity derives from a sympathetic and knowledgeable understanding of a recipient's plight, which in turn is something that only comes from a voluntary choice to be charitable and from having a reasonably close personal relationship with the recipient, not from distant, anonymous bureaucrats playing Santa Claus with other people's money.
Prior to the welfare state, immigrant communities traditionally relied on things like fraternal mutual aid or religious charities to provide a "safety net" for themselves. Immigrants and native-born alike were also more strongly incentivized to assimilate to each other's language and norms, since the welfare state's destruction of personal responsibility also reduces the need to bridge differences of identity with bonds of reciprocity.
Where can I buy that mug?
Is a policy of open borders combined with a welfare state a good idea? Which of us has an "open border" policy for our homes?
How practical is the concept of “open borders”? That seems like a hypothetical argument with no basis in reality. How do you get the peoples of all countries in the world to enact/allow open borders?
Would people in your country accept open borders?
So what can you do instead? It seems wealth redistribution via taxation is something that each nation-state can at least enact on its own.
If you can’t do the perfect, by helping all the global poor (by letting all of them come to your country), you shouldn’t let that be the enemy of good, which is helping some of your local poor.
What Bryan doesn’t understand is the actual motives of the leftist-altruists. He should re-read Ayn Rands’ Atlas Shrugged. The altruists don’t care about helping the poor. If they did they would be advocates of laissez capitalism, for nothing has done more for the poor than political freedom and self-reliance. The moral standard for Leftist-altruists is not human flourishing, or evening the flourishing of the poor, it’s *self-sacrifice*. They are focused on whether the rich are sacrificing for the poor and if they are not then they demand more sacrifices. Just look at Mother Theresa as an example of this. Although she is religious she is held as a moral exemplar, even among the secular left, why? Did she raise the living standards of the poor more than anyone else? No! Because that is not what altruism preaches. It would be selfish for the poor to benefit and succeed. The leftist-altruists want to hurt the rich, productive and successful and use the moral code of altruism to guilt the rich so that they can control them psychologically.
The problem though, and one I'm intimately familiar with unfortunately recently, is without a welfare apparatus what happens to those that aren't able to "work for willing employers, rent from willing landlords, and patronize willing merchants", I.e. you are making a presumption there is a willing employer, a willing landlord, or a willing merchant, i.e. a right is meaningless if you can't successfully take advantage of it. To butcher Bastiat, "the right to not sleep under a bridge and own a mansion while working as a CEO and shopping at Tiffany's is magnificent in its equality of opportunity to rich and poor alike.".
At some point a country is rich enough to afford a little inefficiency for the sake of human dignity to do things like mandate a slum lord is required to fix a broken furnace in -50F Milwaukee, force employers to pay someone in a timely manner, or not let the sole local utility provider refuse to provide your house sewage service because you aren't transgendered unicorn willing to pay some approving account middle manager there in kind with sexual currency". Likewise I've lived in third world countries, I don't wish how Somalis with end stage ALS are treated on anyone compared a US welfare state that gives them the dignity to not starve to death or have their families euthanize them regardless of their wishes.
We can gripe all we want but taking that US$70 billion in foreign aid to help poor Taiwanese or Ukrainians would be better spent back home where increasing the SNAP budget by that same amount would have life changing positive effects on nearly a million more Americans.
And that isn't a Leftist argument. You fail to acknowledge even within libertarianism there is a split between near and far and I'd argue in my experience your camp, the universal utilitarian one, is the extreme minority in practice and one that's morally wrong. The market place of ideas does not mean we need to impose libertarian beliefs on communities practicing other ideas, we can simply protect our own and others can come around via emulation and marketing. That said, open borders should exist to facilitate that marketing BUT at no point does a libertarian have any moral duty to consider, much less help, anyone outside our own community even if that's a nation-state.
1. The best thing we who prefer more to less consumption inequality can do for the poor abroad is maintain low restrictions on trade and immigration and make sure our domestic redictribution does not harm growth.
2. Greater domestic equality is beneficial (I claim) to those on top prevents cultural fracture on class lines, promotes political stability
3. Having MORE regard for countrymen than foreigners is not hypocrisy unless you define it that way.
It’s the beginning of a new one
There's plenty of cosmopolitan leftists who are in favor of open borders or de facto open borders, so i don't think this argument really works.