If I understand correctly, over a million people die each year due to air pollution, mostly in very low income countries due to indoor fires of dung or wood.
I have a probably naive criticism. Not everyone can be an advanced service economy and there has to be industrialization and industrial economics. Does the increase in the size of the service sector economy mean there need to be larger industrial economies to take on the tasks they're not performing?
There are a couple of ways to come at this that don't necessarily require that there always has to be industrialization. That is, it's possible to do a lot of environmentally "dirty" industrial tasks more cleanly. But, it's expensive to do so.
In this sort of world (which I think is the real world), it would is possible for the given Kuznetsov curve "cure" to work. Everyone has secure property rights, and enjoys the benefits of increased wealth, so as we become more wealthy, we spend part of that wealth developing more sustainable practices that don't destroy the environment. As we get richer, we want to live next to parks, so we put money into turning factories into non-polluters.
The problem with open immigration is that we don't have secure property rights. Instead of paying the full cost of doing the activity safely in an advanced state, we (for the sake of simplicity) outsource our toxic waste and send it to places where the people can't afford or don't have the right to do anything about it. In exchange, we offer (some) individuals the option to move to our advanced state (with varying strings attached).
This is basically an arbitrage process. The people most likely to pay to protect the environment move to the good environment. The people unable or unwilling get stuck with the toxic stuff, and represent the lowest rung of the pyramid are basically stuck bearing the costs of the unrealized externalities. Which is a fundamentally unjust outcome even under pretty classical economic assumptions.
That seems pretty realistic. I wonder though if the poorer countries would become weather by proxy though some means, including the increased demand for their industrial output. I think industry would pop up where property rights were well enough protected to at least support it, so that may be the case. Even if not, I guess this would be pretty similar to today anyway but with more people better off.
Bryan Caplan, in the public debate on affirmative action admission policies at Harvard, you wrote: "By the way, I support Harvard's *right* to discriminate. But if they're not guilty of discrimination, no one is." (https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan/status/1058008101020942336)
If the libertarian argument for open borders is that any human has a moral right to phsyically enter their nation of choice and purchase housing and accept offers of employment with the same basic legal rights and privileges of citizens. It would seem that a direct analogy would be that anyone has a right to enter a university campus of choice, purchase housing, purchase enrollment in classes, work on their academic career path of choice for full credit, and be entitled to the same basic rights and privileges of any other student.
Your colleague, Tyler Cowen, says that elite universities are designed for "elite reproduction", to foster exclusive social peer groups, and to replicate their culture across the generations rather than just wither away.
It seems hypocritical to assert that it is immoral for a nation to exclude outsiders to preserve a traditional ethnic culture (https://www.econlib.org/you-have-no-right-to-your-culture/), while it's morally allowed for elite universities to exclude outsiders to build and preserve their culture.
One common response is that Harvard is private and private institutions are morally allowed to exclude outsiders. First, this about elite universities in general, including elite public universities, not specifically Harvard. Secondly, while Harvard was a private institution in the past, the modern Harvard is not realistically a private insitution, it is for all practical purposes, a part of government.
I've seen other pundits raise this issue and haven't seen a response from the Open Borders people.
Something is broken in that analogy. Everyone has a right to offer to buy something or purchase a service, and everyone has a right to accept or reject such offers. When I buy housing, I am dealing with a particular owner. When I purchase education, I am dealing with a particular organization. Both are free to accept my offers or reject them. In this framework at least, some third party saying that I can’t buy housing or education from a willing seller is being a busybody. But the seller, whether of housing or eduction services, can discriminate using any criteria. We have mostly agreed that certain sorts of discrimination seem divisive and dumb, while we like others (e.g. merit, test scores, etc.).
So your analogy works if the state, or perhaps the majority of voters, owns an easement on all the land in the US (or only the public spaces and roads?), which allows them to exclude or mandate migrants on arbitrary grounds. It is possible to argue for such an arrangement, but it doesn’t seem that they could be based on free association among adults, rather than paternalism or busybodyism.
You say we like discrimination based on merit and test scores. Not quite. The open borders logic explicitly rejects that and argues there is no moral right to restrict entry and membership to a nation based on measures of merit or test scores. You shouldn't stop someone from purchasing housing or food because of low merit or test scores either.
Many professors and would be professors would be happy to teach any eager students, even those with less than perfect test scores. The University system explicitly stops that from happening.
You are saying a university is similar to a private owner and has the moral right to refuse service. However, universities are basically part of government.
The exclusive college admissions system is designed to be exclusive and exclude many students from purchasing course enrollment in classes with willing professors.
I believe this analogy is excellent and given that many of the open borders advocates are based in academia, it seems quiet relevant, and from what I've seen, they've evaded answering this.
That does not strengthen your analogy. It just points out the incoherence of having a university that is both exclusive and government subsidized. Sure
Y you do not want to conclude that because our education system makes no sense, nothing else needs to make sense either?
We can imagine land owners agreeing among themselves to limit access to exclude persons with criminal records. It is a bit harder to imagine them agreeing to enforce quota limits, or selection of migrants by lotteries. What moral rights does a dissident landowner have, to resist such measures? What rights do the majority landowners have to force dissidents to comply? I suppose if one can’t conceive of such persons having a right to make their own choice, one might consider it a refutation of free association, and proof of the inevitability, if not the legitimacy, of the state.
Very good insight, sir. With regards to point 4, I think a lot of the anti-global-warming crowd do indeed oppose economic progress, in general.
But, another objection I've come across: hWhat about natural resource wealth? Not all rich nations are "post-industrial" like the US. Some of them make a large part of of their income from natural resources, like Qatar. Or Canada.
Since, renewable or not, there is a fixed limit to the amount of resources per capita, more people means less resources per capita.
In Canada, the government charges royalties to oil companies and sells logging rights on public land. So income from these natural resources goes back to the government and, hopefully, indirectly, the people. With more people, presumably, our taxes would be higher.
Or, take, Alaska, for example: They have Alaskan Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) which pays out resource revenues to all Alaskans. More Alaskans = less PFD per person. Alaska does have open immigration with the United States. But many Americans don't want to move to Alaska, even if they get $2000 for doing so. It's not worth it to put up with the cold weather and higher cost of living.
BUT, it may be worth it for say, a Filipino, given the option. Imagine if there was a special program whereby anybody from around the world could immigrate to Alaska. Just Alaska. No other state. A LOT of people would probably jump at the chance. And the PFD per person would be greatly reduced.
hWhat do you say to that? My naïve answer: keyhole solution. Everybody pays taxes but only citizens get to enjoy their share of resource revenues. And make it REALLY hard to become a Citizen. This seems to be hwhat Qatar does... But have y'all any other ideas?
> Everybody pays taxes but only citizens get to enjoy their share of resource revenues. And make it REALLY hard to become a Citizen.
This wouldn't work in the US: even if you make requirements for naturalization much more restrictive, the immigrants' children (if born after they immigrate) would be guaranteed citizenship by the Constitution, so that the dilution of public benefits would happen anyway in the next generation. I'm not sure there's a way to avoid this, in a rich country that lots of people want to permanently immigrate to, other than limiting citizenship to descendants of pre-open-borders citizens & denying it to the descendants of immigrants, which most Western countries would probably want to avoid. Of course, a consistent libertarian would not be discouraged by this, since they would already oppose redistribution of wealth by the government.
"4. Note: If you buy this argument, you should be similarly afraid of economic development in the Third World. So rather than opposing immigration, you should oppose economic progress in general."
I’m assuming this article is a joke, right? Does anyone take it seriously? As Lester says above this is not a libertarian approach. The actual effect would be to raise taxes, raise the crime rate, and make life unpleasant for all but the rich who have their own high walls that will keep out the immigrants.
End the drug war by legalizing drugs. Lower taxes by defunding public schools. But getting rid of the military can’t happen overnight because the military is replacing what free market insurance companies would do which is providing protection services for their customers. So there needs to be a gradual and thoughtful shift before we have a free market defense force. We can and should abolish the DEA because they are an entirely illegal abomination but the military and even the police are different and need to be treated differently.
As Lester explains in detail the same with immigration. This is just crazy talk. Maybe the real goal is to destabilize the current system enough to cause a revolution. But if that’s the real goal it should be honestly stated.
I think that the "contagious disease" objection is weak, as it is something that has to do with the broader category of “international travel”. To decrease the likelihood of an outbreak of a contagious disease, borders would have to be completely sealed, meaning then zero international tourism or business trips for foreigners but also for nationals (unless you are ok with being denied re-entry and getting stuck in Haiti, as a wise man once hypothesized in a nightmare scenario). COVID wasn’t spread by immigrants, COVID was spread by tourists and businesspeople.
As for the “environmental” objection, I think that argument #4 is spot on. As Alex Epstein would put it, denying the progress of millions of human beings because they would pollute more is an anti-human policy.
I wouldn’t put much emphasis, or I would even avoid, the EKC argument. I think that theory is in general short-sighted.
Looking at countries individually to see how they do with regards to pollution as they grow economically, obviates the fact that a lot of the pollution avoided in one place is “exported” to another. In so far as the world doesn’t export pollution to Mars, world pollution should be growing on a per capita basis as world GDP per capita grew.
Yes, there is evidence to the contrary with specific pollutants (e.g., SO2 or CO), however, that could be related to technological progress. As more efficient processes and cleaner technologies are adopted, world emissions of specific pollutants can decline with concurrent economic growth, and that decline can begin to show in richer countries (early adopters) and later in poorer ones. All that, without increased GDP per capita in the poorer ones.
However, if technological progress weren’t able to offset an increased world production, we would end up with an increase of certain pollutants per capita (or in general negative environmental externalities), as is the case with CO2.
Thought experiment-- what if the computer revolution had pre-dated the woman’s movement. Women become a vanguard of family entrepreneurship, raise large families who take for granted that home and business are allies in survival and flourishing. Children were educated at home in practical and intellectual development. Three generations returned to the home and when families separated they remained only a short distance apart. Children and adults often worked outside the home for defined periods and purposes. Now that connectivity, microelectronics and work from home are culturally feasible, let history run back !
Great response. I think other criticisms of open borders to address would be infrastructure. I don’t recall you addressing it in your book. For instance, we have limited resources (e.g., housing).
The environment is a value only relative to mans life as judged by mans mind. There is no mystical, value intrinsic to the environment and known by intuition, not the mind. Pollution is relative to man's life. A lava flow that burns trees is not pollution. Its nature. There is no such fact as polluting the environment. There is only the polluting of man. Environmentalism pollutes man. That is the explicit goal of environmentalists. Mans life requires changing nature, eg, plowing a field for wheat. Man must adapt nature for his life or die.
Yes, but some of my changes poison you and some of them don’t. Okay, sure, the poison is in the dose, and there has been an overreaction to just the idea of emitting byproducts into the air or water. But there is still a motte somewhere near that bailey. We don’t always know what the effects of emissions will be. But that calls for better (and more honest) research, not preemptive bans.
Polluting other people has long been a justification for lawsuits. It doesnt justify the environmerntalist hatred of industry and their primitive, mystical nature-worship. Fossil fuels are a need of man until nuclear is decriminalized and it becomes dominant. FF are needed for heat, cooling,transportation, ending drought, and a surprisingly large variety of everyday products. More people are killed by cold than heat. Despite a 1 degree warming over the last 100? years, environmenalist deaths have dropped to near zero. Leftists hate industry, especially capitalist industry. and have for centuries, starting maybe w/Rousseau. They want the impossible Garden Of Eden and not even that. They want sacrifice as an end in itself, w/no values. They cant have the Garden Of Eden and are filled w/rage. Destruction is their basic idea. Look at California. I wanted to return there but now I wonder. The Enlightenment is not even a memory for most people. And the pathetic alternative is a mindless zero named Trump and Republicans who stand for nothing.
See Alex Epsteins vids on fossil fuels on Improve The Planet. Hes a philosopher of energy.
>But there is still a motte somewhere near that bailey
“Package-dealing” is the fallacy of failing to discriminate crucial differences. It consists of treating together, as parts of a single conceptual whole or “package,” elements which differ essentially in nature, truth-status, importance or value....Package-dealing employs] the shabby old gimmick of equating opposites by substituting non-essentials for their essential characteristics, obliterating differences....A typical package-deal, used by professors of philosophy, runs as follows: to prove the assertion that there is no such thing as “necessity” in the universe, a professor declares that just as this country did not have to have fifty states, there could have been forty-eight or fifty-two—so the solar system did not have to have nine planets, there could have been seven or eleven. It is not sufficient, he declares, to prove that something is, one must also prove that it had to be—and since nothing had to be, nothing is certain and anything goes.
Not sure who/where motte/bailey came from, but it refers to an annoying style of internet argument, where an outrageous undefendable claim is made (the bailey), and when challenged, the offender will instead defend a related but distinct position that no one disagrees with (the motte). An exaggerated example would be, “all white people are guilty of racism” “what? That's nuts” “what??!! You think racism is okay??!!”
If I understand correctly, over a million people die each year due to air pollution, mostly in very low income countries due to indoor fires of dung or wood.
Is that Kuznets curve really counting that?
I have a probably naive criticism. Not everyone can be an advanced service economy and there has to be industrialization and industrial economics. Does the increase in the size of the service sector economy mean there need to be larger industrial economies to take on the tasks they're not performing?
There are a couple of ways to come at this that don't necessarily require that there always has to be industrialization. That is, it's possible to do a lot of environmentally "dirty" industrial tasks more cleanly. But, it's expensive to do so.
In this sort of world (which I think is the real world), it would is possible for the given Kuznetsov curve "cure" to work. Everyone has secure property rights, and enjoys the benefits of increased wealth, so as we become more wealthy, we spend part of that wealth developing more sustainable practices that don't destroy the environment. As we get richer, we want to live next to parks, so we put money into turning factories into non-polluters.
The problem with open immigration is that we don't have secure property rights. Instead of paying the full cost of doing the activity safely in an advanced state, we (for the sake of simplicity) outsource our toxic waste and send it to places where the people can't afford or don't have the right to do anything about it. In exchange, we offer (some) individuals the option to move to our advanced state (with varying strings attached).
This is basically an arbitrage process. The people most likely to pay to protect the environment move to the good environment. The people unable or unwilling get stuck with the toxic stuff, and represent the lowest rung of the pyramid are basically stuck bearing the costs of the unrealized externalities. Which is a fundamentally unjust outcome even under pretty classical economic assumptions.
That seems pretty realistic. I wonder though if the poorer countries would become weather by proxy though some means, including the increased demand for their industrial output. I think industry would pop up where property rights were well enough protected to at least support it, so that may be the case. Even if not, I guess this would be pretty similar to today anyway but with more people better off.
Basically, is this a fallacy of composition?
Bryan Caplan, in the public debate on affirmative action admission policies at Harvard, you wrote: "By the way, I support Harvard's *right* to discriminate. But if they're not guilty of discrimination, no one is." (https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan/status/1058008101020942336)
If the libertarian argument for open borders is that any human has a moral right to phsyically enter their nation of choice and purchase housing and accept offers of employment with the same basic legal rights and privileges of citizens. It would seem that a direct analogy would be that anyone has a right to enter a university campus of choice, purchase housing, purchase enrollment in classes, work on their academic career path of choice for full credit, and be entitled to the same basic rights and privileges of any other student.
Your colleague, Tyler Cowen, says that elite universities are designed for "elite reproduction", to foster exclusive social peer groups, and to replicate their culture across the generations rather than just wither away.
It seems hypocritical to assert that it is immoral for a nation to exclude outsiders to preserve a traditional ethnic culture (https://www.econlib.org/you-have-no-right-to-your-culture/), while it's morally allowed for elite universities to exclude outsiders to build and preserve their culture.
One common response is that Harvard is private and private institutions are morally allowed to exclude outsiders. First, this about elite universities in general, including elite public universities, not specifically Harvard. Secondly, while Harvard was a private institution in the past, the modern Harvard is not realistically a private insitution, it is for all practical purposes, a part of government.
I've seen other pundits raise this issue and haven't seen a response from the Open Borders people.
Something is broken in that analogy. Everyone has a right to offer to buy something or purchase a service, and everyone has a right to accept or reject such offers. When I buy housing, I am dealing with a particular owner. When I purchase education, I am dealing with a particular organization. Both are free to accept my offers or reject them. In this framework at least, some third party saying that I can’t buy housing or education from a willing seller is being a busybody. But the seller, whether of housing or eduction services, can discriminate using any criteria. We have mostly agreed that certain sorts of discrimination seem divisive and dumb, while we like others (e.g. merit, test scores, etc.).
So your analogy works if the state, or perhaps the majority of voters, owns an easement on all the land in the US (or only the public spaces and roads?), which allows them to exclude or mandate migrants on arbitrary grounds. It is possible to argue for such an arrangement, but it doesn’t seem that they could be based on free association among adults, rather than paternalism or busybodyism.
You say we like discrimination based on merit and test scores. Not quite. The open borders logic explicitly rejects that and argues there is no moral right to restrict entry and membership to a nation based on measures of merit or test scores. You shouldn't stop someone from purchasing housing or food because of low merit or test scores either.
Many professors and would be professors would be happy to teach any eager students, even those with less than perfect test scores. The University system explicitly stops that from happening.
You are saying a university is similar to a private owner and has the moral right to refuse service. However, universities are basically part of government.
The exclusive college admissions system is designed to be exclusive and exclude many students from purchasing course enrollment in classes with willing professors.
I believe this analogy is excellent and given that many of the open borders advocates are based in academia, it seems quiet relevant, and from what I've seen, they've evaded answering this.
That does not strengthen your analogy. It just points out the incoherence of having a university that is both exclusive and government subsidized. Sure
Y you do not want to conclude that because our education system makes no sense, nothing else needs to make sense either?
We can imagine land owners agreeing among themselves to limit access to exclude persons with criminal records. It is a bit harder to imagine them agreeing to enforce quota limits, or selection of migrants by lotteries. What moral rights does a dissident landowner have, to resist such measures? What rights do the majority landowners have to force dissidents to comply? I suppose if one can’t conceive of such persons having a right to make their own choice, one might consider it a refutation of free association, and proof of the inevitability, if not the legitimacy, of the state.
Very good insight, sir. With regards to point 4, I think a lot of the anti-global-warming crowd do indeed oppose economic progress, in general.
But, another objection I've come across: hWhat about natural resource wealth? Not all rich nations are "post-industrial" like the US. Some of them make a large part of of their income from natural resources, like Qatar. Or Canada.
Since, renewable or not, there is a fixed limit to the amount of resources per capita, more people means less resources per capita.
In Canada, the government charges royalties to oil companies and sells logging rights on public land. So income from these natural resources goes back to the government and, hopefully, indirectly, the people. With more people, presumably, our taxes would be higher.
Or, take, Alaska, for example: They have Alaskan Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) which pays out resource revenues to all Alaskans. More Alaskans = less PFD per person. Alaska does have open immigration with the United States. But many Americans don't want to move to Alaska, even if they get $2000 for doing so. It's not worth it to put up with the cold weather and higher cost of living.
BUT, it may be worth it for say, a Filipino, given the option. Imagine if there was a special program whereby anybody from around the world could immigrate to Alaska. Just Alaska. No other state. A LOT of people would probably jump at the chance. And the PFD per person would be greatly reduced.
hWhat do you say to that? My naïve answer: keyhole solution. Everybody pays taxes but only citizens get to enjoy their share of resource revenues. And make it REALLY hard to become a Citizen. This seems to be hwhat Qatar does... But have y'all any other ideas?
> Everybody pays taxes but only citizens get to enjoy their share of resource revenues. And make it REALLY hard to become a Citizen.
This wouldn't work in the US: even if you make requirements for naturalization much more restrictive, the immigrants' children (if born after they immigrate) would be guaranteed citizenship by the Constitution, so that the dilution of public benefits would happen anyway in the next generation. I'm not sure there's a way to avoid this, in a rich country that lots of people want to permanently immigrate to, other than limiting citizenship to descendants of pre-open-borders citizens & denying it to the descendants of immigrants, which most Western countries would probably want to avoid. Of course, a consistent libertarian would not be discouraged by this, since they would already oppose redistribution of wealth by the government.
"4. Note: If you buy this argument, you should be similarly afraid of economic development in the Third World. So rather than opposing immigration, you should oppose economic progress in general."
Correct.
I’m assuming this article is a joke, right? Does anyone take it seriously? As Lester says above this is not a libertarian approach. The actual effect would be to raise taxes, raise the crime rate, and make life unpleasant for all but the rich who have their own high walls that will keep out the immigrants.
End the drug war by legalizing drugs. Lower taxes by defunding public schools. But getting rid of the military can’t happen overnight because the military is replacing what free market insurance companies would do which is providing protection services for their customers. So there needs to be a gradual and thoughtful shift before we have a free market defense force. We can and should abolish the DEA because they are an entirely illegal abomination but the military and even the police are different and need to be treated differently.
As Lester explains in detail the same with immigration. This is just crazy talk. Maybe the real goal is to destabilize the current system enough to cause a revolution. But if that’s the real goal it should be honestly stated.
>Any related topics you think I should address?
Despite what Open Borders argues, that open borders is not the most libertarian solution and that there would be a devastating deluge of people: https://jclester.substack.com/p/immigration-and-libertarianism
Totally confirms my bias!
I think that the "contagious disease" objection is weak, as it is something that has to do with the broader category of “international travel”. To decrease the likelihood of an outbreak of a contagious disease, borders would have to be completely sealed, meaning then zero international tourism or business trips for foreigners but also for nationals (unless you are ok with being denied re-entry and getting stuck in Haiti, as a wise man once hypothesized in a nightmare scenario). COVID wasn’t spread by immigrants, COVID was spread by tourists and businesspeople.
As for the “environmental” objection, I think that argument #4 is spot on. As Alex Epstein would put it, denying the progress of millions of human beings because they would pollute more is an anti-human policy.
I wouldn’t put much emphasis, or I would even avoid, the EKC argument. I think that theory is in general short-sighted.
Looking at countries individually to see how they do with regards to pollution as they grow economically, obviates the fact that a lot of the pollution avoided in one place is “exported” to another. In so far as the world doesn’t export pollution to Mars, world pollution should be growing on a per capita basis as world GDP per capita grew.
Yes, there is evidence to the contrary with specific pollutants (e.g., SO2 or CO), however, that could be related to technological progress. As more efficient processes and cleaner technologies are adopted, world emissions of specific pollutants can decline with concurrent economic growth, and that decline can begin to show in richer countries (early adopters) and later in poorer ones. All that, without increased GDP per capita in the poorer ones.
However, if technological progress weren’t able to offset an increased world production, we would end up with an increase of certain pollutants per capita (or in general negative environmental externalities), as is the case with CO2.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&country=OWID_WRL~Low-income+countries~High-income+countries~Lower-middle-income+countries~Upper-middle-income+countries
Thought experiment-- what if the computer revolution had pre-dated the woman’s movement. Women become a vanguard of family entrepreneurship, raise large families who take for granted that home and business are allies in survival and flourishing. Children were educated at home in practical and intellectual development. Three generations returned to the home and when families separated they remained only a short distance apart. Children and adults often worked outside the home for defined periods and purposes. Now that connectivity, microelectronics and work from home are culturally feasible, let history run back !
Great response. I think other criticisms of open borders to address would be infrastructure. I don’t recall you addressing it in your book. For instance, we have limited resources (e.g., housing).
I’m still an advocate of open borders though.
Build baby build.
Κοιτάμε μπροστά το μέλλον μας είμαστε εμείς οι νέοι να φτιάξουμε αυτόν κόσμο μαθαινοντας και στοιχεία από τους παλιούς ήταν δασκαλοι για το μέλλον μας
The environment is a value only relative to mans life as judged by mans mind. There is no mystical, value intrinsic to the environment and known by intuition, not the mind. Pollution is relative to man's life. A lava flow that burns trees is not pollution. Its nature. There is no such fact as polluting the environment. There is only the polluting of man. Environmentalism pollutes man. That is the explicit goal of environmentalists. Mans life requires changing nature, eg, plowing a field for wheat. Man must adapt nature for his life or die.
Yes, but some of my changes poison you and some of them don’t. Okay, sure, the poison is in the dose, and there has been an overreaction to just the idea of emitting byproducts into the air or water. But there is still a motte somewhere near that bailey. We don’t always know what the effects of emissions will be. But that calls for better (and more honest) research, not preemptive bans.
Polluting other people has long been a justification for lawsuits. It doesnt justify the environmerntalist hatred of industry and their primitive, mystical nature-worship. Fossil fuels are a need of man until nuclear is decriminalized and it becomes dominant. FF are needed for heat, cooling,transportation, ending drought, and a surprisingly large variety of everyday products. More people are killed by cold than heat. Despite a 1 degree warming over the last 100? years, environmenalist deaths have dropped to near zero. Leftists hate industry, especially capitalist industry. and have for centuries, starting maybe w/Rousseau. They want the impossible Garden Of Eden and not even that. They want sacrifice as an end in itself, w/no values. They cant have the Garden Of Eden and are filled w/rage. Destruction is their basic idea. Look at California. I wanted to return there but now I wonder. The Enlightenment is not even a memory for most people. And the pathetic alternative is a mindless zero named Trump and Republicans who stand for nothing.
See Alex Epsteins vids on fossil fuels on Improve The Planet. Hes a philosopher of energy.
>But there is still a motte somewhere near that bailey
? Is that a Brit saying?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
Very interesting.
“Package-dealing” is the fallacy of failing to discriminate crucial differences. It consists of treating together, as parts of a single conceptual whole or “package,” elements which differ essentially in nature, truth-status, importance or value....Package-dealing employs] the shabby old gimmick of equating opposites by substituting non-essentials for their essential characteristics, obliterating differences....A typical package-deal, used by professors of philosophy, runs as follows: to prove the assertion that there is no such thing as “necessity” in the universe, a professor declares that just as this country did not have to have fifty states, there could have been forty-eight or fifty-two—so the solar system did not have to have nine planets, there could have been seven or eleven. It is not sufficient, he declares, to prove that something is, one must also prove that it had to be—and since nothing had to be, nothing is certain and anything goes.
-Ayn Rand
Not sure who/where motte/bailey came from, but it refers to an annoying style of internet argument, where an outrageous undefendable claim is made (the bailey), and when challenged, the offender will instead defend a related but distinct position that no one disagrees with (the motte). An exaggerated example would be, “all white people are guilty of racism” “what? That's nuts” “what??!! You think racism is okay??!!”