The context that led to the surge in open-borders economics was that free trade was supposed to lead to an equalisation of wages between countries based on significant increases in income
Free-trade doesn't mean open immigration between nations. Free trade means that goods move across borders without taxation or tariffs. If your best and hardest workers aren't in your country, how can you have any type of trade?
They had a hypothesis—free trade would equalise wages across countries. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) provided a test of the hypothesis. The hypothesis was proven untrue.
I live in Texas and I've been watching this for 30 years. If you want to increase wages, you need to increase the means of production. That means US businesses putting factories in Mexico and South America. Instead of fostering growth on our own continent, we pushed those factories into China.
When the evidence was unhelpful, they doubled down on their Theory. Just as the grotesque failures of Marxism has generated endless versions of “real Communism hasn’t been tried” here was “real (market) liberalisation hasn’t been tried”.
Marxism always works as intended. The mass starvations, gulags, re-education, loss of productivity and loss of wages is a feature, not a bug. Marxism is meant to fail.
Being a Person of System has at least two great appeals. First, it potentially provides the basis for wielding a great deal of power over one’s fellow humans.
That is why Marxism/communism always works as written. It gives a great amount of power over everyone else. That's not a bug, it's a feature. It's why communism always fails spectacularly.
Second, it elevates one’s moral and cognitive status: one can dismiss those who reject your System,
Has anyone else noticed that the ongoing rant is "Our democracy," as if their democracy is different from general democracy.
…suggest that the potential migrant attaches a very high psychological value to the social, cultural and physical amenities associating with remaining where he or she was born, including family, friends and familiarity with old surroundings. It then takes a very large improvement in living conditions to justify the decision to move.
If you move someplace to improve your life, why bring all those troubles with you? If a place is better, changing it to where you are from doesn't work. You might as well have stayed home.
One again, from a Texas perspective. I've worked with green card immigrants. They work hard, they learn the language, they follow the laws, and when they get permanent citizenship, they are the most pro-American people I've ever seen.
This has been classed as the “Magic Dirt” hypothesis—once migrants hit the “magic dirt” of the West, they will act like Westerners—but I would call it the perfectly resilient institutions hypothesis.
If this were the case, migrants hitting the shores would instantly learn the language, follow the laws, and be good citizens. But they don't, not always. Some never learn the language, and some don't obey the laws, and some stand at protests waving the flag of the country they came from.
I consider anyone that looks back to before NAFTA to the late 1970s and finds the fact that Corporations coordinated with Federal Government to suppress wages, that all post WWII till 1979 wages increased as worker's productivity increased in nearly 1 to 1 correspondence, at 1979 and since then wages have been intentionally suppresses by corporations while Government false reported inflation rates that benefited pension systems and corporations by allowing them to argue 'cost of living' increases that significantly robbed and impoverished labor and pensioners to the profit of Corporations and Pension management systems, and likely others.
NAFTA was clearly argued well to cause massive destructions to middle-class jobs and a loss to local, State, and Federal tax revenues and destructions of most all businesses that those middle-class jobs supported. All was clearly debated and 'the large sucking sound' is exactly what happened and simply what was intended by powerful forces that profited in that or otherwise benefited - continued destruction of a powerful middle class that refuse to allow enslavement and injustice and unrestrained lies that our powerful desired and now seems to have achieved.
We must learn to see through the flood of lies vomited into us all under extreme pleasure and realize that high sounding intents are never true, and only fool the young, ignorant, and forever retarded and foolish.
“Cost of living” Yeah right. The last two places I’ve worked gave us “Cost of living” raises every two years. By the time we got through paying the increase in insurance and the increase in mamdatory retirement contributions, we hadn’t recieved a raise at all. Meanwhile, all the prices kept rising with no matching real increase in pay.
I would be careful on the productivity point, as there are some very dubious data presentations around (I was caught by one of those myself). The notion that corporations suddenly got much greater power seems dubious. There is a productivity puzzle, but it is, alas, not clear what caused it. What is clear that it did lead to a much greater push for policies to increase efficiency.
This article resonates deeply but I always struggle to articulate well a point you alluded to. You mention using examples instead of Theory but apart from that it’s unclear how to proceed without *any* theorizing. Even following an example must include some theory of what’s analogous and what is not, right?
If it’s not the case that all theorizing is misguided or counterproductive, how do you draw the line?
Fair question. If you are looking at patterns in history, some level of theorising is inevitable. By Theory I don’t mean mechanisms such as comparative advantage, I mean much wider claims about social dynamics. Especially claims that postulate invisible mechanisms (e.g. “structural racism”) or make claims about universal causal processes (e.g. “class struggle”).
Nations are not merely economic units. They are also vessels for language, culture, traditions, customs, cuisine and social norms. People can justifiably be proud of all that, and want all that to prevail.
The US may have the weakest argument against immigration, given that it was long been n immigrant nation, but even in the US there is an American culture. Global homogenization is a goal?
The Japanese should be proud of being Japanese, and desire Japan survive forever. Japan should not invite 40 million foreigners to live in Japan, so they can avert labor shortages. The result would be Japan would not be Japan anymore. Same for Korea.
Always impressed because you are always able to hit the nail directly.
The context that led to the surge in open-borders economics was that free trade was supposed to lead to an equalisation of wages between countries based on significant increases in income
Free-trade doesn't mean open immigration between nations. Free trade means that goods move across borders without taxation or tariffs. If your best and hardest workers aren't in your country, how can you have any type of trade?
They had a hypothesis—free trade would equalise wages across countries. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) provided a test of the hypothesis. The hypothesis was proven untrue.
I live in Texas and I've been watching this for 30 years. If you want to increase wages, you need to increase the means of production. That means US businesses putting factories in Mexico and South America. Instead of fostering growth on our own continent, we pushed those factories into China.
When the evidence was unhelpful, they doubled down on their Theory. Just as the grotesque failures of Marxism has generated endless versions of “real Communism hasn’t been tried” here was “real (market) liberalisation hasn’t been tried”.
Marxism always works as intended. The mass starvations, gulags, re-education, loss of productivity and loss of wages is a feature, not a bug. Marxism is meant to fail.
Being a Person of System has at least two great appeals. First, it potentially provides the basis for wielding a great deal of power over one’s fellow humans.
That is why Marxism/communism always works as written. It gives a great amount of power over everyone else. That's not a bug, it's a feature. It's why communism always fails spectacularly.
Second, it elevates one’s moral and cognitive status: one can dismiss those who reject your System,
Has anyone else noticed that the ongoing rant is "Our democracy," as if their democracy is different from general democracy.
…suggest that the potential migrant attaches a very high psychological value to the social, cultural and physical amenities associating with remaining where he or she was born, including family, friends and familiarity with old surroundings. It then takes a very large improvement in living conditions to justify the decision to move.
If you move someplace to improve your life, why bring all those troubles with you? If a place is better, changing it to where you are from doesn't work. You might as well have stayed home.
One again, from a Texas perspective. I've worked with green card immigrants. They work hard, they learn the language, they follow the laws, and when they get permanent citizenship, they are the most pro-American people I've ever seen.
This has been classed as the “Magic Dirt” hypothesis—once migrants hit the “magic dirt” of the West, they will act like Westerners—but I would call it the perfectly resilient institutions hypothesis.
If this were the case, migrants hitting the shores would instantly learn the language, follow the laws, and be good citizens. But they don't, not always. Some never learn the language, and some don't obey the laws, and some stand at protests waving the flag of the country they came from.
I consider anyone that looks back to before NAFTA to the late 1970s and finds the fact that Corporations coordinated with Federal Government to suppress wages, that all post WWII till 1979 wages increased as worker's productivity increased in nearly 1 to 1 correspondence, at 1979 and since then wages have been intentionally suppresses by corporations while Government false reported inflation rates that benefited pension systems and corporations by allowing them to argue 'cost of living' increases that significantly robbed and impoverished labor and pensioners to the profit of Corporations and Pension management systems, and likely others.
NAFTA was clearly argued well to cause massive destructions to middle-class jobs and a loss to local, State, and Federal tax revenues and destructions of most all businesses that those middle-class jobs supported. All was clearly debated and 'the large sucking sound' is exactly what happened and simply what was intended by powerful forces that profited in that or otherwise benefited - continued destruction of a powerful middle class that refuse to allow enslavement and injustice and unrestrained lies that our powerful desired and now seems to have achieved.
We must learn to see through the flood of lies vomited into us all under extreme pleasure and realize that high sounding intents are never true, and only fool the young, ignorant, and forever retarded and foolish.
“Cost of living” Yeah right. The last two places I’ve worked gave us “Cost of living” raises every two years. By the time we got through paying the increase in insurance and the increase in mamdatory retirement contributions, we hadn’t recieved a raise at all. Meanwhile, all the prices kept rising with no matching real increase in pay.
I would be careful on the productivity point, as there are some very dubious data presentations around (I was caught by one of those myself). The notion that corporations suddenly got much greater power seems dubious. There is a productivity puzzle, but it is, alas, not clear what caused it. What is clear that it did lead to a much greater push for policies to increase efficiency.
This article resonates deeply but I always struggle to articulate well a point you alluded to. You mention using examples instead of Theory but apart from that it’s unclear how to proceed without *any* theorizing. Even following an example must include some theory of what’s analogous and what is not, right?
If it’s not the case that all theorizing is misguided or counterproductive, how do you draw the line?
Fair question. If you are looking at patterns in history, some level of theorising is inevitable. By Theory I don’t mean mechanisms such as comparative advantage, I mean much wider claims about social dynamics. Especially claims that postulate invisible mechanisms (e.g. “structural racism”) or make claims about universal causal processes (e.g. “class struggle”).
Yes. There is something creepily transcendent about a lot of Theory.
Looking forward to the next installment.
I wrote my own less ambitious piece:
https://hoisttheblackflag.substack.com/p/evaluating-immigrants
I liked this post.
Nations are not merely economic units. They are also vessels for language, culture, traditions, customs, cuisine and social norms. People can justifiably be proud of all that, and want all that to prevail.
The US may have the weakest argument against immigration, given that it was long been n immigrant nation, but even in the US there is an American culture. Global homogenization is a goal?
The Japanese should be proud of being Japanese, and desire Japan survive forever. Japan should not invite 40 million foreigners to live in Japan, so they can avert labor shortages. The result would be Japan would not be Japan anymore. Same for Korea.
Are the Poles wrong to be proud of Poland?
Anyone who doubts your first point should watch:
"why intellectuals are f*cking idiots":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqs8D3xfxsc
to see how the obsession with theory over reality fails.