From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Tue Jun 20 2000 - 23:44:07 MDT
> > > Frankly I don't find immigration laws to be inhumane.
> > > Why are they a bad idea?...
> > > ...societies that produce excessive numbers of people should pay the
> > > costs of those problems themselves, not pawn them off on others.
> >
> > I'm surprized at you, Michael. Open borders are a bedrock of the free
> > market economy, and a simple consequence of granting the same basic
> > rights of free travel and association to those born on one side of an
> > imaginary line as we do to those born on the other. Nationalism is
> > unbecoming rational minds. "Excessive people" are a resource to be
> > cherished, not a burden.
>
> I don't look at it as a nationalist issue, its an economic AND ecological issue.
> Open borders for TRADE are a bedrock of a free market economy. The existing
> members of a free market economy should also have the ability to control the
> quality of life in their communities. If people living elsewhere want a high
> quality of life like we do, then they should work to recreate our success where
> they are at. Part of that is re-engineering their society. Societies that
> produce more people than can be sustained on their resources not only degrade
> their own quality of life, by exporting the results of their bad social
> reproduction policies to our countries, they not only perpetuate a dumb idea
> where they are at, but they export people who will perpetuate those same dumb
> ideas elsewhere.
The only "dumb idea" here is that resources are finite, and that it is
even possible to "overpopulate" an area. Julian Simon and others have
done a good job of debunking those. But even if it /is/ true, free
market solutions including basic travel can work to solve those
shortages as well. Travel is fundamental to trade. I have as much of a
human right to buy land or rent a house or take a job in Mexico as any
Mexican does to do the same here; any restriction on either is a
restriction of trade just as much as a tarriff or embargo. And if one
side or the other has a culture that makes the other side more attractive,
travel is one way for the market to express that preference and make
incentives for change.
> I see this all the time, with flatlanders moving up here to the sticks. THey
> want the high quality of life that we have living up here, but once they get
> here they go about trying to change our community and its laws into the same
> sort of shithole they came from, then they wonder why everything has gone to
> shit. When my parents moved up here from Massachusetts when I was a kid, they
> understood this, and we learned to live like the people around here lived.
The problem causing that is government, not immigration. In a free
market, the flatlanders could only screw up their own land, not yours.
> Opening your borders with any economy that does not behave as yours does only
> opens your own economy up to being degraded by its association. Take our
> relationship with China, for example. We as a nation are benefitting from the
> slave labor practices of the People's Republic of China. Their cheap products
> are keeping our inflation low. But our morals and ethics have been degraded, we
> are externalizing the cost of the products we want onto the backs of the chinese
> laborer who is not paid, or is paid little for his forced labor. I personally
> try to boycott any chinese made product. If I know a product was made in China,
> I won't buy it. I would guess though that probably half of the stuff in my
> apartment was made in china, or parts or resources for the stuff was made in
> china.
Human rights abuse is a problem; foreign "behavior" is not, unless it is
actually crime. Of course foreign customs are different--if that bugs
you, that's your problem, not theirs, unless they actually trespass on
your rights somehow. Their markets "behave" differently--of course. If
they work better, learn from them. If they work worse, outcompete them.
That's what freedom is about. But a free market does work better when
we fight to protect the rights of everyone to participate; but just
closing our eyes (and borders) to the problem won't help anyone.
> If we opened immigration to everyone that wanted to live here, we'd
> shortly have 6 billion people living in the US, starving to death.
Oh, poppycock. We'd have 6 billion people making the biggest,
strongest, cleanest, most diverse, most magnificent economy the world
has ever seen, assuming the government doesn't intervene to screw it up.
But even that is less likely--with an influx of immigrants, states
would be falling over themselves to eliminate welfare laws and
other handouts so that the people would /have/ to be productive.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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