If you can look at Western Europe and think that mass immigration by people from the middle east and north Africa is going to work out just fine and that the institutions will not be altered drastically, I don't know what to say. It is incredibly naive to think that people are "all the same" sitting here in the West. Western values are the weird ones. People raised in other cultures can be extremely different in their core values, and that's not even counting people with actual malevolent intent.
I am well aware of the problems Europe is having. My basic view (which differs somewhat from Caplan's) is that welfare statism, laws against private discrimination, and interventionist obstacles to entrepreneurship, etc. are major obstacles to assimilation and to moral progress. Maybe conservatives need to rediscover the importance of personal responsibility instead of falling into the trap of trying to solve problems caused by welfarism and interventionism with yet more welfarism and more interventionism. Left to their own devices, politicians who only care about winning the next election aren't going to save you from long-term economic and cultural decline.
What I find naive are denials of the various factors I mentioned that shape cultural evolution, and the strength cultures forged in freedom display in influencing more backward cultures abroad as well as at home. Why do you suppose the radical jihadists and the Chinese Communists put so much effort into coercively imposing their cultural values on dissidents? If Western values are so weird, why do they fear those values so much?
It sounds like you are suggesting that a huge mass of immigrants will simply see the light and decide not to modify our institutions? It doesn't appear to be so, but even if I concede that they might, the consequences of being wrong about this are irreversible.
Hell, even among native born Americans, many people are unaware that the prosperity they enjoy is a function of our individualistic, enlightenment values. The whole left of the Democrat party would gladly kill the goose laying our golden eggs.
No, I'm saying that the direction of cultural evolution depends on things like whether or not you have a welfare state. Bad institutions and bad ideas can corrupt both immigrants *and* the native-born and spawn intractable conflicts between them in spite of widely-shared innate psychological motivations.
I agree that miseducation of the native-born is a huge problem, but I don't see MAGA Republicanism as promoting individualistic Enlightenment values either. American conservatives used to denounce welfarism and used to reject tribalistic appeals to identity, but now they won't touch Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits for the native-born (which, as I've explained in many articles I've written for mises.org, are the principal cause of America's deindustrialization over the past sixty years) and openly promote themselves as a Christian revival movement, something which even many Christians find off-putting.
It is no secret that in America today there is a titanic highly-politicized culture war being waged among the native-born, and that immigrants are just another set of pawns in this struggle and that the 18th century principles of individual liberty, individual virtue, rule of law, and democratic accountability are taking heavy casualties in the cross-fire.
1) immigrants, even high earning ones like Asians, are more supportive of the welfare state then white natives. This can be seen in individual issue polling and actual election results.
2) If the USA had less immigration for instance california would still be a red state and Romney would have won handily in 2012 (it was the immigrants who rejected his message, whites voted 59% for him). We probably wouldn’t have the ACA without immigration.
3) talking about reforming SS and never doing it was a pointless waste of political capital for the GOP. It’s better to just be honest than to lose votes for no results.
4) the trump 2.0 admin has made massive cuts to Medicaid, marketplace subsidies, Medicare advantage rates, among others i won’t bore you with.
He’s going to pay a huge political price for trillions in healthcare savings and I don’t see you fiscal conservatives giving shit credit for it.
5) red states have massively lower welfarism then blue states over the parts of their budget they control, and vote against federal welfarism even when it’s imposed on them by blue states (many red states could make a windfall expanding mediciaid at the Feds expense but have refused).
6) overall immigrants move politics to the left and increase government.
The parties adjust to the desires of the median voter so they can get to 50.1% and changing the demographics of the country changes the median voter.
The truth is that the vast majority of voters of all races refuse to tolerate *any* cuts to the existing welfare state, and large majorities even want to expand government healthcare coverage. Whites are not significantly better than other races with respect to a willingness to cut existing entitlement benefits.
One can argue that blue states are worse than red states and that various blue constituencies are worse in terms of wanting to further expand the welfare state beyond its current extent (with age arguably being a better predictor than race), but that is all a moot point. My point is that the welfare state we've already got has deindustrialized America and has been wrecking the standards of living of the productive classes. The red partisans refuse to confront these basic truths, instead blaming imports of foreign workers and foreign goods for problems that were made in America.
Don't kid yourself with the absurd notion that Trump is fixing any of this. The One Bill (which I've wrote about at https://mises.org/mises-wire/one-bloated-brobdingnagian-bill ) merely doubled down on the existing fiscal irresponsibility; and now his infernal war-mongering means that the warfare state will catch up with the welfare state in accelerating America's economic decline.
There is a reason healthcare stocks are down like 50% this year. ACA subsidy cuts, Medicare advantage having 0% payment trend instead of 5%, coding changes, etc are all real. Even if work Medicaid requirements end up being less impactful then the CBO score, it won’t be worth zero. Try telling an employee at United Healthcare that Trump hasn’t made meaningful cuts.
I will also remind you that places like Texas and Florida not expanding Medicaid is pure ideology. It’s electorally and economically retarded for them not to get in on the “rape the federal government on Medicaid” game. They just don’t it because the right thinks it’s wrong.
While I’m against defense spending, trumps hardly a dramatic break in the trendline under Biden and defense spending remains around post ww2 lows as a % of gdp.
Look, you’ve got to face the fact that in 2012 we had an election whose primary issue was fiscal responsibility (entitlement reform and the ACA) and Romney/Ryan lost. They got 59% of the white vote and lost! If the USA had the demographics of the Reagan era they would have won in a landslide with 59% of the white vote, but we don’t have Reagan demographics anymore.
Romney/ryan lost because Hispanics and Asians only voted for them 27%, and there are a lot more of them now. That’s a fact. The reason Trump took over the party and won elections that they lost is because he got non-whites to vote for him by moving left on economics and giving up talk of reforming entitlements. You can call Hispanics rapist lazy trash…as long as you let them keep their ACA subsidies! If he loses them it will largely be because he forgot this and actually cut healthcare.
It’s a problem that voters like retirement benefits and hate having status quo benefits taken away. But it’s clearly a worse problem amongst non-whites than whites and most new entitlements come from the left.
"So what is a libertarian to do if the tide of immigration is so strong that peaceful assimilation of native and immigrant nationalities doesn’t appear to be possible, a scenario that Mises concedes would be the case for Australia if it permitted unrestricted immigration by Asians? Mises admits that an inundation scenario would likely result in the native-born nationality becoming a minority in its own homeland, and thus likely subject to the horrors of national persecution. On the other hand, Mises wrote at length in works like Nation, State, and Economy, and Omnipotent Government warning that the fragmentation of the world via trade and migration barriers strongly incentivizes comparatively overpopulated “have not” powers to resort to war to gain access to territories and natural resources denied to them by the comparatively underpopulated powers. Destructive global wars sparked by national autarky are not such a great option for libertarians either"
The second option is no longer a real concern because of low and falling birth rates, except in Africa countries which are in no position to be invading anyone outside their continent.
"“It is clear that no solution of the problem of immigration is possible if one adheres to the ideal of an interventionist state, which meddles in every field of human activity, or to that of the socialist state. Only the adoption of a liberal program could make the problem of immigration, which today seems insoluble, completely disappear. In an Australia governed according to liberal principles, what difficulties could arise from the fact that in some parts of the continent Japanese and in other parts Englishmen were in the majority?"
But the whole question is whether a country that was majority X would actually be governed by liberal principles.
"Raico’s thesis fails to appreciate that immigrants are no less human than the native-born are, and are psychologically just as responsive to the profound culture-altering effects of liberation from cultural repression when they are finally able to breathe free in a liberty-loving land."
No actually, it's megapolitics, as described in the book "The Sovereign Individual". "Magic air" is just a lazy way of describing the way that institutions and mark structures shape human behavior and cultures themselves.
Indian state of Bihar just banned selling meat near schools since "meat consumption leads to violent tendency in children". Similar views are quite common among vegetarian Hindus and the resurgent Hindu parties harass meat sellers in all possible ways.
Beef is already banned in India nation-wide. Any concentration of Hindus is likely to agitate for beef ban wherever they find themselves politically significant.
Hey man, all you gotta do is redraw the national borders when the demographics change, doncha know? Once the Hindus get their own little enclave, I'm sure they won't leave it for a better place, just like they have no reason to ever leave India.
There is one minor error in the article you should be aware of. The fourth paragraph, beginning with "Free immigration would appear to be in a different category . . . " and ending with ". . . what would become of the liberal society of Switzerland under a regime of 'open borders.'” is actually a part of the quote of Ralph Raico's criticism of Mises.
> humans are naturally compelled by their own innate psychological nature to revise their values away from the extremes of illiberalism when they have the freedom to do so
Hitler didn't have illiberal values because he lacked the "freedom" to revise his values. Illiberal values are just common and people can retain them.
Nobody denies that there are psychological differences between individuals, or that reason has to operate in conjunction with innate motivations to generate better values and better social results.
The question then becomes why 96% of the population that is normal sometimes gets enslaved by the 4% who are sociopaths in spite of the rule of law and democratic accountability. Widespread acceptance of coercive concentrations of power, wealth, and authority by the 96% creates an obvious target for the 4% to get on top. Liberty, private property, free speech, arms in the hands of the people, etc. function as an insurance policy against tyranny. So too does a populace that is educated well enough to maintain a healthy skepticism towards any self-proclaimed "leader" figure posing as a savior, towards any broad-brush demonization of unpopular minorities and foreigners, and towards any promise of magical solutions to its problems.
Regarding population genetics, for the vast majority of traits there is always greater genetic differences existing within a given national population than there is between it and other populations. The most reliable genetic markers of ethnic identities have no discernible phenotypic expression at all.
The claim that particular individuals are mere puppets of the culture they were raised in is false. Individuals can and do stray from the values they were raised with, and of course cultures themselves change over time, and deviant subcultures can sometimes sustain themselves within a culture, which implies that there have to be causal factors that regulate the success of both the teachings and the straying from teachings in being propagated to the next generation.
I'm not saying that genetics is the only non-rational factor guiding such cultural evolution, but it does create constraints on what sorts of non-rationally-accepted teachings are propagated successfully.
We know cultural influence. Muslim children grow up Muslim. Hindu vegetarian children stay vegetarian. Genetic influence is speculation and needs large studies to find even smallest effects.How much genetic difference between Palestinians and Israelis?
Yeah? Impress me with the degree to which Moslem immigrants to the United States, or other countries of the West, have given up the oppression of women.
And remember, to deface synagogues and vandalize Jewish businesses and assault Jews and occasionally assassinate people or blow things up and so on does not require the active participation of the average Moslem. It takes ... well, look around you. How average are they?
> Impress me with the degree to which Moslem immigrants to the United States, or other countries of the West, have given up the oppression of women.
They have though, to a large extent! look at the survey data in Muslims in the US vs. the rest of the world -- selection+assimilation is doing a lot of work. And look at how Muslim women can live in the US vs in Muslim theocracies, it is a great improvement!
Muslim immigrants from Muslim-majority countries gradually leave Islam over a few generations. From Nathan Smith's The Islamaphobic Case for Open Borders:
"Islam in the West still loses about one-fourth of each Muslim-born generation. At that rate of member loss, less than half of the descendants of Muslims would still be Muslim after three generations."
And there isn't much flow of non-Muslim to Muslim in the West (or globally).
Also, a non-negligible percentage of people that unfortunately find themselves born in Islamic theocracies want out and privately disavow Islam, but cannot due to death sentences for apostasy. Those that privately disavow Islam would be much better off in a place where they are free to not be Muslim.
When an 80 iq cousin fucker “leaves Islam” he doesn’t become a middle class weird white person.
He becomes a secular low iq thug usually with higher rates of broken families and drug use than when they were part of a religious community.
Islam is a shit religion, but it’s not the problem. The underlying genetics are the problem. Taking away the religion won’t improve behavior. It won’t even solve the clannishness issues (they can still act as a clan based on ethnicity without religion).
American Hindus eschew beef exactly as they do back home. More so, they continuously agitate for vegetarianism and would certainly restrict meat trade if they ever come anywhere near power, just as they have done back home.
What a load of delusional academic waffle. What an academic thinks is real and would be nice about what they think the immigrant is and thinks. No they aren't and no they don't, not most of them. Certainly not since mass imigration from the Islamic World, where Islam is thway people are controlled and their way of thining froman early age.
Head nodding, script reciting, trance iducing, cult belief. Wholly inappropriate ina secular sovoiety whose evoluation, development and continuation of our current civilised existence and properity has been achieved by not thinking like this, rather by te freedom to question evrything and everybody. They don't work like that..
I would prefer to believe the evidence of my eyes and ears regarding this, what is real, on the ground, rather than what academics say they believe. The majority of immigrants to the United Kingdom, and in much of Europe now, are Islamic peoples of largely mediaeval cultures who are governed by beliefs, controlled by priests and organised crime imported from their home cultures (also see Italians, Catholicism and the Mafia in the US), and come from an even worse male dominated and even more intolerant primitive value systems. They have no interest in learning or adapting to our culture, as their actions in their ghettos show.
They share little with the majority of the host society, except they consume the modern services we have built and abuse our benefits culture, they congregate in ghettos, which they control and our own police cannot function properly within, because the Police are scared and use DEI excuses to avoid confronting the primitive evil of the ghettos. Which leads to the criminal Islamic rape and drug gangs and murders that are also well reported. The women in particular are appallingly treated, and complicit in this, our own white women have been widely abused by the primitive islamic male immigrants, or their male children born here, who are no better, unassimilated in any significant way. What have they to gain by adjusting to the host culture in the ghetto controlled by their home culture?
All a matter of record across the country. This is the reality that has happened, not your idealistic prattle about what values and beliefs you impute to these primitives. Of course the few educated, more secular and rational elites of these cultures seek careers within the host society, and always have, but not the majority dregs that have followed. In haste now...
If you think that they mostly just want to integrate into our broad society, rather than make it like theirs, respecting a secular open and free culture and merge as you describe, you are SO wrong. The early immigrants into America are nota good exapmle because there was no real host culture to adopt, unless it was Native Indian, just gun fuelled greed, murder and land grabs, and some dodgy protestant religions, unwanted in Europe seeking to control people using irrational religion in isolated communities according the the words of a non existent god they made up, the Mormon, Amish, etc. Lately the cults like WACO, Scientology ......... you appear to be living in a virtual reality that I do not see reported in the mainstream media or elsewhere, rather the opposite. If you are motvraised with the necessary formation, you cannot nderstand the way your new host'd culture works.
If you are religious its impossible, IMO. Because you are unable to know what is real and what are fairy tales, so irrational, without critical thinking, but that's another story.
When the immigrants home countries have become educated and secular, perhaps even rational in the process, although that is not a given in the West, where religions are still followed by the weak minded under cultural pressure, in spite of no evidence to support its beliefs, then perhaps we can absorb them without serious problems.
BUt not the primive products of mediaeval religious societies whose only acceptance of modern technological socieies are in our guns, cars, TVs, social security hand outs and the lenience of our courts when presented with their widespread and primive crimality, by our secular laws they have no respect for. etc. This the diversity we should welcome? No thanks.
So I reject your assertions because they are based on your opinions about a minority of these people, probaly the ones you may know because of where they are in the educated elite of society, not representative of the immigrant majority? RIght or wrong?
I believe the evidence of my eyes and ears as regards the ability or even the will to intergate of majority of these immigrant populations, and what is measured to be the case. They want us to adapt to their culture, put the clocks back 100's of years to primitive/religious. NO thanks.
I reject your luxury opinion, coccooned in academe at taxpayers expense, with no consequences for your opinions, except perhaps another grant, a University press release. or a book read only by other elite "thinkers" at our expense, privileged, mostly work shy parasites on the taxpayer who think their elite luxury thoughts should be those of the majority who have to live with reality?
Out here is the real world, where we must earn our living being good about what we do and say and not screwing up, most of the people most affected by this mass invasion of mediaeval primitives and the ghettoisation of our cities have to live here, and are made to pay for the likes of you?
I bet the mass of imigrants don't impact on your community, physically or culturally. The few that are there simply merge in and belong, because they are the educated elites, the exceptions in their own land.
The others don't fit in because they cann't. The evil people who control the ghetto, using irrational faith the masses are required to follow by the gheto enforcers, will never let them adapt to a modern secular, free, independent, culture that they are still at least 200 years of social development away from. And in fact, once the immigrant ghetos are established, change is slowed versus the home country, as is obvious in India now, for example.
We should take the best of other cultures, by all means. Equalyy certainly reject and eject the dregs, most are not clever or able enough to function independently in a modern secular society outside the cuture they have been raised to be dependent upon to exist at all. Another way is already beyond them. Our way. They are beyond help on time scales of several human life times. Have you been and seen where they come from? Don't get me started. In haste. It's probaly worse than I describe. IMO
My dear friend Ralph Raico was wrong about this. Mises was right. People say that we can't recognize the rights of "outsiders" to move here as long as we have a welfare state. But how will we get rid of the welfare state if we shelter it from the inevitable stresses and strains?
I was disturbed by the fact that a higher percentage of foreign born New Yorkers voted for Mamdani than native born New Yorkers.
I also saw a guy who interviewed a couple of guys from Venezula in New York and he asked them who the wanted to win and they said Mamdani. I found that shocking.
I agree that am argument can be made and hypotheses established where one concluded they massive immigration wouldn't destroy the miracles of good institution
Similar theories can be had concluding that immigration will destroy liberal institutions.
On the have waving method, this is a draw.
But the question is where is the higher risk?
Should we assume that the rich countries efficient institutions are the default? Or that they are fragile and can easily be destroyed?
And what are the utility calculations for such gambles?
There are empirical data to back up the existence of cultural phenomena like assimilation, the influence of cognitive dissonance, etc., but you are correct in noting that there are different causal explanations offered for it. In the social sciences, one can't do controlled experiments or even make direct observations and measurements the most relevant variables (which exist as mental states inside individual brains).
To get past mere hand-waving, one can only fall back on the logical implications of a small set of generalizations that are self-evident truths (which is the procedure favored by Ludwig von Mises) and on very broad (though fallible, especially if your observations lack a cross-cultural perspective) generalizations one makes about man's psychological nature based on indirect inferences about other people's mental states.
It's worth noting that state promises of economic security relieve individuals of having to take personal responsibility for providing future goods and reserves of purchasing power for themselves, so they incentivize a shift of time and reservation preferences towards lower savings rates. Since Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in the mid-1960s, personal savings rates relative to national income have fallen by half, while the remaining savings are largely being consumed by gigantic deficits driven mostly by the growth of welfare state expenditures. America is no longer in a position to increase its stock of capital goods as a consequence of this.
This is true. Alas, the studies on the cultural persistence compare descendants from different cultures, so all should have the same influence from the welfare state.
If the studies are done incorrectly, yes. Like if they compare temporal changes between new immigrants that need to habituate to the new system and natives which did habituate already. My read is that this isn't the case....
Depends on the culture. I don't see much difference between the Hispanic immigrants culture wise and most Americans. Same with Asian cultures. Different, but not in a way that harms Americans and has many benefits as well.
I see a huge difference between Russian immigrants and Americans. It's a huge culture clash
Even bigger difference between Muslim culture and American. This one is mutually exclusive. They are so fundamentally opposed they can't coexist peacefully with each other
"a right of self-determination that enables peaceful changes of the borders of democratic nation-states, so that borders can stay aligned to the changing national character of the territories they enclose"
On the contrary, this supposed "right of self-determination" has proved to be mischievous and has given nothing but unprecedented disasters in 20C. Sudetenland is only one example.
How is Mises going to ensure that a nation-state would peaceably dissemble itself? State are hardly known to voluntarily make themselves small. This goes against the basic ingrained features and nature of state.
"humans are naturally compelled by their own innate psychological nature to revise their values away from the extremes of illiberalism when they have the freedom to do so"
I think this is one of the key claims of the article, but there is not enough done to back it up.
Frequent bryan caplan readers are familiar with the claim (backed up by evidence by bryan), that this is not the case? see "anti-market bias", "make work bias", the old "what is seen and what isn't seen"
I am pro massivelly increasing immigration.
I haven't yet seen a good explanation for why such relativelly (economically) liberal values are practiced by big western governments in spite of human nature. I think it is a great thing, maybe a great coincidence, but until I understand what causes it I do see some value in being very careful to not disturb it. The second trump government has shown us how it's a lot less robust than we like to imagine
>"humans are naturally compelled by their own innate psychological nature to
>revise their values away from the extremes of illiberalism when they have the
>freedom to do so"
>
>I think this is one of the key claims of the article, but there is not enough done
>to back it up.
That is a fair criticism; the original draft of this article was written with a 1500 word limit in mind, making it difficult to spell out all the qualifications and nuances of this statement let alone spell out the justifications for it.
There is a large literature in psychology that deals with cognitive dissonance and with the correlations between happiness and personal autonomy. There are also social scientists who investigate things like cultural changes in immigrant communities. America also has a long history of immigration and mutual assimilation that's impossible to reconcile to the theory that people are just puppets of the national and religious cultures of their homelands and don't change under the influence of pluralistic, unrepressed social conditions of a free society.
If you can look at Western Europe and think that mass immigration by people from the middle east and north Africa is going to work out just fine and that the institutions will not be altered drastically, I don't know what to say. It is incredibly naive to think that people are "all the same" sitting here in the West. Western values are the weird ones. People raised in other cultures can be extremely different in their core values, and that's not even counting people with actual malevolent intent.
I am well aware of the problems Europe is having. My basic view (which differs somewhat from Caplan's) is that welfare statism, laws against private discrimination, and interventionist obstacles to entrepreneurship, etc. are major obstacles to assimilation and to moral progress. Maybe conservatives need to rediscover the importance of personal responsibility instead of falling into the trap of trying to solve problems caused by welfarism and interventionism with yet more welfarism and more interventionism. Left to their own devices, politicians who only care about winning the next election aren't going to save you from long-term economic and cultural decline.
What I find naive are denials of the various factors I mentioned that shape cultural evolution, and the strength cultures forged in freedom display in influencing more backward cultures abroad as well as at home. Why do you suppose the radical jihadists and the Chinese Communists put so much effort into coercively imposing their cultural values on dissidents? If Western values are so weird, why do they fear those values so much?
It sounds like you are suggesting that a huge mass of immigrants will simply see the light and decide not to modify our institutions? It doesn't appear to be so, but even if I concede that they might, the consequences of being wrong about this are irreversible.
Hell, even among native born Americans, many people are unaware that the prosperity they enjoy is a function of our individualistic, enlightenment values. The whole left of the Democrat party would gladly kill the goose laying our golden eggs.
No, I'm saying that the direction of cultural evolution depends on things like whether or not you have a welfare state. Bad institutions and bad ideas can corrupt both immigrants *and* the native-born and spawn intractable conflicts between them in spite of widely-shared innate psychological motivations.
I agree that miseducation of the native-born is a huge problem, but I don't see MAGA Republicanism as promoting individualistic Enlightenment values either. American conservatives used to denounce welfarism and used to reject tribalistic appeals to identity, but now they won't touch Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits for the native-born (which, as I've explained in many articles I've written for mises.org, are the principal cause of America's deindustrialization over the past sixty years) and openly promote themselves as a Christian revival movement, something which even many Christians find off-putting.
It is no secret that in America today there is a titanic highly-politicized culture war being waged among the native-born, and that immigrants are just another set of pawns in this struggle and that the 18th century principles of individual liberty, individual virtue, rule of law, and democratic accountability are taking heavy casualties in the cross-fire.
1) immigrants, even high earning ones like Asians, are more supportive of the welfare state then white natives. This can be seen in individual issue polling and actual election results.
2) If the USA had less immigration for instance california would still be a red state and Romney would have won handily in 2012 (it was the immigrants who rejected his message, whites voted 59% for him). We probably wouldn’t have the ACA without immigration.
3) talking about reforming SS and never doing it was a pointless waste of political capital for the GOP. It’s better to just be honest than to lose votes for no results.
4) the trump 2.0 admin has made massive cuts to Medicaid, marketplace subsidies, Medicare advantage rates, among others i won’t bore you with.
He’s going to pay a huge political price for trillions in healthcare savings and I don’t see you fiscal conservatives giving shit credit for it.
5) red states have massively lower welfarism then blue states over the parts of their budget they control, and vote against federal welfarism even when it’s imposed on them by blue states (many red states could make a windfall expanding mediciaid at the Feds expense but have refused).
6) overall immigrants move politics to the left and increase government.
The parties adjust to the desires of the median voter so they can get to 50.1% and changing the demographics of the country changes the median voter.
You can see the actual 2024 polling data regarding Social Security with breakouts by race, etc. here:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/americans-views-of-government-aid-to-poor-role-in-health-care-and-social-security/#views-on-the-future-of-social-security
and Medicare/Medicaid here:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/10/most-americans-say-government-has-a-responsibility-to-ensure-health-care-coverage/
The truth is that the vast majority of voters of all races refuse to tolerate *any* cuts to the existing welfare state, and large majorities even want to expand government healthcare coverage. Whites are not significantly better than other races with respect to a willingness to cut existing entitlement benefits.
One can argue that blue states are worse than red states and that various blue constituencies are worse in terms of wanting to further expand the welfare state beyond its current extent (with age arguably being a better predictor than race), but that is all a moot point. My point is that the welfare state we've already got has deindustrialized America and has been wrecking the standards of living of the productive classes. The red partisans refuse to confront these basic truths, instead blaming imports of foreign workers and foreign goods for problems that were made in America.
Don't kid yourself with the absurd notion that Trump is fixing any of this. The One Bill (which I've wrote about at https://mises.org/mises-wire/one-bloated-brobdingnagian-bill ) merely doubled down on the existing fiscal irresponsibility; and now his infernal war-mongering means that the warfare state will catch up with the welfare state in accelerating America's economic decline.
There is a reason healthcare stocks are down like 50% this year. ACA subsidy cuts, Medicare advantage having 0% payment trend instead of 5%, coding changes, etc are all real. Even if work Medicaid requirements end up being less impactful then the CBO score, it won’t be worth zero. Try telling an employee at United Healthcare that Trump hasn’t made meaningful cuts.
I will also remind you that places like Texas and Florida not expanding Medicaid is pure ideology. It’s electorally and economically retarded for them not to get in on the “rape the federal government on Medicaid” game. They just don’t it because the right thinks it’s wrong.
While I’m against defense spending, trumps hardly a dramatic break in the trendline under Biden and defense spending remains around post ww2 lows as a % of gdp.
Look, you’ve got to face the fact that in 2012 we had an election whose primary issue was fiscal responsibility (entitlement reform and the ACA) and Romney/Ryan lost. They got 59% of the white vote and lost! If the USA had the demographics of the Reagan era they would have won in a landslide with 59% of the white vote, but we don’t have Reagan demographics anymore.
Romney/ryan lost because Hispanics and Asians only voted for them 27%, and there are a lot more of them now. That’s a fact. The reason Trump took over the party and won elections that they lost is because he got non-whites to vote for him by moving left on economics and giving up talk of reforming entitlements. You can call Hispanics rapist lazy trash…as long as you let them keep their ACA subsidies! If he loses them it will largely be because he forgot this and actually cut healthcare.
It’s a problem that voters like retirement benefits and hate having status quo benefits taken away. But it’s clearly a worse problem amongst non-whites than whites and most new entitlements come from the left.
All agency lies with the Europeans. Non-whites have no agency.
Maybe read the article.
"So what is a libertarian to do if the tide of immigration is so strong that peaceful assimilation of native and immigrant nationalities doesn’t appear to be possible, a scenario that Mises concedes would be the case for Australia if it permitted unrestricted immigration by Asians? Mises admits that an inundation scenario would likely result in the native-born nationality becoming a minority in its own homeland, and thus likely subject to the horrors of national persecution. On the other hand, Mises wrote at length in works like Nation, State, and Economy, and Omnipotent Government warning that the fragmentation of the world via trade and migration barriers strongly incentivizes comparatively overpopulated “have not” powers to resort to war to gain access to territories and natural resources denied to them by the comparatively underpopulated powers. Destructive global wars sparked by national autarky are not such a great option for libertarians either"
The second option is no longer a real concern because of low and falling birth rates, except in Africa countries which are in no position to be invading anyone outside their continent.
"“It is clear that no solution of the problem of immigration is possible if one adheres to the ideal of an interventionist state, which meddles in every field of human activity, or to that of the socialist state. Only the adoption of a liberal program could make the problem of immigration, which today seems insoluble, completely disappear. In an Australia governed according to liberal principles, what difficulties could arise from the fact that in some parts of the continent Japanese and in other parts Englishmen were in the majority?"
But the whole question is whether a country that was majority X would actually be governed by liberal principles.
"Raico’s thesis fails to appreciate that immigrants are no less human than the native-born are, and are psychologically just as responsive to the profound culture-altering effects of liberation from cultural repression when they are finally able to breathe free in a liberty-loving land."
Magic air.
"Magic air"
No actually, it's megapolitics, as described in the book "The Sovereign Individual". "Magic air" is just a lazy way of describing the way that institutions and mark structures shape human behavior and cultures themselves.
What's a "mark structure?"
Indian state of Bihar just banned selling meat near schools since "meat consumption leads to violent tendency in children". Similar views are quite common among vegetarian Hindus and the resurgent Hindu parties harass meat sellers in all possible ways.
Beef is already banned in India nation-wide. Any concentration of Hindus is likely to agitate for beef ban wherever they find themselves politically significant.
Hey man, all you gotta do is redraw the national borders when the demographics change, doncha know? Once the Hindus get their own little enclave, I'm sure they won't leave it for a better place, just like they have no reason to ever leave India.
There is one minor error in the article you should be aware of. The fourth paragraph, beginning with "Free immigration would appear to be in a different category . . . " and ending with ". . . what would become of the liberal society of Switzerland under a regime of 'open borders.'” is actually a part of the quote of Ralph Raico's criticism of Mises.
> humans are naturally compelled by their own innate psychological nature to revise their values away from the extremes of illiberalism when they have the freedom to do so
Hitler didn't have illiberal values because he lacked the "freedom" to revise his values. Illiberal values are just common and people can retain them.
Nobody denies that there are psychological differences between individuals, or that reason has to operate in conjunction with innate motivations to generate better values and better social results.
The question then becomes why 96% of the population that is normal sometimes gets enslaved by the 4% who are sociopaths in spite of the rule of law and democratic accountability. Widespread acceptance of coercive concentrations of power, wealth, and authority by the 96% creates an obvious target for the 4% to get on top. Liberty, private property, free speech, arms in the hands of the people, etc. function as an insurance policy against tyranny. So too does a populace that is educated well enough to maintain a healthy skepticism towards any self-proclaimed "leader" figure posing as a savior, towards any broad-brush demonization of unpopular minorities and foreigners, and towards any promise of magical solutions to its problems.
This feels like a lot of assertions without merit.
There are psychological differences between peoples. The sense of right and wrong is not innate but largely taught by the culture one is reared in.
Regarding population genetics, for the vast majority of traits there is always greater genetic differences existing within a given national population than there is between it and other populations. The most reliable genetic markers of ethnic identities have no discernible phenotypic expression at all.
The claim that particular individuals are mere puppets of the culture they were raised in is false. Individuals can and do stray from the values they were raised with, and of course cultures themselves change over time, and deviant subcultures can sometimes sustain themselves within a culture, which implies that there have to be causal factors that regulate the success of both the teachings and the straying from teachings in being propagated to the next generation.
I'm not saying that genetics is the only non-rational factor guiding such cultural evolution, but it does create constraints on what sorts of non-rationally-accepted teachings are propagated successfully.
We know cultural influence. Muslim children grow up Muslim. Hindu vegetarian children stay vegetarian. Genetic influence is speculation and needs large studies to find even smallest effects.How much genetic difference between Palestinians and Israelis?
Yeah? Impress me with the degree to which Moslem immigrants to the United States, or other countries of the West, have given up the oppression of women.
And remember, to deface synagogues and vandalize Jewish businesses and assault Jews and occasionally assassinate people or blow things up and so on does not require the active participation of the average Moslem. It takes ... well, look around you. How average are they?
> Impress me with the degree to which Moslem immigrants to the United States, or other countries of the West, have given up the oppression of women.
They have though, to a large extent! look at the survey data in Muslims in the US vs. the rest of the world -- selection+assimilation is doing a lot of work. And look at how Muslim women can live in the US vs in Muslim theocracies, it is a great improvement!
No more honor killings? No more genital mutilation?
Indeed, Muslim immigration in the US is very different from Europe.
Muslim immigrants from Muslim-majority countries gradually leave Islam over a few generations. From Nathan Smith's The Islamaphobic Case for Open Borders:
"Islam in the West still loses about one-fourth of each Muslim-born generation. At that rate of member loss, less than half of the descendants of Muslims would still be Muslim after three generations."
And there isn't much flow of non-Muslim to Muslim in the West (or globally).
Also, a non-negligible percentage of people that unfortunately find themselves born in Islamic theocracies want out and privately disavow Islam, but cannot due to death sentences for apostasy. Those that privately disavow Islam would be much better off in a place where they are free to not be Muslim.
When an 80 iq cousin fucker “leaves Islam” he doesn’t become a middle class weird white person.
He becomes a secular low iq thug usually with higher rates of broken families and drug use than when they were part of a religious community.
Islam is a shit religion, but it’s not the problem. The underlying genetics are the problem. Taking away the religion won’t improve behavior. It won’t even solve the clannishness issues (they can still act as a clan based on ethnicity without religion).
There's much too much damage being done in the meantime, just (to name three places) on the campuses of Harvard, Penn, and MIT.
American Hindus eschew beef exactly as they do back home. More so, they continuously agitate for vegetarianism and would certainly restrict meat trade if they ever come anywhere near power, just as they have done back home.
Name some riots or killings by American Hindus.
Back home people even suspected of having beef in their fridge have been lynched.
Did you read the prompt?
The famous Indians trying to take meat away from you such as Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, and Arvind Krishna.
What a load of delusional academic waffle. What an academic thinks is real and would be nice about what they think the immigrant is and thinks. No they aren't and no they don't, not most of them. Certainly not since mass imigration from the Islamic World, where Islam is thway people are controlled and their way of thining froman early age.
Head nodding, script reciting, trance iducing, cult belief. Wholly inappropriate ina secular sovoiety whose evoluation, development and continuation of our current civilised existence and properity has been achieved by not thinking like this, rather by te freedom to question evrything and everybody. They don't work like that..
I would prefer to believe the evidence of my eyes and ears regarding this, what is real, on the ground, rather than what academics say they believe. The majority of immigrants to the United Kingdom, and in much of Europe now, are Islamic peoples of largely mediaeval cultures who are governed by beliefs, controlled by priests and organised crime imported from their home cultures (also see Italians, Catholicism and the Mafia in the US), and come from an even worse male dominated and even more intolerant primitive value systems. They have no interest in learning or adapting to our culture, as their actions in their ghettos show.
They share little with the majority of the host society, except they consume the modern services we have built and abuse our benefits culture, they congregate in ghettos, which they control and our own police cannot function properly within, because the Police are scared and use DEI excuses to avoid confronting the primitive evil of the ghettos. Which leads to the criminal Islamic rape and drug gangs and murders that are also well reported. The women in particular are appallingly treated, and complicit in this, our own white women have been widely abused by the primitive islamic male immigrants, or their male children born here, who are no better, unassimilated in any significant way. What have they to gain by adjusting to the host culture in the ghetto controlled by their home culture?
All a matter of record across the country. This is the reality that has happened, not your idealistic prattle about what values and beliefs you impute to these primitives. Of course the few educated, more secular and rational elites of these cultures seek careers within the host society, and always have, but not the majority dregs that have followed. In haste now...
If you think that they mostly just want to integrate into our broad society, rather than make it like theirs, respecting a secular open and free culture and merge as you describe, you are SO wrong. The early immigrants into America are nota good exapmle because there was no real host culture to adopt, unless it was Native Indian, just gun fuelled greed, murder and land grabs, and some dodgy protestant religions, unwanted in Europe seeking to control people using irrational religion in isolated communities according the the words of a non existent god they made up, the Mormon, Amish, etc. Lately the cults like WACO, Scientology ......... you appear to be living in a virtual reality that I do not see reported in the mainstream media or elsewhere, rather the opposite. If you are motvraised with the necessary formation, you cannot nderstand the way your new host'd culture works.
If you are religious its impossible, IMO. Because you are unable to know what is real and what are fairy tales, so irrational, without critical thinking, but that's another story.
When the immigrants home countries have become educated and secular, perhaps even rational in the process, although that is not a given in the West, where religions are still followed by the weak minded under cultural pressure, in spite of no evidence to support its beliefs, then perhaps we can absorb them without serious problems.
BUt not the primive products of mediaeval religious societies whose only acceptance of modern technological socieies are in our guns, cars, TVs, social security hand outs and the lenience of our courts when presented with their widespread and primive crimality, by our secular laws they have no respect for. etc. This the diversity we should welcome? No thanks.
So I reject your assertions because they are based on your opinions about a minority of these people, probaly the ones you may know because of where they are in the educated elite of society, not representative of the immigrant majority? RIght or wrong?
I believe the evidence of my eyes and ears as regards the ability or even the will to intergate of majority of these immigrant populations, and what is measured to be the case. They want us to adapt to their culture, put the clocks back 100's of years to primitive/religious. NO thanks.
I reject your luxury opinion, coccooned in academe at taxpayers expense, with no consequences for your opinions, except perhaps another grant, a University press release. or a book read only by other elite "thinkers" at our expense, privileged, mostly work shy parasites on the taxpayer who think their elite luxury thoughts should be those of the majority who have to live with reality?
Out here is the real world, where we must earn our living being good about what we do and say and not screwing up, most of the people most affected by this mass invasion of mediaeval primitives and the ghettoisation of our cities have to live here, and are made to pay for the likes of you?
I bet the mass of imigrants don't impact on your community, physically or culturally. The few that are there simply merge in and belong, because they are the educated elites, the exceptions in their own land.
The others don't fit in because they cann't. The evil people who control the ghetto, using irrational faith the masses are required to follow by the gheto enforcers, will never let them adapt to a modern secular, free, independent, culture that they are still at least 200 years of social development away from. And in fact, once the immigrant ghetos are established, change is slowed versus the home country, as is obvious in India now, for example.
We should take the best of other cultures, by all means. Equalyy certainly reject and eject the dregs, most are not clever or able enough to function independently in a modern secular society outside the cuture they have been raised to be dependent upon to exist at all. Another way is already beyond them. Our way. They are beyond help on time scales of several human life times. Have you been and seen where they come from? Don't get me started. In haste. It's probaly worse than I describe. IMO
My dear friend Ralph Raico was wrong about this. Mises was right. People say that we can't recognize the rights of "outsiders" to move here as long as we have a welfare state. But how will we get rid of the welfare state if we shelter it from the inevitable stresses and strains?
I was disturbed by the fact that a higher percentage of foreign born New Yorkers voted for Mamdani than native born New Yorkers.
I also saw a guy who interviewed a couple of guys from Venezula in New York and he asked them who the wanted to win and they said Mamdani. I found that shocking.
All great speculative arguments.
I agree that am argument can be made and hypotheses established where one concluded they massive immigration wouldn't destroy the miracles of good institution
Similar theories can be had concluding that immigration will destroy liberal institutions.
On the have waving method, this is a draw.
But the question is where is the higher risk?
Should we assume that the rich countries efficient institutions are the default? Or that they are fragile and can easily be destroyed?
And what are the utility calculations for such gambles?
There are empirical data to back up the existence of cultural phenomena like assimilation, the influence of cognitive dissonance, etc., but you are correct in noting that there are different causal explanations offered for it. In the social sciences, one can't do controlled experiments or even make direct observations and measurements the most relevant variables (which exist as mental states inside individual brains).
To get past mere hand-waving, one can only fall back on the logical implications of a small set of generalizations that are self-evident truths (which is the procedure favored by Ludwig von Mises) and on very broad (though fallible, especially if your observations lack a cross-cultural perspective) generalizations one makes about man's psychological nature based on indirect inferences about other people's mental states.
Assimilation is generally partial up to 4 generations.
We do have lots of studies regarding saving rates, and various social attitudes. Lots stay sticky partially.
Assimilation is a two way street. If you assimilate from cultures with economically negative habits, the locals will mimick the immigrants too.
It's worth noting that state promises of economic security relieve individuals of having to take personal responsibility for providing future goods and reserves of purchasing power for themselves, so they incentivize a shift of time and reservation preferences towards lower savings rates. Since Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in the mid-1960s, personal savings rates relative to national income have fallen by half, while the remaining savings are largely being consumed by gigantic deficits driven mostly by the growth of welfare state expenditures. America is no longer in a position to increase its stock of capital goods as a consequence of this.
This is true. Alas, the studies on the cultural persistence compare descendants from different cultures, so all should have the same influence from the welfare state.
If the studies are done incorrectly, yes. Like if they compare temporal changes between new immigrants that need to habituate to the new system and natives which did habituate already. My read is that this isn't the case....
Depends on the culture. I don't see much difference between the Hispanic immigrants culture wise and most Americans. Same with Asian cultures. Different, but not in a way that harms Americans and has many benefits as well.
I see a huge difference between Russian immigrants and Americans. It's a huge culture clash
Even bigger difference between Muslim culture and American. This one is mutually exclusive. They are so fundamentally opposed they can't coexist peacefully with each other
"a right of self-determination that enables peaceful changes of the borders of democratic nation-states, so that borders can stay aligned to the changing national character of the territories they enclose"
On the contrary, this supposed "right of self-determination" has proved to be mischievous and has given nothing but unprecedented disasters in 20C. Sudetenland is only one example.
How is Mises going to ensure that a nation-state would peaceably dissemble itself? State are hardly known to voluntarily make themselves small. This goes against the basic ingrained features and nature of state.
This article opens quotes and then doesn't close them, at least anywhere I can find. It rapidly gets to where I can't tell whom/what I'm reading.
"humans are naturally compelled by their own innate psychological nature to revise their values away from the extremes of illiberalism when they have the freedom to do so"
I think this is one of the key claims of the article, but there is not enough done to back it up.
Frequent bryan caplan readers are familiar with the claim (backed up by evidence by bryan), that this is not the case? see "anti-market bias", "make work bias", the old "what is seen and what isn't seen"
I am pro massivelly increasing immigration.
I haven't yet seen a good explanation for why such relativelly (economically) liberal values are practiced by big western governments in spite of human nature. I think it is a great thing, maybe a great coincidence, but until I understand what causes it I do see some value in being very careful to not disturb it. The second trump government has shown us how it's a lot less robust than we like to imagine
>"humans are naturally compelled by their own innate psychological nature to
>revise their values away from the extremes of illiberalism when they have the
>freedom to do so"
>
>I think this is one of the key claims of the article, but there is not enough done
>to back it up.
That is a fair criticism; the original draft of this article was written with a 1500 word limit in mind, making it difficult to spell out all the qualifications and nuances of this statement let alone spell out the justifications for it.
There is a large literature in psychology that deals with cognitive dissonance and with the correlations between happiness and personal autonomy. There are also social scientists who investigate things like cultural changes in immigrant communities. America also has a long history of immigration and mutual assimilation that's impossible to reconcile to the theory that people are just puppets of the national and religious cultures of their homelands and don't change under the influence of pluralistic, unrepressed social conditions of a free society.