You surely can. The state will of course go broke very quickly. But there's no law of physics or economics saying that the United States government can't go broke.
The larger question remains "which is the greater evil, to maintain evil immigration laws until you can dismantle the welfare state, or to lift them and risk the fallout of the government going broke". With the smaller more interesting question of "what kind of welfare policy should we advocate for once it's clear the government can't afford the present one".
Simply declaring two things incompatible tells you nothing about what policy you ought to advocate.
The statement is trivially false unless significantly qualified - and when qualified, it becomes obvious that it is a completely insufficient argument against immigration *or* a welfare state, because really it boils down to "but those of us who are already here might be made worse off!"
You can make the same argument against a welfare state regardless of immigration.
And it is not "trivially false." In an email to Henryk A. Kowalczyk, Friedman wrote:
"Immigration is a particularly difficult subject. There is no doubt that free and open immigration is the right policy in a libertarian state, but in a welfare state it is a different story: the supply of immigrants will become infinite."
That's hilarious. You think something is NOT trivially false and attempt to demonstrate that by offering a quote that is CLEARLY trivially false. The supply of immigrants will NOT become INFINITE.
In relationship to our welfare system's very finite ability to meet demand, yes, it is true. But, our dialog here won't resolve the debate. You are free to have the last word.
My final word is that it is not a good plan to attempt to win a public debate by changing the meanings of words. "Infinite" has a meaning. "False" has a meaning. "Gross exaggeration to the point of falsehood" has a very clear meaning. Milton Friedman knew he was exaggerating to make a point. He would have denied it was to be taken literally, let alone trivially true, and found anyone who did so gullible (or if done to win a debate, mendacious.)
This is still "it makes those of us already here less well off than otherwise" in slightly different clothes. It's not a good argument against a welfare state.
therefore, if you get made worse off by policy X, that policy is bad.
This is not a valid argument.
I'm not saying "it makes people worse off" is a bad argument *in general* - but it is a bad argument when deployed against immigration, because it is implicitly based on a premise that whoever is being made worse off *deserves* whatever benefits they're losing.
You do not have any more moral right to the substantial surplus that comes from being a US citizen than a potential immigrant. Arguing that immigration is bad because it takes what are effectively unearned rents from one group and distributes them to another group that arguably *did* earn them is not remotely persuasive.
Also I'm pretty sure even the claim that it would make existing citizens worse off is empirically wrong.
But when the people who are being made worse are the ones who decide, and who have the monopoly of force to restrict entry, then you do need to persuade them.
Going back to the original article, Dan is arguing that something like open borders is simply not politically feasible, and a more moderate position is needed if you care about persuading real people to move in the direction you prefer rather than just winning a philosophical debate that barely any actual voters care about.
I don't think the "rents" of the first world are unearned. I believe in Hive Mind. I think the first world is what it is because of the nature of its residents. If you mass introduce lower quality residents, the "rents" of having a functional society go away.
Maybe you feel that having a good IQ or whatever is unearned, but that is life buddy.
But given neither of those things is going to happen, the problem becomes 'given the existence of a universal welfare state for current and future citizens, what is optimal immigration policy'. Is the answer still 'open borders'?
How in the living fuck are you going to keep this citizen/non-citizen distinction going?
That's called "apartheid".
We aren't some gulf monarchy using dormitories of slaves to build our vanity projects.
Hey maybe we can do what Singapore does and subject migrants to pregnancy checks and outlaw relationships with citizens because we don't want to give citizenship to anyone born in Singapore.
Bryan addressed that in his Open Borders book. Long story short, you can, because most of government entitlements (in dollars) go to old people, not poor people, and immigrants are younger than the average population.
I guess we're gonna see, for at least the next 2 years anyway. But you miss the point. Open borders isn't what we have yet. IF we truly created open borders, what we have now will look like a trickle.
I know it's not feasible. I myself wouldn't want it. But not because of welfare. The main problem would be housing. If you have actual open borders, the whole world will be bidding up homes for sale in the US, raising the prices astronomically for natives. We just don't have the capacity to build fast enough to keep up with demand. Not with the current regulatory climate anyway.
The EU is full of welfare states, and has free moment of people.
Israel is a welfare state and allows anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent to become a citizen, no questions asked. The number of eligible people is more than 150% of its current population. By the same token the USA could allow anyone living in central America to become citizens, and still have a smaller eligible population.
Those 2017 figures predate the Joe's open borders. Sorry, but you'll convince me with #'s that are based on the current inflow, not those that pre-date Joe's open border policy. And as even the essay itself acknowleges: "First-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born"...
I've read many breakdowns of the net cost of immigration, and I've come to the conclusion that they are a huge net cost on net. Every time I've reviewed the literature where that isn't the case, I've found an assumption in the data that fudges it to get the necessary result.
Often some kinds of expense is ignored (like education), or the most productive adult years are disproportionately counted, or characteristics of second generation are overestimated (or not counted). Sometimes "immigrant" is defined in a way to ignore illegal immigrants or skew it disproportionately Asian.
I mean we all know there is only one correct answer that anyone would be allowed to find. The few brave souls that have taken an honest look all come back saying that the big immigrants groups (Hispanics in America, Muslims in Europe) are a train wreck.
If you take the time, and I think I've taken the time more then enough to be comfortable that I'm not about to find anything new, you can parse through the data and figure out that immigrants are a huge fiscal burden. Probably hundreds of thousands of dollars in the negative for Hispanics, probably worse for Muslims in Europe.
Asians are good guys, and I used to support Asian immigration, but lately I've come to belief they are just too culturally different. I don't want America to take on more Asian values. I happen to like showing my face and breathing the air freely and taking some risks and being different from the crowd. They aren't exactly right wing on economics either, even if they hate shirkers.
My guess is that if you took the 130 IQ+ immigrants out, you would be capturing 90%+ of the positive fiscal impact.
Obviously, I don't care about everyone in the entire world equally. Nobody does.
But if I did, I would consider Open Borders the single most destructive and evil policy imaginable.
Everything decent in the world that makes it better than 99.99999% of all human history has come from a select group of societies populated by a select group of people. Open Borders threatens to destroy that by flooding these societies with genetic trash, which based on what data we have will most likely diminish or even destroy these societies.
Without these advanced societies gifting things like engineering and antibiotics to the third world the lives of those people will degrade to pre-modern levels. So in the end not being able to immigrate to the first world is actually good for those people, as living off our scraps is still better then anything they could ever build for themselves.
Immigration increases welfare because immigrants vote for welfare.
Places with more immigrants tend to have more welfare. California and the northeast were transformed into high tax one party democratic states by immigration. Urban areas full of immigrants have even higher taxes and more government waste.
It’s basic self interest for low productivity people to vote to use violence to steal from high productivity people.
If god wants open borders he can come down here and tell me. Till then I’ll assume your another zealot that wants to use god talk for your own ends.
1) I’m aware of the Flynn effect. An afternoon of research on the topic should prove to you that it’s irrelevant to the discussion.
2) everywhere low iqs move en masse to welfare increases. This happens both because:
A) they vote for it
B) within existing welfare systems they rarely produce enough taxes to pay for their benefits
This is just an empirical fact.
Most third world countries tend to be kleptocratic spoils systems where the government takes what it can and sometimes more the economy can bear. There is often not much economic surplus to loot since they are low productivity economies. They often go in cycles based on commodity prices and the rise and fall of political movements, but they always remain well behind the first world.
3) I do not believe that an apartheid state, in which there is a large body of people within a polity that are denied citizenship, is a desirable or sustainable goal. I find it ironic that we spent most of the 20th century trying to eliminate such states, only to have you support their re-introduction.
4) I have little doubt that social and political trends favor your view. I expect you will get most of what you want, and that anyone that criticizes you will face increasing punishments.
However, because I think your ideas are false I believe this will result in a worse world. Perhaps dramatically so.
History is littered with bad ideas beating out good ones and making the world worse. This is an empirical fact. I’m something of a “betting man” to take our substack namesake, and I can separate out “likely to happen” from “good it will happen”.
1) Stupid comment by you. Your reply to him is the dumbest cockroach shit response I have ever seen.
2) Ask why they vote for it... rather than implicitly saying "poor, aggressive savage genes" of these barbarians make them welfare "queens". I know that a racist piece of shit like you believes that.
3) Apartheid state is immoral. Gradual and careful Open Borders with continuous evaluation are literal opposite of racial segregation (and apartheid). Are you this dumb? Do you really believe that David Friedman, Bryan Caplan, Michael Huemer and literally almost any economist and moral philosopher, who are all much much much more intelligent than you, have not considered your worries?
4) It is your ideas which are false and dumb.
>>This is an empirical fact.
Fuck off with your lies ya racist cunt.
You are like a racist doomer. Go cry somewhere else, Mr. forumbitcher123. Go on the fucking st*rmfront rather than here you little bitch.
Milton Friedman famously once said, “you cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state” (1999). He was and he remains correct.
You surely can. The state will of course go broke very quickly. But there's no law of physics or economics saying that the United States government can't go broke.
The larger question remains "which is the greater evil, to maintain evil immigration laws until you can dismantle the welfare state, or to lift them and risk the fallout of the government going broke". With the smaller more interesting question of "what kind of welfare policy should we advocate for once it's clear the government can't afford the present one".
Simply declaring two things incompatible tells you nothing about what policy you ought to advocate.
Precisely. Again, as Milton put it, "the more you subsidize anything, the more you have of it. The more you tax anything, the less you have of it."
No, he was not.
The statement is trivially false unless significantly qualified - and when qualified, it becomes obvious that it is a completely insufficient argument against immigration *or* a welfare state, because really it boils down to "but those of us who are already here might be made worse off!"
You can make the same argument against a welfare state regardless of immigration.
Milton Friedman's position was far more nuanced than he's given credit for on this topic. https://openborders.info/friedman-immigration-welfare-state/
And it is not "trivially false." In an email to Henryk A. Kowalczyk, Friedman wrote:
"Immigration is a particularly difficult subject. There is no doubt that free and open immigration is the right policy in a libertarian state, but in a welfare state it is a different story: the supply of immigrants will become infinite."
That's hilarious. You think something is NOT trivially false and attempt to demonstrate that by offering a quote that is CLEARLY trivially false. The supply of immigrants will NOT become INFINITE.
In relationship to our welfare system's very finite ability to meet demand, yes, it is true. But, our dialog here won't resolve the debate. You are free to have the last word.
My final word is that it is not a good plan to attempt to win a public debate by changing the meanings of words. "Infinite" has a meaning. "False" has a meaning. "Gross exaggeration to the point of falsehood" has a very clear meaning. Milton Friedman knew he was exaggerating to make a point. He would have denied it was to be taken literally, let alone trivially true, and found anyone who did so gullible (or if done to win a debate, mendacious.)
Well said.
It isn't an argument against immigration. It is an argument against totally open immigration.
Immigrants vote for the welfare state and utilize it at a disproportionate rate.
It's completely fair to blame them for it.
This is still "it makes those of us already here less well off than otherwise" in slightly different clothes. It's not a good argument against a welfare state.
If you break into my house and steal my stuff, I'm worse off and you're better off.
And to the extent crime has negative impacts beyond the actual damage of the crime, it can be net negative beyond the zero sum transfer.
You appear to be arguing as follows:
1. if someone robs you, you get made worse off
2. you getting robbed is bad
therefore, if you get made worse off by policy X, that policy is bad.
This is not a valid argument.
I'm not saying "it makes people worse off" is a bad argument *in general* - but it is a bad argument when deployed against immigration, because it is implicitly based on a premise that whoever is being made worse off *deserves* whatever benefits they're losing.
You do not have any more moral right to the substantial surplus that comes from being a US citizen than a potential immigrant. Arguing that immigration is bad because it takes what are effectively unearned rents from one group and distributes them to another group that arguably *did* earn them is not remotely persuasive.
Also I'm pretty sure even the claim that it would make existing citizens worse off is empirically wrong.
But when the people who are being made worse are the ones who decide, and who have the monopoly of force to restrict entry, then you do need to persuade them.
Going back to the original article, Dan is arguing that something like open borders is simply not politically feasible, and a more moderate position is needed if you care about persuading real people to move in the direction you prefer rather than just winning a philosophical debate that barely any actual voters care about.
I don't think the "rents" of the first world are unearned. I believe in Hive Mind. I think the first world is what it is because of the nature of its residents. If you mass introduce lower quality residents, the "rents" of having a functional society go away.
Maybe you feel that having a good IQ or whatever is unearned, but that is life buddy.
So lets have free immigration and no welfare state.
I have no problem with that.
Edit: My point being, the existence of the welfare state isn't a reason to not have free immigration, it is a reason to get rid of the welfare state.
Edit2: Also, Milton was wrong. You could still have a welfare state for CITIZENS ONLY. The key is no welfare for non-citizen immigrants.
Either edit doesn't change the problem posed by Friedman. And, Milton Friedman's position was far more nuanced than he's given credit for on this topic. https://openborders.info/friedman-immigration-welfare-state/
But given neither of those things is going to happen, the problem becomes 'given the existence of a universal welfare state for current and future citizens, what is optimal immigration policy'. Is the answer still 'open borders'?
How in the living fuck are you going to keep this citizen/non-citizen distinction going?
That's called "apartheid".
We aren't some gulf monarchy using dormitories of slaves to build our vanity projects.
Hey maybe we can do what Singapore does and subject migrants to pregnancy checks and outlaw relationships with citizens because we don't want to give citizenship to anyone born in Singapore.
Bryan addressed that in his Open Borders book. Long story short, you can, because most of government entitlements (in dollars) go to old people, not poor people, and immigrants are younger than the average population.
I guess we're gonna see, for at least the next 2 years anyway. But you miss the point. Open borders isn't what we have yet. IF we truly created open borders, what we have now will look like a trickle.
I know it's not feasible. I myself wouldn't want it. But not because of welfare. The main problem would be housing. If you have actual open borders, the whole world will be bidding up homes for sale in the US, raising the prices astronomically for natives. We just don't have the capacity to build fast enough to keep up with demand. Not with the current regulatory climate anyway.
The EU is full of welfare states, and has free moment of people.
Israel is a welfare state and allows anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent to become a citizen, no questions asked. The number of eligible people is more than 150% of its current population. By the same token the USA could allow anyone living in central America to become citizens, and still have a smaller eligible population.
Those 2017 figures predate the Joe's open borders. Sorry, but you'll convince me with #'s that are based on the current inflow, not those that pre-date Joe's open border policy. And as even the essay itself acknowleges: "First-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born"...
I've read many breakdowns of the net cost of immigration, and I've come to the conclusion that they are a huge net cost on net. Every time I've reviewed the literature where that isn't the case, I've found an assumption in the data that fudges it to get the necessary result.
Often some kinds of expense is ignored (like education), or the most productive adult years are disproportionately counted, or characteristics of second generation are overestimated (or not counted). Sometimes "immigrant" is defined in a way to ignore illegal immigrants or skew it disproportionately Asian.
I mean we all know there is only one correct answer that anyone would be allowed to find. The few brave souls that have taken an honest look all come back saying that the big immigrants groups (Hispanics in America, Muslims in Europe) are a train wreck.
If you take the time, and I think I've taken the time more then enough to be comfortable that I'm not about to find anything new, you can parse through the data and figure out that immigrants are a huge fiscal burden. Probably hundreds of thousands of dollars in the negative for Hispanics, probably worse for Muslims in Europe.
Asians are good guys, and I used to support Asian immigration, but lately I've come to belief they are just too culturally different. I don't want America to take on more Asian values. I happen to like showing my face and breathing the air freely and taking some risks and being different from the crowd. They aren't exactly right wing on economics either, even if they hate shirkers.
My guess is that if you took the 130 IQ+ immigrants out, you would be capturing 90%+ of the positive fiscal impact.
Obviously, I don't care about everyone in the entire world equally. Nobody does.
But if I did, I would consider Open Borders the single most destructive and evil policy imaginable.
Everything decent in the world that makes it better than 99.99999% of all human history has come from a select group of societies populated by a select group of people. Open Borders threatens to destroy that by flooding these societies with genetic trash, which based on what data we have will most likely diminish or even destroy these societies.
Without these advanced societies gifting things like engineering and antibiotics to the third world the lives of those people will degrade to pre-modern levels. So in the end not being able to immigrate to the first world is actually good for those people, as living off our scraps is still better then anything they could ever build for themselves.
Immigration increases welfare because immigrants vote for welfare.
Places with more immigrants tend to have more welfare. California and the northeast were transformed into high tax one party democratic states by immigration. Urban areas full of immigrants have even higher taxes and more government waste.
It’s basic self interest for low productivity people to vote to use violence to steal from high productivity people.
If god wants open borders he can come down here and tell me. Till then I’ll assume your another zealot that wants to use god talk for your own ends.
1) I’m aware of the Flynn effect. An afternoon of research on the topic should prove to you that it’s irrelevant to the discussion.
2) everywhere low iqs move en masse to welfare increases. This happens both because:
A) they vote for it
B) within existing welfare systems they rarely produce enough taxes to pay for their benefits
This is just an empirical fact.
Most third world countries tend to be kleptocratic spoils systems where the government takes what it can and sometimes more the economy can bear. There is often not much economic surplus to loot since they are low productivity economies. They often go in cycles based on commodity prices and the rise and fall of political movements, but they always remain well behind the first world.
3) I do not believe that an apartheid state, in which there is a large body of people within a polity that are denied citizenship, is a desirable or sustainable goal. I find it ironic that we spent most of the 20th century trying to eliminate such states, only to have you support their re-introduction.
4) I have little doubt that social and political trends favor your view. I expect you will get most of what you want, and that anyone that criticizes you will face increasing punishments.
However, because I think your ideas are false I believe this will result in a worse world. Perhaps dramatically so.
History is littered with bad ideas beating out good ones and making the world worse. This is an empirical fact. I’m something of a “betting man” to take our substack namesake, and I can separate out “likely to happen” from “good it will happen”.
1) Stupid comment by you. Your reply to him is the dumbest cockroach shit response I have ever seen.
2) Ask why they vote for it... rather than implicitly saying "poor, aggressive savage genes" of these barbarians make them welfare "queens". I know that a racist piece of shit like you believes that.
3) Apartheid state is immoral. Gradual and careful Open Borders with continuous evaluation are literal opposite of racial segregation (and apartheid). Are you this dumb? Do you really believe that David Friedman, Bryan Caplan, Michael Huemer and literally almost any economist and moral philosopher, who are all much much much more intelligent than you, have not considered your worries?
4) It is your ideas which are false and dumb.
>>This is an empirical fact.
Fuck off with your lies ya racist cunt.
You are like a racist doomer. Go cry somewhere else, Mr. forumbitcher123. Go on the fucking st*rmfront rather than here you little bitch.