RE: Immigration

I am what most people refer to as an "open borders libertarian" and some people occasionally refer to as a "Mexican-lover," only those people tend to use another word in place of Mexican. I refer to myself as an advocate of the free labor market, because this cleverly excludes certain categories of people who aren't labor: gangsters, terrorists, lunatics, and Europeans.

I kid.

I have no concern whatsoever that immigration will create a culture of dependency. I realize people do come from other countries, but let's zoom in on Mexico since I don't honestly think this would be a very controversial issue if everyone who wanted to come here was Swedish. And yet the Swedes are filthy socialists and the Mexicans really are not. Mexico has lower taxes and a higher approval of the free market than America (not that that's hard; the Communist Chinese do too).

Mexico does have endemic corruption. That is a concern. So are relatively lower levels of educational and economic achievement that persist for generations after immigrants arrive.

For that reason, a proponent of the notion that Jon calls short-sighted; that is, that you really cannot have a free labor market before you get rid of the welfare state. The fact of the matter is that an immigrant has a hard lot in life and while overcoming that hard lot is entirely possible, it's made much more difficult if it's disincentivized because you can, in the stereotypical view, come here and sit on your ass and collect a check. (I'm fully aware that's not how it actually works, but it's a useful metaphor, which is why it gets used so much).

Will allowing this just make the welfare state collapse faster? Yes, but welfare state collapse isn't the wonderful thing it's made to appear in Atlas Shrugged, where all the capitalists disappear, some unspecified number of parasites are implied starve to death in a comfortably offstage and invisible way, and then the capitalists return and impose Libertopia.

Welfare state collapse looks pretty much like California, and that will get worse. People are not going to quietly understand or accept that they cannot have a welfare state. They're going to vote, march, maneuver, wheedle, be too big to fail, spread the costs around, borrow from speculators, inflate the currency, and ultimately resort to violence. When I was a teenager I would have loved to shoot some of my pinko neighbors in the street, and it may yet come to that, but I'm older and wiser now and no longer consider it conducive to good government.

All that said, I think this debate is already pretty much over. Urbanization was already going to gut the Republican Party; immigration is making it worse for them, and they've already squandered their opportunity to either close the border or ditch the welfare state. So we're going to have de facto open borders and high social services. Until we don't. And then we just have to seize the opportunity to come out of it as best we can.