9 comments

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  Dain

  1 year ago

  Scratch a universalist humanitarian and you'll ultimately find a rather milquetoast conservative.
  
  Here's why.
  
  The welfare state must be defended, and by extension the political borders and nation-state conventions it is concretely based on. There's a tension here between the liberal disdain for national borders and their commitment to upholding the redistributist and regulatory status quo.
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  John V

  1 year ago

  Well said, Will.
  
  I'd love to see you interview PK on "Free Will"...hahaha. That would be fun. Having read PK's book, I came away with a similar disdain.
  
  But what you say is a nice summary of the premise advanced by Dan Klein and Harika Barlett in this paper.
  
  Too bad your excellent analysis of PK (as well as that of Klein and Barlett) is not as easy to grasp for most people. It is indeed a very telling way and to expose PK for what he is.
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  KJ

  1 year ago

  "Liberal Fascism is a more intellectually evenhanded book, which says more about Krugman than it does about Liberal Fascism, I’m afraid."
  
  Now that's just stupid. Starting your argument that way is like starting a critique of Bush with "Bush is a Nazi" or writing a book called "Liberal Fascism" and expecting people to take it seriously.
  
  Now, I've only read Krugman's book once but you seem to take quite a bit of liberty with his immigration intentions. My estimation is Krugman has little problem with a nice inflow of immigration so long as it doesn't create a political backlash that drives the working class into the hands of the nativists mostly trolling about the Republican party or worse yet turn the Democrats into a Nativist party as well. It's a pragmatic calculation, something Libertarians, for all their nice traits, are quite awful at.
  
  So yes, you could open up the borders and see a nice short term increase in Earthen income equalization followed by an isolationist backlash and a turn toward conservative economic policy and ending up with a hefty overall decrease in opportunity and equalization. So perhaps you should imagine Policy A beyond the short term which changes the outcome considerably. But as I said, Libertarians have never been good at translating theory into practice. In my estimation, that's why they'll always be big players in the political abstract of policy theory and cocktail discussions but on the margins when it comes to accomplishing anything practical. This post seems to be a perfect illustration.
  
  I can see the Libertarian attraction to this argument but ask yourself if we can really greatly increase immigration and not expect a backlash. Don't we already bring in the most immigrants of any nation? The calculus is much more complicated than how you present it.
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  Dain

  1 year ago

  KJ,
  
  Allowing Muslims into the country, to proselytize and accumulate wealth and likely political power could also very well drive the plebs into the hands of the Republicans. Should Muslims, then, be descriminated against?
  
  One may as well say that Democrats being Democrats drives non-Democrats into the hands of Republicans. Thus Democrats should be...Republicans.
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  "Q" the Enchanter

  1 year ago

  "Liberal Fascism is a more intellectually evenhanded book, which says more about Krugman than it does about Liberal Fascism, I’m afraid."
  
  Now that feels like reading Ann Coulter! Maybe Krugman made a hash out of the argument, but Goldberg's entire thesis is inherently, transparently frivolous.
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  Dain

  1 year ago

  Well, uh, to the extent that authoritarian elitists and police-backed technocratic paternalists essentially don't trust people to run their own damn lives, I'd say Goldberg's thesis isn't INHERENTLY frivoulous.
  
  The problem with Goldberg is that he has no credibility writing a book like that, supporter of Bush - a right wing social engineer - that he is.
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  The libertarians' friend

  1 year ago

  Perhaps Cato would care to join up with the immigration supporter quoted at my name's link. I'm sure they have much in common.
  
  (Note that her comments were warmly received and that "economists" frequently forget to include all the costs of immigration, including giving people like her more power.)
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  conchis

  1 year ago

  I (perhaps wrongly) took part of Krugman's point to be that policy A would increase political inequality at the global level: people who previously could vote now can't.* To the extent that such political inequality is something that than an egalitarian might care about, it's conceivable that they could think that policy A is worse than policy B, all things considered.
  
  Now, I don't personally buy this: individual choices to migrate seem to indicate pretty clearly which way they see the tradeoff between income and political rights; and I see little reason to second-guess them. But it seems possible at least, for an egalitarian to think this way.
  
  *Yes, this depends on where the immigrants come from, but I think it's defensible as an empirical generalisation.
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  goabroad

  1 month ago

  The time is about to come when immigrants will have the power to swing the results of elections.
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