I want to draw attention to this analogy of Eli Dourado’s from a few months ago because it has stuck with me, and I find myself thinking about it often. In it, he says that our restrictions to immigration are attempts to preserve our advantaged positions and are similar to those who sought to preserve aristocracy:
It is perhaps unsurprising that those who think they benefit from the current system wish to keep it. They trot out all kinds of practical-sounding excuses for why we cannot completely open the border. All of these reasons have analogs in the system of class-based privilege. Most of us, I imagine, would like to think that if we were aristocrats of centuries past, we would see through the lameness of the arguments for using the state to keep down the lower classes. Yet the widespread opposition to open borders today shows that we are not that good.
I only disagree with this to the extent that I don’t think it applies to all opponents of open borders. My own opposition, for instance, is I think not grounded in any desire to preserve privilege, and fairly strong on cosmopolitan utilitarian grounds. Nevertheless, for many immigration opponents, I think his charge holds and that more people should consider it.
Bryan Caplan is quoted as having said the following about Robin Hanson:
”When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is ‘Eh, maybe.’ Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is ‘No way! Impossible!’ Then I think about it for years.”
I disagree with Eli often -although in the grand scheme of things we are not so far apart- but I think something similar could be said about him, in that his ideas often sound radical at first pass, but they stick with you and provoke much thinking.
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Saturday ~ August 13th, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Curt Doolittle
Although Dourado repeats the less than novel convenient ‘metaphor’. It could also be restated as: ‘People demonstrably object to the forcible appropriation and transfer of their opportunities, their social status, their political power, their traditions and their culture so that those who have not earned it may profit by redistributing it to others who have also not earned it. People consider these things their property, and they act as if it is their property.”
But let’s ask a few questions that the positivist does not ask: Just what is it that creates and maintains the behavior of forgone opportunity costs we call property? The high cost of truth telling? The high cost of non-corruption? Where to ‘incentives’ come from? Why are some organizations of people impervious to all attempts at quelling corruption both public and private?
Conservatism is more complicated than you or Dourado suggest.
Conservatism consists of a series of properties: (a) a general resistance to change in social order: the habits, manners, ethics, morals, and laws by political means. (b) In the USA, it consists of Jeffersonian Classical Liberalism, and the Civic Republican sentiments (real or not) and the predominant culture of the prewar era. (c) In the west it consists of the remnants of Fraternal Aristocracy — and all the social habits, myths and values that it entails.
Railing against conservatives due to (a) and (a) alone, is a convenient ruse by which opponents ignore and fail to consider the value inherent in (b) and (c), and whether the system of property rights, and requisite costs that individuals must pay to create and maintain those property rights (in both individual an political spectrums) as well as the system of economic calculation, incentives and social status, that are implied in (b) and (c) CAN POSSIBLY be perpetuated WITHOUT (a). Especially given the different time preferences of the social classes.
Each of these norms requires individual costs: each of these habits, these cultural forms of ‘capital’ is a cost born by the individuals who adhere to them, day by day, action by action, judgement by judgement. People treat as property that which they pay costs to acquire – even if they are acquiring a ‘norm’. if you take from them that property – even the abstraction of property we call tradition – they will cease paying for it, by abandoning the morals, ethics, manners, habits, and social status – even the very culture and government and nation itself. Because it is no longer an investment for them. Furthermore they will resent the theft of it. In their minds, they have financed a system of meritocratic rotation of elites by serving consumers in the market. Either there is a meritocratic rotation of elites through the service of consumers and society in the market, or there is a dictator who makes a non-meritocratic and arbitrary judgement such that none of us should attempt to meritocratically rotate elites due to service of consumers in the market. It is one or the other.
Immigration is incompatible with the welfare state. It explains why small ethnically homogenous states are redistributive and empires are not. Because people PAY for their social status, their culture, their morals, ethics, manners, habits, narratives, and all other friction-reducing behaviors by acting as if they are making purchases. The more diluted the status, the less it is worth. If you steal the status, then people just stop paying for the state. And THAT IS WHAT IS HAPPENING TODAY.
This is an Austrian analysis of human actions. (Versus some silly Rothbardian ideology, or some simplistic overly reductive positivist explanation) It is also Hayek’s criticism of policy. It is a claim against HUBRIS. In particular, an argument against the hubris of positivism.
We are markedly different from other civilizations due to the secondary effects that were caused by the need of a technically superior but numerically weak fraternity of independently financed warrior-shareholders (Aristocrats), to hold the numerically and economically superior and totalitarian East at bay. This accidental social order led to the technologies of debate, philosophy, science, and the concepts of balance of power, contract, an independent judiciary, natural rights, personal freedom, political freedom, national freedom, and democratic republicanism – without which the western commercial order, and all that has come from it could not have evolved. And (as Hoppe has tried to illustrate) the behavior of monarchs as intertemporal guardians of property rights has been demonstrably superior to that of democratic socialists.
If there is a man alive today that is capable of articulating how we can use a positivist technology to maintain the system of calculation and incentives, and the perpetuate the willingness to pay requisite costs in order to maintain the system of property, manners, ethics, and morals, non-corruption, non-privatization, over four generations of time without these conservative traditions, then I would like to meet him. Because despite a lifetime of attempting to find that some solution to this problem I cannot. Hayek failed, as did Mises and Parsons.
Positivism is an insufficient and hubristic technology for a problem we barely comprehend, and the mechanics of which, at least in the aggregate, we are only beginning to discover.
Children shouldn’t play with dangerous things.
Saturday ~ August 13th, 2011 at 9:34 pm
Jim
I am always wary of analysts and expert opinion which reaffirms class warfare dynamics.
No person I know who is against open borders is also against closed or even limited immigration. I suppose they are out there.
Now it is true that a significant portion of fallen Iron curtain and yes, Spanish immigrants end up on welfare, many for a generation. And that is an issue, as Mr. Doolittle above and many others have articulated.
I suppose when regulation and licensing costs precludes many lower skilled persons from pursuing virtually any kind of entrepreneurial activity such as taxi driving, hair cutting, meal preparation, or even gardening for profit, even while they struggle with a new culture and language, one must expect welfare ranks to rise. Heck, neither the young nor recent immigrants can even begin work at a starter wage to prove their worth. But I suspect that is all too involved for the purpose of surveys or border debate.
At some point though, we must decide who we are going to be; a highly restrictive welfare state like Western Europe where unintegrated temporary immigrants perform most of the low skilled labor while a significant portion of the citizens live on the dole (in American culture, it is only lately becoming an acceptable way of life), or a wide open complex economy welcome to anyone as long as they aspire to the common goals and culture that binds us all.
Both societies require an emotional and cultural story to survive. But what we can not do is sit happily in the muddled post-modern middle. And for better or worse, there is no longer a largely unsettled west to run to.
In the meantime, people are dying on the border. And in its simplest terms, that is just not acceptable. And nor is a permanent illegal or, IMHO, a temporary visa underclass.
Saturday ~ August 13th, 2011 at 9:50 pm
danielbroc
Mr. Doolittle, despite your numerous citations of principles, I don’t have the energy to figure out whether you are going or coming. However, it is my impression that, if feeding a starving man would violate one of the principles, then you would be content for him to starve. Correct me if I am wrong.
In my opinion, our economic system is a production and distribution engine. That’s why we maintain it and that’s how we use it. Marvelously and amazingly, it works very, very well. Unfortunately, we can’t rely on it to deliver to all persons the necessities and fundamental tools of life. Clearly there are many people without, even while others have vast wealth oversufficient to fulfill their every desire and their least whim. And so, I favor government (absent a better candidate) intervening to adjust the distribution and assure that all persons have clean water to drink and food to eat, even if that means partially compromising some wealthy person’s right to property.
And if the economy has some other purpose, then I guess it’s not very important.
I regret we have fallen so far from the topic of Immigration. Despite the many principles you mention, doesn’t the European experience demonstrate empirically that immigration laws are less desirable than their revocation?
Saturday ~ August 13th, 2011 at 11:29 pm
Rick Russell
In response to Mr. Dolittle, I have to wonder what a 20-year-old new entrant to the labor force has done to “earn” their opportunities, property, ethics and culture. Is simply being born on one side of a political line drawn by a river how you “earn” access to opportunity?
IMO, national borders are a 20th century anachronism. By what privilege does government constrain my ability to form economic relationships? I should be able to give opportunities to those who earn them by *merit*, not by place of birth.
Wednesday ~ August 17th, 2011 at 8:39 pm
Curt Doolittle
Thank you for your reply. I did not see this until today because I was travelling. I realize that I wrote uncommonly held ideas in haste as I often do, and I understand that I failed to render them well, as I often do.
To your comments:
1) I am explaining why people do what they do. It doesn’t matter whether I agree with it. It only matters whether the description has explanatory power, and whether it corresponds with the data. It does and it does. And that is why I find quantitative abstractions somewhat humorous at times. It’s as if people acted in a market to abstractions rather than to local opportunities and stimuli. ANd that’s simply ridiculous. It isn’t possible for them to do so.
2) Since I get wrongly accused of everything under the sun, I am loathe to tease you for violating a common philosophical principle of ethics, which is to confuse that which you can experience directly and can solve with your own resources (giving a dying man a drink of water — a feat that is epistemically transparent, and where there are no visible externalities) with the abstraction of unmeasurable ‘charity’ in the extended order of human cooperation, where there are multiple externalities, and where each of us is permanently ignorant, and where we are spending other people’s money, thereby depriving them of their preferences, wants, desires, and ambitions. If there is any principle of ethics, it is a problem of transfers.
3) An economy is not a production system for it’s participants, it only is so to an observer. It is a collection of human beings who are able to forgo violence by competing in a division of labor that we call a market — where the creation of that market requires INACTION (failing to sieze opportunities by demonstrating respect for property, norms, ethics and morals) as well as taking ACTION (sizing opportunities for production and consumption). Other than for food and shelter, people universally pursue a) stimulation and b) status. They pursue status first and foremost. They pursue money only as a means of obtaining status. Otherwise everyone would be happy with rice and beans while living in a shelter. But they are not. They seek to narrow differences, because their status is more obvious by those differences, and their opportunity for novel stimulation is decreased by those differences. ….. So what you mean instead is “I Daniel” see the economy this way, and I attribute value to economic and cooperative interactions this other way, and therefore that is how other people act.” But that’s not demonstrably true.
4) Europe is having a culture war right now of size and scale. They are openly stating that multiculturalism has failed. But that the problem is impossible to fix. We see the cultural differences in institutions between northern and southern europe. We see the impact of converting christian majorities to islamic majorities and the affect on their economies. So I would argue that by any logic, and by any evidence that we have in history, that open immigration that occurs faster than linguistic and cultural (normative) immigration is ‘bad’. It is bad because it pushes ‘costs’ into the habitual institutions. Why people think that one currency reduces economic friction and therefore is good, while language increases economic friction and therefore is not bad, is kind of illogical.
5) If people observe property rights, manners, ethics and morals, laws and institutions, and observing each of these is a cost to them, then they will view each as their ‘property’. Otherwise, ‘identity’ in the popular discourse, would have no meaning. People would abandon their ethnic and cultural preferences without resistance. But they don’t. They keep them. They treat them as property. They defend them. Institutions have real costs to everyone. People pay those costs. They know they pay them. They care about having paid them. And that is what human beings do. Any argument to economic efficiency is simply absurd, since people do not ACT in favor of economic efficiency. They ACT to preserve their property. They act to preserve their culture. They ACT to preserve their social status. They aCT to obtain experiences. That is what they do. And since there is NOTHING ELSE THAT THEY CAN KNOW that will allow them to ACT on a daily basis OTHER than by property, norms, status, and experiences, they will ALWAYS act that way.
People have to ACT. They need principles by which to act. They invest in those principles. They own them. And those principles become a cognitive necessity. Using them, they obtain status. They protect their investment. In the case of western classical liberal values, they are economically intelligent values to have, because they use micro principles to achieve macro ends.
This is the virtue of micro – the bottom up analysis of economics. It prevents you from making errors inherent in aggregations.
Sunday ~ August 14th, 2011 at 1:48 pm
teageegeepea
Is Eli telling us that it really is in our self-interest as aristocrats to oppose immigration?
Monday ~ August 15th, 2011 at 10:11 am
Gepap
Human beings are inherently mildly xenophobic, a trait we share with all other social mammals. The great majority of people are not confortable surrounded by other individuals who do not share their language or customs. This is the fundamental reason for border controls – the maintenance of existing political systems a secondary but still crucial one.