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Yes, doctors and lawyers are protected by non-immigration-related government policies that geeks don't benefit from. But most of the money you spend every day
by sethg 18y ago
Yes, doctors and lawyers are protected by non-immigration-related government policies that geeks don't benefit from. But most of the money you spend every day doesn't go to doctors and lawyers.
Consider your laptop. What proportion of the cost of a laptop can be attributed to the cost of wages for workers in the US? (Remember what Adam Smith said: the cost of everything in a free-market economy can be divided among "rent of land", "wages of labor", and "profit of stock".)
There's the cost of the longshoremen who unloaded it from the docks, the cost of the truck drivers who drove it across the country, the cost of the warehouse workers who put it on the shelf and then took it off again when you ordered it...on a per-laptop basis, I don't think those costs add very much to the price. So if the US opens its borders and people all over the world compete for truck-driving jobs, I don't think the cost of laptops is going to go down very much.
- geebee 18y agoOh yeah, I totally agree. It doesn't have to be a government sponsored union like the AMA or ABA to count as market manipulation. My point was that software is among the most free labor markets in the US. This was in response to the point that engineers are hypocritical for not applying their libertarian leanings to foreign engineers who would like to move here without restrictions. My point was that 1) I plead guilty to this charge - I do not support unlimited immigration, though that would be the purest form of free markets, and 2) relative to other fields, software engineering is more open to foreign nationals than almost any other field in the US (rivaled only by crop picking - the other great employer-sponsered work visa program - and maybe that tells you something about software...)