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I cannot "win" here. But here are some thoughts: - The Jim Crow/Chinese Exclusion comparison is not in rhetorical good faith. Both are associated with violen

I cannot "win" here. But here are some thoughts: - The Jim Crow/Chinese Exclusion comparison is not in rhetorical good faith. Both are associated with violent mobs. Anti h1-b folk may have comparable legal goals, but they are not beating up Indian sysadmins at gas stations. - Of all the injustices of birth to remedy, why pick the one for which the remedy hurts those suffering another accident of birth---being born without sufficient financial means to be capitalists? If this is about foreign aid within our borders, why do workers have to pay for it, while capitalists get cheap labor?

yummyfajitas 12y ago
If I raised the spectre of violent mobs, it was unintentional. I merely meant to raise the spectre of police/DHS/etc using violence to prevent people from engaging in trade. My apologies. I'm also not attempting to "remedy" any injustice of birth, I'm merely opposed to using violence to make it worse.
- dropit_sphere 12y ago
  I am unapogetically in favor of using violence to prevent some trades. Another word for this is "regulation." When others can't engage in trade but you can, you have a monopoly, which could be (and by many, is) seen as a second-order form of wealth. It's disingenuous to posit that we are "merely treating people equally" when one group gets a net gain and another a net loss from a policy.
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    So white Americans had a second order form of wealth in the New Deal/Jim Crow era? And it was disingenous to posit that we were "merely treating people equally" when we allowed blacks to compete economically with whites?
    - dropit_sphere 12y ago
      Yes, it was. Of course, things were hardly equal before the change as well. So we have one unequal situation vs. an unequal action. Given an unequal situation that favors people in my country, vs. an unequal action that favors people not in my country, I choose the former.
      - temujin 12y ago
        It's way more asymmetric than that. The US government is in a better position to work for Americans' interests than those of foreigners; the Mexican government has a comparative advantage in working for Mexican citizen interests, etc. Just like how you are better at spending money for yourself than for others (and the Soviet Union collapsed largely because it tried to ignore this law of nature). All existing proposals by the open borders crowd for the US with political traction are severely negative-sum for this reason. (I've seen a few ideas from them which are not, but they have essentially zero chance of being implemented.) If one wants to devote themselves to helping foreigners today, there are far, far better ways, like training/employing them in their home countries, or working toward constructive political change there.
        grinnbearit 12y ago
        (I'll paste a comment I made somewhere else here) I understand your morals could be different from mine but heres how I see it. A Chinese or Indian citizen is an individual, like any other, just like you even. Through no fault of their own they've been born in a country that doesn't provide the same quality of life for them and their family that an American/EU resident enjoys. Don't they have the right to the pursuit of happiness just like you? For an extreme example, would you rather be a Chinese Foxconn employee or an unemployed American. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance ) Edit: If Exit is not longer an option for a citizen, that only leaves Voice and Loyalty and Voice doesn't have a great track record in these countries.
        temujin 12y ago
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  >I'm also not attempting to "remedy" any injustice of birth, I'm merely opposed to using violence to make it worse. As such, you're conducting a long, wasteful discussion on the basis of an absolutist, deontological rule you cannot convince the rest of us to adopt. You are not saying to minimize violence, since you are quite comfortable with both the inherent systemic violence of private property and the resultant levels of systemic and symptomatic violence involved in petty crime, organized crime, and crime by capitalists (ie: corporate crime, in both its white-collar and Pinkerton-esque forms). You're not weighing consequences against each-other in terms of how much violence different policies generate. So it's not that you're even talking about a local minimum of violence while we're talking about other minima: it's that you simply do not care how much violence you create by enforcing minarcho-capitalism, so long as minarcho-capitalism is enforced. So why are you wasting everyone else's time for the sake of an incoherent, unreasonable ideology?

yummyfajitas 12y ago

If I raised the spectre of violent mobs, it was unintentional. I merely meant to raise the spectre of police/DHS/etc using violence to prevent people from engaging in trade. My apologies. I'm also not attempting to "remedy" any injustice of birth, I'm merely opposed to using violence to make it worse.

dropit_sphere 12y ago
I am unapogetically in favor of using violence to prevent some trades. Another word for this is "regulation." When others can't engage in trade but you can, you have a monopoly, which could be (and by many, is) seen as a second-order form of wealth. It's disingenuous to posit that we are "merely treating people equally" when one group gets a net gain and another a net loss from a policy.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  So white Americans had a second order form of wealth in the New Deal/Jim Crow era? And it was disingenous to posit that we were "merely treating people equally" when we allowed blacks to compete economically with whites?
  - dropit_sphere 12y ago
    Yes, it was. Of course, things were hardly equal before the change as well. So we have one unequal situation vs. an unequal action. Given an unequal situation that favors people in my country, vs. an unequal action that favors people not in my country, I choose the former.
    - temujin 12y ago
      It's way more asymmetric than that. The US government is in a better position to work for Americans' interests than those of foreigners; the Mexican government has a comparative advantage in working for Mexican citizen interests, etc. Just like how you are better at spending money for yourself than for others (and the Soviet Union collapsed largely because it tried to ignore this law of nature). All existing proposals by the open borders crowd for the US with political traction are severely negative-sum for this reason. (I've seen a few ideas from them which are not, but they have essentially zero chance of being implemented.) If one wants to devote themselves to helping foreigners today, there are far, far better ways, like training/employing them in their home countries, or working toward constructive political change there.
      - grinnbearit 12y ago
        (I'll paste a comment I made somewhere else here) I understand your morals could be different from mine but heres how I see it. A Chinese or Indian citizen is an individual, like any other, just like you even. Through no fault of their own they've been born in a country that doesn't provide the same quality of life for them and their family that an American/EU resident enjoys. Don't they have the right to the pursuit of happiness just like you? For an extreme example, would you rather be a Chinese Foxconn employee or an unemployed American. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance ) Edit: If Exit is not longer an option for a citizen, that only leaves Voice and Loyalty and Voice doesn't have a great track record in these countries.
        temujin 12y ago
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
>I'm also not attempting to "remedy" any injustice of birth, I'm merely opposed to using violence to make it worse. As such, you're conducting a long, wasteful discussion on the basis of an absolutist, deontological rule you cannot convince the rest of us to adopt. You are not saying to minimize violence, since you are quite comfortable with both the inherent systemic violence of private property and the resultant levels of systemic and symptomatic violence involved in petty crime, organized crime, and crime by capitalists (ie: corporate crime, in both its white-collar and Pinkerton-esque forms). You're not weighing consequences against each-other in terms of how much violence different policies generate. So it's not that you're even talking about a local minimum of violence while we're talking about other minima: it's that you simply do not care how much violence you create by enforcing minarcho-capitalism, so long as minarcho-capitalism is enforced. So why are you wasting everyone else's time for the sake of an incoherent, unreasonable ideology?