The default view is that the government should dramatically expand redistribution programs, forcing the well-endowed – especially business and the rich – to provide a decent standard of living for everyone. I strongly reject this default view.
Tag: immigration
Deadlock and Partisan Bitterness
Why does American politics seem so deadlocked? The media mostly focuses on issues where Democrats and Republicans refuse to compromise because they strongly disagree: immigration, guns, health care. But American politics often seems deadlocked even when both parties agree. For example, supermajorities of both parties want to protect DREAMers, but they’ve never reached an agreement to do so. How is this possible?
McCarthyism, Then and Now
The stale whiff of McCarthyism stole across the venue of the State of the Union address last week. POTUS played the “socialism” card, or rather he just showed the back of the card, allowing no peeks at the face of the card — not of its value, not of its suit. He was deliberately vague and ambiguous.
We Wanted Tech
“We wanted workers, but we got people instead.” This line from Max Frisch didn’t just give George Borjas the title of his most recent book. At last Friday’s immigration conference in St. Cloud, Borjas declared it his all-time favorite immigration epiphany. The point, he explained, is that immigrants aren’t just machines that produce stuff; they have broad social effects on our culture, politics, budget, and beyond.
Immigration and Redistribution: The Research to Trust
Evaluating the quality of research is laborious. Unless you re-do the whole paper yourself, how do you know the authors were not only truthful, but careful? Faced with this quandary, one of my favorite heuristics is to ask: Did the authors want to find this result? If the answer is No, I put a lot more credence into the results. In research as in the law, statements contrary to interest count more.
The Mighty Difference Between Immigration and Trade
International trade is a wonderful thing, but merely trading goods across borders has no blatant effect on the productivity of the workers who produced the goods. When a worker migrates from a low-productivity country to a high-productivity country, however, he becomes vastly more productive almost overnight.
Taking The Bait; Abandoning The High Ground
If something is necessary, it can’t be unethical, and if something is unethical it can’t be a necessity. Maybe you can’t see another way, but it’s there. It is never necessary to rape a baby, in other words.
The Call to Entrepreneurship and Our Excuses
Imagine going straight from being on vacation to starting up a complex refugee rescue mission under the nose of the Nazis – with no prior experience and no preparation. That was 29 year-old stock broker Nicholas Winton’s entrepreneurial story.
Reflections from my Panama Cruise, I
As I’ve mentioned before, cruises are in one sense a great test case for open borders. Workers from all over the world come together to run one some of the world’s most sophisticated technology and please some of the world’s most demanding customers.
On Voluntaryists IV
One notable difference between voluntaryists and coercivists are the former’s insistence on tackling issues from their root, largely dug deep in a coercive foundation. Coercivists prefer to hack away at the branches with nary a concern for whose lives and liberties they may be violating.