Full Employment • Hacker News Board

Re: Full Employment

#131

Post by justin66 » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 2:28 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #121

setgree wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our pressing problems Generalization: most of those problems are political rather than technical, and unlike with technical problems, if you make a wrong guess about how to solve a political problem, the costs might be unboundedly catastrophic (e.g. world war). I personally believe that the best response to global warming is open borders, becaus…

The more obligations a state takes to its population (not limited to citizens), the harder it is to enact an open-borders policy while keeping these obligations. The US used to accept basically anyone, but it did not have any Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, etc. In EU states, the problem is even more severe, as they provide more benefits, to those who pay taxes an to those who don't alike.…

> The more obligations a state takes to its population (not limited to citizens), the harder it is to enact an open-borders policy while keeping these obligations.

The opposite is true. Immigrants generally work very hard and accept minimal wages. (This is one reason why many citizens would prefer not to compete with them in the labor market.) Their labor can be highly effective in supporting an economy with strong, potentially expensive, social programs.

In the US, our problem is that we've found that we can make them work even harder for even lower wages, and provide them even less social support, by making them "illegal."

Re: Full Employment

#132

Post by LatteLazy » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

This is just Cory's musings based on a list of very questionable assumptions. At several points he is not quite factually wrong but almost factually wrong (30% unemployment sounds huge, till you realise the employment rate has been falling, is around 50% and much lower in plenty of Rust Belt towns without total collapse). Why are we even discussing it?

Re: Full Employment

#133

Post by throwanem » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

tristor wrote: post #118

throwanem wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I especially want to validate your reference to a piece of diegetic COINTELPRO agitprop in a not very good and rather outdated polemical novel, but if it's "two mutually antagonistic but still self policing Outer Parties" you want, have you seen the ostensibly competing libertarian tendencies that currently make up American public politics?

Are you kidding me? What are these "ostensibly competing libertarian tendencies that currently make up American public politics"? We have a broken two-party system where both parties abandoned their philosophical beginnings more than 3 decades ago to pursue headlong corporatist and globalist goals, with varying spins depending on what personally benefits party leadership the most. Both parties are working hard to sys…

Thanks for that! It's been a few years now since I was accused on HN of being a paid agent of a foreign government. It's nice to see that standards here haven't changed as much as is so constantly alleged.

I think you might want to read my earlier comment again. I said "libertarian", in the "classical liberal" sense; I did not say "anarcholibertarian" or "anarchocapitalist" or "libertarian anarchist" or "autarkist". You've also mistaken my description of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism for a description of the not very good and rather outdated polemical novel in which it appears.

Given that nothing here responds to anything I actually said, there doesn't seem to be any basis for a more fruitful response than the one I have given. Please feel free to make another attempt, ideally without the misapprehension of my points. You're welcome to double down on the slander, though! For all that the intent is to insult, I can't help but find it amusing.

Re: Full Employment

#134

Post by mdorazio » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 2:39 PM UTC

justin66 wrote: post #131

nine_k wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more obligations a state takes to its population (not limited to citizens), the harder it is to enact an open-borders policy while keeping these obligations. The US used to accept basically anyone, but it did not have any Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, etc. In EU states, the problem is even more severe, as they provide more benefits, to those who pay taxes an to those who don't alike.…

> The more obligations a state takes to its population (not limited to citizens), the harder it is to enact an open-borders policy while keeping these obligations. The opposite is true. Immigrants generally work very hard and accept minimal wages. (This is one reason why many citizens would prefer not to compete with them in the labor market.) Their labor can be highly effective in supporting an economy with strong,…

The opposite is true. Social programs are funded by tax dollars, not cheap labor that may or may not be reported for taxes at all. If you want to make an argument that immigrants are good for these programs you need to limit immigration to higher economic output (and thus tax revenue) individuals like many other countries do.

Re: Full Employment

#135

Post by leetcrew » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

setgree wrote: post #124

tomjen3 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a fan of open borders, but you can't have any kind of public assistance and open borders.

Bryan Caplan addresses this as one of his "keyhole solutions" to various perceived negative externalities: [0] > For instance, if the problem lies with migrant welfare use, the most keyhole solution-like approach is to change the rules, or enforcement of rules, surrounding migrant welfare use. Another option is open borders with a migration tax [1]. At the end of the day, I think that once someone adopts the mindset…

this raises more questions than it answers for me. the migration tax in particular doesn't make a lot of sense to me. immigrants are either going to a) consume more services than they pay for in "normal" taxes, or b) make enough money that their taxes more than offset the services consumed. in case b), the people probably already have some valuable skills; you don't want to discourage these people from entering with a special tax. they would already be a net benefit to the balance sheet upon entry. in case a), they probably couldn't afford to pay a meaningful migration tax in the first place. do you just turn them away if they can't pay?

restrictions on use of welfare for immigrants seems "fair" in a sense. at least, it doesn't leave them worse off than they were in the first place. I have to suspect this is a non-starter politically though. outside of a certain group of libertarians, most people who think it's morally wrong to prohibit free movement probably also consider it morally wrong to let people starve in the streets once they get there.

Re: Full Employment

#136

Post by truculent » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #77

Reading the economic and tech-fix discussion here, it strikes me again that we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our pressing problems. Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is. I don't know how we get from here to a p…

> Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is.

This is well said, and I have been very frustrated by this in recent years, too. The simplest clue I have is to look at who benefits from this perspective, and what means they have to spread this idea in the public sphere and discourse.

Re: Full Employment

#137

Post by petermcneeley » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

LatteLazy wrote: post #132

This is just Cory's musings based on a list of very questionable assumptions. At several points he is not quite factually wrong but almost factually wrong (30% unemployment sounds huge, till you realise the employment rate has been falling, is around 50% and much lower in plenty of Rust Belt towns without total collapse). Why are we even discussing it?

Seconded. This strikes me as the half confused ramblings of someone who has smoked too much weed and watched Mad Max once too often.

Re: Full Employment

#138

Post by justin66 » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 2:48 PM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #134

justin66 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more obligations a state takes to its population (not limited to citizens), the harder it is to enact an open-borders policy while keeping these obligations. The opposite is true. Immigrants generally work very hard and accept minimal wages. (This is one reason why many citizens would prefer not to compete with them in the labor market.) Their labor can be highly effective in supporting an economy with strong,…

The opposite is true. Social programs are funded by tax dollars, not cheap labor that may or may not be reported for taxes at all. If you want to make an argument that immigrants are good for these programs you need to limit immigration to higher economic output (and thus tax revenue) individuals like many other countries do.

> Social programs are funded by tax dollars, not cheap labor that may or may not be reported for taxes at all.

The economy provides tax dollars. If immigrants are working hard for low wages, they're supporting the economy and economic growth. You're thinking very unclearly if you gauge the economic impact of a worker, or a class of workers, solely on how much income tax they pay.

Re: Full Employment

#139

Post by bpizzi » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 2:49 PM UTC

montereynack wrote: post #100

wGeF7H8Z59y985y wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In our (western civilization) societies, everyone wants to be a manager or a scrum master or at least a programmer, have a nice white collar job in the home office. That’s a very coastal city attitude which in most parts of the US would seem utterly provincial. The man who owns the roofing company that’s redoing my roof shakes his head when he hears me talk about staring at a computer screen all day. The HVAC repai…

Sorry, I know you wanted to communicate a lot with that paragraph but I gotta ask - what keyboard do you use? I want to avoid carpal tunnel myself but haven’t been able to find any recommendations online.

You should aim for orthogonal and spitted keyboards. Big changes, you possibly need to relearn to type, but potentially life changing. One model among others which is safe for recommendation is Ergodox EZ. Warning: not cheap, none are.

Re: Full Employment

#140

Post by LatteLazy » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 2:50 PM UTC

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #129

> Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks, like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland Isn't sea level rise likely to only be a few feet? Regardless, Holland seems fine living below sea level. I don't think we really need to move cities kilometers inland.

2.3m per degree C. That's about 7ft per degree. And we're looking at a 5C (aka 35ft) rise.

And that's without the "leverage" of flat land: you might have to go a mile in land to find the first place that's an inch about the beach. Ever been on a flat beach when the tide came in? You can lose a lot of land to a very small rise in sea...