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I'm not sure what to call the fallacy I think you're making, but it seems like you're drawing lines about what is and isn't state intervention in a way that's intended to benefit your point, rather than deriving logically from some coherent first-principles definition. For example--
You complain about immigration as if the default state of the world is "no immigration" and state intervention is required and responsible for migration. But imagine a world where national policy isn't concerned with immigration at all. Yes, that would mean a reduction in government-sponsored pull factors like welfare and resettlement initiatives for immigrants/refugees, but also a complete lack of enforcement of any sort of border controls. What do you think migration looks like, in this world? Personally, I think we'd see fewer refugees, but even more economic migrants, which seem to be the sort that you're complaining about. Why not let these "natural civilizational cycles" play out here?
Similarly you propose, "a bunch of other childless couples want to organize a mutual support community to help look out for each other in your old age" as an alternative to government, but... that seems essentially like a government to me.
Giving you maximal charity, I think I agree with the weak form of the point you intend to make, which is (to the best of my understanding) that particular forms of higher-order, nonlocal government preclude and interfere with individual and local control in a negative way. With some caveats, I'd also agree with,
But I think it's worth being precise about what levels and what kinds of government result in these negative outcomes so as to adequately identify why these problems occur and how they can be prevented. There's no point devolving power to local governments if they're going to be just as stupid, and it's worth noting that a wide variety of modernist problems have direct analogues in smaller local communities. Local communities just happen to benefit from survivorship bias and fewer historical records.
We used to have those and they looked like the Migration Era. And to be honest, if the Central Americans can pull off a Migration Era conquest of the rich land to their north, they deserve their winnings.
What were you envisioning? A world of huge masses of people just move around freely and frictionlessly? Because that’s what requires massive state intervention to accomplish.
That would be better than the current situation, so if they were actually allowed to play out with all the violence accompanying it(and not the weird Libertarian vision of people just freely going wherever while the current residents just bend over and take it), I would be fine with that. If that means all of India and Africa builds a navy and comes over here, conquering and pillaging as they go, well, the West had a good run. But at least they actually had to build their navy, instead of just being escorted straight into our airports.
I’m pretty sure I used the word State as my hate object, which is a kind of government but not synonymous with government in general, a point it seems like you understand in the very next paragraph, so I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make here.
Of course there is. It’s because you don’t actually know what’s stupid. Or rather, we have no idea what the fifth order consequences of our actions are going to be. Nobody who was working on the internal combustion engine in the 19th century had the foggiest idea that it was going to produce Greta Thunberg. The American post-war consensus was a huge boost to the worldwide economy, but it appears to me that a slow decay of the population’s dynamism and a societal Balkanization might have very negative effects later on.
You might think it’s stupid for people to have a purposely all white community, or to have a community that’s all Catholic by law. You could be right, even. I might think a society that transes kids is stupid. I could be right. But we’re not going to know in the long run if my ideas are stupid, or if yours are, when the State shuts down every community it doesn’t like.
And that of course is the crux of the original discussion here. The State has decided that the allegedly best thing for the original population is to let in more than 76 million immigrants, in the belief that this is what’s best for the population it was empowered by.
Because of that, cities and states are allowed to be sanctuaries for these immigrants, but nowhere is allowed to be an anti-sanctuary, actively stopping immigrants at the edge of town. There’s no way to really know which choice is stupider, if such a concept could ever even really be agreed upon.
This is just an example, of course. One could even argue that the State would be betraying its original clients by stopping massive transfers to old people. That’s certainly looking out for their interests, after all, and they were around before the young, so first come first served. That’s a fair argument. Totally destructive for the society as a whole, of course, but a fair argument.
But we’ll never have the opportunity to actually know if stopping transfers of wealth from the young to the old would make a thousand fetuses bloom, because no one is allowed to try it.
We’re just stuck here, asking ourselves “Who will take care of me, if not the State?”
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