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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24312 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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No. There is a fellowship in an ethnos that goes deeper than economic relationships.

Good news about a free market, it would also allow the people participating in them to properly weight their "ethnos fellowship" preferences against their "economic relationship" preferences. If the American people weighted heavily against immigrants to the point of sacrificing some economic wellbeing, then we would see it in the market activity, economic opportunities for migrants would decrease accordingly and there would be less immigration.

But in the same way that prediction markets help to reveal true beliefs, free economic markets reveal true preferences. Just like people who whine about big supermarkets like Walmart "taking over local businesses" still go there, because in actuality they prefer lower prices with higher variety over the inefficient highly local grocery stores, people generally prefer their economic wellbeing over racial collectivism. There's a reason why even Trump on this major anti migrant crusade won't actually prioritize (and has often exempted) the farms, construction sites, meatpacking plants and other similar major industries and instead focuses on high publicity acts like in Minnesota right now.

But in the same way that prediction markets help to reveal true beliefs, free economic markets reveal true preferences.

Would you agree that most poor people have a revealed true preference to invest most of the money they receive into credit card payments and similar fees, and that the people who receive those fees are benevolent actors working tirelessly to help such poor people live their very best life?

If not, I'm curious as to why you view the market as "revealing true preferences" in the one case and not the other.

Would you agree that most poor people have a revealed true preference to invest most of the money they receive into credit card payments and similar fees, and that the people who receive those fees are benevolent actors working tirelessly to help such poor people live their very best life?

Yes, they decided to borrow money under a preset agreement. If they fail to pay it back, it's their fault.

(Not OP, but I agree with their position)

Yeah, that’s obviously true? I wouldn’t call credit lenders “benevolent”, but yes, access to credit reveals a lot about how some people value deferring great cost for short-term benefit.

Do you oppose the use of public resources to subsidize their lifestyle? Can you actually prevent public resources from being used to subsidize their lifestyle? Or is this just policy arbitrage, where we appeal to atomic individualism or social unity, whichever is convenient at the moment?

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