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It turns out Greenland/Denmark and Canada aren't the only friendly countries that the US has been threatening, the Vatican's ambassador to the US (according to The Free Press and Letters from Leo a Catholic focused blog) was given both explicit and coded threats of military force against the Holy See.
JD Vance, a Catholic himself, has done a pretty rare thing for the Trump admin and said they're gonna get to the bottom of it first, instead of immediately dismissing it as fake news.. This doesn't confirm it as real, but that it wasn't immediately denied and dismissed like the typical M.O. is quite interesting.
This could help explain why Pope Leo has felt so emboldened to speak up against Trump's war efforts in Iran, cause the administration officials have been warmongering against them behind the scenes. The chance that the admin actually pulls the trigger and attacks the Vatican is obviously low, but that they keep threatening many of our allies both publically and privately seems quite concerning to me. It also opens up a new thing to consider, how many other allies are they threatening behind closed doors too?
The Pope planning to spend the 250th anniversary of the USA in the completely irrelevant island named Lampedusa (yeah we get the pun Leo), known solely for importing Africans into Europe, reminds me why I ultimately have to hate Catholicism. This is a serious insult to an entire country over a political dispute involving a transient administration. And never would an Italian pope consider missing an important political anniversary in Italy. If Catholicism continues supporting endless migration into America and Europe then I will support any effort to shatter them into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the winds. There’s a generous middle-ground between “not supporting the destruction of an alien civilization” and “bringing literally infinite aliens into your country”, I don’t know how they could get this so wrong.
(Just reasoning from love thy neighbor: the Hispanic laborer who works in America has the privilege of sending home remittances with significantly greater purchasing power. Due to average salary difference adjusted for USD, cost of living difference and purchasing power difference, the Hispanic laborer could effectively make 10x more than his American counterpart. This allows him to easily support a family back home, which according to God’s design is a key factor for happiness, but the poor American laborer does not have this same privilege. Even the poor Indian who migrates here to work at a gas station has greater odds of supporting a family due to the status / wellbeing differential between here and India. We oppress our poorest neighbor by forcing him to compete with foreign workers when he makes significantly less in two key ways: (1) he often makes far less in terms of purchasing potentials re Latin America, (2) he makes far less in terms of marital potential re all foreign migrants. Same amount of stressful work, but significantly different payoff for wellbeing. Seems evil to me.)
I like seeing the most incredibly leftist stereotypes imaginable coming from the nominal right simply by adding "foreign" or "immigrant" with it. The traditional (actual) conservative view of people like Reagan and Thatcher understood that growth is the rising tide that floats the boats for everyone, instead of constant regulation put to "protect" the poor. We oppress our poorest neighbors not by "forcing him to compete" but by sabotaging the market efficiency of our companies and slowing improvements.
It's the exact sort of thinking as an example that had blue states "protecting" taxi cab drivers from rideshare apps, slowing down the spread and hurting all the people who benefited from their use. The tradeoffs of neutered growth is that all the people who would benefit from it don't, and those people are disproportionately the poor who wouldn't have had any access before. A very poor person might have rarely ever taken a taxi long ago, the price being artificially restricted from competition (like taxi medallions) and instead end up stuck on public transit. Now it is so accessible to the poor that they're even ordering private taxis for groceries and restaurant food. It is not restriction, but growth that has allowed even the poorest Americans access.
Take this to almost anything and you see the same story. Whether it be from immigrant work, outsourcing, or automation, it helps the poor when the economy is grown. Factories allow poorer people to own cars. Developments like automated switchboards make phone bills cheaper. Laborers building homes help drive down rent (even if cities insist on restricting new homes and flooding the dam). You don't spend almost 15% of your income on clothing anymore because of growth. You've flown in a plane because of growth. You have a smartphone because of growth. You have cheap lighting in your homes because of growth. I can call a friend of mine all the way over in the UK for pennies because of growth. Do you wish to deny the poor all of this and all future things to come? If not, be pro growth and fight for efficiency in growing the economy, not temporary rent seeking "pro worker" progressiveism.
In real life, when you restrict the labor supply then quality of life and technology improves: https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-better . And when you saturate the labor pool, wages for the poorest drop: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/wage-impact-marielitos-reappraisal-0
China has genuine technological growth far exceeding ours without saturating their labor pool with new workers. Europe has little technological growth despite saturating their labor pool with new workers.
American Uber drivers would be making a killing if it weren’t for mass migration.
Yes labor shortages in the short term can be quite beneficial to workers at the time, but what do labor shortages actually mean for the economy and the world? Things that people want or need to be done, don't get done because there's no one around to do them. People have to shift their labor away from awesome but not strictly necessary things like developing cars, phones, rocket ships, televisions, new medicine, whatever else in favor of the essentials. This means those new things don't happen (or at least happen much later), hurting everyone in the long run including the poor.
"Pro worker" leftist policies have major tradeoffs attached to them, it's not a free lunch.
China has 1.5 billion people. Despite the constant economic sabotage done by communism, the large labor supply simply brute forces through many of their issues. And that's pretty much entirely because Deng Xiaoping was like "come on guys, we can't be this stupid we need to be a little pro growth and pro business" and handicapped the communism part.
Europe is awash with "pro worker" policies that cuck their potential to grow. It's basically impossible to fire bad workers, vacation time is way longer than the US, and they tend to have better benefits. And yet as you say, they don't have growth and they're falling behind. Immigration is not the only factor important to growing out an economy and they've taken a knife to their businesses repeatedly in name of supporting the workers. This is what you're arguing for, sacrificing growth and our long term for the short term concentrated benefits.
An actual labor shortage means that every business owner who owns two mansions and three cars has to sell one of their mansions and one of their cars unless they want to lose their entire income and become homeless. No one in America has ever experienced an actual labor short. There are only labor shortages in very narrow subspecialties. If Amazon for some reason needed an experienced Lisp or COBOL engineer, then Amazon needs to spend money to recruit one. Then the sub-occupation of Lisp programmers have a better QoL, and Bezos’ QoL stays exactly the same because he has so much money that it can no longer increase his QoL. We have more than enough wealth wasted (genuinely wasted) at the top, that we can artfully redistribute it to the poor by simply preventing the addition of more low-wage workers.
Nope. It means that the people who want or need something done need to pay more to have it done, otherwise the employee will stop working and find somewhere else to work. You only need a very small amount of “temporarily can’t do it” or “need to do it suboptimally” to accomplish this, only 1 out of 1000 projects, a civilizationally-irrelevant amount. When the QoL and wages of the lower class increase, then they can actually afford to quit their job for months to find a better one, and can actually afford to move to other parts of the country to find a better position. It’s a race to the top in terms of QoL and wellbeing. It’s only bad for the rich who hate the poor. Consider landscaping. A rich person always wants pristine landscaping. In the wealthy areas of the east coast I am familiar with, they universally spend exorbitantly on landscaping and nearly all the employees are illegals who don’t speak English. (The oversees of more sophisticated projects speak English). They are worked to exhaustion and have to eat outside under the shade of trees. What happens when we restrict the labor pool here? If the landscaper doesn’t want to be worked to exhaustion or piss in a bottle, he can quit to find a firm with better QoL; the firms have to compete over QoL in order to retain workers; everything improves for everyone, except the ~0.1% of wealthy properties which did not want to pay more to secure the QoL of the poor. That person may have to hire a local kid to do spotty landscaping, which is also good for the poor. Or maybe the grass grows a little taller (the horror!).
I think what you’re getting at is, “I want to trade the suffering of the poor for greater tech development”. If we compel them to keep working really hard, while their life may be miserable, it’s worth it for the rest because they get more goodies, like 4k VR porn and even more addictive algorithms. But this doesn’t even apply in America, because if you wanted more tech development you would want to restrict the supply of tech employees, whereas we are saturating the field with Indians and Asians. Now all the creative techies do not have the stress-free working conditions or the income affordance necesssary to really dive into passion projects. I mean some do, but only the most conscientious and industrious, ie not the most creative. So you actually have the worst of both worlds here. Not only do we trade the stress and tears of the poor for more waste at the top, but we even trade the stress and tears of our technologically-interested creatives for more waste at the top. If you wanted more tech development, you would want to restrict tech jobs, particularly in regions known for less creativity and less start-up potential. We have done the opposite. We have guaranteed less innovation, and instead we have Mark Zuckerberg 80 billion dollars on the MetaVerse, and Bezos space vanity projects. I will admit that Musk buying x was a good thing though.
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