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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.
What are some of these examples of huge amounts of wealth being genuinely wasted? That'd have to happen in the form of huge amounts of consumption. Most of the wealth at the top is sitting in the form of stocks, at most you get some yachts, which just aren't much of a blip on any measure of consumption.
Too many houses, houses that are too large, too many private pools and other unnecessary amenities, expensive overseas luxury good purchases, too many cars, too many vacations, too many private jets (15k), etc etc etc
Just extraordinary waste which we know, scientifically, does not measurably influence happiness. It is entirely reasonable to design an immigration policy which forces the rich to depart from the resources they waste, so that the resources are necessarily transferred into the lower and middle classes.
Whats your cut off for rich here? Unless you're including like the broad middle class then these forms of consumption are just such a tiny percent of total wealth/consumption that it's hard to take seriously as anything but resentment that they have nice things.
These things comprise a large part of the consumption of the rich in America. Is it possible you resent the poor for having a genuine moral claim to the resources that the wealthy waste?
They comprise a large part of the consumption of the rich of course, what else would they consume? But a very small amount of total consumption. If you redistributed all the pools and big houses we'd all have a 5 minute time share a year in mansion and get to enter a one in a thousand lottery to have one of flights be private instead of commercial jet. And yeah, I think it's basically fine that the system works out that people who get into a bunch of voluntary, everyone wins and grows the pie contracts get to consume some of that newly created pie. It's not a big deal to me. I think redistribution to a degree is good to a point, we should have some baseline level of consumption that even the least fortunate have access to, good shelter, good food, free time and plentiful entertainment options, but it's just not a big deal to me if the guy who built up a company to provides valuable goods and services gets to debauch it up in a nice big house by his private pool, good for him.
All that even said, your position doesn't even really work out to redistribution, it just shrinks the pie for everyone. The poor get even less in actual terms although maybe a bigger slice in relative terms.
If the wealthiest top 1% of households in America have at least $14mil, and the class as a whole possesses 55 trillion in wealth, then there is necessarily a lot of wealth wasted on things that are not required for the happiness of these 1% of households. And so we can improve a comical amount of lives in America by simply halting immigration. If this wealth were originally compelled to be redistributed annually (because no surplus of workers), we are talking about 1-3 trillion to be distributed. That’s giving the bottom 100 million working Americans (the bottom 60%) between 10k and 30k annually. We are also talking about lower housing costs and lower stress-related healthcare costs. We are also talking about a more efficient economy as the workers are actually able to pick up and move for greater wages (simply not realistic for many working Americans right now, and they can’t bargain if they can’t afford to quit for a couple months). We are also talking about less educational waste as people see that they can live comfortably without a college degree. Then we will see gains in civic participation, with all of its myriad benefits. &tc
It’s a big deal for me that this wealth is wasted because, at the end of the day, we are trading the blood and lives of the poor so that the flooring in a wealthy person’s bathroom is more colorful. We are looking at the mangled corpse of a child in a drunk driving accident, knowing of course that alcoholism and life stress are linked (and in any case treatment costs money), and we are saying “this is just the price we pay so that an investment banker gets a yacht”. This is not a rational trade for the statistically-informed looking at the predictable cofactors of misery. I think this is just allowing the poor to die so that the rich are more comfortable.
So immediately you've moved off the consumption point. The vast majority of this wealth is is frozen assets that don't do anything to consumption.
??? This just seems like free association. Where are you getting these numbers? Where is the redistribution coming from because of preventing immigration? Almost all of higher labor costs are passed on to the consumers which you can basically model as a flat tax, famously a regressive type of tax.
What are you talking about man? You don't need to take months off to find a job. Most people interview for new jobs while working their current jobs.
Ultimately this whole world view you're espousing is a mess. I guess the cleanest way to attack it is just that your conflation between wealth and consumption is founded on misunderstandings and the mechanism you're expecting to connect immigration enforcement to lead to improving people's lives are very transparently you deciding you don't like immigration and working backwards. Almost none of the wealth of the rich is in the consumption of bathroom tiles. It's tied up in little bits of paper, they are for the most part deferring their right to bid up consumption for the average person. They're not buying thousands of pounds of beef and burning it on pyres so that the hard working American has to go without, they're not buying up entire hospitals and cackling as they sit empty or square miles of in demand real estate that they leave empty. They are having negligible impacts on the consumption of your downtrodden American. Further immigrants that come and do the work that your average American consumes are on net increasing the average American purchasing power. They're on the supply side of the equation. Building houses, working agriculture, all the stuff that reduces the cost of living for the average American.
You know that people invest in order profit later. And you know that the category “frozen assets” includes a lot of frivolous waste (large properties, private jets, art, watches, jewelry). And you know that, were these business owners compelled in their business career to pay workers more, the money they put into frozen assets would have went to these workers.
Because you have to pay workers more to retain them; they are more valuable; the owner cannot reduce the QoL and wages as much as possible. Workers can bargain for a greater share in the profit.
This is essentially saying, “Jeff Bezos would keep increasing the price for Amazon if he had to pay workers more so that he magically makes the same amount of profit as today.” This is incorrect and it should be obvious why it’s incorrect. Amazon cannot raise their prices so much that people stop using their services. At a certain point it becomes too high for the consumer to pay. There is a ceiling to the price of Amazon that cannot increase, and if you pay the low wage workers behind Amazon more, eventually most of his excess profit transfers to these workers. Because there’s a cap on the pricing of Amazon.
Again, this has been shown repeatedly in all real world scenarios. After the 1920s Immigration Quotas. Higher wages after the 1918–1919 Spanish Flu. After the Bracero Program ended. You realize that if your theory was right, you should be able to find a real world example where there was a significant artificial restriction in low-wage labor which reduced the wages of the lowest wage earners? Doesn’t it make you suspicious that this… doesn’t exist? And it has only ever been shown to increase their wages and bargaining power? And shouldn’t this be sort of obvious?
There are two things to this: (1) when low wage earnings are sufficiently high that a laborer can actually quit in between jobs when dissatisfied with his conditions, this is excellent for the bargaining power of their class, as it penalizes companions with a low QoL. Wages are not high enough for low wage earners to do this without risking financial catastrophe. (2) It’s not realistic for a low-wage earner today to pick up and move across the country to wherever they can make more, even if they know they can make more. They don’t have the wealth to do this. It’s expensive to do it, they risk immediate homelessness if it fails, employers will not help them relocate and they may not be able to find someone willing to lease to them.
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