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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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I still cannot wrap my head around the idea of low/middle wage immigration to a country with billionaires and wealth inequality. All of the “economic efficiency” is just going to go to the very wealthy, whereas by restricting immigration you force the wealthy not just to pay higher wages and allow greater employer QoL, but to invest in the future of the citizens. If companies with longterm plans realize that they need to hire high-skilled Canadians to work as employees, suddenly you’ll find yourself with widespread maternity programs and more investment in education. Your companies will actually be lobbying the government to increase health and fertility.

Because all the efficiency isn't going to the very wealthy?

Again, the only study that has shown any sort of long-term wage depression for workers was in the immediacy of the Mariel boatlift in Miami-Dade, but that's an equivalent amount of immigration nationwide that would never happen, short of Bryan Caplan somehow becoming dictator. Yes, things don't go positively for 100% of people, but most of the actual economic downturn in certain parts of the country is actually due to outside competition from China, not immigration into the US.

Also, fertility is linked to women's education. America could become a fortress with zero immigration, and TFR will keep on going down, as long as birth control and highly educated women with expansive freedom exist.

I think when the arcane, longterm, complicated multivariable analyses on economic cause and effect conflict with common logic, we must trust common logic unless there are clear real world cases to disprove it. I have never seen anything approximating a simplified model that explains how increasing the low wage labor pool would not result in worsened quality of life when the wealthy hoard resources and min-max for greed. I have never seen any persuasive argument that supply and demand suddenly stops to work as a principle when you constrict the supply of workers.

If I start a business that requires COBOL engineers, I have one choice and one choice only: hiring COBOL engineers. If there are many to pick from who desire work, I can keep more resources and pay them less. If there are fewer on the market, I need to pay more, end of story. There can be so few COBOL engineers that I can’t hire them to start my business, but before this occurs I would cease to be a billionaire or multi-million! Clearly our country is very far away from having insufficient workers if there is still so much wealth inequality. In every scenario I can think of, in every industry, reducing the labor pool should result in greater wealth equality by forcing C-Suite and investors to let go of resources to use them to recruit and retain talent. God, it’s just so simple… why would any NBA team pay 50 mil for Steph Curry? It doesn’t matter if they don’t want to, they need to, if they want to win, and winning means money. How does this not apply to ever industry, magically, only in complicated studies?

Is this also an argument against TFR > 2.1?

TFR is directly driven by rural VS Urban and cost of living.

Those who live in rural areas have more kids.

Forcing Urbanization by importing immigrants who settle in cities rapidly increases both urbanization AND the cost of living, cascading TFR downwards.

You're making the problem worse and forcing the children produced by the native rural population to support a bunch of aliens when their old age comes in 20 years (you don't get to be the kind of skilled immigrant slected for in your 20s or even early 30s)

Ethnic Expulsions would be the best thing for birth rates.

Lowered cost of living and rapidly increased perception of risk correlates heavily with higher TFR. There's a reason over 50% of Gaza is under 18

I think you missed my point.

The arguments brought up above against immigrants apply every bit as much to children. All those kids are going to be taking up jobs, housing, etc. People should have just one kid at most to ensure that the good times keep rolling and the CEOs have to keep paying more and more.

Is this supposed to be a gotcha? Are you implying that you can't see any functional difference between the two options? Or are you just trying to bait them into saying something that you can label as racist/eugenicist?

I don't really care about baiting people on a pseudonymous Internet forum for wrongthinkers.

My question is simply, what is the distinction? You mention eugenics, but smart immigrants are actually much worse for the housing market because they earn more money and can pay more for housing.

If a population could mutually agree to all have fewer babies, while pensioners agreed to stop collecting to make way for new generations, it might be good; if that's somehow easier than the rich all agreeing to build as many houses as possible, and so on. But if your rivals/enemies/the lowest-functioning are having lots of kids, you don't want them to be the only ones. All those kids are going to be taking up jobs, housing, etc., but at least your kids are in that group, and having more kids means more success chances for your family overall. Importing a bunch of foreign competitors doesn't benefit you even genetically.

Or maybe I went off half-cocked, and I'm missing the point just like you say Kulak did. Seems kind of rude of me to have butted into the exchange and demanded an answer, really.

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