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Good grief. What a hellscape of a world you paint a picture of. The open borders proposition alone sinks all the rest. What will you do when half of the middle east moves over and votes to repeal all of your pretty policies and install Islamic theocracy? What is the plan for dealing with open ethnic warfare in the streets as immigrant enclaves import their bitter generations-old grudges onto your streets? Spending all this time and energy setting up these expensive policies before throwing wide the gates and inviting all the barbarians in to burn it all down strikes me as far from rational.
Not for the first time, I find myself comforted that these people are confined to their weird Bay Area poly sex cults far away from the levers of power.
You have only grasped half of the reason why open borders are bad. There are deeper problems with open borders. The way you frame it, with "bad guys" crossing the border, suggests that the problems are fixable. Just dial it down a bit and have a semi-open border, closed to "bad guys", porous to "good guys". But open borders is a path to catastrophe, even on a homogeneous clone world, with no races and just one culture.
I've made two lengthy attempts to explain the point, one as a modernized version of Malthusian Immiseration, the other in response to a discussion of Bryan Caplan's ideas.
Did I manage to distill the essence of the issue here? Lightly edited, it reads:
Isn't this argument goes not only against open borders but even modern large countries with no internal barriers in them. How small should your PaCCPs be? And what about effects of scale that historically allowed large countries to dominate smaller ones?
That is a sharp observation. I've written as though the mobility boundary was the whole story. What about the political boundary?
The Canadian fishery that collapsed was on the East coast. Presumably the fishermen could move to the West coast of Canada and pivot to different fish (Perhaps salmon instead of cod?). So Canada, with different fisheries on the East and West coast, lets us ponder what we think of political boundaries.
Imagine that geography and fish biology makes fishery regulation trickier and more expensive on the East coast. Let us fill in the details, first that politics is uniform across Canada, but mobility is restricted. This creates a perverse incentive. Fishermen on the West coast don't want restrictive catch laws and expensive inspections that they don't need. But what if the fishery on the East coast collapses? Won't the fishermen from the East move West, compete for jobs and drive down wages? No. In this hypothetical there is an internal mobility boundary different from the political boundary. Fishermen on the West coast can ruin things for fishermen on the East coast and not have to care.
Second branch of the hypothetical: Canada is a single, big unitary country with full internal mobility. There is a fight on the East coast, within the East coast fishing community, between those seeking catch restrictions so that there will be fish to catch next year and those with bills to pay this year. If stocks are higher on the West coast, the large size of the country dilutes the urgency of local concerns, the catch restrictions don't get imposed, the East coast fishery collapses. Later, an influx of East coast fishermen to the West coast, drives down wages, and drives up catches. The conflict between those looking to the future and those pressed by immediate concerns repeats, with the same outcome. Classic progressive collapse, first East, then West.
Third branch of the hypothetical: Canada is divided. (Perhaps the division is somehow fishing specific. I haven't thought how such a thing would play out in the long term.) Fishermen cannot change coast. But each coast decides its fishing policy independently.
I've thought of PaCCAP as the question of how big should the PaCCAP be, in the sense of comparing the second case with third. In both cases the mobility boundary and the political boundary coincide. The first hypothetical probes what happens if one has fewer and larger political units than mobility regions. It looks bad. There is obviously much scope to argue about the correct size for a PaCCAP, but the mobility boundary and the political boundary should always coincide.
I've been thinking about why defensive alliances fail to keep collections of small countries safe. We talk about fighting for King and Country. But why did Britain enter the Great War (1914-1918)? The country involved seems to be Serbia, or maybe Belgium, not England. I'm pondering that small countries have historically been unsuccessful in staying safe because the concept of a defensive alliance is ambiguous. Inventing new terminology I ask whether "defensive alliance" means "chaining alliance" or "isolating alliance".
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Comically, this is almost exactly a common argument I see in favor of open borders: that is, that we already have "open borders" for capital and it causes exactly those problems so it's BS that we don't have open borders for labor, too.
Not claiming it's a good argument, but I've definitely seen it pretty often.
If you want to do a le epic handshake, I'm happy to close the borders for capital.
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As perhaps a compliment to this, but phrased in a way that may be less antagonistic, notable proponent of open borders Brian Caplan was recently asked to steelman the "Bordertarian" position. He replied:
I think most people acknowledge that culture and politics is one of, if not the main really significant hurdle to open borders. Beyond that, it gets to be a bit difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. What would the voting blocs end up looking like? What kind of policies would end up being pursued? Damn if it's not hard to know. But it is potentially quite scary, especially as it already feels like core Western principles and freedoms are already hanging at knife's edge.
Probably agreed that it is highly unlikely that the new political alignment, whatever the details, would adopt the rest of the OP's platform.
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Are they, though? Doesn't Effective Altruism have a big 'policy' focus? And how well did assuming weird progressive academic-ish nerds wouldn't have any influence over the levers of power go for the past few centuries?
At any rate, it shouldn't be surprising that a post or ideology with a few dozen big ideas will have a few bad ones. What doesn't? That shouldn't sink the whole concept.
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Good grief, indeed.
You’ve been warned and banned before for low-effort sneering and antagonism. Please dial it down, and try to attack arguments rather than people.
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