In the absence of full libertarian private property, we can at best guess what that system would have resulted in and then try to approximate to that with government policies. Trump's suggestion probably counts as such an approximation.
When in your opinion did America become great through open immigration?
I see protestant sects that were thrifty and literate before the Independence.
In the 19th century, wages were higher than in Europe due to labor shortage. The US was openly racist and was forbidding the immigration of "Negroes, Chinamen, and Hindoos", while illiterate Catholics be they Scott, Irish or Italians were welcome to come and try to integrate.
This influx of low social capital populations from paternalistic societies and their concentration in industrial cities contributed to the advent of the progressive era, and the development of the "Great" welfare state.
The American politician has a choice: 1) should we select immigrants to get adequately skilled, productive, and easy to integrate people, or 2) should we use immigration as a way to buy votes by increasing the number of welfare recipients and create problems that the government will be tasked to solve?
Strictly, the U.S. has never had fully open immigration. But it was relatively open through most of the 19th and early 20th century. It might always have been better to discriminate in favour of immigrants more likely to be productive. Like most philosophers, I only go into the empirical details as far as seems necessary for philosophical purposes.
That comment of yours is very interesting, it got me thinking, but I think I may be projecting my thoughts onto yours.
Karl Marx saw himself as a political philosopher but wanted to change things. Maybe you should do a short and sweet meta post on why you take a philosophical viewpoint and how you see it being different from a historical approach.
IMHO, the shorter the sweeter. Or maybe if you already wrote that, you can point me to it.
I certainly hope to contribute towards changing the intellectual outlook to a more libertarian direction. The reasons I take a philosophical viewpoint:
1) My degrees are all in philosophy (BA, MSc, PhD).
2) Other libertarian philosophers leave a lot to be desired. In particular, they have no philosophical theory of liberty (which is as absurd as a utilitarian philosopher not being able to say what his theory of utility is) and they think “supporting justifications” are epistemologically possible.
3) There are many good libertarian economists, historians, etc. I cannot do a better job than they are already doing in their areas of expertise (although I sometimes have philosophical criticisms).
4) What is different about philosophy from other subjects is that it examines the assumptions that they are unaware of, or take for granted, or appear to be somehow mistaken about, etc. I sometimes say that philosophy is far less important for promoting liberty than are the social sciences; but only in the sense that medicine is far less important for promoting health than is refuse disposal. And sometimes philosophy and medicine are needed.
I think there is mainly a cultural problem with immigration and less the scale. Unless they are directly immigrating into the welfare system, the economics work. The immigrants Germany has received in the last few years have resulted in a massive increase in violent crime. That is one of the main problems with it. I don't think, if 10 million Englishmen or French had moved to Germany we would have seen the same results. Overall, that would have been a good thing for Germany, although if people move too quickly that can of course result in a temporary problem with the infrastructure. But with culture, it becomes a bit collectivist, which is a problem for libertarians.
How about more open, e.g. Trump's suggestion that every STEM graduate of a US university get a green card?
In the absence of full libertarian private property, we can at best guess what that system would have resulted in and then try to approximate to that with government policies. Trump's suggestion probably counts as such an approximation.
When in your opinion did America become great through open immigration?
I see protestant sects that were thrifty and literate before the Independence.
In the 19th century, wages were higher than in Europe due to labor shortage. The US was openly racist and was forbidding the immigration of "Negroes, Chinamen, and Hindoos", while illiterate Catholics be they Scott, Irish or Italians were welcome to come and try to integrate.
This influx of low social capital populations from paternalistic societies and their concentration in industrial cities contributed to the advent of the progressive era, and the development of the "Great" welfare state.
The American politician has a choice: 1) should we select immigrants to get adequately skilled, productive, and easy to integrate people, or 2) should we use immigration as a way to buy votes by increasing the number of welfare recipients and create problems that the government will be tasked to solve?
Strictly, the U.S. has never had fully open immigration. But it was relatively open through most of the 19th and early 20th century. It might always have been better to discriminate in favour of immigrants more likely to be productive. Like most philosophers, I only go into the empirical details as far as seems necessary for philosophical purposes.
That comment of yours is very interesting, it got me thinking, but I think I may be projecting my thoughts onto yours.
Karl Marx saw himself as a political philosopher but wanted to change things. Maybe you should do a short and sweet meta post on why you take a philosophical viewpoint and how you see it being different from a historical approach.
IMHO, the shorter the sweeter. Or maybe if you already wrote that, you can point me to it.
I certainly hope to contribute towards changing the intellectual outlook to a more libertarian direction. The reasons I take a philosophical viewpoint:
1) My degrees are all in philosophy (BA, MSc, PhD).
2) Other libertarian philosophers leave a lot to be desired. In particular, they have no philosophical theory of liberty (which is as absurd as a utilitarian philosopher not being able to say what his theory of utility is) and they think “supporting justifications” are epistemologically possible.
3) There are many good libertarian economists, historians, etc. I cannot do a better job than they are already doing in their areas of expertise (although I sometimes have philosophical criticisms).
4) What is different about philosophy from other subjects is that it examines the assumptions that they are unaware of, or take for granted, or appear to be somehow mistaken about, etc. I sometimes say that philosophy is far less important for promoting liberty than are the social sciences; but only in the sense that medicine is far less important for promoting health than is refuse disposal. And sometimes philosophy and medicine are needed.
I think there is mainly a cultural problem with immigration and less the scale. Unless they are directly immigrating into the welfare system, the economics work. The immigrants Germany has received in the last few years have resulted in a massive increase in violent crime. That is one of the main problems with it. I don't think, if 10 million Englishmen or French had moved to Germany we would have seen the same results. Overall, that would have been a good thing for Germany, although if people move too quickly that can of course result in a temporary problem with the infrastructure. But with culture, it becomes a bit collectivist, which is a problem for libertarians.
Open borders for Germany (and no other country) would be likely to mean both far too many people too quickly and of a problematic kind.