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by knucklesandwich 3349 days ago
It's incredibly weird when I find myself agreeing with someone on the right. This article is filled with lots of bullshit "its just econ 101" neoliberal cliches (and uses the beloved tactic of the right that "everything I dislike is soviet central planning and a perversion of this clearly natural and non-synthetic notion of a totally free market"). None of that is necessary to what is fundamentally an argument that should rest on moral principles. I prefer this version of the argument: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/03/the-case-for-open-borders...
2 comments
davidw 3348 days ago
I'm not really a right-wing guy either, but I think anyone can agree that the current "magic numbers" involved in H1-B visas are very much central planning at its worst.
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knucklesandwich 3348 days ago
It's a failure of policy to be sure, but it's not as though planning is really at fault here, just as open borders isn't really a market solution (even though the implication that it is somehow worms its way into this argument). A market solution would be to use the government to perpetuate scarcity of visa slots and enforce property rights around a visa, and allow visa holders to sell or trade their visa rights. As a corollary, the problem with immigration is not inefficient allocation of slots caused by planning, its that we have immigration limits to begin with.

It's a neoliberal trope to try to work markets into every social problem, but this is really an issue concerning ethics and justice, not allocation.

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tn135 3348 days ago
I am libertarian and I think US immigration system is a glowing failure of central planning. It is something that people on left, right, center and under the ground can very easily agree on.
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knucklesandwich 3348 days ago
Planning is not the problem, and open borders is not a market solution. There's a fair point to be made that it's an overreach of the state, that it's unethical and pointlessly carceral and represents the kinds of things we shouldn't have government doing, but that has nothing to do with it being a failure of planning. And the soviet analogy is really going out of your way to score redbaiting ideological points when you can compare it to every other needlessly cruel and punitive policy that leads to social ills in our own legal system. At least that would be a comparison structured around the actual problem, which is one of morality and justice.
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