This is actually one of the strongest reasons to oppose widespread immigration as a global policy, paradoxically enough, though the argument smack pretty hard against some paternalistic and/or colonialist flavor.
Essentially by allow mass immigration you’re allowing a “safety valve” of population growth in areas where it’s not sustainable into areas where it is. All the westernized countries have below or nearly below replacement rates right now. Immigration is really the only thing keeping populations growing in the West.
The other even less tasteful… well… i’m not sure which is more distasteful tbh… argument is the same explanation as to why rural areas in the Western world are suffering so badly - because the best and brightest are leaving them to go those shining metropolises everyone wants to live in. By siphoning off the cream of the crop you’re actually making it harder for those nations to solve their economic and political problems because everyone with talent and ambition has gotten the heck out of there.
Well if this does surprise people, that’s because people don’t think in terms of work. Cheaper fuel doesn’t mean a steady state system, it means cheaper “work”, and individuals will use the cheaper fuel to do more “work”.
If i could fly anywhere on earth for $50 flat round trip, setting aside the carbon “costs” or environmental side effects, you bet i’d take you up on that offer and go anywhere and everywhere. And so would hundreds of millions more than now. There’s no threshold on the large numbers of people in the economy between that state and, say, making the effective cost of fuel 20% cheaper due to increased efficiency.
Except sometimes it really does reduce consumption! So it’s clearly not simple to work out the end result in that way.
I think it’s very easy to look at these things with the benefit of hind-sight and say ‘well of course that’s obvious’. But it clearly once wasn’t obvious, like many things in the world we now understand, and take that understanding for granted.
Sign me up for the program of massive first world investment in the third world for the purposes of boot-strapping them into stable developed status. Failing that, I like to sleep at night, so I’d want to let them in. I do wonder, though, if I can get any conservative votes on either option.
To be clear, there are numerous cases where this wasn’t the case. They were dramatically weaker economies, but it’s not actually guaranteed that the lending market will lend a country money. Like any other lending situation, people only lend you money with the goal of profiting from the loan. That means that the interest they are getting needs to print the risk of you defaulting on that loan and never paying them back.
Yet during the crisis, people bought US Treasuries that were basically paying negative interest rates. Sometimes people just want a safe place to park money.
Of course I agree with you that there are some countries at some times that would find it difficult to find takers for debt. But that doesn’t have much to do with US debt.
An interesting definition of Conservatism I hadn’t heard before (but which coincides quite well with what has happened to “Conservatives”):
As political theorist Corey Robin wrote in his book The Reactionary Mind (originally published in 2011 and recently updated), conservatism is at its heart about “the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” Robin argued that from its roots with Edmund Burke in 18th-century England, conservatism has always been a reaction to any attempt by any disenfranchised group to demand or seize some measure of power and the benefits that come with it.
That applied to peasants in the French Revolution, to slaves seeking freedom, to workers seeking better employment conditions, to women seeking the vote, or to African Americans and LGBT people seeking civil rights. Conservatives bitterly opposed them all, in the belief that any expansion of rights, resources, and influence granted to supposedly lower and less-deserving groups would mean something was being taken away from those whose rightful place was at the top of society’s hierarchy.
What if this is true conservatism, and the values of small gov’t, lower taxes, personal responsibility were more an elitist reaction to the Civil Rights movement?
Burke in Reflections: French revolutionaries misunderstand the nature of man. They are exchanging one form of despotism for possibly a worse form of despotism. Burke goes on to warn that by sweeping away the former bonds of government and social contract, France would be placed in danger of succumbing to charismatic tyranny…Suffice to say the French Revolution played out much like Burke predicted as compared to say Thomas Paine’s predictions.
I am bemused and somewhat amused that a warning that a political revolution will end in bloodshed and tyranny and having those predictions come true is somehow an indictment of conservatism. I’m probably not too bemused, because as history shows you can’t have Communism without mass executions.
I would describe this as reactionary, not conservative. I would absolutely agree that the current US conservative movement is reactionary in nature. However I think it’s imoortant to keep a label for the Burkean governing philosophy and its evolutions that has been one of the dominant ideologies of the last century.
Robin has argued persuasively for his thesis at Crooked Timber. It’s quite hard to identify any real-world conservativism, whether past or present, that isn’t basically authoritarianism deployed to protect the beneficiaries of the status quo.
and certainly not most immediately and notably here:
This is one of the reasons why it’s impossible to take American conservative “thinkers” seriously. They are unable to see what is directly in front of their faces. Something something Burke, something something 200 years ago. Ignore the authoritarian con-man riling up crowds of pig people in the service of oligarchic power, nothing to see here.
Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle’s campaign was already rocked last month by the release of a secretly recorded conversation in which Cagle said he backed what he called “bad public policy” for political gain. Cagle’s runoff opponent, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, released another snippet of that conversation Monday.
In this 50-second piece , Cagle can be heard candidly discussing the GOP primary’s sharp turn to the right, saying the five-man race came down to “who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck and who could be the craziest.”
Yep! One can make a pretty good case that open primaries, especially given what they’ve unleashed over the past twenty years, should be opposed by a Burkean conservative.
Not trolling, but has gman taken over your account and started using it as an experiment in applying his argument techniques from a left wing perspective?
There are very few examples of “communist” regimes without mass executions. There are countless examples of conservative regimes without mass executions.
Pinochet would traditionally be described as fascist or reactionary. The condemnation of communism does not extend to social democracy, and it would be ridiculous to do so. Yet you use exactly that ridiculous argument to attack conservatism.
There are very few examples of ‘communist’ regimes, period. Not that I’m pining for any more, big it’s a camparably small sample size. Which ‘conservative’ regime do you say hasn’t produced state-directed mass murder? Not the UK. Not the US. Who else?
Yes, and we’re talking about a book the thesis of which is that all conservatism is reactionism; in which conservative is a synonym for reactionary. You might not agree with the thesis, but that’s the basis of my comment.
The majority of modern democracies have a party that describes itself as “conservative” that is regularly in government, often for extended periods (more than a single electoral cycle). CDU and LDP are the most obvious examples, and I guess the conservative party in Canada whatever it’s called?
Right. It was unclear to me whether you were simply using a narrow definition of conservatism based on the modern US scenario or indulging in bad faith cherry picking with the Pinochet example. I see now it was the latter.
