China has 1.4 million immigrants, and 12000 foreigners with permanent residency. Not per year, but total, cumulative [1]. Despite having 4x the population of the USA.
Meanwhile the USA has gone from 83% White in 1970 [2], to White children being a minority [3] in less than 50 years. And most of that change was due to legal immigration (that they were promised wouldn't change anything [4]) Yet still they're called out for not erasing their own identity even faster.
So do you just not believe in the national right to self-determination, to decide who may live among them? Do you also not believe in this right for Kashmir [5,6] or Palestine?
[6] Human rights activists said that the moves to change Kashmir’s status were only the first steps in a broader plan to erode Kashmir’s core rights and seed the area with non-Kashmiris, altering the demographics and eventually destroying its character. Previous laws barred outsiders from owning property. - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/world/asia/india-pakistan...
How long did it take America to go from 0% white to almost complete native erasure?
If we’re gonna apply your definitionally racist argument then whites (ie Europeans) (or Asians or Africans) shouldn’t be in the country.
Also, apparently you’re ok with America’s population doubling with immigration as long as those immigrants are white Europeans?
The share of immigrants as a percentage of population is about where it was between the mid 1800s and early 1900s, but you’re fine with that because it was primarily Europeans? (Although, ironically, a lot of those Europeans were also not considered white contemporaneously and it’s only now that their descendants consider themselves white and rail about all the non white immigeants).
> Although, ironically, a lot of those Europeans were also not considered white contemporaneously and it’s only now that their descendants consider themselves white and rail about all the non white immigeants
The myth was likely started by Noel Ignatiev's "How the Irish Became White" book [1]. The same Noel Ignatiev that co-founded the "Race Traitor" journal, "which promoted the idea that "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity"". Who would have thought such an unbiased and objective academic would be falsifying history. It's an exercise for the reader how something both so unbelievable, and so easily falsified, could persist for so long in academia.
I would not be using the "natives were wiped out by foreign conquerors" argument in support of uncontrolled (or any other kind) immigration, if I were you.
> So do you just not believe in the national right to self-determination, to decide who may live among them? Do you also not believe in this right for Kashmir [5,6] or Palestine?
On a personal moral/philosophical level, I think lines on a map which we call "nations" are a foolish way to decide who is allowed to go where and do what.
So from first principles, I don't accept the framing. I don't think "national" right to self-determination is a meaningful or valid term. It exists in practice but it is not valuable except in terms of pragmatism/realpolitik.
Therefore, I advocate for immigration policies which are much more focused on helping people and bettering society around me than on any nation-based concept of identity. That doesn't mean I want to bring more people who would hurt others into my society. But it does mean I don't care about whether the people who come in are "like me" in some meaningful way.
(That doesn't mean I don't act like nations exist or agree that they do, just that my ideal world probably would not include them in that way. Nor does it mean I don't think national lines ever echo the lines of societies or that I'm an anarchist who doesn't believe in governments. I just don't accept the idea that "this person lives on this side of the border" is a meaningful way to decide if they get to live in a place or not.)
Also, it sounds like what you consider "national" framing is actually racial framing. Given that you spend a lot of time talking about white people in a nation that has never been just white people, is that not correct?
>> I just don't accept the idea that "this person lives on this side of the border" is a meaningful way to decide if they get to live in a place or not.)
I curious where do you draw the line then? Can a random person move to your backyard or your house?
You can be sure that, like most people who espouse such open-borders views, he has never been impacted by the negative externalities of such policies.
Like the Uk Green Party leader who lodged a complaint about planned migrant camp in her town. It’s all about optics and as soon as it impacts them directly they revert.
> lines on a map which we call "nations" are a foolish way to decide who is allowed to go where and do what.
A nation is a group of people. What you're referring to is territory that belongs to a country.
> But it does mean I don't care about whether the people who come in are "like me" in some meaningful way.
That's great if you don't value national identity or the differences between nations in any way, but many people do value those. They (myself included) wish to see their and other groups retain their distinctions, and not be homogenized into a globally indistinguishable mush, which is what you propose.
> Also, it sounds like what you consider "national" framing is actually racial framing.
That is what "national" means [1]. The "people who share a passport" alternative meaning is a very recent redefinition.
Why are you so concerned with White people being the minority? Does the US somehow have a history of not treading minorities equally or something that I’m not aware of?
Everything on your list involved the sale of a product, by this logic China would be our closest ally (actually I wish our leaders were that sane, but the inconsistency stands...).
I wish people could just state the transparently documented historical truth, Israel is a US ally because Truman and enough other backers wanted to create a state for Holocaust survivors. The leadership and majority of voters in the US have been true believers in Zionism (in one of its many versions) for generations, and supports Israel by essentially the same logic that Israelis support Israel by. This existed as a state of affairs with almost no opposition at any level until a couple years ago when it came into conflict with another basic belief (about being close enough to just in the cause and method of war that most people could somewhat believe it).
Should we say that every other country that doesn't provide aid equivalent to what USAID did, is also killing those 14 million? E.g. China, Japan, India, Brazil, the UK, Saudi Arabia, France, Russia, Canada, Mexico..?
Many countries have their variation of the USAID. In fact the UK, France, Canada, etc. have such programs.
I'd argue that these are an investment in the future and end up being positive for the countries investing in them, in the form of the world being a better place, putting less pressure on immigration flows, and so on.
Per capita, other countries contribute more, so this wasn't such a wasteful use of American resources.
And absence of such a program elsewhere doesn't take away from Musk's DOGE wilfully destroying the program. Yes, that's in his legacy, the deaths that will be caused.
I understand your sentiment, but I feel like your position is somewhat simplistic, and the actual situation is more complicated.
First, overall, the US has increased manufacturing output over the last couple decades. 2019 was the highest year ever, covid interupted a bit, but levels are back there again.
However the number of people involved has dropped a lot. US manufacturing prefers automation and prefers to manufacture things which are high-volume, low labor.
A good parallel is agriculture. Foods produced in the US (and the US produces a lot of food) tend towards low-labor. Think fields of wheat or corn, not vegetables. Most fresh produce comes from cheap-labor regions like Mexico (or is grown locally with foreign labor.)
So really your point is not about American manufacturing, but rather American labor.
Secondly, this free market you refer to is the American consumer. They are very price sensitive, and deeply favor cheap over good. This contrasts to a lot of the rest of the developed world which strikes more of a balance in this regard.
Since labor is cheaper elsewhere, it follows that cheap imports are favored (by the consumer) over the locally produced items. Unfortunately the imported good is often of a higher quality now (because foreign manufacturers can afford quality and still be cheap.)
So, the politicians you speak of (regardless of party) are reluctant to medel, partly because of unintended consequences, and mostly because the only real lever they have is to increase the cost of imported goods (ie tarrif them) which in turn gets consumers upset. (Witness the fury of the voter in 2020 because of more expensive goods.)
Thus while it's helpful to blame politicians, politicians are elected by consumers. Consumers who could by local, but choose not to. Consumers who vote against politicians that cause price hikes. (Even when those same politicians incentivise local production with things like CHIPS act.)
You can blame politicians, and indeed corporations all day long, but the consumers are voting with their wallets, and "cheap" is the only metric they care about.
> US has increased manufacturing output over the last couple decades. 2019 was the highest year ever, covid interupted a bit, but levels are back there again
Terms like "highest ever" conceal that US industrial production only grew by about 13% in the last 25 years [1]. However, in that same time, the US population increased from 281 to 340 million [2]. Meaning that per capita industrial production decreased by 6.6%.
> So really your point is not about American manufacturing, but rather American labor.
No, my point is about treating markets and the economy as if they have no effect on sovereignty or independence, and about only looking at the consumer, not the worker or the citizen.
> the only real lever they have is to increase the cost of imported goods
That's sure not the only lever that Chinese politicians have, and they took full advantage of that, first to industrialize, and now to take over industries left out to dry by their home governments who think the Free Market can do no wrong. Learned helplessness at its worst.
> However the number of people involved has dropped a lot. US manufacturing prefers automation and prefers to manufacture things which are high-volume, low labor.
That's fine and indeed about the only way it even can be done in a country with higher wages. The question is, why can't we do more of that? Basic simple components like capacitors should be possible to automate, so what's preventing it? Why don't we have policies tuned towards causing more domestic automation?
The number of jobs won't be what it was when it was done by hand, but that's never coming back either way, and some is better than none. Meanwhile you reduce dependency on adversarial countries.
> the only real lever they have is to increase the cost of imported goods (ie tarrif them) which in turn gets consumers upset.
There is another alternative: Lower the cost of domestic goods, i.e. lower taxes or provide credits to domestic manufacturers. For example, allow capital investments in domestic manufacturing to be deducted immediately rather than over time.
This is actually one of the longstanding major problems with the US tax code right now. It creates a preference for international supply chains because that allows profits to be shifted into countries with lower tax rates and penalizes purely domestic supply chains.
Subsidies are a definite tool, and subsidies are existent in many industries. Lots of farm products for example are subsidized.
Of course they encounter their own political hurdles. Think Solar, Electric Cars, CHIPS act etc. But they become political footballs, even to the detriment of local interests. (Witness Florida reps voting to repeal CHIPS even though Florida got a lot of CHIPS money.)
So yes, companies want consistency in the supply chain, and current US politics doesn't offer that.
They become political footballs when you do it wrong. If you make a tax credit for solar then it's partisan and the Republicans are going to try to get rid of it. If you make a tax credit for all manufacturing and some companies are using it to manufacture solar and lithium batteries then everybody still wants to keep it because there are also companies using it to manufacture trucks and gas turbines and mining equipment.
But that's the point isn't it? You can't (shouldn't?) subsidize all industries. That's unaffordable, and misses the concept of subsidizing things considered important to long term national security.
So subsidies, by their nature, are govt putting their finger on the scales, picking winners and losers.
And of course companies competing with those industries (coal versus solar) will lobby, and provide votes.
Bearing in mind of course that ultimately subsidies are just a tax on all citizens for the benefit of some.
All taxes are imperfect. The least distortionary one is a head tax and that's heinously regressive; it's basically a UBI with the sign inverted (which is also why a UBI is the least distortionary means of social assistance).
So the question then is, what are you going to tax and how much? The problem right now is that we're so bad at it. To begin with the government burns money like there is no consequence to it. Huge payouts to affluent retirees who don't need the money, defense contracts for things the military doesn't even want, etc. And yes, that means you need to stick your foot up the rear end of some lobbyists. Stop being the people who say it can't be done and start being the people doing it.
> You can't (shouldn't?) subsidize all industries.
If you stop wasting preposterous amounts of money then you could lower taxes across the board and remove the anti-subsidy. But taxes are also by category anyway.
So for example, don't lower the tax rate on dividends but create new credits and deductions and faster depreciation for capital investments, or make R&D fully deductible in the first year. In other words, if you make money and use it to buy a Ferrari, you're paying tax. If you use the same money to build a factory, you get to deduct it right away. Then you're effectively subsidizing all kinds of new factories or new construction, but not subsidizing purchases of imported products. Which is like a tariff in the sense that it makes domestic products relatively more attractive, except that it does it by making things less expensive rather than more expensive.
> First, overall, the US has increased manufacturing output over the last couple decades. 2019 was the highest year ever, covid interupted a bit, but levels are back there again.
> Motor vehicles, bodies and trailers, and parts: actual light vehicles produced down 11%, real gross output of vehicles up 39%, real value-added up 125%. Inputs as a percent of gross output rose from 74% to 77%.
> Steel mills & manufacturing from purchased steel: in raw tonnage, steel shipped is down 18%, real gross output is up 5%, real value-added is up 125%. Inputs as a percentage of gross output rose from 73% to 74%.
> If the quality adjustment is 32%, the value-added increase becomes 652%!
> Another “quirk” of real value-added is that inflation adjustments and quality adjustments get applied retroactively, which creates wild inflections from small changes. In simplified terms, let’s say that, in 1997, car sales were $100 billion, and were still $100 billion twenty years later in 2017, with no changes due to inflation or input costs. Input costs in both years were $75 billion, meaning $25 billion in value-added in both years. The only thing that changed, let’s say, was that the “quality” of cars got 10% higher thanks to software innovations like Apple CarPlay and design improvements like crumple zones for safety—neither of which add to recurring production input costs. So, let’s say, our economists would adjust the 2017 figure to be $110 billion in “real” terms and show a small 10% increase, right?
>
> Instead, the way it works is that a recent “base year” is taken, in this case 2017, and the base year is never adjusted. So rather than adjusting from $100 billion to $110 billion, the “real” output of 1997 is retroactively adjusted to be lower, in this case $91 billion, to get the same 10% increase. But then, our value-added in 1997 has fallen to $16 billion, and the increase in “real value-added manufacturing” has jumped from 10% to around 50%! We have created a 50% increase in car manufacturing not by actually producing 50% more cars or “objectively” making cars 50% better, but just by playing around with statistics and definitions.
It's not like every single Chinese consumer decided they didn't want American soybeans. More authoritarian countries have strong import controls; helps with both having high (inefficient) employment but also your citizens aren't going to wonder why all these cool stuff (fridges, etc) are always imported and the local stuff sucks.
How convenient for the investor class to have such a scapegoat to always fall back on. It's the consumer's fault! Not ours! Truly!
Nevermind that the bounds of what consumers have to buy/consume are entirely drawn and selected by investor prospectus, and business collusion, in an environment shaped by regulatory capture or selective compliance!
I'm open to accepting some blame on consumers, but trying to scapegoat them as the root of the problem is horseshit of the highest order.
MBA's and investors of the past 50 years drank deep of the draught of economic growth through regulatory arbitrage by off shoring, labor replacement above all else, and trying to chase shareholder returns over stakeholder returns. Fuck you, got mine in the socioeconomic sense.
... "cheap" is the main metric consumers care about because whenever anything can be supplied for less, the Federal Reserve calls that "deflationary" and creates enough new money to make sure prices go up to erase those gains. So the cost of buying anything isn't bottom of the barrel keeps going up in real terms. Most people can afford to swim against the current in one product category, and some people [the affluent] can afford to swim against the current in many product categories, but most people cannot afford to swim against the current in most product categories.
Dang it no! That isn’t remotely how deflationary works.
There’s always things being supplied for at lower prices. That is what product or service improvements do.
Your car is vastly safer than a Ford Model T. Air bags, better brakes, power steering, AC - all of which make it a vastly superior vehicle. If inflation worked the way you implied, the price of it would have constantly gone up, and never would it have managed to be affordable.
Firms reduce the cost of production and get to sell more to larger numbers of consumers. Total revenue = $ value * N customers.
You expand further on your position in the second part of your para, but that is fundamentally about how wages have not gone up over time. Which has nothing to do with inflation. It has MUCH more to do with the labor markets, and the pay people are getting for their labor.
> Air bags, better brakes, power steering, AC - all of which make it a vastly superior vehicle. If inflation worked the way you implied, the price of it would have constantly gone up, and never would it have managed to be affordable.
You're talking about something different than what I was - improvements that make a product better without the price going up (because the cost is small enough to become the new baseline, either by market stickiness or regulation). Those don't affect CPI, and therefore make life better at the same price. So I agree with where you're coming from there.
My point is about the manufacturing/product innovations that make prices go down (regardless of whether quality gets better or worse). Take for example offshoring, which was sold as maybe your local factory will have to lay off some people but we will have less expensive items at the store so we will all win on average. But it's a trick because the Fed creates a feedback loop that makes it so prices cannot go down on average.
Wages haven't risen as fast as consumer price inflation because that new money is injected into the financial industry (the fake "fiscal responsibility" of the Republican party). And when too much newly created money finally leads to too much demand for labor and wages start rising, the Fed then tamps down on the monetary creation.
Clearly monetary policy is a big subject, and yes the Fed has specific targets etc in mind.
But I was talking more about a mindset. And of course speaking generally- lots of people (everywhere) have budget constraints.
Having traveled in the US and Europe I'd suggest that in the US "volume" is rewarded as "good". For the same amount of money, "more" is preferred to "good". In contrast in Europe it's less "look how big the plate is" and more about "better quality."
So, to rather over-simply things, I'd describe US food as "bland, loaded with sugar, lots of it", whereas Europe is more "smaller quantities, less processing, more farmer's market".
Not just food. But across the board. Cheap = good.
And yes, I'm talking generally big-picture here - it's a culture thing - there are lots of counter examples if you look hard.
I definitely agree with this point. I'd say food is a special case though, where the US really did have much more than Europe after WWII. Why do most Americans seem allergic to spices and flavor? I wish I knew. And this applies even to food that is supposed to be flavorful like burritos when scaled to national chains - eg Chipotle/Qdoba/Fresh City.
But economics shapes culture, too. There are certainly no shortage of subcultures trying to swim against the grain - buy American, local/organic food, German tool enthusiasts, even the tech community's libre software and anti-cloud. It feels like they remain subcultures because they're fundamentally fighting an uphill battle against top-down prices/advertising/etc set by large market makers. Which is why I initially took issue with your comment, framing it solely in terms of individual choice.
But the dynamic extends other places too, say the housing market with everything "move in ready" being beige, spec grade fixtures, and "fancy" appliances bought from a market for lemons. Trying to chew on that it still feels like not exactly what people prefer, but rather what people don't disprefer - the least offensive option to enable economies of scale (which once again comes down to monetary policy supporting the housing bubble, but I'm certainly not trying to ram the whole topic back into that)
> doing the extra digging instead of just going along with the claim.
That's the intention of intermediary liability laws - to make meritless censorship be the easy, no-risk way out. To deputize corporations to act as police under a guilty-until-proven-innocent framework.
> Grokipedia’s entry for “Clinton body count,” a conspiracy theory that falsely links the deaths of multiple people to Bill and Hillary Clinton, cites an unlikely source [InfoWars]
Okay, but in the very example the article gives, the subject matter that Grokipedia cites InforWars on, is what is written on InfoWars, and explicitly calls InfoWars "alternative media". I.e. it's not saying "this is true", it's saying "this is what alternative news site InfoWars says", and is very clear about it. Unless one argues that no encyclopedia should even record what unreliable but prominent sources are saying, I don't see the issue. And while the article tries to imply otherwise, the Grokipedia entry gives largely the same conclusion as the Wikipedia one:
While advocates cite empirical clusters of untimely deaths—far exceeding actuarial norms for such a networked couple—as suggestive of causal foul play, rigorous analyses reveal most incidents as coincidental given the Clintons' decades-long prominence involving thousands of contacts, with no prosecutions or leaked evidence confirming orchestration; dismissals by establishment institutions often overlook investigative lapses, such as Epstein's unchecked cell or Foster's contested forensics, potentially influenced by institutional incentives to protect elite figures.
As this is the only example the article gives before the paywall, I can't comment on the problems with other citations. But one would expect they'd lead with the most egregious case.
"Unless one argues that no encyclopedia should even record what unreliable but prominent sources are saying"
Um, yes, absolutely, an encyclopedia should not *cite* tabloids in its articles, since any idiot with a bit of cash can publish garbage about anything. There's a reason why Wikipedia is so anal about the reputability of its sources.
A reputable article would say something like "InfoWars and other fringe publications have spread conspiracy theories on this topic" and then cite actual news publications reporting on the matter.
> As soon they became a competitor there was a problem
Was there? It seems to me trade and offshoring continued even after they became a competitor. And then continued after they strong-armed Western corporations to invest in China [1], destroyed Western corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,4.1], after they extracted groveling apologies from Western firms [5], and after they started operating literal police stations on Western soil [6], while turning Western countries into subordinate receivers of orders [7,8].
I guess you were hoping your framing would guilt people into not seeing the threat?
[1] Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
Western state department and corporations aren’t the same thing. China is New Democracy where the classes are all represented with the state at the top. That’s not how Old Democracy (liberal democracy) works where the hierarchy between state and corporations is more mixed with corporations in more power.
You’re equating things that corporations are doing as if that’s in the best interest of the American state.
China is being seen the way it is by white people and white societies because they see a competitor.
the west made a deal with the devil for cheap plastic trinkets and reaped what it sowed. that's why switching the manufacturing to India won't do any good either.
domestic production or nothing. the "service economy" is a stupid concept.
Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
