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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   32102 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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Democrats' rhetoric surrounding immigration and wages has always stood out to me as an obvious example of politically-motivated doublethink. "The experts" are asking us to hold two contradictory axioms simultaneously. One is that maintaining a supply of "off the books" labor is essential to the survival of multiple industries (such as roofing and agriculture) and that ideally we should be increasing the supply of labor to reduce costs (ie wages) even further. The other is that the available supply of labor has has little if any effect on wages (ie costs).

These are not contradictory because immigrant (especially illegal immigrant) and native pools of labour are not easy substitutes, they have very different skill mixes - and when I say 'skills', I don't mean that American citizens are all accountants or nuclear engineers, I mean in the most basic sense. Hence because of complementary task specialisation it is possible for new illegal immigrants to, on average, depress the wages of other illegal immigrants but not, on average, natives, and for such influxes to improve native productivity. It's a bit of a waste of a median American to be working in the fields, but in a constricted labour market wages in non-skilled fields get pushed up until people are pulled out into those fields, which is bad for productivity and standards of living in the long run. In a way it's the logic of automation.

Of course, there will be some in the American citizen labour pool (especially, ironically, recent legal immigrants) who are similarly unskilled to the average illegal immigrant, but the way to remedy that is via fiscal policy and redistribution of the native productivity gains which immigration facilitates.

I do not believe you.

I believe that to the degree that substitution might be difficult it is difficult because affluent blue tribers on the coast want it to be difficult, and actively work to make it so.

I believe that "They are doing jobs Americans wont" is code for "I don't think I should have to pay 'the help' the going rate" and "I don't want an emplyee with legal rights and delusions of equality, I want a serf I can exploit"

Finally i beleive that @coffee_enjoyer is correct that roofing companies will start increasing the wages and quality of life they offer thier employees before we go without roofs. If they don't, screw 'em.

the way to remedy that is via fiscal policy and redistribution of the native productivity gains which immigration facilitates.

It's pretty amazing that the solution to the harm caused by liberal immigration policy is to give even more money to liberals in the department of economic equity to distribute according to equity metrics designed by some other liberal consultant from harvard.

Like all those "teaching coal miners to learn to code" programs that, wow, didn't get any coal miners good jobs, but sure did hand out a lot of money to the kind of people whose nonprofits run those programs.

It's so obvious to anyone on the outside how relentlessly self-serving this leftist managerial ideology is, how is it seemingly impossible to notice from the inside?

It's pretty amazing that the solution to the harm caused by liberal immigration policy is to give even more money to liberals in the department of economic equity to distribute according to equity metrics designed by some other liberal consultant from harvard.

Don't be facetious. The proportion of money redistributed via welfare which goes to administration of that welfare is pretty low, and that mostly consists of ordinary administrative workers not high-level policy wonks.

Like all those "teaching coal miners to learn to code" programs that, wow, didn't get any coal miners good jobs, but sure did hand out a lot of money to the kind of people whose nonprofits run those programs.

Lol. To the extent that 'learn to code' was ever a real policy, which it never really was, the vast vast majority of the funding changes downstream of that discourse didn't go to non-profits. In any case what I meant by redistribution was, well, redistribution.

It's so obvious to anyone on the outside how relentlessly self-serving this leftist managerial ideology is, how is it seemingly impossible to notice from the inside?

Lazy and trite. There are problems with left-wing non-profits, especially in the post-Floyd period, but that has nothing to do with genuine government redistributive programmes which do a lot of good and have relatively low overheads.

It's pretty amazing that the solution to the harm caused by liberal immigration policy is to give even more money to liberals in the department of economic equity to distribute according to equity metrics designed by some other liberal consultant from harvard.

To my knowledge, the primary means of redistribution in the US is the EITC which does it on the basis of income. That doesn't seem very objectionable to me.

The primary means of redistribution is Social Security, which does it on the basis of age.

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