#BuildTheWall, limit focus on illegal entry to points of entry. Solves many issues right there.
Even with monitoring it isn't perfect. if people can escape from North Korea, they'll sure as shit make it into your country wall or no wall, monitored or unmonitored, but it solves many ethical issues both sides care about. Taxes aren't spent on people who have no right to be there in the first place and you don't have tent cities or illegals being shot because they're processed at points of entry and that way you have a tighter control over the flow of entry, or the rate of rejection.
Even if a wall is expensive it makes a lot of sense in the long run to have it.
A couple of quibbles, taxes are spent on illegals, quarantining them or not.
Also illegals will make it in wall/monitoring or not, but the numbers are drastically reduced. There's a reason many countries have border walls/fences, and it's not because they are all stupid.
When we get right down to it, the main dividing difference between every strain of "progressive" and "conservative" is that progressives refuse to accept TANSTAAFL, both literally and metaphorically.
The irony of late-stage capitalism is that we have pockets of enormous wealth, and disparate regions of extreme scarcity. Capitalism creates artificial scarcity because if it didn’t then there wouldn’t be any need for competition. It’s not a disconnection from reality that progressives suffer from; it’s a disagreement with the values that promote the unquestioned hoarding of wealth.
Capitalism is the greatest distributing force of wealth in the history of the world. Countless third-world nations have left poverty thanks to free trade. Regions of extreme scarcity are overwhelmingly ex-leftist and otherwise property-less African shitholes. Capitalism doesn't "need" competition, it creates competition, and scarcity is the primary thing that capitalism alleviates through competition. Everything you said is exactly wrong.
We don’t think TANSTAAFL at all. We just think there’s plenty of resources to provide for everyone’s lunch.
The irony of late-stage capitalism is that we have pockets of enormous wealth, and disparate regions of extreme scarcity.
1
2. Regions of scarcity may be locally ex-leftist, but the global axiomatic is capitalism. As soon as local regions attempt something other than free trade internally, they’re usually excluded from international trade internationally (or seriously disadvantaged by it).
3. Capitalism can alleviate scarcity, absolutely; but if it actually distributed its products evenly then it would leave little or no incentive for people to compete (hence why capitalism “needs” competition).
A lot of what you said is exactly right, but you’re assuming there’s a supreme universal perspective from which to interpret the situation. I’m telling you there isn’t. Capitalism is the greatest distributing force in the history of the world, and yet still promotes poverty, misery, and exclusion. It has to in order to survive.
In the Marxist tradition, economism [...] is the idea that progression from capitalism to communism is inevitable; or, in Konstantinou's words, that Marx's formulations are "literal predictions of the future." If this were the case, then all we would have to do is wait for the dialectical contradictions of capitalism to unfold. Of course, this has never happened. If we wait for the dialectical contradictions of capitalism to unfold on their own, we will find ourselves waiting forever. [...] We should rather say that, for Marx, the dictatorship of Capital is itself the realm of necessity; what's needed is somehow to get beyond it. Marx is notorious for only giving a vague sense of what life beyond the capitalist order would be like. He leaves it open as a realm for speculation, rather than giving detailed plans in the way that some of his "utopian socialist" predecessors did. [...]
Given the failure of economism, many Marxists have instead gone to the opposite extreme: they have embraced a kind of voluntarism. Capitalism can be abolished by sheer force of will--as long as this is supplemented by proper methods of organization and mobilization. We see this sort of approach in the Leninist doctrine of vanguard party, and also, I think, in the ultra-leftism of such contemporary thinkers as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. But it seems obvious to me that, over the course of the twentieth century, the voluntaristic approach fared as badly as the fatalistic one. It resulted not in human emancipation but in the horrors of Stalinism, the sclerotic tyranny of the later USSR, and the deadly convulsions of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Today, Leninist voluntarism does not even give us that; all that remains is a fantasy of revolution, providing the basis for a self-congratulatory moralism.
Capitalism also doesn't "do" anything. It's a system for relatively (but certainly not entirely) decentralized human economic activity.
@Einherjar86 Hoping you watched the video rather than judge it by its title, I wasn't turning to Peter Hitchens in lieu of giving my views on capitalism, he's not necessarily pro-capitalism, he just brings up an interesting anecdote from the days when he lived in Russia.
In short, capitalism doesn't seem to want to go away. Shaviro has other ideas, namely accelerationism; but accelerationism is very much in league with varieties of capitalist theorizing.
Then replace "do" with "facilitates," "mediates," "permits," or anything else. Of course, that's still doing something, if you want to get particular. As much as you might object to this, capitalism does do things--the same way an oven does something, or a refrigerator, or a car, or a book. These aren't sentient objects, but they have agency. They complete operations in a very literal sense.
As for your graphs, there's nothing in them I object to. Capitalism has created more wealth/access to resources, and reduced poverty more than any prior system ever. Given that, it should be even easier to alleviate the remaining occurrences of scarcity, whatever they may be.
@Dak I know you like some Yang, wondering how you feel about UBI as he supports it (1k a month iirc).
For every dollar illegal immigrants pay in taxes — fees, Social Security withholding taxes, fuel surcharges, sales and property taxes — they collect $7 in government benefits: schooling, English-as-a-second-language classes, hospital costs, school lunch programs, Medicaid births, police resources and so on.
Said that way it seems like the problem is simply with the timeframe/speed of change, if we gloss over what is meant by terms such as scarcity, wealth, and resources. But these terms are important. We got here talking about illegal immigration. How does illegal immigration "rectify" problems of scarcity (however defined)? Why do the citizens of the United States have any duty to address problems of non-citizens over those of citizens?
The reason I press on what one means by wealth, scarcity etc is because we do not, in fact, have enough wealth to get everyone up to a level that would begin to assuage the average western progressive. Best estimates of global cash assets are around 5 trillion. Equally distribute that to 7 billion people, and everyone suddenly has around $700 dollars. That's not gonna do hardly anyone any good.
The argument isn't for everyone on the planet to be able to afford a New Yorker subscription, gym membership, and buy kombucha on a regular basis.