7mo ago

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The one that wants to provide universal basic income based on a wealth tax.
I know this is a meme but i fundamentally disagree with what lots of other people call "left politics". I'm against immigration (for purely economic, not for racist reasons!), and i think that "men are the root of all evil" is a false and meaningless statement. It creates unnecessary tension within society and in my opinion provokes a civil war. It's literally that meme:
- I'm against immigration (for purely economic, not for racist reasons!)
  I really hope you are being sarcastic here.
  
  I am not anti-immigration because I prioritize social factors in my country's situation, but that is a real position that people make valid arguments for.
  Immigration is a real economic factor used by the owning class to lower wages. It exploits both local and immigrant workers. Look at Trump voters complaining in the news about how anti-immigration has ruined their workforce - they were exploiting immigrants to save money instead of paying local workers a (...relatively) reasonable wage.
  
  Except this is not true. Immigration does not depress wages. It boosts the economy.
  
  What do you mean by boosting 'the economy'? GDP (PPP) per capita? Median wages? Labor productivity? A nebulous all-encompasing concept of a country's production, distribution and trade? It's not a meaningful term on its own, it's usually just a rhetorical trick in mass media to make it sound like shareholders making more money is somehow good for the country.
  I was not talking about the abstract grand scheme of things, like benefits from their diverse experiences and overall population benefits, I'm talking about the direct immediate effects on worker wages. Due to social circumstances, companies can, and often do, save wage costs by replacing local labor with immigrant labor they can underpay, and with the special case of illegal immigrants, even pay illegally small amounts. Immigration increases the reserve army of labor that compete for lower wages. This is happening in my workplace, actually, not with immigration but with outsourcing, the human resources department are replacing trained capable local workers with undertrained workers in countries with lower labor costs and regulations (e.g. India) purely to cut wage costs. But the principle is the same, outsourcing like this only applies to work capable of being done remotely (e.g. call centers, graphic design, tech work), for manual labor then immigration has a similar benefit to a business owner.
  Once again, I'm not talking about whether immigration is beneficial, (and like I said, I believe it is) I'm talking about how immigration is used by the owning class to reduce wages and enrich themselves.
  
  No, i'm sick of being lied to.
  I'm not a nationalist in the sense that i think my country's any better than any other country.
  But I do comprehend the significance of borders. Imagine people had no skin. They couldn't survive. When you go to a restaurant and ask for a glass of apple juice, you wouldn't expect a server of another restaurant to give it to you. Because one server is associated to one restaurant, and not to the other restaurant.
  That has exactly nothing to do with thinking you're superior. It's just a concept to help organize the world. I hope i've made my point clear enough.
  
  You don't think people should ever move to a different country than the one they were born in? Sounds like a boring world. If your county is a monoculture then there will definitely be xenophobia and racism.
  
  You lost some of us at the presumption of restaurants and servers.
  Maybe imagine no countries (nothing to kill or die for, etc. etc.)
  Presume that everyone is a person and has all the rights you do.
  
  apart from the issue with borders. states also serve a second purpose:
  the state is the only thing that restricts company's powers and protects the people from companies. at least that's how it works in every sane country (which includes the US). how do you avoid company-towns if there's no state? do the physical violence yourself and threaten companies to treat the people not completely shitty? would you really do that?
  
  Actual democracy and collective decision making solves that
  
  Because one server is associated to one restaurant, and not to the other restaurant.
  Why do you feel that is a good thing worth preserving? That's one of the worst aspects of wage labor.
  
  How else would you have it? Every server serves at every restaurant? There are no restaurants? Restaurants are all self-service? In the latter case, what's the difference to a kitchen?
  
  It's not about which way I'd rather have it (Though that's a worthwhile conversation of it's own), it's that the analogy doesn't work because wage labor is immisterating and not something most wage laborers themselves would want to uphold in their ideal society. That is to say, your analogy doesn't support your argument for borders. And yes I know you said immigration and not borders, but immigration isn't a thing without border.
  
  This isn't even complex Bistromathics my friend and people like you have already tried to foot the bill for hateful people far to many times for this ideology not to be a dead end composed of us resisting you.
- “men are the root of all evil”
  I've never heard this claim, only "money is the root of all evil".
  Patriarchal society is profoundly harmful, but that's not an issue that divides sex or gender - patriarchal culture also directly hurts men. Men aren't immune from its problems simply because patriarchy systematically positions them above others. We can generalize this false-attribution error to other identity conflicts like sexuality, race, ethnicity, appearance, etc., it's easier to notice and then blame the tangible benefactor rather than identify the underlying system and its roots.
  
  The love of money is the root of all evil.
  
  “men are the root of all evil”
  I’ve never heard this claim
  well then i guess it's dependent on your environment and who you spend your time with. i've definitely heard a friend say it just this week, although she said it jokingly.
  
  well then i guess it’s dependent on your environment and who you spend your time with
  It definitely is! I didn't mean it to dismiss or anything, I know there are people out there who would say that, I just haven't heard it said around me.
- If you have a country that's below it's replacement rate then you need net positive immigration to compensate for this. Likewise if your above replacement rate and have problems with overpopulation then you need net negative immigration. This is fairly straightforward demographics and economics. Being too far below replacement rate without immigration leads to an aging population, and even countries like China which used to have serious overpopulation issues can fall fowl of this. Aging population is the root of a lot of economic and cultural issues. Saying immigration is bad is not just wrong, it's the exact opposite of what the situation calls for in most European nations, the USA, Japan, and South Korea.
  
  2% of workers produce enough agricultural output to provide for 200% of society. And it's similar in other branches of the economy. We'd be able to live well with a significantly lower number of workers. The reason why people still work so much is because we're not actually working for the wellbeing of society, but mostly towards the pockets of the rich. That's what causes a shortage of workers.
  There's not actually a shortage of workers if society produces for the wellbeing of society, instead of for the pockets of the rich.
  On top of that, if AI replaces workers in the near future, we'd have the opposite problem of a mass unemployment crisis. Having fewer people in the country is then a good thing because there's less workers to fill the remaining workplaces.
  Note that it doesn't matter whether you think that AI can replace workers. What matters here is what companies think. And we're already seeing mass layoffs due to AI.
  
  I mean this is full of stuff that dosen't pass the sniff test.
  Modern society has a lot more than just agricultural workers, and in western countries much of the food is imported anyway which I am not sure you have accounted for. If you want modern standards of living your going to need a lot more workers than that.
  As for the whole thing of us working for rich people. You are exactly right that they have the most money. That doesn't mean they actually spend all that on themselves, and it certainly doesn't mean they consume the lions share of physical goods requiring work for their personal pleasure. If you look at someone like Elon for example, as evil as they are most of the money they spend will be in investments to public companies. Things like the development of SpaceX rockets, new electric cars, data centers to push AI, and so on. Very little of that is spent on their personal needs. Still way more than we could ever afford, none of us are getting rides in private jets, but since there are only so few people at that level it doesn't add up to much in the scheme of things. Even if we got rid of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and so forth we would still have to fund R&D somehow, and all those scientists and engineers still want to be paid or taken care of. Things could potentially be made more efficient by combining the efforts of some of these companies, but that doesn't mean you ask scientists to go home, it just means innovation happens that much faster. Heck sometimes competition can be good for innovation, so you might still keep around competing teams even if they are all technically funded by the same government or public institution.
  If anything we might need to work harder for a time after capitalism to repair the damage done to people and the planet. Certainly all oil and gas infrastructure needs to be replaced, and that means lots of new stuff needs to be built and research needs to be done at break neck pace. Ending economic exploitation doesn't magically fix everything that's wrong with the world, it would only be step 1.
  It's also unlikely that capitalism is going away soon anyway, so this is all moot. It is after all the most efficient system we have built to date, even if it's crazy bad in some areas, and coming up with something to replace it that wouldn't just be worse is a tall order. Many have died trying.
- I'm against immigration (for purely economic, not for racist reasons!),
  I'm against brown people (for purely cultural, not for racist reasons!)
  ...facepalm so big it became an asspalm

367 comments