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The Liberty Conspiracy News Notes: 1-26-26
LIBERTY CONSPIRACY NEWS NOTES:
1-26-26
PGG
Share
A few items to prepare for tonight’s Liberty Conspiracy LIVE - Most of which will focus on the DHS-BPS-ICE murder of Alex Pretti, and the Trump lies to cover for their own malfeasance.
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
—PART THREE ON IMMIGRATION, AFTER PARTS ONE, TWO IN OUR SUNDAY NEWS ASSEMBLIES FROM 1-25-26—Following-up our logical analysis of the federal assumption of power over “immigration and border control”, its practices of deportation and kidnapping, breaches of the Fourth Amendment, breaches of Article Four, Section Four, and breaches of deeper morality re freedom of association and the right to retain the fruits of one’s labor… Now, let’s look at the ethical and practical problems of any political institution claiming the power to handle “a border” or even define what or where it is, and to define who can associate with whom.
In our first two articles, we noted that the word immigration is not in the US Constitution, that Jefferson and Madison both correctly observed that the matter was a state issue, and that the feds cannot claim an “invasion” without a response of a Declaration of War or Letters of Marque and Reprisal for non-state “adversaries”. Likewise, Article Four, Section Four of the US Constitution requires state legislatures or the governor (if the legislature is not in session) to REQUEST federal military aid to protect their “republican form of government” against rebellion or violence before any federal military can enter, and, of course, that negates both the inferior “Insurrection Act” and the idea that the “necessary and proper” clause allows the feds to enter to “protect federal buildings” that cannot be federal buildings, since the Constitution only allows the feds to run three kinds of property (territories, military garrisons, and the national capitol).
But on the deeper philosophical and logical levels, one must ask (as one asks with any comparison between statist action and freedom): Even IF the Constitution were amended to allow for border definition and policing and for immigration control, would it be possible for anyone to claim there was any valuation involved, any VALUE, tied to the political process of the state determining where a border will be and how it will be “protected”?
The answer, of course, is “No.” Since all political actions are predicated on force, coercion, and intimidation, and since the money used to pay for the determination of the border and how it will be policed comes through the force of taxation, no one who pays for the “border” can be said to have willingly wanted it there. Even if a small cadre wants a border someplace, this is the Tragedy of the Commons, meaning that not all taxpayers will agree, yet they will be forced to pay, leaving them arguing. Similarly, the politicians are not using their own money, so they are not showing their own true preferences. And, of course, in most cases the land is taken via eminent domain, threats of seizure and force. And the arbitrary “payments” to see the polis acquire that land come from taxation, of course, so that is a double sin.
The only borders that reflect value or personal interest are those on private property. All political borders are established through illegitimate, coercive means. If there is no choice, there is no subjective-value-expression.
And what of the “economic impact” of “open borders”?
First, let’s reiterate the PHILOSOPHICAL axiom that no one has a right to tell other people they cannot peacefully associate, to do so is to become the criminal, the aggressor, the threat.
Second, let’s establish that one’s ability to associate with others is both an outgrowth of, and sourced FROM, division of labor, and that political obstacles blocking free association — be those inhibitions in the forms of import duties, bans on “outsourcing”, or immigration “limits” from the central political authority — all are arbitrary mandates and decisions over other people’s lives, all, forms of aggression, regardless of the vaunted “rationales” in the halls of government, unions, or any other special interest.
As such, they undercut, weaken, or abolish the ability of people to divide their labor, to trade money, time, and opportunities in order to let others take on tasks to which they might be better suited, and free oneself up to do something else.
Share Gardner Goldsmith
Labor is a key factor of production, and arbitrary, force-imposed decisions over, and restrictions on, the labor factor of production increase the cost of that factor of production, decreasing productivity, profitability, and the power of consumers to save and spend on or invest in other ventures.
As I noted in my book, “Live Free or Die”, referring to a brushfire debate over immigration in the early 2000s, there are many people of both major parties who push for federal curtailment of immigration. Here is a new version of part of my argument, found in “Live Free or Die”…
Subscribe now
Share
On January 7, 2004, President George W. Bush announced what appeared to be a sweeping plan to grant de facto amnesty for millions of resident aliens working in the U.S. In fact, it was little more than a long-term worker visa program that barely increased the ability of employers to hire whom they wished and came nowhere near recognizing the right of individuals to move where their abilities could take them.
Nonetheless, this has not stopped profits ranging from conservative radio hosts Laura Ingraham and Michael Savage, to supposedly conservative writers such as Pat Buchanan and Mark Krikorian, from heralding the end of America as we know it.
Much like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they seem wide-eyed and enervated, exhorting us to beware because, as he said with such conviction, “They’re coming! They’re coming!”
Though it might be easy to flippantly dismiss such exclamations, many of their arguments are substantive, important – and incorrect.
Due to the paternalistic nature of contemporary government, the proposal to accept the “illegals,” as they are called, and then accept them as legal, which they should be, is fraught with many problems. But apart from these practical day-to-day considerations, and separate from the debate over whether immigrants are a net gain or loss to the coffers of the federal government, there is a larger, timeless issue that lies at the heart of the conservative assertions.
It is the sweeping claim that immigrants suppress American wages and take American jobs. The argument is used to pander to blue collar workers and high-tech workers alike, and it is bandied about far too frequently by those who should know better. Perhaps the worst culprit in this regard is Krikorian, who has a deft and stylish way of selectively presenting arguments made by free trade advocates and using their words to bolster his own anti-free trade position. In his January 7, 2004 National Review online article about George W. Bush’s plan, Krikorian, then a visiting fellow at the Nixon Center and director of the Center for Immigration Studies, paints a rosy picture of an America which restricts immigration. According to Krikorian, if the U.S. government were to enforce more stringently the nation’s immigration policies, life for American workers somehow would improve. Employers would respond to this new tighter labor market in two ways.
One, Krikorian claims they would:
“offer higher wages, increased benefits, and improved working conditions so as to recruit and retain people from the remaining pool of workers. (Two) At the same time, the same employers would look for ways to eliminate some of the jobs they now are having trouble filling”.
This hopeful passage brings some nagging questions to mind. Foremost among them is where employers will get the expendable capital to offer higher wages, increased benefits, and improved working conditions. Are they operating on such high profit margins that they can absorb the new costs that Mr. Krikorian would dictate? He seems unconcerned with this minor problem and continues to tread along his utopian path.
“The result would be a new equilibrium,” Krikorian says, “with blue-collar workers making somewhat better money, but each one of those workers being more productive.”
One would assume that these workers would not age either because Krikorian would get them apartments in Shangri-La as part of their benefits package. It is interesting that he should feel so free to tell employers and workers how their businesses will operate and that they will achieve, as he says, a “new equilibrium”, which he prefers over the one the employers and workers could establish without his meddlesome help. Besides the fact that his assumption regarding wages is completely erroneous and reflects little understanding of profit, marginal cost, and the productive use of capital, Krikorian assumes employers can simply increase these wages without any consideration of the most important player in the free market economy, the consumer. Krikorian conveniently neglects to consider how consumers would respond to the forced higher costs of products. Perhaps this is because he believes the heady notion that costs just wouldn’t go up. As he says:
“Since all unskilled labor from Americans and foreigners in all industries accounts for such a small part of our economy, perhaps four percent of GDP, we can tighten the labor market without any fear of sparking meaningful inflation.”
Such arrogant assurances usually don’t sit well with people who understand why we work to decrease costs of production in the first place. This is a basic concept that nearly every consumer going to the market understands. The entire purpose of a productive economy is to make things easier, not harder to buy, to let us use less of our toil to get a product, not more of our energy and time. To embrace Krikorian’s naive notion would be to accept the idea that the farmer should take a wheel off his plow because, though the machine will move more slowly and he will have to work harder to get his produce, it will employ an American to carry the wheel-less side of the plow, or better yet, it will force the farmer to hire a team of experts to develop a new floating plow that may cost him too much to stay in business, but will employ high-skilled natives. This seems to be a very attractive line of thinking to Krikorian. For in his attempts to supersede the preferences of consumers and businessmen as reflected in the market, he cites one of the most legendary free market thinkers, Julian Simon, and his work on scarcity as inspiration. In Simon’s breakthrough 1981 publication, “The Ultimate Resource”, Simon revealed that most of the leftist fears regarding depletion of natural resources were unfounded. Simon found that the relative scarcity of resources led to greater human innovation, which led to greater productivity, greater market abundance of old and new resources and improving living conditions.
As Krikorian notes, Simon spelled it out clearly when he said:
“It is important to recognize that discoveries of improved methods and of substitute products are not just luck. They happen in response to scarcity and increase in cost. Even after a discovery is made, there is a good chance that it will not be part There is a good chance that it will not be put into operation until there is need for it due to rising cost. This point is important. Scarcity and technological advance are not two unrelated competitors in a race. Rather, each influences the other.”
This is absolutely correct. Unrestricted human ingenuity lets us thrive in a world of limited resources. But Krikorian seeks to use this observation to justify depletion of the U.S. labor force.
Citing raisin growers in the U.S. and Australia as comparative examples, Krikorian explains that in Australia, a nation with a small workforce, raisin growers were forced to develop new techniques to harvest their product. This innovation led to greater productivity, more raisins being harvested per worker. But, in the U.S., he argues, a surplus of low-wage immigrant workers suppressed this development, and thus U.S. raisin growers did not adopt the new productive methods that arose in Australia. But implicit in his argument is the fact that U.S. employers did not have to develop those new forms of harvesting in the first place because their relative costs were lower and labor was not scarce. According to Krikorian, the scarcity of labor in Australia led to technological progress, the kind of thing Simon would have applauded. and the surplus of labor in the US led to technological stagnation, which hurts an economy in the long run. By embracing the idea that scarcity leads to innovation, Krikorian assumes that a man like Simon would have welcomed greater scarcity, that Simon would have embraced the mock idea Frederic Bastiat put forward to “blot out the sun” in order to employ more candle-makers! Under Krikorian’s paradigm, we ought to eliminate as many resources as we can, be they labor resources or natural resources, because their scarcity will lead to technological innovation and greater productivity.
In other words, burn down the forests with eager dispatch. We will come up with new, more productive ways to harvest what is left.
Krikorian makes the dual mistakes of assuming better market knowledge than the U.S. raisin growers themselves and of confusing all technological innovation at all times with a greater productive use of capital. While the needs of Australian raisin growers led them to come up with new ways of harvesting their crops and these may have been more productive for them, U.S. growers made their own decisions based on their needs. To assume for U.S. growers the responsibility of how best to spend their money and invest in resources is not only arrogant, it stifles the cost analysis that leads to innovation in the first place. This may all seem academic at first glance, but it is important. As it happens, Krikorian’s argument has been widely disseminated, not only in the online and print versions of National Review, but also in the broadcast media, where Rush Limbaugh read his polemic on the air to millions of listeners. It is pervasive, and it is dangerous. Krikorian’s messy reinterpretation of Simon’s logic is really a tool to support his belief that immigration is not only unnecessary, but that it should be curtailed. At the core of his thinking, and of that of people such as Laura Ingram, is the sincere but mistaken belief that foreign laborers suppress native wages and harm the economy as a whole.
Perhaps not coincidentally, it was Julian Simon himself who conducted probably the most exhaustive survey of all economic data regarding these claims. And his work refutes Krikorian on every level.
In his landmark 1995 paper entitled, “Immigration, the Demographic and Economic Facts,” published by the Cato Institute and the National Immigration Forum, Simon looked at the available studies and concluded:
“The studies uniformly show that immigrants do not increase the rate of native unemployment in the aggregate. The reader need not go further if the conclusion is all that is desired.”
However, if one wanted to go further, he could discover that immigration also does not, in the aggregate, suppress wages for native workers. Immigration has a slight dampening effect on wages only in certain sectors of the economy, typically those sectors that depend on immigrant labor. These decreases in wages are often very slight and the wages rise over time as each sector sees economic improvement. As one of the studies reported:
“The evidence we have assembled for the nineteen eighties confirms the conclusions from earlier studies of 1970 and 1980 census data. In particular, we find little indication of an adverse wage effect of immigration, either cross sectionally or within cities over time. even for workers at the tenth percentile of the wage distribution, there is no evidence of a significant decline in wages in response to immigrant inflows.”
Data like these often go overlooked by commentators, which is a shame, since it would be much more productive to debate when informed by as many facts as possible. With such information on hand, readers would be able to dispel error and seek out the truth.
And in the political realm, this practice is not just an academic exercise. When codified, assumptions can cause great damage. Many people assume that an influx of immigrants will harm the bargaining power of the American worker, but they do not see that a decrease in immigrant workers would mean a decrease in the bargaining power of the consumer. Some claim that the low-wage jobs that immigrants fill would magically pay higher wages if we just got those pesky foreigners out of the labor pool. They never consider that the consumer would be forced to pay more and the businessman might not be able to attract the consumer to his product if he had to sell it at a higher price. Most of all, however, they do not see the dynamic effect that a few extra pennies in each person’s pocket can have on the economy as a whole.
The reason immigrants are not dangerous to the U.S. economy is that they allow consumers to be free, free to buy the best products they can for the lowest price. The labor factor of production goes down in cost. This in turn allows the consumer to have more expendable capital to use on another product, perhaps a new American product or business venture, which will employ more people and, in turn, help strengthen the economy, but which could not have the opportunity to start up without the savings consumers can achieve. Despite what the doomsayers claim, immigration helps us all better our lives. It’s what economic progress is all about, and it is why people come to this country in the first place.
WE WILL CONTINUE, TOMORROW! JOIN US TONIGHT AT 6 PM EASTERN TO DISCUSS THIS AND THE MURDER IN MN, IT WILL BE CLASSROOM BACK AND FORTH W YOU AS THE PROF!
Be Seeing You!
Leave a comment
Share
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
View all episodes
By Gardner GoldsmithLIBERTY CONSPIRACY NEWS NOTES:
1-26-26
PGG
Share
A few items to prepare for tonight’s Liberty Conspiracy LIVE - Most of which will focus on the DHS-BPS-ICE murder of Alex Pretti, and the Trump lies to cover for their own malfeasance.
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
—PART THREE ON IMMIGRATION, AFTER PARTS ONE, TWO IN OUR SUNDAY NEWS ASSEMBLIES FROM 1-25-26—Following-up our logical analysis of the federal assumption of power over “immigration and border control”, its practices of deportation and kidnapping, breaches of the Fourth Amendment, breaches of Article Four, Section Four, and breaches of deeper morality re freedom of association and the right to retain the fruits of one’s labor… Now, let’s look at the ethical and practical problems of any political institution claiming the power to handle “a border” or even define what or where it is, and to define who can associate with whom.
In our first two articles, we noted that the word immigration is not in the US Constitution, that Jefferson and Madison both correctly observed that the matter was a state issue, and that the feds cannot claim an “invasion” without a response of a Declaration of War or Letters of Marque and Reprisal for non-state “adversaries”. Likewise, Article Four, Section Four of the US Constitution requires state legislatures or the governor (if the legislature is not in session) to REQUEST federal military aid to protect their “republican form of government” against rebellion or violence before any federal military can enter, and, of course, that negates both the inferior “Insurrection Act” and the idea that the “necessary and proper” clause allows the feds to enter to “protect federal buildings” that cannot be federal buildings, since the Constitution only allows the feds to run three kinds of property (territories, military garrisons, and the national capitol).
But on the deeper philosophical and logical levels, one must ask (as one asks with any comparison between statist action and freedom): Even IF the Constitution were amended to allow for border definition and policing and for immigration control, would it be possible for anyone to claim there was any valuation involved, any VALUE, tied to the political process of the state determining where a border will be and how it will be “protected”?
The answer, of course, is “No.” Since all political actions are predicated on force, coercion, and intimidation, and since the money used to pay for the determination of the border and how it will be policed comes through the force of taxation, no one who pays for the “border” can be said to have willingly wanted it there. Even if a small cadre wants a border someplace, this is the Tragedy of the Commons, meaning that not all taxpayers will agree, yet they will be forced to pay, leaving them arguing. Similarly, the politicians are not using their own money, so they are not showing their own true preferences. And, of course, in most cases the land is taken via eminent domain, threats of seizure and force. And the arbitrary “payments” to see the polis acquire that land come from taxation, of course, so that is a double sin.
The only borders that reflect value or personal interest are those on private property. All political borders are established through illegitimate, coercive means. If there is no choice, there is no subjective-value-expression.
And what of the “economic impact” of “open borders”?
First, let’s reiterate the PHILOSOPHICAL axiom that no one has a right to tell other people they cannot peacefully associate, to do so is to become the criminal, the aggressor, the threat.
Second, let’s establish that one’s ability to associate with others is both an outgrowth of, and sourced FROM, division of labor, and that political obstacles blocking free association — be those inhibitions in the forms of import duties, bans on “outsourcing”, or immigration “limits” from the central political authority — all are arbitrary mandates and decisions over other people’s lives, all, forms of aggression, regardless of the vaunted “rationales” in the halls of government, unions, or any other special interest.
As such, they undercut, weaken, or abolish the ability of people to divide their labor, to trade money, time, and opportunities in order to let others take on tasks to which they might be better suited, and free oneself up to do something else.
Share Gardner Goldsmith
Labor is a key factor of production, and arbitrary, force-imposed decisions over, and restrictions on, the labor factor of production increase the cost of that factor of production, decreasing productivity, profitability, and the power of consumers to save and spend on or invest in other ventures.
As I noted in my book, “Live Free or Die”, referring to a brushfire debate over immigration in the early 2000s, there are many people of both major parties who push for federal curtailment of immigration. Here is a new version of part of my argument, found in “Live Free or Die”…
Subscribe now
Share
On January 7, 2004, President George W. Bush announced what appeared to be a sweeping plan to grant de facto amnesty for millions of resident aliens working in the U.S. In fact, it was little more than a long-term worker visa program that barely increased the ability of employers to hire whom they wished and came nowhere near recognizing the right of individuals to move where their abilities could take them.
Nonetheless, this has not stopped profits ranging from conservative radio hosts Laura Ingraham and Michael Savage, to supposedly conservative writers such as Pat Buchanan and Mark Krikorian, from heralding the end of America as we know it.
Much like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they seem wide-eyed and enervated, exhorting us to beware because, as he said with such conviction, “They’re coming! They’re coming!”
Though it might be easy to flippantly dismiss such exclamations, many of their arguments are substantive, important – and incorrect.
Due to the paternalistic nature of contemporary government, the proposal to accept the “illegals,” as they are called, and then accept them as legal, which they should be, is fraught with many problems. But apart from these practical day-to-day considerations, and separate from the debate over whether immigrants are a net gain or loss to the coffers of the federal government, there is a larger, timeless issue that lies at the heart of the conservative assertions.
It is the sweeping claim that immigrants suppress American wages and take American jobs. The argument is used to pander to blue collar workers and high-tech workers alike, and it is bandied about far too frequently by those who should know better. Perhaps the worst culprit in this regard is Krikorian, who has a deft and stylish way of selectively presenting arguments made by free trade advocates and using their words to bolster his own anti-free trade position. In his January 7, 2004 National Review online article about George W. Bush’s plan, Krikorian, then a visiting fellow at the Nixon Center and director of the Center for Immigration Studies, paints a rosy picture of an America which restricts immigration. According to Krikorian, if the U.S. government were to enforce more stringently the nation’s immigration policies, life for American workers somehow would improve. Employers would respond to this new tighter labor market in two ways.
One, Krikorian claims they would:
“offer higher wages, increased benefits, and improved working conditions so as to recruit and retain people from the remaining pool of workers. (Two) At the same time, the same employers would look for ways to eliminate some of the jobs they now are having trouble filling”.
This hopeful passage brings some nagging questions to mind. Foremost among them is where employers will get the expendable capital to offer higher wages, increased benefits, and improved working conditions. Are they operating on such high profit margins that they can absorb the new costs that Mr. Krikorian would dictate? He seems unconcerned with this minor problem and continues to tread along his utopian path.
“The result would be a new equilibrium,” Krikorian says, “with blue-collar workers making somewhat better money, but each one of those workers being more productive.”
One would assume that these workers would not age either because Krikorian would get them apartments in Shangri-La as part of their benefits package. It is interesting that he should feel so free to tell employers and workers how their businesses will operate and that they will achieve, as he says, a “new equilibrium”, which he prefers over the one the employers and workers could establish without his meddlesome help. Besides the fact that his assumption regarding wages is completely erroneous and reflects little understanding of profit, marginal cost, and the productive use of capital, Krikorian assumes employers can simply increase these wages without any consideration of the most important player in the free market economy, the consumer. Krikorian conveniently neglects to consider how consumers would respond to the forced higher costs of products. Perhaps this is because he believes the heady notion that costs just wouldn’t go up. As he says:
“Since all unskilled labor from Americans and foreigners in all industries accounts for such a small part of our economy, perhaps four percent of GDP, we can tighten the labor market without any fear of sparking meaningful inflation.”
Such arrogant assurances usually don’t sit well with people who understand why we work to decrease costs of production in the first place. This is a basic concept that nearly every consumer going to the market understands. The entire purpose of a productive economy is to make things easier, not harder to buy, to let us use less of our toil to get a product, not more of our energy and time. To embrace Krikorian’s naive notion would be to accept the idea that the farmer should take a wheel off his plow because, though the machine will move more slowly and he will have to work harder to get his produce, it will employ an American to carry the wheel-less side of the plow, or better yet, it will force the farmer to hire a team of experts to develop a new floating plow that may cost him too much to stay in business, but will employ high-skilled natives. This seems to be a very attractive line of thinking to Krikorian. For in his attempts to supersede the preferences of consumers and businessmen as reflected in the market, he cites one of the most legendary free market thinkers, Julian Simon, and his work on scarcity as inspiration. In Simon’s breakthrough 1981 publication, “The Ultimate Resource”, Simon revealed that most of the leftist fears regarding depletion of natural resources were unfounded. Simon found that the relative scarcity of resources led to greater human innovation, which led to greater productivity, greater market abundance of old and new resources and improving living conditions.
As Krikorian notes, Simon spelled it out clearly when he said:
“It is important to recognize that discoveries of improved methods and of substitute products are not just luck. They happen in response to scarcity and increase in cost. Even after a discovery is made, there is a good chance that it will not be part There is a good chance that it will not be put into operation until there is need for it due to rising cost. This point is important. Scarcity and technological advance are not two unrelated competitors in a race. Rather, each influences the other.”
This is absolutely correct. Unrestricted human ingenuity lets us thrive in a world of limited resources. But Krikorian seeks to use this observation to justify depletion of the U.S. labor force.
Citing raisin growers in the U.S. and Australia as comparative examples, Krikorian explains that in Australia, a nation with a small workforce, raisin growers were forced to develop new techniques to harvest their product. This innovation led to greater productivity, more raisins being harvested per worker. But, in the U.S., he argues, a surplus of low-wage immigrant workers suppressed this development, and thus U.S. raisin growers did not adopt the new productive methods that arose in Australia. But implicit in his argument is the fact that U.S. employers did not have to develop those new forms of harvesting in the first place because their relative costs were lower and labor was not scarce. According to Krikorian, the scarcity of labor in Australia led to technological progress, the kind of thing Simon would have applauded. and the surplus of labor in the US led to technological stagnation, which hurts an economy in the long run. By embracing the idea that scarcity leads to innovation, Krikorian assumes that a man like Simon would have welcomed greater scarcity, that Simon would have embraced the mock idea Frederic Bastiat put forward to “blot out the sun” in order to employ more candle-makers! Under Krikorian’s paradigm, we ought to eliminate as many resources as we can, be they labor resources or natural resources, because their scarcity will lead to technological innovation and greater productivity.
In other words, burn down the forests with eager dispatch. We will come up with new, more productive ways to harvest what is left.
Krikorian makes the dual mistakes of assuming better market knowledge than the U.S. raisin growers themselves and of confusing all technological innovation at all times with a greater productive use of capital. While the needs of Australian raisin growers led them to come up with new ways of harvesting their crops and these may have been more productive for them, U.S. growers made their own decisions based on their needs. To assume for U.S. growers the responsibility of how best to spend their money and invest in resources is not only arrogant, it stifles the cost analysis that leads to innovation in the first place. This may all seem academic at first glance, but it is important. As it happens, Krikorian’s argument has been widely disseminated, not only in the online and print versions of National Review, but also in the broadcast media, where Rush Limbaugh read his polemic on the air to millions of listeners. It is pervasive, and it is dangerous. Krikorian’s messy reinterpretation of Simon’s logic is really a tool to support his belief that immigration is not only unnecessary, but that it should be curtailed. At the core of his thinking, and of that of people such as Laura Ingram, is the sincere but mistaken belief that foreign laborers suppress native wages and harm the economy as a whole.
Perhaps not coincidentally, it was Julian Simon himself who conducted probably the most exhaustive survey of all economic data regarding these claims. And his work refutes Krikorian on every level.
In his landmark 1995 paper entitled, “Immigration, the Demographic and Economic Facts,” published by the Cato Institute and the National Immigration Forum, Simon looked at the available studies and concluded:
“The studies uniformly show that immigrants do not increase the rate of native unemployment in the aggregate. The reader need not go further if the conclusion is all that is desired.”
However, if one wanted to go further, he could discover that immigration also does not, in the aggregate, suppress wages for native workers. Immigration has a slight dampening effect on wages only in certain sectors of the economy, typically those sectors that depend on immigrant labor. These decreases in wages are often very slight and the wages rise over time as each sector sees economic improvement. As one of the studies reported:
“The evidence we have assembled for the nineteen eighties confirms the conclusions from earlier studies of 1970 and 1980 census data. In particular, we find little indication of an adverse wage effect of immigration, either cross sectionally or within cities over time. even for workers at the tenth percentile of the wage distribution, there is no evidence of a significant decline in wages in response to immigrant inflows.”
Data like these often go overlooked by commentators, which is a shame, since it would be much more productive to debate when informed by as many facts as possible. With such information on hand, readers would be able to dispel error and seek out the truth.
And in the political realm, this practice is not just an academic exercise. When codified, assumptions can cause great damage. Many people assume that an influx of immigrants will harm the bargaining power of the American worker, but they do not see that a decrease in immigrant workers would mean a decrease in the bargaining power of the consumer. Some claim that the low-wage jobs that immigrants fill would magically pay higher wages if we just got those pesky foreigners out of the labor pool. They never consider that the consumer would be forced to pay more and the businessman might not be able to attract the consumer to his product if he had to sell it at a higher price. Most of all, however, they do not see the dynamic effect that a few extra pennies in each person’s pocket can have on the economy as a whole.
The reason immigrants are not dangerous to the U.S. economy is that they allow consumers to be free, free to buy the best products they can for the lowest price. The labor factor of production goes down in cost. This in turn allows the consumer to have more expendable capital to use on another product, perhaps a new American product or business venture, which will employ more people and, in turn, help strengthen the economy, but which could not have the opportunity to start up without the savings consumers can achieve. Despite what the doomsayers claim, immigration helps us all better our lives. It’s what economic progress is all about, and it is why people come to this country in the first place.
WE WILL CONTINUE, TOMORROW! JOIN US TONIGHT AT 6 PM EASTERN TO DISCUSS THIS AND THE MURDER IN MN, IT WILL BE CLASSROOM BACK AND FORTH W YOU AS THE PROF!
Be Seeing You!
Leave a comment
Share
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.