All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 25, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:59
620 Immigration Part 2

Logic and dungeons

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello everybody and staff.
24th maybe? 20 something of January 2006.
Hope you're doing well. It's time for our...
Ooh! It's a chilly day!
Minus 15 degrees in Canada.
And it's time for our lunchtime chat-o-stroll-o-rama, and I'm going to travel further afield because I try...
It actually gets kind of irritating when I want to make a good point, and people come wandering or clustering by.
That pause at the beginning of the podcast was me not wanting to speak energetically to a sock while standing inside the building, so...
I'm going to wander out to a distant parking lot where I shall stalk back and forth like a man in search of his contacts.
So, let's continue and I think close off the topic of immigration, for now, for good.
No, probably not for good.
For now. And I just wanted to run through a couple of the arguments that are often put forward by people who have some significant objections to Do you know where Consumer's Road is?
Yeah, you know, I think I do.
Consumers Road, if you can actually walk through this area here, just go straight down that way.
That's one entrance, but there's another.
It's a U. It's sort of an L. It actually ends up coming up that way as well.
Okay. But I don't think you can get through there back here.
If you walk up there and then walk left, it should come up there.
I know for sure if you go that way and down, then you'll see it.
Okay, I think I need that one.
Thank you. Okay, good luck. So, the oppositions that are often put forward to immigration in general are sort of along these lines.
Some people say, well, immigrants will come in and they will use the welfare system in order to Enrich themselves at our expense, and there's a general feeling of ripped-off-edness that comes.
And this, of course, appeals to very basic tribal instincts within the human soul around making sure that your resources don't go to other people.
I was watching this Dr. Phil the other day where a guy was refusing to pray child support, so he claimed, because There were other children by other men, and he felt that his money was going to those other children rather than to his own.
So, that is pretty ingrained in human nature, not to have our resources exploited by other people, except as they be people we love or treasure, either morally or biologically, through love or children.
So, of course, it can't be both.
So there's this general fear that some parasitical outsider tribe is going to come along and hang off our necks like a leech and drain us dry and all of the concomitant stereotypes arise from that kind of situation wherein people are supposed to be giggling as they take you over and Prey upon your wallet and so on and getting away with everything and sitting around scratching themselves and all this kind of stuff.
It's just general hateful stuff that is brought about by this fear of outsiders coming in and pillaging your crops, so to speak.
And, of course, it's very clear and positive, from an evolutionary standpoint, biological reasons why we would have that fear and work very hard.
Social calculus, in terms of distribution of resources, people who suck at math When you give them an abstract mathematical question will perform exquisitely well when you've reframed that into a resource allocation question.
So questions about who pays for what in a bar And whether it's equal or fair, people can't work that out to save their lives, most people, mathematically, but if you give it to them in terms of so-and-so is paying for such-and-such and so-and-so is not paying, they get the answer instinctively.
We have a calculus engine for resource distribution within our consciousness, which is really quite powerful and well worth exploring if you have time and inclination.
So, hostility towards outsiders taking resources Holy crap, it's gone!
The outsider's taking resources, my friends.
For me, today, are you, podcast listeners?
Okay, let me just... I'm going to be a little muffled.
I simply can't take it. I'm going to have to cover up my mouth a little with a muffler or something.
It really is quite a wind.
So, that fear is natural that people are going to have it.
It's undifferentiated. Biological bigotry, which is not to say that it's necessarily wrong, but the problem is not that people don't say, I hate immigrants, and I don't want them in my country.
Obviously, that is An unsustainable position.
Every human being is an immigrant in one form or another.
Even my family in England, we came over with William the Conqueror, so we were immigrants from that standpoint.
So that kind of stuff doesn't really work at all to say, I don't like immigration, because at some point, especially people in America saying, the country's only a couple of hundred years old, for Christ's sake.
People saying in America, I don't like immigration, The only people in America who can say, I don't like immigration, are the drunken remnants of the original native tribes.
They, I think, have a fair reason to dislike immigration.
Though I still say they're doing better than they would have, at least there's more opportunity for those who want it, than they would have done under the old system of blank tribal hierarchies.
But those people can say it, I think, with some justification for...
Waspy dudes and dudettes to say it is really quite laughable.
So, nobody can say, I hate immigration.
Immigration is bad. Because that's clearly just rank prejudice.
So, what do people do?
Well, they say something else, right?
They say, I dislike immigration because immigrants come in and they...
You know, they cost the U.S. Treasury $14 billion and they only contribute $8.4 billion in taxes and so on.
And so there's a net loss and that's why I don't like immigration.
So nobody then says, I dislike immigrants.
What they always do is they say, I dislike immigrants for this reason.
And The reason can't be something that's synonymous with immigration because that returns you right back to the first problem.
The reason that people claim to dislike immigrants is always for some reason of economic exploitation of the working masses or whatever.
Fine, fine. Let's take that.
And let's find out if it is something that is just and valid, in other words, if it's universal, or if it is just another synonym for immigration, right?
In the same way that many of our black brothers and sisters suspect, and probably quite rightly so, that when the media talks about welfare moms, they're really talking about black women in the projects, or as they're sometimes called, drug dealer girlfriend farms.
So, let's have a look at this question.
If somebody says, I dislike immigrants because immigrants take out more than they contribute to the social wheel, to the riches and wealth within society, fine.
Then you have the challenge of explaining why it is only immigrants that you focus your dislike on, if it's based on this criteria, right?
Those who take out more than they contribute to the social wheel.
Well, there's a rather large group of people who They take out rather more than they contribute to the social wheel as a whole.
And those would be children.
Children are certainly immigrants in that they're new to the country.
They certainly do take an enormous amount of resources out of the country without putting resources back in.
Sadly, dusting off the blackboard erasers after school does not count as adding to the GDP. Taxation, immunization, the increased healthcare costs of children, and so on, all do rather substantially deduct from the GDP. So, or consume at least a large amount of resources.
So, I would say that if you are against groups that are new to the country, that subtract from the GDP, or consume more than they produce, no problem.
Let's pull a King Herod But with trucks and trains, rather than swords and blades, and simply deport all the children because they are new to the country and consume many more resources than they produce.
But I don't see that being a very valid approach to the problem, and I don't see a whole lot of immigrant bashers going to take that route.
So it can't be simply a group that is new to the country, newly arrived in the country, that consumes more resources than they produce.
So it must be something else.
So let's just say it's adults who are new to the country or who are in the country who consume more.
Whether they're new to the country or not shouldn't really matter a whole lot, right?
It's not like if somebody who is Lived in America for 40 years is taking your resources versus somebody who's been in America for a year who's taking your resources over wherever you live.
It shouldn't really matter, right? I mean, does it really matter how old the guy is who robs you?
No. Age is not a relevant factor in something like theft.
So, the longevity of the person who's taking from the common wheel in terms of their presence of the country, eh, it shouldn't matter at all.
So, Where they're born, of course, does it really matter whether the guy who steals from you is born in Baltimore or is born in Des Moines or Tulsa or New Orleans.
It doesn't really matter to you, right?
The place of birth is not a determinate factor in the ethics of theft.
So, what we can only really conclude is that the fundamental objection that What is being levelled against people, in this case immigrants, is that they're taking and not giving.
That they're taking more out of the public purse than they're providing.
And we can't redefine that as just saying, and they have to be born outside the country, because then the primary thing you're complaining about is people born outside the country, of which your ancestors were born, outside the country, and therefore blah blah blah blah blah.
Their citizenry was illegitimate because they arrived in the country and took over land.
And I don't believe that the immigrants who are currently coming in, even the illegals, are taking over the land and houses of other people.
So, you can't simply redefine that which you object to in immigrants as those born outside the country.
It has to be something else.
And the moment you make it something else, you can't then tack on to that and born outside the country, otherwise you write back where you started.
So, people say, well...
Immigrants, they come in and they sit on welfare and they send their kids to public schools and blah-de-blah-de-blah, you know, pay taxes and so on.
All fine. So your criteria is those human beings who consume social resources disproportionately to the degree with which they contribute to those same social resources, using the term contribution in the loosest possible manner, in the same way that a woman contributes her vagina to a rapist or you, your wallet, to a mugger, Then, the issue is the net negative economic loss to the community and economic gain to the individual.
Fine, no problem. We can go with that.
Then, once we recognize that you can't redefine this category in terms of people who are simply born outside the country, then you have a rather large and challenging problem on your hand, which is that You have far more complaints against naturalized fellow citizens than you do against people who've come into the country legally or illegally.
So, who is it who is consuming the vast majority of your tax resources?
Is it, say, the quarter or third of the population who works for government in one form or another?
Yeah, I would say so, and that's probably a much larger group than even illegal immigrants.
And those people are not just taking out more than they're contributing.
They're contributing almost nothing and taking out their entire salary and overhead and heating and lighting and all the other stuff that it takes, the computer systems and all of that which it takes to keep you enslaved, right?
See, as I sort of was mentioning yesterday, or perhaps more than mentioning, I apologize for the swearing, but as I was mentioning yesterday, the people who are pointing WMDs at you are slightly more dangerous to your liberty than the guy shaking citrus on a median.
Or the guy sticking up some plaster in a house somewhere.
So, these people are not enslaving you, are not causing you those kinds of problems, not diminishing your liberty.
They're just trying to get by as everybody else is.
So, clearly, the major issue should be with those, right?
With those people who actively take your property and Dude, let's call the muffler.
Look into it. So, those people who are taking your property actively rather than simply through the prosecution of wanting to get their children educated in some manner and being forced by the existing system to put them in state schools and so on, Or have them educated at home, or however you want to put it.
Then those people who are not simply contributing less than they're taking from the common wheel, but rather in fact are taking everything that they have from the common wheel and inflicting the theft of your property to boot, right?
Those people you should have far more problems with.
Here's another example. What about mercantilist, state-sucking corporations?
Do they Have a large effect on diminishing your economic freedom?
To what degree do corporations take out more from the common wheel than they put in?
And by those corporations, I include not just those who, like ConAgra, who take vast amounts of government subsidies and so on, but Amtrak and places like that, but also, even more importantly, those corporations that, say, manufacture arms,
which we'll get to a little later today, Who manufacture arms that are shipped overseas, which raise resentment against you as an individual, so they tax you in order to inflame attacks against you by selling arms overseas, and not exactly putting forward the image of your country as a noble, wise, and benevolent statesman of the planet.
So, I would say that there's another group that you might have slightly more problem with than with immigrants.
Now, of course, there are Domesticated citizens within your own country who are on welfare.
And those people get enormous amounts of subsidies.
Direct subsidies. They get medical aid subsidies, rent control subsidies.
Sometimes the rent is paid for them.
They, of course, can use the roads.
There's public subsidies for transportation systems like buses and subways, which they also use.
And, of course, the school systems and the policing systems, which they don't pay for.
All of these kinds of things.
People on welfare, you see, are net negatives to the common wheel.
See, the complaint against, at least some of the statistics that I've seen on illegal immigrants or immigrants of a certain category, that they contribute only two-thirds of the resources that they take away from the state, well, if contribution versus deduction to the social wheel is your criteria for hostility, then those of your fellow citizens who are on welfare are much, much worse than any conceivable immigrant population as a whole.
The people on welfare are almost defined as those who are taking enormously relative to their, quote, contributions, which are almost non-existent and almost always under the table, because otherwise their earnings are simply deducted from their welfare payments and there's no incentive to get any of that stuff done, to have a job, right? So if your criteria is those who are net takers from the social wheel, or the common wheel, then Naturally, the people on welfare should be far more...
you should be far more hostile to the people on welfare than you ever would be to any group of illegal or illegal immigrants.
Let's just stay with illegal immigrants to make it as inflammatory as possible.
But illegal immigrants have jobs and, of course, don't have access to vast raised social programs, have to work under the table a lot, and so on.
And so that just doesn't make any sense to have your primary hostility.
Towards these people. Unless, of course, you're just hostile towards immigrants, which brings us back to our original problem of self-contradictory nonsense.
Not to mention bigotry.
Let's have a look at another group of people who, it could be said, are subtracting a fair amount from the common wheel.
There's a little group of green-clad GI Joes, we call soldiers, who Probably look a whole lot like you, and may even come from your socio-economic spectrum, i.e., poor Southern.
And those people, I would say, fairly adept at taking from the common wheel, at not contributing in any way, shape, or form, but rather simply taking from the common wheel.
They get paid medical benefits, free flights everywhere, they get armed at your expense, and, of course, what are their arms going to be trained at?
You, if you don't pay your taxes.
So, I would say that if there was A growing sort of mercenary, illegal immigrant army that was stomping around taxing everyone, and the taxes that they levied were far greater,
or even just greater, than the taxes levied by the Government agents at the moment, then, yeah, sure, then you would say, well, you know, this government is robbing me of 30% taxes, but this army, this wild army of illegal immigrant mercenaries is taxing me at 40%, then I would understand that you would have a certain hostility towards the illegal immigrant...
Oh, and my brain is frozen!
...the illegal immigrant mercenary army that was taxing you at a higher rate than the government, but...
If you really are concerned about those who consume without producing, and I would of course throw in the additional concern that they are threatening your life and liberty and property to boot, and with soldiers and policemen in particular, of course, it's more than threatening.
They will shoot you if you don't pay your taxes, which I don't believe I've read of any illegal immigrant mercenary armies running around imposing taxes on people.
So, as far as those who are negative towards your Person and property, and taking from the commonweal without contributing to the commonweal, I would say that you've got, just off the top of my head, right?
You have people on welfare who are naturalized or whatever, children as a whole.
You have soldiers.
Corporations, political parties, mother of all the toly, as cold as a witch's titten here!
So, these are...
I mean, this is just at the top of my head.
I'm sure you could come up with dozens and dozens of more of groups that were...
that would fall under whatever category you imposed upon illegal immigrants, which would justify your hostility towards them and your desire to control their entry, and to eject them, of course, if...
If that should be your desire or your goal.
So if you desire to have these people ejected because they are subtracting, More from the common good and common wealth than they're contributing, then ship all the kids, all the soldiers, all the policemen, all the business leaders, most corporations that deal with the state, ship all of these people overseas, and perhaps you can stack them all like cordwood on Sealand, I don't know, but overall, or fundamentally, this is the challenge that you're going to have.
When you end up creating some justification that is not just bigoted in nature as to why immigrants should be disallowed or disbarred or, you know, that we should put barriers against them coming in.
Now, it seems to me that it would be kind of hard to justify...
This is just another way of looking at the problem.
If a problem is illogical, it doesn't matter which way you take it.
So look at it, it will all fall apart.
So, here's another thing, which I would not find to be particularly easy to oppose, should I be anti-immigrant, or anti-illegal immigrant, or whatever.
And that is that you don't want more people who subtract from society's wealth coming into society, right?
I mean, that's the general idea, that's the general goal behind it, right?
So, I'm not sure that I understand, then, why a eugenics program of sterilizing people on welfare would not be a valid approach, right?
I mean, if you're willing to restrict people's freedom of movement and you're willing to point guns at their heads and force them into trucks or planes or boats or trains or whatever to go back to where they came from, it's because you don't want new faces in the land that are subtracting from the common wealth.
So, it's a little hard for me to understand why you would be happy pointing a gun at somebody and chipping them overseas.
And that would be a fair and valid approach to the problem of new faces emerging who were subtracting for the common good, common wealth.
That you would allow people on welfare to have babies, because surely that is also creating, and in a far more likely manner, is creating those who grow up subtracting from the common good, right?
I mean, an adult illegal immigrant is going to get a job, almost certainly.
Whereas a...
and this is relatively quickly.
As I said yesterday, most people who come across into your country have jobs already lined up.
So, An illegal immigrant is going to have a job, whereas a baby that is born to a welfare mother, and by this I do not mean a black sister, is without a doubt not going to be economically productive for the next 15 years, at minimum, and probably longer, and in fact has a much higher incidence of crime and sort of things like that.
I'm not sure exactly why the logic would be that of those two risks to your economic integrity, you would feel hostile towards the adult Mexican laborer versus the child of a welfare mother.
I'm not sure, logically, why you would be more hostile to the man who could have a job versus the child who's going to consume, you know, $50,000, $150,000 worth of resources while contributing nothing.
Other than carbon dioxide and enormous amounts of poo.
So, that aspect of things, of course, I don't support either, right?
But just logically, right?
Logically, this is not where you would put your emphasis.
What I'm trying to do is, based on the arguments that are put forward, which are against immigrants, it's trying to figure out that if these were, in fact, The arguments that cause you to end up pointing your negativity towards immigrants or becoming hostile towards immigrants.
Like if you said, well, I don't know whether I'm for or against illegal immigration, but I do know this, that I am quite hostile towards those who take more out of society than they put in.
Well, let's not even talk about mentally ill people, but, or the elderly.
But if that is your criteria, well, they take more than they put in, if that was your sort of first criteria, then naturally it would be logical for you to go down the list of those who consume more than they produce, and immigrants would not even be in the top 20, the top 50, I'm guessing, if you really sat down and did the math.
So clearly, This is an ex post facto justification.
Clearly people just feel hostile towards illegal immigrants and they are coming up with pseudo-justifications for their hostility.
So that is very, very clear in the same way that people talk about government programs helping the poor and say, well, we have to have welfare because welfare helps the poor and they have not started out with the premise of what helps the poor and does welfare help the poor and so on.
They're simply putting a justification on A ridiculous notion, or an evil notion, the way I guess that some old women put little suits on dogs.
It's not that you think that the dog needs a suit, it's just something that you put on for your own bizarre fetish.
So, this is one way of understanding that whatever arguments people are going to come up with about their hostility towards, or fear of, or loathing of illegal immigrants, It doesn't really do any good, or doesn't really help out in any way, shape, or form, logically.
Either they're going to hate them just for being immigrants, which is a gun that goes off in your own hand, because we're all immigrants, and it's a clear revealing of bigotry, or you're going to come up with some justification as to why you dislike immigrants, which is going to apply, whichever way you cut it, far more To your fellow citizens than it is to immigrants, so illegal or otherwise.
So this kind of stuff is all just pure nonsense, and it is my particular goal, of course, to simply peel away the moral nonsense that people use to clothe their bigotry in, so that we can see it sort of for what it really is, which is just a hatred of other.
And why is there this hatred of other?
Well, I'll just sketch out a very brief theory, and certainly you can let me know what you think.
People are addicted to feeling special because of something that is accidental.
Guys with nice hair feel superior to the guys who are bald, and guys who are tall feel superior to the guys who are short, and so on and so on and so on.
White guys feel superior to non-white guys, and light-skinned blacks feel superior to dark-skinned blacks.
Indians with accents feel inferior to Indians without accents.
All this accidental stuff, right?
It's all nonsense. Intelligence of people who can sing, people who are very musical, people who can dance, skinny people feel superior to fat people, and I'm not talking about that.
You've got some level of control over it.
But overall, In England, people with upper-class British accents feel superior to those who are cockney, and it's all just accidental nonsense.
And we do have this great, terrible, awful, soul-destroying temptation to feel a special or superior due to mere accidents.
I think that people who are...
Let's just... I'm sorry too, but let's just say...
I'll pick on Americans, right? People who are Americans are going to feel superior because they're American.
I'm an American. And they're going to feel some sense of superiority about that.
And the moment that you place any kind of self-esteem in a false and nonsensical identity, a manufactured accidental identity, quote, identity, then you're going to have hostility towards...
Those who threaten this ideal.
Christians dislike atheists mostly because atheists point out that Christians aren't special, they're just delusional.
And the major hostility is really against the vanity of the false self.
It's not against their particular conviction that they are religious, because nobody really behaves like they are religious anyway, otherwise they just kill themselves and go meet God.
That's all nonsense. So, what they're really hostile about is the fact that their specialness is taken away.
And if you can just walk over the border and be an American, then being an American doesn't mean anything.
Thank God! Wouldn't it be great if it didn't?
Wouldn't it be wonderful if accidents of birth meant nothing in terms of virtue or self-esteem?
So, open borders, what it means is that you're not special anymore.
You're not virtuous for being born an American.
There's nothing special about being an American.
Anybody who's got two feet or can roll themself over an imaginary line is suddenly part of your special club, which means that your special club is all just nonsense.
It's all just completely made-up tribal idiocy.
And that's, I think, one of the reasons why libertarians have this problem.
As I mentioned yesterday, they identify with this old-school, classical-liberal, Enlightenment-style of American constitutionally-bound democracy.
And they want to keep this to be special in some manner.
But I can absolutely guarantee you that one of the reasons that people want to keep the fences up is to keep themselves feeling special.
And it's extraordinarily destructive for them to do so.
Thank you so much for listening. Before I freeze to death, I'm going to go in.
▲
Export Selection