Caplan’s argument does not account for costs. He’s wrong. Always has been. This argument is just an extension of Cosmopolitan justification for identitarian incorporation of subgroups into host countries. It is simple literary and economic obscurantism that seeks to ignore the costs of heterogeneity on a population. In an homogenous population under universal absolute nuclear families, we still see high costs of relocation of individuals to changes in capital centers that doe NOT offset the increases in productivity – which are merely artifacts of the change in prices as demand increases in geographies.
In homogenous populations containing ANF families, it takes time for the introduction of heterogeneous forces to play out, but temporary increases do simply to increases in demand for consumption due to relocation are not increases in production, and those costs have to measured against the long term decline of the trust as well as socialistic costs of incorporating lower trust groups into the society.
Trust and homogeneity of high trust, is the most expensive capital to create. And heterogeneity consumes that capital asset – rapidly.
The fallacy of the economic benefit of immigration is that there is no cost to norms. If high trust ethics were fully codified in law, then we could enforce high trust ethics at low cost. However, the immigration of low trust peoples has produced precisely the erosion of our constitution and our liberties that the protestants predicted would happen.
The majority does not desire liberty. The minority desires liberty. And the aristocratic (noble) minority imposed high trust ethics upon the northern european peoples by force. It was that forcible imposition that caused the high trust society, plus the restoration of science, that resulted in european miracle – the only people to possess liberty.
I don’t want to say Caplan is a LIAR, so much as engaged in intentional deception, but he’s no better than the progressives who abuse statistics to tout changes family incomes instead of individual incomes.
Its sort of like his arguments as to why he’s not an austrian. They’re just word games. (There is no difference between the argument for prices and incentives. Obverse and Reverse of the same concept.)
My purpose is to promote my genes, even at the expense of others genes. If we can cooperate while I do that then that’s fine. But if we cannot cooperate while I do that, then there is no point in cooperation.
We all demonstrate our time preference. That’s mine. That’s everyone other than W.E.I.R.D’s – who are demonstrably suicidal.
You don’t get to determine what my preference is. Thats totalitarian. If you dictate my preferences that is by definition not a state of liberty. I agree to cooperate if it’s beneficial to my ends, but not if it is not. That is all that can be said.
I don’t subscribe to the leftist proposal of Rawls, nor the left libertarian position of open borders. I subscribe to the aristocratic proposal that if cooperation is beneficial to me and mine then we should cooperate, but if it’s not then no. I don’t know what’s libertarian about favoring dysgenics.
I mean, why should I squander my earnings through redistribution? Why should I squander my culture’s high trust norms through redistribution? And why should I squander my genes through dysgenic redistribution?
I mean, if you’re a libertarian and you claim to have rights to your earnings, then why do you only have rights to your earnings and not the right to your other forms of capital?
I can spend my inheritance too. That isn’t an increase in production, that’s just rapid destruction of accumulated capital.