CONVERSATION ON IMMIGRATION
(just for record purposes)
SAUL: But it’s advantageous for a state to have a process that is fast and efficient
CURT: I think it is an advantage to have the most difficult process possible, with the only expediency education in a technical subject, and experience in the field.
SAUL:If you have a system under which you can move around goods freely and cheaply while at the same time create great difficulties for moving around labor advanced countries will end up with what they are today: cheap goods and expensive labor. $5k dental visits. Great cars needing a minor repair junk yards. Outsourcing. Curt Doolittle living in Ukraine. And other undesirable consequences.
CURT: Move capital and institutions to labor and thereby construct norms and institutions, do not move labor to capital and institutions and pay a cost in norms and institutions.
SAUL: And this is where I think you got it wrong. Moving capital to labor does not create institutions, while moving labor to capital can assimilate labor according to the rules of the culture.
CURT: That is only true if and only if one does not understand the content of those norms. All that is necessary to transform any country are 10,000 lawyers and an equal number of police. Why are we not exporing both instead of importing underclass dependent labor?
SAUL: Don’t get me wrong, I wish more countries were like America. But it simply doesn’t work that way.
CURT: (I kind of doubt that I am wrong since the evidence is overwhelmingly on my side. wink emoticon ) I don’t wish more countries were like america, Canada and Australia: land-privilege is not a particular bit of intelligence. It’s just luck
(or conquest).
SAUL: If you propose unachievable conditions for your argument to work it means it doesn’t work.
CURT: It is not as important to achieve that end as it is to revise existing law such that costs are not born.
SAUL: Yes 10000 lawyers and police and it would work. But you don’t have 10000 lawyers and police. And America has MILLIONS of immigrants EVERY YEAR. Most will assimilate seamlessly within our lifetime.
CURT: Truth is truth in the sense that moral statements are objective. America has an overabundance of both and americans are natural judges and police. We have 1 lawyer for every 300 people and making lawyers since 1980 has become an industry. We can manufacture order-making on a grand scale. Because we DO IT ALREADY.
SAUL: In the private sector. not so much in government
CURT The probem is not sending 10000 lawyers to Ukraine. It’s Ukraine prohibiting 10000 lawyers and jusges. The single most advantagous thing a low trust country can invest in is american jurists and police.you want to radically change the world that’s how. And there is absolutely no reason why such things cannot be done. if others can send us MILLIONS of peasants, we can send the world THOUSANDS of jurists. You don’t build an airport or a judiciary by placing a help wanted ad, you hire a group of specialists to sytematically do it.
SAUL: Low trust countries are poor. They don’t invest much, especially in American lawyers. America has a built-in magnet that brings peasants. Ukraine has no magnets to bring American lawyers. Lawyers are human beings, and highly paid ones. You can’t just push them around like cart wagons wherever you want.
CURT: If ukraine set up a program to do that most developed nations would support it, and we could easily get 10k people here. Easily. We send millions of troops, americans overwhelmingly evangelize care around the world, and a law degree in america is no longer a key to an upper middle class lifestyle.
SAUL: Besides, we tried it before. It’s called colonization. Not just lawyers but exporting all levels of government. Didn’t really work except that the colonized were a bit less fucked up than they are today.
CURT: So yes, you can push whomever you want, because 10K legal people is about 1.5-6 billion. a year for 10 years to transform a nation from low trust to high trust. that is a trivial amount of money. Imagine the return on that investment in the establishment of consumer credit alone. They are already replacing all the police. They will soon replace the bureaucracy. Hell, for that amount of money I bet they could get credit since the people could even be paid by external entities. Colonization by common law WORKED EVERYWHERE. Even india.
SAUL: “If Ukraine set up a program” do you realize that Ukraine will never set up such a program?
CURT: So now we are to the crux of the matter.
CURT: OK. Well now we are down to your subjective optionon, not a statement of whether such a program if instituted would be both a cheap (good) investment and would work to transform the country.
We can import any technology we want.
SAUL: of course it would work. in principle. provided that conditions that are next to impossible to meet are met
CURT: OK. Well, then how do we raise the cost of NOT doing it?
I mean, how could Ukraine refuse if with that came nearly unlimited banking and credit?
Source date (UTC): 2015-09-05 08:49:00 UTC