Seems like discussion on homelessness would be slightly easier if we started from first principles or at least some place where there is closer to a consensus.
And to reframe the question, do all people have a right not to be excluded from land (without a commensurate payment)? I believe the answer is a resounding yes.
Note: I'm a Georgist. [0]
What then?
Government creates property rights, which is what Land really is about, and there appears to be a limited supply to go around. Thereby only citizens of a country who pay taxes should have the right to own Land. Does this make sense?
Georgists (including myself) tend to see anything less than open borders as deeply immoral.
> Georgists (including myself) tend to see anything less than open borders as deeply immoral.
Large numbers of Nigerians moved to Dublin. Robbery, fraud, violence shot up immediately and the CSO (gov stats) shows they are mostly not working and are recipients of state aid.
I used to believe in open borders once until I started living in some estates with migrants and started seeing the horrendous shit they were up to. Stealing cars, beating people up, probably murdering people judging by some of the awful sounds and continual police visits. I still do, but only for people like me. It might not be based on ethic identity necessarily but it should be based on something. Geekdom perhaps.
Otherwise, unwelcome though it is, violence is an inevitability.
Those borders were there for a reason. If you remove the borders then you need to remove the reason also. Until then we shall resolve conflict with violence. Calling that immoral solves nothing.
Similar arguments were made against dismantling the institution of slavery, and they were just as incoherent at addressing the root moral evil.
I think the denizens of this website would get along because regardless of race or class our cultural values are similar. Culture reduced to a single person is a personality, and ours are quite similar. And this is a very recent development yet the distinctions between different groups of people online are well defined. When I first met a large group of computer geeks in person, it was like coming home from a distant journey.
I agree that geographical boundaries are somewhat arbitrary but I don't agree that the idea of borders themselves are immoral. They seem more like a natural and organic adaption to the world. Birds of a feather flock together. That is what open borders proponents are up against, they are lumpers in the eternal battle between the lumpers and splitters.
> Similar arguments were made against dismantling the institution of slavery
I didn't make an argument that some people are intrinsically disposed to being slaves so I'm not sure what similarity you are seeing, perhaps you could develop that into a comparative explanation since I do not see it.
> You are doing nothing to argue that closed borders are moral,
I made no such claim. It is you who made a claim about morality and borders. You are the one who would be required in a classical debate to give up a rhetorical explanation for the motion.
> just that implementing open borders has caused problems in some cases.
That is indeed my claim. I think many countries are similar enough that an exchange of citizens would not lead to significant disruptions. The states of California and Texas are quite different but I presume they wouldn't kill each other. However should 500 years pass I would be much less confident about that statement because the differences may be too stark by then.
A exaggerated version of this is North Korea and South Korea. Two countries, with a common language, genetics, yet in less than fifty years the differences have become profound. In another fifty years they may be irreconcilable.
There is no real reason to believe all groups are destined to become one people, which is what most open borders proponents I've met do believe. The borders mostly exist because of politics, it was never geography or ability to commute with transports that caused splitting.
I think we're dealing with something that organically happens with group dynamics, like how a village behaves differently to an urban metropolis, and I don't think open borders people have explanations for these dynamics.
What I do know is that historically large population movements of different peoples are a prelude to war. They always have been and I see no reason why they won't be once more.
I agree more with the concept that strong borders are the prelude to war. To quote H.G. Wells:
> It was just this dignity of government which the crude Darwinism and the Kiplingism of the later Victorian years were destroying. Competition and survival were accepted as the basal facts of life. “War is the natural state of nations,” said a popular London men’s weekly the other day, with an air of repeating something universally known. “Peace is only the interval of rest and preparation between wars.” In accordance with such ideas the growing boy was exhorted to be “loyal” to his school and contemptuous of other schools, “loyal” to his class against other classes, “loyal” to his nation and contemptuous and fierce towards other nations, “loyal” to the English-speaking peoples and contemptuous and hostile to the German or French-speaking. His instinct for brotherhood was narrowed and debased. The universal brotherhood of mankind was laughed to scorn. All life was bickering, he was taught; and yet the whole course of history has shown that the bickering nations perish, and that the alliances and coalescences of peoples and nations ensure the life they comprehend.
Your name sounds Irish actually. Have you ever lived in an areas with a large foreign population? Do you have any experience of those cultures apart from the television and holidaying.
You have to understand this is nothing to do with individuals. This is about groups and they don't behave like individuals somehow.
I've worked with a chap from the Congo, model citizen. Also a South African with a temper who couldn't work to save his life. I've worked with a guy from Pakistan and it was a car wreck because his views on women could only be described as vile, I literally saw him watching a woman being stoned to death for adultery and he thought it was hilarious. You don't want to live next door to somebody like that with your family.
There are good people everywhere. This is defined by me as whether those people are like us. It is just that you have to discriminate when people are doing evil things, sometimes in prodigious quantity. There's no two ways about it. Values really are that different in different places. There are parts of our world in which the rape of children and slavery are not illegal because they are so common and even when they are made illegal the practices continue. There are tribes that literally practice human sacrifice and cannibalism, still, in this world. These are their cultural values!
That means borders, and if you don't allow borders on the outside of a country then they develop themselves on the inside of a country. Look at the USA, they have gated communities because there exist predominately minority group areas with high crime rates.
A border is basically a filter for people. If you are saying this is immoral you need to explain why castle walls and border patrols are a recurrent feature of humankind since forever. The borders are literally in the landscape around us in Europe. This is something that goes way deep and it won't be shifted by waving your hands philosophically.
There are horrible cultures in the world; I agree.
> That means borders
NOPE
This merely traps people where these bad cultures are, and this in my mind is the great immorality. You cannot tell a person "you live in a failed place, but you stuck there forever in poverty, and because of the luck of where I am born, I am entitled to greater things."
You allow for a free movement of people, you will perhaps see a transient spreading of some worse cultures, but in a free marketplace of ideas, they will not remain ascendent-- barbarities and oppression simply aren't very effective. Loss-aversion is no way to build a community.
> and if you don't allow borders on the outside of a country then they develop themselves on the inside of a country. Look at the USA, they have gated communities because there exist predominately minority group areas with high crime rates.
Very true, which is why Georgists pull for a Land Value Tax, which would do much to end this segregation.
""" The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris. The Declaration arose directly from the experience of the Second World War and represents the first global expression of what many people believe to be the rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled. The full text is published by the United Nations on its website.[1] """
[1] http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/inde...
I view the UN generally as 'not even wrong'.
With leftist propaganda, it is not what they say that matters. It is what they leave out.
They come up with things that sound to me like this:
"Everybody has the right to a chocolate bar, because chocolate bars are delicious and everybody ought to have one"
Then I think 'Well, that sounds like a nice thing' but who produces these bars of chocolate. How many bars? What are the limits on this new standard?
These kinds of questions are invariably never answered. You just get a bunch of blowhards leaping down your throat shouting about how you don't care about the children who never experienced the joys of chocolate or something.
I don't give a wet slap about ideology, left or right or anything else, but I do think everyone should have as much chocolate as they want. Bathe in it, why not?
If no one stops me there will be floating castles and highways to the stars. ;-P
> If no one stops me there will be floating castles and highways to the stars. ;-P
Why have a highway to the stars when you could have a maglev train to the moon. Check out Sam Hyde's talk at TED.
The problem is humans being jerks (people call it "human nature" but I say that's a cop-out.) We could make this world a paradise with a wave of our hands, but we have bad dreams.
> We could make this world a paradise with a wave of our hands, but we have bad dreams.
That is actually the core point behind my last post on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12686698
To me it seems like society has decided to taboo major lines of inquiry in physics, chemistry and biology because it didn't like some of the answers it got initially.
These are my bad dreams.
Research into nuclear energy, the source of all power: Taboo. Not even taught in Britain anymore. No building for decades but lots of empty promises.
Research into genetics, the source of all natural variation and adaption. Taboo. The cult of egalitarianism has seen to that.
Research into drugs. Not many people know this but there exists a reverse of Moore's Law called Eroom's Law in the phamaceutical industry. Ignoring the recreational drug side of things which is tabooed, outside of DARPA I don't know any mainstream research into fine motor and brain chemical control in conjunction with control by computation.
The core problem with all of this tabooing is that we're prevented from opening up new avenues of exploration. You could taboo some things and it wouldn't matter because they're just a leave node on the tree of ideas, but if you outright forsake an entire branch node then you lose much more than just the thing you tabooed. Nuclear energy physics and genetic manipulation of humans are definitely branches and not leaves.
I didn't mean that you or the guy in the TED talk were jerks. I'm thinking more about e.g. the people still supporting a certain handsy clowntroll as candidate for U.S. President. Enough said on that though.
I agree that nuclear power suffers from a "taboo". It's crazy that we don't develop and use fusion. Personally I count solar power as fusion but it's not the same as, say, working jet-packs that never run out of fuel.
I think people just don't get fusion power, what it means, what it enables. But on the same token: could you trust fusion jet-packs to the general public in a world that still contains suicide bombers? I am freedom-loving and egalitarian as all hell but I just don't think that would be wise.
Coming at it from another angle, I am convinced that we have all the technology we really need already. I'm not against more research, not at all, not even a little, but I don't feel the urgency anymore.
We've got this. The limiting factor going forward has everything to do with psychology, in my opinion.
Silicon Valley is sometimes overly optimistic but I prefer that to the cynicism I felt in the UK.
Europe in particular really needs some successes. I think I could do something with affordable housing that would scale but we'll have to see. Am confident I wouldn't get venture funding but I have an angle or two. I intend to build a demonstration model as a proof of concept and then hopefully some traction will occur through internet-magic.
Good luck with your projects carapace! We've got this!
Think of it as a call option - you have an undeniable right to exercise it under the terms of contract, but it doesn't mean the brokerage or anyone else have to finance this transaction in case you're low on funds.