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Comment by dkxjxb | Hacker News Reader

I used to think like this. However, this kind of argument is only good if the basics are met. We have enough technological advancement in America that given strict immigration controls we can ensure the median American is able to raise a family of at least 2 kids while holding an entry level job (of which their should be plenty). Anything else is morally wrong, and those pulling the levers of power are evil.

We’re seeing the opposite and the wealth gap is increasing because the elites running our society see us as cattle, not countrymen.

The current point of our country is to increase GDP (which is a fancy way of saying make the rich richer, given the current wealth gap). It should be to enrich the lives of all its citizens.

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I completely agree with the goal, but I don't think that making it difficult to fire employees is a good way to achieve it. That's essentially funding welfare with a randomized and hidden tax on employers. It would be better if firing for performance was reasonably easy, but new jobs are plentiful and welfare programs allow a reasonable life between jobs. (And, of course, for those who can't work.)

> We have enough technological advancement in America that given strict immigration controls we can ensure the median American is able to raise a family of at least 2 kids while holding an entry level job (of which their should be plenty).

What evidence is there to support this? Kids are expensive, and entry level jobs do not produce enough value to generate an income that can support several people.

> Anything else is morally wrong

Why?

But it used to.

In the post war boom it definitely used to produce enough value to support several people.

And we're far wealthier in aggregate now than before, it's just distributed badly now.

Thats because entry level jobs provided a lot of value back then. It's just harder these days with the amount of automation and tech advancement.

I guess one way is to increase the min wage a lot. But I am guessing employers will just pivot to hiring even less.

In the post war boom, most of those entry level jobs that could support an entire family were limited to white (itself a heavily restricted term back then) men with a union membership.

Heck, unions themselves were heavily racialized back then.

On top of that, housing was segregated either overtly via race restrictions or covertly by overwhelmingly denying loans or sellers colluding to not sell to "that" family.

You'll hear plenty of these stories from older Black, Italian, Greek, Armenian, Chinese, and Hispanic Americans.

That’s true enough, but at that time whites were 90% of the US population, so there was arguably enough wealth then, definitely enough wealth these days, to extend entry-level jobs to the remaining 10%. When 40% or more of your population is descended from post-1965 immigrants, the competition for good jobs goes up a lot in most industries, unless enough economic growth makes up for it - and even with growth, housing scarcity is almost always an issue.

Wages from a single entry level job absolutely did not support a family of 4 or more in the 1950s and 1960s, let alone as comfortably as you are probably imagining.

These delusions need to stop, because it makes it impossible to have meaningful conversations about the many actual issues that do exist. I would expect people here to be better informed, but that seems to be less and less true over the last couple years.

And yes, the wealth distribution is more uneven now than it was in those days, but not to the point that you are claiming.

We dont build housing anymore so costs go up. That has little connection to our ability to afford living well

> given strict immigration controls

Why is this the case? I hear this come up time to time, but the only case in which the American working class actually is having their wages lowered by foreign competition is through global trade, which does not need to go through immigration control. In fact, if anything, making it harder for poor workers to move to rich countries guarantees that poor countries will always have a supply of underpriced manufacturing labor to do arbitrage on, and that's what actually happened since America switched from the pre-1970s "high tariffs and whites-only immigration" regime to the post-CRA, post-Reagan regime of "low tariffs and restrictive immigration unless you have family that can sponsor you".

You're entirely correct that the elites see us as cattle, but the whole point of immigration control is to keep your cattle in fences. The elites can always buy their way into a country - in fact, most countries have "immigrant investor programs" that make this an official, on the books thing that anyone with enough capital can do. So if you want to oppose the power of the elites, you need an immigration policy that benefits the people - i.e. one loose enough that the average person can move to another country as easily as one moves to another state.

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