Input Junkie

(Here after you linked to my Jeeves story, hope you don't mind non-friend comments)

I don't know about other countries, but I do know the British immigration system has become broken precisely because of politicians on all sides thinking we're 'too soft' on them. It's got to the point where people are being deported to countries that will kill them for homosexuality because 'they have not provided sufficient evidence' of their sexuality. I've had people who *KNOW* that my wife is an immigrant, that it cost us £750 to get her a visa and another thousand to get permanent residence, and that she had to take a 'life in the UK' test that they couldn't pass - and, furthermore, who know that it's become even more restrictive and expensive since then - tell me that we have an 'open door' policy for immigrants.

Closed borders aid repressive regimes, destroy families, and enforce privilege. They're evil.

But I was really just commenting to say you have good taste liking The Imagined Village, and that Tam Lin Ballads page looks great.

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nancylebov

I have no problem with comments from non-"friends". Thanks for coming by.

This might fall under your privilege category, but immigration restrictions specifically facilitate slavery. Every time I've heard of slavery in a developed country (unless we're talking about children or prisoners, another large topic), it's of people who are outside the law because there's something wrong with their permission to be in a country. Usually they're undocumented, but occasionally their documents were taken by the person enslaving them.

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Very, *very* good point. One thinks specifically, of course, of those enslaved into prostitution...

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nancylebov

I'm not sure prostitution is a good default image-- I've heard, at least in the US, that the proportion of trafficked women isn't that high, and that it's used as an excuse to mistreat women who are in prostitution voluntarily.

However, I don't have actual numbers, and accurate numbers don't really exist anyway. I do know that there's a fair amount of commercial enslavement (I mean people doing janitorial work or farm work for businesses), and smaller scale domestic slavery, which has a reasonable chance of including rape.

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Hmm... I *think* that might be a US/UK thing (though of course however true the perceptions are, it's not an excuse to mistreat *anyone*, but to get rid of the laws that cause trafficking). I've heard of relatively few cases of that kind of thing over here (which doesn't mean it doesn't happen of course, but I do try to stay up to date) and quite a few of (usually Eastern European, though less so now there's supposed free movement within the EU) women enslaved into prostitution.

(Which is not, of course, to say that any kind of slavery is qualitatively different from or more justifiable than any other. And it could all be prevented using the same measures.)

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nancylebov

Hard to say-- I mostly hear about that sort of thing happening to Chinese and Hispanics, so it's possible that people-smuggling for non-prostitute slavery is more developed in those communities, and it hasn't happened that way in the UK.

On the other hand, I'm not talking about having heard huge numbers of news stories. It's more a matter of being sensitized to check for details about immigration status every time I hear a story about slavery in the developed world.

And notice who gets blamed. It's always the people smugglers (who admittedly are apt to abuse their clients), never the respectable folks who want and enforce immigration restrictions. For that matter, if there are honest people smugglers who do a reliable but expensive job, we never hear about them. I'm merely hypothesizing that such exist, but it wouldn't surprise me.

My sympathies to you and your wife for needing to deal with closemindedness about such a serious matter. Have you managed to change anyone's opinions?

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nancylebov

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-fails

Article claiming no evidence of sex trafficking in the UK, labour trafficking is the real problem.

This backs one of my theories about human nature: People would rather talk about sex. Sexual abuse of children (which is a very serious matter) gets huge amounts of attention, while physical abuse gets rather little.

Please let me know if you see this.

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Yeah, I saw that earlier (presumably you got it from Andrew Ducker, like me) and was planning on commenting. That's *very* odd, because it conflicts with what I've been told by people I know who work on immigration matters, but that was anecdotal and this is far more wide-ranging and rigorous, so it looks like I was wrong.

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nancylebov

There's a lot of fog in this. Is it possible that traffickers are generally able to bribe their way out of trouble? What about those fake arrest records?
The one thing I'm deducing from this is that there's much less sex trafficking than generally believed, but I'm not concluding that there's none at all.

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Thought you might be interested... just got a call from Amnesty International. They were trying to get me to support their (very admirable) campaign for greater protection and support for trafficked people, but while once I talked to them it became clear this would apply to all trafficked people, they pitched it at first as being about sex slavery, and it was only when I brought up that report that they even mentioned anything else.

When even organisations like Amnesty are only talking about the sexual angle, it's hardly surprising that people (including myself) have had such a warped view of the situation. Prurience wins over accuracy again :-/

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I'm not a fan of immigration restrictions; I think that freedom of migration is a basic human right.

But open migration does put certain kinds of pressure on governments. For a start, if you have income transfers, a rich nation's degradingly scanty survival allowance for the desperately poor may be more than most people make in a poor nation; that's a disequilibrium situation that will give rise to population flows toward the rich nation, unless it does away with welfare, or limits it to people who are citizens by parentage and not just by birthplace (which the United States cannot do without a constitutional amendment).

Similarly, immigrants from poorer countries are likely to be willing to work for lower pay. That destroys the ability of unions to demand high pay. And as a result, unions have often been bitterly hostile to immigration; some of the ugliest anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese propaganda in California, for example, came from Samuel Gompers. If you are going to have free immigration you have to accept that the tribal spirit of unions is doomed; unions cannot retain the ability to treat a particular job, firm, or industry as their shared territory and run other workers off. Though of course the latter effect can also be achieved by outsourcing.

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avram

Thing is, as you mention in that little aside at the end, outsourcing also has the effect of wrecking labor unions. So a climate like ours, in which immigration is harshly restricted while outsourcing is allowed, is one in which capital can move freely across borders while labor cannot.

If we removed the restrictions on migration (which would require more than just US action), then both capital and labor would be able to migrate, so capital would lose its advantage. If we placed restrictions on outsourcing, then both capital and labor would be restricted, and capital would lose its advantage.

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I'm sure there are plenty of people well to the left of me who'd say this in much more colorful language, but unions haven't shown an impressive record of living up to their stated principles. If they cared about workers in general, they'd be working on unionizing more of the world.

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I would not say that at all, but then my analysis of a labor union is that it's a monopoly of labor in a given subsector of the economy. It can drive up the price of labor locally, but not globally. Unions can make gains because there are nonunion workers whose jobs can be lost, or whose pay can be driven down, to make up for their high pay. If the entire work force were unionized, there would be no more local gains to exploit; all gains would have to be made globally. And that's not going to happen as long as you have private capital in the equation.

Of course, you could go for a union takeover of the entire economy, but then you arrive at the economic calculation problem that wrecked classical socialism.

It's been said that big business is the worst enemy of laissez-faire capitalism; every government regulation creates advantages for some firms and disadvantages for others, and big firms can afford to buy regulation that makes them better off, or hurts smaller firms worse. In much the same way, labor unions are the worst enemy of labor generally. In fact, big business and labor unions are mirror images of each other: both are organized around seeking special privileges from government that exempt them from competitive pressures. I'm not sure what the solution is; it's kind of like the way a forest gets overgrown with huge shady trees and climbing vines, leaving little room for new growth . . . which suggests that we need an economic policy analog of firestick farming. Of course, if you buy Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction, you might say that we've had that process going on for the past couple of centuries, and that we'll really be doomed when the economy is so well controlled that old industries can no longer be wrecked by technologically innovative competitors.

I wonder: If we had a singularity, would part of it be that the lifetime of big businesses and entire industries shrank from decades to years or even months?

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captain-button.livejournal.com

Vernor Vinge used this in Rainbow's End. One of the characters has his mind back after spending years senile. He asks his kid about his money and is told something like "That was four bubbles ago, Dad." Which it seems meant that no matter how much money he had before, it was gone now.

The world in that book struck me as a hideously awful place, which it probably wasn't supposed to be. But that's another thread.

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I don't remember the book very well, but I do remember wondering if shredding books and recording and reconstituting the scraps was Vinge's way of teasing people.

I'm looking forward to Children of the Sky anyway-- it's another book in the A Fire Upon the Deep series.

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avram

unions haven't shown an impressive record of living up to their stated principles

Have you read anything about what working conditions were like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? How many people do you know who work 100-hour weeks for 40¢/hour, for an employer who locks them in their workplace, or chained to their machinery? (That 40¢ figure is already adjusted for inflation, BTW.)

Anyway, the reason I mentioned unions is that they're the primary mechanism for the organization of labor on a large scale. The other 99 words of my earlier comment explain why that's relevant.

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I think much more of the difference is due to rising real economic output than to union activities. That's especially true of the increase in pay.

Unions characteristically raise wages by limiting the supply of labor, which puts supply and demand to work forcing the price up, just like a coffee cartel burning a third of the crop to raise the price on the other two-thirds. But this only works because unions are able forcibly to exclude nonunion labor from taking the same jobs, whether by legally granted monopoly privileges, as in much of the twentieth century, or by extralegal violence, as in much of the nineteenth. (Not that the twentieth century was devoid of such methods; see Mancur Olson's books on collective action.) It's particularly worth noting that during the most vigorous phase of their history, unions were largely white only and often bitterly racist; I've mentioned Gompers's anti-Chinese agitation, and it's well known that into the sixties, the craft unions systematically kept blacks out. All of which means that unions enrich union members at the expense of depleting the funds available to pay other workers, and shutting those workers out of desirable jobs. It's classic rent-seeking, no different in spirit from le roi soleil telling his current favorite courtier, "M. le duc, I grant you the monopoly of soap manufacture and sale in Languedoc." It does not raise output, but lowers it, by diverting effort from trade and production to pursuing special privileges, and thus lowers real wages economywide.

I was going to say something about inflation, but I see you've taken that into account. (When I actually read Keynes's General Theory, a couple of years back, I was startled to find him saying in the first chapter, in plain language, that sustained unemployment was the result of excessively high wage rates, but labor would not tolerate lowering them, so instead the government should expand the money supply, driving prices up so that a higher money wage would amount to a lower real wage that businesses could afford. On one hand, this seemed unlikely to work, because labor unions can hire econometricians to tell them what's happening to the cost of living. On the other, I thought, wow, how did this guy ever come to be admired by the left after saying things like that?)

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avram

I think much more of the difference is due to rising real economic output than to union activities.

What started happened to real economic output in the early '80s to account for the wage stagnation since then?

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At least one of the factors contributing to wage stagnation in the United States has been the irrational financing of health care through employee health benefits that are not counted as taxable income. For example, as a self-employed person, if I make $1, I pay $0.25 to the government in direct taxes (income tax, Social Security, and Medicare), so I can only buy $0.75 of health insurance; an employee who gets prepaid group health insurance gets $0.75 of health insurance per $0.75 the corporation spends. This is a big enough implicit subsidy so that there's a massive incentive to fund every possible form of health care through prepaid group insurance. As a result, many Americans pay about $0.10 or $0.15 out of pocket for each dollar of health care . . . and they pay the same for insurance whether they use a lot of health care or none. That's a classic moral hazard situation. It has resulted in people using health care excessively, past the point of diminishing returns, in ways they would not if they had catastrophic coverage and paid everything else out of pocket. So with more people demanding health services, the price has spiralled upward, much faster than inflation.

But the corporation still has to pay for that, by paying insurance premiums. The money has to come from somewhere. If your employee compensation fund has the health benefits component shooting up rapidly, it's going to eat up the productivity increases, leaving little over to pay out as higher wages/salaries. If you figure "wages" as including your share of health benefits, as they ought to for proper accounting, you would find that the total has not been so stagnant . . . but the big growth area has been medical, partly as actually doing more, but partly as paying more for the same services.

Nothing to say about the political economy of labor unions? Not even an argument against the claim that they exist to earn monopoly rents for their members at the expense of nonmembers?

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It's not just overuse of medical services, however you might define that.

The following is stuff I've heard from more than one source, not anything I've researched.

There are incentives to overcharge-- people who have insurance aren't that likely to go over their hospital bills carefully. Those who do may well find that they've been charged for services they've never received and/or that very ordinary things like getting an over the counter mediation is wildly expensive.

And the rates that are charged to uninsured people have nothing to do with what's charged to insurance companies-- the insurance companies have enough clout to bargain the charges down considerably.

It seems to me that there's a common libertarian error of assuming that the system will work according to its own rules. Frequently things are worse than that.

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If "people who have insurance aren't that likely to go over their hospital bills carefully," that too is exactly what you would expect from a situation where those bills are heavily subsidized and the out of pocket payment is only around ten or fifteen percent of the total. I would include "consumption of medical services that cost too much for what you get" as a natural component of "overuse." Somebody who paid 100% of the cost of a service would be more likely to ask "do I really need this?", to ask "how much will it cost?", and to go over the bill and say, "where did this charge come from."

On the other hand, my experience has been that as a health care consumer without insurance, I have more than once been offered substantial discounts for payment in cash.

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Yes, that's the usual defense of unions. However, I think it's relevant that existing unions haven't done a lot of (any?) outreach to unionize the low-cost labor that's been competing with them.

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avram

I've been saying for decades (or maybe, I said a few times a decade or two ago) that the next big wave of social change would come when labor unions went global. It's probably a tough thing to do, though. Leaving aside the language barrier, I don't imagine the Chinese government would look kindly upon visits from Western union activists.

It also takes time. In the US, it took nearly half a century to get from the earliest unions to the Knights of Labor. It doesn't take anywhere near that long for a capitalist to build a new factory in a different country.

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There may be unions worldwide, but I doubt there will be individually global unions.

I expect that foreign union organizers would be no more welcome than local organizers, perhaps less so, but there might be other sorts of support (political? financial?) which could be offered. And people have been known to risk their lives in causes which were important to them.

The Knights of Labor no longer exists.

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chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com

The Tam Lin site belongs to

tamnonlinear but I assumed you knew that given she's an LJ friend.

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asakiyume.livejournal.com

I have that Tam Lyn retold song--it's a great retelling, I think!

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I'm wondering how the nasty last section of the original:

# Out then spak the Queen o Fairies,
And an angry woman was she,
"Shame betide her ill-far'd face,
And an ill death may she die,
For she's taen awa the bonniest knight
In a' my companie.

# "But had I kend, Tam Lin," said she,
"What now this night I see,
I wad hae taen out thy twa grey een,
And put in twa een o tree."

The judge or the DA could have resented Tam Lin's good outcome and made a threat or two, but that would have spoiled the happy ending of the song. Of course, we can believe that the Faerie Queen had magic which was constrained in some way so that she's limited to resenting that she didn't something awful. The government isn't so limited.

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asakiyume.livejournal.com

The government isn't so limited.

No, and it has a disturbing habit of acting on its grudges.

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ndrosen.livejournal.com

One thing about Australia is that they have some (not enough, but some) Georgism. Henry George, you may recall, was the 19th century economist who explained depressions and unemployment, and advocated a single tax on the value of land. Sydney, Australia, raises most local revenue from a land-only tax. The tax doesn't fall on buildings, just land.

When land is heavily taxed, there are incentives to use it, not hold it on speculation, so land prices don't get bid up beyond reason, and then crash. Therefore, without land speculation, you don't get the same degree of gambling on mortgage-based securities and such.

That may not be the only factor -- and other parts of Australia, like Melbourne, do not have land-only property taxes -- but that's one point to look into.

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It's really odd to see someone writing about the single tax! It's like seeing someone advocate bimetallism, or social credit, or some other forgotten reform scheme. (Of course, Canada does have a Social Credit party, or did at one time, though I don't know how much of the old ideology survives beyond the name.)

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ndrosen.livejournal.com

It is really odd, isn't it? But then, it's really odd to see President Obama and his advisors trying to fix the economy by Keynesian "stimulus," or by having the government pick winners and losers, and "invest" in the right "green" industries.

By now, we should know that these policies don't work, while Georgism has worked to the extent it's been applied (in Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong, New Zealand, towns like Scranton and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the German concession in late 19th/early 20th century China, etc.).

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Keynes's General Theory actually betrays a lot of sympathy for Social Credit, and for the kindred proposals of Silvio Gesell . . . and for the "overproduction/underconsumption" theories on which all three were founded, and which were also an element in Marx's theory of the ultimate breakdown of capitalism. And the bimetallist or "free silver" movement of the 19th century (which turns up, interestingly, in Byatt's The Children's Book) was, if not ancestral to all those "easy credit" theories, at least sprung from the same root impulse.

I'm doubtful about Single Tax on grounds both of ethics and economics, but I think it's clear that it springs from a quite different root impulse: not "easy credit" but opposition to economic rent. I know that there is still a journal with Georgist affiliations, the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, but I haven't looked into Single Tax carefully.

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ndrosen.livejournal.com

I recommend the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. I recall one brief mention of Gesell in Keynes's General Theory; I'm not sure about "a lot of sympathy," but it's been long enough since I tried to read the book that I'm not going to argue the point. Please note that Henry George rejected the overproduction/underconsumption hypothesis, and offered an alternative, and much more consistent and plausible explanation.

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