I CTRL-F your post for "hana" and got no hits, but I'm sure you know he is currently shitting on you for this stance. What he and other Very Smart Boys don't seem to realize is that there is no law requiring a nation-state to maximize its GDP; some of us are happy where it is and prefer our country to improve in qualitative ways. Anyway Happy 2026 to you and yours 🍾
I’m not sure that hawking Bryan Caplan’s sloppy seconds in public makes one “very smart” (I do, of course, appreciate that your comment was sarcastic).
Yes. Clearly GDP is not the issue in USA, it is share of the GDP that goes to the bottom 75% that is the problem.
Anyone really interested in democracy and politics would be pushing to scrap GDP as a number to follow and target 75% wealth - the wealth of the bottom 75% of the population.
Pretty sure the top 25% can look after themselves.
Goodhart's law never lies. While I don't deny that a higher GDP is a net positive ceteris paribus, only midwits think that raising it is always good per se.
I usually think of Godwin's law about raising Hitler in an internet conversation, and my own version of Goodwin's law that says anyone on that kind of salary will always be described as incompetent even when they aren't.
On GDP targetting it is so often a cover for ill intent that I can't think of a single GDP up argument that works.
Likewise anti-inflation arguments are invariable described as positive for the whole population but usually channel government borrowed spending away from the people and into assets like stocks or houses.
Whereas oddly enough some of the most positive periods for correcting inequality have been during Stag-Flation. High inflation, low GDP but spending on investment and the people (eg on NHS and benefits) QE has been a disaster for the poor.
If someone preaches the values of "diversity" but cannot name a single "diverse" place they would like to live, I'd consider that pretty damming for their ideology.
That is one of the issues of Steve, do blacks and Hispanic born in the U.S. count the same as far as Citizenism is concerned or is Steve just thinking of Legacy Americans.
If you want to win at American politics, you need power. Once you have power you can implement your moral theory. Power is the sine qua non of politics.
The counter to this would be aha!, without a popular moral theory you are not going to get power! But this only underscores the point: winning depends on popularity, not moral theory. In Minnesota, if you rob the taxpayers blind, maintain a large and parasitic public sector, trash white people, and import low IQ Third World tax eaters, you will get all the power you need to implement your perverse moral theory.
I don't think our team is particularly popular, Steve. Which means we will need an awful lot of will to power.
>I don't think our team is particularly popular, Steve. Which means we will need an awful lot of will to power.
I've found that people who talk like this tend to rapidly fall back on morality if you suggest that you want to acquire power by doing things like discarding unpopular parts of the platform that are dragging your party down.
I just want a majority Anglo-American country without policy warped by weird, alien Slavs or neurotic Jews, bubuleh. I'm indifferent to the morality at this point.
The problem is that there is no natural boundary around who is a citizen and who is not, which means that whenever there is a disagreement between citizens, one faction of citizens may be tempted to make citizens out of foreigners who fall on their side of whatever internal political divide it happens to be.
And ultimately, divisions between humans that are real and organic-- based on race, culture and language-- are always going to be more salient in defining a person's interests and affinities than divisions that are purely administrative. So citizenism is kind of spitting into the wind.
>By cutting pay for the worst jobs, illegal immigrants have made honest work less appealing to many citizens, especially young African-American males, too many of whom have dropped out of the workforce and into the lumpenproletariat world of crime. That’s bad for both black Americans and for our country as a whole.
The timing on this doesn't work: young black male labor force particiation plummeted from 1964-1980. Welfare makes more sense than immigration as the cause. But even taking your logic as true: a Bukele-style crackdown on those who hurt people and steal things seems much easier to justify morally than expelling Pedro who does honest work for a low wage. The only reason to favor the lumpenprole is white guilt over slavery, but the Right helped to end that, so here we are.
>Citizenism calls upon Americans to favor the welfare, even at some cost to ourselves, of our current fellow citizens over that of foreigners and internal factions."
Who exactly is paying the cost, and who's getting the benefit? Seems like you're saying the proles benefit, and the upper-middle and wealthy classes pay the cost. The latter may be willing to do so if it came with even a modicum of gratitude or respect from the proles. If the "citizenist" movement responds by calling them pedophile pagan demonic eugenicists and accuses them of poisoning the world with vaccines, like the MAGA movement does today, they're not going to play ball. You've talked before about how the elites lack noblesse oblige, which is a little like complaining that men are no longer chivalrous. Take away the nobles' power and there goes noblesse oblige. With Trump as President and RFK as HHS Secretary, we're well into prole rule.
I've accepted that I'm largely just a Romney/Ryan country-club Republican. Sure, I have views about race/IQ and eugenics that make me unwelcome in parts of that club, but the MAGA right is just as hostile to eugenics. Become Who You Are and join us, Steve.
>"Citizenism calls upon Americans to favor the welfare, even at some cost to ourselves, of our current fellow citizens over that of foreigners and internal factions."
Who exactly is paying the cost, and who's getting the benefit? Seems like you're saying the proles benefit, and the upper-middle and wealthy classes pay the cost. The latter may be willing to do so if it came with even a modicum of gratitude or respect from the proles. <
No serfdom, no slavery, and now no importing masses of cheap labor. The wealthy can only handle so much abuse!
>Yet the well-educated and well-to-do aren’t expected to subject their own children to the realities of living among the diverse. They search out homes removed by distance or doormen from concentrations of illegal aliens—although not so far that the immigrants can’t come and clean their houses tax-free.
This is only hypocritical if support for immigration is combined with support for anti-discrimination law.
I read it correctly. The rich can cynically support both immigration and Title VII because they are able to price themselves away from the consequences. Bryan Caplan supports immigration and diversity from a neighborhood with an $800K admission fee.
A lot hinges on how you read 'immigrant' and 'anti-discrimination law.'
Support for a well-ordered system of immigration of those who are likely to be a net benefit to our society coupled with support for meritocratic operation of public and private institutions? Nothing hypocritical about that.
Support for de facto open borders coupled with advocacy for whole of society DIE-based ethnic quotas? Completely hypocritical.
Title VII and the Fair Housing Act both outlaw discrimination in public accommodations and in housing, so the proles can't resist their neighborhoods being converted to barrios. The wealthy, who get cheap labor and more people to sell crap to, can wall themselves off behind high property values. It is of course completely hypocritical. It is also extremely shortsighted. Turok is a self-proclaimed "Romney Republican" who thinks he won't burn with the rest of us.
Although I think your point is either wrong or has not been articulated well*, most of the current American left supports both open borders and all the bogus "disparate impact" BS (and other DEI things that are marketed as "anti-discrimination" by the MSM and the left)
*It depends what you mean by anti-discrimination law; because both sides consider themselves to be against discrimination, although the left does it by discriminating against whites and males, etc.
C. 2006, I believed we'd soon be admitting a growing stream of rich Europeans fleeing Islam who would help our govt avoid bankruptcy. It's clear now they'll have to prove themselves worthy or at least sane about Western civilization and liberty first, because their elites are even worse than ours.
Expelling post-2006 immigrants, including naturalized, would still leave us with many thousands of Somalis, Haitians, and South Asians, a decidedly mixed bag.
>C. 2006, I believed we'd soon be admitting a growing stream of rich Europeans fleeing Islam
Even the most immigrant-heavy European countries, like Sweden and France, remain whiter than the US. But the conservative masses hate Europe so conservative media tells them exaggerated stories to make them happy.
Are you sure? What's the difference in net effect? In both cases the people who previously working in slaughterhouses and now unemployed and in both cases everyone else is better off.
Almost unbearable reading as things have just gotten worse. No one listened then. No one listens now and we also have anti white animus complicating the situation.
> found that 60 percent of Americans consider the present level of entry to be a “critical threat to the vital interests of the United States,” compared with only 14 percent of prominent Americans. <
If one could revert to the pre-1950s quality of education plus work ethic, USA wouldn't need to import labor.
Mrs Katze, It's a completely legit concern. At the moment, it results in pensioners and people near to pension being particularly pro-immigration.
I think the way to go about it is to link old-age pensions to TAXES in sum paid by biological offspring. Let's say one has 5 kids working productively paying taxes (and other social dues and tariffs!) and 10 grandkids paying taxes etc - you get my drift. Maybe tax private and public pensions a bit higher in addition.
One would of course need to accommodate people who have girly offspring who then marries and has kids. Maybe have a marriage privilege on top, that in such a case, tax from son-in-law counts too.
1954 was the first year that more than 50% of 19 y/o American had graduate from high school. Education in the U.S. has never had good quality. And one should look up the Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits to see that the work ethic in the 1950's was not that great
Markovits pointed out that for knowledge workers: lawyers, doctors, engineers, consultants the biggest inheritance that they can give their children is an education. Thus, Harvard goes from accepting over 30% of applicants in 1960 to 5% in 2025. In addition, getting into a top law school or graduate program has become much harder. And last, the number of hours worked by knowledge workers has steadily gone up for the years instead of down.
And one should look up the articles in Commentary about meritocracy and how it is impossible to define.
Bla bla bla. Harvard made a choice by choosing Claudine Gay as a president. Someone with 11 publications, mostly plagiaristic. And then, she doubled down by promoting the pro-Hamas demonstrations. Who's going to believe Harvard now?
Commentary - I listen to them to hear how non-Trump Republicans feel, but belief is something else. They know they will be wiped out. But no, Commentary folks do not have a problem in identifying meritocracy. Just as it may not be a polite thing to talk about openly in their circles.
It's kind of THE Leo Strauss problem. Not that Leo Strauss philosophy has a problem. Rather it is a political problem Leo Strauss has written tons about.
Since I did not mention Dr Gay, would could have left off the cut and paste job. Commentary has mentioned that there is no real way to quantify merit. How does someone merit something because their parents could afford the best private schools, private coaches, private tutors, or a summer in an unpaid internship.
DNA is a very strong component of merit, Besides, it's absolutely not difficult to identify it - for a start, one can study the Joseph story in the first book of Scriptures. As far as I can see, there were no private tutors or unpaid summer internship, lol.
The real purpose of every ideology is to serve the ethnic interests of a group, as is seen in our millennium. That is what ideologues really are in the 20's. Younger people are tired of living in a world of lies that do not even benefit them.
This aged well over 20 years. Citizenism means Americans first. Happy New Year, Steve!
I CTRL-F your post for "hana" and got no hits, but I'm sure you know he is currently shitting on you for this stance. What he and other Very Smart Boys don't seem to realize is that there is no law requiring a nation-state to maximize its GDP; some of us are happy where it is and prefer our country to improve in qualitative ways. Anyway Happy 2026 to you and yours 🍾
The Respect certain Libertarians have for "what's this per capita shee-it" when it comes to individuals personal circumstances to be darkly amusing.
I’m not sure that hawking Bryan Caplan’s sloppy seconds in public makes one “very smart” (I do, of course, appreciate that your comment was sarcastic).
Yes. Clearly GDP is not the issue in USA, it is share of the GDP that goes to the bottom 75% that is the problem.
Anyone really interested in democracy and politics would be pushing to scrap GDP as a number to follow and target 75% wealth - the wealth of the bottom 75% of the population.
Pretty sure the top 25% can look after themselves.
Goodhart's law never lies. While I don't deny that a higher GDP is a net positive ceteris paribus, only midwits think that raising it is always good per se.
I'd forgotten Goodhart's law.
I usually think of Godwin's law about raising Hitler in an internet conversation, and my own version of Goodwin's law that says anyone on that kind of salary will always be described as incompetent even when they aren't.
On GDP targetting it is so often a cover for ill intent that I can't think of a single GDP up argument that works.
Likewise anti-inflation arguments are invariable described as positive for the whole population but usually channel government borrowed spending away from the people and into assets like stocks or houses.
Whereas oddly enough some of the most positive periods for correcting inequality have been during Stag-Flation. High inflation, low GDP but spending on investment and the people (eg on NHS and benefits) QE has been a disaster for the poor.
Godwin's law, for those of us who had not previously heard of it, is discussed in tiresome detail here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law.
Goodhart's law is a different matter and is described here: https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/goodharts-law/
Can you name a low GDP per capita country you think is a good place to live?
Alex, what is a non sequitur?
If someone preaches the values of "diversity" but cannot name a single "diverse" place they would like to live, I'd consider that pretty damming for their ideology.
When did I preach the values of diversity, dipshit?
"But I did have breakfast this morning."
*morning, genius
Happy New Year, Steve. God bless you and yours.
“Citizenism with a stable white/white adjacent majority” is even better.
That is one of the issues of Steve, do blacks and Hispanic born in the U.S. count the same as far as Citizenism is concerned or is Steve just thinking of Legacy Americans.
As "Germanicus" observed in The Londonium Chronicles "A Guatemalan immigrant is the same as a white blue collar person to them".
If you want to win at American politics, you need power. Once you have power you can implement your moral theory. Power is the sine qua non of politics.
The counter to this would be aha!, without a popular moral theory you are not going to get power! But this only underscores the point: winning depends on popularity, not moral theory. In Minnesota, if you rob the taxpayers blind, maintain a large and parasitic public sector, trash white people, and import low IQ Third World tax eaters, you will get all the power you need to implement your perverse moral theory.
I don't think our team is particularly popular, Steve. Which means we will need an awful lot of will to power.
>I don't think our team is particularly popular, Steve. Which means we will need an awful lot of will to power.
I've found that people who talk like this tend to rapidly fall back on morality if you suggest that you want to acquire power by doing things like discarding unpopular parts of the platform that are dragging your party down.
I just want a majority Anglo-American country without policy warped by weird, alien Slavs or neurotic Jews, bubuleh. I'm indifferent to the morality at this point.
The problem is that there is no natural boundary around who is a citizen and who is not, which means that whenever there is a disagreement between citizens, one faction of citizens may be tempted to make citizens out of foreigners who fall on their side of whatever internal political divide it happens to be.
And ultimately, divisions between humans that are real and organic-- based on race, culture and language-- are always going to be more salient in defining a person's interests and affinities than divisions that are purely administrative. So citizenism is kind of spitting into the wind.
>By cutting pay for the worst jobs, illegal immigrants have made honest work less appealing to many citizens, especially young African-American males, too many of whom have dropped out of the workforce and into the lumpenproletariat world of crime. That’s bad for both black Americans and for our country as a whole.
The timing on this doesn't work: young black male labor force particiation plummeted from 1964-1980. Welfare makes more sense than immigration as the cause. But even taking your logic as true: a Bukele-style crackdown on those who hurt people and steal things seems much easier to justify morally than expelling Pedro who does honest work for a low wage. The only reason to favor the lumpenprole is white guilt over slavery, but the Right helped to end that, so here we are.
>Citizenism calls upon Americans to favor the welfare, even at some cost to ourselves, of our current fellow citizens over that of foreigners and internal factions."
Who exactly is paying the cost, and who's getting the benefit? Seems like you're saying the proles benefit, and the upper-middle and wealthy classes pay the cost. The latter may be willing to do so if it came with even a modicum of gratitude or respect from the proles. If the "citizenist" movement responds by calling them pedophile pagan demonic eugenicists and accuses them of poisoning the world with vaccines, like the MAGA movement does today, they're not going to play ball. You've talked before about how the elites lack noblesse oblige, which is a little like complaining that men are no longer chivalrous. Take away the nobles' power and there goes noblesse oblige. With Trump as President and RFK as HHS Secretary, we're well into prole rule.
I've accepted that I'm largely just a Romney/Ryan country-club Republican. Sure, I have views about race/IQ and eugenics that make me unwelcome in parts of that club, but the MAGA right is just as hostile to eugenics. Become Who You Are and join us, Steve.
>"Citizenism calls upon Americans to favor the welfare, even at some cost to ourselves, of our current fellow citizens over that of foreigners and internal factions."
Who exactly is paying the cost, and who's getting the benefit? Seems like you're saying the proles benefit, and the upper-middle and wealthy classes pay the cost. The latter may be willing to do so if it came with even a modicum of gratitude or respect from the proles. <
No serfdom, no slavery, and now no importing masses of cheap labor. The wealthy can only handle so much abuse!
Yeah rich people, like everyone, wants an ideology that offers them something and yours doesn't seem to.
>Yet the well-educated and well-to-do aren’t expected to subject their own children to the realities of living among the diverse. They search out homes removed by distance or doormen from concentrations of illegal aliens—although not so far that the immigrants can’t come and clean their houses tax-free.
This is only hypocritical if support for immigration is combined with support for anti-discrimination law.
Of course it's hypocritical. Prices discriminate so you don't have to.
Read my sentence again.
I read it correctly. The rich can cynically support both immigration and Title VII because they are able to price themselves away from the consequences. Bryan Caplan supports immigration and diversity from a neighborhood with an $800K admission fee.
Bryan Caplan is a libertarian who opposes anti-discrimination law.
A lot hinges on how you read 'immigrant' and 'anti-discrimination law.'
Support for a well-ordered system of immigration of those who are likely to be a net benefit to our society coupled with support for meritocratic operation of public and private institutions? Nothing hypocritical about that.
Support for de facto open borders coupled with advocacy for whole of society DIE-based ethnic quotas? Completely hypocritical.
You can't read.
Title VII and the Fair Housing Act both outlaw discrimination in public accommodations and in housing, so the proles can't resist their neighborhoods being converted to barrios. The wealthy, who get cheap labor and more people to sell crap to, can wall themselves off behind high property values. It is of course completely hypocritical. It is also extremely shortsighted. Turok is a self-proclaimed "Romney Republican" who thinks he won't burn with the rest of us.
Who Is Daron Dylon Wint? History of Woodley Park Quadruple Murder Suspect – NBC4 Washington https://share.google/OpYdl994PO4IIsTem
Although I think your point is either wrong or has not been articulated well*, most of the current American left supports both open borders and all the bogus "disparate impact" BS (and other DEI things that are marketed as "anti-discrimination" by the MSM and the left)
*It depends what you mean by anti-discrimination law; because both sides consider themselves to be against discrimination, although the left does it by discriminating against whites and males, etc.
>most of the current American left supports both open borders and all the bogus "disparate impact" BS
Yes, my point was that they are hypocrites. But the iSteve commentariat includes a lot of "but I did eat breakfast today" type people.
C. 2006, I believed we'd soon be admitting a growing stream of rich Europeans fleeing Islam who would help our govt avoid bankruptcy. It's clear now they'll have to prove themselves worthy or at least sane about Western civilization and liberty first, because their elites are even worse than ours.
Expelling post-2006 immigrants, including naturalized, would still leave us with many thousands of Somalis, Haitians, and South Asians, a decidedly mixed bag.
>C. 2006, I believed we'd soon be admitting a growing stream of rich Europeans fleeing Islam
Even the most immigrant-heavy European countries, like Sweden and France, remain whiter than the US. But the conservative masses hate Europe so conservative media tells them exaggerated stories to make them happy.
those countries didn't have a 13% non-white legacy population to start with, nor are they bordered right next to Mexico
Excellent. May I recommend “Making Patriots” by the late Walter F. Berns.
And what if automation can completely replace those slaughterhouse jobs? Should they be banned as well?
> And what if automation can completely replace those slaughterhouse jobs? Should they be banned as well? <
No. Automation is actually what you want. Can you figure out the difference? It requires a tiny bit of "big picture" thinking, but it's not hard.
Hint: One makes Americans poorer--and has other even worse negative effects. The other makes Americans richer.
Hint #2: People are biological entities.
Are you sure? What's the difference in net effect? In both cases the people who previously working in slaughterhouses and now unemployed and in both cases everyone else is better off.
>It requires a tiny bit of "big picture" thinking, but it's not hard.
I'm not seeing the difference.
Almost unbearable reading as things have just gotten worse. No one listened then. No one listens now and we also have anti white animus complicating the situation.
Happy New Year Steve and all!
> found that 60 percent of Americans consider the present level of entry to be a “critical threat to the vital interests of the United States,” compared with only 14 percent of prominent Americans. <
If one could revert to the pre-1950s quality of education plus work ethic, USA wouldn't need to import labor.
The population would fall due to below replacement birth rate. See countries like Japan and South Korea.
Mrs Katze, It's a completely legit concern. At the moment, it results in pensioners and people near to pension being particularly pro-immigration.
I think the way to go about it is to link old-age pensions to TAXES in sum paid by biological offspring. Let's say one has 5 kids working productively paying taxes (and other social dues and tariffs!) and 10 grandkids paying taxes etc - you get my drift. Maybe tax private and public pensions a bit higher in addition.
Interesting idea. Could work.
One would of course need to accommodate people who have girly offspring who then marries and has kids. Maybe have a marriage privilege on top, that in such a case, tax from son-in-law counts too.
But President Trump just ended taxes on social security.
Yeah. But that was just taxes. Here it would serve to refamiliarize the old-age support. As a counterpoint to that 19th century socialist, Bismarck.
1954 was the first year that more than 50% of 19 y/o American had graduate from high school. Education in the U.S. has never had good quality. And one should look up the Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits to see that the work ethic in the 1950's was not that great
I don't trust Markovits, he's a dyed in the wool Democrat.
here is a review from law&liberty lawliberty.org/meritocrats-the-new-class-enemy/
Markovits pointed out that for knowledge workers: lawyers, doctors, engineers, consultants the biggest inheritance that they can give their children is an education. Thus, Harvard goes from accepting over 30% of applicants in 1960 to 5% in 2025. In addition, getting into a top law school or graduate program has become much harder. And last, the number of hours worked by knowledge workers has steadily gone up for the years instead of down.
And one should look up the articles in Commentary about meritocracy and how it is impossible to define.
Bla bla bla. Harvard made a choice by choosing Claudine Gay as a president. Someone with 11 publications, mostly plagiaristic. And then, she doubled down by promoting the pro-Hamas demonstrations. Who's going to believe Harvard now?
Commentary - I listen to them to hear how non-Trump Republicans feel, but belief is something else. They know they will be wiped out. But no, Commentary folks do not have a problem in identifying meritocracy. Just as it may not be a polite thing to talk about openly in their circles.
It's kind of THE Leo Strauss problem. Not that Leo Strauss philosophy has a problem. Rather it is a political problem Leo Strauss has written tons about.
Since I did not mention Dr Gay, would could have left off the cut and paste job. Commentary has mentioned that there is no real way to quantify merit. How does someone merit something because their parents could afford the best private schools, private coaches, private tutors, or a summer in an unpaid internship.
DNA is a very strong component of merit, Besides, it's absolutely not difficult to identify it - for a start, one can study the Joseph story in the first book of Scriptures. As far as I can see, there were no private tutors or unpaid summer internship, lol.
The real purpose of every ideology is to serve the ethnic interests of a group, as is seen in our millennium. That is what ideologues really are in the 20's. Younger people are tired of living in a world of lies that do not even benefit them.