Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Beware Anyone, Who Argues That Walls, Tariffs, Import Quotas and Immigration Restrictions, Promote Economic Well-Being

By Robert Higgs

My family eats a lot of cantaloupes. We buy them from Lucio, a Mexican man who heroically hauls produce and other goods in his rickety pickup truck three times each week a hundred miles from Bacalar to our house on a wretched road at the extreme limit of the semi-civilized world in southeast Quintana Roo.

Yesterday, as I was about to cut up a melon, I noticed the label, which stated that the fruit had been produced by Pappas Produce in the USA. I immediately recalled Pappas Farms from my boyhood, when I worked in the summers for General Box Company making crates for the shipment of cantaloupes and putting colorful, artistic labels on the end slats. Pappas Produce continues to operate today, as it has since the 1930s, only now with a different, improved shipping technology. (In my day, the melons were graded, packed in wooden crates, loaded into railroad cars, and covered with crushed, blown ice to keep the fruit fresh while it was carried to markets around the USA.)

Pappas’s operation is located in Mendota, California, which is the little town west of Fresno to which my family moved from Oklahoma in 1951. We lived in a labor camp southwest of town for about five months before moving 25 miles up the road to Dos Palos, where my dad had found a better job on another ranch, and three years later we moved again to a ranch about midway between Mendota and Dos Palos, east of Firebaugh, where we lived from 1954 till I left home in 1961.

So, once again, as I enjoy the firm, sweet fruit brought to me thousands of miles from the place where I grew up, I have reason to declare, hurray for the free market. Hurray for private enterprise and enterprising immigrant entrepreneurs. Hurray for open international trade. And hurray for the free migration that allowed George Pappas to move from Greece to the USA in 1914 and, later, allowed my parents to move our family to a place where our economic fortunes promised to be better—as indeed they turned out to be.

If the workings of an ever-improving economic world have any single key, it is freedom of movement: freedom in every realm—of labor, capital goods, technology and other ideas, all sorts of goods and services, money, credit, and every other factor of production. Wherever governments impede such freedom of movement, they promote poverty where prosperity might have become more firmly established by people’s acting out their natural tendency to improve their economic conditions.
Beware anyone who argues that walls, tariffs, import quotas, immigration restrictions, and other impediments to freedom of movement will promote economic well-being. The only people who gain from such impediments are nativist busybodies and privilege seekers who have no defensible moral or economic basis for their actions, but thrive on ethnic bigotry, personal effrontery, and economic buncombe.

The above originally appeared at The Independent Institute

9 comments:

  1. "The only people who gain from such impediments are nativist busybodies and privilege seekers who have no defensible moral or economic basis for their actions, but thrive on ethnic bigotry, personal effrontery, and economic buncombe."
    Attempting to end the genocide of the White race is a very moral and defensible reason for immigration restrictions.

    Ending immigration to halt all the rent seeking the immigrant wants is also quite a moral and economically defensible action. One can get back to me once the "welfare wall" is built, but until then this is the reality.

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    1. Re: FormerLibertarian,

      --- Attempting to end the genocide of the White race is a very moral and defensible reason for immigration restrictions. ---

      At least in your fantasies, isn't it?

      It would still make NO economic sense to restrict immigration even if this "goal" of yours was feasible, especially in light of the fact that the "white race" is made of individuals of will who do not share your preoccupation with melanin, or lack thereof.

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    2. .
      .
      Beware of Any One that reports restriction free immigration is a goal and beneficial. These are the selfish and unwitting fools that bring about decline and will rob you of all personal freedoms.
      .
      Want a modern day example Erdogan in Turkey.
      Who tells his people not to assimilate.

      https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&tab=nw#hl=en&q=erdogan+do+not+assimilate

      .
      Want to go back a few years, imagine if the German Nazi party was given full right of immigration without restriction to all of Europe.
      .
      .
      So yes, if you want to fundamentally change from the Judeo Christian morals and ethics and the legal system that has arisen from same and that have created the US and most of Europe and you desire to move toward for example Sharia law or other system of law then yes, unrestricted immigration is good.
      .
      .
      But have a nice day living in Saudi Arabia as a woman or a gay.

      .
      .
      .
      Having a culture based on morals and ethics like the US has is terrible.
      .
      .





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    3. fools and naive fools abound

      https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&tab=nw#hl=en&q=erdogan+do+not+assimilate

      no understanding of immigration

      no understanding of culture nor religion.
      .
      .
      Fools abound.
      .

      Delete
  2. ─ If the workings of an ever-improving economic world have any single key, it is freedom of movement: freedom in every realm—of labor, capital goods, technology and other ideas, all sorts of goods and services, money, credit, and every other factor of production. ─

    But for the envious who regards a job in America as a gift bestowed sorely to those of noble birth (call it "being an American") or something, free movement of labor is inconceivable. So, too, the idea that capital should flow outwards ─ "trade deficit", they call it, because money 'should stay in America'. Yes, they believe if money (or currency) is sent overseas somewhere, we're just going to run out of money!

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  3. @Francisco Torres
    -It would still make NO economic sense to restrict immigration even if this "goal" of yours was feasible, especially in light of the fact that the "white race" is made of individuals of will who do not share your preoccupation with melanin, or lack thereof.-

    If true, infinity immigration would have never needed to rammed down the Whites throats.

    These "individuals of will" as you call them are quite easy to pick off which is why TPTB pushes this nonsense theme and is gleeful when Libertarians repeat it.

    What is amusing to me is this article has been up for 8+ hours and not one Libertarian has pointed out how restrictive immigration policy was in 1914.
    Must be a good sale on weed today.
    Liberty !

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Re: FormerLibertarian,

      ─ If true, infinity immigration would have never needed to rammed down the Whites throats. ─

      I think you meant infinite. And I am left to wonder exactly how has immigration been rammed down the throat of the Whites? Who are the Whites, anyway, to deserve such abuse? I only know the Browns, the Greens, the Blacks and the Greys. There's also the Roses but I don't really talk to them much.

      ─ These "individuals of will" as you call them are quite easy to pick off ─

      I wouldn't know. I am not in the habit of picking off anyone.

      ─ What is amusing to me is this article has been up for 8+ hours and not one Libertarian has pointed out how restrictive immigration policy was in 1914 ─

      That's because it is not relevant. Up to that point it wasn't as restrictive; that didn't translate to this "genocide" you talk about (except maybe for the Native Americans). Instead, the post bellum period saw the greatest and most spectacular industrial and economic growth this country had ever seen, what the Marxians insist on calling the Gilded Age as if being rich was a sin.

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  4. Unrestricted immigration ALWAYS results in MORE GOVERNMENT.

    Either by the immigrants, who want more government handouts; or by the natives, who want to be protected from the immigrants.

    ReplyDelete