Milton Friedman on Illegal Immigration
Milton Friedman knows what's up.
SOURCE URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eyJIbSgdSE
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He's buying into the "good immigrant" myth, that the parasites coming into the country take jobs Americans won't take, and are decent, honest, hardworking proles.
When was the last time this asshole was on a construction site?
(yes, I'm using vulgar language; I'm really pissed off at the moment).
He sets up his own premise; he presumes that most people would say that open immigration prior to 1914 was a good thing.
I'm one of those people who disagree.
Open immigration, for example, gave us such wonderful things as the mafia. It brought the dregs of other societies as well as those yearning for opportunity to make something for themselves.
It also artificially short-circuited the law of supply and demand with regard to labor. While we got some skilled craftsmen from other countries, we also got a lot of unskilled craftsmen, who drove down the value of craftsmen in general, because they had to sell their efforts for less.
Because, "...another one'll get off the boat tomorrow", unskilled laborers could, and were, driven to work under horrific conditions. Remember, many of them came here on the promise of the land of opportunity. But there's no harsher master than an empty belly.
When they arrived, they found a labor market choked, and most lacked the ability to move west. They were forced to compete not only with the masses of incoming male immigrants, but also women, and even young children. You only get away with this if something is abundant and endlessly replaceable.
The ability to move west, which many immigrants lacked, alleviated this somewhat.
But now, there is no frontier to expand into. Now, there are labor laws which citizens and honest businessmen must obey. So, when illegals flood a market, offering labor below the minimum that employers must pay, the unscrupulous hire them instead of honest citizen workers. At such a disparity in pricing that, again, quality be damned (one keeps a few craftsmen in the stable to do the work the peons can't handle...)
And he's again full of shit when he says that they only take jobs when they don't qualify for welfare. Illegal alien invaders are liars and thieves to begin with; they commit fraud on a massive scale, collect the welfare as well as their pay. It's part of what makes the pay "survivable".
They lie to apartment and house renters, and move multiple families into places too small, and, like collectivists, pool their resources.
One trick the crooked employers and illegals pull is for the employer to hire one legal (usually the relative of one or more of the illegals; sometimes he *is* illegal himself, but has fraudulent papers) to be foreman, pay him on the books, and then leave it up to him to pay the illegal workers whatever they agree upon.
This drives the quality of life down, makes us more like the banana republics south of the border, makes prosperous the proponents of failed cultural philosophies, impoverishes honest workers and businessmen, often driving them out of business or onto welfare, respectively, and lowering the quality of goods and services.
1983 Eastern Wisconsin. Functional unemployment, including those who ran out of "benefits".... exceeding 20%. I secured employment as skilled, seasonal labor in a vegetable canning plant. Full time in my occupation at $10 to $12 per hour......me $4. I worked 12 hour shifts 7 days a week from early May till late Dec. Two years with no offer of full-time employment. Yet......I filled my belly and had "earned" shelter. Despite the perceived inequities I had a choice to move away from this environ or not. I'd only lived within this community for 5 years or so.....I was treated like an "immigrant", and , literally Grandfathered "In" when It was discovered,,,,my Grandfather had been a resident for all his life. Hmmmm...I harbored a lot of bitterness for 20 years. I got past this perception of inequity...it just "was".
I'd really appreciate your insights.....considering this is just a snap-shot.
Were you paid time and a half for overtime? (in some States double-time is required for Sunday, iirc).
Same community, same time....I applied and tested in the upper fraction of the 1 percentile for another position with the municipal fire dept. The hiring was in the 50 percentile range of "qualified"......all three positions filled by relatives of present employees.
Hmmmmm....I exercised free will....I left.
Now...flip-side. I'm referencing your post: "Most immigrants came here to escape..." Everything you express is of "subjective" value/s. My father worked with one of five divisions of an amalgam. Communications / Human Relations background. He brought about awareness of communication styles and culture within the "division". In one year "Corporate" was asking why their division was suddenly increasing their profitability. The division" offered my dad as affective. "Corporate Central" dismissed the idea and no further efforts were made.
I see the degeneration of some of our largest best producing businesses every day...not due to cheap labor, but deteriorization of a culture of "value"....as subjective as that may be. "The cheap bastard modern Americans" you refer to have been my customers and employees....it grieves me deeply to see.
So... I raise the question: What are values? By what "standard" can we begin to asses "value"? There is a simplicity beyond the complexity of what faces us....I'm an avid explorer of this specific venue....my livelihood depends on it....I am an Industrialist Manufacturer.....not a lot of subjective value in tangible items I create.
Once the assembly line became the norm, a man's worth became measured in the hours spent servicing the line or the system. No longer was it about individual effort or love in each piece. In one of my incarnations, I used to contract on modernization projects in heavy manufacturing, employing high end electrical/instrumentation/control journeymen and technicians. Quality (related to value) was a constant issue for me and trying to explain it to a 100 man crew or 500 men throughout the Western US, in the context of what the customer wanted and was willing to pay for, in an environment of OSHA, MSHA, state inspectors, NFSA and NEC regulations, it was at best difficult.
On an inspection tour one day, I found a simple, yet very impactful method in an old electrical junction box. The man who had originally installed that box and routed wires through it, had done so with care and even an elegance. Everything was precisely arranged, numbered, and spaced. It was obvious that he took pride in what his work meant to himself; so much so that he signed his name to a small tag and hung it there in that box, to be discovered some 40 years later by this crew. It wasn't an 'inspected by' or something to ever be seen by the customer - it was for the next craftsman to see it long after retirement, probably death.
That day, I began making up a program for each employee, particularly new hires, utilizing videos and that old tag. If you are providing your customer value that you're proud of, sign your name on a tag and hang it. That tag may not be seen for another 40 years, but what better measure can you place on the value of your work, than someone else down through the years to find and admire the work you did today and know who you were.
After two or three projects, the word got out to customers and other potential hires. They still wanted a good price, but they also liked that slogan - 'Sign Your Work'. The best value possible for what you're paying me. Going home each day with a little personal pride.
There can be tremendous value in what you create, even when costs and specs are tight. That value, pride as a craftsman (an artisan), ownership of the work done, can be placed in each piece or service rendered and can be perceived and measured by customers and workers alike.
Not only did I, as the employer, and the customer as well gain value in terms of cost/work and increased sales, but the men doing the work gained value within their communities of like craftsmen. How you obtain that ownership of value for the work product has to vary from product to product and plant to plant, and how the customer learns of it has to vary as well, but ownership of the skill, the art, the effort, the value being transferred to the customer - it worked for me and I learned a valuable lesson that day on that little tour in that old junction box.
That said, I have also worked often with skilled trades in manufacturing. I know the obvious difference between those who "sign their work" and those who dare not. I have seen potential wasted in organizations that refuse to reward good work. More to the point, though, I have worked with people who did their best regardless of the negative incentives. They knew no other way to live, but to be superlative. I have seen many tags; and it is no surprise which are neatly signed and lettered and which are scrawled.
http://www.tvrage.com/American_Restorati...
As D'Anconia said:
"Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward."
We don't have that any more, and its roots go back to the 19th century factories, but it became malignant in the 1970s with the relentless hammering of our national psyche, with the gas crisis and population crisis and national impotence, and the false campaign for "equality"... which led to the successful invasion of the American auto industry by Japan, Inc, offering *inferior* automobile imports, and every idiot thinking, "yeah, they may be small and frail and take nonstandard parts right down to the bolts, but they cost a dime and drink an ounce of gas per lightyear!" That was when the "cheap bastard modern Americans" came into their ascendency.
Maybe Americans have always been gullible, but in the 21st century they've turned it into an art form.
The wave of Irish immigrants came here to escape the English starvation; the wave of Russian immigrants came to escape the oppression of the communists, same for Cubans, and the boat people.
You say you were compensated fairly... were you paid time and a half for over time? That's 44 hours at $6, plus the 40 hours at $4. That's federal f*ing law, and if you didn't comply with it, you were part of the problem about which I complain. I don't remember what the minimum wage was in 83, might still have been $3.25. If it had been raised above $4, again, you were part of the problem.
I am completely in agreement with your offering.
Regarding your last paragraph: I was paid above minimum and applicable overtime. I was not compensated equally within the peer group...the $4 / $10 differential. I don't do well within environments of favoritism, unionism, nepotism; and I don't do well with the idea of "Can't". I can deal with "won't"....reason/s can be expressed.
Appreciate the input..
In a nut-shell.
I've been trying to get dad's butt on this forum for a while now....maybe this question will enjoin his interest. I know he'll revel in this place. Despite being a recovering "Social Liberal" (He'd howl at that) , he's read Creature From Jeckyll Island....at least twice now!
You say there's no harsher master than an empty belly, which is true, but that's very often the whole reason many of the early immigrants came over in the first place -- because they were unable to provide for themselves in their native land.
Also, cheaper labor is a GOOD thing! It increases production, makes products less expensive, and improves the standard of living for the whole of society, as well as every individual.
There's also nothing wrong will pooling resources. Big business owners do that all the time. It's called teamwork and collaboration, and it's a fundamental part of capitalism.
Bring the rest of the family over to live in a single room and "pool their resources"... that's why. It was the only way to escape the cycle of slave labor.
Of course cheaper labor is a good thing... for the feudal lord... I mean the employer. And for the cheap bastard modern Americans who wouldn't know "quality" if it hit them in the arse.
Hm... if cheaper labor is a GOOD thing... then let's make everyone work for free! Then products can be really cheap. When a market is flooded, the product quality goes down because a producer can't make a profit otherwise.
Next time a bridge collapses, or a train derails, or an airliner has to emergency land... you tell yourself how great cheap labor is.
"What good would our need do to a power plant when its generators stopped because of our defective
engines? What good would it do to a man caught on an operating table when the electric light went out?
What good would it do to the passengers of a plane when its motor failed in mid-air?" - AS
Cheap labor doesn't improve the quality of life of the laborer working 14 hours a day up to his 12 year old knees in icewater among dangerous gears. Cheap labor doesn't improve the quality of life of the laborer who is making so little he can neither afford housing, the products he's manufacturing, or to save enough to escape his position by learning a craft or moving west. Quality of life in the U.S. in the 19th century wasn't all that great. One had to move west, out of the urban centers, for it to improve.
For someone who wants to force association, you sure aren't big on obeying the law.
The LAW demands that an HONEST employer pay his employees a minimum of $7.25 per hour. When you don't enforce border security, this opens a window for DISHONEST employers and illegal alien invaders to get together to break more laws, and take advantage of the artificial loophole.
You know what *that* gets you? That gets you successful crooked, crony businessmen, and drives the honest ones and honest workers out of the market.
Pooling resources is fine... except when you're renting an apartment or house that is A) legally and B) contractually certified for only ONE FAMILY. In some cases, one PERSON. You're breaking the law, and cheating the renter.
So, these illegal aliens are being allowed to flood the country with their inferior work ethic, their inferior work quality, and their established dishonesty; dishonest contractors benefit, driving honest contractors out of business, increasing crime, poverty, the load on the welfare system, and above all, the amount and degree of dishonest practices, cronyism, establishing the aristocracy of pull, because an honest man can neither get honest employment or run an honest business.
And the presence of cheap labor doesn't necessarily drive down the quality of all products. There are always high quality products available to those who can afford to pay for them, though naturally the costs do rise in proportion to the quality. Driving the cost of labor up does not improve the quality of products, it just stops the cheap, low quality products from being produced. And it's those cheaper goods that benefit the lives of poor people. Without such cheap products, the less advantaged members of society would be worse off.
I have no particular opposition to free labor as long as the laborer is giving his time and energy willingly and voluntarily. Though very few businesses can actually convince people to work without pay. Generally the only ones that can are charity organizations and other humanitarian efforts, which is perfectly fine.
I say cheap labor is good, and you automatically assume I'm talking about child labor? Come on now, that wasn't part of my argument. Obviously it's not good for children to be working in factories.
If employees and employers want to come together and work for an agreed wage that both parties mutually consent to, then the government should not interfere in that, especially not just because some xenophobic nationalists have an inferiority complex and demand that government make it impossible for immigrants to compete on price.
Also, we wouldn't have to worry about the load on the welfare system if the welfare system didn't exist. That's why Milton Friedman said that free immigration in a welfare state is only a good thing so long as it's illegal -- because then illegal immigrants don't qualify for welfare, and they have to support themselves by their own effort and their own work (which is honestly what everyone should be doing anyway).
I didn't assume anything. Child labor is part of what made it cheap in the 19th century.
The government WAS interfering, by keeping our borders open.
I just want the government to get rid of the minimum wage so the illegal aliens have to compete on *quality*.
There's nothing "xenophobic" about wanting to control who comes into the country, how, and from where. The one thing we as a nation don't need right now is more unskilled labor.
"...because then illegal immigrants don't qualify for welfare, and they have to support themselves by their own effort and their own work"
Which is a load of shit... illegal aliens commit FRAUD and collect welfare. They don't pay income taxes on the money they get from their employers, either, in spite of the fantasies of the open borders crowd.
And even without child labor, immigrants are still typically willing to work for lower wages, which brings the cost of labor down, thereby increasing production and profitability.
And there's always a market for high quality luxury products. But there's a market for cheap, inexpensive products, too. A free market will produce both, which is how it should be.
It is not out of fear I say we MUST close our boarders. It is the simple fact that our attention needs to turn inwards for a time. We need to slam shut our boarders, and bring our military back. I am not saying we should be isolationists, especially in the world market, but we need to clean up our house. It’s gotten real dirty.