Critiquing a Critic - A Follow Up to An Immigration Proposal

Critiquing a Critic - A Follow Up to An Immigration Proposal

Earlier this week I wrote An Immigration Proposal where I proposed a way to end mass immigration to Australia within 7 years. One of my regular readers and commentators Mr. Panther wrote a reply over at his blog Percy's Pensieve, with the actual reply being here The Great Immigration biff-up. Now I don't have a problem with a critique, but just as he found things to criticize in my article, I found things in his to criticize.

The first, roughly 1/3rd of Mr. Panthers article concerns my article, the rest consists of a Libertarian way to restrict immigration. I'm not a fan of Libertarianism as I believe they are simply Anarchists who like business. So I will not spend much time on this part of the article, but try to restrict myself to the first 1/3rd of the article. I will quote a sentence and provide my critique of it.

Let me start with this sentence "There is a tension on the Right between those who are interested in tradition, community, order and social preservation, and those who are interested in liberty and prosperity". It implies that Traditionalists are not interested in Liberty or Prosperity! Something I find very strange, what we do not believe in is unlimited liberty or unlimited prosperity. It is a Liberal conceit to believe that only they believe in such things and to have any doubt on the unlimited ability of either is to not really believe in them.

"Mark seems to admit the economic necessity of immigration, but seemingly only insofar as immigration props up a "pyramid scheme"." I need to break this sentence in half, first off I do not admit the economic necessity of immigration, what I said was "I unfortunately see that that could have serious consequences for the economy"(of ending immigration suddenly), which means lets engage in economic change in a responsible manner. As I am seeking to move from an economy where many rely on immigration for their livelihood to one where hardly anyone relies on immigration for their livelihood, that change should not be sudden. Quite a different thing. Secondly different industries rely on immigration to different degrees, building for example is heavily dependent upon immigration and to allow change people need time to adjust.

"a net immigration intake of 0 would be not only desirable, but feasible and without any negative consequences." Here Mr. Panther is stating my opinion accurately, except for one minor point. I do believe we could have a 0 immigration intake, the only reason I put it at 1/1000 or 23,000 is to cover those personal relationships, services to Australia or truly exceptional candidates such as world leading experts that may need entry to Australia. It has nearly no economic consideration at all. But I do not believe this has no negative consequences, all decisions have consequences. But as I also wrote "Immigration should only exist for one reason and that is to benefit the nation, if it doesn't do that then it should end.". In the current economic climate, immigration should end.

Now we get to the crux of the Liberal economic argument and it is here that I have the most to object to. Even when most countries had protectionist policies world trade continued, this idea that only Liberal economics allows trade is rarely stated but most heavily implied and it is wrong.

"If one country, our country, closed it's borders or set an arbitrary (low) limit on immigration, we would not be allowing supply to meet demand. The economy would stagnate as business would cease to be able to grow for lack of labour supply." Now heres one I have alot of problems with. Mr. Panther is a smart man, I would go so far as to say very smart. How can he believe that Australia has a labour shortage? Or even that we have a potential labour shortage? The reality is we have 700,000 unemployed and we have a further 800,000 adults in post secondary school education. That means that in the next 5 years the economy must create at least 1,500,000 jobs, half of them right away! We do not have a labour shortage, this should be quite clear.

These ideas are why the Working class hate the Liberal Party and in America the Republican Party and in Britain the Conservative Party. Because they treat the Working class with utter contempt, they export our jobs to the third world and at the same time bring in foreigners to compete with us for work. They create unemployment and poverty and tell everyone, not least themselves that they are such brilliant economic managers. If that were true unemployment would have been eliminated but it has not been eliminated and in fact many think they want mass unemployment. It would certainly fit with their continuous effort to destroy the Working class, something they deny but which I see every day all around me.

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