re: I'm at an intellectual crossroad (Free Trade)

That's an incredibly oversimplified argument. If 2 M people consume 10 widgets each year and 100 people make widgets, what's the cost to society to keep widget prices high?

Free trade and open borders is good in theory and the best system but it only works if all sides participate and nobody has a welfare system, corporate or individual.

Like communism, it sounds good in theory but is unrealistic because it defies human nature. A persons natural response is to try to attain as much power and wealth as they can, so that's why communism doesn't work.

Free trade doesn't work because people naturally don't react well to losing their job due to market forces. And other countries will never agree to even playing fields long term. Always seeking an advantage over the other.

Open borders don't work in the free movement of labor because generally people don't like it when their culture gets threatened by another. You can point to the diversity of America, but it has only worked with 1 dominant culture stifling the others. With white anglo Saxon culture influence diminishing, you see much more unrest and anger. It is only natural human response

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Widget prices aren't high- they're at market value. By engaging in free trade with a non-equal labor state such as China (or a different tier nation, if you prefer that concept), widget prices then become unnaturally low. And in the real world, it's not just widgets. It's steel, and tractors, and cars, and a nation's entire manufacturing capacity. The impact to society looks like Detroit, Cleveland, or Buffalo. It has consequences, and to say that unnaturally cheap goods are better for society is myopic to the long run.

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Restating your poor argument with different parameters didn't help it.

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Well your point has nothing to do with my thread. I'm not interested in how Western European Culture integrated into America, I've already accepted it and understand it

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But I think his examples highlight that some of our most irrational fears don't come to fruition. We have the benefit of hindsight, but it's a lesson that can't be overlooked.

And besides sharia-like, anti-wesfern Muslim cultures, which cultures have eroded our own?

And even then, some middle eastern cultures (Lebanese) are some of the most successful diasporas (good Freakonomics podcast on it).

First, I agree 100% that western European culture has been mankind's crowning achievement thus far in our history. So nothing I am about to say should be construed to mean that I think that "all cultures and peoples are equal in quality". SJWs can call me a white nationalist all the want, in nearly every quantifiable metric the western white culture has dominated. That may change, for reasons that I suspect you already know, but for now it's fact.

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With increased mobility of international workers and national entrepreneurs, the value of free trade diminishes as it erodes national cultures.

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There are a number of factors that must be analyzed here. What is causing the increased mobility of these peoples, and why are they coming to America and western Europe?

Complicated. I have probably pounded my fist 100 times on here talking about the difference between immigration and refugees. Immigration is a key component of free trade theory and anarcho-capitalism. The process for immigration is not unlike the process of being an entrepreneur. It is high risk, and it favors the bold and intelligent. It also highly favors those with social skills and an ability to coalesce with cultures that might be on the surface very different. A prime example of people who have been generally successful in this way are the Jewish people of Europe and the Lebanese people of the Arab world. people from these cultures who migrate have extraordinarily high success rates in America and all over the world. A quick internet search reveals all the data one requires to prove this point. Immigrants are virtually sponsored in their endeavors by those with whom they do business in their new country. Had these connection not been possible, most Immigrants would not leave their current environment because to do so would be unnecessarily risky. In a freed economy, these people would face a real likelihood of extreme poverty. That does not mean that they will be parasites of the state in a real to life scenario such as we see today, though it is possible.

Immigrants are a far-cry from refugees. refugees need not possess any of the characteristics of an immigrant. They need only be affiliated with a specific religion, geographic area, ethnicity, political party etc. Their movement is low risk, either because it costs them nothing to move or they have virtually nothing to lose by doing so. They are usually unsuccessful in their home territory for reasons that may or may not be their fault. Nearly all of their movement and much of their lives in their new country is paid for by the current residents of that country. When refugees assimilate and adopt the basics of the culture they move to, it is the exception and not the norm. Most of all, refugees are not products of the free market. They are products of state policies.

what Vox Day and others like him are actually noting are very destructive and deliberate liberal and statist policies that are destroying the fabric of America. I don't mean that they are destroying the "whiteness" of America. I mean they are destroying the cultural glue of America. I can speculate as to why people like Soros want this to happen, but that isn't really the point. Vox Day is correct to say that we should be very concerned and vocal about this issue; but in my opinion this is the opposite of a "free-market" problem. It's a statism problem.

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The brilliant economists that developed these theories were 100% correct, because, at the time, businesses and workers were fairly immobile and economies could develop to produce the most efficient goods while our Western Culture was simultaneously not weakened.

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Obviously we are far more mobile today than ever before, but that mobility is relative to all the other advances in human kind. In the silk road days, the world benefited immensely from the movement of people from east to west and west to east, and they absolutely did move. On foot, by camel or horseback millions of people every year traveled thousands of miles to trade an interact. We can see the evidence of that in the cultural cross overs between Europe and Asia that still survive. In the days of these brilliant economists, the West had really begun its journey as the leading force in the world. That happened on the back of extensive oversea and overland trading with very different cultures. I can only imagine that in an era of kings, that foreigners weren't at the top of the list for receiving "royal" subsidies to live in their kingdoms, as the nature of being a king sort of lends itself to keeping ones own population satisfied. That of course is not the case today. In america the liberals want the foreigners to come in droves and become lifetime voters. All of this of course at the expense of producers who never had much use for these people.

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If non-Western cultures didn't suck this would be less of a problem, but we're faced with the decision of having Americans potentially move to non-Western cultures and replacing them with foreigners from often inferior cultures or seeing American investors start their initiatives in other nations where economic development is then fostered.

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Non-Western cultures don't suck. They just aren't as good as western culture. What a lot of people forget is that it wasn't too long ago that in Europe and America we held some of the same social norms that we are horrified to hear about today. Wedding at puberty, slavery (ok, that's all Im saying about it I swear), Child labor, extreme capitol punishment, conservative dress, Extreme religious rigor etc... I don't want to say that "we came through all that" because some aspects were necessary to the development of the west and some should certainly be preserved in the face of our current cultural onslaught. what brings nations out of that mess is prosperity. It doesn't matter what the quality of your culture is, it's almost always better in a prosperous state than it is in a statist and poverty stricken state.

As a person who sincerely believes that western culture is superior, I will tell you the only thing that I believe can save western culture is to spread that culture outward. Not in a Neo-con statist fashion, or a liberal world citizen fashion, but through being the example of free-trade for the world. We cannot out breed these other cultures, we cannot stop their desire to come get what we have for themselves, and we cannot close our borders and hope that we can survive and ultra-protectionist gameplan. Because we can't do that and maintain our standards of living or our western tendencies.

We have to stop intervening in other people's problems. We have to stop trying to "fix" old mistakes, only to make the same ones over and over. We have to develop a true respect for individual property rights and sovereignty. We have to do all of those things in hyper-drive like we have never done them before or these marxist influences on our society will kill us and the third world dregs will come in and feast on our remains. Making a world wide silk road is pretty much the only thing that will elevate these third world people to a level that isn't lethally poisonous to the west.

If we close ourselves off to the world to save our culture, then they will grow faster, we will grow slower and they will win anyway.

I don't know man. I hope that is convincing but I kinda think that I didn't really hit what you were looking for.

The government is responsible for monopolies.

Pretty decent article.

I hate the concept of intellectual property, but without it the little guy can never get ahead. Big business will always steal your idea without a patent.

How exactly does the free market naturally correct monopolies? Teddy Roosevelt isn't called the trust buster for nothing. He corrected the monopolies that the free market of the 19th century allowed to flourish.

Well stated Bob.

Yeah. It's a tough one. Of course, in a perfect world, it would be idiotic to argue against free trade. The best way to get avoid r-selected cultures messing up everything is private enterprise and let people trade and interact voluntarily only with those who they want to interact with. The other cultures would eventually collapse because they cannot survive on their own. However, there is a statist government that pollutes everything and, until you can overthrow it, it's probably just best to hope that those who are elected will force us to interact with cultures that we do not wish to interact with as little as possible. I guess some people would call it a hypocritical position but that's the way it is, I guess.