anon_peva said in #5164 25h ago:
We American capitalists are perhaps better trained in thinking about our interest relative to a for-profit corporation. Let's say you own some founder shares in America-corp. Some new foreign investors come along (imagine the smell) and you get shafted in the resulting deal: the company is worth more, but now your shares are worth less, leaving you as a glorified employee. Your interests are no longer aligned with the corporation, and you're now just resume-stacking, running a normal career, and networking for your eventual bitter departure. We all know this intuitively.
But somehow in the case of states people don't see it so rationally. The state, too is a corporation. You own "shares" in it through your citizenship. The major difference is that if the state screws you over to its own benefit with immigration, you have less legal recourse. So the first enlightenment is actually following the calculation all the way through: when we take new "high skill" immigrants, when all political impacts and changes resultant from that are accounted for, does it benefit, not "us" (a fictionalized collective created for the benefit of the state), but *you*? I find it much harder to meet this bar.
This may not be apparent without a further enlightenment: the actual ground-truth of collective interest is based in coalitions of you and people with similar interests, not states. The factions can be based in religion or socioeconomic class, but especially in modern multicultural conditions, they are based primarily in ethnicity and even race. The actual repository of your collective interest is *your people* with whom you symmetrically share inalienable bonds of interest, conviviality, history, identity, and basic character. Whether you like it or not, whether it fits your ideology or not, when you get thrown into an open-air prison society, you too will be joining the Aryan Brotherhood (or whatever is appropriate to your ancestry). The reason for this is that these groupings are more resistant to dilution and politics than the social institutions that can prove in tough times to be made of mere paper.
The question is not what is best for the state, but what is best for your people. The state is just a piece of territory that you built up for your collective benefit separate from the state. It can be taken from you. The question becomes whether some action of the state means your people having a better position in the world. "Beating China" does mean something in this view, but it means *beating the Chinese people*. Do we care to do that? Maybe; we certainly don't want them to beat us. I would prefer that we all get along at a safe distance. But if "beating China" in inter-state conflict requires inviting in and giving way to Chinese"-Americans" in intra-state racial struggle, what exactly is the point? They will not be as generous to us as we have been to them.
Likewise, we can reevaluate international affairs through this lens: is it worth firebombing Europe for the supremacy of "our" state in the competition for control of the third world? The material result for our actual people was a crushing defeat, both domestically and internationally, though it was a victory of "our state".
In the age of multiculturalism, things are rapidly heating up to come to a head, and you are going to find out the hard way that what had been "our states" are but mere territory to be captured by enemies. States are not peoples, and are not yours. Ignore their interests and focus on the people.
referenced by: >>5170 >>5173
In the "high skill"