@Logical Fallacies made a post
here which triggered off some political musing on my part which I decided to shitpost here instead of shitposting there.
In other news: We're no longer taking in refugees (this tells me shit is bad because we usually let everyone in) and those who can no longer work due to their work place closing because of measures against corona, will get short-time work unemployment benefit from the government.
I wonder if this crisis will finally convince the powers that be that most people don't want open borders? Then again if Brexit, Trump and the rise of populist parties didn't convince them, you have to wonder if they are convincible. Ezra Levant, not someone I'm normally a fan of,
remarked that if you don't have walls at the borders, you need them somewhere else, like around your home. This is an interesting way to put it - the walls are in some sense inevitable, it's just a question of whether we want them inside the country stopping people traveling and doing stuff, or at the borders. Of course, this is classic questions where elite and regular people have a very different view.
Most people spend most of their time in one country and want to be able to move around freely and not worry about crime or excessive competition for jobs driving down their wages. Elite politicians and businesspeople are almost the opposite - they spend a lot of time traveling internationally, believe that free movement promotes economic growth by driving down unskilled wages and when they are in their home country they live in gated communities which have low crime levels because they have their own walls. And of course, by definition, elite politicians and business people are not competing with unskilled immigrants for their jobs, only with other people from their rather rarified social group which excludes both immigrants and 90% or more of the population of their home country. I suspect these people know they're incredibly privileged and that combined with a distaste for the poor of their own country makes them keen to virtue signal by letting in even poorer people from the third world.
Put that way you can see there's not all that much chance that the elites will change their view of borders. Still, perhaps they won't have to. In the Brexit debate, there was a lot of concern about how Brexit would lead to more friction as customs were imposed. Right now that seems an absurd thing to worry about given all EU external borders are being closed. You won't even notice Brexit in a world where everyone is closing their borders, with the probable exception of the US southern border which the left will never let Trump secure because they see all those illegals as future voters. Still, it demonstrates that his 'build a wall' motto wasn't all that crazy. I.e. the coronavirus lockdown is interesting because suddenly everyone is in favor of much stricter controls on international movement than either Trump or the Brexit voters were asking for.
Also for another example of the inevitability of borders Macron has threatened to ban travel from the UK unless the UK imposes the sort of strict controls on movement inside the UK as he has done in France.
BRITONS face being banned from France under plans being drawn up in response to Boris Johnson's refusal to join European Union-wide travel restrictions to curb the spread of coronavirus.
www.express.co.uk
https://web.archive.org/web/2020031...kdown-France-UK-EU-restrictions-latest-update
www.cnbc.com
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