US immigration: economics vs. politics (Riley Callanan, 2/28/24, GZero)

According to a CBO study, the surge in irregular migrants seen under Joe Biden will lead to 1.7 million more workers in 2024, and will grow the economy by about $7 trillion over the next decade.

One of the reasons the Right is so anti-capitalist is that economic growth attracts immigrants. And immigrants produce more growth.

MET ONE IDENTITARIAN…:

He Hunted al-Qaeda. Now He Hunts Neo-Nazis (Feb. 27th, 2024, Free Press)

On a frigid night last February, Iraq combat veteran Kristofer Goldsmith woke to the sound of his dogs barking. He removed a gun from the safe next to his bed and crept downstairs to the kitchen of his home in suburban New York when he noticed movement just outside the glass kitchen door.

He turned to find a man in all-black tactical gear crouched behind a bush, pointing an AR-15 with a suppressor directly at him.

“I didn’t know at that moment if it was a terrorist or a cop,” Goldsmith remembers.

Goldsmith, 38, has made enough enemies that they frequently retaliate. He is the founder of Task Force Butler—an elite team of veterans who use their military expertise to take down neo-Nazi terrorists on American soil. Over the last few years, the Aryan Freedom Network (AFN) has repeatedly posted his home address online as well as photos of his family. Just this month, the FBI contacted him to say an AFN member had made a credible threat to “exterminate” his family.

That night back in February 2023, someone had called the police claiming Goldsmith had murdered his wife, and a cop had staked out his home.

Though Goldsmith managed to defuse the situation, he could have easily ended up wounded or killed. But he says it’s all in a day’s work for a neo-Nazi hunter and former Army sergeant who’s tasted his fair share of danger.

“I have a high threshold for threats,” he says with a slight grin and a shrug.

Folklore is philosophy (Abigail Tulenkois, 2/26/24, Aeon)

The Hungarian folktale Pretty Maid Ibronka terrified and tantalised me as a child. In the story, the young Ibronka must tie herself to the devil with string in order to discover important truths. These days, as a PhD student in philosophy, I sometimes worry I’ve done the same. I still believe in philosophy’s capacity to seek truth, but I’m conscious that I’ve tethered myself to an academic heritage plagued by formidable demons.

The demons of academic philosophy come in familiar guises: exclusivity, hegemony and investment in the myth of individual genius. As the ethicist Jill Hernandez notes, philosophy has been slower to change than many of its sister disciplines in the humanities: ‘It may be a surprise to many … given that theology and, certainly, religious studies tend to be inclusive, but philosophy is mostly resistant toward including diverse voices.’ Simultaneously, philosophy has grown increasingly specialised due to the pressures of professionalisation. Academics zero in on narrower and narrower topics in order to establish unique niches and, in the process, what was once a discipline that sought answers to humanity’s most fundamental questions becomes a jargon-riddled puzzle for a narrow group of insiders.

This was inevitable once Physics became obscurantist. It was intolerable for specialists that people could understand their fields but they couldn’t understand others. So they just added phoney-baloney theories too.

…AND CHEAPER…:

We Are Still Measuring Inflation All Wrong (Alan Reynolds, 2/26/24, Cato)

Owners’ equivalent rent purports to measure monthly variations in a price nobody pays, and to average those estimates for every house in the entire country. Nearly every other country wisely excludes such impossibly arbitrary OER estimates from their measure of inflation. Yet that singular made‐​up number dominates the US CPI, and to a lesser extent the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) inflation index too.

Shelter accounts for 36.1 percent of the CPI and 42 percent of Core CPI. Shelter also accounts for 60 percent of measured inflation in non‐​energy services. This turns out to matter quite a lot, because estimated inflation for shelter has long been extremely high, while inflation for everything else has been extremely low.

The Graph shows that from July 2022 to January 2024, the average CPI inflation rate for shelter was 7 percent, yet the average inflation rate for everything else was only 1.2 percent. This January alone, the reported annual inflation rate for shelter was 6.9 percent, but inflation for everything else was 1.6 percent.