Oct 4, 2023·edited Oct 4, 2023Liked by Richard Hanania
Taking moldbug's cue and turning this into a reasoning-from-first-principles exercise is a mistake. We do not actually have to rely on aristotelian wordcelism in order to compare democracy with autocracy. It should be sufficient to reject authoritarianism because authoritarian countries in practice regularly commit uniquely absurd atrocities and because we have a plethora of natural experiments where the same ethnic groups completely diverge in general prosperity and economic growth (such as East vs. West Germany, SK vs. NK, or Taiwan vs. China). Speculation as to *why* these countries seem to do better is fun, but the last hundred and fifty years of trying out these alternatives in various places and among various peoples has been quite enough for me to reach my initial conclusions.
Funny that you use South Korea and Taiwan as your examples for "democratic" exellence, since these are 2 countries who have become "democratic" only relatively recently (Taiwan had it's first democratic election in 2000) and both had their imprsssive industries and economy built by authoritarian leaders (Park and Chun regimes for SK, Kuomintang regimes for Taiwan).
Infact, since these 2 countries democratised all they have gotten is extreme social degeneration, as evidenced by both countries having some of the world's lowest birthrates and highest suicide rates.
South Korea's birthrate was already below replacement by '87. China is not doing much better, and their fertility started dropping much earlier. This is just a universal problem for rich countries, especially Asian ones.
Agreed on Taiwan, disagreed on South Korea. North and South Korea had very similar economies up until the mid 70s, nearly 15 years after Park entered power. While the high IQ nature of East Asians seems to be the most common and sensible correlate between their nations despite divergent political systems from Western democracy, Korea is probably uniquely mentally touched; just as Germany is known uniquely among West European Whites for its autism, Korea suffers from a kind societal vanity that handicaps their intellectual potential with an obsession of cult.
South Korea & Taiwan weren't that democratic early on. They're actually go-to examples of how right-wing authoritarian countries transition more easily to democracy than left-wing ones.
How can you say that "we can't" predict what the ultimate political impact of immigration will be, but also that immigration "arguably makes small government more likely"? Saying that immigration makes small government more likely is a prediction.
Because it’s like 55%-45%, which does not allow good predictions. So restrictionists want to make people much poorer for very uncertain results. I don’t see restrictionists take seriously just how much worse off their views make people, and so they make up stuff like brain drain.
"When added together, the net costs of immigration turn out to be considerable: for immigrants who entered in the period 1995-2019 alone, these are 400 billion euros, an amount in the order of magnitude of the total Dutch natural gas revenues from the 1960s onwards." https://demo-demo.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Borderless_Welfare_State-2.pdf
We know that people with less education/lower IQ commit more crimes and receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. Why would it be different for foreigners with those characteristics?
Half of Americans pay no income taxes. Does that mean the country would be better off if half of the nation disappeared? This way of calculating net contribution to society is something only used by immigration restrictionists, it makes no sense.
Similar methods are used by immigration proponents to show that high-skilled immigration is usually a net positive. On what basis would you argue that low-skilled immigration from Africa and the Middle East has been good for the Netherlands?
Yes, it would be better if people at the bottom of society stopped existing. 50% of the first world norm might be too harsh, but there's a number out there.
Let's get more concrete. The average Latin American immigrant to the US is in the low 90s IQ. In Europe it's much worse. Under open borders I would surmise that the average IQ of immigrants would be at least as bad as African Americans in the long run (85).
In fact if we followed your logic it would have to be, because you claim importing people at that IQ level has massive positive value. If an $800 plane ticket could raise someones productivity 10x or 100x for life (and according to you lead to more libertarian government) then some effective altruist will pick up that trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk and start buying plane tickets from Africa. Or maybe some for profit entity will do so if they actually believed you.
Compared to the white norm of 100 about ~15% of the population would be 85 or lower. Would our society be better off if the bottom 15% stopped existing? This seems trivially obvious to me. They are huge burdens on every single metric, and if they went away there is little that would be lost. One could mathematically prove they have a net impact to society in the negative millions per person. I view them essentially as the equivalent of bank robbers.
And its not even close to compare them to someone with 100 IQ (who at least pays significant non-federal income taxes, doesn't qualify for most needs based welfare, and generally doesn't have lots of other negative externalities).
Of course this has issues:
We don't have some Thanos snap magic gauntlet that just makes these people stop existing and wipes everyones memory of their existence.
To reduce the native population by those people you would need to murder them, or at a minimum do widespread violence.
By contrast, not letting low IQ people immigrate in the first place is much easier. It doesn't require mass violent action. It doesn't raise difficult political issues. It's already pretty popular. Several first world countries manage to do it in practice.
In short, its easier to prevent low IQs from entering your polity then it is to remove them when they are already there.
This was what Lee Kuan Yew said directly on the issue. That Singapore would be better off if it didn't have Malays, but they were here already so we might as well try to make it work while making sure not to import any more.
There is also the question of how important the issue should be. If your underclass is only 15% of your population and politically inert it's really not a top priority to remove them. You can work around them and share the burden of their existence with other worthy people (your basically outnumber them 6.666 to 1). Certainly that is preferable to genocide.
But as their population % rises and if they become more politically salient you can no longer do this. A good example of this doesn't even have to involved international migration. Just look at what blacks migrating from the south to Detroit did to Detroit. It's quite obvious that Detroit would be better off if the blacks never immigrated there. When they are 13% of your population they are a nuisance, when they are 78% they literally cause de-civilization. And the logic of your open border stance plus current fertility patterns demands that kind of shift.
And in truth I know your are comfortable with the Thanos snap solution as long as I add a couple of caveats.
First, that's basically what embryo selection is. You are culling the unworthy embryos and making sure they don't come into existence. I don't mean this as a dig, I think we are kindred spirits on this. Embryo selection is just eugenics that is less dirty.
But lets' get beyond that to say that in order to apply for Medicaid (etc) benefits, a woman had to get an IUD inserted, and she couldn't remove it until she was off Medicaid. I think I know enough about your philosophy that you wouldn't object to such a rule compared to the status quo.
Over time this would have a similar impact to the Thanos snap without violating the non-aggression principal.
You've made similar statements about support for abortion on these grounds, including saying that six weeks bans were morally wrong because it was too early to detect and abort Down syndrome kids and it would make the population stupider if they were born.
Of course advocating this IUD requirement would make you extremely unpopular in polite society (even more than today, I think you know this in your bones). It's not that far removed from the Eugenicon article stuff.
And the people on Medicaid would obviously vote against it, so the only way it's passing is to take votes away from the underclass. And of course it would help not to import more underclass voters from aboard.
In general democracy would probably be better if the underclass couldn't vote, or if you gave more votes to married people with kids or net taxpayers, etc. That used to be the way democracy worked until well into the 20th century in many places. It doesn't have to be that the franchise is restricted to some tiny elite, but it doesn't have to be universal one man one vote either. Arguably blacks couldn't effectively vote in many places until Civil Rights, which eliminated a pretty big block of underclass votes. It's been downhill for polities with lots of blacks since then.
“We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.”
I mean the last time we did that was before Civil Rights were blacks were disenfranchised and it didn't matter what they appreciated or not. Since they started throwing 13% of the vote (much more in urban areas) behind a side they have mostly been able to vote against effective anti-crime policy as you mention.
But it's also not politically stable to have a large disenfranchised % of citizens (hence why we got civil rights in the first place), which would be inevitable if you combined such disenfranchisement with open borders. South Africa couldn't keep up apartheid, and look at what it's like now. They can't even keep the lights on.
In short, I would look at what a typical random person in the first world is entitled to. Healthcare, education, retirement, etc. And if the persons lifetime taxes from all sources (SS, income, sales, property, etc) are dramatically lower, then its a fair bet that their existence is a net negative and we'd be better of if they didn't exist.
Especially if they themselves are likely to vote for maintaining or increasing those entitlements, and if areas with lots of those people tend to have more of those entitlements (hint: they do).
Combine that with a policy to radically expand the demographic % of people who match that profile and its a disaster waiting to happen.
So yeah, just let the first world be the first world. I'd rather have a high functioning high IQ first world advancing human civilization while the low IQs that might fuck all that up stay in the third world. Maybe one day we will invent the technology to un-fuck their genetics, but until then they have little to offer and if they move to the first world and screw up the scientific progress that might one day fix their genes they will just hurt them in the long run.
No such thing as bad migrants according to Hanania. It's somehow always and everywhere a benefit to society, even when good research shows it costs billions in taxpayer money, jails are 80% filled with people with migrant backgrounds, migrant gangs are fighting eachother with hand grenades in previously peaceful Swedish suburbs etc. It's all great and a net positive and if you're against it you must be a racist.
You’re taking the bait. He goes after immigration-restrictionist conservatives because they act like wokies: they’re willing to kill the golden goose because they don’t like the sound of its honking.
Based on what criteria? The US has a massive illegal migrant population, much of it unskilled, uneducated, with no money or English and absolutely no vetting whatsoever. I highly doubt the Netherlands has an illegal migrant population with the same size and characteristics.
My gut often agrees with Hanania's hunches, but what's with all the bullshit math? I'd love to see the logic, algos and data empirically proving the reference to a (median) 50%. FAR SILLIER though are the numerical references to IQ on this string. I'm sure many on this string understand that behavioral differences derive from both nature and nurture. If Richard, like the Pillow Guy, has secret access to quantum-complex data empirically (eg observably in repeatable results) proving that whites are smarter than blacks, then let's have access to those data because I'm sure they'd come as a surprise to scientists who helped map the human genome (e.g. Craig Venter or even Substack's own Richard Dawkins).
The simplest argument for democracy that I’ve encountered comes from Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: when the the set of people required to stay in power is small, like in dictatorships, the smarter it is to simply buy them off at the expense of everyone else. Everyone else can suffer and it won’t matter much so long as the army and underlings get paid. Kings don’t worry about long term growth--they worry about staying in power, and will nuke their economic growth to keep their underlings rich.
This argument appears for a general audience in The Dictator’s Handbook.
" I used to be very bullish on China. Three years ago, I saw a high IQ nation that believed in meritocracy and didn’t have many of the brainworms associated with Europe and America like radical feminism, identity politics, and sympathy for criminals "... "Then the government showed a series of pathologies that could be traced to its authoritarian system."
When you put a cloth over the nose of a European baby he begins fighting for dear life. Do the same with a Chinese baby and he'll open his mouth and lay there passively. I wonder if this has any correlation with masking totalitarianism... I don't know, let's check other Democratic Asian countries and see if they too are masked. Fuck!
Maybe genetics are more important than your political system, and reaching conclusions about the ideal form of government for Europeans from non-suffocation resisters is a bad idea?
China was completely unique in their neurotic response to Covid among southeast asian countries. Japanese police were not welding people their own citizens their apartments. You need to actually speak to someone who lived in Shanghai or another major city in China at the time.
Indeed, as mentioned in another comment we posted here, taking a look at first hand accounts from the ground is always a good idea. That is most especially true in the case of China, because so much of the reporting in the West about China is either extremely skewed, exaggerated, over-generalized or outright false. The "welding people into their homes" story is a good example of this.
n=48, no followup even in 1969 before this all got so un-PC.
I think it's entirely possible Confucian societies select for more rule-following types, but the Taiwanese brawl in parliament and the Koreans love their riots. And the history of China itself is full of peasant revolts with really, really high death tolls. (Remember the guy who claimed to be Jesus Christ's younger brother?)
The empirical case for democracy has, though to a lesser extent, the same survivorship bias problem as the case for monarchy (e.g., Ed West's argument that - mostly nominal - monarchies today tend to be wealthier and more stable). When monarchies fail, they generally cease to be monarchies, but the same tends to be true of democracy. Venezuela ceased to be democratic because it democratically elected leaders who then chose authoritarianism; Hitler became dictator of Germany because Article 48 of democratic Germany's constitution gave its democratically elected president overly-broad emergency powers to appoint officials. Neither of these should count as a point in favor of democratic decision-making. Those democracies that survived to the present tend to be the ones that are sufficiently undemocratic to prevent popular dictators from coming into power.
Most prominent critics of democracy actually hobble their own case by wedding their criticism of democracy with their preference for pre-democracic aesthetics, but the most persuasive critics of democratic institutions - Bryan Caplan, Jason Brennan, and Garrett Jones - don't argue for silly things like kings, but rather for privatisation of the public sphere, restriction of franchise, or greater insulation of officials from the electorate. A measure of democracy is probably a good thing, but the sacralization of democracy isn't just bad because it frustrates silly efforts to bring back hereditary monarchies, but also because stifles discussions about how society might be improved by making politics less democratic at the margin.
Minor footnote: Nietzsche wasn't as utilitarian as you think. In fact his view was kind of closer to the opposite of yours in one respect: we don't empower the rarefied minority because they produce most of the value for humanity (which is really just standard elitism); rather, the pauper majority exists to toil so that the rarefied minority of people capable of living worthwhile lives can do so. Hence why he idolized great artists and aristocrats who led lives of adventure and leisure rather than, say, entrepreneurs (whom he generally loathed). People tend to mischaracterize Nietzsche as a cynical utilitarian elitist, but for better or worse, his view wasn't really that the slaves are better off under slavery, but that the slaves exist to aggrandize the masters (he may have believed the former too, but if so it was incidental).
“In addition to the standard arguments for porous borders, ethnic diversity can be seen as another factor introducing instability and division into society, which make people less likely to unify around shared goals.”
And yet the very reason non-whites move to the West is because of the massive wealth that was created by a homogeneous white culture. The idea that too many whites means inevitable stagnation or runaway bad ideas overlooks the intellectual diversity within white nations. The idea that we have to destroy the white homeland in order to save classical liberalism is silly. Those who constantly stress the economic benefits of immigration overlook the massive externalities caused by destroying whites’ homeland because it’s PC to count these costs. Caplan is an anarchist who favors open borders but if the streets, roads, parks, etc. had been privatized prior to mass non-white immigration and all anti-discrimination laws had never been passed, mass non-white immigration would have been stopped in its tracks. Ironically, one of the ways the open borders crowd sells mass immigration is based on the destruction of social trust (the aforementioned externalities) as a means to slow the growth of the welfare state. But we might end up with a worsening of both.
According to recent news, Indians living in the UK are the wealthiest/most-property owning demographic in the UK, not native Britons. Your claim was accurate 100+ years ago when poor Irish, Jews, etc came to America by the millions to parasitize our nation with multi-racial democracy. Today it's reversed, Chinese come here to buy our land, attend our top universities, and then it's roughly a coin-flip whether or not they stay (and when they do they are almost inevitably among our highest earners). While I certainly would not endorse the leftist view that Whites enjoy wealth stolen from foreigners, what wealth we do have is certainly pissed away by Whites who fully endorse the internationalist ideology that FDR and his minions infected our nation with, even if said Whites do not understand their own actions.
Indian has a population of over 1 billion people. Those who came to the UK were the creme de la creme of an enormous population. They also immigrated in a complexly different milleu where diversity and multicultural reign. Immigration uber alles advocates completely ignore the different world we live in today. What worked in the past doesn't necessarily work now.
The biggest problem with Democracy isn't that it's bad (even though it is) but that it isn't actually possible. Within sufficiently complex organisations, there will always be the Iron Law of Oligarchy.
In the west today, true Political power doesn't lie in the hands of elected officials and doesn't change hands when some other party is elected. It is held by the unelected network of institutions called (by Moldbug) the Cathedral.
You keep claiming immigration has massive positive benefits. It is true that immigration is positive FOR THEM, but it is not positive for people living in good countries to import low skill immigrants. It's a massive social cost, as shown in every study of this. Look at my review of these studies. If you want to argue for open borders type policies, you will have to be more forthright about the underlying moral premise which is that the country should do things that bring massive harm to themselves and their citizens while benefiting foreigners. https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/immigration-economics-for-economist
I find the fertility problem to be the weakest link in your "nietzschean liberalism" vision for society. Even with IVF, surrogacy, artificial wombs, embryo selection etc., someone's gonna have to raise those kids, and this is a lot of work. Who will do this if not for mothers and fathers? Barring the realism of this utopian techno dream (cope?), of which I have serious doubts in the first place, wouldn't it just in the end open up vast opportunities for more government regulation, central planning, social workers and bureaucrats? This seems neither very nietzschean, nor very much like liberalism to me. What happened to the idea of heads of families raising their own offspring and passing down their own acquired wealth (and moral values) to the next generation? I guess it got lost somewhere in the unending American conservative panegyric of the Free Market as the epitome of Freedom. Or maybe it's just the naturalist fallacy?
Secondly, I find it a bit surprising that you so easily pass of the success of the Arab Gulf monarchies down to "luck", especially coming from your pro immigrationist stance. If there's any countries in the world today that has been able to capitalize off of global migration and draw immense economical benefit from it, it's the gulf states. Qatar has almost 90% immigrants, and it's a relatively peaceful and prosperous country. In Europe, a ratio of about 10% immigrants is sufficient for big social problems and political upheavals to start materializing. The reason for the gulf states success is not necessarily because they're monarchies, but rather because of their non (social) democratic approach to immigration, which includes drawing a strict distinction between non-citizen and citizen. This is by the way how classical republics used to govern themselves, until liberalism came along. In the US you have illegals, which is the more democratic way I suppose.
I think you need to distinguish actual monarchies from one-party "democratic republics", particularly if that party is Communist. It's not a coincidence that the actual Gulf monarchies are so much better off than North Korea. Nor that one of the successful one-party republics, Singapore, is not communist but instead like Hong Kong was formed by British colonialism.
Sizable Immigrants population gaining political power , will have deleterious consequences on the political structure and institutions will face severe stress test .
Most of immigrants, especially of the Moslem variety do not share liberal values like free speech , individualism and in many cases paradoxically hate the West . Few of the English cities resemble socially like rural Bangladesh or Pakis
tan . Denmark has come up with a blasphemy law , which is a * serious* regression from the western norm .
Culture is persistent ( Garett jones ) . The West should be more discriminatory of the immigrant it selects - Australia/canada model + assimilation into liberal norms ( free speech) is the only hope
Singapore hasn't loosened its anti-crime or pro-market policies in any way. 99% of reactionary types would be fine taking just those two policies and calling it a day.
1. Be extremely harsh against any type of crime (no matter how small)
2. Allow people to trade freely
3. Focus your immigration policy on only the highest skill immigration; fill low-skill labor demand with guest workers
That's really all it takes to become a successful country. It's actually shocking that so many dictators fail at it.
China does 1 and kinda 3 (though not really even high skill), but utterly fails at 2.
Canada/Europe fails at 1 and 2, while somewhat paying lip service to 3.
U.S. fails at 1 and 3, while being good at 2.
Singapore is really the only country I can think of that succesfully does all 3.
"China does 1 and kinda 3 (though not really even high skill), but utterly fails at 2."
This is a curious statement. How so? If this were the case, why has China has been the world's top destination for foreign investment in manufacturing for most of the past 20 years or so? Why did its economy grown by over 4000% in the thirty period between 1992 and 2022? Moreover, why is China the world's #1 e-commerce market by far, with over $6 trillion in annual sales and almost everything imaginable delivered to your door within 24 hours?
Some commentator once noted that whenever someone argues that democracy may not be the best political system, they use Singapore as an example. But the fact that there's only one country that (a) you'd be willing to live in and (b) is a democracy suggests that it takes quite a bit of luck to do better than democracy.
Singapore is better off than Norway in nearly every way (richer, less crime, etc.) AND it doesn't have the benefit of being one of the world's largest exporters of oil out of sheer luck.
And that multiculturalism had to be managed by an authoritarian leader. It's fascinating people praise Singapore as a beacon of a multicultural democracy yet ignore its history, people and politics.
I wonder if Hanania reads Brian Leiter - a vocally anti-woke, anti-identity politics Nietzchean Leftist. You should have him on CSPI Podcast to talk about your Nietzschean bullet points and what a Nietzsche-informed politics would look like. https://www.amazon.com/Nietzsche-Morality-Brian-Leiter/dp/0415856809
I can't comprehend people who think there is an alternative to markets, but I also can't comprehend people who don't get why humans naturally and sensibly care about proportional rather than absolute gains and rebel at massive inequality of outcome that seems out of proportion to actual human capital differences.
If nations are but imagined, then a democracy is what? Universal voting can be circumvented by limiting the choices available. That's not necessarily bad, but one possible check and balance on a system. Putting together the right system of checks and balances has vexed Western man for centuries. Ultimately the system stems from the people and must account for their culture and very nature. And those things vary among populations. Race, ethnicity, and nation exist. Ignore them at your peril. The most well intentioned institutions will be subverted if imposed on a alien people, or continued among a changing populace.
From Alex at thedailymemes: "Finding the right system" has long "vexed" man, PostUmbraLux notes and I'm sure all here would agree, but not just "Western man." This is a shocker, but Eastern societies have ALSO wrestled with this question longer than we Western infants. And as anyone who's followed the eyes of Modi in India and Xi in China knows, the most important proxy war now on Earth is NOT over land in the Slavics, but over who in the North (the U.S. India or China) will big brother (aka make loans to) the poorer "South." Many in NATO still think the U.S. "ended history" by finding "the right system." But (NEWS FLASH!) many income-challenged nations in the South have already been wooed by the China/India argument that our money will come to you without the "colonial" strings imposed (eg through world bank loans) by the U.S. and Europe. I'm not sure who is winning this "string war," but the U.S. is definitely losing the current global socio-economic war.
This article is one big straw man . Hoppe is very much against dictatorship. He isn’t even in favour of monarchy , though he thinks it’s much better than either democracy or dictatorship. Hoppe is an anarcho-capitalist.
"All fair and intelligent observers now understand that “pro-vaxx, anti-NPI” is the correct position."
This is where you lost me. Evidence continues to accumulate that the vaxxes were not just useless, but counter-productive. They certainly did not work as "vaccines" because they did not prevent transmission, illness, hospitalization, or death. They can't even be given credit for "reducing the severity of the disease," because for most people, Covid was no worse than the seasonal flu - the vaccines did not improve these people's outcomes upon infection (that the vaccines should have prevented, but didn't). In children, they almost certainly killed more of them than they prevented from dying.
And those of us who were "anti-vaxx" didn't necessarily believe Covid was "nothing" (although in my personal experience with the original variant, at 64 years old, was extremely mild). It became apparent very early on that it wasn't a serious threat to the vast majority of the population. Because of this, the only possible utility to the vaccination of the entire population (the goal of mandates, in their various iterations) would have been to prevent transmission of the virus to the vulnerable. But it very quickly became apparent that the vaxxes didn't provide such protection. So tens of millions of people for whom Covid would not have been a serious threat were needlessly put at risk for adverse effects, without any benefit to the community in return for the assumption of that risk. (To say nothing of the fact that "vaccination" actually damages the immune system, producing NEGATIVE immunity, i.e., increasing the risk of becoming infected and ill, thus increasing the possibility of transmission to others.)
Consider this: The IFR of Covid was something less than 1% (under 0.5% for people under 65 years of age with no co-morbidities, as low as 0.18% by some metrics). Because of this, even if the vaccines had been 100% effective in preventing death, they could have only improved the IFR by no more than 1%. A vaccine capable of reducing a disease's IFR by 50% is worthwhile when the IFR is high. Even an IFR of 5% would be dropped to 2.5%. But immunizing a population in which the vast majority were never going to die of Covid without the vaccine, in order to improve the IFR by less than 1%, presents an absurd risk to anyone not at particular risk of death (from Covid) even when the chance of adverse effects is extremely low to nearly non-existent. The risk/benefit analysis (vaccination when your chance of dying is statistically zero, when the chance of adverse, debilitating effects from the vaccine is even similarly low) doesn't compute. You COULD die from Covid without the vaccine, but the vaccine COULD kill you. Why get vaccinated when vaccination is the only sure way to expose yourself to the risk of adverse effects? (And, as it quickly became apparent, when the vaccine won't prevent you from becoming ill and dying, and, in fact can increase your chances of becoming infected.)
I could go on. But I'll end with this: Remember when being "vaccinated" was called "immunization"? Now tell me the "vaccines" were a success and that vaccination was the "correct position." Enough said.
Taking moldbug's cue and turning this into a reasoning-from-first-principles exercise is a mistake. We do not actually have to rely on aristotelian wordcelism in order to compare democracy with autocracy. It should be sufficient to reject authoritarianism because authoritarian countries in practice regularly commit uniquely absurd atrocities and because we have a plethora of natural experiments where the same ethnic groups completely diverge in general prosperity and economic growth (such as East vs. West Germany, SK vs. NK, or Taiwan vs. China). Speculation as to *why* these countries seem to do better is fun, but the last hundred and fifty years of trying out these alternatives in various places and among various peoples has been quite enough for me to reach my initial conclusions.
I agree. I’m not engaging in first principle reasoning, if I did I’d probably reject democracy. This has to be a case of learning from history.
Funny that you use South Korea and Taiwan as your examples for "democratic" exellence, since these are 2 countries who have become "democratic" only relatively recently (Taiwan had it's first democratic election in 2000) and both had their imprsssive industries and economy built by authoritarian leaders (Park and Chun regimes for SK, Kuomintang regimes for Taiwan).
Infact, since these 2 countries democratised all they have gotten is extreme social degeneration, as evidenced by both countries having some of the world's lowest birthrates and highest suicide rates.
South Korea's birthrate was already below replacement by '87. China is not doing much better, and their fertility started dropping much earlier. This is just a universal problem for rich countries, especially Asian ones.
Why is the South Korean stock market so strong then? It appears that the market disagrees with you on South Korea.
Agreed on Taiwan, disagreed on South Korea. North and South Korea had very similar economies up until the mid 70s, nearly 15 years after Park entered power. While the high IQ nature of East Asians seems to be the most common and sensible correlate between their nations despite divergent political systems from Western democracy, Korea is probably uniquely mentally touched; just as Germany is known uniquely among West European Whites for its autism, Korea suffers from a kind societal vanity that handicaps their intellectual potential with an obsession of cult.
Can confirm, Koreans seem be the most neurotic, lamest NE Asians. Going by actual experience dealing with all three major ethnic groups.
South Korea & Taiwan weren't that democratic early on. They're actually go-to examples of how right-wing authoritarian countries transition more easily to democracy than left-wing ones.
Well, the economy's still working.
How can you say that "we can't" predict what the ultimate political impact of immigration will be, but also that immigration "arguably makes small government more likely"? Saying that immigration makes small government more likely is a prediction.
Because it’s like 55%-45%, which does not allow good predictions. So restrictionists want to make people much poorer for very uncertain results. I don’t see restrictionists take seriously just how much worse off their views make people, and so they make up stuff like brain drain.
"When added together, the net costs of immigration turn out to be considerable: for immigrants who entered in the period 1995-2019 alone, these are 400 billion euros, an amount in the order of magnitude of the total Dutch natural gas revenues from the 1960s onwards." https://demo-demo.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Borderless_Welfare_State-2.pdf
Yes, I'm aware of this genre. It's not very good.
We know that people with less education/lower IQ commit more crimes and receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. Why would it be different for foreigners with those characteristics?
Half of Americans pay no income taxes. Does that mean the country would be better off if half of the nation disappeared? This way of calculating net contribution to society is something only used by immigration restrictionists, it makes no sense.
Similar methods are used by immigration proponents to show that high-skilled immigration is usually a net positive. On what basis would you argue that low-skilled immigration from Africa and the Middle East has been good for the Netherlands?
Yes, it would be better if people at the bottom of society stopped existing. 50% of the first world norm might be too harsh, but there's a number out there.
Let's get more concrete. The average Latin American immigrant to the US is in the low 90s IQ. In Europe it's much worse. Under open borders I would surmise that the average IQ of immigrants would be at least as bad as African Americans in the long run (85).
In fact if we followed your logic it would have to be, because you claim importing people at that IQ level has massive positive value. If an $800 plane ticket could raise someones productivity 10x or 100x for life (and according to you lead to more libertarian government) then some effective altruist will pick up that trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk and start buying plane tickets from Africa. Or maybe some for profit entity will do so if they actually believed you.
Compared to the white norm of 100 about ~15% of the population would be 85 or lower. Would our society be better off if the bottom 15% stopped existing? This seems trivially obvious to me. They are huge burdens on every single metric, and if they went away there is little that would be lost. One could mathematically prove they have a net impact to society in the negative millions per person. I view them essentially as the equivalent of bank robbers.
And its not even close to compare them to someone with 100 IQ (who at least pays significant non-federal income taxes, doesn't qualify for most needs based welfare, and generally doesn't have lots of other negative externalities).
Of course this has issues:
We don't have some Thanos snap magic gauntlet that just makes these people stop existing and wipes everyones memory of their existence.
To reduce the native population by those people you would need to murder them, or at a minimum do widespread violence.
By contrast, not letting low IQ people immigrate in the first place is much easier. It doesn't require mass violent action. It doesn't raise difficult political issues. It's already pretty popular. Several first world countries manage to do it in practice.
In short, its easier to prevent low IQs from entering your polity then it is to remove them when they are already there.
This was what Lee Kuan Yew said directly on the issue. That Singapore would be better off if it didn't have Malays, but they were here already so we might as well try to make it work while making sure not to import any more.
There is also the question of how important the issue should be. If your underclass is only 15% of your population and politically inert it's really not a top priority to remove them. You can work around them and share the burden of their existence with other worthy people (your basically outnumber them 6.666 to 1). Certainly that is preferable to genocide.
But as their population % rises and if they become more politically salient you can no longer do this. A good example of this doesn't even have to involved international migration. Just look at what blacks migrating from the south to Detroit did to Detroit. It's quite obvious that Detroit would be better off if the blacks never immigrated there. When they are 13% of your population they are a nuisance, when they are 78% they literally cause de-civilization. And the logic of your open border stance plus current fertility patterns demands that kind of shift.
And in truth I know your are comfortable with the Thanos snap solution as long as I add a couple of caveats.
First, that's basically what embryo selection is. You are culling the unworthy embryos and making sure they don't come into existence. I don't mean this as a dig, I think we are kindred spirits on this. Embryo selection is just eugenics that is less dirty.
But lets' get beyond that to say that in order to apply for Medicaid (etc) benefits, a woman had to get an IUD inserted, and she couldn't remove it until she was off Medicaid. I think I know enough about your philosophy that you wouldn't object to such a rule compared to the status quo.
Over time this would have a similar impact to the Thanos snap without violating the non-aggression principal.
You've made similar statements about support for abortion on these grounds, including saying that six weeks bans were morally wrong because it was too early to detect and abort Down syndrome kids and it would make the population stupider if they were born.
Of course advocating this IUD requirement would make you extremely unpopular in polite society (even more than today, I think you know this in your bones). It's not that far removed from the Eugenicon article stuff.
And the people on Medicaid would obviously vote against it, so the only way it's passing is to take votes away from the underclass. And of course it would help not to import more underclass voters from aboard.
In general democracy would probably be better if the underclass couldn't vote, or if you gave more votes to married people with kids or net taxpayers, etc. That used to be the way democracy worked until well into the 20th century in many places. It doesn't have to be that the franchise is restricted to some tiny elite, but it doesn't have to be universal one man one vote either. Arguably blacks couldn't effectively vote in many places until Civil Rights, which eliminated a pretty big block of underclass votes. It's been downhill for polities with lots of blacks since then.
“We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.”
I mean the last time we did that was before Civil Rights were blacks were disenfranchised and it didn't matter what they appreciated or not. Since they started throwing 13% of the vote (much more in urban areas) behind a side they have mostly been able to vote against effective anti-crime policy as you mention.
But it's also not politically stable to have a large disenfranchised % of citizens (hence why we got civil rights in the first place), which would be inevitable if you combined such disenfranchisement with open borders. South Africa couldn't keep up apartheid, and look at what it's like now. They can't even keep the lights on.
In short, I would look at what a typical random person in the first world is entitled to. Healthcare, education, retirement, etc. And if the persons lifetime taxes from all sources (SS, income, sales, property, etc) are dramatically lower, then its a fair bet that their existence is a net negative and we'd be better of if they didn't exist.
Especially if they themselves are likely to vote for maintaining or increasing those entitlements, and if areas with lots of those people tend to have more of those entitlements (hint: they do).
Combine that with a policy to radically expand the demographic % of people who match that profile and its a disaster waiting to happen.
So yeah, just let the first world be the first world. I'd rather have a high functioning high IQ first world advancing human civilization while the low IQs that might fuck all that up stay in the third world. Maybe one day we will invent the technology to un-fuck their genetics, but until then they have little to offer and if they move to the first world and screw up the scientific progress that might one day fix their genes they will just hurt them in the long run.
The real problem with his remark is that the Netherlands gets much worse migrants than the US does.
No such thing as bad migrants according to Hanania. It's somehow always and everywhere a benefit to society, even when good research shows it costs billions in taxpayer money, jails are 80% filled with people with migrant backgrounds, migrant gangs are fighting eachother with hand grenades in previously peaceful Swedish suburbs etc. It's all great and a net positive and if you're against it you must be a racist.
You’re taking the bait. He goes after immigration-restrictionist conservatives because they act like wokies: they’re willing to kill the golden goose because they don’t like the sound of its honking.
Based on what criteria? The US has a massive illegal migrant population, much of it unskilled, uneducated, with no money or English and absolutely no vetting whatsoever. I highly doubt the Netherlands has an illegal migrant population with the same size and characteristics.
My gut often agrees with Hanania's hunches, but what's with all the bullshit math? I'd love to see the logic, algos and data empirically proving the reference to a (median) 50%. FAR SILLIER though are the numerical references to IQ on this string. I'm sure many on this string understand that behavioral differences derive from both nature and nurture. If Richard, like the Pillow Guy, has secret access to quantum-complex data empirically (eg observably in repeatable results) proving that whites are smarter than blacks, then let's have access to those data because I'm sure they'd come as a surprise to scientists who helped map the human genome (e.g. Craig Venter or even Substack's own Richard Dawkins).
Do you make any distinction between legal and illegal immigration? Most people aren't "anti immigration", they're anti illegal invasions.
The simplest argument for democracy that I’ve encountered comes from Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: when the the set of people required to stay in power is small, like in dictatorships, the smarter it is to simply buy them off at the expense of everyone else. Everyone else can suffer and it won’t matter much so long as the army and underlings get paid. Kings don’t worry about long term growth--they worry about staying in power, and will nuke their economic growth to keep their underlings rich.
This argument appears for a general audience in The Dictator’s Handbook.
Who's gonna "buy off" the dictator?
Dictators usually aren't all powerful; someone has to run the army and the police.
They pocket whatever money is left over that they don't need to stay in power for personal luxuries.
" I used to be very bullish on China. Three years ago, I saw a high IQ nation that believed in meritocracy and didn’t have many of the brainworms associated with Europe and America like radical feminism, identity politics, and sympathy for criminals "... "Then the government showed a series of pathologies that could be traced to its authoritarian system."
When you put a cloth over the nose of a European baby he begins fighting for dear life. Do the same with a Chinese baby and he'll open his mouth and lay there passively. I wonder if this has any correlation with masking totalitarianism... I don't know, let's check other Democratic Asian countries and see if they too are masked. Fuck!
Maybe genetics are more important than your political system, and reaching conclusions about the ideal form of government for Europeans from non-suffocation resisters is a bad idea?
China was completely unique in their neurotic response to Covid among southeast asian countries. Japanese police were not welding people their own citizens their apartments. You need to actually speak to someone who lived in Shanghai or another major city in China at the time.
Indeed, as mentioned in another comment we posted here, taking a look at first hand accounts from the ground is always a good idea. That is most especially true in the case of China, because so much of the reporting in the West about China is either extremely skewed, exaggerated, over-generalized or outright false. The "welding people into their homes" story is a good example of this.
China was way worse of a government response, but the *voluntary* East Asian response in general was a discrediting of the entire race.
Did you happen to look at what Taiwan did? A mask on your face is several orders of magnitude separated from what the PRC did.
Relevant study: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/2241227a0
n=48, no followup even in 1969 before this all got so un-PC.
I think it's entirely possible Confucian societies select for more rule-following types, but the Taiwanese brawl in parliament and the Koreans love their riots. And the history of China itself is full of peasant revolts with really, really high death tolls. (Remember the guy who claimed to be Jesus Christ's younger brother?)
So it's not so clear.
The empirical case for democracy has, though to a lesser extent, the same survivorship bias problem as the case for monarchy (e.g., Ed West's argument that - mostly nominal - monarchies today tend to be wealthier and more stable). When monarchies fail, they generally cease to be monarchies, but the same tends to be true of democracy. Venezuela ceased to be democratic because it democratically elected leaders who then chose authoritarianism; Hitler became dictator of Germany because Article 48 of democratic Germany's constitution gave its democratically elected president overly-broad emergency powers to appoint officials. Neither of these should count as a point in favor of democratic decision-making. Those democracies that survived to the present tend to be the ones that are sufficiently undemocratic to prevent popular dictators from coming into power.
Most prominent critics of democracy actually hobble their own case by wedding their criticism of democracy with their preference for pre-democracic aesthetics, but the most persuasive critics of democratic institutions - Bryan Caplan, Jason Brennan, and Garrett Jones - don't argue for silly things like kings, but rather for privatisation of the public sphere, restriction of franchise, or greater insulation of officials from the electorate. A measure of democracy is probably a good thing, but the sacralization of democracy isn't just bad because it frustrates silly efforts to bring back hereditary monarchies, but also because stifles discussions about how society might be improved by making politics less democratic at the margin.
Minor footnote: Nietzsche wasn't as utilitarian as you think. In fact his view was kind of closer to the opposite of yours in one respect: we don't empower the rarefied minority because they produce most of the value for humanity (which is really just standard elitism); rather, the pauper majority exists to toil so that the rarefied minority of people capable of living worthwhile lives can do so. Hence why he idolized great artists and aristocrats who led lives of adventure and leisure rather than, say, entrepreneurs (whom he generally loathed). People tend to mischaracterize Nietzsche as a cynical utilitarian elitist, but for better or worse, his view wasn't really that the slaves are better off under slavery, but that the slaves exist to aggrandize the masters (he may have believed the former too, but if so it was incidental).
“In addition to the standard arguments for porous borders, ethnic diversity can be seen as another factor introducing instability and division into society, which make people less likely to unify around shared goals.”
And yet the very reason non-whites move to the West is because of the massive wealth that was created by a homogeneous white culture. The idea that too many whites means inevitable stagnation or runaway bad ideas overlooks the intellectual diversity within white nations. The idea that we have to destroy the white homeland in order to save classical liberalism is silly. Those who constantly stress the economic benefits of immigration overlook the massive externalities caused by destroying whites’ homeland because it’s PC to count these costs. Caplan is an anarchist who favors open borders but if the streets, roads, parks, etc. had been privatized prior to mass non-white immigration and all anti-discrimination laws had never been passed, mass non-white immigration would have been stopped in its tracks. Ironically, one of the ways the open borders crowd sells mass immigration is based on the destruction of social trust (the aforementioned externalities) as a means to slow the growth of the welfare state. But we might end up with a worsening of both.
According to recent news, Indians living in the UK are the wealthiest/most-property owning demographic in the UK, not native Britons. Your claim was accurate 100+ years ago when poor Irish, Jews, etc came to America by the millions to parasitize our nation with multi-racial democracy. Today it's reversed, Chinese come here to buy our land, attend our top universities, and then it's roughly a coin-flip whether or not they stay (and when they do they are almost inevitably among our highest earners). While I certainly would not endorse the leftist view that Whites enjoy wealth stolen from foreigners, what wealth we do have is certainly pissed away by Whites who fully endorse the internationalist ideology that FDR and his minions infected our nation with, even if said Whites do not understand their own actions.
Indian has a population of over 1 billion people. Those who came to the UK were the creme de la creme of an enormous population. They also immigrated in a complexly different milleu where diversity and multicultural reign. Immigration uber alles advocates completely ignore the different world we live in today. What worked in the past doesn't necessarily work now.
The biggest problem with Democracy isn't that it's bad (even though it is) but that it isn't actually possible. Within sufficiently complex organisations, there will always be the Iron Law of Oligarchy.
In the west today, true Political power doesn't lie in the hands of elected officials and doesn't change hands when some other party is elected. It is held by the unelected network of institutions called (by Moldbug) the Cathedral.
You keep claiming immigration has massive positive benefits. It is true that immigration is positive FOR THEM, but it is not positive for people living in good countries to import low skill immigrants. It's a massive social cost, as shown in every study of this. Look at my review of these studies. If you want to argue for open borders type policies, you will have to be more forthright about the underlying moral premise which is that the country should do things that bring massive harm to themselves and their citizens while benefiting foreigners. https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/immigration-economics-for-economist
I find the fertility problem to be the weakest link in your "nietzschean liberalism" vision for society. Even with IVF, surrogacy, artificial wombs, embryo selection etc., someone's gonna have to raise those kids, and this is a lot of work. Who will do this if not for mothers and fathers? Barring the realism of this utopian techno dream (cope?), of which I have serious doubts in the first place, wouldn't it just in the end open up vast opportunities for more government regulation, central planning, social workers and bureaucrats? This seems neither very nietzschean, nor very much like liberalism to me. What happened to the idea of heads of families raising their own offspring and passing down their own acquired wealth (and moral values) to the next generation? I guess it got lost somewhere in the unending American conservative panegyric of the Free Market as the epitome of Freedom. Or maybe it's just the naturalist fallacy?
Secondly, I find it a bit surprising that you so easily pass of the success of the Arab Gulf monarchies down to "luck", especially coming from your pro immigrationist stance. If there's any countries in the world today that has been able to capitalize off of global migration and draw immense economical benefit from it, it's the gulf states. Qatar has almost 90% immigrants, and it's a relatively peaceful and prosperous country. In Europe, a ratio of about 10% immigrants is sufficient for big social problems and political upheavals to start materializing. The reason for the gulf states success is not necessarily because they're monarchies, but rather because of their non (social) democratic approach to immigration, which includes drawing a strict distinction between non-citizen and citizen. This is by the way how classical republics used to govern themselves, until liberalism came along. In the US you have illegals, which is the more democratic way I suppose.
I think you need to distinguish actual monarchies from one-party "democratic republics", particularly if that party is Communist. It's not a coincidence that the actual Gulf monarchies are so much better off than North Korea. Nor that one of the successful one-party republics, Singapore, is not communist but instead like Hong Kong was formed by British colonialism.
Sizable Immigrants population gaining political power , will have deleterious consequences on the political structure and institutions will face severe stress test .
Most of immigrants, especially of the Moslem variety do not share liberal values like free speech , individualism and in many cases paradoxically hate the West . Few of the English cities resemble socially like rural Bangladesh or Pakis
tan . Denmark has come up with a blasphemy law , which is a * serious* regression from the western norm .
Culture is persistent ( Garett jones ) . The West should be more discriminatory of the immigrant it selects - Australia/canada model + assimilation into liberal norms ( free speech) is the only hope
What about Singapore?
Singapore incorporates more than a few democratic feedback mechanisms, and is in the long run headed towards basic democratic liberalism.
It's not an argument against democracy so much as an argument for slow-rolling it in developing countries.
Most of these Asian countries are one and a half party states with high iq and homgenanity. That's probably a good mix for them.
Unlike Richard, I don't think importing say a couple 100 million africans to Japan and giving them the vote would result in libertarianism.
Nowhere in the West has anything close to importation of 100 million Africans have occured.
It's not even a scenario that has any chance of taking place or is seriously advocated by anyone.
This is just out of touch sensationalist talk.
Singapore hasn't loosened its anti-crime or pro-market policies in any way. 99% of reactionary types would be fine taking just those two policies and calling it a day.
1. Be extremely harsh against any type of crime (no matter how small)
2. Allow people to trade freely
3. Focus your immigration policy on only the highest skill immigration; fill low-skill labor demand with guest workers
That's really all it takes to become a successful country. It's actually shocking that so many dictators fail at it.
China does 1 and kinda 3 (though not really even high skill), but utterly fails at 2.
Canada/Europe fails at 1 and 2, while somewhat paying lip service to 3.
U.S. fails at 1 and 3, while being good at 2.
Singapore is really the only country I can think of that succesfully does all 3.
"China does 1 and kinda 3 (though not really even high skill), but utterly fails at 2."
This is a curious statement. How so? If this were the case, why has China has been the world's top destination for foreign investment in manufacturing for most of the past 20 years or so? Why did its economy grown by over 4000% in the thirty period between 1992 and 2022? Moreover, why is China the world's #1 e-commerce market by far, with over $6 trillion in annual sales and almost everything imaginable delivered to your door within 24 hours?
Democracy? You cannot praise Singapore and ignore Lee Kuan Yew as benevolent dictator.
Yarvin does not like Singapore that much. I guess Yarvin would ask "What about Queen Elizabeth? (The good one)" or "What about Cromwell?"
Regarding Singapore, I think the usual succession problem has occurred. His son is not nearly as competent as Lee Kuan Yew himself
Huh, back when I was reading UR he would trumpet it regularly. I haven't been paying attention to him since then though.
Some commentator once noted that whenever someone argues that democracy may not be the best political system, they use Singapore as an example. But the fact that there's only one country that (a) you'd be willing to live in and (b) is a democracy suggests that it takes quite a bit of luck to do better than democracy.
What about Norway?
Singapore is better off than Norway in nearly every way (richer, less crime, etc.) AND it doesn't have the benefit of being one of the world's largest exporters of oil out of sheer luck.
Not to mention Singapore is much more multicultural than Norway!
And that multiculturalism had to be managed by an authoritarian leader. It's fascinating people praise Singapore as a beacon of a multicultural democracy yet ignore its history, people and politics.
I wonder if Hanania reads Brian Leiter - a vocally anti-woke, anti-identity politics Nietzchean Leftist. You should have him on CSPI Podcast to talk about your Nietzschean bullet points and what a Nietzsche-informed politics would look like. https://www.amazon.com/Nietzsche-Morality-Brian-Leiter/dp/0415856809
https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/
I knew him when I was at Chicago. Is his book on Nietzsche good?
His debate with Caplan was weird.
I can't comprehend people who think there is an alternative to markets, but I also can't comprehend people who don't get why humans naturally and sensibly care about proportional rather than absolute gains and rebel at massive inequality of outcome that seems out of proportion to actual human capital differences.
If nations are but imagined, then a democracy is what? Universal voting can be circumvented by limiting the choices available. That's not necessarily bad, but one possible check and balance on a system. Putting together the right system of checks and balances has vexed Western man for centuries. Ultimately the system stems from the people and must account for their culture and very nature. And those things vary among populations. Race, ethnicity, and nation exist. Ignore them at your peril. The most well intentioned institutions will be subverted if imposed on a alien people, or continued among a changing populace.
From Alex at thedailymemes: "Finding the right system" has long "vexed" man, PostUmbraLux notes and I'm sure all here would agree, but not just "Western man." This is a shocker, but Eastern societies have ALSO wrestled with this question longer than we Western infants. And as anyone who's followed the eyes of Modi in India and Xi in China knows, the most important proxy war now on Earth is NOT over land in the Slavics, but over who in the North (the U.S. India or China) will big brother (aka make loans to) the poorer "South." Many in NATO still think the U.S. "ended history" by finding "the right system." But (NEWS FLASH!) many income-challenged nations in the South have already been wooed by the China/India argument that our money will come to you without the "colonial" strings imposed (eg through world bank loans) by the U.S. and Europe. I'm not sure who is winning this "string war," but the U.S. is definitely losing the current global socio-economic war.
This article is one big straw man . Hoppe is very much against dictatorship. He isn’t even in favour of monarchy , though he thinks it’s much better than either democracy or dictatorship. Hoppe is an anarcho-capitalist.
"All fair and intelligent observers now understand that “pro-vaxx, anti-NPI” is the correct position."
This is where you lost me. Evidence continues to accumulate that the vaxxes were not just useless, but counter-productive. They certainly did not work as "vaccines" because they did not prevent transmission, illness, hospitalization, or death. They can't even be given credit for "reducing the severity of the disease," because for most people, Covid was no worse than the seasonal flu - the vaccines did not improve these people's outcomes upon infection (that the vaccines should have prevented, but didn't). In children, they almost certainly killed more of them than they prevented from dying.
And those of us who were "anti-vaxx" didn't necessarily believe Covid was "nothing" (although in my personal experience with the original variant, at 64 years old, was extremely mild). It became apparent very early on that it wasn't a serious threat to the vast majority of the population. Because of this, the only possible utility to the vaccination of the entire population (the goal of mandates, in their various iterations) would have been to prevent transmission of the virus to the vulnerable. But it very quickly became apparent that the vaxxes didn't provide such protection. So tens of millions of people for whom Covid would not have been a serious threat were needlessly put at risk for adverse effects, without any benefit to the community in return for the assumption of that risk. (To say nothing of the fact that "vaccination" actually damages the immune system, producing NEGATIVE immunity, i.e., increasing the risk of becoming infected and ill, thus increasing the possibility of transmission to others.)
Consider this: The IFR of Covid was something less than 1% (under 0.5% for people under 65 years of age with no co-morbidities, as low as 0.18% by some metrics). Because of this, even if the vaccines had been 100% effective in preventing death, they could have only improved the IFR by no more than 1%. A vaccine capable of reducing a disease's IFR by 50% is worthwhile when the IFR is high. Even an IFR of 5% would be dropped to 2.5%. But immunizing a population in which the vast majority were never going to die of Covid without the vaccine, in order to improve the IFR by less than 1%, presents an absurd risk to anyone not at particular risk of death (from Covid) even when the chance of adverse effects is extremely low to nearly non-existent. The risk/benefit analysis (vaccination when your chance of dying is statistically zero, when the chance of adverse, debilitating effects from the vaccine is even similarly low) doesn't compute. You COULD die from Covid without the vaccine, but the vaccine COULD kill you. Why get vaccinated when vaccination is the only sure way to expose yourself to the risk of adverse effects? (And, as it quickly became apparent, when the vaccine won't prevent you from becoming ill and dying, and, in fact can increase your chances of becoming infected.)
I could go on. But I'll end with this: Remember when being "vaccinated" was called "immunization"? Now tell me the "vaccines" were a success and that vaccination was the "correct position." Enough said.