Adam Smith Institute

I sometimes wonder at posts like this on ASI (a site I still mostly support). Are you just trying to provoke discussion or do you genuinely believe what you say? If it is the former then great but if it is the latter then you are just plain naive. I suspect it is the latter.

I do not know why this is but it seems to me that too many people that work at ASI (or at least post on the blog) are seduced by their own ideology. Whether it is libertarian, capitalist, liberal or free market in orientation, or a combination of all four I am not sure but it tends to argue for everything and anything that fits this narrow ideology irrespective of any other views.

Because markets should determine almost everything, societies are not allowed to determine how they want their country to be if it tries to stop what the will of free individuals might otherwise do. Note that individuals are not always good in intention or deed. Therefore, because markets are supposed to need free movement of labour, the labour market has to be the entire world irrespective of the trauma this creates in settled communities as they see their towns fragmented into disparate and unconnected groups or as their wages are undercut - when we complain about the growing disparity in income between the top and bottom, what effect do we think an unlimited labour supply has?

The lesson ASI should remember is that liberal market economics is not to be supported because it is the end in itself but because of what it achieves simply and effectively: a good and prosperous life for most people who live under such a system. By implication this means that it is not always right but subject to some other, greater demand.

When we let ideology (which is what it all too often sounds like on ASI) rule our lives we crowd out any dissent or other way of doing things. In this it has something of the Left about it: intolerant of dissent and with a conviction that it alone has the answers to life's big questions and so absolutely everything must be subordinated to its tenets.

Human beings and, therefore, societies are not just governed by the physical (economic) but by the intellectual and moral. Physical well being might be better served by free markets than command planning but we are intellectual, making rational choices that limit our demands, all for a greater good (as we see it). And we are moral, again curbing our individual desires for the greater good.

Therefore, back to the point of this post. Unlimited immigration does not cause trouble because governments try to manage it too much but because, too much of it, leaves settled communities and coherent cultures left feeling lost and helpless as it rips up that sense of commonality so vital for peaceful living. The market will always tend to push people from failing areas to prosperous areas which might be well and good for the mill owner but at some point the good area becomes so crowded that it destroys what was once so good about it. This sort of world I do not want.

Yes, the writers at Adam Smith blog are naive when it comes to immigration (and quite a lot else besides, judging by that laughable post regarding building regulations after the Chinese earthquake). They seem to share with the liberal-left the notion that a nation state is at most some sort of glorified local council, or maybe an economic area, that all peoples should drift in and out of at the whim of the market.

Massive, sudden influxes of alien peoples bring in massive, sudden doses of alien cultures. If that swamps the culture of the native population then the nation state is threatened. As an extreme but illustrative example, Israel is a free-market democracy and it isn't hard to imagine what would happen to Israel if it adopted the Adam Smith approach to immigration.