To the extent she ever had any, she lost all credibility with me when she generalized from her experience getting fired and going home to Mother, then getting a better job (her current one?), to the conclusion that a social saftey net is a bad thing
because coping with disasters on your own is good for you.

Although as far as I’m concerned, it’s self-evident that anyone who would choose Jane Galt as a nom de plume has her head screwed on sideways, at best. Why does anyone pay her any attention at all?

Megan is not a reasonable person. She’s a fanatical Chicago-School person, who’s hit her niche as a propagandist after repeatedly failing in the business world (despite having world-class training).

I highlighted the part I felt was most correct. Mostly because there’s a very good chance the company knew before hiring that the immigrants were not legal, and they preferred illegal workers because they could push around and treat subhumanly, threatening them with deportation. What you outlined in the italics above would have been infinitely preferable. In fact, the only thing I would add to it is “and the company should have put a statement on its applications or job postings that specifically, clearly stated this will-not-hire, turn-’em-in policy.” I’d respect and appreciate a company that did all this.

You are correct, the company morally should not blackmail immigrants by threatening to report them to immigration if they complain about work conditions. The company wouldn’t be able to blackmail the immigrants, though, if there was some sort of enforcement of the laws against the company hiring the immigrants.

However, the company currently has a 1% chance of being punished for hiring illegal immigrants, while the immigrants have a 100% chance of being punished if the company reports them.

*I’m referring specifically to the time she argued for the estate tax appeal by asserting that rich people get around it anyway. Her anecdote in support of this was that in her high school class at her prestigious boarding school none of her classmates had paid the estate tax. This requires that out of this group of 17 year olds a non-trivial number had already inherited estates above the limit and that this was a standard topic of conversation at that school.

Why are Chris and Megan getting so vicious at each other, when they’re both reasonable, smart people? Why is it that they both don’t say, “OK, we each exaggerated a bit here, and made an unnecessary insinuation there, but we’re both out to genuinely improve the lot of humanity so let’s let bygones be bygones and agree to disagree”?

A couple of hypotheses:
1) It’s fun to have a debate with a smart person who disagrees with you. (Fair enough, but the fun stops when the debate turns ugly. Or it looks like you’re losing. In public. Which leads to point #2)

2) Ego investment/maintaining a public persona. They’re public figures, they’ve each got their cheering section which they don’t want to let down by saying, “um, yeah, I guess you’re right about that.

All of this leads me to another, larger hypothesis on the correlation between 21st-century communication and political polarization. (I’m totally leaving aside institutional and structural explanations, not because they’re not important but because I don’t think they can explain everything). Email, blogs, and all the other methods to express opinions publicly and easily make it much harder to back down from an opinion when you realize you’ve been mistaken about something.

The only publicly acceptable narrative we have for “I made a mistake” is “I once was lost but now am found”—you have to admit to complete error in order to disavow an earlier view.

If you say, “I was mistaken about…” you are labelled a flip-flopper or a fool or worse.

Anyone care to shoot down my idea? Anyone have any better narratives? Any great examples of self-correction on the part of politically successful and powerful people?

Or, are there any optimists out there, who think that the notion of “the self-correcting blogosphere” is actually having the opposite effect, and perhaps there is a new generation growing up with the internet teaching them that there is always someone out there who can teach you something?

“…and we seriously believe that FREE TRADE, free intercourse, will do more than any other visible agent to extend civilization and morality throughout the world—yes, to extinguish slavery itself.”

What does McCarthy have to do with illegal immigrants?

“Steve, I see the insinuation as that the company knowingly hired illegal immigrants, and then used selective reporting to use the government to rid themselve of problem workers (which could well include those injured on the job).”

I saw no mention of injuries on the job. I only read the implication that turning in immigrants to the authorities constitutes abuse of immigrants. Still can’t figure out how. If the company knowingly hired illegal immigrants, then the company also broke the law. But that also has nothing to do with ‘abuse’ of immigrants.

“to treat illegal immigrant workers the very ways labor law has deemed illegal”

The only statement in the article is that the company threatened to turn (illegal) immigrants into the authorities. Has labor law really said that turning illegal immigrants into immigration authorities is illegal?

I guess I can see that only turning in illegal immigrants under certain circumstances is unfair (whether it constitutes blackmail or not, I’m not sure), and maybe illegal.

I understand that we all agree, then, that the company’s mistake was to only selectively turn in the illegal immigrants. What the company should have done was not hire the illegal immigrants to begin with, and then turn them all in as soon as they learned of their existence. Is this correct?

Steve

‘Ever since its 1843 prospectus, the mission of the Economist has been to write articles “in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day”.’

Although those free-trade principles can be suspended when convenient: IIRC Daniel and I had a hard time explaining to McArdle that compensation to gubmint workers would have to track income growth in the economy as a whole, and not inflation. (Perhaps they teach microeconomics differently in U.Chicago GSB.)

Her current employer, I believe (although I could be mistaken). But in fairness, this isn’t dishonesty on her part; she hasn’t ever tried to conceal her affiliation afik.

Most likely it would do none of these things.
Illegal Hiring Is Rarely Penalized:

Between 1999 and 2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaled back 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which subsequently was merged into the Homeland Security Department. The number of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrants dropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declined from $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal statistics.

In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies. In 2004, it issued fine notices to three.

The employee would be deported and the employer would suffer no consequences.

Unfortunately, those with very little social capital, those not so familiar with the workings of the world, are quite vulnerable to manipulation by threatening the law.