Published on 28 Aug 2017
★★★★★ “Bristol Scout Rebuilding History” on Vimeo: http://bit.ly/BristolScoutVimeo ★★★★★
★★★★ “Bristol Scout Rebuilding History on DVD:
http://bit.ly/BristolScoutDVD ★★★★In our first episode from Stow Maries Great War Aerodrome we talk with David Bremner about his Bristol Scout 1264 which is an exact copy of his granddad’s WW1 airplane that he flew on the Mesopotamian front.
August 29, 2017
Inside A British Bristol Scout WW1 Airplane I THE GREAT WAR Special
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The benefits and costs of an “open borders” policy
David Thompson linked to this Ben Sixsmith article on the pro and con arguments for open borders:
No one except a militant nativist would deny that some level of immigration is beneficial and should be accepted. After that, we face a question of scale. There are those, however, on the opposite end of the spectrum, who believe that no level of immigration should ever be denied. These are advocates of “open borders”; an idea as strange as that of the nativist — yet more dangerous for being considered respectable.
The liberal Economist magazine contains an essay promoting open borders. It imagines a world in which people are free to live and work wherever they please. It is an astonishingly biased and unreflective piece, which illuminates dangerous extremes of progressive utopianism:
A world of free movement would be $78 trillion richer https://t.co/0xLg6OLNEF
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 29, 2017
Perhaps I sound inhuman. Who could dislike people living and working wherever they please? It can be a splendid thing, but if everybody did it think of what that would entail. The Economist reports that if borders were opened, 630 million people would be likely to migrate. Perhaps 138 million would go to the US, expanding its population by almost a half. About 42 million would join the British, expanding their numbers by more than a half. How many would go to Australia, a country with a population of 24 million, and with infrastructure already under strain? Such influxes would pose monumental demographic changes, soon made more dramatic by the higher birth rates. It will be exacerbated by the fact that local governments will not be able to keep up with the building of roads, hospitals, schools and transport systems that citizens — both old and new — will demand.
A commenter at David’s blog quips that “It’s amazing how quickly the Economist turned into the Guardian“, but The Economist began to go in that direction quite suddenly in the late 1990s … at least, that was the point I noticed and gave up my annual subscription. As The Economist generally does not use author bylines, it’s not clear whether the change was driven by editorial diktat or staff changes over time, but what used to be a pretty staunch free market newspaper (as they prefer to call themselves) turned into a British version of typical American “liberal” magazines.
As Sixsmith points out, the masses of would-be immigrants to the west are not an undifferentiated cultural mass with broadly similar cultural, educational, and demographic profiles:
But what of proposed merits of open borders? A consistent failure of the Economist’s article is a reluctance to distinguish between different migrants. If one finds the study, it turns out that 54% of the men and women who expressed a desire to migrate came from Africa and the Middle East — with another 20% being from Central America. Yet the most successful immigrants, in terms of launching businesses and earning wealth, have been found to hail from Asia and Europe. A UCL study found that European immigrants to Britain contribute more to the economy than they take from it while the opposite is true for non-European immigrants. It is senseless, then, to claim, as the author of The Economist article does, that immigrants are “more likely than the native-born to bring new ideas and start their own businesses”. Immigrants do not come from “Immigrantland”. Population differences related to entrepreneurial and earning potential are real, and significant, and difficult to bridge.
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Tank Chats #17 Tiger I
Published on 1 Apr 2016
David Willey, The Tank Museum Curator and co-author of the Tiger Tank Owner’s Workshop Manual, presents this Tank Chat on the subject of the most famous tank in the Bovington collection – and perhaps the world – the German Tiger 1 from the Second World War, also known as Tiger 131.
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QotD: The power of unions
Moreover, the ability of unions to raise the wages of some workers does not mean that universal unionism could raise the wages of all workers. On the contrary, and this is a fundamental source of misunderstanding, the gains that strong unions win for their members are primarily at the expense of other workers.
The key to understanding the situation is the most elementary principle of economics: the law of demand — the higher the price of anything, the less of it people will be willing to buy. Make labor of any kind more expensive and the number of jobs of that kind will be fewer.
Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, 1980.
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