At the recent Politicon conference cult meeting thing, Cenk Uygur and Tucker Carlson had a debate. I will take selective statements that I think represents issues with each position presented.

They start with the issue of immigration and Tucker is asked first about the issue. Carlson distinguishes the issue of moral and political obligations. While a nation may be not obligated to immigrants it is obligated to enforce the laws of the land and to the citizens of their respective country. Cenk uses the example of Nazis and Jewish migrants when the United States turned Jewish ships away and thus Jews were murdered.

I think the issue is that the situations aren’t equivalent. It is not as if that every illegal immigrant is facing genocide. Most are just facing poverty. I hold to Milton Friedman’s view on immigration. The only issue(other than possible security) that immigration is illegal is because the invention of the welfare state is incompatible with constant inflows of immigrants.

http://spirited-tech.com/COG/2017/08/17/milton-friedman-illegal-immigration/

Tucker pivots to a position where immigrants steal American jobs. He references Hugo Chávez an example of someone eliminating immigration to keep wages up and he imputes anti-immigration laws of the last century to Democrats being in bed with workers unions. Cenk and Tucker agree on most of these issues, that Republicans were fine with immigration to exploit the workers. They disagree about the solution to the issue they see. One thinks that government intervention is the solution, but Tucker thinks the issue is the government solution is to enforce the laws it currently holds.

I think that Tucker simply begs the question to whether the current laws on immigration simply need to be changed. Cenk and Carlson are too eager to attribute all issues to the greed of wealthy people. It is false to assume that the rich must in order to acquire their wealth trick and exploit the lower classes. It is obviously false for the fact that if we all recognized that we are merely being misused we simply would never have come to the United States or we would just leave. Why would immigrants come to a land in which they are just mistreated? Furthermore, the fact of the matter is that the rich also pay a large amount of the taxes and that high taxes on the top 10% of earners in this country is a disadvantage for the lower class:

• • America’s progressive tax system is the most progressive—higher rates for higher earners—in the developed world. View Source
  • The top 10% of all earners in 2012 paid 70% of all federal income tax, while earning only 48% of all national income. View Source
  • In 2012, the top 1% paid 38.1% of all federal taxes, but took home only 21.9% of all income earned. View Source
  • Academic studies indicate that high taxes have a significant negative impact on economic growth. View Source
  • The poor suffer the most when the economy suffers, and these negative effects can be long-lasting. View Source
  • Read UCLA economist Dr. Lee Ohanian on taxes and economic growth. View Sourcehttps://www.prageru.com/videos/do-rich-pay-their-fair-share

The other issue is that Cenk and Tucker forget that people have chosen to work these jobs. Nobody is a slave and lacks a choice to get up and leave. They have the burden to show that some objective moral norm is being violated. They attribute low wages to corporations. But why suppose any injustice is occurring if it was?  The workers accept the rates they are paid and life continues on. The fact of the matter is that it is a voluntary transaction that doesn’t cross any moral boundaries. It isn’t a universally accepted idea that increasing the minimum wage actually helps the poor:

• Because a higher minimum wage increases unemployment among low-skilled workers, it adversely affects the poor by making fewer jobs available for them. View Source
• Past increases in the minimum wage made some lower and middle-class people poorer and led to an increase in the overall poverty rate. View Source
• By one estimate, only 11% of people who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage actually live in a poor household. View Source

https://www.prageru.com/videos/whats-right-minimum-wage

The issue of public education was brought up by Cenk. He makes a comment about how the rich pay for their kids to go to private schools and skip out for paying for public schools. Why does Cenk suppose it is the obligation of the wealthy to pay for others education? Does Cenk think the rich need to also babysit his children(the irony is that he is rich himself)? Are the rich to parent everyone’s kids as well? Why should they pay for an education system their kid doesn’t use? What proof does Cenk have to show that money is the problems with schools? We dump billions of dollars into failing school programs and they never seem to improve. So, the burden is on Cenk to show a lack of cash is the problems with schools. I think the problems with schools is cultural and that schools should be privatized.

The rest of the conversation is about campaign finance reform. I think that Cenk’s “money out of politics” idea is stupid for the following reasons:

1. You can’t arbitrarily create restrictions on donations if no law is being violated and people want to give money to have political influence. What role is it of the government to say how much can be donated?

2. It seems to me rather obvious that politicians can make and receive money other ways from their constituency. So, it isn’t as if the politician can’t receive money through other means such as affiliated business deals and kickbacks.

3. It isn’t universally recognized that campaign finance reform actually is a beneficial idea:

This video covers all the other issues that I didn’t touch upon: