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- Name change and new content
Name change and new content
Freeing foreign workers, emancipation through liberalism. And after a crazy nine months, a minor reboot.
As is the style these days, hello after a long absence! I’m looking forward to having more regular content to pass along, thanks to securing some external commitment mechanisms. (Normalize getting the help you need to work!)
I’ll acknowledge the name change since it’ll be in your inboxes. This rebrand probably deserves a little write-up, but that will have to come later. For now, I’ll just say that Substack is less interactive than I guessed it might be. I still hope for feedback and disagreement, but Cheerful Remnant feels more right.
I’m back at The Hub, and you should expect at least a monthly contribution from me there going forward.
Today I argue that criticizing temporary foreign workers in Canada because of how they affect productivity is wrongheaded and scapegoats workers that we really do need. I’d like to see the “TFW” program reformed by liberalizing the work permits to protect the workers and bulk up our economy over the longer term, rather than by restricting it further to placate the loudest yelps of immigration critics. I’d also like to see Canadians get serious about evaluating the economic costs of popular policies rather than blaming those costs on foreign workers. An excerpt:
Every new worker increases Canada's economic potential. It's good to have and to steward natural resources, even if they're not being used yet. And it's good to have workers who can learn and produce more, even if they don't produce as much as they ever will yet. This is what Adam Smith meant when he wrote in The Wealth of Nations that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market.
Economic potential is separate from productivity. We might think of productivity as how much of our potential is being realized. It’s impossible to measure potential unless you have a crystal ball to tell you every worker's future—that’s why we focus on the snapshot we have of productivity. However, we can understand that potential exists and is realized over time. The growing productivity of immigrants as they become established in Canada is evidence of that.
Raising our potential for economic growth is at least as important as how much of that potential we use with high productivity. Immigration increases the number of workers and, with them, Canada’s economic potential. Immigration is not the problem.
You can read the whole thing here. The Hub has introduced a paywall since I first started writing for them (alas), but they have the option to pay $1 for a single article. I wish a lot more outlets would do the same!
I’m also a recent guest on Aaron Ross Powell’s Reimagining Liberty podcast talking about Liberalism as Emancipation. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking more and more about and hope to have some more writing in this vein soon.
I've become convinced that you kind of have to take the institutions that you've got and work with them. I used to be really into imagining the perfect institutions. And that's still fun over a couple drinks! But like in terms of social change, I look at the world as it exists right now and I look at the conversations that a marginalized group is having about what they want to achieve. And I look at the stonewall they sometimes feel like they come up against. And I think that behind that stonewall is power. And I think that the power is often concentrated in government. And I think that the change from that wall is going to have to come from people politically making a difference.
That doesn't have to be through passing laws, but it does have to be through changing minds.
It appears I also missed sending out my ode to David Boaz back in the spring at AdamSmithWorks—I refer to him in my appearance on Aaron’s podcast.
Boaz’s focus on the Enlightenment, tracing liberalism’s origins back to the Scientific Revolution, is also a reminder that liberalism has to be a learning philosophy to remain relevant. The challenges to liberalism and to freedom today are not the same as the ones that faced the world when Boaz joined the Cato Institute—that’s good. That’s progress. And Boaz has worked hard to remind us that “Respect for the dignity of each person is the foundation of moral and social progress.”
A liberalism that remembers that will always serve people who want to be free.
David has since passed away. His influence on my intellectual community is hard to understate, and I hope that I was able to capture what about it mattered most to me.
I’m very pleased that he read it and was flattered. It’s just what I wanted.
Other recs: