“The American welfare states focuses almost exclusively on helping relatively poor Americans, not absolutely poor foreigners.” I have long en

Ending the Welfare State is Not the End of the World

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2024-12-02 19:00:04

“The American welfare states focuses almost exclusively on helping relatively poor Americans, not absolutely poor foreigners.”

I have long enjoyed loudly pointing out this indisputable fact, but why? At minimum, this fact exposes the moral blindness of actually-existing leftist philosophy: “Oh thou hypocrites, if you really cared about the wretched of the Earth, you would want to take the money you are squandering on the 90th-percentile of the world income distribution, and give it to those at its 1st-percentile.”

Actually-existing leftist philosophers normally ignore my challenge. But a few marshal a reply along the lines of: “You libertarians are the real hypocrites. You don’t actually care about the global poor. You’re just name-dropping the global poor to distract us from your real agenda: Defunding the domestic poor to help the domestic rich. Sure, if we had to choose between helping relatively poor natives or absolutely poor foreigners, we should help absolutely poor foreigners. But that’s impossible in a democracy. Leftists aren’t hypocrites; we’re virtuous people trying to do the most good we can given political realities.”

How do I respond? If I were being defensive, I would start by objecting, “I don’t actually care about the global poor?! I am the author of Open Borders. Free migration from the Third World to the First is my top policy issue! Granted, most libertarians don’t share my prioritization, but no other political philosophy takes open borders — or Effective Altruism for the global poor — as seriously as libertarians do.”