I have another post up that outlines my general suspicion of advice.

In addition to what I say there, I have two reasons that I am suspicious of advice from successful people. First, the people receiving the advice may not be sufficiently like the advice-giver. “Never settle” may be great advice for a talented person like Steve Jobs, but it is probably not good advice for more average people like me. Second, there is a lot hindsight bias. A lottery winner might tell a graduating class, “never stop dreaming,” but clearly that is not good advice, at least to the extent that it means “buy lots of lottery tickets.”

Regarding success – I don’t want to attempt to nail out a strict definition on the fly, as I imagine I won’t do a very good job. Nonetheless, I suspect that most people are able to judge somebody’s relative successfulness, and that there is a large amount of overlap between people’s informed rankings. “You know it when you see it,” which is not to say that it can’t be defined, more or less accurately.

Also, the premise shouldn’t be that the government “can’t” conduct unreasonable searches, but that it is illegal for it to do so. But it doesn’t follow that the punishment must be exclusion. There are many ways to punish.

The Kaus quote could be interpreted two ways. He is either taunting people (i.e. Will Wilkinson) for being in the political minority, or implying that they/Wilkinson are wasting their time advocating a moral principle that people will never vote for. He may be right about that, but that isn’t a reason for anyone to adopt Kaus’s position instead of Wilkinson’s.

How is the latter fallacy related to the Kaus quote?

I haven’t written anything satisfactory, but I saw this Tyler Cowen comment and I thought it was interesting (see point number 1): http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/11/observations-about-rio.html

This is different from the “the welfare statement can’t handle too much immigration.” By public goods, I think we’re talking about police force, court system, perhaps some transportation infrastructure, public health measures, etc. i.e. Things that small gov’t types like myself would usually support.

I don’t know how much immigration the system can handle, but maybe there needs to be some restriction of some sort, if only minor. This sort of argument may also push us in the direction of Gary Becker, i.e. immigrants purchase citizenship. Some of this revenue can be used to pay for public goods.

To summarize, a utilitarian ethic that opposes immigration has to prioritize less poor natives over more poor foreigners (and richer natives). This might be a valuable self-serving procedure for less poor natives, but very few people upon reflection adopt this as an actual moral framework that is generalizable across society (whatever is in my interest is justified as law).

In any event, I’m more sympathetic to rights arguments, at least in this series of posts. A marginal gain to some class does not justify depriving central rights to another (poorer) class.
http://www.commentarius.org/?p=1147