Note that most dictatorships use walls around their 'houses' to keep the population in, not to keep others out.
Note that countries that are bordering other countries with great wealth disparity are using walls to keep the wealth concentrated and those on the other side of the wall poor so they may be further exploited.
This is not the same as you and your roughly equally wealthy neighbor sharing a wall in a duplex or a fence between your two gardens.
Those fences and walls are there for practical reasons and to delineate responsibility and right-of-way, not to specifically make it harder for your neighbor to share in the collective wealth of the neighborhood.
The equivalent of that would be a gated community in a poor country (which by the way look exactly like inside-out prisons).
I think you miss a "despite" or "notwithstanding" somewhere there.
In any case, even though a country is indeed not a house in some ways (no ceiling for one), it is quite like a house in others -- a set of people live there, some where born there, others came later, but in any case, it's their house, they (and their parents and grandparents) maintained it over the years, and its their decision who comes in and how it's run.
>Note that most dictatorships use walls around their 'houses' to keep the population in, not to keep others out.
That's not generally applicable, except when the dictatorship can't guarantee enough prosperity or is especially violent towards some groups. It's safety and/or food primarily. Otherwise, most people have little intention of living merely for political freedom.
But even if so, it's orthogonal to our subject. Dictatorships might do that (keep their population in), but we're talking about the inverse (keep non-citizens out -- which, by some logic, would be what democracies do).
>Those fences and walls are there for practical reasons and to delineate responsibility and right-of-way, not to specifically make it harder for your neighbor to share in the collective wealth of the neighborhood.
Borders are there for very practical purposes too. To define the area that a nation state controls, taxes, enforces laws, etc, and to keep non citizens of that state, outside of it unless asked to come in.
No, I'm perfectly ok with what I wrote.
What I find interesting is that many people are perfectly ok with exploiting a poorer neighbor, but they definitely should stay on their side of the dotted line.
All this hoopla about illegal immigration, walls and repatriating jobs to the other side of that dotted line will have the exact opposite effect. Illegal immigration will go up.
It's akin to a chemistry process called osmosis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmosis
Since we're in broken analogy territory anyway, why not use another?
So, in osmosis you have a wall - which should be easy to identify as your border - and two liquids on either side with a varying concentration of some substance. Say 'wealth'.
Now for wealth to stop flowing from one side to the other you will have to reach some kind of equilibrium first.
The faster you reach that equilibrium the faster you no longer have to worry about 'illegal crossings of the wall'.
In the end that border wall never was about people: it was all about wealth, and possibly about the sharing of that wealth.
How is having trade with a poorer neighbor country "exploitation"? Or when manufacturing plants move to the poorer nation? How is that exploitation? It's not good for the higher-paid workers who now are unemployed in the richer country, but it's good for the workers in the poor country who now have jobs which they apparently want because those plants do get staffed quickly.
As for your equilibrium/osmosis analogy, what if that substance differs highly in concentration because there's fundamental differences between the two countries, and one of them is severely broken politically (the other one is too, just not as badly and not in the same way)? Until the fundamental problem in the poorer country is addressed, I don't see how you're going to ever achieve equilibrium unless it's to the severe disadvantage of the richer country (i.e., dragging them down). And the responsibility for fixing that is not with the richer country; doing that is generally called "imperialism" and not viewed positively these days.
Because HNers will fill in the blanks for you?
Claims to the contrary the map is not the territory and a country is not a house.
The correction is saying this should be:
Despite claims to the contrary the map is not the territory and a country is not a house.
This does not seem to change the meaning, but rather makes the sentence read sensibly.
They use them for both, as it is common for prisons.
> Note that countries that are bordering other countries with great wealth disparity are using walls to keep the wealth concentrated
As do you - you keep your household's wealth concentrated in your house and your bank account, instead of putting it outside on the street and let anybody who wants take a piece.
> not to specifically make it harder for your neighbor to share in the collective wealth of the neighborhood.
My neighbor's walls definitely make it harder for me to share his wealth. I think that's kind of the point.
Well, consider a country as a people's collective house.
In this, a border, if not analogous to the walls, is at least analogous to the fence around the house and/or the lock on the door.