We live in a democracy.
The idea that we vote to screw ourselves over completely is strange.
Some people forget that everything isn't a zero sum game. Something can be good for companies and not bad for you. And something can be good for you and not bad for companies.
One word: Brexit
It should not be a surprise that social services are taken advantage by a large population of rural/republican voters who vote in candidates who’s explicit platform is removing or diminishing the very social services they depend on.
If they're a single-issue voter then - by definition - they are not voting against their interests. They just have different interests than you.
Maybe you care about a million things, mostly revolving around taxes.
Maybe all they care about is whether or not someone else can get an abortion.
That's THEIR interest.
It's in everyone's interest to get a good deal for their money. For example, we should all be for an efficient government, and efficient markets. However folks vote against those all the time without thinking about it, because their focus is elsewhere.
If you don't care about money, and only care about telling other people what to do - money isn't your interest. Telling other people what they can and can't do is your interest.
You seem to be incapable of grasping that other people care about other things than money.
The single issue of that voter maybe be the most overriding important issue for them, but it doesn’t mean that the consequences aren’t still a net negative for them (Or especially society as a whole).
To my previous point, they may be doing so with full knowledge or with partial knowledge. They may knows Candidate X supports Issue Y and that is their top line issue. They may not know Candidate X’s position on Issue A, B, or C.
Those positions may have an impact on what they would actually prefer to vote on.
Candidates are not single issue, even if voters are, but they often advertise them that way to limit single issue voters from knowing or caring about anything else they represent.
You can also vote for someone who says the thing you like or prefer but the reality of their plan is contradictory to the stated goal. (Preventing Medicare from negotiating drug costs will somehow make them less expensive, according to some candidates)
To be clear my point isn't to blame voters specifically. My point is that due to imperfect knowledge (Anywhere from willful ignorance to not learning enough about a candidate to the particular candidate straight up lying about things) people make choices in voting that can and do contradict their own interests.
Unions have a very specific set of rules to play by, and these rules are different for each country.
I was listening to an interviewer with a labor organizer on the US Mexican border who worked with new arrivals. He said the workers were used to unions from back in Mexico, but he had to spend lots of time educating folks about how things work in America.
Mexican unions have a level of corruption unheard of in even the most corrupt US unions.
The rules unions have to play by were put in place to reduce their power to effectively organize.
Only if by "secure" you mean prevent your population from leaving [1]. The whole origin of border control was to prevent people from leaving. The easy way to think about it is you can't leave a country without a passport but you can enter a country without a visa (exceptions apply).
Did you think about this statement for even 1 second?
It should be clearly and immediately obvious that it is easier to leave places like the US than it is to enter it.
This is obviously the case.
You cannot with a straight face claim that actually it is easier to enter the US than leave.
Clearly, leaving is easier.
It is in fact, 4x easier to enter the US than to leave. Passports are actually rare for a US citizen to have, you just live in a bubble.
[1]: https://www.trade.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/Fact%20She... [2]: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-us/reports-...
Thats not how that works, lol.
If it took a lot of effort, PER person to enter the US, there could still be a lot of people who enter the US.
> Passports are actually rare for a US citizen to have
Its not difficult to get a passport, regardless.
Pointing to how many people choose to leave the US, or get a passport, says very little about how easy it is to do that.
The amount of visitors would be limited by the size of the tourism industry and regulations around entry visas. This is an unrelated metric.
[1]
> Dispersed as it was, the village abroad was a curiously intimate place, where people knew each other, or of each other, or at least where one another came from. It has its own networks of information that paralleled the new colonial posts and telegraph. Rumour flew vast distances. It was into these byways that the story of Nguyen Tat Thanh [Ho Chi Minh] became interwoven, as he made his way through, and as the French attempted to trace his movements. The new regime in Indochina emerged out of a blizzard of papers for personal identification and restrictions on exit and entry.
[2]
> Migrants everywhere lived under the constant fear of sudden displacement or banishment. This practice of medieval rules was condemned in England by the Magna Carta of 1215, if never wholly discontinued. It was routine in the repertoire of colonial states. It was visited on Asian kings - the last Mughal emperor in 1958 and the deposed rulers of Burma in 1885, Vietnam in 1888 and 1907 and Korea in 1910 - as well as coolies. People of long residence could be suddenly expelled to some distant 'home', a point of imagined origin to which they might have few ties. This was a visceral exercise in power to cow and to shame: the life histories of the banished were recorded, their faces photographed, and the scars and other marks on their bodies mapped to guard against their return. In the Straights Settlements alone in 1914, 416 people were banished for life, and another 801 'vagrants' detained in prison, the great majority to be repatriated. Ministers denied in parliament that they used banishment to expel trade unionists from the colony.
[3]
> In no small part, modern empires were created in an effort to realize what the British Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Winston Churchill, in 1908 called 'a harmonious disposition of the world among its peoples'. At the cold heart of liberal visions of free trade and progress was a ruthless global and racial division of labour. Europeans monitored movement obsessively, enumerating and marshaling people towards their mines, plantations and households. Colonial regimes' ability to control subjects beyond their own borders, often in the name of exercising 'protection' over them, became a yardstick of their authority and a challenge to their prestige. Who were all these people, and to whom did they belong? Who was what they said they were, and who was not, and how could it be proven?
[1] - Underground Asia, pp. 56
[2] - Ibid, pp. 61
[3] - Ibid, pp. 62-63
I have never heard this explanation. Where is it coming from? It sounds not only wrong but inverted to me. Governments enforce borders to effectively secure their territory and people, and thus its own power. Is the idea that, without the “legal fiction” of borders, we’d have some kind of global autoworkers Union or something?