This Week: Quiet Quitting the Union; Natalism Goes Mainstream; EXIT Private Q&As

Quiet Quitting the Union

The Supreme Court lifted an injunction preventing Border Patrol from destroying Texas’ border barrier at Shelby Park, but Texas refused to give them access to do so.

Biden gave Governor Abbott one day to stand down and let Border Patrol through — Abbott refused, the day passed, and nothing happened.

The fight’s not over, but the situation illustrates how our media environment favors incumbency and the status quo:

Regardless of the legal merits or who had jurisdiction in theory, or even who had the most guns, the Biden Administration would have had to initiate violence to get their way — which both sides knew was a non-starter.

Meanwhile, the Texas Attorney General has demanded that Homeland Security provide:

“the official plat maps and deeds demonstrating the precise parcels to which they claim ownership, an explanation of how Texas is preventing access to those specific parcels, documentation showing that Eagle Pass or Texas ever granted permission for DHS to erect infrastructure that interferes with border security, and proof of Congress empowering DHS to turn a Texas park into an unofficial and illegal port of entry.”

In other words, he is bending the Biden Administration’s subterranean, legalistic, and bureaucratic mentality back against itself.

It’s unclear whether any of this changes the national immigration debate — it’s a big border, and there are plenty of places for the Biden Administration to let people in.

But there are other places where the states can use the power of incumbency and inertia to claw back sovereignty. Just don’t give the feds anything for free — force them to take you to court for everything, every time — and in cases where the court rules against you, but the public is on your side, invite the feds to decide whether this or that legal decision is worth firing on uniformed American citizens over.

Natalism Goes Mainstream

The last couple hit pieces have tried to frame natalism as a bizarre, icky, fringe, sexist, maybe even racist (?) thing to care about — but last week in Bloomberg Business, Tyler Cowen points out that in the global demographic collapse, it will indeed be Women and Minorities who are Hardest Hit.

Middle-income countries like Brazil, China, and Mexico have experienced a burst of output and consumption, as a population of healthy, productive workers made their way through life with neither children nor elderly dependents.

In particular, the Chinese pushed in all their chips on a bet that this generation of unburdened workers would bring the country to technological and productive parity with the West, and in some ways it worked — but now those workers are retiring, and there’s no young people to pay for their healthcare or buy their boondoggle investment properties.

But even without Chinese-style forced abortions and tax penalties, every country on earth is headed for a demographic death-spiral, in which the growing burden of elder care on a shrinking number of families depresses the birth rate even further.

As rich as we are, it’s not clear whether young American workers will be productive enough to support 4 adult dependents on top of feeding their own families — but it’s absurd to think of young workers in Guatemala or Romania doing it.

Robin Hanson is also banging the drum about the impending demographic collapse. He seems to think that there is basically no turning things around for the global secular monoculture, and it’s time to embrace that insular & aggressively pro-natalist communities will inherit the earth.

We’re working on getting them to NatalCon ‘24 — in the meantime, catch the NatalCon ‘23 replay.

EXIT News

• Last Tuesday, Charles Haywood took 90 minutes of questions on turning $50K into a $50M manufacturing empire. Short version is that it took some IQ arbitrage and a few lucky breaks — but I figure if we could be half as smart/lucky as Haywood, $25M would be okay.

• DC Meetup this Friday, February 2nd. Open to members and supporting newsletter subscribers. Sign up now to get your invite:

• Tomorrow, we will hold a group Q&A for a major real estate developer and investor. Topics:

  • What can we build to create real-world independence & control of space?

  • What does he think of the current real estate market & its prospects?

  • How did he scale his business into a position of regional political influence?

• EXIT now has a little beach-head on Urbit. We’re still playing around with it, but we have a supply of planets for members who want to try it out with us.

• You can now find our current meetup schedule on the website, along with a map of our existing membership distribution, so you can see if you’ve got EXIT guys in your area.

Meetup invites for Washington, DC (2/2/24), Salt Lake City (3/1/24), and Seattle (3/29/24) available below the fold.