If you have your axiom, allow him his. When someone claims to be logical, the implication is that their machinery for reasoning is intact. No logic can support its own axioms. You might claim that your construction is more generalizable or more minimal but you're demonstrating bad semantic training when you say that being logical is inconsistent with ascientific beliefs. And this would still be true even if you're reductio ad absurdum of Christianity didn't also preclude a belief in any ancient historical event, misidentify the social class of the authors of nearly all religious texts, or conflate the pseudo-scientific inferences made from theology with the essential theology itself.

We don't live in an endowment economy. The money you take home in pay isn't based on some money well that we're drawing from that is slowly running dry. Resources are both consumed and created.

You have to determine whether immigrant labor is a complement or substitute to your labor economically. The problem is that we tend to see unskilled labor as complementary to skilled labor. What this means is that more skilled labor increases the wages of unskilled workers and vice versa.

The challenge you have offered has been answered several times. The point is that it doesn't end up having that much of an effect in net anyway. Why are you so upset?

Bottom line: if you are skilled, you should be excited about low-wage immigrant labor because it actually benefits you. If you are unskilled, you should get skilled.

The *science* doesn't show any such thing. Theories and explanations are not the same thing as science. Really, the closest thing to *science* on this topic is empirical research done by sociologists and economists, most notably, IMHO, Professor Steven Levitt. Imprisonment has two effects: incapacitation and deterrence. In general, incapacitation is more significant, but deterrence is clearly a factor. That is, longer prison sentences do reduce crime rates. Sociologists have for a long time been saying that prisons teach people to be better criminals, but that's a tough idea to sell, and it's even harder to prove. It's just not enough to cite examples of people who say they made criminal contacts in prison. You don't know what they would have been doing during their time outside prison. Without good data, there is no proof. By the way, I believe Levitt would agree with your main point that prison sentences in the US need to be reduced, but not for any of the reasons you give. http://www.jstor.org/pss/725795