CAnnoneer,
I think part of the problem with your view on labor supply is tied up in an inaccurate and imprecise view of history. Let's start with:
If that is the case, why is it that Italy was the technological, economic, and cultural leader of Europe? If it is all thanks to the Moors, Spain must have been, but it wasn't.
Italy had more contact with Muslim Spain and the Muslim middle east than any other European state. Sicily was Muslim controlled, and the Venetians operated ships between the two worlds regularly. This is a great example of how contact with the Arab/Turkish world spurred development in Europe.
By the same logic, China is the agricultural leader of the world, because it has the most peasants. Incidentally, North Africa did use to be the bread basket of Rome, but ecological damage and climate changes made it much less so by the Middle Ages.
Uh, where did I say that lots of peasants are good for the economy? Egypt was the breadbasket because of its climate, which, Egypt having fallen in the 7th century, could not have changed all that much from its Roman breadbasket days just a few decades before. Cairo and Alexandria continued to be major economic centers under Muslim rule, and their economies expanded because the Arab taxation system was far more generous. To tie this back to the point: Lower taxes and lots of economic freedoms will cause the economy to grow; not more soldiers on the border.
The Ottomans hired Hungarian and Italian engineers, including artillery and naval specialists, because they did not have their own. Europe had gunpowder since the 1200s, while Constantinople was reduced to rubble in 1453
The first Turks were not Ottomans. The Hungarians were, interestingly, Turkic peoples...from the same general area of the world. The earlier (mostly Muslim) Turkic invasions brought gunpowder to the West. A lot of that Turkish and Arab learning was transferred via the Crusades...interestingly, in the years just prior to the 13th century. Nice try, but "Turk" and "Ottoman" are not the same category, and there you will go wrong if you are trying to google yourself a short course in medieval history.
The Byzantine empire and its cities were the cultural, economic, and technological jewel of Southern Europe and the Near East since the times of Constantine himself (early 300s), simultaneously staving off the Islamic invaders since the 600s.
We use the term "Byzantine" today like we do because of the gross abuses and decaying legal system that existed in Byzantium at the time of the Muslim conquest. They had just finished a war to vanquish the Persians under Heraclius when the Muslim armies first appeared, and the Byzantines did not stave off any Islamic invaders at all. Heraclius's new empire fell to pieces as if no one in Byzantium cared to defend it...which was the case. In a couple of decades, Byzantium was reduced to a small piece of Anatolia. Most of the former citizens welcomed the Arabs with open arms, because they introduced religious freedom and much, much lower taxes.
Again, tie in to the immigration debate: more economic freedoms means growth. So you have to consider the reasons businesses are choosing to go with these illegals over other workers when you think about all the effects of closing the border.
As the Ottomans grabbed territory, they would exterminate virtually anybody who would not convert. In addition, they would do other "humane and enlightened" things like kidnapping Christian children en masse and training them into Islamic stormtroopers - the famous Janissaries. Historians estimate population losses to up to 70% over the period 1300-1500 in South Eastern Europe.
This is patently false. The Ottomans were the least concerned with religion of all the Muslim empires. Don't you think it's odd that there are still millions of Jews, Coptic Christians, Maronite Christians, Alawhites, and Druse all still living in areas that the Turks ruled from the 1400's up until World War I? Surely an extermination or conversion campaign under territory that was occupied continuously by large numbers of troops would've done a bit more? In fact, if you look at the primary sources...there are all kinds of records about the formation of the Millet system. Read that: a system for letting different religions govern themselves according to their own laws.
That 70 percent includes exactly the years that the Plagues and Mongols hit. It's misleading to cite it that way, since as you well know the death toll of the plague and Mongols combined made up the lion's share of those deaths.
Are you seriously equating 1300s feudalism with late 1700s feudalism? I guess you are.
No, I'm equating the hundred years war and the reformation laying the preconditions for the French Revolution. Not a peaceful or prosperous time, was it?
I tire of this foolishness. There is no benefit in arguing with somebody who combines sporadic sophomoric knowledge, sophistry methods, and single-minded prioritization of the appearance of "winning" at any cost. When the objective search for truth is forsaken, all that is left is circulation of hot air.
Apparently you tired of this before you read my posts, because you drew conclusions that were not there in order to create little straw men in the past post. (There's an example for you, jrfuser.)
To tie this back to immigration....which was the issue we were discussing, I think your inaccurate picture of historical development is clouding your judgment on illegal immigration. We're talkign about the costs of closing the border to keep people like the MS13 out, and I'm pointing to the labor costs involved.
