It's just the flip side of the utilitarian idea that you have to give everything you own to charity (except for the money you need to keep making more money to give to charity). Pretty much nobody actually does this, but utilitarianism demands it.
Except in this case, it's not about reducing your utility to increase other people's utility by a greater amount, it's about reducing the utility of everyone in the country to increase other people's utility by a greater amount. It's always easier robbing Peter to pay Paul if you are not Peter.
Or for another comparison, taxation. We could let in lots of immigrants, decreasing the utility of people already in the country for a greater increase in the utility of other people. We could also tax people in the country and use it to buy foreigners a whole series of things starting with malaria nets, again reducing the utility of people already in the country for a greater increase in the utility of other people. Yet taxing locals for the benefit of outsiders is something we only do to a very limited extent, and mostly when giving things to outsiders also brings us some benefit.
(And before you say libertarians don't believe in initiation of force, most libertarians are not anarchocapitalists and do think there is some role for government.)
it's about reducing the utility of everyone in the country
What? If an employer is willing to hire the immigrant, this means that his labour is more valuable to her than her money, and if a grocer is willing to sell him food, this means that his money is more valuable to her than her food, so it'd seem like the immigrant is providing positive net value to the original population of the country, isn't him?
New chapter!
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 102.
There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: