Awhile back I was driving more and therefore listening to the radio more. Most of this post was written at that time and you could say it is sponsored by the nice gentleman so full of economic fallacies selling American cars in St. Louis who advertises heavily on the radio.
Immigration: Opposing politicians who tolerate or promote illegal aliens is understandable. Lawlessness is a problem, and I’m not too upset about other people being upset about it. Then again, I remember watching a movie in the seventies that expected me to cheer for a family that made it out of East Germany on a home-made hot air balloon. So breaking the law to cross the border to find prosperity (presumably this family’s quest wasn’t for West German welfare support) was not always so hard to sympathize with.
People come here and work for a living. Feeling threatened by this is to turn the entire nation into one giant labor union is shameful. I hear people actually and seriously comparing people who come here to find jobs to military invaders who need to be stopped by our own military. I hate border fascism.
More importantly, sinful as I am, I love God’s law.
Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; that your ox and your donkey may have rest, and the son of your servant woman, and the alien, may be refreshed (Exodus 23.12).
And I charged your judges at that time, “Hear the cases between your brothers, and judge righteously between a man and his brother or the alien who is with him” (Deuteronomy 1.16).
When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God (Leviticus 19.33, 34).
If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner, and he shall live with you (Leviticus 25.35).
For the assembly, there shall be one statute for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you, a statute forever throughout your generations. You and the sojourner shall be alike before the LORD. One law and one rule shall be for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you (Numbers 15.15, 16).
There is a problem when immigrants swamp “public” goods without paying for them. But that is only a little bit worse than natives swamping “public” goods. Public goods need to be privatized. If welfare is seriously a reason some come to the US, then it serves us right for inventing such parasitic programs. Frankly, virtually anyone you see who doesn’t work came from someone who at some point did work. Someone had to teach a next generation to stop imitating the previous generation. While I don’t deny there is personal guilt involved, it is not at the level that anyone has a right to characterize people as “lazy” or “freeloaders” or worse.
Unquestionably, unfunded mandates from Congress are becoming an unbearable burden to border states. Personally, I think all illegal aliens should be given some cash and put on a bus for New England. That might provide some more realistic policy. There ain’t know such thing as a free lunch. But the frustrations these problems cause should not be blamed on poor people trying to make a living.
From what I have read, characterizations of immigrants as pursuing free goodies are overblown. People come here to work, and in doing so, even illegal aliens pay some taxes. Of course, it is horrible that people who are wealthier and who can’t afford to live an “undocumented” life are unable to get into the country while other poor laborers get through, but the answer is to open our borders, not blame those who are worst off for trying to better themselves.
And then there is the plea and alleged moral imperative to “buy American.” How am I supposed to be patriotic about a country that produces such bad products or produces them in such an inefficient manner that they have to plead on the basis of race or soil or shared suffering under the same federal apparatus as a basis for choosing those products? If you are selling you are supposed to be selling something I need or that you can make me want and prefer to what others offer. Any real custom of choosing on the basis of nationalism simply allows industries that aren’t as good as their foreign competitors to continue to be second-rate. They should improve or close down so that investors and workers can find other industries where we can be superior to others.
It is amazing that people complain about our trade deficit and then say that it mandates protectionism. Protectionism redistributes wealth from those who sell products in the international market to those who sell in the domestic market. It guarantees that our trade deficits will only grow. How can somone whose domestic expenses go up compete in an international market where there is no way to fix prices or get protection from competitors? The more we make the cost of living higher the US the less we are able to produce anything at an attractive price point abroad.
We’ve numbed ourselves to this basic reality because of the international money game. Since dollars are the reserve currency of the world, there is an incentive for every other country to produce real goods to get our printed cash. It has been an awesome racket for while it could last. People slave long hours to make our flatscreen TVs while we consume goods and blame free trade for our manufacturing base going overseas. But there is no free market without sound money–i.e. money is a real commodity, not a paper with a mark on it. Our magic has run out and the world is waking up from the Federal Reserve’s enchantment.
Better adjust. We’re about to learn the real world limitations on the imaginary concept of “superpower.”