Coyote Blog

I never said my immigration opinions were widely held here in Arizona, but apparently they are not popular nationally either:

The new poll finds 61 percent of voters nationally think Arizona was right to take action instead of waiting for the federal government to do something on immigration. That's more than twice as many as the 27 percent who think securing the border is a federal responsibility and Arizona should have waited for Washington to act. . . . Significantly more voters think the Obama administration should wait and see how the new law works (64 percent) than think the administration should try to stop it (15 percent).

Oh well.  Its not like being in the minority is a new thing for me.

What I would really like to understand is:  what drives these folks?

I will take them at their word that it is not racism.

If its violent or property crime, the stats are pretty clear that immigrants don't really contribute to these crimes disproportionately.

If its gang violence at the border, I am wondering what people see in the law's rules that allow easier harassment of day laborers and brown-skinned people with broken turn signals that they think is going to deter gang members supposedly armed with AK47's.

If its competition for jobs, well, I encourage folks to learn how the economy actually works (hint:  it's dynamic, not static), and further, encourage them to figure out why they feel they can't compete with unskilled, uneducated laborers who don't speak the native language.

Finally, if it is, as many of my emailers claim, just a matter of the rule of law -- "THEY ARE ILLEGAL" as I get in many emails, inevitably all in caps, then why not just legalize their presence?  After all, I lament all the hardships associated with marijuana law enforcement but you don't see me advocating new rules to incrementally harass potential possessors -- I am grown up enough to know form history that such efforts are never going to work as long as their is an enthusiastic supply and demand.  I advocate legalization.

As is usual when I make an immigration post (wherein I am supportive of open immigration and suspicious of gung-ho enforcement efforts) I got mail saying that the real concern here is the rule of law.   People inevitably want to inform me that this immigration is ILLEGAL (usually in caps) and that these immigrants are BREAKING THE LAW and that the law cannot be enforced unevenly.

First, I am happy to listen to this argument from any commenter who has never broken the speed limit or done a rolling stop at a stop sign.

Second, I would like to offer the rule of law folks, especially those on the right side of the aisle, a thought problem:  Soon, it will be illegal to not purchase a health insurance policy that meets specifications set by Congress.  It is anticipated, however, given relatively low fines, that many people will break this law and not obtain health insurance.   This failure will be ILLEGAL.  These people will be criminals.  Do those of you who seek higher penalties, more robust enforcement, police sweeps, and reduced standards of probable cause for people committing the crime of illegal immigration also plan to seek the same higher penalties for lawbreakers who do not buy an insurance policy?   After all, as you have said, this is not about the law itself but respect for the rule of law.

By your immigration logic, we should be ruthless about lawbreakers who do not have the right insurance policy.  We should encourage the Minutemen to patrol for people without health insurance -- after all, they have said that their concern is with people breaking the law, not immigration or Mexicans per se.  There should be sweeps where people can be arrested for suspicion of not having health insurance, just as they can be arrested under our new AZ law for suspicion that they do not have a green card.

If there is a difference, please explain it to me.  I understand that you may be opposed to open immigration or high immigration rates or immigration by poor uneducated people or whatever.  If so, fine, we disagree -- but stop saying that this is all about the rule of law, or telling me we can't pick and choose what laws we violate.  Because we do the latter all the time.  Our willingness to challenge the state is a large part of American exceptionalism.

PS- Just to avoid misunderstandings from trolls who do not usually read this site, of course I do not advocate the above for health insurance violations.  Just as I don't for Mexicans seeking a better life in this country without obtaining a license to do so from the government.

Disclosure: I have several good friends who are illegal immigrants.  They are wonderful, hard-working people who have been in this country for years.  If we were to conduct tests of people's acceptability to be present in this country, they would pass with scores far ahead of many US citizens.

Update:  I find the argument that open immigration and an overly-generous welfare state can't coexist to be moderately compelling, though I don't see why we could tie citizenship narrowly to receiving these benefits.  I have problems saying that a government license in the form of a green card is required for mere presence in the country.  I have no problem imposing this licensing requirement for receipt of unearned goodies.

This is a recurring post on Coyote Blog on Memorial Day, but I forgot this year so I will repost it on July 4.  Greetings this year from the Mother Country, from which I will be returning soon.  And let's give a big shout-out to the Dutch, who seldom get much love on this point, but the Dutch perhaps even more than the English really pioneered a lot of things that are important to us - e.g. capitalism, a republic, and tolerance.

The Liberty Papers thinks we have become a lawless Banana Republic.  George Will is thinking along the same lines, snarkily observing that Sweden, China, and Mexico have all observed in one way or another that the Feds seem to be acting outside the rule of law.

I have opined in the past that what really extended the Great Depression was not any real underlying economic issue, or even vast increases in government spending per se.  It was that arbitrariness with which the Roosevelt administration dealt with economic matters.  With nutty programs like the Mussolini-inspired National Industrial Recovery Act coming and going, investors and businesses never knew from day to day what the rules of the game would be next year, or even next week.

I fear that this is exactly the climate Obama and Congress are creating today.

• When Congress reacts to CNN headlines by retroactively confiscating legal compensation that it had protected just weeks before, what will happen to my compensation?
• When government deficits soar by trillions of dollars, what will taxes look like next year?
• When the Administration says that Co2 will have to be reduced by 80%, what numbers do I plug into my forecasts for fuel and electricity?
• When the government decides on a whim to print a trillion dollars more money to pay off government debt, what will inflation look like in the coming months and years?

As of two months ago, my company was still investing.  We were still getting bank credit, particularly for equipment financing, though it took more work than in the past to secure it.  We still saw opportunity in our business, and in fact saw increased opportunity in the recession for low-cost recreation options and outsourcing of public recreation facilities.

But today, I am reluctant to make any new investments.  Investing $5000 now for $8,000 a year from now normally sounds good, but what happens now that the Feds have more than doubled the money supply?  How much will $8,000 really be worth a year from now?  What will my taxes be on the increase?**  What new costs or liabilities  might be retroactively placed on me for making the investment?  What happens if beltway pundits start thinking I am making too much money?

All this commotion of government intervention started when Paulson and other Bush appointees started screaming that the banking system was going to shut down and therefore crash the whole economy.  As my readers know, I believe to this day that this was all sky-is-falling over-reaction and panic-mongering, and most of the credit crunch resulted from uncertainty about the Treasury and its statements, not due to realities on the ground.   However, whatever tightening of credit we might or might not have avoided by government action, it pales in its effect on investment in comparison to the arbitrariness and trillion-dollar-plan-of-the-day that has been the first 60 days of the Obama administration.

** footnote: For those of you who have not lived through high inflation times, taxes and inflation are a deadly combination.  That is because the Federal Government, after creating inflation, then taxes each of us on its effects.  Here is an example:  Invest $5000 now at a fixed 10% a year.  Suddenly, inflation goes up to 8% a year.  In five years, I now have a bit over $8000.  In economic terms I have made a small profit of, since $8000 in five years at 8% inflation is worth $5,445 today.

But the IRS thinks I have made $3000, not just $445, and will tax me on the full $3000.  If they take a third, I only have $7000 at the end, or $4,764 in current dollars, meaning that after taxes, I actually lost money.

Those who oppose more open immigration generally have three arguments, to which I have varying levels of sympathy:

• It's illegal!  Illegal immigration violates the rule of law.  I have always thought this argument weak and circular.  If the only problem is that immigrants are violating the law, then the law can be changed and its now all legal.  Since this is not the proposed solution, presumably there are other factors that make more open immigration bad beyond just the fact of its illegality.  I am positive I could come up with hundreds of bad laws that if I asked a conservative, "should I aggressively enforce this bad law or should I change it," the answer would be the latter.
• We will be corrupting our culture.  I am never fully sure what these arguments mean, and they always seem to carry a touch of racism, even if that is not what is intended.  So I will rewrite this complaint in a way I find more compelling:  "We are worried that in the name of liberty and freedom, we will admit immigrants who, because of their background and culture, will vote against liberty and freedom when they join our democracy."  I am somewhat sympathetic to this fear, though I think the horse may already be out of the barn on this one.  Our current US citizens already seem quite able to vote for restrictions on liberties without any outside help.  If I were really worried about this, I might wall off Canada before Mexico.
• Open Immigration or Welfare State:  Pick One.  I find this the most compelling argument for immigration restrictions.  Historically, immigration has been about taking a risk to make a better life.  I have been reading a biography of Andrew Carnegie, which describes the real risks his family took, and knew they were taking, in coming to America.  But in America today, we aren't comfortable letting people bear the full risk of their failure.  We insist that the government step in with our tax money and provide people a soft landing for their bad decisions (see:  Mortgage bailout) and even provide them with a minimum income that in many cases dwarfs what they were making in their home country. 

My problem with conservatives is that they are too fast to yell "game over" after making these arguments, particularly the third.  There are some very real reasons why conservatives, in particular, should not so easily give up on finding a way to allow more free immigration.  Consider these questions:

• Should the US government have the right and the power to dictate who I can and cannot hire to work for me in my business?
• Should the US government have the right and the power to dictate who can and cannot take up residence on my property (say as tenants)?

My guess is that many conservatives would answer both these questions in the negative, but in reality this is what citizenship has become:  A government license to work and live in the boundaries of this nation.

I can't accept that.  As I wrote here:

The individual rights we hold dear are our rights as human beings, NOT
as citizens.  They flow from our very existence, not from our
government. As human beings, we have the right to assemble with
whomever we want and to speak our minds.  We have the right to live
free of force or physical coercion from other men.  We have the right
to make mutually beneficial arrangements with other men, arrangements
that might involve exchanging goods, purchasing shelter, or paying
another man an agreed upon rate for his work.  We have these rights and
more in nature, and have therefore chosen to form governments not to be
the source of these rights (for they already existed in advance of
governments) but to provide protection of these rights against other
men who might try to violate these rights through force or fraud....

These rights of speech and assembly and commerce and property
shouldn't, therefore, be contingent on "citizenship".  I should be
able, equally, to contract for service from David in New Jersey or Lars
in Sweden.  David or Lars, who are equally human beings,  have the
equal right to buy my property, if we can agree to terms.  If he wants
to get away from cold winters in Sweden, Lars can contract with a
private airline to fly here, contract with another person to rent an
apartment or buy housing, contract with a third person to provide his
services in exchange for wages.  But Lars can't do all these things
today, and is excluded from these transactions just because he was born
over some geographic line?  To say that Lars or any other "foreign"
resident has less of a right to engage in these decisions, behaviors,
and transactions than a person born in the US is to imply that the US
government is somehow the source of the right to pursue these
activities, WHICH IT IS NOT...

I can accept that there can be some
minimum residence requirements to vote in elections and perform certain
government duties, but again these are functions associated with this
artificial construct called "government".  There should not be, nor is
there any particular philosophical basis for, limiting the rights of
association, speech, or commerce based on residency or citizenship,
since these rights pre-date the government and the formation of borders.

I have advocated for years that the concept of citizenship needs to be unbundled (and here, on the Roman term Latin Rights).   Kerry Howley makes a similar argument today:

Citizenships are club memberships you happen to be born with. Some
clubs, like the Norway club, have truly awesome benefits. Others, like
the Malawi club, offer next to none. Membership in each club is kept
limited by club members, who understandably worry about the drain on
resources that new members might represent. Wishing the U.S. would
extend more memberships in 2008 isn't going to get you very far.   

Conceptually,
for whatever reason, most of us are in a place where we think labor
market access and citizenships ought to be bundled. A Malawian can't
come work here, we think, without the promise of a club membership,
which is nearly impossible to get. This is an incredibly damaging
assumption for two reasons: (1) memberships are essentially fixed in
wealthy democratic societies (2) uneven labor market access is a major
cause of global inequality. Decoupling the two leads to massive gains,
as we see in Singapore, without the need to up memberships.   

Here's
another way to think about it: Clubs have positive duties toward their
members, including those of the welfare state. But the negative duty
not to harm outsiders exists prior to clubs, and denying people the
ability to cooperate with one another violates their rights in a very
basic way. Our current policy is one of coercively preventing
cooperation. In saying "we can't let people into this country unless we
confer upon them all the rights and duties of citizenship," you are
saying that we need to violate their right to move freely and cooperate
unless we can give them welfare benefits. But that's backwards.

I propose that we waive the normal waiting period and induct Eliot Spitzer right away into the statist hall of fame.  Few men in modern government have been able to demonstrate such a lack of respect for the rule of law and individual rights vs. their own power than Mr. Spitzer:

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was unabashed on Wednesday
about declaring himself a "steamroller" and the most accomplished
governor in the history of the state after three weeks on the job.

"I
am a fucking steamroller and I'll roll over you or anybody else," the
Democratic governor told Republican Assemblyman James Tedisco in a
private conversation last week, the New York Post reported on Wednesday.

"I've done more in three weeks than any governor has done in the history of the state," Spitzer also said, the Post reported. 

Asked at a news conference if the comments were inappropriately boastful, Spitzer replied tersely, "No. Next question."

Twenty-five years ago at Princeton, Mr. Spitzer's uniquely irritating ruling style inspired the normally silent and apathetic majority to rise up in an incredibly humorous coup, let by the Antarctic Liberation Front.

For those who, like me, have trouble decoding why certain SCOTUS justices make the rulings that they do, Richard Epstein propounds an interesting theory in the WSJ ($) today.  He says that you can't relay on traditional conservative or liberal monikers to predict when a justice will back an expansion of government and when she/he will rule to reign it in.

In principle, it would nice if both sides of the
ideological spectrum displayed a sound and consistent position on
statutory construction. Unfortunately, each bloc is opportunistic. The
litmus test for this erratic behavior boils down to a factor not found
in any statute: trust.

The court's two wings share one trait: They defer only
to the government officials they trust. Otherwise, they read a statute
carefully to rein in the authority of officials they don't trust. The
two factions don't differ in their philosophy of language, or in their
on-again, off-again adherence to the rule of law. Rather, the court's
liberal wing profoundly distrusts this president, but has great
confidence in the domestic administrative agencies that regulate
matters such as the environment. The conservative wing of the court
flips over. It willingly defers to the president on national security
issues while looking askance at expansionist tendencies of the
administrative agencies.

This feels as right as any theory I have read of late.  And I certainly can get behind this:

Our Constitution starts out with a presumption of distrust of all
government actors, which is why it drew a sharp line between the
legislative and executive branches. We can argue until the cows come
home whether national security or environmental protection presents the
greater threat of executive or administrative misuse. But that ranking
really doesn't matter, because there is no reason why the Supreme Court
has to defer to overaggressive public officials in either context.
Justice Stevens rightly chastised the president for flouting the rule
of law in Hamdan. But he was tone deaf on the easier question
of statutory construction when blessing the Corps' extravagant reading
of the statute in Rapanos.

Happy Birthday to the greatestn nation on earth.  I spend a lot of time criticizing our leaders and their policies, but there is no place else I would live.  The US Constitution is still, over two-hundred years after its creation, the greatest single document ever written.  Many other countries since have written constitutions and spilled tons of ink pontificating on theories of government, but none have had similar success in protecting individual rights while creating an environment where every individual can focus their productive energies in whatever direction they choose with generally minimal interference.

A while back I wrote about how wealth was created, and I pointed out that the great leaps we have made in human well-being over the last two hundred or so years stem from two effects:

Sure, our leaders, our military, and sometimes the nation as a whole screws up.  I and others are quick to point these screw-ups out and sometimes we find ourselves wallowing in them.  But at the end of the day, unlike in the majority of countries in the world, these screw-ups are treated as such, talked about and debated, and dealt with rather than treated as the norm. 

Take the US military in an occupying role in Iraq.  Out of 100,000 or so people, you are going to have some criminals who commit criminal acts, even in the military.  The US army, unlike nearly every occupying army in history, generally treats its soldiers' crimes as crimes, and not as the inherent right of victors to rape and pillage.  US soldiers who have committed crimes in Iraq will generally go to jail, while worse malefactors in most armies, even the holier-than-thou UN peacekeepers who seem to be engaging in rape and white slavery around the world, generally go unpunished.  For all the crap the US military takes around the world, I bet you that if you took an honest vote on the question of "Which world army would you choose to occupy your country if you lost a war" most people would answer the US.  If for no other reason because, despite all the charges of imperialism, our armies eventually leave rather than remain on as lingering masters.

So tomorrow, I will start dealing out more crap to our leaders, to the administration, to Congress, to the SCOTUS, and most especially to most every bureaucrat who thinks they can better manage my business or my property.  But today I will step back and see the forest rather than the trees, and observe I am dang lucky to be an American.

For further thoughts, I refer you to .  They tend to celebrate first the "right to vote", when in fact many people get to vote but few enjoy the freedoms we do.  The greatness of our country is in our protection of individual liberties and the rule of law.  And the great insight our country was founded with is that rights flow from the very fact of our humanity -- they are not granted to us by kings or Congress.  This last is perhaps most important, as I wrote:

At the end of the day, our freedoms in this country will only last so
long as we as a nation continue to hold to the principle that our
rights as individuals are our own, and the government's job is to
protect them, not to ration them.  Without this common belief, all the
other institutions we have discussed, from voting to the rule of law to
the Constitution, can be subverted in time

Now I am off to see Buckingham Palace.  If I see the Queen, would it be in bad taste to wish her a happy Fourth of July?

I was going to write a Fourth of July post, but it kept looking like my past Memorial Day effort, so, since I am in France and ready to go consume more food, I will take a shortcut this holiday:

Every Memorial Day, I am assaulted with various quotes from people
thanking the military for fighting and dying for our right to vote.  I
would bet that a depressing number of people in this country, when
asked what their most important freedom was, or what made America
great, would answer "the right to vote."

Now, don't get me wrong, the right to vote in a representative
democracy is great and has proven a moderately effective (but not
perfect) check on creeping statism.  A democracy, however, in and of
itself can still be tyrannical.  After all, Hitler was voted into power
in Germany, and without checks, majorities in a democracy would be free
to vote away anything it wanted from the minority - their property,
their liberty, even their life.   Even in the US, majorities vote to curtail the rights of minorities all the time, even when those minorities are not impinging on anyone else.  In the US today, 51% of the population have voted to take money and property of the other 49%.

In my mind, there are at least three founding principles of the
United States that are far more important than the right to vote:

• The Rule of Law.  For about 99% of human
  history, political power has been exercised at the unchecked capricious
  whim of a few individuals.  The great innovation of western countries
  like the US, and before it England and the Netherlands, has been to
  subjugate the power of individuals to the rule of law.  Criminal
  justice, adjudication of disputes, contracts, etc. all operate based on
  a set of laws known to all in advance.

Today the rule of law actually faces a number of threats in this
country.  One of the most important aspects of the rule of law is that
legality (and illegality) can be objectively determined in a repeatable
manner from written and well-understood rules.  Unfortunately, the
massive regulatory and tax code structure in this country have created
a set of rules that are subject to change and interpretation constantly at
the whim of the regulatory body.  Every day, hundreds of people and
companies find themselves facing penalties due to an arbitrary
interpretation of obscure regulations (examples I have seen personally here).

• Sanctity and Protection of Individual Rights.
  Laws, though, can be changed.  In a democracy, with a strong rule of
  law, we could still legally pass a law that said, say, that no one is
  allowed to criticize or hurt the feelings of a white person.  What
  prevents such laws from getting passed (except at major universities)
  is a protection of freedom of speech, or, more broadly, a recognition
  that individuals have certain rights that no law or vote may take
  away.  These rights are typically outlined in a Constitution, but are
  not worth the paper they are written on unless a society has the desire
  and will, not to mention the political processes in place, to protect
  these rights and make the Constitution real.   

Today,
even in the US, we do a pretty mixed job of protecting individual
rights, strongly protecting some (like free speech) while letting
others, such as property rights or freedom of association, slide. 

• Government is our servant.
  The central, really very new concept on which this country was founded
  is that an individual's rights do not flow from government, but are
  inherent to man.  That government in fact only makes sense to the
  extent that it is our servant in the defense of our rights, rather than
  as the vessel from which these rights grudgingly flow.

Statists
of all stripes have tried to challenge this assumption over the last
100 years.   While their exact details have varied, every statist has
tried to create some larger entity to which the individual should be
subjugated:  the Proletariat, the common good, God, the master race.
They all hold in common that the government's job is to sacrifice one
group to another.  A common approach among modern statists is to create
a myriad of new non-rights to dilute and replace our fundamental rights
as individuals.  These new non-rights, such as the "right" to health
care, a job, education, or even recreation, for god sakes, are
meaningless in a free society, as they can't exist unless one
person is harnessed involuntarily to provide them to another person.
These non-rights are the exact opposite of freedom, and in fact require
enslavement and sacrifice of one group to another.

Don't believe that this is what statists are working for? The other day I saw this quote from the increasingly insane Lou Dobbs (Did you ever suspect that Lou got pulled into a room a while back by some strange power broker as did Howard Beale in Network?):

Our population explosion not only detracts from our quality of life but
threatens our liberties and freedom as well. As Cornell's Pimentel puts
it, "Back when we had, say, 100 million people in the U.S., when I
voted, I was one of 100 million people. Today, I am one of 285 million
people, so my vote and impact decreases with the increase in the
population." Pimentel adds, "So our freedoms also go down the drain."

What??
In a society with a rule of law protecting individual rights, how does
having a diluted vote reduce your freedom?  The only way it does, and therefore what must be in the author's head, is if
one looks at government as a statist tug of war, with various parties
jockeying for a majority so they can plunder the minority.  But in this
case, freedom and rule of law are already dead, so what does a
dilution of vote matter?  He is arguing that dilution of political
power reduces freedom -- this country was rightly founded on just the
opposite notion, that freedom requires a dilution of political power.

At the end of the day, our freedoms in this country will only last
so long as we as a nation continue to hold to the principle that our
rights as individuals are our own, and the government's job is to
protect them, not to ration them.  Without this common belief, all the
other institutions we have discussed, from voting to the rule of law to
the Constitution, can be subverted in time.

So to America's soldiers, thank you.  Thank you for protecting this
fragile and historically unique notion that men and women own
themselves and their lives.

Every Memorial Day, I am assaulted with various quotes from people thanking the military for fighting and dying for our right to vote.  I would bet that a depressing number of people in this country, when asked what their most important freedom was, or what made America great, would answer "the right to vote."

Now, don't get me wrong, the right to vote in a representative democracy is great and has proven a moderately effective (but not perfect) check on creeping statism.  A democracy, however, in and of itself can still be tyrannical.  After all, Hitler was voted into power in Germany, and without checks, majorities in a democracy would be free to vote away anything it wanted from the minority - their property, their liberty, even their life.   Even in the US, majorities vote to curtail the rights of minorities all the time, even when those minorities are not impinging on anyone else.  In the US today, 51% of the population have voted to take money and property of the other 49%.

In my mind, there are at least three founding principles of the United States that are far more important than the right to vote:

• The Rule of Law. For about 99% of human history, political power has been exercised at the unchecked capricious whim of a few individuals.  The great innovation of western countries like the US, and before it England and the Netherlands, has been to subjugate the power of individuals to the rule of law.  Criminal justice, adjudication of disputes, contracts, etc. all operate based on a set of laws known to all in advance.

Today the rule of law actually faces a number of threats in this country.  One of the most important aspects of the rule of law is that legality (and illegality) can be objectively determined in a repeatable
manner from written and well-understood rules.  Unfortunately, the massive regulatory and tax code structure in this country have created a set of rules that are subject to change and interpretation constantly at the whim of the regulatory body.  Every day, hundreds of people and companies find themselves facing penalties due to an arbitrary interpretation of obscure regulations (examples I have seen personally here).

• Sanctity and Protection of Individual Rights.  Laws, though, can be changed.  In a democracy, with a strong rule of law, we could still legally pass a law that said, say, that no one is allowed to criticize or hurt the feelings of a white person.  What prevents such laws from getting passed (except at major universities) is a protection of freedom of speech, or, more broadly, a recognition that individuals have certain rights that no law or vote may take away.  These rights are typically outlined in a Constitution, but are not worth the paper they are written on unless a society has the desire and will, not to mention the political processes in place, to protect these rights and make the Constitution real.

Today, even in the US, we do a pretty mixed job of protecting individual rights, strongly protecting some (like free speech) while letting others, such as property rights or freedom of association, slide.

• Government is our servant.  The central, really very new concept on which this country was founded is that an individual's rights do not flow from government, but are inherent to man.  That government in fact only makes sense to the extent that it is our servant in the defense of our rights, rather than as the vessel from which these rights grudgingly flow.

Statists of all stripes have tried to challenge this assumption over the last 100 years.   While their exact details have varied, every statist has tried to create some larger entity to which the individual should be subjugated:  the Proletariat, the common good, God, the master race.  They all hold in common that the government's job is to sacrifice one group to another.  A common approach among modern statists is to create a myriad of new non-rights to dilute and replace our fundamental rights as individuals.  These new non-rights, such as the "right" to health care, a job, education, or even recreation, for god sakes, are meaningless in a free society, as they can't exist unless one
person is harnessed involuntarily to provide them to another person.
These non-rights are the exact opposite of freedom, and in fact require
enslavement and sacrifice of one group to another.

Don't believe that this is what statists are working for? The other day I saw this quote from the increasingly insane Lou Dobbs (Did you ever suspect that Lou got pulled into a room a while back by some strange power broker as did Howard Beale in Network?):

Our population explosion not only detracts from our quality of life but threatens our liberties and freedom as well. As Cornell's Pimentel puts it, "Back when we had, say, 100 million people in the U.S., when I voted, I was one of 100 million people. Today, I am one of 285 million people, so my vote and impact decreases with the increase in the population." Pimentel adds, "So our freedoms also go down the drain."

What??

In a society with a rule of law protecting individual rights, how does having a diluted vote reduce your freedom?  The only way it does, and therefore what must be in the author's head, is if one looks at government as a statist tug of war, with various parties jockeying for a majority so they can plunder the minority.  But in this case, freedom and rule of law are already dead, so what does a dilution of vote matter?  He is arguing that dilution of political power reduces freedom -- this country was rightly founded on just the opposite notion, that freedom requires a dilution of political power.

At the end of the day, our freedoms in this country will only last so long as we as a nation continue to hold to the principle that our rights as individuals are our own, and the government's job is to protect them, not to ration them.  Without this common belief, all the other institutions we have discussed, from voting to the rule of law to the Constitution, can be subverted in time.

So to America's soldiers, thank you.  Thank you for protecting this fragile and historically unique notion that men and women own themselves and their lives.

Sticking with the Cinco de Mayo theme, immigration has been a big issue of late down here in the Southwest.  Last election cycle Arizona passed a law limiting benefits to illegal immigrants.  This last few months have seen the "minuteman project", ostensibly to have private citizens help "defend the borders" and which got surprising support from America's most famous immigrant Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I have a number of friends who passionately support these efforts.  I am forced to say that not only do I disagree with them, I am actually embarrassed by the Minuteman project.  Michelle Malkin makes the argument that these are good people and not crazed racist KKK crazies.  OK, I am willing to accept this (for most of them) but this just makes it worse, wasting the patriotism and labor and time of people to such a wrong-headed end. (Matt Welch is less willing to believe they are just happy misguided soles).

At the end of the day, the vast, vast majority of people crossing the border are looking for a job.  That's it.  They are not terrorists or foreign spies or criminals -- they are ordinary people looking for a job, often to support their family.  This is why I find it an incredible waste that we have Arizona's private citizens, many of whom probably lament the slacker mentality of recent American generations of kids, standing around along the border making sure that people who are looking for a job in this country don't find one.

Of course, these Minuteman folks won't say that is what they are doing.  They are saying that they are:

• Defending the borders.   A Government's job is NOT (repeat NOT) "defending its border".  A government's job is to defend its citizens.
  In 1939, if a country was next door to Nazi Germany, defending its
  citizens probably meant defending the borders.  Today, though, next to
  Canada and the Mexico with whom we have been at peace for 150 years and
  with whom we share a common market, its harder to argue that defending
  our citizens requires having a Maginot Line at the border.

I am sure that our southern border is vulnerable to terrorists crossing, but I am equally sure that the minutemen did not find a single one.  Here is the real problem:  Because we force Mexican immigration to cross illegally across the open borders, terrorists trying to use the same approach are masked by thousands of others crossing the border.  By making free passage of Mexicans across the border illegal, we shift them out of monitored border crossings and onto the frontier, where they mask true criminals and terrorists.  Think of it this way - would you rather try to find a single terrorist who is alone in an empty stadium or one of 60,000 people at a football game?

• Enforcing the rule of law.  Maybe, but why not start with sitting beside the highway and writing down license plates of speeders too?  At the end of the day, enforcing current immigration law is as hopeless as was prohibition, the war on drugs, and enforcing the 55 mile-an-hour speed limit.

• Protecting American jobs.  I would not be at all surprised to find a high degree of overlap between the Minuteman supporters and the anti-NAFTA crowd.  The fear that "immigrants might be willing to do your job for less than you are willing to do your job for" has always been a strong part of anti-immigration movements.  The fact of the matter, though, is that this takes a very static view of the world.  The economy is not a zero sum game with competition for a fixed number of jobs.  New sources of labor can spur economic growth that creates new jobs.  The best example of this was in the last three decades, where a totally new, sometimes unskilled, work force of 40 million people showed up at industry's door suddenly looking for work:  women.  I told the story here (towards the bottom of the post), but the bottom line is that these new workers made the economy stronger, and now, with a generation or two behind them in the work force, women are really the backbone of entrepreneurship today in this country.  Besides, if we don't allow companies to legally hire immigrant workers, businesses in this global economy will just pick up and move to Mexico.

• Reducing cost of government services.  As a libertarian, I am very sympathetic to the argument that you don't want immigrants coming in and being able to immediately live off our safety net at taxpayers expense.  In my mind, though, this has historically been a problem of poorly crafted law rather than immigration per se.  It certainly would be possible to craft an intelligent immigration policy that allowed access to social services in steps.  By the way, shifting illegals into legal guest worker programs would likely increase tax revenues by bringing these folks into the system.

• Preventing Hispanics from becoming the dominant ethnic group in the Southwest.  Yes, I am positive this is a concern of many of these folks, just as the Italians in Boston at one time were worried about being overrun by the Irish.  It barely dignifies a response, except to say that if you are really concerned with the number of permanent Hispanic residents, then a guest worker program might actually reduce the number.  The reason is that many Mexicans still love their country but want work.  If they were allowed to freely move back and forth, they would do so.  But, since the border is the riskiest point for them, once they get in the US, they are reluctant to ever leave again.

We have got to have an intelligent immigration policy that

• Allows for free movement of guest workers across the border, with few limits on total numbers allowed. 
• A clear and fair system for guest workers to move up over time towards full citizenship
• A clear and fair system of tiered access to social services as immigrants progress from worker to citizen (e.g. emergency services access to all, but welfare/social security require full citizenship).
• Includes a taxation system on guest worker labor that causes these workers to help pay for the services they use.

Kudos to Professor Bainbridge for breaking with the conservative ranks to support an intelligent guest worker program.  More here from Steven Taylor.

Postscript:  I want to propose a thought experiment.  Most everyone considered the Berlin Wall a travesty.  Now, keeping all the facts about East and West the same, make one change:  suppose the wall was built instead by the West to stem the flood of immigrants from the oppressive east.  Would the wall suddenly become OK?  Even if the reality on the ground for an East Berliner (ie they can't escape) remained unchanged?

Border walls in Nogales, AZ and Berlin, Germany:

Oh, and from this site, here is the Montana-Canada border "wall" and a "checkpoint"

 
But its not about race.

Socialists and "progressives" of various stripes always want to argue that the distribution of wealth among nations is basically due to luck, in large part related to the distribution of natural resources.

This is disprovable in about 2 seconds:  Russia (via Cafe Hayek) and the Netherlands.   Russia, resource-wise, is perhaps the richest country in the world.  It is, our could be, among the largest producers of any number of natural resources, from diamonds and gold to oil and uranium.  But its economy is a disaster.  The Netherlands, resource wise, has about nothing.  There are few third world economic hell-holes that don't begin with infinitely more resources than the Dutch, but the Dutch are among the richest nations in the world. 

Wealth comes not from labor or capital or resources - wealth comes from the mind, and as such requires a rule of law where the mind is free not only to imagine new ideas but to pursue and reap the fruits of these ideas.  As I said in this article:

From the year 1000 to the year 1700, the world's wealth, measured as GDP per capita, was virtually unchanged.
Since 1700, the GDP per capita in places like the US has risen, in real
terms, over 40 fold.  This is a real increase in total wealth - it is
not money stolen or looted or exploited.  Wealthy nations like the US
didn't "take" the wealth from somewhere else - it never even existed
before.  It was created by the minds of human beings.

How?  What changed? 

1. There was a philosophical and intellectual
   change where questioning established beliefs and social patterns went
   from being heresy and unthinkable to being acceptable, and even in
   vogue.  In other words, men, at first just the elite but soon everyone,
   were urged to use their mind rather than just relying on established
   beliefs
2. There were social and political changes that greatly increased
   the number of people capable of entrepreneurship.  Before this time,
   the vast vast majority of people were locked into social positions that
   allowed them no flexibility to act on a good idea, even if they had
   one.  By starting to create a large and free middle class, first in the
   Netherlands and England and then in the US, more people had the ability
   to use their mind to create new wealth.  Whereas before, perhaps 1% or
   less of any population really had the freedom to truly act on their
   ideas, after 1700 many more people began to have this freedom. 

So today's wealth, and everything that goes with it (from shorter
work hours to longer life spans) is the result of more people using
their minds more freely.

As a libertarian that voted rather unenthusiastically Republican in the last election, I am right here with Ryan Sager:

While
some libertarian types may have been upset with President Reagan's
deficits, he was at least singing from their hymn book: Government is
the problem, not the solution. George W. Bush on the other hand has
never even gone to the trouble of aping a small-government posture.
Instead, Bush has adopted one of Reagan's other famous lines, sans
irony: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.

 

This
represents a fundamental shift in the direction of the Republican Party
and a threat to its traditional alliances. The shift is self-evident.
Instead of being the party that tries to rein in entitlement spending,
the Republican Party is now the party of the $1.2 trillion Medicare
prescription-drug benefit. Instead of being the party that is opposed
to even having a federal Department of Education, the Republican Party
is now the party of extensive intrusion into local schoolhouses by Washington.
And instead of being the party of the rule of law and state's rights,
the Republican Party is now the party of Congressional intervention
into the thoroughly adjudicated medical decisions of an individual
family.

A few weeks ago I wrote here that about the high-stakes battle over judicial nominations.  When Republicans were out of power, they could be trusted to support non-activist judges against liberal activist alternatives.  Now, however, my fear is that Republicans may have shifted their stand, seeking to nominate activist conservative judges.  Leaving no one at all in Washington to support a constitutional separation of powers.

Some of the "official" biographies of Arafat in the media are starting to make me sick.  Arafat was not a slightly flawed statesman and freedom-fighter.  Arafat was a leading terrorist who has squandered the Palestinians chances to get a real homeland for themselves.  When given the chance at statehood, he was unwilling and unable to create any sort of rule of law, and quickly demonstrated that he was really seeking violence and chaos, not stability and happiness, for his people.  You can find "alternate" obituaries here and here.