Author Archives: thezman

The Immorality Of Immigration

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Every ruling elite has certain primary duties. These are obligations that come before anything else. Regardless of the form of government, the rulers  have to maintain things like public order. Being the tribal chief is useless if your people are in chaos. For that matter, having a tribal chief is useless if it means living in chaos. Therefore, one of the primary duties of all rulers in all times and all places is to maintain public order by enforcing laws and local customs.

There are other primary duties of the ruler, like organizing the common defense, that are universal to all forms of government. Then there are primary duties that are peculiar to a people or to a form of government. If the ruler is understood to be a god, then the ruler and his retainers have to maintain that myth.  In modern western countries, protecting property rights and enforcing contracts is counted as a primary duty of the state in order to maintain its legitimacy

One of the more destructive things to happen to America over the last half century is the sacralizing of immigration by the elites. The endless repetition of the nonsense phrase “nation of immigrants” has turned a temporary expedient a century ago into an essential element of the nation’s founding mythology. The fact that immigration is a violation of the state’s primary duty to the people is excused because the immigrant now has a superior place in the moral order.

In a country like America, one that allegedly is built on consensual government, citizenship has great value. In fact, the most valuable thing to a citizen of a representative democracy is his citizenship. The reason for this is that citizenship is an ownership stake in the country. In theory, the American government was voluntarily founded as an agreement among individuals, invested with the power to secure mutual protection and regulate the relations among its members.

If you had the option of selling your citizenship, let us say at some sort of auction, there would be no shortage of bidders. For example, there is no shortage of buyers for the EB-5 visa, which costs $500,000. That is right, you can buy citizenship from the US government. Your citizenship is something of value and therefore, the state has a duty to protect it, just as they have a duty to protect your property rights. This is a primary duty of government.

When the American government hands out citizenship to millions of foreigners every year, it is stealing the value of your citizenship and giving it to someone else. This is no different than a company diluting the value of its shares by selling additional shares. It is why open borders fanatics swear that immigration makes us all richer, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. They know it is essential that people believe this as even the sacred immigrant is not enough to justify theft.

The argument from open borders people is that immigration is not just holy and beneficial. It is perfectly legitimate. The trouble is, when 50% plus one vote to rob the 50% minus one, it is still theft, even if it comes after an election. This is why America is not a democracy and it is also why democracy was famously called two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch. The very nature of democracy makes it an immoral form of rule because of the theft problem.

Additionally, a primary duty of the modern state is the maintenance of equality before the law. In fact, this is what makes the law legitimate. Not only do all citizens have a say in what laws are passed, but those laws apply to all citizens equally. The very nature of immigration violates this principle. Immigration steals from some citizens for the benefit of foreigners and the connected. This is true for quasi-immigration schemes like guest workers, as well as for permanent settlement.

If the primary duty of the state is to safeguard the citizens, including the value of their citizenship and maintain equality before the law, then immigration by its very nature is a direct violation of the social compact. It makes a mockery of the very idea of consensual government and sows distrust among the people. It is why all mass immigration quickly leads to a breakdown of order, because it erodes the legitimacy of the ruling authority, as the people see they are no longer willing to fulfill their basic duties.

That does not preclude all immigration. It is just that the bar is extremely high. In order to justify that which is naturally and always immoral, the offset must exceed the cost of the deed. Since this is impossible in the modern age, the open borders people have been forced to turn morality on its head, claiming the first duty of the state is to foreigners at the expense of its own citizens. It has turned America into a bust out where the value of your citizenship is stolen.

The White Not

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When one people conquer another people, there are a number of ways they can cement their dominance. One is for the ruler of the winning side to make himself the ruler of the losers, maybe marrying a high-ranking female of the losers. If the ethnic differences between the winners and losers are small enough, this can work out well. In this case, it is not really one people defeating another, so much as one set of rulers besting their relations, who happen to be rulers of another wing of the family. It is a family squabble.

Of course, the other end of the spectrum is when a different people defeat another people. The most likely outcome is some form of genocide. The winners kill off the males or maybe sell them into bondage, while distributing the women as wives to their men. The alternative to this is to simply kill off the losers. Genocide is a lot easier when the vanquished are alien to the victors. Most likely, the point of the conflict was to take the land the losers had been occupying, so killing them off makes perfect sense.

A third way of cementing your dominance over a conquered people is to erase their language and culture. Instead of killing off the men or committing full scale genocide, you take away their religion, ban their customs and force them to use your language for any official business. The first generation is going to resist, but the second generation is going to see the opportunity and adopt the new ways. The benefit of this approach is it turns some portion of the vanquished into an asset that works to support the victors.

The British tried a form of this with the Welsh in the 19th century. For centuries, the Welsh had been a thorn in the side of the English. Despite their numerical advantage, the English were never able to drive them off. King Offa of Mercia built a giant earth works to wall off the Welsh from the English in the 8th century. That was not because the Welsh were a trouble-free population. In the 15th century, Owain Glyndŵr led his people in revolt against the English. For Shakespeare fans, he is Owen Glendower in the play Henry IV.

The English solution in the 19th century was something called the Welsh Not. The British used it in Welsh schools to discourage the use of the Welsh language. A kid caught speaking his native tongue was given the “Not” which was usually a piece of wood on a string he hung around his neck. If he heard another boy speaking Welsh, he could rat him out and the “Not” would pass to him. At the end of the day, the boy with the “Not” got a beating. Alternatively, children were caned whenever they were caught speaking Welsh.

Something similar is happening in English speaking countries today, except the people in charge are attempting to rub out the native culture by un-personing anyone who says or does normal things. People are routinely punished for noticing the obvious or speaking truths about reality. The point of the punishment is to discourage normal behavior, just as the British wanted to discourage speaking Welsh. Every day, we get examples like this one, where the bizarre and deranged are elevated over the normal culture.

The systematic effort to turn bathhouse doggerel into art, at the expense of respectable Western literature, is not so much about elevating the depraved, as it is an assault on the culture. The people doing this are not motivated by a desire to help the degenerates. The point of the exercise is to discredit literature that comports with the norms of Western society. It is the same motivation behind larding up movies and television with vulgarity, even though the audience finds it revolting. Contempt for the audience is the motivation.

It is tempting to assign rational motivations to the PC idiocy, but that is always a mistake when talking about the clash of cultures. The motivations are purely emotional. When the Left flips out over someone noticing a logical flaw in their education policy, it is not the flaw the angers them. It is who is pointing it out. It is why pointing out the endless contradictions and hypocrisies of the Left is a waste of time. In a world of “who? whom?”, the only logic at play is determining who is attacking whom. The point of the attack is manifest.

Like the banning of bagpipes and tartan in Scotland, the Welsh Not probably did more to build Welsh nationalism than break it. It provided motivation for the Welsh to preserve their language. The rallying point was the Welsh-language bible, which was used in Welsh churches. Instead of the language and customs being erased as intended, the British ended up inculcating a deeper sense of identity in the Welsh people. The long-term result has been a modern revival of Welsh and a drive toward greater autonomy for Wales.

It remains to be seen if the current assault on normalcy has the same effect on the normal white people in English speaking countries. Tommy Robinson may be a flawed player in the great battle over immigration in Britain, but he has become a rallying point. The alt-right in America may be a dumpster fire, but the outlandish treatment of them by global corporations has opened a lot of eyes to what’s happening in America. Perhaps the war on whiteness has reached a tipping point and white people are becoming race aware.

Squid Ink

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If you scan the so-called conservative sites these days, the remarkable thing is the dullness of them. The writing is mediocre, at best, and the arguments are mostly washed-out ideas from the 80’s with a heavy dash of libertarianism. The major issues of this age, immigration, identity, populism, and nationalism are largely ignored. When they bother to pick them up, it is to take swings at the growing army of people to their right. The main role of so-called conservatism is to confuse and discourage the rank-and-file conservatives.

This old column from Jonah Goldberg is a good example. It is in the style that he has become mocked for of late. It is where he lards up his text with Borscht Belt gags, along with a bunch pointless dissembling. The post is supposed to take a stab at defining conservatism, but he just does a bunch of name dropping, while making a hash of the subject. His jocular style is intended to put the reader at ease, while his hemming and hawing is supposed to make it seem like conservatism is up for debate.

Now, Goldberg is just an affable guy, who does not want to cause any trouble, while pretending to be an intellectual. I am surely giving him too much credit for suggesting his incoherence is intentional. His latest book is so bad that I suffered from vicarious embarrassment while reviewing it. Even so, he is not alone. If you look around the so-called conservative intellectual space, it is a parade of mediocrities spouting banal nonsense that mostly defends the status quo against criticisms from the Right.

One argument against mediocrity is Ben Shapiro, who is pitched to us as a pint-sized wunderkind. He has a billionaire backer for his web site, a perch at National Review and the full support of Conservative Inc. If that stuff does not impress you, Shapiro did manage to get into Harvard at 16 and graduate at 20. Even the Left has started promoting him as the conservative voice of his generation. Here he is explaining the core principles of conservatism at a Young Americans Foundation event a couple of years ago.

In that speech, he starts out by claiming conservatism is about fairness of opportunity, rather than fairness of outcome. Then he says conservatism is about individual rights and individualism. He makes the point a few times that group identity is invalid, which is rather amusing coming from a guy who sports a yarmulke all the time. He actually says we should target people who discriminate and use the law against them. Not so long ago, conservatives warned that this was the ultimate goal of the Left. Now, here we are.

Individualism sounds fine, especially if you are a member of a small group hoping to topple the large group. If you can convince the large group that it is immoral for them to stick together, then you can pick them off one at a time. That is why there has never been a military organized around individualism. It is also why conservatism never embraced individualism. Deracinated and atomized people are easily conquered, which is why his people have made group loyalty their defining characteristic for a thousand years or more.

Shapiro is a smart guy, so he surely sees the contradictions. That means he says things about conservatism that he knows are false, or at least at odds with what has been the core of conservatism for centuries. Maybe it is just what sells, and he is just an ambitious person willing to do anything to get ahead. None of that really matters because the net effect is the same. The well-meaning young people who look to guys like Shapiro to put structure around their temperament are swimming in squid ink.

One reason conservationism is now a dog’s breakfast of libertarian nostrums and reworked liberal platitudes is that conservatism is short of conservatives. The people carrying the banner for Official Conservatism do not know the first thing about what it means to be conservative. It is as if they have spent their lives trying to avoid the great conservative thinkers. There is no trace of intellectual giants in the ideas of the modern conservative. Take for example the great quote from the philosopher Michael Oakeshott.

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

Now, it takes immense talent to write something so powerful and insightful with such an economy of language. No one can be blamed for not having that skill. On the other hand, how is it possible to read that, as a conservative, and not immediately understand that being on the Right is not about individualism or anti-racism or any of the other ridiculous fads popular on the Left? The answer is they are either too dumb to see it or they hope their readers don’t see it. In other words, the squid ink is intentional.

The Cost Shifting Economy

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When most people think of business, they think of people buying and selling, making something, and selling it or maybe selling a service. The old adage of buy low and sell high is still the basic idea of business. Rich people, however, like the people who currently rule over us, do not think about any of that stuff when they hatch a business scheme. Instead, they think about how they can shift the cost of doing business onto the public or some unsuspecting suckers, like the American taxpayer. It is how rich people do business.

This is not a new idea. Cost shifting was an integral part of the Industrial Revolution. The factory owner was not covering the full cost of his labor, for example, because he did not have to cover the cost of workplace health a safety. Building a bridge was a lot cheaper, because the cost of worker deaths was not the responsibility of the builder. No one thought about the costs of environmental degradation in the 19th century, so companies were free to dump poison into rivers and pump pollutants into the atmosphere.

It is reasonable to argue that the great fortunes made during the Industrial Revolution, at least in America, were made in large part from cost shifting. After all, it was not just the direct costs like labor, which were shifted onto the public. Once a man got rich, he could afford to buy politicians, who would pass laws giving the rich business owners leverage over their smaller competitors. It is not an accident that those great fortunes were created early in the industrial age, and none were created in later stages.

The political class in the early 20th century was still strong enough to push back against the industrial barons. It became politically popular to push through trust busting to weaken the industrialist. Then it became popular to push through reforms and allow unions to organize labor. Conservative proselytizing against these policies over the decades has obscured the fact that much of it was an effort to push those private costs back into private hands. The end of the industrial age corresponded with the end of cost shifting.

Today, cost shifting is everywhere in the economy. Tech companies have exploited public utilities, like the internet, to provide media services, without having to pay distribution costs. Amazon built its business, in part, on not having to collect sales taxes like every other retailer in America. Currently, their shipping costs are subsidized by the US Postal Service which loses billions every year. Then there are the many rackets that rely on government subsidies. Higher education is just one big upper middle-class subsidy.

The biggest cost shifting racket today is the use of imported labor. Recruiting, hiring, and training Americans is expensive because America is a first world society. Citizens expect first world working conditions. That makes it hard to shift labor costs onto the public, so companies prefer foreign labor. That way, they can pay lower wages and they avoid having to deal with employees who know their rights or have ideas about forming a union. Plus, foreign workers do not sue for things like discrimination or poor safety conditions.

There is a cost to this sort of predatory labor system, but those costs are shifted to the public in the form of depressed wages and high social costs. The migrants in every hospital emergency room are not having their bills picked up by their employer. When Pablo decides to get drunk and drive over an American, his employer is not paying the victim’s family or covering the cost of Pablo’s incarceration. The fact is, there is nothing more expensive to a society than cheap labor, it is just hidden from public view.

The question though is whether it is possible to get rich in a mature economy without massive cost shifting. No great fortunes were amassed from the end of World War Two until the technological revolution. That was a period when business costs were shifted back onto business. The tech revolution made it possible to get around the regulations and laws, because the government never anticipated a digital economy. That is starting to change just as the technological revolution is winding down and the public is pushing back.

Take a look at the newspaper business. Prior to the digital age newspapers could be run profitably, but they had high labor and capital costs. In theory, the digital age offered the chance to slash those costs. The internet does not require printing presses and delivery trucks. But the internet also slashed their revenue stream. All those ad dollars are now on eBay, Monster and so forth. Newspapers, without monopoly power and with no ability to shift their costs to the public, are all losing money and headed for extinction.

That does not mean it is impossible to turn a profit without cost shifting, but it does suggest it is impossible to get rich without it. At least not billionaire rich. That would certainly explain the fanatical commitment to migrant labor by American business. It also explains the increasingly opaque financial system. It is not so much about reducing costs as hiding them in the costs of other goods and services, like taxes and health care. It is a lot easier and profitable than trying to make a better product or become more efficient.

The Dumbening

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An important project of the Left for a long time now has been to discredit the idea that intelligence is genetic and therefore heritable. In order to maintain the blank slate, they have to argue against genetics and evolution. Anytime someone can produce a study showing that environment alters life outcomes, progressives rush to the internet to trumpet the study as if it was holy writ. That has been the response to this Norwegian study on intelligence, that claims to observe a reverse in the Flynn Effect.

There is confusion in the commentary, because there is confusion about the meaning of the Flynn Effect. The Left likes to claim that the Flynn Effect shows that better schools and ideological indoctrination make people smarter. What the Flynn Effect observes is that populations get smarter as environmental conditions improve. People also get taller when environmental conditions improve. In other words, an improving physical environment means more people able to reach their genetic potential.

On the other hand, the other side often leaps to the conclusion that immigration and fertility rates exclusively drive IQ. This is true in the aggregate. Import large numbers of Africans into Iceland and the average intelligence of Iceland will decline. That does not mean the native Icelander got dumber, although the decision to import Africans could be proof of that claim. The Flynn Effect observes that children will be smarter than their parents, when environmental conditions improve. A better life means better kids.

This Norwegian study is causing blank slate believers to hyperventilate because it claims to show a decline in IQ within families. Specifically, the children are dumber than their parents and younger brothers are dumber than older brothers. Children born in the 1960’s had an average IQ a little over 99, while children born in the 1970’s had an average IQ of 102. Since then, IQ’s have declined to the 1960’s level. Because this was measured within families, it rules out genetics, dysgenics and immigration as causes.

Now, the first thing to note is that blank slate people employ the same tactic we used to see with the intelligent design people. The ID’ers would hunt around for anything they could hold up discrediting Darwin or natural selection, no matter how trivial or tangential, so they could claim evolution was not science. This was supposed to “prove” that intelligent design was therefore a valid theory. Blank slate people play the same game by trying to poke holes in genetics.

There’s a word for this sort of argument. It is called sophistry. Just because natural selection cannot solve every puzzle in the fossil record, that does not mean magic is the default explanation for the fossil record. Similarly, just because IQ’s appear to be declining within Norwegian families does not mean IQ is not heritable. It has always been known that intelligence varies within families. The question posed by this study is what is causing the change.

Further, it has been observed for a long time that average intelligence within Western societies have been declining since the 1970’s. Overall IQ appears to have peaked in the 1970’s and been in decline ever since. Immigration is one cause. Another is the habit of smart successful people having fewer children. The opening scene to Idiocracy is not entirely wrong, even though fertility among the poor has declined. Smart people used to have big families, because they could.

Again, this Norwegian study is not reporting this sort of result. Instead, they are picking up a decline within families. The one potential flaw is that it measures only male intelligence, which means sons are dumber than fathers and younger brothers are dumber than older brothers. The Flynn Effect observes increases in IQ within families due to improved environmental conditions. Therefore, a decline would logically be linked to some unknown environmental changes.

Of course, the changes are quite small, so it could simply be the Breeder’s Equation at work. The uptick in the sample population used in this study could have been driven by a bit of environmental luck. The decline is simply a reversion to the mean. The recent uptick you see in the above graph could also indicate a natural variance between a maximum and minimum for this group. The observable difference between a 99 and 102 IQ is so small it has no impact.

All that said, there are two things we know are true about human intelligence. One is the population with low-IQ’s are breeding like bunnies. Simple math says mankind is getting dumber on average. The other thing we know is that the load the smart fraction can carry is finite. Pile in enough stupid people in a population and eventually they overwhelm the efforts of the smart people. The puzzle is in figuring out the tipping point and the goal is to make sure to avoid it.

Prison Reform

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One of the under discussed topics floating around Washington is prison reform, which has the support of President Trump. His son-in-law has been quietly whipping support for a bill backed by the White House. Trump’s photo-op with Kim Kardashian was part of the effort to get Democrat support for the bill. The point of the reform plan is to put more money into training and counseling for inmates, in an effort to reduce recidivism and decrease the prison population. America has 2.2 million prisoners.

Prison reform in America is a loser of an issue, mostly because all previous prison reform efforts have been nothing more than opening up the jails. Even if you are not old enough to remember the crime wave of the 1970’s, the “soft on crime, bleeding heart liberal” is a stock figure in pop culture. As a result, whites are solidly against anything with the name “prison reform” in it. That is why you never see blacks on TV making demands for prison reform. Their handlers have no interest in it.

Republicans in the House and Senate are in no hurry to pass anything. Even the open borders fanatics, who want to fill your neighborhood with criminal aliens and MS-13 gang-bangers, are not in a hurry to pass anything. Instead, they are doing the “comprehensive reform” dance, which is how politicians manage to do nothing, while endlessly talking about the need to do something. That means the odds of something getting done in the near term is not good.

That does not mean the status quo is workable. We have roughly 2.2 million people in jail at any moment. There are roughly 4.7 million people on parole, house arrest and court supervision. In a country of three hundred million, that is not a huge number, but seven million people is more than the population of Paraguay. It is close to twice the population of Ireland. One reason we have so many people in jail is it is a lot easier to manage criminals in jail than when they are on parole.

Of course, the prison population is about 40% black. That means about 2.5% of black people are in jail at any one time. Another 5% are under court supervision. As has been pointed out for decades, eliminate black crime and America is suddenly as docile as any other Western nation. That brings us back to the politics of prison reform, as everyone knows the stats on black crime. Since addressing the realities of the black population in America is forbidden, we maintain a massive human warehousing system.

The looming problem is demographics. In the 1990’s, getting tough on crime mostly meant longer sentences for smaller crimes. The “broken windows” approach to policing is mostly mythology, but getting crime under control does have a real impact. It works the same way the death penalty worked to pacify Europe. By handing out long jail sentences, cities like New York culled the herd. Eventually, the people sent away for 20 years get out of jail. What happens to them at that point?

A useful example, although not representative, is Joseph Konopka, who went by the name Dr. Chaos in his criminal career. He recruited a group of young people he called The Realm of Chaos, who committed acts of terrorism and vandalism in Wisconsin and Illinois. Konopka was arrested plotting a mass cyanide attack on the Chicago transit system. He is serving a 20-year sentence at ADX Florence and will be released in August of next year. How is that going to work out?

For those unfamiliar, ADX Florence is a prison for the worst of the worst. It is called a “supermax” prison, but the inmates call it the Alcatraz of the Rockies. It holds people like Larry Hoover of the Gangster Disciples, Barry Mills and Tyler Bingham of the Aryan Brotherhood. They also have Zacarias Moussaoui, Faisal Shahzad, Ramzi Yousef, Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph. In other words, when Konopka comes out, he will have spent 20 years living with some of the most dangerous men on earth.

This is an extreme example, but illustrative. The solution to crime was to lock people up, which made sense at the time, but no one thought much about what those prisons would produce in 20-30 years. Granted, many men coming out of the system are going to be old, but they will still be useless, as the prison did nothing to ready them for life after jail. There is zero chance the social justice warriors running Facebook or Starbucks will be hiring Joseph Konopka upon his release.

The right answer, of course, is to start accepting reality about the last 70 years of social reform that started after WW2. Crime spiraled upward when the constraints on non-whites were removed, and diversity was imposed on whites. Steve Sailer famously used Katrina to illustrate this biological reality. Black crime would be half of what it is today, most of which is against other blacks, if whites were willing to reimpose the sorts of cultural restraints common before Civil Rights.

That said, the diversity horse has left the barn. By turning America into a majority-minority nation, the ruling class of the last half century has condemned future generations to endemic crime problems like you see in Brazil. One solution to this is the return of penal colonies and criminal reservations. The people serving life terms should be housed on remote islands where they can live out their lives, without causing harm to other prisoners and prison guards.

Penal colonies would also mean a shift in sentencing. A guy like Joseph Konopka would not get 20 years. Instead, he would get life in the colony. In fact, a fair chunk of the 2.2 million currently in jail would get sent to the penal colonies. There is simply no point in pretending that a man can come out after 30 years in a gladiator academy and be a normal person in society. There is no point in pretending the rest of us wish to invest in the effort, even assuming it is possible.

Pure Politics

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I have returned from the land of the perpetual 70’s. Newark is a strange place, in that it feels like it is trapped in a 1970’s blacksploitation film. Walking around the city, I saw lots of shucking a jiving. I saw people dressed like extras from a movie on the great heroin dealers of the period. Atlantic City has the same vibe. Maybe the 70’s was the peak for these places, at least for their current demographic, and they still have a residue of the era hanging over them. I had the theme song to Shaft in my head for the last week.

This week I wanted to do a show on politics. I have not been doing a lot of political stuff, so I thought it was a good time to swing back and do a show in political topics. In Newark, I was around some northeast Progressives, so hearing them talk about Trump got the juices flowing. There’s also been a lot of big stuff this week. The Korea summit and the IG report are a month’s worth of content for each event. Whatever you want to say about Trump, the guy is a man of action. He’s doing as much as he can, despite the opposition.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

iHeart Radio

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Odysee

The Sacred Immigrant

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For a long time, I have made the point that the Republican Party is not really a political party, in the sense that it is a coalition held together by common interests. Instead, it is more like a dumping ground for politicians. About a third of Republican office holders would prefer to be huddling with the Democrats, but the voters of their home district or state have decided the Democrats are too crazy, so ambitious politicians run as Republicans. The result is a party held together by convenience.

You see that with the immigration disaster brewing in the House. As it stands the GOP could simply do nothing on immigration and ride the wave of popular support into the election. That would be the smart thing. Instead, they are trying to pass an immigration bill that has no chance of making it through the Senate. Now, this could be good politics if it is popular with their voters. Instead, they are about to pass a bill highly unpopular with their voters and sure to remind Trump supporters why they hate the GOP.

A leaked draft of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) amnesty deal could lead to the “biggest” amnesty for illegal aliens in United States history, experts tell Breitbart News.
Ryan’s immigration deal would go beyond giving amnesty to only the nearly 800,000 illegal aliens who are enrolled in the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

According to a leaked draft of the amnesty deal, obtained by Breitbart News, Ryan’s plan would allow the entire “DACA population” to be eligible for amnesty so long as they meet low educational, work and criminal requirements, prompting the amnesty to explode in size.

That DACA population could include the nearly 3.5 million DACA-enrolled and DACA-eligible illegal aliens, and even more illegal aliens who arrive in the U.S. to fraudulently obtain the amnesty.

NumbersUSA Governmental Affairs Director Rosemary Jenks told Breitbart News that Ryan’s amnesty will — at the least — allow 1.8 million illegal aliens to stay in the U.S.

“This has the potential to turn into the biggest amnesty we’ve ever had,” Jenks said.

The leaked amnesty deal reveals that Ryan and the Republican establishment may even be considering going beyond giving amnesty to DACA illegal aliens.

A second amnesty is included in the leaked draft, one that would allow the children of temporary foreign guest workers and “anyone who has a ‘contingent nonimmigrant status’” to apply for the amnesty.

This amnesty for the children of temporary foreign workers does not have a numerical cap, allowing for an endless amount of foreign nationals to obtain amnesty through this avenue known as “Pathway Concept B.”

“The winners are the DREAMers cause they get their amnesty, Democrats because they don’t have to concede much to get the amnesty and donor-class Republicans who are interested in perpetuating the current system,” Center for Immigration Studies Director of Policy Jessica Vaughan told Breitbart News of Ryan’s leaked amnesty deal.

It is tempting to blame this on the secret “donor party” that allegedly manipulates the inner party, like some sort of Turkish conspiracy. There is no doubt that business pushes hard for unlimited “guest worker” visas. No matter how many indentured servants they are granted, it is never enough. Who is pushing for amnesty? In whose interests is it to hand a ballot to millions of foreigners? That actually hurts the cheap labor lobby, as it removes exploitable people from the labor pool.

This is an example of why so-called conservatives lost every fight over the last thirty years. They start with the assumption that the other team is working from facts and reason, motivated by a desire for some tangible goal. In this case, immigration patriots will demand everyone believe Paul Ryan is getting sacks of cash to push this ridiculous amnesty bill through the House. Sure, some of the provisions are bought by lobbyists, but the amnesty stuff has no obvious constituency in the Republican Party.

The fact is, people are more often motivated by a desire to be seen as on the side of angels, even if it brings personal risk. Just look at the number of pols who have driven a hole into their career opposing Trump. As they go under for the last time, they are smugly certain they are doing the Lord’s work. For many in our political class, open borders is a moral issue now. They want to grant the blessing of your town to the world, because they feel righteous as they watch it play out.

This suicidal altruism is not just confined to the political class. Any time the immigration question comes up, there are people who will blurt out “I’m not opposed to legal immigration. It is illegal immigration I oppose.” That is why the political class is working to legalize every conceivable form of immigration. If there are literally no laws against coming here, then there can be no illegal immigration, and everyone is happy. It is the natural result of sacralizing the immigrant.

It is why arguments from facts and reason about immigration have had no impact on the political class. Even as the public begins to get serious about the issue, the politicians are unresponsive, because they correctly see that the immigrant remains a magical figure in the mind of the public. Until a large majority of the voters become hostile to immigration in the spiritual sense, nothing changes. Yeah, the cheap labor lobbies play into this and exploit it, but the root problem here is immigrant worship.

The Cheap Credit Era

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The current age is one of extreme short-term thinking. Americans have always been known for taking the short view, but today our culture is built around a “live for the moment” attitude. Sit in a business meeting and exactly no one talks about downstream possibilities. It is all about this month, this quarter or, for the sprinkling of long-term planners, the remainder of the year. You see this in our politics, where everyone reacts to the latest polls or latest news event. We are a high time preference society now.

This is why immigration reform is proving to be a non-starter. The Left side of the political class sees nothing but opportunities to rig the next election with foreign ringers, so anything that interferes with that is blocked. The Right side is wholly owned by the cheap labor lobbies, who like the idea of disposable labor. It is not that the people in charge think their grandchildren will be exempt from the ravages of mass migration. It is that they are unable to think past the moment. For our rulers, tomorrow never comes.

Just because the people in charge have no interest in the future does not mean the future is equally disinterested in us. That is what will make the coming years interesting, with regards to the economy. The Fed has finally begun the process of tightening the money supply, after a decade of an extremely loose policy. That means rising interest rates in the US and a strengthening dollar, relative to other currencies. This is not going to happen overnight, but the Fed is going to move quickly now that there are signs of real inflation.

The trouble is a big chunk of the economy has become addicted to cheap money. Take a look at the car business. Every car maker has set up special lending facilities so they can entice buyers. Instead of figuring out how to make cheaper cars, they offer near zero interest and extended terms. You can get from most makers a seven-year term on a new car, along with a super-low interest rate. They may even offer cash back you can use for the down payment. There’s even sub-prime lending at the lower end of the market.

Now, the Feds are not bringing back 1970’s interest rates and they are going to move slow. Still, it has been a long time since interest rates have been close to historic averages and that means most people making decisions do not know what it is like to live in that world. It has been 18 years since mortgage rates were above seven percent. It has been 27 years since we saw eight percent rates. It has been a decade since rates were above five percent. In other words, the world has become used to historically low rates.

It is not just the retail end that will have to come to terms with a world of rising interest rates. Most business runs on credit these days. The bigger the business, the bigger the debt burden. US corporation have $4 trillion in debt that will roll over in the next five years, according to industry analysts. What this means is their debt service will increase as they refinance old debt with new, more expensive debt. That is how corporate debt works. Most of it is fueled by bonds, so new debt pays maturing debt plus interest.

Of course, business is not the only institution relying on cheap credit. Governments around the world have come to depend on the endless appetite for sovereign debt to keep borrowing rates low. When central banks take money off the street, it means there is less money to chase after sovereign debt. Healthy debtors like the US government will not feel the pinch, but the struggling countries in Europe and South America are going to find it more difficult to sell debt. It may not take much to topple a country like Argentina.

Again, the Fed is not bringing us back to the 1970’s. Barring some inconceivable catastrophe, no one reading this will ever see double-digit interest rates again. It is just that since the end of the Cold War, America has been living with historically low interest rates and it has changed the nature of our economy. Cheap credit makes short term deals more viable and more common. It also increases risk taking. The result of all this cheap money is an economy that lives for the moment. Everyone is in it for the quick buck.

In theory, the slow gradual return of interest rates to something close to historic norms should not have a big impact. Almost thirty years of super-low rates, means most of the institutional knowledge about working in a normal rate environment is gone or heading for retirement. That means a lot of people are going to have learn the hard way about how business and finance works in a less than free money era. Therefore, no one can really be sure what is going to happen as the Feds slowly raise rates over the next years.

The Reality Gap

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In the old days, a popular gag was to comment about the Soviet media’s disconnect from observable reality. Every schoolboy learned that the name of the main party newspaper, Pravda, meant “truth” in Russian. Unlike America, with its free-wheeling adversarial press, the Soviets had one newspaper that published the official truth. It is right out of Orwell! It was all mostly nonsense, of course, but it was a useful bit of propaganda that served the interests of the liberal American media.

Our library had copies of the English version of communist publications. I no longer recall if Pravda was one of them, but there were others from Soviet Bloc countries, along with publications from Western communist organizations, like the Daily Worker and Mother Jones. I enjoyed reading them, especially the news articles, because it was like experiencing an alternate reality. Even allowing for the gross bias of the New York Times, the commie rags were hilariously delusional.

As a result, I have often thought that there should be an index that measures the distance between a society’s official dogma, and observable reality. Every human society has its pretty lies. This is the grease that keeps the gears moving. There are also the things everyone knows are true, but everyone agrees to not discuss. Then there is official dogma, the prevailing orthodoxy, that exists because the people in charge demand that it exists. This is where we see the reality gap.

In the case of the Soviets, they often made claims about their material prosperity, relative to the West, which were everyone knew was nonsense. These were less obviously false in the 1950’s, as Europe dug out from the war and Stalin forced modernization on his country. The gap grew larger after Stalin, as the West slowly passed the Soviets in material prosperity. By the 1980’s, the gap between East and West was too large to hide.

You can see this gap on a smaller scale in cities like Newark and Baltimore. While in Newark, I looked up the local politicians, expecting the usual suspects. The funny part was the talk about the city, as if everything is coming together and the boom years are just around the corner. The pols in Baltimore talk the same way. They claim that young people are flocking to the city, when in reality people are fleeing. In fact, the worse things get, the more they talk about how the city is turning the corner.

The question that naturally arises is whether necessity drives this growing gap between reality and orthodoxy or does delusion drive the decline? In business, management will address falling sales with more marketing, not accepting that it is their poor management and products. The marketing efforts will exacerbate the decline, as the gap between the promise and reality grows. On the other hand, maybe lying is the last resort, when there is simply no way to address the true causes.

The other question is at what point does the gap between reality and official orthodoxy get so wide that the strain collapses the orthodoxy. In the case of the Soviet Union, it was not a bloody revolution or violent civil war that ended the system. It was mostly the fact that the system had grown so absurd, not even the people in charge could accept it any longer. That gap between official orthodoxy and obvious reality was too large to maintain, so the system collapsed.

The challenge, of course, is quantifying this gap between official orthodoxy and observable reality. For example, is the reality gap in America today bigger than the gap was in 1980’s Russia? We are required to pretend there are fifty-seven genders, which seems a click nuttier than pretending the Lada was a nice car. There has never been a time or place where humans came in more than two sexes. The Lada was crap, but it beat walking.

Does it matter if lots of people are willing to believe the nonsense? Today, lots of liberal women buy into the unlimited gender stuff. In fact, it is quite remarkable just how fast so many people in modern America are willing to accept this crazy stuff. For there to be a reality gap, the public has to know it exists. No one in the Soviet Union thought the Lada was a good car. You were even allowed to complain about the poor state of consumer goods, just as long as you kept it to a minimum.

All that said, it seems that a society can tolerate only so large a gap between reality and its official truth. Whether or not we are reaching some sort of breaking point is probably impossible to know. No one saw Trump on the horizon. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, no one saw it coming. Maybe people just get used to the disconnect until one day, the number of people who notice it reaches critical mass. Then like a precipitate falling out of solution, the whole thing collapses.