Category Archives: Immigration

A Sickness Reason Cannot Cure

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One of the stranger things about daily life is that the most obvious answer, the one most likely to succeed at the lowest possible cost, is almost always declared unacceptable or even impossible by the people in charge. More often than not, the next best option is also eliminated, even laughed off. Somehow, the public debates always revolve around options that are unlikely to work or promise to make things worse.

This madhouse dynamic is most obvious when it comes to health care. The laws of supply and demand apply to all things. Prices go up when demand outstrips supply. Prices fall when supply exceed demand. Health care, like all other goods and services, must be rationed. That’s either done through price or through monopoly, which has failed everywhere it has been tried, leaving price as the best solution yet discovered.

Therefore, the most obvious way to make health care cheaper is to increase the supply. If we have more doctors, hospitals, pill makers and so forth, the price for their services will fall. The way government helps this along is by removing impediments to entering these fields. Government can also remove the artificial costs that make these fields less attractive. This is ground floor economics, yet it is never discussed anywhere by anyone.

Instead, the public debate over health care in America is one side with their insanely complex plans versus the other side with their insanely complex plans. ObamaCare is tens of thousands of pages of rules and regulations that no one comprehends. The results have been disastrous, but simply repealing it is considered madness. Instead, the only possible option is to pile on even more insanely complex plans, like throwing a drowning man an anchor. It’s as if the people in charge want the whole thing to collapse.

If you are a normal person looking at this, there are two ways you can go with this. One is you can doubt yourself and assume the issue must be vastly more complex than you can comprehend. I suspect many take this option, preferring to ignore it all rather than consider the other choice.

The other choice, the other way you can go is to try to understand why the people in charge insist on not doing the obvious, most sensible thing. Why are seemingly smart people allergic to the obvious? Mickey Kaus touches on this in this post:

If the Republican establishment is so panicked about Donald Trump — a wild, proto-fascist egomaniac with his finger on the button, in their telling — you’d think it would do the one thing that would almost certainly stop him: Surrender. By “surrender” I mean abandon their decades long dream of winning Latino votes through a magic pill called “comprehensive immigration reform” (known to its opponents as amnesty). After Romney’s 2012 defeat, conservatives like Charles Krauthammer argued that if they just caved to the Democrats on this one issue — immigration — they wouldn’t really have to change anything else. (“It requires but a single policy change ….”) In 2013, with Marco Rubio as their smiling pitch man, they tried desperately to sell out on immigration. They failed.

Today, Trump’s massive rallies can be interpreted as an expression of the historic populist undercurrent animating America’s white working class. Or they can be interpreted, with less sophistication, as Americans saying, as loudly as they can, “WE DON’T WANT YOUR F___ING ‘COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM.’” Either way, anger over elite “more immigration” plans is the molten core of the Trump eruption. Is there any doubt that if “comprehensive immigration reform” went away for good, Trumpism would wither? So why don’t Haley Barbour and Karl Rove call a big K Street meeting where they say, “Boys, we have to throw the damn yahoos this bone. We’re giving up on amnesty”?

My bet is most sensible people think that after the recent terror attacks, the people in charge will back off of open borders and the importation of Muslims. After all, the people are starting to get very pissed off over the Muslims. All across the West, the people are shouting, “Enough with the fucking Muslims!” Yet, the people in charge are out grinning like chimps promising to import even more Muslims. You would be forgiven for thinking that maybe they like it when Mohamed shoots up a mall or an office park.

That, I think, is the part that is hard for most people to face. It’s hard to imagine that President Obama or Angela Merkel or David Cameron really want to see their people suffer. It’s unfathomable that someone could be so deranged by self-loathing that they would commit their lives to pulling down the roof on their countries. It’s a madness that is impossible for normal people to contemplate, but what else is there?

The most obvious answer to the problem of Syed Farouk coming back from Saudi Arabia and murdering his co-workers at the Christmas party is to not import guys named Syed Farouk in the first place. But, that’s the obvious answer, the one most likely to succeed. Instead, the madmen in charge insist on building a police state so they can keep importing Muslim fanatics. There’s no reasoning with them. No amount of carnage will shake them of this disease that has driven them mad.

The Mosque on the Hill

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One of my themes here is to point out the similarities between modern Progressives and the Islamic lunatics in the Middle East. Both sides of that equation would deny the equality symbol exists, but that’s the nature of the fanatic. The hatred of Islamists toward the West, in most respects, is due to the similarities they perceive in the other side. You always hate most in others what you fear about yourself.

One way to look at ISIS is in the context of the sectarian wars within the Christian West starting with the 30 Years War. The first schisms eventually lead to increasingly extreme  rejections of the dominant sect culminating in the Puritans who left the West entirely and set out for the wilderness. The folks who landed on Plymouth Rock were the ISIS of their day.

It turns out that Obama agrees with me.

This Thanksgiving, President Obama is calling for Americans to lend a helping hand to another group of pilgrims fleeing persecution.
“Nearly four centuries after the Mayflower set sail, the world is still full of pilgrims – men and women who want nothing more than the chance for a safer, better future for themselves and their families,” Obama said in his weekly address Thursday. “What makes America America is that we offer that chance.”

The president praised Americans who have offered to open their homes to refugees fleeing war-torn Syria.

“One woman from Pennsylvania wrote to me to say, ‘Money is tight for us in my household. … But I have a guest room. I have a pantry full of food. We can do this,’ ” Obama said.

“Another woman from Florida told me her family’s history dates back to the Mayflower — and she said that welcoming others is part of ‘what it means to be an American,’ ” he added.

Obama called for citizens to put the “generosity” of America on full display by welcoming refugees into the country with arms wide open.

“I hope that you and your family have a wonderful Thanksgiving, surrounded by loved ones and full of joy and gratitude,” he said. “And together, may we all play our own small part in the American story, and write a next chapter that future generations can be thankful for.”

Obama, like all Progressives, sees the West as a fading force in the world. The future will belong to the yellow, brown and black. You really can’t blame him for that. That’s what the facts are telling us.Just look at the television for a short time. It’s Pale, Male and Stale being pushed aside by young and vibrant. The Puritans had the same view of Europe in the 17th century.

There’s a new Audi commercial that captures this perfectly. It starts with an old white guy thinking no one is coming for the Solstice celebration. He’s putting away all those old western culture items, preparing to have dog food for dinner. Then, his mixed race family arrives and all is good. His hilariously black granddaughter informs him how Audi is responsible for her being there. Not hard to see the point of that ad.

Audi is letting you know, old white man, that the future is not you. Audi is the future, helping bring the black, brown and yellow to you. You better embrace it. That way you can have some peace in your final years. Otherwise, it’s dog food for you. Or, worse.

That’s ultimately why the Left across the West wants to flood your neighborhood with young male Arabs. You’re not just the past. You’re a wilderness, a nothing, into which the vibrant people of the future will arrive and build a new mosque on the hill. In the process, that means slaughtering the locals and pushing them into holding pens, but let’s not notice that and instead pretend our sacrifice will be noted by Allah God.

What Comes Next

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Steve Sailer has an excellent column on how Europe can manage its Muslim lunatic problem. The other day, I made the point that the will of the people cannot be ignored forever. If the politicians can’t be made to do the people’s bidding, they will get new politicians. If the parties are too corrupt to produce the right politicians, then we get new parties. Ultimately, if the political system proves useless in dealing with threats, then the people get a new political system.

The French Revolution is the most common example of the people getting a new system. Through trial and error, they eventually got to the Second Republic. In America, the Constitution may still be the theoretical framework of the nation’s political system, but our government is nothing like it was 100 years ago or at the founding. As times change the political system changes, sometimes peacefully and sometimes violently.

The changes Sailer discusses are changes in the political system. Implementing a system of collective guilt where the clan of a criminal pays for the crimes as opposed to the current method of punishing just the criminal, requires a radical change in the political system. Sailer is no doubt being facetious with this, but it is not far-fetched. There has to be a way to keep the peace and if the current arrangements cannot keep the peace, we will get new arrangements.

John Derbyshire the other day mocked up his chart of probable outcomes with regards to the immigration issue. It sounds reasonable if one assumes the political systems remain static and you reject other possible outcomes, like revolts, anarchy, pestilence, war, etc. The countries of Europe, for example, have not faced an invasion like this since Batu Khan stood at the Mohi River.

The political systems and cultural structures in place did not evolve to face invasion, at least not invasion from over the horizon. Europe is what it is today due to the internal forces of Europe. For instance, the authorities no longer wear uniforms and solute one another in public. Instead, they wear pants suits and grin like chimps, so no one thinks they are Hitler.

What John gets right is the math, which stands to reason. The math makes clear that the ruling elite’s desire to replace their native populations with foreign imports is doomed to failure. A critical mass of Muslims will simply force changes on the political system that either trigger revolts or sends the West spiraling into anarchy.

Take a look at the responses from Western governments to the latest Muslim attacks. Civic life is being sharply curtailed, and restrictions are being placed on citizens. All over Europe, large public events are being cancelled because they fear a Muslim may detonate and kill a bunch of spectators. The Germans government is telling people to avoid walking in large groups so as not be a target.

Today, the French president is out there welcoming 30,000 new suicide bombers into France. There’s simply no way they can keep importing Muslims and remain France. They know this, at some level, which is why they put in jail anyone who points it out. Holland says, “France will remain a country of freedom” unless you’re opposed to the Muslim invasion. Then it is not a free country.

Because the people in charge have defined themselves in such a way that open borders is the only option, they must implement these sorts of polices in order to prevent mayhem. The Muslims will adapt and find new ways to blow themselves up in public. That means new restrictions. This cycle can only go on for so long before even the most docile honky throws down his pacifier and picks up a rock.

It’s tempting to assume that whites are too timid and lost to fight back. Some are, for sure, but action in the streets has a funny way of bringing out the revolutionary in even old men. A big part of what plagues the West is there’s no place for men in modern societies. Rioting Muslim hoards in the streets suddenly will spike the demand for white males willing to crack skulls. The supply will soon follow.

History says this sort of large scale, transformative event washes away the old solutions for long ago problems. What comes next is something different. Again, Europe is politically and culturally alien to its past of just a century ago. Two great wars did that. An invasion by millions of Muslims will surely mean a different Europe, even if they beat back the tide.

That’s where John’s five scenarios falls down. Whatever comes next means the West stops being the West, politically and culturally. If it lets in the Muslim invaders, it becomes Muslim and follows the path of every other Muslim society into a dark age. Alternatively, it becomes a police state to keep the Muslims from killing everyone else. Or the West changes to beat back the tide and do what is now unthinkable.

Regardless, what comes next will something entirely different than what we are today.

Paris

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Upon disembarkation, the leader of the Muslims, Tariq bin Zayid, ordered the Islamic fleet burned, explaining that “We have not come here to return. Either we conquer and establish ourselves here, or we perish.”

“Near the river Owar [Loire], the two great hosts of the two languages and the two creeds [Islam and Christianity] were set in array against each other. The hearts of Abd al-Rahman, his captains and his men were filled with wrath and pride, and they were the first to begin to fight. The Muslim horsemen dashed fierce and frequent forward against the battalions of the Franks, who resisted manfully, and many fell dead on either side, until the going down of the sun.”

“The men of the north stood as motionless as a wall, they were like a belt of ice frozen together, and not to be dissolved, as they slew the Arab with the sword. The Austrasians [Franks], vast of limb, and iron of hand, hewed on bravely in the thick of the fight; it was they who found and cut down the Saracen’s king [Rahman].”

The Bust Out

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My grandfather had an expression he used so often I cannot disentangle it from him in my memory. The expression was “a dog that will bring a bone will take a bone.” The meaning is that someone who will loyally steal for you will just as quickly steal from you. Stealing is stealing and the sort of person who steals is not someone you should ever trust. I never understood why people would use dogs to steal bones, but that was long ago in a land far far away.

Anyway, it is one of those things that often pops into my head when thinking about the great pressing matters of our age. The temptation, at least for me anyway, is to confuse what I would like to see happen with what I think will happen. Being a man of the Right, it really means I confuse what I fear will happen with what I think will happen. Having that old pithy expression rattling around in my head reminds me that I have my biases like everyone else.

The worst bias to have, of course, is the bias of hope, particularly when it comes to politics. As soon as you start thinking your side might win, the pol on your side will turn around and stab your side in the back. The reason conservatives hate evolution so much is they have seen too many of their guys evolve into liberals as soon as they hit Washington.

One of the things I find baffling about so many Republican voters is that they can’t seem to learn this lesson. They pour their heart into the party only to have the party crap all over them. Here’s a story coming out of DC that is a perfect example.

The first immigration bill introduced under Rep. Paul Ryan’s speakership Wednesday would bypass the annual 66,000 cap on H-2B work visas by allowing foreigners admitted in any of the three previous years to remain and not be subject to the cap.

Critics say it will lead to more competition for what are often middle-class American jobs and will eventually lead to more illegal immigrants as the foreign workers overstay their visas.

The H-2B is considered a “seasonal” work permit for lower-skilled workers such as cooks, construction workers, hospitality, theme park employment, maintenance, forestry, seafood processing, cruise ship employees and truck driving among many other jobs.

It differs from the H-1B, which is for skilled guest-workers and also is the subject of pending legislation sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who wants to triple the number issued to foreign workers each year.

The cap exemption on the H-2B expired in 2007. At the time, it doubled the number but it could as much as quadruple, legislative sources told WND. This is the same way the total number of existing H-1B visa workers got so much higher than the annual inflow.

The H-2B visa program, though referred to as a “seasonal” guest worker program it is not an agricultural guest worker program.

The promise from Paul Ryan and his supporters in the party was that all immigration bills would be tabled until the new president was in office. Obama was too feckless and devious to trust and the issue was too divisive for Republicans. The main opposition to Ryan was over the fact he is an open borders fanatic that dreams of turning your town into Tijuana or Lagos. But, here we are anyway.

Politicians lying is nothing new, but this is a rather egregious example. Still, outlandish lying is what we have come to expect from Republicans. The outrage, of course, is how these dirt bags behind the bill are crapping all over their fellow citizens. Bringing in legions of foreigners to take the jobs of Americans is horrible in itself. Teaming up with business to screw the guys and gals at the bottom of the income scale is loathsome.

It’s tempting, of course, to think that these pols are just, wink, wink, helping local business get around labor laws that would otherwise force them to hire locals who, well, you know. We all know what I mean. Those Mexicans work so hard and they never complain, never call out sick and never steal. You don’t want to see the price of your Big Mac go to forty bucks, do you?

Except, the next guys they sell out will be you because the dog that will bring a bone will carry a bone. If they will sell out the white trash and blacks down at the bottom, they will have no qualms about selling you out the next time. In fact, they look forward to it. It is what they do. It is their nature. They will keep auctioning off bits and pieces of this country until there is nothing left.

It’s what used to be called a “bust out.” In the olden thymes, the mafia would get its hooks into a local business man who maybe had a gambling problem, a thing for boys or something else he would just as soon not disclose. The mafia would use this to get their tentacles into his business with the vague promise that there was some price he could pay to satisfy them.

Instead, they would run up his lines of credit, skim off all the cash and sell whatever they could out the back door, pocketing the results. Eventually, the business could borrow no more and it would be squeezed dry. At that point they would burn the place down, collect the insurance if any existed and the owner would turn up wearing cement sneakers.

That’s a big part of what’s driving the immigration issue. For sure, many are romantics with heads full of nonsense. Others imagine a Utopian world without borders. The guys doing the work to make it happen, however, are just gangsters in suits selling off every part of the country they can grasp.

Steve Chabot, Bob Goodlatte, Andy Harris, and Charles W. Boustany are not ideologues. They’re crooks, stealing anything and everything. A lot of people voted for them thinking, “they may be crooks, but they’re our crooks.” Nope. They are just thieves who steal because that’s what thieves do.

Fundamentally what ails America is that we have a ruling class that despises the people and nation over whom it rules. That’s why they have hung a sign on the door that reads, “Fire Sale: Everything Must Go!” Just as there’s no bargaining with the mafia, you don’t beat these people by getting more of “your guys” in the Estates-General.

Meantime, the bust out continues.

The Religion of Open Borders

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I’m fond of pointing out that the main reason Progressives win every fight is that their opponents make the mistake of thinking it is a debate over facts and reasons. The people calling themselves conservative right now are sure that all they have to do is round up the facts and present them to the other side and the Left will throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers.

Reality is completely different. Progressives are religious fanatics and no amount of reality will shake them from their beliefs. Their religion does not have a superior being anymore, but it has lots of supernatural components. Most important, it has a moral component. The adherent is there to receive grace and that comes through social activism. They act locally because they think eternally.

We’re seeing a similar thing with open borders. It’s common to blame the greedy cheap labor lobbies for buying off pols in both parties, but there’s not a ton of evidence for it. The guys doing most of the hiring of illegals are small businesses with no lobbying power. Amnesty actually harms the cheap labor lobbies because it would end the under the table hiring. Yeah, there are cheap labor lobbies, but they are not the bogeymen many imagine.

Steve Sailer has other ideas. In this post about Paul Ryan, he blames black people.

In the early 1990s I visited the Milwaukee fairgrounds on the lakefront a couple of times for various festivals. I recall being struck by how African Americans made up a large percentage of the partiers at the festivals, but a small percentage of the workers. Most of the work seemed to be getting done by Mexicans.

A continuing theme here at iSteve is that Milwaukee and Madison have, on average, close to the worst blacks in the country. Most Northern cities’ blacks are the descendants of people who left the South in the 1940s and 1950s for jobs in the North. But Wisconsin’s blacks tend to be the descendants of people who left Mississippi in the 1960s and 1970s for welfare in social democratic Wisconsin.

It’s only natural for Wisconsin whites like Paul Ryan to see Mexicans as better than blacks and thus want more of them in order to demographically swamp the African-Americans who have made life miserable for Wisconsin whites. But it’s also natural for Republicans further from the Canadian Border to be less naive about the poorly thought-through social engineering emotions of Wisconsin politicians.

Steve is fond of this sort of reductionist argument. It sounds good at first, but when you think about how it must work, it starts to sound implausible when you scale up from one guy at the state fair. Imagine Ryan meeting with his team and saying, “We have to do something about our bad blacks and I think we should import a bunch of Mexicans!”

I don’t know. Maybe that’s happening at secret meetings of The Deep State™ and I’m terribly naive, but my sense is exactly no one in Wisconsin thinks like this. I get around a lot and what you always hear from amnesty advocates is one of two talking points. One is that Hispanics are wonderful hardworking additions to the country. The other is they are a necessary part of the labor market.

Frankly, I don’t know if anyone that says these things thinks much about it. They just say these things because that’s what you do. If you are a Democrat, you are for amnesty so you pick from one of the Democrat talking points. The same is true for most Republicans. Libertarians, of course, have their fantasies about the free flow of good and people in a world without government.

My hunch is what lies at the core of the Religion of Open Borders is morality. It’s a manifestation of Public Protestantism. In a prior age, the Yankee religious impulse was focused on the salvation of society, not of the individual. You had men in black clothes making sure you were observant of the Sabbath and not having too much fun. Once God faded from the picture and the world got smaller, this impulse folded into what we call social activism. The moonbat woman next door with the Prius really does think she is saving the planet.

The Religion of Open Borders is the next great cause or perhaps the globalization of Yankee Public Protestantism. Take a look at this article by Tyler Cowen’s flunky, Alex Tabarrok.

Not every place in the world is equally well-suited to mass economic activity. Nature’s bounty is divided unevenly. Variations in wealth and income created by these differences are magnified by governments that suppress entrepreneurship and promote religious intolerance, gender discrimination, or other bigotry. Closed borders compound these injustices, cementing inequality into place and sentencing their victims to a life of penury.

The overwhelming majority of would-be immigrants want little more than to make a better life for themselves and their families by moving to economic opportunity and participating in peaceful, voluntary trade. But lawmakers and heads of state quash these dreams with state-sanctioned violence—forced repatriation, involuntary detention, or worse—often while paying lip service to “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

That is a purely moral argument. He couches it a little in economic terms, but he is not shying away from the moral claims he is making in favor of mass immigration.

What moral theory justifies using wire, wall, and weapon to prevent people from moving to opportunity? What moral theory justifies using tools of exclusion to prevent people from exercising their right to vote with their feet?

No standard moral framework, be it utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, Rawlsian, Christian, or any other well-developed perspective, regards people from foreign lands as less entitled to exercise their rights—or as inherently possessing less moral worth—than people lucky to have been born in the right place at the right time. Nationalism, of course, discounts the rights, interests, and moral value of “the Other, but this disposition is inconsistent with our fundamental moral teachings and beliefs.

The language used here is right out of the Abolitionist Movement. It is right from the Civil Rights Movement. It’s right out of John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity. God does not make an appearance, but clearly Alex believes that the path to grace is through creating a world where “every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection.”

Travelogue: Texas

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Travel is one of the best ways to see the world. I’ve been lucky in my life in that I have had the luxury of traveling quite a bit on someone else’s dime. Business travel is not vacation travel, but I think it is often a better way to see the world simply because you have long stretches with nothing to do so you look around, explore, adventure. On vacation, you have “stuff’ that fills every waking moment, usually within the confines of the Potemkin vacation area.

I’ve been to Texas many times. I used to travel here often for work matters. Thirty years ago when I first visited Texas on the way to Mexico, I thought this is a place I should live. For some reason, it just seems to fit my sensibilities. Every time I’ve come here, I have had the same thought: I don’t think I’m going back. But, here I am nearing my jump into the void and I’m still just a guy who visits Texas.

The funny thing about Texas is it is remains the one place in America that is brimming with confidence. Texas is not a terribly sentimental place. They will knock down an old building for a new building without giving it a thought. In the Northeast, an army of weirdos will be there guarding the old building, even though the weirdos will have no clue why the old building was built. It’s just old so they think it has to be saved.

At the same time, those same weirdos will claw one another’s eyes out to cancel the school Christmas play. There’s the lack of confidence. In most of America, our betters conduct themselves like the ne’er do well grandchildren of a successful man. The kids compete with one another as to who is the most reverent toward the old man, but not a one of them tries to emulate him. The best they can do is have a big picture of him in their house, which he bought for them.

Texas does not have the problem yet. Texans love being Texans and they love being in Texas. There’s really nothing special about Texas. Dallas is a massive suburb that looks like every other suburb in the South, but they are proud of it and you see that everywhere you go. Texas plays Oklahoma today in the Cotton Bowl and tickets are selling for $500 on the secondary market, even though UT is terrible. It’s just a great celebration of Texas football history.

I think that confidence is why Texans are soft on immigration. They are cocksure that if you move to Texas, you will become a Texan. They are right about it too. Vietnamese refugees landed in Houston and are now Texans whose ancestors came from Vietnam.  Of course, Texas has always had loads of Mexicans from the northern part of Mexico. A big part of what makes Texas tick is the blend of Southern culture and northern Mexican culture.

In Massachusetts, there’s zero cultural confidence. If America were invaded, the good thinkers of the Bay State would surrender on day one and begin taking classes in the language and culture of the invaders. That’s why the northeast seems to be leading the charge on the immigration fight. They are scared. A friend here in Texas, who is from Mass, is a rock-ribbed Trump man now and it is all over immigration.

In the South, illegal immigration is an issue, but mostly because it offends the people’s law and order instincts. It’s not seen as a threat to their way of life. In many respects, migrant workers are a part of their way of life. The South would be a very different place without the flow of migrants into the agribusinesses. Go into a poultry plant in Virginia or North Carolina and you see nothing but Hispanics. It’s been that way for generations.

The same is true of Texas. Mexican migration in and out of the state is just a part of the state’s character. The Mexicans who live here permanently came here because a part of what made them Mexican also made them Texan. The transition was easy. Of course, there are Texas families who were here before Texas was a place. The result is most Texans feel they have a good handle on how to manage Mexican immigration.

Finally, kicking around here it strikes me that the Cult hates Texas for the same reason they hated Sarah Palin. In the case of Palin, the idea that dirt people could live the feminist ideal while hanging onto dirt people culture enraged the Cult. Palin was the living negation of the One True Faith. There’s a similar thing with Texas. here, diversity is on display all over, but it’s held together with the dominant Texas culture.

The Cult believes this is impossible. For them, diversity means obliterating all culture by running it through the blender of multiculturalism. The result is the exact opposite of vibrant diversity, but the screaming and bellowing makes it impossible to point it out. A state like Texas puts the lie to the Cult’s blathering about diversity. Texas has boatloads of it without adopting any of the Cult-Marx nonsense.

Now, I’m off to eat my weight in fried food.

Diluting the Stock

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Imagine this blog is a business and you are a stock holder who got in early when I was starting up. The blog is booming and that means the value of the stock is booming. I figure I can capitalize on the boom and start issuing more stock. That’s good for me, but there’s one problem. That dilutes the value of your stock. That would be a crappy thing for me to do to my stock holders, which is why companies tend to avoid doing this.

But, let’s assume I don’t care about my stock holders and I start issuing new stock. One thing that will happen is current stock holders will begin dumping the stock. After all, the value of the stock will most likely decline and the point of buying the stock in the first place is to get something for it, as in a return on the investment. If I keep issuing stock, the price will collapse and the stock will be worthless.

The same logic applies to citizenship. Being a Canadian has value. You get cheap maple syrup, high alcohol beer and good hockey. There’s also the protection of the Canadian government, law enforcement, economic benefits and social welfare benefits. In return, the citizen serves on juries, pays taxes and serves in the military when required. A country is a lot like a company and the citizens are stock holders. It’s not a perfect analogy, but a useful one.

What our rulers seek to do is dilute the value of citizenship by offering it to whoever staggers along.

Rep Luis V. Gutiérrez, one of Congress’ most outspoken advocates for immigrants, on Wednesday called for expanding the Affordable Care Act to cover all of the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants in the United States.

“The goal is to make integration and inclusion real for millions of families that are locked out under current law,” the Illinois Democrat said in a floor speech introducing his proposed legislation.

“As it stands right now, undocumented immigrants are not subject to the individual mandate and cannot buy into health insurance exchanges even if they use their own money.  My legislation will change that.  It says that we stand for inclusion.”

Citing last week’s papal address to Congress (the pope repeatedly urged U.S. lawmakers to follow “the Golden Rule”), Gutiérrez said: “Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you means moving forward with no restrictions on which brother and sister and neighbor we think of as ‘eligible’ or ‘deserving.’”

The Gutiérrez legislation faces long odds in the House, where proposals to overhaul immigration have been stymied by Republicans who insist the federal government must first address holes in border security.

If everyone on earth is eligible for the benefits of citizenship, as long as they get to America, what point is there in being a citizen? More important, why would anyone try to make the country better? The whole point of investing in a company or a country is to make it better. In the case of a country, better for your descendants. If the children of foreigners are going to take from your kids the fruit of your labor, why bother?

That would obviously spill into voting, as doing what’s best for the country would lose all value. Instead, factions would vote in blocks, at war with other factions, for the right to take what they can from whomever they can. That’s assuming people both voting. The only solution to that is authoritarianism where the national government uses force to compel cooperation from and among the people.

That’s what our betters have failed to understand. At some point, people will simply not respond to patriotic appeals or moral suasion. After all, loyalty to the state will have no basis as there is no benefit to citizenship. The relationship becomes purely transactional as both sides try to beat the other in their dealings. The only result of open borders is a Hobbesian world that looks more like the Middle East than Western Civilization.

Kindermord

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No people have been more poorly served by their leaders than the German people, going back to the founding of the modern German nation. Most people would assume I’m referring to you know who and the you know what, but that’s just one example.The Kaiser’s actions in the lead up to the Great War were reckless and crazy, costing his people immeasurably. The Great War has largely been forgotten, but it is fair to pin the blame there for what came after on the events of 100 years ago.

I’ve been reading about the Great War lately and one event in the Battle of Ypres jumped out to me for its significance today. The German army found itself on the defensive after the French rallied at The Marne. They retreated back toward Belgium and took up defensive positions before the Race to the Sea, where both sides tried to outflank the other to the north. The Battle of Ypres was at the end of this.

There’s one battle that struck a chord with me and it is the Battle of Langemarck. The war had not gone as the Germans had planned and they suddenly found themselves needing many more soldiers. Not only was there not going to be a quick end to the war, the Allies had amassed a huge army and the Germans had to match it so they began conscripting every able bodied man into the army.

Both sides found themselves in a position where they were sending raw recruits into battle against hardened units in a form of warfare no one had contemplated until the Great War. The result was often slaughter where raw units were sent rushing against machine gun positions, only to be mowed down by the thousands. By Langemarck, however, both sides were well aware of the reality of this war.

In September 1914 four new German Army Corps had been formed. At that time, a German corp was about 12,000 men so these new corps totaled 50,000 men at most. Estimates vary, but about 75% of these new units were young volunteers between 17 and 19 years of age. As a result of the young age of so many of the soldiers, the Corps became known as the “Kinderkorps”. The word “Kinder” translates as “children” in English.

These four Corps were incorporated into the German Fourth Army and by October, with only a few weeks of training, they were on the march towards the front at Ypres. On the other side were experience soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force. These were some of the best soldiers in the war at the time. The BEF was a professional, full-time military that had fought around the globe prior to the war in France.

The accounts are disputed, but the reports at the time claim these “Kinderkorps” attacked the British positions, singing Deutschland Uber Alles, with some having put flowers in their helmets. This was most assuredly apocryphal, made up to add poignancy to a dreadful event. Estimates say 70% of these units were mowed down in the attack. Again, the details are disputed by revisionists, who have motives worse than the the people they wish to refute, but the slaughter is not disputed.

For a long time this event held a special place in the German national consciousness, but I’m sure it no longer holds any place today. It should have remained a warning to all future Germans about the conduct of their leaders and the cost of giving them too much power. The story of German leadership since the founding of the modern state is one of suicidal squandering of their most precious resources for no good purpose, beyond self-aggrandizement.

This is relevant today in what we are seeing with Merkel’s quest to fill up Germany with Muslims form the Near East. These Muslims are not looking to become German, even if that were a possibility. They are not seeking temporary shelter from a storm back home. The majority are men of military age, who should be back home fighting to make their country safe again. No, this is just a bunch of people looking for a better deal.

Germany should be organizing the defense of Europe, helping the periphery deal with this flood of migrants. Instead, it is a slow motion “Kindermord”, where the children of today are being sacrificed to the mad policies of a bunch of old farts in charge of the country.The absolute inability to admit error is leading the German political class to embrace what amounts to national suicide, just so they can feel good.

Reading about the Great War, it’s hard to comprehend how the leaders of that age could have been so foolish, reckless and craven. But, we also have the benefit of 100 years of hindsight. Still, after the first wave of young men were fed into the gaping maw of industrial warfare, there was simply no excuse for not seeking a way to end what was a pointless war.

One hundred years from now, if civilization permits a looking back at our age, people will wonder how the leaders of today let wave after wave of migrants wash away European civilization. After the first experiments with wholesale immigration, how could they not see the suicidal lunacy of these polices? The lesson, of course, is no amount of “Kindermord” can shake the faith of men determined to wipe themselves out.

Fear the Brown Tide

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The Left is a religion, a secular version of Public Protestantism. The adherents deeply believe that the promised land is over the next hill. All that is necessary is to eliminate the sins of society so that the elect can be freed to reach the Utopia that has been promised. They are not much different from the Muslims who believe the hidden Imam will return when the righteous have the final showdown with the infidels.

To the true believer, everything passes through the filters of their belief. Anything that contradicts the faith is either filtered out or re-imagined so that it fits the narrative. Extraneous data is worked into the narrative to give it weight, so that the believer can believer harder. All of it, so to speak, points to the day when the Great Pumpkin rises out of his pumpkin patch and flies through the air with his bag of toys for all the children.

A great example of this is the Latin King. Since the Reagan years, it seems, the Left has been telling us that the Latin King is coming and he is going to be pissed unless we get our bleep together. That means lifting up his little brown children on our shoulders and carrying them to the top of American society. Otherwise, when the Latin King arrives, the tide of brown will wash all the gringos out to sea or something.

This column in Politico is a good example.

Hispanic activists have two words for Donald Trump — thank you.

“I think the greatest thing to ever happen to the Hispanic electorate is a gentleman named Donald Trump, he has crystalized the angst and anger of the Hispanic community,” U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce President & CEO Javier Palomarez told POLITICO in an interview. “I think that we can all rest assured that Hispanics can turn out in record numbers.”

Trump has rankled the Hispanic community from Day One of his presidential run when he called many illegal Mexican immigrants “rapists” and drug peddlers during his rambling announcement speech in June. Since then, he’s driven the GOP field further right on immigration issues, in part with his aggressive proposal to have Mexico pay for a wall along the border with the U.S. and to deport 11.3 million undocumented immigrants in short order.

While many activists find his comments downright offensive, they also see an opportunity. Trump has managed to get Latinos engaged with the 2016 race, and activists plan to exploit that to the fullest extent possible.

“He really is just outrageous, he’s built his entire campaign on attacking our community and really playing to the worst element of American society,” said José Calderón, president of the Hispanic Federation, a nonprofit membership organization. “In some ways, he’s helping us out, the base is energized —I think people are really eager to stand up and say this is not who we are and show that through our electoral process.”

Calderón said in nonelection years, the Federation, which represents 100 community-based organizations across the country and is leading voter outreach efforts, can register about 25,000 Hispanics and on election years it’s about 60,000. But with Trump’s comments driving people to the polls, Calderón believes they can register even more.

“It’s become easier, right, to do it now. The community is very mobilized, there is this anger,” Calderón said. “We will respond in kind, through our votes.”

One of the stock features of this form of Progressive fairy tale is to have a super-white WASP lady do the reporting. There’s nothing more compelling than a lecture about diversity from a girl who makes Eva Braun look like a mulatto. But, from her end of the telescope, those little brown people look threatening so she’s scared that the mean old Trump guy is getting them worked into a frenzy.

There’s also the suicidal impulse on display. The choice presented is either resist the brown tide flowing north from below the equator and incur the wrath of that brown tide or lie back and enjoy the brown tide washing away your culture and people. This does not occur to the nice white people as they can only focus on one thing at a time. Their focus is on the bad whites whose sinful ways are keeping everyone else from grace.

This is what has always perplexed conservatives about their Progressive antagonists. Rational people see the suicidal implications, but they can’t believe it is intentional so they try everything to talk the moonbats out of it. There’s no convincing a fanatic and these fanatics think burning the village in order to save it is rational, even when it is their own village. The elimination of the sinner is all that matters.