A cheery interview with Vox Day:
The dirty little secret of politics is that most politicians are of barely above average intelligence and possess very narrow educations. They’re mostly people with IQs of around 120 and a law degree. So, they know literally nothing about economics and lack the capacity to see that what the experts are telling them doesn’t add up. Given those circumstances, it should come as no surprise that they so readily embrace the economic theory that tells them exactly what they want to hear. “Go, thou, and spend, and thus shalt the economy be saved. And lo, thou shalt be the savior of thy people!” That’s a lot more palatable than being told that the nation is in dire straits and their careers are in jeopardy due to the actions of their predecessors, and that there’s not much they can do about it. So, they listen to the self-interested parties and blindly go about making the situation worse.
I think that he overestimates the intelligence of the narrowly educated lawyer/politicians. Particularly the one in the White House.
This have anything to do with Pelosi’s statement that unemployment generates jobs?
The wall street economists are worse
Krugman
Mis-educated is more like it. They tend to be fully schooled in Marxist though via the standard American university cannon.
It does not take more than BELOW AVERAGE intelligence to understand an entity cannot spend more money than its income except for short periods. Borrowed money results in future impoverishment in all cases except very astute and lucky investments.
To say nothing of blowhard IT/Programmer and Engineering types on the internet with similarly above average intelligence and wayyyyyyy too much of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Well, of course 80 percent of us commenters on this website know we’re better than the average commenter here. And you can’t teach us any different!
I would not say that politicians are particularly stupid (though there are some notable exceptions), mostly they just have different incentives/priorities that trump the long term economic well being of all of the people.
Maybe one could write the economic equivalent of the first law of thermodynamics into the constitution. Hence forth government will be prohibited from trying to implement economic perpetual motion machines…
I think the issue in politics is that cause and effect are usually separated by enough time that the cause can be forgotten or (sometimes intentionally) misunderstood. So connecting the two becomes problematic, particularly if the short term interest of all involved leans towards not connecting them. That means that lessons learned by one administration tend to be forgotten by the next.
Everyone thinks they are smarter than the last guys to do the job, and if their policy on a particular issue failed, it’s just because they were incompetent. It will work this time, because we are better. The disconnect is caused by a mixture of ego and convenience.
I know it wouldn’t happen, but I think a start on the problem Chris outlines is paying officials strictly in “futures” based off of the values when they entered office.
If the measuring index is down five years after you’ve left office -> you get paid nothing.
Thus providing monetary incentive to root for long-term growth.
The problem with politicians isn’t a lack of IQ, it’s a lack of critical thinking skills. Obama isn’t stupid; he is just intellectually arrogant to a fault. (An extreme fault.)
I lived in Japan from 1991 to 2000. Japan had its bubble and then a lost decade. I see no reason why it would be any different here. Since I lived through the lost decade in Japan (and made money), I see no reason why I cannot do the same here.
I lived in Japan from 1991 to 2000. Japan had its bubble and then a lost decade. I see no reason why it would be any different here. Since I lived through the lost decade in Japan (and made money), I see no reason why I cannot do the same here.
Especially since the response isn’t significantly different. Huge amounts of borrowing, idiotic social programs, massive building of useless infrastructure, etc. BTW, if any promiscuous Keynesians (that is, people operating under the illusion that any spending is a good thing) are out there, consider that Japan’s economy has stagnated for more than a decade despite (or rather because of) vast government spending and the utter failure to fix structural problems with Japan like the postal saving system.
I think a useful analogy is that most laws are like computer programs being run for the first time. If they actually work at all and do what was intended it is a miracle.
Karl Hallowell, “Especially since the response isn’t significantly different. Huge amounts of borrowing, idiotic social programs, massive building of useless infrastructure, etc.”
Sounds like what we’re doing in Australia. We decided to build lots of school assembly halls. The idiot in charge of this (stuff costing up to 4 times what it was really worth and useless anyway) is now the Prime Minister after last week’s union coup. Just what this country needs – a red haired female communist ex student union leader and ambulance chasing lawyer in charge.
The governments bailed out the economy with phoney money after the Panic of 2008 and we’re going to be back to square one very shortly as this funny money runs out and, for example, the mortgage market bvecomes jammed again. You can’t print funny money backed by nothing in order to trigger a recovery. This’ll be worse than the 1930s, I hope everyone’s prepared!
Maybe one could write the economic equivalent of the first law of thermodynamics into the constitution. Hence forth government will be prohibited from trying to implement economic perpetual motion machines…
But that will put most of them out of a job.
Hey, wait…
“Since I lived through the lost decade in Japan (and made money), I see no reason why I cannot do the same here.”
Any investment tips for strategy to follow based on that prediction?
Hmmm, it appears Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale, is a Christian Libertarian, whose background is designing computer games, not in economics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Beale#cite_note-women-20
As a side note he thinks the U.S. should return to being a White Anglo-Saxon Culture and
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=151689
and it was wrong to give women equal rights.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45654
So I guess just belonging to Mensa doesn’t make you smart 🙂
If by “white Anglo-Saxon culture,” we would be better off if we returned to that. That culture is why the Anglosphere has been so successful. It has nothing to do with racism — it’s about culture. You know, as they say in the inner city, “acting white.”
“Hmmm, it appears Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale, is a Christian Libertarian, whose background is designing computer games, not in economics.”
And yet he still seems to have a better grasp of economic realities than Paul Krugman. Maybe Krugman should start designing computer games.
Rand,
I guess you didn’t read the Vox Day blog post I referenced “The revoluciónary is right”
Is isn’t talking just about ideas, but racial heritage in the sense of white supremacy. As he starts out:
[[[Throughout history, when an occupying power has wanted to destabilize and destroy a nation, it has settled a foreign people in its midst.]]]
Foreign as in non-White Anglo-Saxon stock. BTW if that sounds familiar it should. Think of Herr Hilter’s speeches in the 1930’s.
The he goes on:
[[[There is, quite simply, no such thing as human equality in any material sense. In fact, the latest genetic research on potential Neanderthal genes found in humans of non-African descent suggest that it is not entirely accurate to even assert that homo sapiens is not divided into various subspecies.]]]
he continues:
[[[As for the myth of the American melting pot, it should suffice to point out that the idea was popularized by a Russian Jew who emigrated to England, never lived in the United States and was a fervent believer in the cause of establishing a Jewish homeland.]]]
and
[[[The reality is that America will proceed on one of two paths. The first is to embrace the conflict. If Americans can find the courage to consciously reject the myth of the melting pot and expel the Mexicans from the American Southwest, the Arabs from Detroit and the Somalis from Minneapolis, they can reclaim their traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture.]]]
and
[[[Since no one of national stature is willing to openly defend traditional American society, that leaves only the second path of conflict avoidance. White Americans will continue to vote with their feet, retreating slowly but continuously before the inexorable wave of migrationary expansion.]]]
and
[[[Melting-pot America was always a myth. There is no magic assimilation to replace the ruthless mathematics of demographic transformation.]]]
Bilwick,
[[[And yet he still seems to have a better grasp of economic realities than Paul Krugman. Maybe Krugman should start designing computer games.]]]
So you agree with these statements by Vox Day?
[[[When women began to enter the work force en masse in the latter half of the 20th century, the overall supply of labor increased, obviously. As per the iron law of supply and demand, over the last 60 years, this increase in supply has somewhat outstripped the growth in the economy and the attendant demand for labor, which is why real wages are still lower in 2005 than in 1973. ]]]
and
[[[(The decline in wages would be much more obvious to the casual observer if men had not begun retiring earlier at the same time women entered thework force. To state that young women are working today so their grandfathers can play golf is reasonable shorthand for what happened.) ]]]
Both quotes from “Why women’s rights are wrong” by Vox Day.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45654
Yes, he thinks society and the economy would be better off if women were dependent on their fathers and husband’s income rather then their own.
So tell me, do you still we should listen to Vox Day on economic policy? That we should repeal the laws giving women equal rights and then drive them from the work force so there are jobs for unemployed men?
Do you really feel this is the economic policy that America should be following to reduced unemployment, turning the clock back 100 years and banning women from the workforce…
Are you still going to argue that Vox Day has a better grasp of economics then economists do?
Are you still going to argue that Vox Day has a better grasp of economics then economists do?
Yeah, actually, I am. I also think Bill Bigelow knows more about building workable space stations than NASA does despite his also apparently believing that there are little green men flying about in saucers. Like Bigelow’s UFOlogy vs. his engineering, VD’s racialist special pleading is hardly an integral part of his economic analysis.
Said analysis is hardly unimpeachable, to be sure. VD is misleading about real wages 1973 – 2005, for example. It is undeniable that massive entry into the work force by women had an overall moderating effect on wages, but VD ignores the fact that a smaller percentage of the total workforce relied primarily on wages in 2005 than in 1973. There are proportionally more people these days who are self-employed and the majority of them make more than people who are employed by others. He also fails to note that overall living standards continued to rise over the 1/3-century interval in question owing to better productivity, the moderating influence on prices of increased global trade flows and the progressively lower real cost of anything that is electronic. So he gets maybe a B- in Econ. That’s still better than Paul Krugman’s F.
As for the racialist special pleading, anyone passably conversant with American history knows the melting pot thing has been true. The modern definition of “white” would be unrecognizable to Americans of 150 years ago, who did not regard the Irish as “white,” or those of 100 years ago, who had similar attitudes with respect to Italians, Poles and Jews. The history of America is one of incremental adoption of progressively more inclusive working definitions of “white.”
As for the Anglo-Saxon thing, American culture incorporates important elements derived from English and Germanic forbears, but the American culture is quite distinct from that of either England or Germany – as present-day English and Germans are only too happy to agree.
Unlike said Anglo-Europeans, however, I contend that the distinct American culture is also distinctly superior by any rational objective criterion. The American culture has been unilaterally defining the future almost from its inception and took the world lead in this respect by the end of World War I and has been pulling out that lead ever since.
What allowed the relatively painless integration of millions of foreigners into the America of decades past was an official policy of unapologetic assimilation based on a justifiable pride in the superior American culture. To say that this aspect of historically successful America is now in tatters is to belabor the obvious.
The dysfunctional aspects of modern American society – of which the decline of rational cultural pride and an assimilationist expectation of immigrant behavior once resident here are only examples – are almost entirely the results of deliberate cultural warfare against the American project by The Left, broadly defined. Their ceaseless efforts to both denigrate American culture, sow internal dissension and paranoia through the encouragement of racially-tribalist identity politics and to spin increasingly convoluted apologetics for every dead-end foreign culture that passes the test of being acceptably anti-American have slowed, but not stopped the progress of the on-going American Project. In the end, I believe the Leftist project will be the one that fails.
To say that this aspect of historically successful America is now in tatters is to belabor the obvious.
Well said and yet still they will argue. I also can’t believe it’s just the result of neglect, since we can list case after case after case where intentional acts have occurred.
Which way will we tip?
Dick Eagleson:
[[[Are you still going to argue that Vox Day has a better grasp of economics then economists do?
Yeah, actually, I am.]]]
So you are on record for agreeing to repealing women’s rights’ to get them out of jobs men should have to reduce unemployment? And deporting non-WASPs who have lived and contributed to America for generations back to their “failed” countries to improve the economy? That these are good economic policy?
Sheesh.
As for Bigelow, he doesn’t build space stations, the engineers and technicians he hires build them so his beliefs about UFO’s are a non-issue as long as he keeps signing their checks.
Ken,
[[[To say that this aspect of historically successful America is now in tatters is to belabor the obvious.
Well said and yet still they will argue. I also can’t believe it’s just the result of neglect, since we can list case after case after case where intentional acts have occurred.]]]
You know a 100 years ago they used to say the Irish would never fit in, always talking about the good old days in the old country, same with the Polish, Russians, etc. And don’t forget how it was claimed these foreigners caused crimes to rise in America. And yet now people like you are saying they added to the nation’s strength.
Tell me Ken, where would libertarians be today if that illegal immigrate, Ayn Rand, never wrote your “bible”, Atlas Shrugged?
Raw intelligence and formal education doesn’t guarantee knowledge or understanding of economic basics. I found myself explaining fractional banking for the second or third time to the same ex-roommate who is by any measure smarter than I & definitely better-educated. It’s all a matter of what a person has time to learn & available attention-span to commit to memory. While I was being Mr. Liberal-Arts general-education guy, he was taking every course in Japanese and math our alma mater offered. Meanwhile, I didn’t even take calculus… You tell me why I was the one explaining reserve requirements & how they bear on credit availability. Again.
Tom, he was talking about the melting pot which is an obvious success story, historically documented.
Ayn Rand assimilated and became an American. The Irish, Polish and Russians became Americans (well my ex-wife is still mostly Russian but much more American than she started out.)
Foreigners did cause crimes. Not all, but many. It’s one of many reactions to the difficulties of going to a foreign land.
Never read it, although I feel like I know the story from all the popular references to it. It’s about government creating problems and adding more regulation to fix the problems they created… sounds prophetic, but it’s not my bible.
As for Bigelow, he doesn’t build space stations, the engineers and technicians he hires build them so his beliefs about UFO’s are a non-issue as long as he keeps signing their checks.
This sounds awful close to the marxist labor value concept. Do you suppose Bigelow’s choices have anything to do with what his company builds?
BTW Tom, it makes perfect sense for people to come to America illegally because we don’t enforce those laws very well and the rewards are great. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make everyone follow the same rules (or change the rules if need be.)
Equal justice… all created equal… etc.
Ken,
[[[Ayn Rand assimilated and became an American. The Irish, Polish and Russians became Americans (well my ex-wife is still mostly Russian but much more American than she started out.)]]]
As will the current generation of illegal immigrates if given the chance.
My grand parents never learned more then a few words of English their entire lives although they migrated in their 20’s in 1901 before the quota laws were passed. But they didn’t need to speak English as they lived in areas like Chicago and Wisconsin where many folks still spoke Polish. My dad, who was born here, spoke only Polish until starting school. It was one of the arguments being made that Eastern Europeans would never assimilate to America because they continued to speak their own language and lived together near others in communities based on the national origin. But guess what? Their children learned the language, the culture and they assimilated.
Ken,
[[[BTW Tom, it makes perfect sense for people to come to America illegally because we don’t enforce those laws very well and the rewards are great. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make everyone follow the same rules (or change the rules if need be.)
Equal justice… all created equal… etc.]]]
Only the immigration laws were not written that way. They were designed to preserve the U.S. as a WASP nation. Indeed, the Immigration Act of 1921 that started this mess was inspired by the Book, “The Passing of The Great Race” by Madison Grant that argued that the U.S. needed to preserved its “Nordic superiority”. That is why the law set immigration quotas as a percentage of the ethnic population in the U.S. in 1890 when the nation was mostly WASP and before immigration shifted from Northern Europe to Eastern and Southern Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passing_of_the_Great_Race
BTW if the term “Nordic superiority” sounds familiar it should as Herr Hitler referred to Grant’s book as his “Bible” and it was on the required reading list of the Nazi Party. Hitler even wrote Grant a personal letter thanking him for a book that had so much influence on him and his thoughts…
http://books.google.com/books?id=4NoE2VyfN70C&pg=PA357#v=onepage&q&f=false
Yep, the U.S. immigration quota laws spring from the same source of inspiration as Hilter’s final solution. Kinda puts them in a new light doesn’t it?
Yes, when the roots are rotten, so is the tree that springs from them.
That is why I consider the issue of illegal immigration as the third great stain on the nation’s morality, after its treatment of native Americans and Blacks. And one its far past time to clean up.
Dear Thomas Matula,
The fact that you can’t handle the truth doesn’t make the truth any less true. Vox Day is right.
B Lewis,
[[[Vox Day is right.]]]
So you agree with Vox Day that we should turn the clock back to 1860 when the slaves were “happy”, women had no rights and all those non-WASPs had not migrated here yet? (shaking head…)
Thomas Matula,
You live in a world of make-believe. I have nothing to say to you. Viva Cristo Rey.
“[[[And yet he still seems to have a better grasp of economic realities than Paul Krugman. Maybe Krugman should start designing computer games.]]]
So you agree with these statements by Vox Day?”
Not all of them. He seems like a social conservative and I’m a hedonistic libertarian.
Al, that would be a start. A further step along that highly sensible path would be for performance bonuses for people above a certain level (perhaps board of directors level?) in private industry to have to be paid the same way. It’s all too easy for someone in authority in a company to asset-strip it, making short-term figures look better, to the great detriment of the long term future of a company. By the time the bad stuff happens, the culprit is long gone.
Which matters, because healthy private businesses are the foundation of a healthy economy. This applies with even more force to banks.
One wonders about Matula. If a guy makes some statements about economics you agree with, Matual seems to automatically assume that agreement implies agreement with everything the same guy has written on other subjects at other times.
Well, if they were logical, they wouldn’t be “liberals.”
Only the immigration laws were not written that way.
So an assumed injustice in the law means that, unlike every other nation on the planet, we should not defend our sovereignty as a nation?
My dad, who was born here, spoke only Polish until starting school.
Did your dad try to incite riots to take Wisconsin away from America?
B Lewis,
nor to I to someone who thinks a white supremacist like Vox Day has something of value to contribute to economic policy.
Ken,
The illegal immigrates are not a threat to America’s sovereignty. They are just here to work so they are able to send money to their families to feed their kids. The reason they are in the U.S. is because there is work and opportunity here, both of which would disappear if the southern states were returned to Mexico.
The folks you are referring to who are calling for those states to be returned to Mexico, or liberated, are not immigrates, but U.S. citizens, born in the U.S. from families that have lived in Arizona, Texas and California since the early 1800’s. Families that lost their land and power when “illegal immigrates” from America (AKA settlers) “invaded” the southwest and “took” it from Mexico in the 1800’s (remember your U.S. history?). They want to turn the clock back to before the U.S. invasion. But the majority of Hispanics, as well as nearly all the illegal immigrates views them as the same kind of fringe nut cases as the white supremacists are on the other extreme. Its no wonder the two groups feed off of each other.
Really, do some research on the issue and its history.
Bilwick1,
Ever hear of source creditability?
So you are on record for agreeing to repealing women’s rights’ to get them out of jobs men should have to reduce unemployment? And deporting non-WASPs who have lived and contributed to America for generations back to their “failed” countries to improve the economy? That these are good economic policy?
I have nothing but your repeated, yet entirely unsupported, assertions to go on about VD’s alleged policy preferences with respect to female employment or the forcible expulsion of non-white ethnics from the U.S. My comments were, in any event, not addressed to Mr. D’s alleged illiberal policy preferences, but to certain economically significant episodes of American social history that allegedly undergirded said alleged policy prescriptions, e.g., the waves of immigration into the U.S. from the 1840’s through the early 1920’s and the entry of vast numbers of women into the full-time workforce after roughly 1970.
I stand by everything I previously posted on these matters. I explicitly do not endorse “repealing women’s rights” or “deporting non-WASP’s” and can see no rational basis for your assuming any such thing based on what I wrote.
To the extent I have anything to be embarrassed about here, it is mainly in charitably assuming that your original comment had anything of consequence to do with the VD interview. I regret to say, I didn’t actually read it before commenting on your comment. Having now done so, I see that it concerns itself almost entirely with macroeconomics, prominently including the government-backed sub-prime loan-fed housing bubble and the TARP bailout. There is no mention of women in the workforce at all and the only mention of “non-WASP’s” is a reference to four states with large Hispanic populations being worst hit by the housing market collapse. Nothing about rounding them all up and shipping them back to Mexico.
Having never heard of the person known as Vox Day before encountering Rand’s post here, I have no idea whether he holds ideas even superficially similar to those you allege. Having seen, right here, the absurd leaps of illogic by which you presume to attribute the same alleged beliefs to me I am now not at all inclined to credit your assertions about VD’s opinions as bearing any necessary resemblance to reality.
Sheesh, indeed.
From the tenor of many of your comments here on the possibilities of establishing commercial space operations, my thought had been that you were a fairly extreme libertarian. You seemed to regard any acceptance of government money under any circumstances by a nominally private business entity to render said entity “non-commercial” in some existential sense.
The following, in another of your comments here, suggests a more leftist/progressive worldview:
That is why I consider the issue of illegal immigration as the third great stain on the nation’s morality, after its treatment of native Americans and Blacks. And one its far past time to clean up.
Perhaps it is even both at once – a combination I admittedly find difficult to fathom, but which I have observed enough examples of in my earlier peregrinations in Libertarian politics to know, in fact, to exist.
I wonder now whether your seeming regard of government funds as having cootie-like qualities with respect to the commercial legitimacy of business enterprises is less libertarian absolutism than it is the familiar liberal tendency to seek, seemingly everywhere, to annihilate real and useful distinctions that are ideologically inconvenient.
As to the “three great stains”:
Treatment of blacks was, indeed, horrendous in the antebellum South and, to be fair, less than delightful in the non-slavery states as well. Even so, I think it speaks well of America that war was not only countenanced but prosecuted in the face of much greater expense in time, money and bloodshed than initially anticipated to end slavery. Do 600,000 graves – most with white occupants – count for nothing in your moral calculus? If there is another instance in world history of an army of one race both taking grievous casualties from, and inflicting them on, a second army of the same race in service of the interests of a largely non-combatant population of a different race, I have yet to find it.
The century of Jim Crow that followed was better at least in the sense that black people had the option of moving out of the states of the Old Confederacy to get away from it.
The Civil War dead, the last 50 years of legislated non-discrimination and even, in many cases, explicit reverse-favoritism have laundered that stain as thoroughly as it is possible to do.
The Indians had the misfortune of being pastoral or nomadic tribal barbarian warriors with essentially static social norms thrust into close proximity with a nationalistic society of individualist, progressive, entrepreneurial bent. The same thing happened in the U.S. as has happened everywhere else in the world where these two social forms have bumped up against each other with predictably disastrous results for the former.
Far from being the tree-hugging pacifists of modern-day left-wing identity-politics propaganda, Indians were unapologetic practitioners of horrendous violence when it suited them. The immemorial default mechanism of conflict resolution between mutually antagonistic Indian tribes was genocidal warfare. Various tribes sporadically tried applying this tried and true mode of social interaction vis-a-vis the growing American white population and were defeated each and severally, despite occasional victories.
Such conflicts were inevitable. Tribal barbarism – especially of the hunter-gatherer variety – requires enormously more land area to support each individual than does a social order based on cities and industry. The small margin between survival and oblivion of such tribes, along with their necessarily limited population bases, made it a foregone conclusion they would be demographically displaced so long as they hewed to their ancient ways.
Tribalism is the default mode of human social structure, but it is poorly adapted to compete with any society that becomes more sophisticated and populous. In a Darwinian sense, it is a less fit form of social organization than essentially any other alternative. When civilization rubs up against previously isolated tribalists, the latter have only two choices; change or die.
Indians always had the alternative of recognizing that the Europeans were fundamentally different than they were and studying their differences with an eye to improving Indian fortunes in a world that was simply never going to be the same as the Indians-only North America of the pre-Colonial past. They didn’t do so, instead choosing to robotically apply their immemorial approaches in the face of radically changed circumstances when those old ways had no chance of success.
For what it’s worth, the North American Indians were hardly alone in being refractory traditionalists. My own forbears, mostly Scottish, were also warrior tribal barbarians for millennia before coming up against civilized opposition in the form of the Norman French. It took the Scots roughly seven centuries of sporadic rebellion-repression cycles before the essential futility of the project adequately sunk in. By that time, of course, the Scots had shed so much of their own tribalist cultural baggage that they would have been all but indistinguishable from the English they resisted to any of their own ancestors, could they somehow have been conjured forward from the time of William Wallace or Robert the Bruce.
As there is no organized killing or enslavement involved – and never has been – I am at something of a loss as to how whatever you regard as the desperate situation of the illegal immigrants rises to anywhere near comparability to that of historical blacks and Indians, but I also yield to no one in my belief that the modern Liberal sensibility can conjure “oppression” out of even hard vacuum when called upon.
Of course illegal immigrants are here mostly to work and feed their families. In doing so in large numbers, however, they have clearly seriously disrupted labor markets for native-born citizens of limited education, especially blacks. The history of the drywall contracting business in Southern California over the past 20 or so years is but one among many exemplars which could be cited.
It is indeed terrible that Mexico is such a perennially screwed-up place, but, in contrast to the United States, most of the world answers to that description to a greater or lesser degree. Even given the narco cartel war currently raging in Mexico it is still a paradise on Earth compared to, say, Somalia. Do we perhaps have an affirmative obligation of some kind to transport the entire current population of Somalia hither and put them to work cropping lettuce, bussing dishes and constructing oddly-articulated vehicles out of superannuated Chevrolets? If not, why not? Simply because Somalia is far away and Mexico is cheek-by-jowl with the U.S.? Sounds like invidious “locational privilege” to me.
Seriously. Our mass immigration past worked because the America of the past had a lot of places and jobs that illiterate subsistence farmers – or even illiterate tribal barbarians – could successfully go and do. Now – not so much. And yet we have long been, and remain, the Studio 54 of nations. Is it too much to ask that we hire a few more bouncers and put up a red velvet rope? I think not.
This is not to say, by the way, that immigration, per se, should be curtailed. It shouldn’t. This country should have a population of between 600 and 750 million by century’s end if we’re to maintain our position of leadership, in nearly all things, in the world. To do that in the face of nearly flat internal demographic growth, we need 2 to 3 million immigrants a year.
Should these immigrants be “Anglo-Saxon?” I say no. The remaining available Anglo-Saxons of the world are mostly whiny leftists with entitlements mentalities. They are also a vanishing species. There aren’t enough of them to keep their own countries going for more than maybe another century of so. They have nothing to contribute here. No thanks.
Future quality immigrants to the U.S. will, then, of necessity, be mostly anywhere from somewhat to a lot more brown than has been the historical norm. My personal favorite likely source of such people is India. My second favorite would be post-Communist China. I suspect that growing opportunities in their own countries may make for fewer such interested parties over time, however. Third place would be Latin America – certainly not excluding Mexico. Just come in legally, please.
But there are a lot of people, even in such largely unpromising areas as the Middle East and Africa who would make solid citizens with some help. The U.S. should institute a system of schools overseas, in countries that agree to have them, in which their current citizens can study English and American society with a view to emigrating here. We need to abandon our current practice of seemingly preferring to let in people with completely incompatible cultural proclivities they refuse to abandon, such as honor killings, polygamy or child marriage.
Dick Eagleson Says:
[[[I have nothing but your repeated, yet entirely unsupported, assertions to go on about VD’s alleged policy preferences with respect to female employment or the forcible expulsion of non-white ethnics from the U.S.]]]
Unsupported??? There are links up the thread directly to his blog posts on them….
Here they are in case you missed them.
On immigration
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=151689
and equal rights for women.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45654
But go ahead, defend his views…
Okay, I read the material at the links. Once again, I decline to defend VD’s policy prescriptions, but I do, at least in part, defend his identification of problems. Let me be specific.
VD’s exile-the-darkies rant seems to have been catalyzed by the reconquista bloviations of some noisy Hispano-tribalist teacher out here in California. I share his annoyance. I’ve met a number of these people face-to-face as I still take classes at a community college. As even VD notes, however, they are pretty much uniformly not immigrants, but second-generation offspring of immigrants who have imbibed freely of the white-devil/ethnic solidarity tribalist idiocy so prevalently peddled by leftist faculty these past 30-odd years.
I don’t think the reconquista nonsense gets much traction among actual Mexican immigrants, including illegals, but there are real problems here in California – mainly garden-variety crime – in which illegals are overrepresented. I don’t think it’s asking too much of our government that it get sufficient control of our borders as to filter out the criminals among would-be entrants. The non-criminal immigrants would likely be even more grateful than I for this service as they are the main victim population.
With mass immigration from Italy, Poland and Ireland we got Sicilian, Jewish and Irish mobsters. With uncontrolled immigration from Meso-America and insufficiently vetted immigration from the old Soviet bloc we have, unsurprisingly, often gotten equivalent characters in the mix. The Mexican and Russian Mafias we can do without. We need to learn from the past instead of repeating its obvious mistakes endlessly.
Elsewhere, there have been other problems that were directly attributable to recent immigrants. A number of Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist cells/conspiracies have been turned up over the past few years among Somali, Arab and other recent immigrants from muslim nations where the population are mostly illiterate tribal barbarians.
The U.S. used to both control immigration – even in the era when hundreds of thousands came yearly, tens of thousands were turned back at Ellis Island – and systematically, and unapologetically, assimilate those who passed initial muster. Unlike VD, I believe it is trivially demonstrable that this policy worked and worked well. We should do it again.
I do not – repeat not – endorse VD’s apparent wish for a white Anglo-Saxon-only immigration policy for the U.S. or for expelling our current non-white population.
I believe my previous post was reasonably specific as to why I do not and what I would prefer to see in place of the current dysfunctional mess that is U.S. immigration policy, but let me reiterate and even expand a bit.
First, there aren’t remotely enough white Anglo-Saxon protestants – or even Catholics – remaining outside the borders of the U.S. to meet what I regard as the minimum immigration needs of the U.S. for the remainder of this century.
Second, of the non-U.S. WASP populations that do exist, majorities in all of them hold socialist welfare-statist views that are incompatible with the future welfare – or even survival – of the U.S. as a functioning society. Thus, I do not support VD’s idiotic immigration ideas because, even on his own terms of argument, they are laughable. He falls into the same provably ridiculous intellectual swamp as the left-wing tribalist identity-politics types on the left who believe culture and skin pigmentation to be in some sort of identity relationship. They are not. VD seems to imagine some vast available reservoir of fish-belly white adherents to good old-fashioned Yankee virtues of thrift, hard work and rugged individualism exists out there – somewhere. News flash – it doesn’t. We already have too many self-hating white Democrats in the U.S. as it is; I firmly oppose importing more. White Europe is well along what is most probably an irreversible path to demographic suicide. Importing these lazy, entitled depressives in large numbers would simply further infect the U.S. polity with an ideological disease that is already well-established here, but is probably still reversible if not continually augmented from outside.
As to his views on women’s rights, I suspect they derive to a large degree from whatever his particular preferred flavor of Christianity is. A number of Christian denominations take fairly traditionalist views of women’s appropriate roles in life. Being an atheist, myself, I share none of this baggage and am entirely unsympathetic to any religiously-motivated imposition of restrictions on female freedom of action.
This is not to say that the consequences of “Women’s Lib” have all been delightful – especially those deriving from government coercions of various sorts. Title IX of the Civil Rights Act has thoroughly screwed up collegiate sports in countless ways, for example.
But even in the purely private sphere, not all of the results of greater female choice have been positive, even for women themselves. Many women, having aspired to, and achieved, lives like those of men of previous generations, are now discovering the downsides of those lifestyles often bite the genders equally.
And, from an economic standpoint, it is indisputable that the entry of vast numbers of new women into the salaried workforce in the 70’s had an overall depressive effect on what wages would otherwise have been. The effect was amplified still more by the fact that the first generation to benefit from these new opportunities was the atypically numerous Baby Boomers. Still, living standards continued to rise, the phenomenon of mass female entry into the workforce was a one-time event and subsequent generations are smaller, as a percentage of the total population, than were the Boomers. On balance, this massive social change was quite a good thing. It’s true that both parents now usually need to work to support a family, but I think VD lets rising taxes off the hook for this too much; taxes are the main driver of this effect.
Bottom Line: VD and I don’t really have much on which we substantively agree. Even so, his economic analyses are still superior to those of essentially anyone on the Left – especially the serial self-beclowner Krugman.