Some Links

Re; “the cacophonous screams of the stimulus crowd”

It isn't really a crowd, of course. Its just politicians shouting over a multi-billion dollar system of megaphones.

Donald Boudreaux’s column is the first time I have seen Austrian business cycle theory applied to the piano industry.

Is the supposition that crime will go up as a result of reduced reporting (a catchall claim, as it was made as an argument for amnesty well before that law was even conceived) meant to argue that the law must be prevented from going into effect?

That is, the Feds must say to the Arizonans, “This law you passed will not work for you like you expect that it will. We know this better than you, so we we'll save you from yourself.”

This is one of the reasons I don't call myself a libertarian. You wouldn't expect it at first glance, but they all go paternalistic at some point. Argue it from human rights if you want; but not from saving the people of Arizona from the responsibility of deciding these trade-offs for themselves.

“Worse, deputizing all of Arizona’s police officers as federal immigration agents will make their jobs more difficult and dangerous. This is because unauthorized immigrants would be all the more reluctant to report crimes or work with police as witnesses. As William Bratton, the former police chief in Los Angeles and Boston, has said, officers “can’t prevent or solve crimes if victims or witnesses are unwilling to talk to us for fear of being deported.””

No, that’s not writing wisely, quite frankly it’s insipid tedium. An essential element of wisdom is some measure of novelty and this is unoriginal pabulum, unworthy but typical of somebody being provided column-inches in an influential publication.

First of all, let’s drop the linguistic engineering of “unauthorized immigrants”. The focus of the issue is about ILLEGAL ALIENS. The use of any other adjective such as “unauthorized” or the even more disingenuous “undocumented” is an intentional attempt to diminish their status as willing law breakers, a lie of distortion. The term immigrant isn’t appropriate either, as immigrants are individuals who enter a new land with the purpose of making it their home either permanently or temporarily, fulfilling civil duties such as respecting the prevailing law, not insisting their host nation conform to their demands.

The fear of deportation exists independently of Arizona’s laws-for the very reason that they entered illegally. Do you really think that ILLEGAL ALIENS have been models of candor and cooperation with the local constabulary prior to the enactment of Arizona’s law? Are we supposed to believe that they have been making a distinction between local and federal officials or do they simply act logically under uncertainty and regard to any official contact (outside of course those nice folks who enroll you in medical assistance or other “programs” but make no judgment on the propriety of spending the public’s taxes on ILLEGAL ALIENS) as a potential for deportation?

I quite frankly do not understand this tendency of SOME libertarians to adopt the leftist tactic of evading the rule of law on this matter, rather than attempting to change it within the rule of law. If you have a better idea, sell it to the public. But that won’t happen, instead they’ll appeal to the Pharisees in the judiciary to impose their vision on an unwilling populace. In short, open borders advocates can’t win in the marketplace of ideas.

I’m guessing the reason some resort to the tactics of the left on this issue is that they understand that the general public; those who really are “looking beyond the visible effects of economic and political actions in order to take account also of unseen effects that often swamp that which is immediately seen” because they realize their answer is insufficient and irrelevant.

You can’t address very real political and social concerns such as the preservation of sovereignty and national security, the maintenance of civil order, the disenfranchisement caused by elected officials either fearful of or catering to ILLEGAL ALIENS or groups sympathetic to them with a myopic focus on abstractions such as a fattened production possibilities curve. However, in the true fashion of somebody whose only tool is a hammer and therefore-every problem is a nail, you keep pounding as if you are making something other than noise.

But of course somebody who sees the widespread criminality in the “immigrant community”, the potential for another 9/11 in wide open borders or a form of warfare by “neighbors” who openly and contemptuously encourage their citizens to enter ILLEGALLY or who is rightly infuriated by the open advocacy of doctrines advocating the annexation of U.S. territory to foreign powers or subjugation of American jurisprudence to Sharia, isn’t a concerned patriot, no he or she is simply an uneducated rube. Of course, as we know from our professor President, doctoral dolts regard patriotism as a social pathology to be excised from the well-trained, (or is that indoctrinated) conscience of an enlightened man. It seems of course especially pronounced in one eager to show his cosmopolitanism by bowing before foreign autocrats and disregarding his own citizens. Yes, I mean the very same statist President who sees fit to join with foreign nations in litigation and public calumny against a state of his own country despite his obligation to defend that state against external forces.

Of course the real rubes are adjunct members of the ruling class; who cloak very ignoble political (increasing the number of individuals dependent on the government to advance and ossify the statist political agenda and structure) and economic (industries built on paying less than market wages to people while being implicitly subsidized by the taxpayers through medical assistance and other programs) in academic respectability while imagining themselves to be uniquely qualified to instruct society at large by virtue of their gaudy credentials and inability to be deluded by their own bias and error.

Then again lets be blunt; U.S. economics departments, especially at the graduate level (specifically with regard to PhD candidates) could not survive without a significant foreign census, there simply isn’t enough of a demand for the degree outside academia to keep enrollment high enough to maintain the status quo of employment, pay or rich supply of graduate assistants who free you from such uninspiring insults such as teaching, holding office hours and grading papers. As much as I like this blog despite its occasional pedantry and noxiousness; in a more competitive, less subsidized environment, your employer would be more jealous of your time and insist that it were used in a manner more directly related to enhancing its bottom line.

You are free to sell your soul (as we all do to some extent) and imprimatur to maintain the style to which you are accustomed, but don’t attempt to assert some unique infallibility or impeccability on policy matters that require greater insights than can be addressed by economics alone.

From where do you get the idea that all libertarians become paternalists? And, what does libertarianism have to do with a massive, overly powerful federal government slapping down a big, overly powerful state government?

This makes too much sense. I much prefer Keynes' “Animal Spirits” explanation. It's more easily explained by behavioral economics.