The Free Market Solution to the Immigration Problem

The nation is tearing itself apart over the issue of immigration. We all know that many who swim the Rio Grande are coming here to escape grinding poverty and the terrors of the drug wars. As Americans we can sympathize. But several million people swimming the Rio Grande every year makes for a real problem for our economy, our culture and our safety. The good illegals don't come alone. Within their numbers are a lot of really terrible people. So why are we so reluctant to do something to stem the tide? Certainly what our government allows our border patrol to do is woefully inadequate. In fact, our reluctance to enforce our borders may downright encourage the problem by making any consequences negligible. Humans are really good at making the risk vs. rewards calculation.

The problem comes down to a dysfunctional economic system that provides incentives, not only for illegals to cross the border, but for employers to encourage it. Employers who have menial labor jobs to offer don't want to pay a lot of money. The less they pay, the more they make. They are, after all, competing against third world countries that use underpaid menial labor to do the same things. So the menial labor employers create work camps (in Texas we call them colonias - colonies of illegal alients). Employers send pickups every morning to the colonias to load up workers and take them to the fields. The wives and children remain home where the kids are picked up for school in buses and the wives barter things purchasable with food stamps for rides to town in the back of pickups to town to buy groceries. These shopping trips can cost anywhere from $50 - $100 per trip. The colonias are frequently in isolated areas, have little or no running water, sewerage or trash pickup. Health care is non-existent and conditions are miserable. Once there, you remain there; to poor to escape.

This "system" works well for the employers, but creates a kind of slavery for the illegal aliens trapped in it, living hand to mouth and unable to get ahead. Trapped by the "system" and the language barrier, exploited and abused, these folks are the victims of the unwillingness of government to close the borders and to arrest the employers who exploit these refugees. The whole mess is tolerated by everyone because, bad as it is, it's at least a solution to the problem and keeps all those people from starving en masse.

"Round 'em up," you say. Well, the problem with that is that if you began rounding these people up and shipping them back home you'd create a tragedy that would make the "Trail of Tears" look like a Sunday picnic with millions dumped back into countries that can't handle the sudden influx of their own expatriate citizens. 

The only solution to the problem is to CLOSE THE BORDERS TO ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION.  Do it now. Make it stick.

Notice I said illegal immigration. Leave in place the proper kind of immigration. For that matter, we could even add a little humanitarian immigration without doing damage to our economy, but whatever happens we need to install a spigot or we're going to drown with it the way the flood is rising. Once that is done, we could let the free market system begin to take hold and clean up the problem naturally. As the unlimited supply of new, ignorant and easily exploited workers dries up, employers will be forced to compete against each other for the dwindiling supply of laborers. When it gets harder to find laborers, employers will have to up the wages they pay to attract them. As that happens, the laborers begin to buy cars, homes and to save money, reducing the would-be slaveowner's power over them. It would have to be a long process and like it or not, the only humane way to do it would be to create a guest worker program for those already here. As Americans we do not want to effectively murder millions of human beings, whose only crime was wanting a better life, by tossing them back into the horrors they tried to escape back in their home countries. Of course, there are criminals among them and I have no qualms about catapulting them back to Mexico or wherever they came from, but there are some cruelties Americans will not inflict on their fellow man.

Let's face it. Closing the borders is the first priority. Without that, the free market system cannot correct the problem and progressive meddling sure as hell hasn't fixed the problem; only exacerbated it. Feeding the problem with food stamps and subsidies only encourages exploitative employers to continue doing what they are doing. Actually it encourages them to do less than they are currently doing because the government is taking care of it now so they no longer have to.

You want to round somebody up, round up the exploiters who make money off the misery of illegal immigration. Send them to Mexico. We don't care that they don't come from there. It would be worth it to get these parasites out of the United States. We ended slavery more than a century ago. Let's not have a revival of it in the new millenium.

© 2014 by Tom King

Pseudo-Science Doubles Down - The Global Climate Change Fraud

Al Gore's new 9 million dollar oceanside villa -
The House That Global Warming Built

With the "settled science" of global climate change having proved so spectacularly wrong over the past six decades, one wonders whether God is messing with those who believe that mere humans can fiddle with Earth's thermostat (or believe that they even should). Truth is, that we cannot protect ourselves from disasters and Mother Nature will do what she wants to do with Earth's climate. It's been done before in Babylon where they decided that, in order to insure God couldn't get them again, they'd just build this giant tower to get above the rising flood waters. Look how well that ended.

It seems, the takeaway from all the climate brouhaha is that we really can't do much about the climate, either by causing it to change or by "correcting" the changes that are happening.  I mean, I suppose we could blow ourselves up with nukes and eliminating ourselves from the planet, but that might not even make much of a difference.

If we do slaughter ourselves, however we do it, Nature will clean up after us and then go on about it's business. Even atomic weapons have shown little of the horrific after-effects everyone predicted. You can visit a memorial in Hiroshima and Nagasaki today on the actual ground where they dropped the A-bomb without becoming a zombie mutant. Nuclear weapons, I was told as a child, would make a place uninhabitable for 50,000 years. Apparently, not so much.

First it was going to be global cooling and a sudden Ice Age. Then they changed the name of the "threat" to global warming and predicted the rising of the seas and the inundation of the Earth (remember Waterworld). Now it's global climate change, a science-for-all-seasons that jumps on any change in weather and takes credit for it on behalf of the human race. Virtually any other science, who's experiments, computer models and predictions had failed so miserably, would have been abandoned and relegated to the realm of superstition and pseudo-science long ago like its predecessors - astrology, alchemy and phrenology (that's the one where you read the bumps on people's heads and predict their psychological makeup).

Unfortunately, there is little likelihood that global climate studies will be abandoned as a bad job any time soon. The specter of global disaster is far too useful a bugaboo for whipping up the proletariat into a frenzy and then convincing them to accept the kind of lower level lifestyle required to sustain progressive socialism. Once most of us trouble-makers, the working rich and middle class primarily, are suppressed and living in government housing, drawing our food stamps and riding public transportation so that our movements are easier to track, the elite leader class will be better able to insure minimum standards of health and safety. I say "minimum" standards because that's what bureaucrats call the rules designed to make us all the same as much as possible "minimum" is what you usually get. The guys who set those kinds of standards, by the way, will be, themselves, exempt from the frugal lifestyle of the proletariat. After all, they argue, since they saved us from global climate change, don't they deserve a few perks?

The whole global climate change fraud is more about convincing the peasants that they owe it to the Earth to get by on less so that the really important people of the Earth can afford to fly 1700 or so private jets to a "climate conference" in Switzerland at the height of the ski season. It's no accident that rich people, politicians and scientists looking for big grant money are the primary ones so "concerned" about climate change. They've never had so good a tool for protecting their wealth from the greedy peasantry.

Even the richest church in the world is getting in on the global climate change hysteria. Its leader has instructed the church's members to get on the global climate change bandwagon (and while they're at it to oppose capitalism). Meanwhile, the church has been busily trying to re-establish its position of leadership at the head of the religions of the world by reuniting Protestants and Catholics and becoming head of a United Religions - a parallel organization to the United Nations. One of the pontiffs in question even called for a single world government made up of trade unions, industrial associations, world political parties and movements. He also suggested that such a government have "teeth" to keep unruly nations like the U.S. in line, making the case that such is necessary to save the planet.

I have to wonder whether God is getting a little tired of the level of arrogance His children have got to. Do we NOT remember Babel. The post-deluvians wanted to protect themselves in case God ever got mad at them and sent another flood. That enterprise didn't turn out too well for them. I suspect, neither will this one. Given how wildly off their predictions have turned out to be, it's starting to look like God is deliberately messing with the global climate change scientists. One climatologist (later proved a fraud) predicted snow free winters in Britain. The very next winter Britain got a 50% increase in snow setting snowfall records for the previous century or more.

If we seriously try to implement the Tower of Babel strategy that politicians and climate change advocates are pushing, are we inviting disaster? I'd expect that since this time there are more of us and we seem to be up to a great deal more shenanigans collectively, God may give us something a little more spectacular than lightning bolts and communication difficulties this time.

One wonders what God will do to the weather next and what convoluted story Al Gore and his ilk will tell us in order to keep gas in their Gulfstreams and pay those $4,000 a month electric bills their mansions run up?

For further reading:

1. Environmentalists Wild Predictions by Walter Williams
2. Pope Francis Calls for Action on Climate Change and Capitalism on a "Planet Exploited by Human Greed"
3. Embarrassing Predictions Haunt the Global Warming Industry by Alex Newman
4. 13 Most Ridiculous Predictions Made on Earth Day, 1970 by Jon Gabriel
   
   
   © 2014 by Tom King
   
   
   
   
    

Where are the Wild Killer Pigeons When You Need Them?

Roger Ebert - Professional Curmudgeon

I love the Internet, but there is one issue that I do have with it. It's not the Internet's fault. The Internet only allows it to be worse than it would be without it. Having Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and all the rest, gives us a platform from which to anonymously exercise our more unlovely tendencies to criticize our neighbors in order to make ourselves feel superior.

In the Garden of Eden, the Devil told two lies.

• He told Eve that if she sinned, she wouldn't die.
• He told Eve that the sin would make them like gods, knowing good and evil (as though that were a good thing).

Well, he's back at it again with a very excellent new tool we've created for ourselves - The Internet.

And it's the same lies. By giving us fancy platforms like blogs and Facebook pages, each of us is given a high castle from which to rain down criticism on the Earthlings below. No matter how big the target, be they presidents, pop singers or pastors, we can sit snug in our little fortresses and demonstrate how much smarter and better we are than others. 

On the Internet we're like little gods knowing what is good and what is stupid and telling lesser mortals what they should think about virtually everything. Also, on the Internet, we (or at least our brilliant criticisms) are immortal or as close as we can get to immortality as server technology can make us.

Because of the seductive call of Internet fame, we are fast becoming a nation of critics. We spout off constantly, making godlike pronouncements about things we know nothing about and couldn't do ourselves if we tried.

This is particularly true in the realm of art and entertainment. I've fallen in the trap myself of trashing a film or book I don't like. Why? It certainly will have little impact on anyone else. Once I realized this was going on, I tried to tone it down. These days I try to limit my criticism to things I feel are a threat to the freedom we enjoy in America and to the safety and security of our world. So, I'm stuck with politics and religion. In the arts I try to issue more positive reviews than negative ones.

As Thumper's Father said, "If you can't say something nice about someone, don't say nuthin' at all."

So, why do people feel the need to criticize movies, books, music and such. I mean the people they are trashing are people who actually made movies, books, music and such. Instead of talking endlessly about how bad everybody else's work was, they went out and by dint of hard work and effort, they created a work of art themselves and got it into the public square. If you haven't done that yourself, do you really think you have any grounds to tell other people whether it's of value or not.

I mean, what have you done lately that makes you an expert?

There's the old say about "Them that can do. Them that can't teach. Them that can't teach become critics."

Not to be critical, but this critic-written
film got a thumbs down from me.

When really good critics do try to do whatever it is they are criticising, the results are often not pretty at all. Rogert Ebert, the famous and influential movie critic, actually wrote a screenplay once - the truly awful "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls". All the critics said it was bad. The film, directed by the notorious Russ Meyer, was mostly about getting the clothes off a series of pretty starlets. Ebert never bragged about having written that film. I heard he tried to get his name taken off it as writer.

Anyway to avoid filling my brain up with unrelenting negativity, I try to avoid these sorts of snarky, nasty critical websites and TV shows that try to tell me which movies I shouldn't watch and what things I'm supposed to like and not like. I find that when I like what I like and do what I want to do without regard to what self-important stuffed shirts think, that I'm a much, much happier person.

As to critics? Well, as they say, "You can't live with 'em. Can't feed them to wild killer pigeons."

© 2014 by Tom King