In response to my recent piece on enforcing our established immigration laws (I did not mention the potential effectiveness of machine guns and land mines, which would be the first resort of any statesman or military commander who really wanted to \u201csecure our borders,\u201d the avoidance of such obvious tools thus demonstrating that every public figure you\u2019ve ever heard use that phrase was lying through their teeth), some well-meaning souls have responded with the traditional Libertarian prescription that there\u2019s \u201cno need to limit immigration; all we have to do is get rid of the welfare state.\u201d<\/p>\n
First, before anyone tries to insist that \u201cMost illegal aliens aren\u2019t on welfare,\u201d let\u2019s stipulate once again that the so-called \u201cpublic schools\u201d are one of our most vastly expensive welfare programs — a massive wealth redistribution scheme funding a humongous make-work government hamster wheel that loots money under threat of force from the paychecks and bank accounts of those who choose to educate their children at their own expense or to bear no children at all, and transferring it to \u201cbenefit\u201d those who care so little for their own offspring that they are content to have their spirits broken and their minds \u201cmolded\u201d by paper-pushing government functionaries I wouldn\u2019t trust to train my cat.<\/p>\n
And there are regions of this country today — parents working two jobs if the regulators have left them any, tax-strapped, unable to afford large families — that are failing to see school population declines only because they\u2019re so swamped with English-as-a-third language illegal aliens.<\/p>\n
Perhaps somewhere there is an illegal alien who declares, \u201cI won\u2019t take welfare — I waited to have children till I was in my 30s precisely so I could pay to send my child to private schools out of my own earnings, which I can afford because I made the sacrifices necessary in my youth to learn a valuable skill or trade.\u201d But I doubt this is a statistically significant group.<\/p>\n
As to the assertion that \u201cPublic education is an investment in our future,\u201d 1) It\u2019s hardly an \u201cinvestment\u201d if the money is taken against my will and \u201cinvested\u201d in ways other than what I would choose, with my supposed dividend checks never actually arriving, having been converted into some metaphorical feel-good \u201cpie in the sky when you die\u201d which boils down to \u201cotherwise the kids will roam the streets, break into your house and steal your stuff,\u201d and 2) while there\u2019s a whole lot of \u201csocialization\u201d and learning to \u201ccomply with the program\u201d going on in those mandatory youth propaganda camps, I see precious little evidence of real \u201ceducation.\u201d Just ask one of the inmates to recite the evidence for the argument that burning fossil fuels does NOT cause global warming, that global warming is natural, cyclical, and a modestly good thing, anyway. If they can devoutly prate only one side of the major debates of our time, they have been propagandized, not \u201ceducated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now — leaving aside the fact that this \u201cInstead let\u2019s get rid of the welfare state\u201d implies we were debating whether to ENACT immigration laws (in fact, we were discussing laws which are already on the books, the constitutionality of which have never been seriously challenged) — let\u2019s agree that shutting down the tax-funded welfare state is an admirable goal. And we should never lower the sights of our long-term goals in the interest of mere \u201cpragmatism.\u201d I even believe someday this will happen — just as decadent Rome could no longer disguise its financial, civic, and spiritual bankruptcy through the provision of bread and circuses.<\/p>\n
But it took centuries for Rome to devolve from relatively virtuous Republic to corrupt and bankrupt tyranny. In planning for the relatively short-term future it does not profit us to confuse long-term hopes and goals with sensible predictions about what\u2019s likely to happen in the next decade or two.<\/p>\n
The Libertarian Party has been offering voters a chance to reject and de-fund the welfare state for 36 years — an entire generation — and has rarely come any closer to majority support than the losing end of a 98-2 split.<\/p>\n
The common prescription of freedom advocates is that \u201cThe majority are really with us, they just don\u2019t know it yet because we haven\u2019t been able to successfully get our message out.\u201d<\/p>\n
But that is not true. Even if we acknowledge that 90 percent of the people who MIGHT vote for Libertarian principles have dropped out of the ball game, noting with some justification that \u201cVoting only encourages them, \u201d that would mean that our REAL support is not 2 percent, but 20 percent.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think even that\u2019s true, not that it would help much anyway. What is true is that a majority of Americans — propagandized for multiple generations in our socialist thought modification academies — might embrace some PART of the Libertarian platform … which gets you exactly nowhere.<\/p>\n
A fiscal conservative may say, \u201cI like the things you Libertarians say about rolling back taxes and business regulations and letting us keep and invest our own capital. I can just never vote your way till you get rid of that part about legalizing drugs. Get back to me when you\u2019ve taken out that part.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pot smokers — on the optimistic assumption most of them would ever remember to go to the polls — respond, \u201cLegalize pot? Awesome. I\u2019ll vote for that. As soon as you get rid of that part of your platform that talks about rolling back environmental safeguards, allowing the greedy corporate bastards to rape our Mother Earth for their lumber and minerals, and buy unnecessary big assault weapons to murder defenseless little Bambis. I\u2019m also not too sure about that tax-cutting business. Taxes fund parks and libraries that are, you know, really cool. And they\u2019re for the children.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both sides — all sides, since I could paint \u201cI\u2019d be a Libertarian if you\u2019d just get rid of the part about …\u201d portraits for any of a dozen major issues — are either failing to understand or explicitly rejecting the underlying premise of the freedom philosophy. They want to be free to do what THEY want to do, but they still cheer the deployment of the mailed fist of government to coerce others to do what they want, or to stop doing things they dislike, on threat of jail or \u201csuicide by police\u201d — even though the banned or overregulated behaviors don\u2019t really deprive anyone else of his or her rights.<\/p>\n
Which returns us to our current status: The socialists and statists, those who want to loot the paychecks and bank accounts of the productive to finance their counterproductive schemes and manipulations of the market — including raising taxes to provide \u201c free\u201d housing and public schools and other \u201cservices\u201d for illegal aliens — outnumber us 98 to 2.<\/p>\n
Yes, by discouraging industry and self-reliance, while encouraging dependence and sloth, this whole scheme will eventually collapse of its own weight, like the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n
But in the meantime, your position is that we should allow anyone into this country who wants to camp out on your sidewalk in a cardboard crate, on the assumption you\u2019ll never have to subsidize their \u201cneeds,\u201d because \u201cpretty soon now\u201d we can just \u201cget rid of the tax-funded welfare state\u201d?<\/p>\n
Because Bob Barr is going to do a better job of \u201cexplaining\u201d Libertarianism than David Bergland or Gary Nolan or Ron Paul ever did? Because John McCain and Barack Obama secretly want to reduce government and its role in our lives to pre-1913 levels?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In response to my recent piece on enforcing our established immigration laws (I did not mention the potential effectiveness of machine guns and land mines, which would be the first resort of any statesman or military commander who really wanted to \u201csecure our borders,\u201d the avoidance of such obvious tools thus demonstrating that every public […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,15,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections","category-immigration","category-welfare"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-1b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}