Sultan Knish
Like stray dogs drawn to an open sewer, after a bitter election, the
Democrats and Republicans have found themselves drawn together to
illegal alien amnesty.
Amnesty has an obvious appeal for both Democrats and Republicans. It's a
means of putting a lot of cheap votes on the table. The Democrats have
been using immigrants as cheap votes before the invention of the
telephone. And the Republicans think that they can begin scoring 39
percent of the Hispanic vote in all their elections again without
considering what 11 percent of 11 million will do to their margins in
even the reddest red states.
Big business has always supported cheap labor, which is why the
Republican establishment has always been eager to dash away from its
base to back the latest amnesty gimmick. Illegal alien amnesty however
is even more damaging to the voting base for the Democrats, but that
hasn't stopped the AFL-CIO and the NAACP, organizations whose members
will take a severe beating from an illegal alien amnesty, from joining
the amnesty parade.
After a decade, illegal alien amnesty that leads to citizenship and
family reunification will kill the ability of the Republican Party to
win national elections. But it will also kill the ability of black men
under 30 to find a job. Black unemployment is already staggeringly high
and throwing in millions of new low-skilled workers will make urban
centers more blighted and dangerous than they are now.
But nobody in D.C. cares about that, even though many of the blighted
neighborhoods are not all that far away from the gilded centers of
power.
Big government needs cheap voters. Big business needs cheap labor. Big
government wants big business to pick up the tab for their cheap votes
through higher taxes. Big business wants cheap labor without having to
pay for their social welfare benefits. After the obligatory tug of war
wraps up, the tab for all those cheap votes and cheap labor will be
dumped on the middle class which is being forced to fund its own
destruction.
Cheap labor can lower the cost of production, but raises the cost of
government. Cheap votes raise the cost of government and that raises the
cost of production. Cheap labor cannot outrun the cost of cheap votes.
Non-voting cheap labor is a social problem. Cheap votes are a political
problem. Either way you end up with a welfare state and a police state
combining into a nanny state.
The traditional American way out of this cycle was through the middle
class, but that is less of an option now. Big government is still
promising that a college degree will turn anyone into a member of the
middle class, but that's a myth meant to subsidize the
government-academia complex which has dumped a huge burden of debt on
the children of the middle class while handing out worthless degrees to
all comers. The debt is real, the jobs aren't.
College degrees don't create a middle class. Neither does the occasional
tech boom out of Silicon Valley. The American middle class had three
traditional gateways. Small business, manufacturing work and government
jobs. Only government jobs is still booming and big government can't
hire everyone. The people it has hired have become a ticking time bomb
of unfunded pensions that once again falls on the rest of the middle
class.
The original middle class expanded itself. The new middle class is a
government toll road paid for by the shrinking middle class. While the
government talks about opportunity, what it is really doing is reducing
the middle class to a taxpayer-subsidized bureaucratic caste that there
will be no one left to subsidize.
Amnesty creates more "clients" for the government bureaucracy to oversee
while making it harder for the lower class to make it up to the middle
class outside the government's toll road. It feeds in more cheap labor
and cheap votes into the machine with the same old results.
Big government does not need a middle class. It needs a large underclass
to exploit for cheap votes. Without the middle class it can have no
revenue, but its sense of mathematical realities is so poor that it
treats numbers as imaginary and government as a creator, rather than
consumer, of wealth. Like most parasites, it would rather kill the
middle class and then die, then stop drinking the middle class dry at
least long enough for it to recover.
Amnesty is a declaration of war by big government and big business
against the American middle class. It is a statement that they have no
room for the middle class in their vision of the country.
The latest amnesty deal has goodies for everyone. There will be cheap
tech labor for Silicon Valley, some of which will eventually try to blow
up skyscrapers, bridges and tunnels. But we'll pin a Green Card on them
first and worry about the consequences later. There will be the promise
of more border patrol officers, in the hopes of shutting up their labor
union which has been rather vocal lately. And a guest worker program,
which as any European country can tell you, is actually an emigrant
program.
Is the United States hard up for cheap labor? Hardly. Unemployment rates
are staggeringly bad, and the average legalized illegal alien is here
as unskilled labor. Even if the United States had a shortage of
unskilled labor, importing unskilled laborers in large numbers has
disastrous results during an economic downturn when the jobs dry up.
The American ghetto was created when the northern urban manufacturing
jobs imploded, first as the GIs returned from WW2 and then as
manufacturing moved overseas. Europe imported cheap labor when times
were good and then watched them build No Go Zones when the times became
bad. Cheap labor brought back street riots to European capitals and
turned burning cars into a national pastime. It also opened the door to a
whole new generation of terrorism.
Unskilled labor can go two places. To the legal economy and the illegal
economy. Not only does the United States have high unemployment, but
Obama's proposal of a minimum wage hike will make the bottom of the
labor market even more blighted. If the employers of legalized illegals
are exempt from ObamaCare, they will crowd out existing low wage
laborers, also mostly minorities, and force them into surviving on
government subsidies or working in the illegal economy. Probably both.
Either way unions looking to stem the illegal competition will still be
stymied, but that is a problem for union members, not union bosses. The
union bosses have decided that their interests lie in helping Democrats
get ahead, no matter what. Their members may lose out but unions are
dwindling anyway and turning toward a European model where they may not
have large memberships, but they will enjoy guaranteed status in
government contracts and on contractor boards. The unions will become a
shell, but a very profitable shell, and they will continue to give the
Democrats their small percentage of the white male non-college graduate
vote.
The Democrats screw each part of their electorate separately, but
balance it out with cheap goodies that seem like a prize in the short
term. The Republicans back the cheap goodie giveaways and screw their
own base collectively, and then belatedly wake up and begin asking who
is going to pay for all the goodies. The answer, of course, is that the
taxpayers will go on paying for it, directly and indirectly, as the
economy continues being dismantled as a result of the destructive
economic policies that have led to short term booms, but long term
busts.
Both sides have a plan. The plan is to wait for the other side to
collapse. The Democrats are waiting for the free market to collapse. The
Republicans are waiting for big government to collapse. But neither is
particularly sincere about it. Both are probably likely to win out in
the end.
Government overregulation is making life harder for big business, but
that just means that manufacturing goes abroad and those same products
are made by Chinese workers and exported to the United States. Big
business service industries will outsource what they can and weather the
rest. Companies that can put down millions in lobbying capital and even
more hiring experts who were formerly employed by Federal agencies to
help them navigate the new regulations have only so much to worry about.
It's small business that finds it nearly impossible to operate under
those conditions.
Big government crafts overreaching regulations which big business fills
with loopholes leaving behind a cage for small business. That describes
ObamaCare and most of the regulatory state. And this is how it will go
on being for the foreseeable future.
Big attracts big. Crony capitalism is a lot easier than actual
capitalism. Why make bets when you can finance sure things with heaps of
government money? America's new elite looks a lot like Russia or
China's elite, an oligarchy that blends big government and big business,
big bribes and big contracts.
The Chinese system makes up for its abuses by generating manufacturing
jobs at a furious rate and expanding the middle class. Once it stops
doing that, the whole system will probably crash, and half of China will
turn into the rust belt, full of ex-farmers turned factory workers with
no farms or factories to work at.
But the American system has become no better, tossing out technocratic
gimmicks as meaningless sops to an economic disaster. In his State of
the Union address, Obama promised to turn the rust belt into trading
hubs full of 3D printers. He might as well have promised to hand out
magic beans to everyone in the area.
The Democrats did their part to destroy American industry and their
liberal base makes reviving it impossible. The furious attacks by
environmentalists on the Keystone pipeline is why any plans to revive
manufacturing in America are limited to Green Energy gimmicks and even
emptier talk about trading hubs.
Having killed the industries in their states Democratic state
governments face hollow economies that are big on big government and
empty of a tax base. But the shift of industries to red states is likely
to turn them blue as populations fed on gimme rhetoric follow them in
search of jobs leaving behind a scorched earth of welfare ghettos only
to create new ones in their new location. The future still belongs to
the Democrats, but it's a short term future that will see them presiding
over rubble and ruin. A hollow victory that makes them the Ozymandias
of Detroit.
State governments that experience a boom are pressured to "invest" that
money in education and the rest of the social welfare network that will
become a sinkhole once the boom ends. And when the boom ends, then Texas
is likely to become another California.
The ability to expand and sustain the middle class is what separate a
failed state full of cheap labor and cheap votes from a nation. And that
requires forward motion. America still has enough technical skill to
create technological revolution, but lacks the infrastructure to take
advantage of them. The iPhone may have come out of America, but it's
built in China. Until that changes, America will not have a secure
middle class.
The American worker has emerged as the collateral damage in the war
between big government and big business. Amnesty for illegal aliens is
the one area where both sides can agree on a truce pursuing their short
term interests, at his long term expense.
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