Sultan Knish
The Heritage Institute report estimates that under amnesty
the average legalized illegal household will take in $43,900 in
benefits while paying a little over a third of that in taxes. Those
numbers are grim from the standpoint of a tottering economy being asked
to take on an even bigger pile of debt and they reveal an even grimmer
view of the future.
Set aside the political debates, the tensions over multiculturalism,
entitlements and the great political divide, and those numbers reek of a
country whose only future is poverty.
Subsidized
poverty, even if we had the ability to continue subsidizing it forever,
is still poverty. A Food Stamp Nation made up of slums full of bodegas
and check cashing places does not offer any kind of future. Its only
growth industries are in expensive government jobs or cheap service jobs
leading to an economy of two tiers; one for workers and another for
political workers.
"A report came out recently which showed what most Mexicans had long
suspected - there is almost no social mobility in the country
whatsoever. If you are born into poverty the chances are very high that
you will die poor too," a BBC report from Mexico concludes.
Now substitute America for Mexico. Imagine a society sharply divided
between the working class and the government class where political
connections mean more than any single other factor.
The report begins with the daughter of the Federal Attorney General for
Consumer Protection shutting down a restaurant because they wouldn't
give her a seat and ends with two wealthy women abusing a police officer
by calling him "asalariado" or "wage earner".
Asalariado is becoming an insult in the United States. And the irony is
that amnesty for illegal aliens may complete the process through which
the people who came here looking to find opportunities that didn't exist
in Mexico will turn America into Mexico.
America hardly had any class issues because both the rich and the poor
worked. A Carnegie or a Rockefeller might be able to buy and sell a
thousand ordinary men, but still started out at the bottom of the ladder
and never stopped working. To have proper class issues, you need a
permanent leisure class to create that gap between those who work and
those who do nothing.
In a dynamic economy, a leisure class is largely unsustainable.
Inheriting a pile of money and then doing nothing is not likely to end
well. But a dynamic economy depends on social mobility. An oligarchy
regulates the economy into an impoverished predictability in which there
is hardly any social mobility and a permanent leisure class. Its
permanence depends not on the economy, but on its control.
Or to put it another way, suppose you have X millions of dollars to
invest. Do you look for undervalued companies with a future or companies
with political connections? In a dynamic economy, you invest based on
merit. In an oligarchy, you invest based on political connections
because the idea or the model are mostly worthless. The economy is
divided up into spheres of influence carved out by interests and guilds.
In the age of Obama, a smart strategy is to invest in politically
connected companies with bad business models and then get out before
they go down. Nothing of worth or value will be created. Instead the
wealth will circulate within the oligarchy and pay out profits with
money harvested from the Asalariados, the suckers still trying to claw
their way up instead of phlegmatically accepting their plight and
cashing their government checks.
Eventually either the checks will get smaller or the price of milk will
get higher. The Asalariados may look like suckers in the short term, but
they're still getting ahead in the long term. The grasshopper may shop
for groceries without checking prices while the ant grits his teeth at
the cash register, but when the economic freeze comes, it's the ant who
has the skills to survive.
But the oligarchy is designed to keep the ant from climbing too high.
The last time the ants climbed too high, feudalism collapsed and gave
way to the free enterprise economy, and most of the thinkers of Europe
spent centuries trying to figure out how to put everything back into a
neatly controllable natural order with lots of farms and lots of
cheerful people working on them without complaint.
Communism was just feudalism in the name of the people. And once the
revolution happened, the farmers got the worst of it. The Soviet Union
confined them to collective farms after starving them. Communist China
is throwing them off the land by the millions. American liberalism has
become an urban feudalism without the labor. Its vision is millions of
people sneering at the Asalariados from the bottom of the ladder while
celebrating their freedom from labor and dependence on government.
Its romance of righteous wealth redistribution can only endure until the
final triumph of liberalism occurs and then all the debts have to be
paid and the oligarchy can begin to consolidate its gains. And then the
only people who can safely sneer at working men will be the ones on top
of the ladder.
The end of social mobility has been made to seem appealing. It's been
dressed up in subsidies and entitlements, into gateways out of the
barrio or the ghetto by becoming a sports star or a pop star, but those
are all ways of disgusting poverty.
The unemployment numbers can be massaged, welfare can be disguised as
disability, the erosion of real jobs can be hidden in government jobs
and debt can be turned into investments, but no matter how you dress up
poverty, the rags still peek out from underneath.
While liberal politicians give speeches about the possibilities of the
future, they know that the future is out of reach for everyone but their
own circle. The future seems bright to them, but dim to everyone else.
The big corporations are becoming oversized and interdependent, merging
and coalescing into each other and into the government. Every industry
is coming to resemble the old defense contractor model with government
officials and CEOs trading jobs and making lucrative arrangements.
Yesterday it was cars, energy and finance. Now it's medicine. And
tomorrow some other sector of the economy will be consolidated and
rebuilt into an arm of the government.
The mass migration of people, the influx of low skilled workers, exist
to make money for some and votes for others, but there is no longer any
place for them to go except to the welfare office and the quota machine
that funnels a percentage of them into colleges and then government jobs
and then back to their old neighborhoods to spread the word on behalf
of whatever cause the people who set the quotas want them to.
Whether or not amnesty comes, the United States of America is becoming
too much like Mexico; a society of limited possibilities and diminished
social mobility. A road to nowhere.
Joseph Chamie, the former director of the United Nations Population
Division, recently wrote an article proposing that the United States
open its borders to become the world's largest country. All it would
have to do is step up immigration from 1.2 million a year to 10 million a
year. And then by the end of the century, the country would have 1.6
billion people.
As insane as the Chamie proposal might be, its insanity is just that of
extrapolating the existing madness on a grander scale. It's the sort of
madness that asks, why settle for drilling a hole in the boat when you
can smash the entire hull? Increasing immigration tenfold is crazy, but
so is our current policy. Aiming for 1.6 billion is nuts, but so is
aiming for 1 billion. It's a difference in scale, not in content. The
problem is the content and the context.
America's industrial infrastructure has been dismantled and a welfare
state has taken its place. The country is not importing workers, it's
importing voters. And the dismantlers are doing the importing.
Territorially the United States may be able to absorb 1.6 billion
people, though it will cease to be anything resembling its old self long
before 2100, even without the insane UN plan, but it can't do so
because the economic ability to absorb immigrants is being destroyed by
the politics of immigration.
The 1.6 billion strong America of 2100 will look a lot like the places
those immigrants came from. It will have the same oligarchies, the same
uncontrollably corrupt politics and religious wars, and the same
pervasive sense of hopelessness for the vast majority of the population.
It will be a failed state.
Imagine
an America in which the middle class has receded to a thumbnail but
those at the top behave the same way that they do now. Imagine the
massive economic burden on a country of wage slaves, the asalariados who
are squeezed to pay for all the latest whims and gimmicks, for the
thefts and spendthrift academics.
Imagine an Obama with no restraint on his power and no middle class to
drain or credit rating to borrow against and you have a true nation of
wage slaves in which democracy is largely useless because the political
and economic institutions have been consolidated and the population is
too powerless to do more than fight with each other for a piece of the
government's subsidies.
Immigration is not the trigger for this; it is the accelerant. Even if
the Rubio-Schumer strategy for destroying the country fails, the road
still leads nowhere. Combining open borders and a closed economy is a
disaster. But a closed economy and porous borders are still a disaster.
The end of a closed economy is indistinguishable from feudalism and a
preview of coming attractions is available in states with high immigrant
populations.
Government control of the economy has made votes more powerful than
labor. And when voting is more powerful than working, then a new leisure
class that looks down on wage slaves is born.
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