Sultan Knish
Like a married man preparing to cheat on his wife, the Republican Party
is circling around amnesty while pretending not to, making excuses,
professing love for its base and then when it thinks no one is looking,
it makes a run for the open border.
Amnesty
is a cheap date for Democrats and Republicans. For Democrats, it puts 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 justify their betrayal by convincing themselves 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.
Paul Ryan, who can
do the math for everything else, loses his calculator when it comes to
counting the impact of a population that is already a disproportionate
drain on social services and enthusiastically supports big government
spending,
But big business has always supported cheap labor,
which is why the Republican establishment may spend 5 minutes at home
with its base before heading back to D.C. for a lecture on how illegal
alien amnesty will turn the economy around. Illegal alien amnesty is
even more damaging to the voting base of the Democrats than of the
Republicans, 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 selling out the people they claim to speak for and
joining the amnesty parade.
Democratic and Republican Amnesty
supporters, obsessed with feudal dreams of cheap nannies and field
hands, despise their base. Democratic feudalists use the language of
civil rights and Republican feudalists use the language of the free
market, but both are just looking for excuses to cheat on their base
with cheap labor and cheap votes.
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 thirty 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. Blight means cheaper votes for
the Democrats and more fear among Republicans translating into political
dividends for both parties whose rulers will stay behind their heavily
policed islands of mansions and museums while the rest of the country
burns.
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, like a man forcing his wife to pay the hotel bill
for his mistress, the tab for the 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. Either way the
economy tanks and big government explodes.
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 ares still booming and big government can't
hire everyone. The people it has hired have become a ticking time bomb
of unfunded pensions that 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 it
must subsidize. It's a pyramid scheme that becomes unsustainable and
hides that fact by talking about taxing the rich
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 has no revenue, but like most
parasites, it would rather kill the middle class and then die, than stop
drinking the middle class dry even for a single decade.
Big
business is less interested in the middle class these days. It has
become comfortable marketing slave labor products to the lower class and
higher end products to the upper class. America is just another market
to it and it treats it much like it does China or Mexico, focusing on
glutting appetites with no concern for the country that it does business
in.
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 immigrant
program.
Is the United States hard up for cheap labor?
Unemployment rates are staggering 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 terrorists.
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 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.
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.
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 a 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.
The Democrats did their part to destroy American industry
and their liberal base makes reviving it impossible. Any plans to
revive manufacturing in America are limited to Green Energy gimmicks.
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
revolutions, 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 destroying the middle class.
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