Are left wingers prepared to choose?

I'm a supporter of an open borders immigration policy. I'd like to see anyone come to America and be able to become a citizen in short order, although I want screenings for medical conditions and criminal background checks to avoid a Scarface scenario where another nation can dump its prisoners on us.

That view is embraced by most progressives, or at least a more moderate version that wants much more immigration than we currently have. But what's contradictory is that those some people also want a generous welfare state.

Here's Paul Krugman on that very issue:

Democrats are torn individually (a state I share). On one side, they favor helping those in need, which inclines them to look sympathetically on immigrants; plus they’re relatively open to a multicultural, multiracial society. I know that when I look at today’s Mexicans and Central Americans, they seem to me fundamentally the same as my grandparents seeking a better life in America. 

On the other side, however, open immigration can’t coexist with a strong social safety net; if you’re going to assure health care and a decent income to everyone, you can’t make that offer global. 

So Democrats have mixed feelings about immigration; in fact, it’s an agonizing issue.

My concern here is that this is in fact not an agonizing issue for Democratic voters, while it is most likely on the radar for Democratic politicians. To often, I see rank and file Democratic voters speaking about the legend of infinite wealth, where the government should be strengthening the social safety net with no consideration on costs because America is "rich."

Perhaps I'm wrong, maybe this is something they really do agonize over in private and don't like to talk about in public.

What I find most frustrating about this is the way immigrants are often portrayed as a burden when they should really be considered an asset. Bryan Caplan's analysis of the data tells us that most studies show immigrants pay more in taxes than they use in benefits, and the ones that show a net loss only show a small one.

Our borders need to be open for everyone, even the uneducated and the poor. Maybe we'd make some progress on this issue and pass immigration reform is everyone stopped talking about poor people as victims in need of saving and instead as untapped resources that can help us if given better incentives.
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I'm sorry, I should have known better

I've often heard one recurring problem with intellectuals, activists and journalists (hey, that's me) is that they bear no cost for being wrong when they advocate how our society should be run.

With that in mind, I'm issuing an apology for the immigration mess our country is facing where South and Central American children, some 52,000 so far, are being smuggled in and dumped over the border. That's just the kids who live, and as President Obama said recently; “We don't even know how many of these kids don't make it, and may have been waylaid into sex trafficking or killed because they fell off a train."

I'm sorry. This is partially my fault.

You see, I'm a supporter of the DREAM Act, a failed piece of legislation that would have granted permanent residency status to illegal immigrants who came to America as young children. These are kids in good moral standing who have no memory of their birth country and deporting them would be like deporting me to a foreign nation.

The DREAM Act has not been passed by the legislature, but instead on June 15, 2012, President Obama issued an executive order essentially mimicking the DREAM Act by refusing to enforce deportation on some of the same people who would have benefited from it. While technically that order doesn't apply to recent immigrants, I imagine the parents who shipped off their kids either didn't know that or thought it would be waived.

I opposed the executive order, as even though I support open borders I want to achieve it by changing laws, not by circumventing checks and balances and refusing to enforce laws. My concern was this sets a bad precedent and nudges us towards tyranny.

But I didn't stop to think of the obvious problem: People are smart enough to change their behavior when the rules change. It never occurred to me that parents in other nations would hand their children over to criminals and spill them onto the ground over the border.

Granted, I didn't support the executive order that caused this problem, but I supported (and continue to support) a similar piece of legislation that if passed would have caused the same problem. I failed to think of the consequences and supported something that lacks a safeguard, and now we have to send these kids back to avoid encouraging more parents to smuggle their kids.

It's been said that success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan. I'm unable to find any news reports where President Obama has apologized for this mess, but I offer my apology freely and sincerely. I should have known better and I was part of the problem behind this catastrophe.

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Immigration politics of the Boston Marathon Bombing

We thought it was a hoax.

I was in the newsroom a little after 3 p.m. on April 15 when Jack, a fellow reporter, said he just read on Twitter that there were two blasts at the Boston Marathon. We had shut the TV off after the early runners crossed the finish line and Jack switched it back on to disprove the rumor. You know how that went.

We spent the next few hours getting details to put on our website and Twitter. Our city editor said that The New York Post was reporting 12 people had died, but then added "but it's The New York Post" and we did not put those numbers online. We had a sports reporter who was at the event but had left before the explosions.

About an hour after the blast, when we were still calling them "explosions" and not "bombs," our editor asked for a reporter and a photographer to drive 50 miles to Boston to check it out. Jack was all over it and spent the rest of the day trying to get something, but it was all chaos. No one really knew what was going on and we had trouble getting any substance.

I finished writing the small potatoes stories I had reported on earlier in the day and on my way home I stopped by the commuter train station to talk to people coming from Boston. The local police had stationed a motorcycle officer there to watch people disembark. Most people didn't want to talk but I was able to speak to a father and son who made a day trip to watch the Red Sox. They were held up several hours getting back because the subway was shut down and they had to walk six miles to the train station where they were wanded and frisked.

The next day I got called in early to write about how the bombing would impact events in smaller communities. When a big story like this happens in our backyard we will have primary stories talking about the event supplemented with tons of lesser stories on different angles. We all wrote several of them. By the time Saturday rolled around and one suspect was captured and the other was dead I was talking to local state lawmakers, all of them democrats, about why they support the death penalty in this case.

The political implications of this case is overwhelming. On the night of the bombing a piece was being passed around from the Daily Kos about Carlos Arredondo, one of numerous civilians who helped save people by picking them up and rushing them to medical staff. In his case, he had the foresight to stop blood loss in a victim and tore down several barriers to help other people get to the victims.

Arredondo became a media darling and received more attention than anyone else who helped saved people. I suspect it wasn't just because of heroic actions and the famous photograph he appeared in, but also his status as an illegal immigrant from Costa Rica, war protester and father of a soldier killed in Iraq. People who support immigration amnesty jumped all over this case because it showed the value to our society immigrants can bring.

As the story unfolded we learned Arredondo wasn't the only immigrant that played a major role. Lu Lingzi, a Chinese grad student who studied statistics at Boston University, was one of three people killed by the bombs.

Then it turned out that the bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were Chechnyan immigrants.

So what lesson does this teach us about immigration? I say, nothing. Immigrants are just people. It's a bit embarrassing for people who wanted to trumpet Arredondo's heroism when it turns out the bombs came from immigrants too. It's also awkward for the anti-immigration people who want to stress the evil caused by the Tsarnaev brothers, both legal immigrants, when they are counting an immigrant as one of the victims and an illegal immigrant was clearly a savior.

Immigration needs to be debated on its own merits, and rare but horrible events like the one in Boston last week contribute little more than anecdotes. I've been in favor of open borders for a long time, although I support keeping tabs on who comes in to give us the chance to filter out known criminals. I dislike seeing anti-immigration folks capitalize on this tragedy. But by the same hand, is it any better for us pro-immigration supporters to capitalize on it in the same way? I don't see much of a difference.
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Follow-up on secular poverty cures

I'm writing to make some corrections and clarifications on several details from last week's article about realistic ways secular and skeptical groups can go about fighting poverty, which included heavy criticism of a David Hoelscher piece that sought to corrupt those movements with Marxist doublespeak.

In a private message Debbie Goddard suggested that "demand" was too strong of a word to describe her attempts to include an education focus in secular activism when I wrote "I've previously criticized demands for skeptics, atheists and secular people to [fight other causes]." Fair enough. I had other people in mind when I wrote that sentence, as some people are demanding that third-wave feminism should become a central aspect those movements. I did not intend to imply Goddard was part of that group.

I stand by when I wrote that Goddard and Walker Bristol endorsed Hoelscher's piece. Goddard said she did not endorse it, but did agree with some of its points about Atheism+ falling short on its promise to fight for social justice. She referred to it as "...A provocative and substantive (i.e., worthwhile and quite long) article." I consider that an endorsement, but either way she did not specifically support the anti-capitalist sections.

Bristol wrote to clarify that my introduction mischaracterized his stance for working with churches to fight inequality. His stance is not to work like the churches do to fight poverty because it would increase prestige and win converts in the black community, but to work with the churches to fight inequality because they are effective.

In a blog comment to my piece, Hoelscher informed me that I got his stance on a Noam Chomsky quotation backwards. Rereading that area, the previous paragraph tells us that classism shows up in unexpected places so the Chomsky quotation was intended to be criticized. That was my mistake.

Of course, this didn't have anything to do with the focus of the piece. The Chomsky error was one of several examples intended to demonstrate Hoelscher's insistence that secular and skeptical activists need to fight capitalism. Two hours after he wrote his comment he posted this image on his Facebook page.

Of course, his intention with the Chomsky quotation would have been a lot clearer if he had included any actual criticism of the remark. As it stands, this is what he he would have us believe is an obvious case of classism:

Take for instance Noam Chomsky. The New Atheist message, he once told an interviewer, “is old hat, and irrelevant, at least for those whose religious affiliations are a way of finding some sort of community and mutual support in an atomized society lacking social bonds.” If “it is to be even minimally serious” he continued, “the ‘new atheism’ should focus its concerns on the virulent secular religions of state worship” such as capitalism, imperialism and militarism.

I have no idea what Hoelscher's issue is with Chomsky and he didn't try to explain it.

Hoelscher's essay is a perfect illustration of "Modern English" as described by George Orwell in Politics and the English language. The writing is snaggletoothed, meandering and pretentious and fails to convey ideas without hiding behind vagueness and impenetrable run-on sentences.

Of course, I would expect him to say his writing is clear as an icicle during a spring thaw and I lack the ability to understand him. I say the Emperor has no clothes. It's up to the reader to determine which is true.

Hoelscher also called me out for tossing a few rude words in to describe his views on economics. He right, of course, but I offer no apology. Anti-capitalism is an adolescent disease and I can give Bristol a pass because he's young but Hoelscher is a tenured professor and needs to be held to a higher standard. As I've said time and time again, there is no excuse to be a Marxist in the 21st century. These are dead-end ideas and the lessons of history are both fresh and clear. Honesty requires harshness in criticism of that position.

If he wants to be rude back, then I have no right to complain. Fair is fair.
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How should secular people fight poverty

Debbie Goddard wrote an interesting piece last week that says promoting education should be an important goal of the secular movement.

I want to see the movement do more than pay lip service to the value of education. I’ve talked about this before, but I am frustrated that we-the-movement only seem to get involved with public education when a teacher puts Bible quotes on the walls of her classroom, when a football coach leads his high school team in prayer, when a science teacher spends time promoting intelligent design, when an administration prevents a student from starting an atheist club, or when a high school graduation is scheduled to take place in a church. Then we swoop in with our science advocates and Wall of Separation to make everything right…but don’t seem to worry about the fact that the high school’s graduation rate might be less than 50% and the shared science textbooks are older than the students.

I've previously criticized demands* for skeptics, atheists and secular people to engage in mission creep, such as to shift their focus away from their central themes and towards other causes that already have support movements. There's no need to retrace those steps, and Goddard did reiterate a good point from Walker Bristol that the black church gains a lot of its power from presenting itself as a force to combat poverty* and it is in the interest of secular groups to copy that approach..

So assuming secular groups should fight poverty what approaches should they use?

Bristol's concentration was on the Why and not the How, so he didn't name any specific approaches the way Goddard spoke of funding education scholarships. Unfortunately both* of them endorsed a piece in the fringe leftist publication CounterPunch written by philosophy professor David Hoelscher about class problems in atheist circles.

To be fair, I do remember thinking when I signed up for my first TAM, the biggest conference of the skeptics movement, that the high registration fees assume that everyone is rich.

Hoelscher started his sprawling essay with a quote from Karl Marx, which should hint at the quality of the rest of the piece. He later quotes Noam Chomsky favorably* as saying "'the new atheism should focus its concerns on the virulent secular religions of state worship' such as capitalism, imperialism and militarism." Later he wrote:

As the Marxist Terry Eagleton observes, there is something egregiously amiss when “[atheist] avatars of liberal Enlightenment like Hitchens, Dawkins, Martin Amis, Salmon Rushdie, and Ian McEwan have much less to say about the evils of global capitalism as opposed to the evils of radical Islam” and “most of them hardly mention the word ‘capitalism’ at all.”

So what are we to make of this, should secular groups who want to fight poverty spend their time fighting capitalism? Instead of asking a shallow philosophy professor, why don't we hear what economist Milton Friedman had to say on the subject:

...the question is how can we as people exercise our responsibility to our fellow man most effectively? That is the problem. So far as poverty is concerned, there has never in history been a more effective machine for eliminating poverty than the free enterprise system and the free-market.

But let's not kid ourselves, secular people who don't study mainstream economics are hostile to capitalism and market-based solutions and reject Friedman. It doesn't seem to matter that economists like Cass Sunstein have convinced modern progressives like President Barack Obama to view markets as an effect tool for organizing society. For example, in last night's State of the Union Address the president advocated market-based solutions to climate change. When it comes to economics, there are far too many secular people on the fringe.

It's also true that capitalism hasn't worked as a magic panacea everywhere, such as in the former USSR and chaotic poor nations. It has, however, worked to eliminate a lot of poverty in famous cases like Hong Kong, Sweden, Estonia, Singapore and Denmark. It even worked when brutal dictators tried it while keeping the rest of the country locked down in China and Chile. Compare West Germany with East Germany or South Korea with North Korea to see the difference between capitalist and anti-capitalist approaches.

Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for eliminating poverty. If we knew of one beyond all uncertainty then academic economists would be advocating its adoption. With no sure-thing to advocate, here are some positions and actions for secular groups that I believe will reduce poverty:

* Promoting financial literacy for poor people. This could take the form of luring adults to free classes with free food, or raising money for public schools in poor districts to require a personal finance class.

*Addressing condom fatigue. I know that sex education is important for reducing unwanted pregnancies, which are a poverty-creating machine, but we can't keep looking at poor people as too stupid to understand how pregnancy works. Americans have access to cheap contraceptives and know plenty about them but many choose not to use them.

*Help increase the purchasing power of the poor through housing zoning deregulation, ending rent control laws, fighting price cartels like barber licensing and increasing access to affordable food.

*Promote international trade as a way to bring lower prices to poor consumers and increase the standard of living for poor foreign workers. For the exact same reasons, promote free and open immigration.

* Stop listening to economic know-nothings like David Hoelscher. Seriously, just close the browser window when he comes up. You have nothing to learn from him about economics except efficient ways to kill poor people.

We should never make zero-sum assumptions and think wealth in one place causes poverty in another. Poverty is the natural state of the world and it is through innovation and human cooperation that we are able to eliminate it. Some places just haven't had as much growth and have been left behind. Those of us who know about growth owe it to everyone else to share what our civilization has learned.

Adamantium Claws: I received messages from Goddard, Walker and even Hoelscher pointing out details I got wrong. I chose to preserve and asterisk them and the clarifications, responses and  admissions of errors are found here. None of these issues challenge or change my thesis in any way.
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The shame of modern communism

Yesterday I made a woman cry during an interview.

I was covering a naturalization ceremony where about 200 foreign-born residents were made American citizens and I interviewed a woman whose family fled the Ukraine in the late 1990's. Her father had been arrested and tortured for criticizing communism and he managed to flee with them when she was a teenager. She told me other people weren't so fortunate and then started to cry uncontrollably.

I write on here a lot about how much I detest Marxism, communism, socialism* and other anti-capitalist utopian fantasies, but I don't spend enough time hitting home how deadly serious these matters are. This woman's personal horrors that came rushing forward shows us what is at stake.

I think of most modern communists as hobbyists. They make shallow, empty-headed suggestions in favor of a communist state because they have no idea what they're talking about and lack the integrity to perform any real research on the subject. They think it's cute and novel.

They speak with the same tongue as the anti-vaccination crowd who tell us that medicine is worse than disease.

Their ignorance and indifference is a crime against humanity. They join activist groups like Worker's World Party, which supports North Korea, and International ANSWER, which sided with the Chinese military in the Tiananmen Square protests.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived a Soviet gulag, said in 1975:

There is a word very commonly used these days: "anti-communism." It's a very stupid word, badly put together. It makes it appear as though communism were something original, something basic, something fundamental. Therefore, it is taken as the point of departure, and anti-communism is defined in relation to communism. Here is why I say that this word was poorly selected, that it was put together by people who do not understand etymology: the primary, the eternal concept is humanity. And communism is anti-humanity. Whoever says "anti-communism" is saying, in effect, anti-anti-humanity. A poor construction. So we should say: that which is against communism is for humanity. Not to accept, to reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. It isn't being a member of a party.

When I read of historic figures like George Orwell who believed in socialism, I cut them some slack because they did not have the hindsight of history to guide them. The modern socialist drones have no such excuse. In fact, they have to cling to bitter little lies like "true socialism has never been tried" to shrug off the lessons of human experience.

When I rewatched the first season of Spartacus I kept thinking how most of the gladiators saw gaining their freedom as the ultimate accomplishment and once they had it their lives would be nearly perfect. Yet, watching the show I knew I had my freedom and didn't think much of it. That's because I have the luxury of taking it for granted. The former soviet and eastern European new citizens I interviewed had a much different experience and cherished their new lives.

There isn't enough shame directed at the modern proponents of communism. Yesterday when I spoke to that woman these ideas that seem so abstract became, very, very real to me. If everyone had that experience, would anyone dare to pick up and carry those discarded ideas ever again?

*This is my boilerplate clarification that I am referring to actual socialism and not President Barack Obama or Denmark's welfare state.
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The open borders club is always recruiting

I was happy to learn today that Fox news regular and former judge Andrew Napolitano is a proponent of open borders immigration.

It took me years to get here, but I proud to support making America a nation where anyone who wants to can live here. When I moved from Maine to Massachusetts I didn't have to get permission from the grand temple of residency bureaucrats (I wish I could say the same thing about my car) so why should it be different for someone escaping Venezuelan socialism? The only restrictions should be on dangerous criminals.

People who worry that immigrants will "take our jobs" are simply engaging in protectionism. If a competitor can make a superior product, what difference does it matter what side of an imaginary line the factory is on? Why should it matter if workers must cross that same imaginary line on their way to the factory?

The one difference I have with other immigration supporters is that I do not support making it harder to enforce our immigration laws, as stupid and harmful as they are. These measures include giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, in-state college tuition, blocking police officers from checking on the immigration status of suspects or declining to deport criminals.

The answer to bad laws is to change them, not to weasel around and leave them on the books.

Milton Friedman was talking about the positive impact from illegal immigrants when he spoke of the problem  of "bad laws [that] make socially advantageous acts illegal, and therefor leads to an undermining of morality in general."

Not enforcing bad laws opens the door to arbitrarily ignoring laws and finally ignoring good laws. I want free and open immigration for everyone, including people who are poor or have few skills. That's why we need to hurry up and change the laws we have, not ignore them.
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What's next, Mr. President?

I've been mulling over President Barack Obama's recent announcement that he will not deport young illegal immigrants who meet certain positive qualifications. This is an important issue and I don't want to put this breezily.

I think he's both power-hungry and condescending to voters.

He's power hungry because he is willing to set horrible precedents to get what he wants. I want to end immigration restrictions and I think the country is better off keeping those young people here, but I can't support cheating to make that happen. It's no different then last year when he said the Justice Department wouldn't defend the awful Defense of Marriage Act in court.

Are we to believe that presidents deserve the ability to arbitrarily declare which laws they will and will not enforce? What happens if a future president instructs the EPA to stop enforcing certain environmental laws with no checks and balances? This is bad news, even if one is on the same side of this issue.

The is another cheap gimmick like last month's attempt to energize voters with a transparent election year conversation. In May he said he now supports gay marriage, but can't be bothered to do anything about it. Who didn't read that as an attempt to win votes and shift attention away from his broken promises to fix the economy? The O-man clearly doesn't think much of the intelligence of Americans.

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Are local people the master race?

Forgive the post title's accusatory tone, but after reading this classic Bryan Caplan piece titled "Are Low-Skilled Americans the Master Race?" I can't stop myself from drawing the same comparison.

Localists claim that shifting production and purchases to inefficient local sources will make the community richer as part of a zero-sum game, where one group takes wealth from another. What they don't fill in is why the local people deserve to prosper at the expense of others. As Caplan writes:

OK, suppose you could give American high school dropouts an 8% raise by deporting every man, woman, and child from Latin America back to their home countries. Would that be the right thing to do?

Clearly not.

I don't think my opponents are inspired by racism, but it is true that the people they aim to help will typically be members of their own race, while the people they intend to harm will often be from another race.

Occasionally you do see localists arguing their strategy is a positive-sum game (it's not) but the majority of the time localists claim that the local people need to be the ones profiting, not outsiders.

This parasitic philosophy should be right at home with the people who ignore tragedies because they occur in non-English speaking countries.
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Spontaneous order creates things we don't like too

Why can't we accept that some powerful forces create both good and bad things?

It's popular to draw lines between free market economics and Darwinian evolution. Both systems depend on a competitive environment that allows helpful traits to survive, whereas critics of these systems claim that higher levels of order and function need to be planned by an intelligent source.

The meeting points of evolution and free markets is spontaneous order, where order emerges through the actions of self-interested participants and creates something that looks like it was designed. Adam Smith's invisible hand is the typical example.

While I see people are willing to accept spontaneous order created the things they like, such as butterflies and iPods, there is a tendency to attribute wicked things to a devilish planner, such as the AIDS virus, racial tension and rival political movements.

Media Bias

Most conservatives express views that the mainstream media has a liberal bias, and I generally agree with them. Where we disagree is that cause of that bias. I typically hear that the bias is a conscious effort to distort events to sway the public into taking a political position. Instead, I see it as a natural result of an industry that has more lefties than righties.

The individual reporters have a left wing worldview, which we can expect to cause the news product they create to lean to the left. It's difficult to create a study that reflects the bias of the reporting, but it's somewhat simple to find out the bias of the news team. We already understand why researchers who believe in astrology can create dubious scientific studies on the matter. The same principal applies to summarizing current events.

But what I typically hear from the right is not a media bias created by unintentional wordings and gatekeeping, but instead a nefarious plot.

That doesn't mean that all news groups attempt to be unbiased - it's a successful marketing niche for MSNBC, Fox News and The Nation magazine. One minor form it takes is with wordings. All news agencies strive to use consistent wording, so what do you do when a partisan issue like illegal immigrant comes up? One answer is to select partisan wording that will please the audience. The left has been chewing on weird phrases like "undocumented workers" - as if documentation was the issue instead of immigration status. "Illegal visitors" caused a firestorm recently, because the story was on illegal aliens who were not workers or planning to live here, and the news agency forbid the term "alien." Fox does the same thing using terms like "illegals," which always struck me as an jagged and ugly expression.

Racist plots

A few months ago I had to stop watching Crips and Bloods: Made in America on Netflix because it wasn't labeled a mockumentary. The film kept drawing lines that weren't there, such as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as a government plot.

I thought it's well-understood that the racist organization that conspired to kill Malcolm X was the Nation of Islam. Government plots have been blamed for a host of terrible things that have devastated black communities, such as the crack-cocaine epidemic, the AIDS virus and even conflict with other minorities.

In reality, crack-cocaine was an innovate drug that stretched expensive cocaine so it could be smoked quickly and cheaply. AIDS was created by nature, not a plot by the government against blacks or a lance from God to destroy gays. As for racism between minority groups, this is simply how racism forms - one group develops contempt, blame and distrust for another. It doesn't matter if it's Korean shopkeepers in black neighborhoods being called "blood suckers," that's the neomercantalism of "buy local" and "buy black" at work. No one thinks the Anti-Chinese Mongolian neo-Nazi's were concocted by a white power organization, so why should conflicts between blacks and Hispanics?

That's not to dismiss all claims of institutional racism - episodes like the Jim Crow laws had a very big impact on the world. Those certainly existed, but there is a huge difference between Black History Month being February, the shortest month, and the very real Stolen Generations where Australian Aboriginal children were forced into adoption.

Obsolescence doesn't need to be planned

Obsolescence, where older technologies need to be replaced, is a natural part of creative destruction. It was not a plot to sell wagons wheels for thousands of years and then to replace them with rubber tires, nor were record players created with eight-tracks, cassettes, CDs and mp3s in mind.

Yet if you watch The Story of Stuff - and I'm not suggesting you should - you'll hear that bulky computer monitors were a scheme until flat screen computer monitors arrived. The idea of planned obsolescence - where companies time the release of products and make things break early in order to cheat customers into buying the same items over and over again - is no less of a wild conspiracy theory than the moon landing hoax or the mafia assassinating JFK.

I remember in my fourth grade public school class being handed a propaganda magazine printed on recycled paper about a fictitious handheld video game system that is designed to break after three months to make kids buy more. It was a fairy tale then, and it's a fairy tale now. That's costly to arrange and it would give the products a bad name. Imagine what a PR disaster that would be if it was revealed to the public.

All opposition as astroturfing

I've written about this before, the idea that anyone who disagrees with you is a front for your opponent, but it could use more focus on rival political groups.

First off, astroturfing - fake grassroots movements - happen. For example, there are pro-Walmart groups that have been faked by the company, and the same has happened with anti-Walmart groups funded by their competitors. After the revelation of a few of these groups, I have seen wanton and reckless accusations that everything hostile is astroturf. This begins and ends with the small-government, low tax "Tea Party" movement.

I have seen so many accusations that the Tea Party is a front group by corporations, billionaires and the Republican party that I don't need to link a single one - they are out there in droves. But if they weren't centrally-planned, then what created this movement in 2009?

There are a few theories. One is a campaign to mail tea bags to politicians, another is a blogger who put together a tax protest in Seattle. The origin I find compelling is the Rick Santelli CNBC viral video that drew immediate attention and pitched the idea of a "Chicago Tea Party" in July. The first protests were April 15 of that year - a little early - but I think that's because once Santelli planted the idea, a collection of individuals planned tax day without being lead by anyone.

The important thing is some of the opposition to this group can't grasp the idea that people would so strongly disagree with them that they'd organize a movement. The nerve!

Inside the tea party is no refuge from conspiracy mongering either. Having been to gatherings of both the Tea Party and overlapping 9-12 Project, I've heard accusations of astroturfing abound. Here's an example:

There was a rally for the nationalization of health care in Portland, I heard there would be a counter-protest nearby, which I attended solely for networking. While there I witnessed a full-grown man from "our side" yelling slogans at "their side" and behaving childish.

Weeks later I mentioned him at a 9-12 Project meeting and the people in charge nodded and said he was a plant from the opposition. I asked how they knew, and was told "they do that sort of thing."

My obvious follow-up was, perhaps they do but how do we know this was an example of that, and not just some jerk?

I was again told, because they do that sort of thing.

People, that is not evidence. There's nothing to prevent a loose-cannon right-winger from showing up at a public protest and being obnoxious. It sounds a lot more likely than an actor was employed to disrupt things, and by disrupt I mean got on my nerves and very few others. They didn't think this could just be some idiot - it had to be planned.
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Economic Reality Check #4

There is no difference between saying a Mexican immigrant took your job and saying a resident of China took your job.
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Happy Thanksgiving

Of all of our naitonal holidays, Thanksgiving is the one I get into the spirit of the most. I celebrate it with no modern twists or wrinkles, and follow the celebration template to the letter. I eat a big stuffed turkey meal with my family and call it a day.

So as we all sit down to enjoy our traditional American Thanksgiving meal, if any of you have a twinge of fear that immigration is going to influence our culture, I have to say you're exactly right. That turkey you're eating is a Mexican immigrant, and if you're not eating a "Meleagris mexicana" today it's downright Un-American.
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Overpopulation is not a threat

A deranged Malthusian extremist took several people hostage at the Discovery Channel headquarters this week before being shot by police. No one else was injured. His demands revealed a hatred of humanity, capitalism and technology. James Lee was concerned that the human population growth would destroy the planet as it consumes all of the world's resources.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a biologist who specializes in butterflies, stepped beyond his realm of expertise when he wrote The Population Bomb. It has the lowest consistent reviews on Amazon I have encountered:



That's because Ehrlich made specific predictions about the carnage that would follow as humanity tore itself apart for the last of the Earth's resources. He said England probably wouldn't be around by the year 2,000 and that prices of food and raw materials would climb and climb. The opposite has happened, but Ehrlich - who still teaches at Stanford University - has never reversed his views.

Business professor Julian Simon famously challenged Ehrlich to a $1,000 wager in 1980. Ehrlich was allowed to select five commodity metals - nickel, tin, copper, tungsten and chromium - and essentially bet if they would go up or down in price over the next decade.

All five went down. To his credit, Ehrlich paid up.

But why did he lose? The planet has finite resources and they are consumed as we harvest them.

Well yes, but as Simon wrote in his book The Ultimate Resource, human ingenuity is one resource that doesn't get used up. As technology advances, we are able to take materials out of nature and find uses for them. Things like petroleum, platinum and uranium were useless to our ancestors. We also get more efficient with the resources we already have. Simon proceeded to trounce all of the claims from the fearmongers and showed that the fear of running out of resources goes back to ancient civilizations.

And the Amazon reviews? Off the hook:

The population phobia of 2010

James Lee demanded that the Discovery Channel change it's programming to propagandize his pet views. For example, his fourth demand:

Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn't, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??

Which is similar to demand number six:

Find solutions for Global Warming, Automotive pollution, International Trade, factory pollution, and the whole blasted human economy. Find ways so that people don't build more housing pollution which destroys the environment to make way for more human filth! Find solutions so that people stop breeding as well as stopping using Oil in order to REVERSE Global warming and the destruction of the planet!

It's a little bit of a stretch to call Lee a localist for his quest to "solve" international trade, but there's a strong possibility he believed in food miles with this talk.

I'm also not going to call Lee a racist, even after he wrote this as demand number five:

Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)

Lee thinks of the entire human population as pollution, not just Hispanics. By itself this paragraph is interchangeable with something a nationalist hate group would publish, but with Lee's mindset it really doesn't have anything to do with race. The Sierra Club - the environmentalist group that published The Population Bomb - took a firm stance against immigration because they saw it leading to population density, but caved when they were criticized as being motivated by racism.

Sadly, this issue will never die. Just as mercantilism, placebo medicine and belief in ghosts crops up generation after generation, the overpopulation fallacy will be back. Empirical evidence and carefully-tested theories are the path to deeper truths, not mere common sense.

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Localism as a proxy for protectionism

I often refer to localists by such charming euphanisms as neo-mercantalists, economic nationalists and hyper-protectionists. The last one is the most useful for finding modern experts to reference.

I've stumbled into a nice niche as the only blog that focuses critically on the "buy local" movement. I will see similar posts pop up here or there, but I've yet to see any other writer spend the majority of his or her time on this subject from a pro-trade perspective.

But that's not true for protectionism. A lot of people write about the fallacy of protectionism, which by no coincidence, is the same fallacy of localism. It's a simple trick for me to take something an economist wrote about protectionism and show how the same rules apply to localism.

Another non-coincidence is that people who become localist activists often hold strong opinions against free trade and globalization.

In the past week two very good posts against protectionism came up from Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek. The first is a response to a letter that said Mexican workers hurt America when they work here and send their money back home.

"The vast majority of these immigrants acquire their wealth by working – a fact that means that the wealth that immigrants accumulate while in America is paid to them voluntarily.

"That is, these immigrants acquire wealth only by creating goods and services that are valued by the Americans who hire or otherwise do business with them. The process that Ms. Pavia describes and dislikes benefits both working immigrants and Americans, regardless of whether or not immigrants take their earnings back to Mexico."

The wages paid to foreign workers is analogues to money paid to distant merchants, and Boudreaux's logic applies equally to both of them.

Localists make the common mistake of confusing dollar bills with wealth. The more a community relies on expensive local production, the less a dollar bill will buy, so even if money is trapped in the community, it's value will slip away into the abyss.

In another post, Boudreaux writes about the protectionist mentality of political commentator Lou Dobbs - a charge Dobbs, dishonestly denies. Boudreaux shares some quotes from Dobbs that says otherwise. The following examples from Dobbs could easily be used to defend a localist mindset:

“Our lack of self-reliance and inability to produce our own goods is seen by most economists as simply a global economy at work, but our growing dependency on the rest of the world for commodities and finished goods alike is, in my opinion, reason for considerable concern, if not alarm.”

Or how about this one:

“...Or is it in our national interest not to spend those hundreds of billions of dollars on imports, but rather to preserve our national manufacturing base – even expand it – and create more jobs at home? These are questions that should be addressed in a national dialogue.”

Localism is protectionism, through and through. But instead of looking at the world past the national border with cold, slitted eyes, the proponents share that same distrust for the world past the border of their home town.
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Both sides misunderstand immigration issue

There is a lot of bigotry surrounding Arizona's new immigration law, where police are able to check the immigration status on someone they have already detained for another purpose. That bigotry is very plain and simple: Sexism.

Look how obvious it is. Arizona's female governor Jan Brewer signed a bill into law on April 23. Illegal immigration is currently a federal crime and this law makes it a state crime too so Arizona police can enforce it. Because Brewer a woman, chauvinist protesters want to keep her down by opposing the law - including self-hating women who are jealous of any other female who has risen to a position of power.

That's a good argument, right? Really? It works for the left...

OK, reality check. There's already enough nonsense on both sides of this issue. Arizona SB1070 does not empower the police to pull people over just to check their immigration status, although that's the bulk of the criticism. The purpose of the law isn't to change police behavior - it's to authorize law enforcement - such as Sheriff Joe Arpaio - to continue checking immigration status without interference from federal agencies.

"The new law makes it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally. Immigrants unable to produce documents showing they are allowed to be in the U.S. could be arrested, jailed for up to six months and fined $2,500. Other provisions allow lawsuits against government agencies that hinder enforcement of immigration laws, and make it illegal to hire undocumented workers for day labor or knowingly transport them."

Now I don't see any arguments about why we should pick and choose which laws to enforce. The opponents clearly state that this is about enforcing existing laws. Their definition fairly represents what the new law does, although their comments do not.

I will make the case on why not enforcing this law makes sense, but first what's wrong with the anti-immigration view.


Where the right is wrong

There are two main thrusts to opponents of illegal immigration. One is that they take jobs away from Americans, and the other is that they take public benefits like welfare.

Some people support both of these views, which doesn't make sense. A given immigrant can not work and collect benefits for not working. It's really one or the other.

It could be that immigrants as a whole perform a mix of the two, but that's the way a welfare system is supposed to operate; those who work pay for those won't don't.

Now what if an immigrant comes to America and "steals a job" by agreeing to work for a lower wage than an American? Isn't that bad?

No, not at all. This is a classic protectionist argument and I'm surprised it's not more popular with the left. Yes, a given American worker will lose a labor job. However, the company will save money with lower labor costs, and in a competitive market, pass some of those savings on to the consumer. This will give people more money to spend in other areas, creating more jobs in other industries.

This goes back to Adam Smith. It's good for both parties to use cheap foreign labor, and all immigration does is change the side of the border those factories are located. In this sense, opposing immigrant labor is a version of the ancient pauper labor fallacy that's still popular with anti-globalizationists.

What's interesting is that few people doubt that it's rational for Mexicans - the group that is most responsible for illegal immigration in Arizona - to come to America to find work. Even though their best option is to work for lower wages than Americans, people realize that's it's a better opportunity than what's waiting for them at home. They also agree that this makes the immigrants wealthier.

This view, which is absolutely correct, is not compatible with the anti-sweatshop view - that offering low-paying jobs in poor countries exploits the workers and keeps them in poverty. Instead, in both cases you see the workers getting richer, and America as a whole benefits at the same time.

There will be losers in this scenario - some Americans with low skills will be out of a job. But American workers as a whole will benefit from the new jobs that open up. There will be more winners than losers.

And unlike what the "buy local" advocates preach, it doesn't hurt America to see our dollars leave the country when immigrants mail some of it back home to their families. Those families do not burn the money - they take it to a bank and exchange it for the local currency. Essentially they are buying money with another type of money. That bank will take the greenbacks and invest them back in America. American dollars have no choice but to come back to America.


Why the welfare state changes the rules

I know a lot of lefties who lust for the big welfare states of the Scandinavia. Countries like Denmark have high taxes and a lot of public goodies to dole out to the citizens.

They also have super-strict immigration policies. It's easier to get into Fort Knox then some of these countries. Why is that?

It's because when you promise a lot of free money to people in an area, people will move to that area to collect that free money. These people aren't being lazy or evil - just smart. When you reward people for being in a certain situation, more people will put themselves in that situation. That works for good things, like having a college degree, but it also works for bad things like being unemployed.

So a generous welfare state will attract people who want to take advantage of it. It's just human nature. That's why welfare states must keep people out if they're not willing to work. This isn't xenophobia - it's keeping the system from having too many takers and not enough givers.

Milton Friedman weighed in on this issue and said that immigration has always been good for America. He said today illegal Mexicans immigrants are still good for America, but making Mexican immigration legal would be bad for us because of our heavy welfare state.

"That’s an interesting paradox to think about. Make it legal and it’s no good. Why? Because as long as it’s illegal the people who come in do not qualify for welfare, they don’t qualify for social security, they don’t qualify for the other myriad of benefits that we pour out from our left pocket to our right pocket. So long as they don’t qualify they migrate to jobs. They take jobs that most residents of this country are unwilling to take. They provide employers with the kind of workers that they cannot get. They’re hard workers, they’re good workers, and they are clearly better off."

That was 30 years ago, and our welfare state is even more generous now. By keeping immigrant workers illegal, they mostly don't pay into or take from our public assistance programs.

That's not entirely true, of course. They still pay sales taxes, and property taxes indirectly through apartment rent. While illegal immigrants don't have access to things like social security, they are able to send their children to public schools. In California it's illegal to check a students immigration status, so we have cash-starved public education system that's paid by legal residents, but also serves illegal ones. Hospitals and law enforcement also absorb costs from serving illegal immigrants.

So Americans benefit from illegal immigrants because they must come here to work, not to collect free public money. It's a good thing that we're not rounding them up off the streets.

Still, there are some moral problems with not enforcing our own laws. It's good that law enforcement in Arizona can punish illegal immigrants with deportation when they are caught for unrelated crimes, and this gives immigrants double the reason to obey our other laws.

Because it won't effect just any person off the street - only the suspects of unrelated crimes - this law should help filter out the criminals from our illegal immigration population. It won't be perfect and it will also deport some illegal immigrants who are just here to work. However, these people are still breaking our immigration laws and it's the duty of police to enforce the laws - whether they agree with them or not.

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