Excuses and some small items
Life just threw me a MAJOR curve ball this Monday, and I'm busy dealing with it. Plus I'm working on the paper I'll be presenting next week at the Two Tasks conference. For these reasons I don't anticipate being able to post anything substantive before the beginning of July.
In the meantime, the disingenuity over the immigration issue continues to gall me. Liberals and a lot of soft-headed conservatives seem think that the way to help these poor folks is to let them enter our country freely. Wrong! The caring path is to make Vincente Fox take care of his own people, instead of giving him a safety-valve for his unwanted population. As a friend of mine observed, if it weren't for the U.S., Mexico would have had a (much needed) revolution some time ago. Fox and his wealthy cronies can continue to turn a deaf ear to their countrymen without forfeiting their sinecures only because they are empowered by the American wealthy elite (Bush, et al.). The net result is the enrichment of wealthy Mexicans at the expense of our American working class. It's one thing for our lower classes to float the rich, but it's quite another for them to float the rich of another country!
The best things I've seen written on the subject have been in The American Conservative. Unfortunately most of the articles are unavailable online (a shame, as it impoverishes the debate). In case you missed it, the most pertinent article was in the May 22 issue, by George W. Grayson, "Looking Out for Numero Uno: While the country's poor flee, Mexico's elite take care of themselves," 23-25.
I stick by my plan to rent territory from Mexico as the best (long-term) way to fix the problem. Smart money (or is that "Big Money"?) is against its being enacted because the American hunger for cheap labor is necessarily local.
Another item (tangentially related) that might be of interest is the imminent book by my friend Tim Carney, due for release July 11, that can be preordered from Amazon now:
The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money.
Tim is a smart writer (formerly worked for Bob Novak), so the book promises to be incisive and insightful.
1 comment:
06 24 06
Hey LG:
The Center for Immigration Studies also does a good job of framing the debate. They use terms like carrying capacity-which seems to validate their stance because they have done some hard number crunching.
Yeah, on this issue I totally disagree with my buddies at the CATO Institute and at the Ayn Rand Institute, they are just a little too soft on border security and if it were up to them, we would all live in a borderless society. I don't think that will work until all of us get on the same ideological page.
In terms of Mr. Fox, Mexico and much of Latin America has an extremely biased wealth distribution curve with racial constraints. Usually the Native Americans in Latin countries are marginalized beyond belief and their governments don't do anything to help their condition. Also, the majority of the wealth is concentrated in the top 3% of the population with no middle classes. They REALLY need to have economic revolutions in those places, but in order for that to occur people have to change the way they think. They have to move out of the hustle to make a dollar mode and think bigger.
Good read and have a great weekend LG:)
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