11 Jul 2006
I recently had the opportunity to appear on a panel discussion, which took place in the Denver area. I appeared via satellite as a large head in a box sitting in a chair, but did enjoy myself thoroughly as has often been the case.
The program was Colorado State of Mind, which was on public television and has had the courage (or lack of judgment) to have me appear a number of times on various panels discussing issues of the day. The people I appeared with this last time were pleasant and polite. The issue was immigration, but what I was struck with was the liberal position that all these problems should be solved in Washington, D.C.
Now, that’s probably more accurate for this type of situation since thecontrol of borders is more specifically addressed by national sovereignty issues. States do however, have an interest in what happens with the use of their goods, services, jobs and budget as a result of illegal immigration.
The possibility of various bills being offered in the legislature, which we have seen recently, was also discussed. The position of the more liberal persons on the panel was that once again this is a problem that the federal government should solve in Washington. I got to thinking about this later and realized that almost all problems that liberals see should be solved in Washington and is manifest in their selective blindness to the concept of federalism and the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.
Why is that, I wondered to myself. And several answers popped to mind.
The first being that only truly elite thinkers living in the East could possibly grasp the problems of this nation and have solutions for it. We mere yokels, in the West especially, say nothing of the rubes that must surely populate the South, cannot be trusted to make decisions that would impact their own citizens, particularly those that might fall into a liberal constituency, mainly the non-productive and unhinged.
Beneath that lies the idea that if we actually are able to see what’s going on, pull the curtain back, as everyone likes to analogize to the old Wizard of Oz and see the man there pulling handles and pushing buttons, and we might put a stop to it. So the further you can remove the levers and switches of power from those on whom the powers are exercised upon, the more likely you are to retain that power.
Ultimately then to the liberal mind, every problem is a federal problem, and should be handled through a program that would require administrators, policy advisers, and field-work representatives sent like Albert Schweitzer into the lost wildernesses of Omaha, Cheyenne, and the exotic and dangerous Alabama.
It struck me when I was thinking of this, of what country it reminded me. In that country, Paris reigns supreme. All of the strings that pull the government together are tied in a Gordian knot in the confines of the City of Lights, whose officials know without a shadow of doubt that they and only they can be trusted to run the country- input from the rest of the nation, small as it is in comparison to the United States, is of little value. The wharf rats of Lyon or the bumpkins of Normandy lack the sophistication and subtlety of the Parisian to make judgments concerning their own welfare.
France calls itself a Republic but in terms of government it is a stateist society. It attempts to exist as one state with the head located firmly in the middle of its body in Paris, a city raided by the Vikings regularly as they rowed down the Seine until such time as other European powers found the time to invade and occupy it.
So if we would like to see the outcome of our race to centralization, we have only to look across the sea to what enormous efficiencies mightbe ours if only we had the intellect and subtleties of those in Paris.
***previous columns / suggested reading below***
The Mesa County Republican Party has been nice enough to afford me the opportunity to preview some of the writings that we are going to be trying to put up on our new web site/blog, conservativepolicy.com. We will let everybody know when that’s up and running. We hope to be able to have some of my observations along with some links to other sites and destinations we think that Republicans will find helpful. I thank everyone for their support.
I hope to do this posting and update it at least once a week. This week I thought I would talk about immigration policy. We’ve heard all the reasons why it’s damaging, and, of course, from the other viewpoint why it’s so important to America to have a seemingly endless stream of illegal aliens flooding the county.
But rather than get into the obvious points concerning crime committed by individuals in our country who have no real identity for us to track down, the use of services or any of the obvious things that we like to discuss when we talk immigration. It might be more important to discuss about why people who support unfettered access are so concerned about the plight of these voters, excuse me I mean illegals.
Arguments about whether or not social services should be provided to these folks or any of the other related topics are really secondary to the most probable reason why liberals and liberal democrats wish to have a flood of illegals into our country. Now while there may be some who just wish a better life as do we all for these people, it seems afair guess that supporters of this position are really hoping to turn the dial in their favor in the electoral process and create a government dependent underclass which will forever keep them in power. If there were a provision in the Constitution that stated immigrants naturalized for less than, say 20 years could not vote, I would suspect that a great deal of interest in immigration would drop from the Democratic party. Some of the supporters on the left and the right who believe that the natural hard-working tendencies of some of these immigrants would make them wish to become productive, conservative members of society may be indulging in a bit of wishful thinking. While there are certainly some that fall into that category it would ignore human nature to suppose that people who move here illegally and in fairly short order are given opportunity to vote; will vote for anything other than income redistribution.
I suspect most Americans if they could move to Mexico and immediately vote to have income distributed from wealthy Mexicans to themselves would do the same thing. Don’t be deceived. There are few new ideas under the sun. And endless government programs to support large cities of immigrants who have no tie to the land in which they are living except a paycheck is simply another version of Roman bread and circuses.
When you support the person, you own the vote.
If we were suggesting that we import hundred of thousands of conservative Japanese into the country and turn them into voters; the Democrats would put up such a howl that every dog and cat in America would run under the porch. We’ve sort of forgotten the reason we had immigration in the first place- we needed people. We needed folks to settle this country; we needed folks to work in places that were dangerous and who were willing to take a throw of the dice on moving to some crazy place like Montana or Colorado in the hope that it was better than where they were coming from and maybe they could make a better living. That’s not really the case anymore, there’s some element of it, but it’s not the same story.
Sure, we would like to pay less for our labor, but if we hadn’t let the labor unions get in bed with the Democratic party over the last 50 years, they might still be helpful to the working man and not create a situation that actually puts them out of work. This doesn’t happen by accident and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You create a problem and then you use that bottleneck of a problem to argue for your point. It’s just like capital punishment. Liberals create a court system where it’s almost impossible to get anybody sentenced to death, followed by enormous amounts of monies spent due to the procedural overlay that liberals want to exist in the court system;then they turn around and say that the death penalty is too expensive.
Same thing here. Through ridiculous environmental legislation, enough employment to strain the back of a large burrow and a natural hostility towards any company that doesn’t either manufacture felonious sport figures or a multi-million dollar waiters now acting in films, we’ve created an economy that does need labor. The solution isn’t to create another sub-culture of problems but to clear away all of the debris in our system that keeps it from functioning properly. Besides, sooner or later the Democrats will want to unionize the illegals, they’ll get too expensive and we’ll have to keep going further and further south for cheap labor until finally you’re going to be seeing a bunch of penguins working on your house.
And then of course the left will push for their right to marry and force a name change of Pittsburgh’s hockey team.
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