Sunday, September 30, 2012

Congressman Mike Rogers on Obamacare

Congressman Mike Rogers of Michigan speaks eloquently on the destruction wrought by Obamacare.  See the video here:



More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

The Inconvenient Truth about Medical Care Supply and Demand

It offends the refined sensibilities of many high-minded people that crude law of the jungle should have any place in the sacred and transcendent fields of health, education, art and so on. But the laws of chemistry certainly apply to drugs and their effect on the body, so there is no rational reason to expect that economic laws shouldn’t apply to the organization and administration of health care too. If more people are clamoring for services that fewer people are providing, either the price of that service will go up or the availability will go down; a shortage, with queues, waiting lists, black markets and other forms of rationing will ensue (see: Canada and the UK).
That’s the law of Supply and Demand, and it’s real, it is of the fundamental nature of human action in society, and it is not subject to repeal via political legislation.
It also explains what is wrong with the health care market in the United States and elsewhere.

The practice of medicine involves a whole lot of math and science (something which our public school pupils and public government politicians are woefully deficient in) but at its core it is an art: an art of human and social interaction among doctor, family and patient; the whole patient, not just the pancreas; the patient’s family history, not just today’s symptoms; the patient’s personality type, psychological profile, relationships, work, nutrition, exercise, sleep and drug habits, not just ink bubbles on a chart. Only a highly trained and experienced doctor or nurse or other provider who is free to practice his/her craft without third-party interference can provide the most effective care.
When we need care badly, we want the best practitioners of the art caring for us and are willing to mobilize our resources to get them. And in the freest nation in the history of the world, there has never been greater quality care nor greater access to it by the most common of citizens.

Yet the government-sanctioned system for regulating healthcare services completely undermines this. In the bureaucratic calculus, a bypass operation is a bypass operation is a bypass operation, whether performed by a first-year intern or a 30-year world-renowned veteran. It has a code in the system and a price that Medicare is willing to reimburse, no more, no less, no qualifiers, no accounting for skill, experience, dexterity or judgment (above all no allowance or toleration for judgment!), no exceptions.
If all there were to medicine was the correct generic, commodity cookie-cutter treatment for the matching defined disease or condition, then no doctors would be required; only kindergarten-variety bureaucrats trained to put the square pegs into the square holes and the triangular pegs into the triangular holes.
Do I exaggerate? A physician who treats a patient according to his or her professional judgment differently from what the government-sanctioned protocol produced by the ‘embedded clinical decision supports’ (the computer that tells the doctor what to do) say (s)he should faces denial of reimbursement, second-guessing of his/her decision or worse. It is happening today with Medicare billings and pharmaceutical prescriptions, and it will explode tenfold when the Medicare model is applied to the entire population.
Under Obamacare, the Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC) may deny medicine, devices or treatments to Medicare patients that its ‘comparative effectiveness analysis’ algorithm deems unsatisfactory; that is, too costly (it’s about the cost to the agency, not the effectiveness to the patient). This is government ownership of your life.
It’s time to pull the plug on Obamacare.
More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Catholic Priest issues strong invocation against socialism

A catholic priest addressing the 2012 Colorado Republican State Assembly and Convention assails socialism for taking away, not just rights, but responsibilities of free people.
For a man representing an institution that has seemed all too willing to go along with the Democrat-party big government social welfare agenda, Fr. Andrew is a breath of fresh air.
Click below.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Milton Friedman on Socialized Medicine

With your Obamacare debate, get some wisdom from one of the greatest economists of the 20th century. We've been warned for decades. When will we learn?
Check out these videos and more:

A Time For Choosing, again

The more things change...
The particulars of political campaign issues change from cycle to cycle, but fundamental principles endure. In truth, there is nothing new under the sun.
As we contemplate the issues of the 2012 election, a speech from 1964 is as true today as it was then.
On October 27, 1964, Ronald Reagan, a former actor and Democrat (not yet Governor of California), addressed the Republican National Convention. It was his first nationally televised appearance.
Watch it and think: How few particulars of the speech would have to be changed to fit the present day, and how many of our problems today stem from not listening to him then.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Obamacare is in Critical Condition on National Review Online

National Review Online has an in-depth blog dedicated to health care policy. Highly recommended.
Click below:
More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Obamacare on Video

For our readers who prefer video, here are a few top selections on Obamacare:
More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Sunday, July 08, 2012

Obamacare's Next Battle: November 2012

In November 2009 HHCapitalism.com published 121 Reasons to Reject Obama-Reid-PelosiCare. Many battles have been fought and lost since then, but this war is not over. With John Robert's tortured reasoning that defies common sense and insults the intelligence of non-law degree-holding Americans, citizens now know that their institutions cannot protect them from political power brokers unless they participate fully and excercize their constitutional rights (while they still have them) at the voting booth and in talking to their friends, neighbors, families and co-workers.
Candidates for office, campaign managers, activists and any citizen who wants to be thoroughy informed on this most critical issue may start here:

Monday, September 12, 2011

LearnLiberty.org: Top 3 Common Myths of Capitalism

If you won't believe me, will you believe a Harvard professor?
Click the link below for an excellent short video.

LearnLiberty.org: Top 3 Common Myths of Capitalism

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Remembering 9/11: Capitalism under attack

Capitalism is not the same thing as large-scale heavy industry or tall, glorious skyscrapers. It is the everyday voluntary cooperation of free people in the marketplace; trade among friends, neighbors, suppliers and customers from the neighborhood to the world. Yet only capitalism in its most avanced form could produce the United States of America as we know it and everything that it has built, including one of capitalism's greatest testaments: the World Trade Center.
It is no random chance therefore that the fascist islamists chose to vent their rage on the twin towers. They represent everything that a backward, tribal, intolerant and ignorant mindset could hate: individual liberty, tolerance of differences, freedom of religion, interest understood as an exchange of different money values across time, equality of the sexes, private property and rule of law in the Western tradition.
The terrorists hate us for who and what we are. Capitalism works and offers hope to millions who flock to the shores of capitalist nations. Communism, fascism and fundamentalist islamic Sharia law offer only physical and mental prisons, torture chambers, privations and death to all but the most privileged elite.
The innocent victims of 9/11 died for living, and thereby defending, freedom and capitalism. Among the honors we give to them, let us continue to defend the same principles.
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Friday, September 09, 2011

Top Articles

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Thursday, September 08, 2011

Nothing To Do About Jobs

The one thing the government hasn't tried for at least 3 years is to get out of the way.

Now that President Obama’s hope-and-change green job-creating juggernaut has flatlined (with 0% job growth in August and downward revisions for prior months), a reasonable question to ask is, what can governments do now?
The answer is that perhaps they can do the one thing they haven’t tried in at least 3 years, if not more: nothing. That is, governments can minimize their footprint on the economy, lighten regulations, cut tax rates (permanently), stop threatening ‘millionaires and billionaires’, banks, oil companies, non-union workers and the private sector in general and basically get out of the way of the people who would otherwise be creating the jobs.
For the fact is, governments and politicians, no matter how wise or worthy, don’t create jobs, on net balance. Even big, established business corporations don’t do it; they’ve lost almost 3 million net jobs in the US over the past decade.
Real job creation is the role of startup entrepreneurs: businessmen and women, investors and speculators with an assist from venture capitalists and private insurance companies. That’s right, the people most reviled on the Left as undeserving rich, racist polluting exploiters are in fact the ones from whom all prosperity flows (prosperity that has to be created before it may be distributed). The pudding is that Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Frank, Dodd, Waters & Co. are at the top of their game in crushing and suppressing these fatcat scum of the Earth, and the logical and inevitable outcome has come to pass, among which the worst spike in black teen unemployment in a generation: 47%.
Entrepreneurs put together business projects on their own account, without subsidies, privileges or prejudice, hoping to enjoy profits (which arrive years or decades after everyone else, including workers, have been paid) but having no guarantee against losses for failing to provide the optimum mix of high-quality low-priced products and services and well-compensated JOBS most urgently needed in the marketplace. When they fail, entrepreneurs lose their own money, not yours and mine, and they don’t indenture our grandchildren.
All the undue laws, regulations, taxes, red tape, lawsuits, threats, monetary manipulations and hostility toward profits that governments slap on the private sector, can only have the effect of raising the cost and risk of hiring people to prohibitive heights, resulting in the unemployment that we are suffering.
By ‘undue’ is meant those interventions which do not derive from governments’ legitimate role of preventing and punishing murder, robbery, theft, fraud, assault, rape, persecution and/or conspiracy. Does it really take tens of thousands of pages of laws, hundreds of agencies and 8 million unionized public-sector employees to do that?

Entrepreneurship doesn’t need to take direction from government in order to do the right thing for the economy. Whether the subject is food, clothing, shelter, minerals, energy, clean air, medicine, university faculty parking spaces or JOBS, the same entrepreneurial cycle pattern emerges: Scarcity leads to rising market prices, which signal entrepreneurial opportunity; there’s money to be made (‘there’s gold in them thar hills!’). Investors and speculators advance their own savings to fund research and development to invent new ways to extract and produce more, to drill deeper under the ocean floor using only one tower where five had been required before, to design new industrial and technological processes, to genetically engineer seeds that multiply crop yields, to discover new life-prolonging and enhancing miracle drugs, etc. Many entrepreneurs fail, at their own expense (not the taxpayer’s) but others succeed, and the result is profits for them and abundant products and services at prices for you and I that are lower than before the ‘crisis’ that started the cycle.
The only force capable of stopping this virtuous cycle is… force: Prohibiting the market to function; controlling wages and/or prices so that signals and information about the true relative abundance and scarcity do not get transmitted properly; awarding contracts and employment positions based on political favoritism, nepotism or ethnic preferences rather than objective competence and qualifications; forbiding an aerospace company from opening a new plant in a right-to-work state because it doesn’t please the Big Labor bosses; barring the exploitation of available resources (EPA); destroying the U.S. IPO market via Sarbanes-Oxley; forcing taxpayers to prop up firms that have failed; failing to enforce the rule of law consistently and fairly; bringing criminal charges against oil companies over the death of a few birds while giving the windmill industry a free slaughter pass; paying people increasingly generous benefits for not working, out of the pockets of those that are; wasting taxpayer money on ‘bridges to nowhere’ on the ludicrous principle that government spending somehow multiplies economic benefits above what that same money would accomplish in private hands from which it was taken…and on and on. Instead of being the custodian of individual liberty and private property rights, government has metastasized into a giant job-killing machine.

The great economic revolutions that began in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and were carried forward in the United States in the 19th  and 20th , were the result of liberty, of government permitting it to happen, not interfering, not doing what most governments to this day still do, which is to stomp on and crush any force or individual that competes with their power and status. The sooner we learn that lesson, the sooner the jobs engine will be revived.
To quote Rich Karlgaard of Forbes Magazine: “Entrepreneurs are not just a cute little sub sector of the American economy. They are the whole game”. Or Tim Kane of the Kaufman Foundation: “When it comes to U.S. job growth, start-up companies aren’t everything. They’re the only thing.” Government has a whole lot of nothing to do about it. May it get started right away.

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Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Hispanic Voters, Immigration and the Republican Party

The Hard Right and Extreme Left both need to give way to the Sober Center

Two of the most miserable groups on the American political scene, especially in my beloved California, are Republicans on the one hand and Hispanic immigrants on the other; Republicans because in spite of the Tea Party wave sweeping the nation they face nearly insurmountable challenges (bordering on impotence and irrelevancy in California), and Hispanic immigrants because they can’t get their legal status normalized despite the power of their supposed friends in Washington DC. Caught in the crossfire are Hispanic American citizen voters and libertarian-minded Republicans who want the Tea Party movement to succeed in rolling back bloated government, ObamaCare, public employee union privileges and the rest, but favor a (classical-) liberal free-market approach to immigration policy.
There can be little room for compromise on restoring limited, constitutional government, low taxes, sane regulation, fiscal responsibility and with them renewed job growth and economic strength. But the immigration issue is one where the extremes must be reined in towards the center, for their own good and for the good of the country.
To the Republicans it must be repeated: There are 20 million Hispanic voters (US citizens, not talking about illegal aliens) in the US, and Hispanics are the single fastest-growing sector of the population, up 43 percent in the last decade. Republicans can’t win elections without gaining the hearts and minds of a substantial percentage of this diverse population. They will continue to fail if they appear hostile to Hispanic voters’ cousins.
Even so, to the undocumented immigrant population it must be told: You won’t succeed without Republican support at the national level. Notice that you got nowhere – and late – with Democrats when they had all the power in 2009 and 2010. Fortunately the most compelling arguments in favor of legal normalization are those that spring from the principles of free markets, limited government, individual responsibility, work ethic, familiy values, free trade and capitalism. These are (or should be) guiding principles of the Republican party. If you can embrace these and discard the false promises of socialistic welfare policies offered by the Democrats (the effects of which after all are what you fled from in Latin America) then you will find allies and solutions.
Unfortunately, much of the self-appointed political activist immigration reform movement elite are out for power for themselves first and tend to lean hard Left. For that reason, Republicans must make their appeals and outreach directly to the people at large rather than wasting too much effort trying to make nice with adversarial power brokers.

The Obama-Reid-Pelosi administration may have blundered fatally by ramming the government takeover of healthcare down the throats of the American people before they (the Democrats) had shored up support of the Hispanic voting bloc. Imagine if they had poured half as much energy into pushing the Dream Act or some other sweeping immigration reform in 2009. After the smoke from that battle had cleared, unlike healthcare the political body count likely would have emerged as a net gain for Democrats, who would then still have ammunition to spare to pass ObamaCare in 2010 with greater support left over for its defense in the aftermath. Instead they gave the flesh-and-blood people they had shed so many crocodile tears for the short stick while pouring all of their energy into a largely abstract goal of comprehensive health care ‘reform’ first. They ticked off not only their enemies but also their supposed friends.
This is a blunder upon which Republicans can and must capitalize. The Republican share of the Hispanic vote rose again in 2010 to 38% (in congressional races) from its low of ~20% in 2008. The question is whether Republicans can maintain the momentum or if they will do what they have been too good at in the past, which is to alienate people with emotional rants foaming at the mouth against illegal aliens, providing ample fuel for the Democat-Academia-Media machine to exploit.
Republicans opposed to compromise on immigration restrictions, border enforcement, amnesty etc. need to consider priorities. This country has serious problems, which were NOT caused by immigrants. Cap and Tax, Card Check, profligate ‘stimulus’ waste, too-big-to-fail bailouts, public employee union Ponzi-scheme pension liabilities and out-of-control administrative agencies like the EPA are greater threats than gardeners and house cleaners. The violence associated with narcotraffic is not an immigration issue; it is the radioactive fallout of the prohibition of substances that Americans demand and support with their dollars at a rate three times greater per capita than the nearest rival country. ObamaCare threatens to fundamentally alter the relationship between the federal government and the citizen in ways not seen since the Constitution was ratified.
These are the priority battles that must be fought without taking prisoners. Immigration calls for moderation and a sober, dispassionate look at the economic and social impact.
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Thursday, December 09, 2010

The Left’s Secret Debating Weapon: Shallowness

While the conservative assembles focused logic and facts, the Leftist sprays vacuous clichés in all directions.

I’ve finally figured out the Left’s most effective not-so-secret weapon: shallowness. Their arguments are so empty that they invite reams of countervailing logic and facts. But in a live debate, who has time for that? So while the conservative is thoroughly dissecting and refuting the Leftist’s last empty assertion, the latter has moved on to his next shallow but emotionally triumphant point. The Leftist ‘wins’ the argument!
I have written 2 complete articles (The Madness of a Twisted Faith and It's the Over-Regulation, Stupid!) detailing just a few of the defects in the logic of The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel’s article An Undeserved Win for the GOP, published in the Wall Street Journal on November 5. Having therefore lost the argument from the economy-of-words and emotional impact standpoints, let me attempt to redeem my failure by taking on her main points using fewer words than she.

“Conservatives in both parties who claim the vote represented an ideological shift to the right are plain wrong.”
It is Obama, Reid and Pelosi who misread the 2008 election as a mandate to shift hard Left.

“For 30 years, these Americans have seen their incomes stagnate as the top 1% accrued a staggering percentage of the nation's wealth.”
Incomes have not stagnated, but they would do a lot better if politicians would stop assaulting the people who create jobs.

“The absence of a clear explanation about how conservative policies have failed in the past and will continue to fail allowed a right-wing narrative of empty slogans to gain traction.”
Conservative policies didn’t fail; excessive government growth, spending and interference (including under the Bush administration) did. One man’s empty slogan is another’s simple truth.

“Mr. Obama abandoned his smart argument about building a new foundation for the economy, embracing deficit reduction instead. This only left voters confused about the White House's recovery plan.”
Agreed, Obama’s argument that the health care plan would cover 30 million more people while reducing the deficit was ludicrous. The only thing confusing was Obama’s ‘smart’ arguments.

“Going forward, Mr. Obama would be wise to lay out a bold plan to create jobs. He should take the advice of the more than 300 economists, including former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich…”
Obama should allow jobs to be created by not punishing job-creators who succeed. He should take the advice of economists like Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman and Adam Smith.

“The federal government could help by expanding existing federal loan guarantees by $300 billion”.
Artificial credit expansion distorts entire economies and engenders crises like the mortgage market meltdown.

“Meanwhile, excess cash reserves held by banks—now estimated at an unprecedented $1.1 trillion in Federal Reserve accounts—should be taxed an initial 1%-2%.”
Punishing people for managing their own resources in their own best interest solves nothing. The income tax also started small.

“Common ground … means investments in people and deteriorating infrastructure; ending a wasteful and futile war in Afghanistan; and enacting ethics and campaign finance reform that levels the playing field so ordinary Americans' voices aren't drowned out by covert political money.”
McCain-Feingold’s result was that ordinary American’s voices are more drowned out than ever. Throw Afghan women back to their burkas under the Taliban? If you want infrastructure, stop diverting fossil-fuel tax revenue to pet non-infrastructure projects.

“If this sensible agenda is met with Republican obstruction… Mr. Obama should channel Harry Truman and come out fighting against a know-nothing, do-nothing GOP.”
You mean the president who made no bones about his decision to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saving millions of American GI’s lives? OK.

“Common ground and common sense also demand that the president listen to and remobilize the base that is the heart of his party. An empowered Democratic electorate—the young, Latinos, African-Americans, single women, union folks—will be an effective counterweight to the assaults of the GOP and its corporate funders.”
Maybe the young, Latinos, etc. decided they don’t want to be mascots for the Democratic party and don’t believe the clichés about the GOP and ‘corporate funders’ anymore, for good reason.

“More than 20 million Americans are out of work or underemployed… They will not find [real solutions] with a GOP committed to slashing billions from key domestic programs even as they make tax cuts for the rich permanent.” The most-needed ‘domestic programs’ right now are private initiatives that create products, services, jobs and investment opportunities. It’s the Left that is stifling the productive sector of the economy.

“All of this presents an opportunity for Mr. Obama to show he stands with working people and the middle class.”
I couldn’t agree more.

Friday, December 03, 2010

A Well-Deserved Defeat for Leftism, Part II: It's the Over-regulation, Stupid!

What does Katrina vanden Heuvel (editor of The Nation magazine) mean by ‘failing to place demands on [banks]’? Is she blind to the government's increasingly intrusive micromanagement of the last 30 years?
God help you if you don't do with your money what the Left thinks you ought.
Read the full article on Front Page Mag: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/12/03/it%E2%80%99s-the-over-regulation-stupid/

Sunday, November 21, 2010

A Well-Deserved Defeat for Leftism, Part I

Those of us who let our subscription to The Nation lapse 20 years ago would do well to read that magazine’s editor Katrina vanden Heuvel’s article ‘An Undeserved Win for the GOP’, published in the Wall Street Journal Friday, November 5. It’s a refreshing reminder of all of the economic illiteracy that the Left is capable of.
Read the full article at FrontPageMag.com.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Bankruptcy: The Salvation of Califrancia

The bad news is that California is bankrupt. The good news is that California is bankrupt. More on this in a moment.
One of the great virtues of the capitalist free market is that the inevitable failures have a tendency to be revealed and resolved rapidly, before they metastasize into society-wide disasters. It is only with the intervention of government – imposing wage and price controls, propping up politically favored firms or classes of people at the expense of others, manipulating interest rates and even the value of the currency itself, forecasting revenue based on optimistic political methods – that the information signaling impending failure can be suppressed and distorted for so long as to allow problems grow orders of magnitude greater than they would otherwise have gotten before an inevitable collapse.
California’s total debt is somewhere around $78 billion (compared to an $87 billion budget), and the unfunded public employee pension liabilities reach above $500 billion. Now it turns out that this year’s deficit will be at least $6 billion greater than previously reported, over $25 billion. Some people are surprised by this. Other people understand that there are natural, immutable laws of economics that politicians cannot overrule any more than they can the physical laws of gravity.
The coming bankruptcy of California is inevitable as long as the Sacramento government machine continues to suppress the productive sector, raise tax rates, impose increasingly irrational regulatory burdens on unfavored businesses, protect state monopolies like education, and bind children, grandchildren, unborn fetuses, frozen embryos and gleams in their parents’ eyes to unsustainable (to say nothing of unconscionable) contracts of liability that they are not competent to read, much less sign.
So what can we – citizens without political power -- do? The worst-case scenario is that the inevitable day gets postponed so long that the compound increase in liabilities grows to a yet greater order of magnitude. Our task is to act to make the day of reckoning come as soon as it can, the sooner to resolve it with the least pain.
Productive citizens and residents should simply act in their own rational self-interest, seeking to pay the least taxes possible and avoid being subject to the most onerous regulations, taking care of their own families, churches, mosques and synagogues as best they can. Those who find opportunities beckoning beyond our borders should take them and move out, sooner rather than later.
A capital strike – physical, financial and intellectual – will accelerate the decline in tax revenue to Sacramento. The reflexive reaction of the political class, especially the current one-left-party regime, will be to double down on higher taxes and more micromanagement. If the voters still go along with the politicians, revenue will plummet again and the debt-to-assets ratio will become increasingly acute. Sooner or later, a critical mass of citizens and officials will be forced to recognize that a fundamental shift of direction is required.
The word bankruptcy invokes negative connotations. But in fact, bankruptcy is a brilliant invention of Western civilization, permitting debtors to get a second chance and creditors to be fairly compensated within the constraints of circumstances. The founders of the United States were wise to incorporate it into the Constitution (Article I, Section 8).
Consider the alternative: debtor’s prisons! And if you think that’s just a joke, look up Dubai; some supposedly modern and ‘capitalist’ countries don’t have bankruptcy laws, and indeed do incarcerate people who can’t pay their debts.
So let’s all get over our bankruptcy-phobia. It’s a golden opportunity to void out unsustainable promises and start over clean.
Bankruptcy can be avoided if our elected (and unelected) officials recognize the counter-productive nature of hiring unionized teachers at a rate faster than the growth of student enrollment, and promising unmatched defined-benefit pension plans to public employees without regard to portfolio performance.
But if bankruptcy must come, let it come before the entitlement culture turns us into France, where the youth unemployment rate among the children of immigrants is triple the already high general rate and unions paralyze the country and hold the citizens hostage at the mere suggestion that the retirement age be raised from 60 to 62.
There are many challenges to making this work, not the least of which is getting politicians to acknowledge that there’s a problem that politics-as-usual won’t fix, and then to act without prejudice (see: takeover of GM by the Obama Administration) to resolve it.
Put another way, California is not (yet) bankrupt, and that’s both the good and the bad news.

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

FPM: Is There Hope for Califrancia?

Democratic politicians in California may be breathing a sigh of relief, but it will be short-lived. Yes, they still have the power, but it is the illusory power of a Doctor Frankenstein over his monster. The Golden State is still bankrupt...
Read the full article at FrontPageMag.com.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Defending Felipe Calderón

Felipe Calderón is the George W. Bush of Mexico
Conservatives are roundly denouncing the words of the Mexican President, spoken in the well of the House of Representatives to the standing applause of the Speaker, the Vice President and other Democrats, that he strongly disagrees with the recently adopted immigration law in Arizona.
We can debate whether we agree with this position, or whether it is appropriate for a foreign head of state to criticize legislation duly and constitutionally enacted by the citizens of a state, particularly a law that does little beyond affirm federal law and express a determination to enforce it (what exactly were those leaders of the federal government applauding? Criticism of a state law that acknowledges the letter of the statute of which they are the guardians?).
Even so, there is a bigger picture that conservatives who sincerely wish to be seen by the electorate as the mature grown-ups in politics (as opposed to the irresponsible teenagers now driving the family car drunk over the cliff) should be mindful of.
Felipe Calderón is the George W. Bush of Mexico; the center-right leader whom the Left lampoons mercilessly and the Right finds plenty of room to criticize, but who will be sorely missed once he gone and his rivals take over.  Recall that in 2006, Calderón won election in a squeaker that made the 2000 Bush-Gore fiasco look like a Boy Scout jamboree. To this day, Andres Manuel López-Obrador, or AMLO as he is affectionately known, has not recognized Calderón’s legitimacy and openly agitates as the shadow government of Mexico. Moreover, for years now Mexico has been besieged by civil war that is far more bloody for Mexico in proportion to Iraq for the United States; a war which has as its driving force the economic demand for illegal drugs in the United States. If collective guilt is legitimate in the debate over illegal immigration, it is equally a two-way street for other purposes. 
Mexico deals very harshly with illegal immigrants into its own territory from places like Guatemala and El Salvador, so Calderón’s words smack of more than a bit of hypocrisy. But conservatives can have a gentleman’s disagreement while still recognizing that Calderón is a priceless partner in our common destiny, a decent and rational man with whom we can work for the common good. To do less would be irresponsible and self-defeating.

Saturday, May 08, 2010

Republicans and the Immigration Trap

The next 2 elections are too important to sacrifice over illegal gardeners.
Americans are understandably upset by the failure of the federal government to implement and enforce an unambiguous legal standard with respect to the border and unlawful immigration, especially where this has permitted violent crimes to occur and go unpunished. Republicans in particular are incensed by Democrat’s pandering to hispanics for votes by handing out taxpayer-financed goodies to their favored groups, including illegal aliens. ObamaCare has poured gasoline on the fire by acting as a giant magnet for fraud in addition to the merely destructive but still ‘legal’ aspects of socialized health care.
Fairly or unfairly, it falls to Republicans to deal with this challenge intelligently and objectively, and not fall over themselves in their eagerness to step into the political traps so obviously set for them by Democrats.
There are at least two major threats to Republican’s hopes of success this November and in 2012, failing which ObamaCare and other nationalizations will take permanent root in our society, and America’s decline into a European-style socialist has-been nation, governed from Belgium and the UN, may be irreversible. The first is that in spite of an abysmal economic record, ObamaReidPelosi will succeed in getting so many more people dependent upon government for whatever they have, that not enough free Americans will remain with the courage to rock the boat back to liberty. This strategy was brilliantly successful for FDR, delivering to him 3 re-elections during this nation’s Great Depression. The second is that Democrats will successfully (note I didn’t say fairly) paint Republicans as reactionary, bigoted racists, and take from them what little share they have left of the Hispanic vote. At the very least, we must not make this easy for them.
It is fitting and proper for Republicans to stand on principle and oppose bad policy. But we cannot win if we are perceived as being against people; in opposition to a huge cross-section of our society, simply for being who they are. Illegal immigrants didn’t cause the Great Recession. Immigration as a proportion of population is about a third of what it was in the peak years of the early 20th century. Contrary to public perception and anecdotal outrages, increased immigration is associated with lower, not higher crime rates overall. The greatest threats to our liberty and prosperity come from Washington itself (and Sacramento … and City Hall in the case of my beloved Los Angeles), followed by Academia, the mainstream media and Hollywood. Republicans need to contain their anger, refrain from foaming at the mouth whenever the subject of illegal immigration comes up, and go on positive offense.
That positive offense can take the form of a series of small legislative proposals – not everything has to be done by sensational, sweeping, grandiose, corrupt, pork-laden omnibus comprehensive bills that make headlines for years on end – to fix the most acute problems in the system. Each bill can stand alone, that is, be proposed, debated and voted on on its own merits; it doesn’t have to be bundled with a hundred others. The good news is that even as we alternate restrictions with concessions, the latter should permit more effective use of law enforcement resources while making it harder for the criminal element to hide among the innocent population.
For example:
• Focus law enforcement on felony criminal activity like murder, rape, assault, grand theft auto, arms and drug trafficking. Stop pursuing illegals whose only crime is being here without permission.
• Build and patrol the border fence.
• Deny (or delay for 10 years) citizenship to anyone who cannot prove that they entered the country through legal channels.
• Stop printing official government election materials in foreign languages at taxpayer expense. We are an English-speaking nation.
• Offer a relatively painless path to legal residency status (not citizenship) to people already here.
• Strengthen standards for knowledge of the English language and American civic institutions, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as a requirement for citizenship.
• Offer accelerated citizenship to persons who serve honorably in the US armed services.
• Amend the US Constitution such that babies born in the US to foreign parents do not automatically become American citizens. No more ‘anchor babies’ (news flash: slavery was abolished 150 years ago).
• Increase or abolish H1-B visa quotas. It makes no sense to educate foreigners in our universities and then chase them away when they are ready to produce wealth and jobs in the USA.
• Relax restrictions on immigrants who come through proper border crossings who openly state their intention to seek work, whether permanently or seasonally. Photograph them, fingerprint them, register them in a nationwide database and test them for infectious disease as necessary, but let them through with legal residency (not citizen) status. Collect from each a payment for catastrophic health insurance coverage that is substantially less than illegal ‘coyote’ smuggling fees. By making it easier for honest workers to come through the front door, law enforcement can focus limited resources on criminal activity coming through the back door.
• Allow/require state and local law enforcement to investigate the legal or immigration status of all criminal suspects, persons of interest or defendants. No ‘sanctuary city’ or any other policies should be permitted to serve as cover for criminals and their activities.
• Stop conducting raids on commercial businesses which are intended to root out illegal workers, unless there is specific, probable cause of felony criminal activity. The drug traffickers are not cutting up chickens for $4/hour. Offering and accepting employment at mutually agreeable terms is not fundamentally a crime (if it were, it would still be the least of any immigration problems).

I’m sure you can think of more of you own. Even if not a single one of these gets a hearing in Nancy Pelosi’s Congress, if Republicans introduce one per week from here to November, Americans will recognize who the grown-ups are who are serious, responsible and really trying to help. We can take the political advantage away from the Democrats and make them play defense.
Even if you think some of these proposals are too lenient, liberal, or slouching toward ‘amnesty’, that judgment has to be balanced against the larger picture of what’s at stake. Do you want to win the argument or the war?
Don’t take the bait; take the initiative.
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