Category Archives: Democrats

Bush Answers Kennedy’s Calling

Bush, Democrats, Republicans

…all immigration policy by definition amounts to top-down, statist, central planning. But the least invasive policy is one that respects a nation’s historical and cultural complexion and the property rights of its taxpayers. Bush’s batch of soon-to-be amnestied illegal aliens are voracious tax consumers, who will cost more in social services than they pay in taxes over a lifetime. By contrast, immigrants who arrived between 1870 and 1920, during the Great Migration, although poor, did not constitute a burden, because the Welfare State as we know it did not exist.
Moreover, what Bush in his dotage termed “the great American tradition of the melting pot” is no more. In previous decades, immigrants assimilated. In the spirit of the times, they are now encouraged to acculturate to the politics of petulance. As a result, too many seem to harbor a vestigial resentment toward the host society and to cling to an almost-militant distinctiveness.
Clearly, unfettered immigration and the interventionist state, as Ludwig von Mises noted, cannot coexist.

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily.com column, “Bush Answers Kennedy’s Calling.”

Bush Answers Kennedy's Calling

Bush, Democrats, Republicans

…all immigration policy by definition amounts to top-down, statist, central planning. But the least invasive policy is one that respects a nation’s historical and cultural complexion and the property rights of its taxpayers. Bush’s batch of soon-to-be amnestied illegal aliens are voracious tax consumers, who will cost more in social services than they pay in taxes over a lifetime. By contrast, immigrants who arrived between 1870 and 1920, during the Great Migration, although poor, did not constitute a burden, because the Welfare State as we know it did not exist.
Moreover, what Bush in his dotage termed “the great American tradition of the melting pot” is no more. In previous decades, immigrants assimilated. In the spirit of the times, they are now encouraged to acculturate to the politics of petulance. As a result, too many seem to harbor a vestigial resentment toward the host society and to cling to an almost-militant distinctiveness.
Clearly, unfettered immigration and the interventionist state, as Ludwig von Mises noted, cannot coexist.

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily.com column, “Bush Answers Kennedy’s Calling.”

Plamegate: A Storm In A Cesspool

Democrats, Republicans

Writes Dave Lester:

Hi Ilana, I am a bit surprised you have said nothing about the Valerie-Plame situation. I have found myself more and more irritated by the way the talking heads treat this as a sort of inside-the-Beltway joke with everyone betting on what will happen if Karl Rove is outed. [When do they ever address principle? This aspect of the talking twits’ thinking I addressed here, here, and in so many other essays.—ILANA] So little is said about the impact on those who work undercover in foreign countries—of their identities becoming a political football. As someone who spent a little time undercover 40 years ago in Europe with the Army, I can tell you that your sanity hangs on the notion that those in your chain of command regard your identity as essentially sacred. If those sent on such missions cannot have absolute confidence in those who sent them keeping the faith, there is no possibility that people will volunteer. I, for one, think that whoever okayed the release of this information should spend 20 years in the nastiest prison we have with much of it in solitary. Let them find out what it means to feel you have been utterly cut loose and deserted by those you trusted.

I did mention the affair, but only in passing: I celebrated the incarceration of Mrs. Judith Chalabi. But Dave is generally correct: this storm-in-a-cesspool doesn’t much interest me—and I suspect I speak for most classical liberals-cum-libertarians. To understand why, consider a fictitious, but true-to-life, criminal gang. To settle scores, its assassins regularly kill people. In one anomalous instance, these crooks confine themselves to merely kneecapping their victims. That’s how libertarians view Karl Rovegate in the grand scheme of government corruption: breaking the bones of a single foot soldier hardly stacks up against the War, Katrina, deficit spending, and so on. If anything, had this scandal been the government’s worst offense, libertarians would rejoice. Instead of killing, stealing, and counterfeiting currency, it has only outed one undercover agent. What restraint!
Libertarians are astounded when, irrespective of its unfailing treachery over the years, Americans continue to bawl about their government’s betrayals. Most of what government does is either unconstitutional, immoral, illegal, or all of the above. In this respect, Demopublicans, Republocrats; they’re interchangeable, although the current band of brigands has set a new Gold Standard for criminality and corruption. The Founding Fathers were classical liberals too. Their thinking was animated by the same understanding of the evils of unlimited power, which is why they sought to limit and delimit it. By all means, if he’s guilty, incarcerate Rove, but how about chocking these (and future) chickens for once and for all by going to the source, and repealing the 16th Amendment? Such a course of action would spell the difference between temporary and long-term solutions to government corruption.