Category Archives: Welfare

NEW COLUMN IS “Pandemic, Plague & Protests: Will Chile Join The Shithole Country Club?” Previously on Quarterly Review, WND.COM and The Unz Review, read it now on American Greatness

An excerpt:

Before the coronavirus pandemic and the plague of locusts came the protesters.

From the affluent locales—Chile, France, Britain, Hong King, Catalonia—to the impoverished ones—Algeria, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Lebanon and more; the world was on fire (to borrow from Amy Chua’s brilliant book).

The reasons cited for a world-wide conflagration ranged from the evils of free-market capitalism (says the Left) to the “socialist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela” (says the Right), to “economics, demography, a sense of powerlessness…and social media.”

Some experts spoke of a “youth bulge” of over-educated young people chasing too few jobs. In truth, this was more like ill-educated youngsters with useless degrees, who thought it chic to don a balaclava and lob hard objects at the police and the property it was protecting.

Chile is the jewel of Latin America. In 2014, it even surpassed the United States on the Index of Economic Freedom, ranking seventh to America’s 12th. Since 1990, economic growth in Chile has been as steady as the stability of its institutions. Poverty rates had plummeted and social services had been extended to the needy.

On the right, Pat Buchanan has described Chile as “the country with the highest per capita income and least inequality in all of Latin America.”

On the Left—yet still on the side of a competitive market economy—the Economist agrees. Chile “is the second-richest country in Latin America, thanks in part to its healthy public finances and robust private sector.”

In no-man’s land are the protestors on the streets of Santiago and other cities. What the demonstrators want is unclear. To the extent their inchoate signs and signals can be divined, it would appear that the path the well-to-do Chile will be forced to take is that of less capitalism and more socialism; less of the private sector and more of the state.

Indeed, Chile is beset with protesters determined to bring the elected government to its knees. Many parts of Santiago, the capital, have been boarded up or burned down. The country’s “malcontents” want more state-provided stuff; more health care and more free education and pensions.

It increasingly looks like Sebastián Piñera, Chile’s president, may just be forced “to scrap a system” that appears to have served Chile well.

READ THE REST … NEW COLUMN IS “Pandemic, Plague & Protests: Will Chile Join The Shithole Country Club?” Previously on Quarterly Review, WND.COM and The Unz Review, it’s now on American Greatness.

* Image is via The Economist

If Mass Migration Is So Magic, Why Is The World On Fire?

Democracy, Globalism, IMMIGRATION, Lebanon, Multiculturalism, Politics, Taxation, Welfare

“The simplest way to make the world richer,” lectures Robert Guest of the open-borders Economist magazine, “is to allow more people to move. Yet the politics of migration has never been more toxic,” he laments.

While extolling endless migration to the West, in the same, November 16th-22nd issue, the magazine depicts a world beset by unrest:

“It is hard to keep up with the protest movements under way around the world. … only the global unrest of the late 1960s was similar in scope.”

The writers point to a movements that “seem strikingly unconnected and spontaneous.”

The Economist, moreover, agrees that it is almost impossible to impose “a pattern on these seemingly random events”—in Lebanon, a tax on WhatsApp; in Hong Kong, “proposed laws allowing the extradition of criminal suspects to China”; in Britain, Brexit, in affluent Chile a sense of inequality.

Inching slowly toward stating the truth, it is eventually conceded that the global unrest is affecting “well-functioning democracies” as well.

In fact, “a related phenomenon [in the unrest equation] is the weakening of the bargain at the heart of Western-style democracy—that losers, who may represent a majority of the popular vote, will accept rule by the winners until the next election. The millions on the streets do not accept the patience that trade-off demands.”

“A weakening of the bargain at the heart of Western-style democracy” why? Because flooding western democracies with foreign people has created societies that share no bonds other than the quest to extract as much as possible from the political process.

* Image courtesy The Economist, Polaris/eyevine.

The ‘Demographic Decline’ Argument For Mass Immigration

Argument, IMMIGRATION, The West, Welfare

The “demographic decline” argument, in the context of the immigration S.O.S, has been used as an excuse to swamp—and weaken—native European populations. From the fact that a nation isn’t breeding to some state-set, desired level—it doesn’t follow that said nation “deserves” to be swamped with better breeders.

Mark Steyn used to be a proponent of this non-argument. I dissected his fallacy in “Beck, Wilders, and His Boosters’ Blind Spot”:

I am told that I don’t understand Mr. Steyn of the dooms-day demographics. So I listened to his “End of Europe” lectures, in which he vividly describes the multitudes of Muslims going forth to North America and Western Europe to be fruitful and multiply and push for Islam. Their Pan-Islamist identity trumps their new assumed identity. Because of numbers, Mark asserts, History is on the march in the Muslim direction. By 2030 much of what we think of as the developed world will be part of the Muslim world.

Here Steyn hits a brick wall. Other than making babies at home and total war abroad, he proposes nothing much at all. Oh yes, if you’re not already fighting (futilely, in my opinion) in Iraq and Afghanistan, you can show your marbles by publishing offensive cartoons, making rightwing movies, and writing right-wing text.

The “One-Man Global Content Provider” is wrong. Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital — people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy.

Declining birth rates?and their antidote; the mass immigration imperative?are the excuses statists make for persevering with immigration policies that are guaranteed to destroy western civil society and shore up the State.

If, as Wilders and Steyn contend, “Islam is a problematic religion; every school of Islam is basically at its core jihadist; and the religion is much closer to a conventional imperial project than to a faith” ? its religionists must be kept out. State-engineered mass immigration must be halted.

Yes, postmodernism, political correctness, and relativism hobble the West. Post-colonialism, however, affords it the opportunity to redraw the frontiers at the borders. This is the Wilders project. It has yet to be embraced fully by his American boosters. As Steyn has openly conceded, “For a notorious blowhard, I can go a bit cryptic or (according to taste) wimpy when invited to confront that particular subject head on.

When he cops to being “wimpy,” Steyn means on immigration. He and others are latecomers to the immigration S.O.S.