And Then There Were Three: David Yeagley Interviews Peter Brimelow

America, Ann Coulter, Ilana Mercer, The Zeitgeist

I was the first to be interviewed by Dr. David Yeagley, who has “invited several nationally known conservative and independent writers to offer their perspective on American Indians.”

It was both an honor and an interesting experience. (I also gained a friend.) Now none other than Ann Coulter has given David an interview. Congratulations, David!

You can read the Coulter interview here. The Mercer interview, “Patriotism, Nationhood, and the American Indian,” is here (and here, if you prefer to read it on David’s site).

Updated: Peter Brimelow has given Yeagley “An English Assessment.” Read it here.

A Republic, if You Can Keep It

America, Constitution, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Individual Rights, Law, Natural Law

Yesterday Bush signed “The Military Commissions Act of 2006.” I went in search for a libertarian analysis, but found only a few splenetic screeds. While perfectly understandable, these execrations do nothing to dissect the implications of the Bill for Americans. As I read them, I knew I ought to be furious about torture. However, too little was being said about the erosion of due process, constitutional protections and the accretion of executive power.

Libertarians need to cite chapter and verse in the actual Bill and then logically and calmly explain its implications for Americans. (It is very possible that, because of his visceral contempt for the Constitution as a so-called statist document, the anarchist can’t rise to the occasion. However, he may want to bear in mind that to the extent the Constitution comports with natural law, it’s both laudable and legitimate.)

In any case, right or wrong, to security-crazed Americans, the constant squealing about torture is a signal to switch off, as it conjures the namby-pamby liberal whose concerns are, overwhelmingly, with the “evil doers.” Readers are likelier to be swayed by arguments that address the possibility of detention without trial of US citizens and the sundering of habeas corpus and the separation of powers.

Finally, I found this, which does just that. This piece from Reason offers a gist of the administration’s impetus vis-a-vis the Bill. This next piece, however, is unhelpful. Libertarians will get its Bastiatian thrust, but, bar some left-liberals, the rest will find it smarmy and juvenile. You don’t have to agree with everything Jonathan Turley says to find him inspiring. (I certainly don’t. Contra Turley, America is a republic, not a democracy, and hence not meant to manufacture “majoritarian” outcomes. And France’s centralized system is the truly ugly system.) There’s a precis of a talk he gave here. Or you can listen to him here.

Standard Libertarian Immigration Non Sequitur

IMMIGRATION, libertarianism

Low-wage illegal aliens cost much more ($26.3 billion) than they contribute ($16 billion) to the economy. [See “The High Cost of Cheap Labor: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget“] But to make light of their indisputable weight on the American welfare state, open-border libertarians advance a standard non-sequitur: “We don’t care if immigrants use a disproportionate amount of social services, because we believe all social programs should be scaled back or preferably junked,” as one put it.

From the fact that you oppose taxpayer-funded welfare for nationals, it doesn’t follow that extending it to millions of illegal newcomers is financially or morally negligible. (Or that this is congruent with the libertarian aim of curtailing government growth.) The argument is akin to declaring that because a bank has been robbed by one band of bandits, arresting the next lot is unnecessary because the damage has already been done.

It’s hard to imagine how immigration evangelizers would extend this logic to the cost of crime perpetrated by illegals. Let’s see: “We don’t care if illegal immigrants commit more violent crimes than locals, because we believe all violent offences, committed by nationals and non-nationals alike, are wrong and should be phased out.”

The End of England

Britain, Political Correctness, Politics, Race, Racism, The West

What people flippantly call “political correctness” is often something far more sinister: state-initiated intimidation, violence, and coercion. How else would you describe the arrest of an English girl (called Codie), by British law enforcement, for asking to be paired in class with English—as opposed Urdu—speakers?
Following the girl’s reasonable request, the disgraceful teacher began “shouting and screaming, ‘It’s racist, you’re going to get done by the police’.” (Teachers, who score very low on college admission tests, are quality people in all state run, union-dominated establishments, aren’t they?) “Codie Stott’s family claim she was forced to spend three-and-a-half hours in a police cell after she was reported by her teachers.”

Codie “said she went outside to calm down where another teacher found her and, after speaking to her class teacher, put her in isolation for the rest of the day.”

Get this, instead of apologizing to the girl, in the hopes of avoiding litigation, “the school is now investigating exactly what happened before deciding what action—if any—to take against Codie.” As if the school has not done enough damage already.

The man behind this regime of gunpoint tolerance is “Headteacher Dr. Antony Edkins.” Under his totalitarianism, “a ten-year-old boy [had been] hauled before a court for allegedly calling an 11-year-old mixed race pupil a ‘Paki’ and ‘Bin Laden’ in a playground argument at a primary school in Irlam.”

Robert Whelan, of the classical liberal think tank CIVITAS (whom I had the pleasure of meeting in April this year), defended Codie. “It’s obviously common sense that pupils who don’t speak English cause problems for other pupils and for teachers. A lot of these arrests don’t result in prosecutions—they aim to frighten us into self-censorship until we watch everything we say.” (Whelan’s colleague, my good friend David Conway, comments here.)

You’d think this act would be hard to follow, but British Airways gave it a bash, suspending without pay a Coptic Christian for wearing a small cross to work, “even as Muslims and Sikhs are allowed to wear headscarves and turbans,” reminds Lawrence Auster.