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.

Gibson's Gibberish

Anti-Semitism

As I’ve said, “the South Park depiction of Mel Gibson bouncing off walls he had freshly ‘coated’ in bodily waste is not far off.” Gibson was at it again, this time in a painful-to-watch interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer. He twitched, grimaced, scratched himself non-stop, and generally came across as creepy and insincere.

Gibson, it transpires, holds that “alcohol loosens your tongue and makes you talk in a way that is not you.” It wasn’t Mel that said those things about all Jews; it was some separate alter ego.

I’ve known a few drug addicts in my life. While they were particularly disgusting when on drugs, their sober persona didn’t deviate that much from their soused state-of-being. A is A, if you know what I’m saying.

In response to Sawyer’s truncated question paraphrasing the assertion that got Mel in trouble in the first place), “So are the Jews responsible [for all the wars in the world]?”, Gibson observed that [Jews] were not blameless in the Middle-East conflict. Blimy! He conflated Jews with Israelis. Sawyer was way too dumb to question him about that.

All the Israelis he considers semi-culpable for the conflict are Jews, but not all Jews are Israelis. And not all Jews support Israel. In fact, the anti-Israel claque is led by Jews. To wit, the New Historians, Noam Chomsky, “The Godfather,” Steven and Hillary Rose, Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Tanya Reinhart in Tel Aviv, and Michael Cohen in Swansea—these are but a few of the new anti-Semitism’s leading Jewish lights.

The fact that Mel conflates Israelis with all Jews confirms he has a prejudice.

Gibson then hazarded that he had lashed out because of the attacks by some Jews on “The Passion,” for its alleged anti-Semitism. Once again, true to type, Mel conflates the “Christophobic charlatan Abe Foxman,” and a few other idiots, with all Jews, and fails to mention the many prominent Jews who valiantly and eloquently defended his morose movie (which, as I’ve said, is not my idea of entertainment, or even art). Rabbi Daniel Lapin, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, and Jackie Mason come immediately to mind.