Rubio’s Immigration Bill A Statist’s Dream

Business, Classical Liberalism, Democrats, Government, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, The State

“Rubio’s Immigration Bill A Statist’s Dream” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“The ‘Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S.744)’ is statist through-and-through.

This is one thing one can state unequivocally about the Gang of Eight’s immigration Bill. The same goes for those who support it. The ‘libertarian’ Independent Institute, for one, whose scholars claim that the ‘Positive Aspects of Immigration Bill Outweigh Its Flaws.’

This is nonsense on stilts—true only if an expansion in the size and power of the federal government is a net positive.

If you’ve enjoyed the ‘work’ of Department of Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano, you’ll love her successor (rumored to be the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk Ray Kelly). The Marco Rubio immigration Bill concentrates even more power in the office Kelly may inherit. Such power includes the ability to adjust the status of a ‘registered provisional immigrant’ (RPI) to that of ‘an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence’ on satisfying a few ridiculous conditions, one of which is the RPI’s ‘continuous physical presence.’ In other words, for being in the country illegally, the RPI may get his illegal status reversed at the pleasure of The Secretary.

Is this not Kafkaesque? It is for any American who imagines that government ought to, at the very least, stand sentinel against unsolicited and unjustified trespass.

Almost all powers specified in the Bill are the prerogative of the Secretary of DOHS, although DOJ will get a chance to bolster its banana-republic credentials. Eric Holder’s Department of Justice gets bigger and badder under the Gang of Eight’s plot to reel-in more ‘undocumented Democrats.’

For instance, were an employer to hire, fire or verify an RPI’s employment eligibility in a manner that might be construed as a discriminating ‘immigration-related employment practice,’ the proprietor is in hot water. In defending their rights of private property, ‘foreign labor contractors’ will be, moreover, going up against tax-paid litigators, to whom the amnestied will have access.

You’d think that an expansion of the frivolous and counter-intuitive grounds upon which private-property owners may be prosecuted goes against libertarian sensibilities.

Another burden business will bear is …”

Read the complete column. “Rubio’s Immigration Bill A Statist’s Dream” is now on WND.

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Seattle Parasite-To-Resident Ratio

Business, Government, Taxation, Technology, The State

In SEATTLE, the parasite-to-resident ratio (public-sector workers per population) is one to 56. To give you an idea of how big a government workforce Seattle labors under consider the bankrupt Detroit, at one to 61. I find this a remarkable statistic for Seattle. What it tells me is that despite the drag that is “the Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector”—an oink sector, in places, comparable to Detroit’s—there are other variables even more powerful, which, against all odds, overcome the economic drag imposed by the unproductive, “public” sector.

Washington State’s prosperity is a function of the quality of the state’s productive sector. The state attracts a highly productive cognitive elite that works in the high-tech industries of Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon and other great companies.

Public sector workers, of course, are net wealth consumers; they do not produce wealth. They do vote themselves exorbitant salaries (averaging $81,488 in Seattle) on the backs of the productive (one of whom is my own).

A breakdown of parasite-to-resident ratios in other cities, many worse than Detroit, is courtesy of EPJ (read my weekly column, also on the Economic Policy Journal).

UPDATED: Zoned Out On The Weiner Worm

Barack Obama, Journalism, Media, Morality, Politics, Republicans

Of course Republicans would fall for the distraction that is Anthony Weiner, coverage of whom is all over Drudge Report and other Republican websites. This is the very thing left-liberals are doing, except that they have reason to track the Weiner Worm (a poster boy for Anti-Semitism, if ever there was one).

The antics of this engorged organism allow our “representatives” in Congress and their loyal representatives in the media to forget about the NSA spying on all of us, that the IRS rapine could be traced to the White House, if the will existed, to say nothing of the nap the Beloved took during an attack on a US embassy, in a country Obama and his liberal posse invaded, to the detriment of its people and our own.

The media love knocking down one straw man (Weiner) for the sake of another (Obama).

UPDATE: “Jay Carney: Obama trying to focus on economy, not ‘phony scandals’; Update: Obama also refers to ‘phony scandals.’”

The laser, I presume, was BHO’s elementary—eighth-grade elementary—address, given today.

Who’s Killing Whom?

Barack Obama, Crime, Race, Racism

The first black president is also a president for blacks first.

Patrick J. Buchanan in “Leading from behind Al Sharpton”:

The president sent his “thoughts and prayers” to Trayvon’s family.

To George Zimmerman, painted as a racist monster for 16 months, hiding in fear of his life, his Peruvian mother and family under threat – not a word of compassion from the president.

Obama moved swiftly off the trial and into a rambling discourse on the black experience and racial profiling.

But why? The jury said Trayvon was not profiled.

What is Obama up to? Answer. A law professor, he knows this case, based on evidence and testimony, was open and shut. And he knows Eric Holder is not going to file any hate-crime civil rights charges.

Because Holder and Obama know they would be seen as caving to Sharpton & Co., they would get stuffed in court, and the nation would react with outrage to a double-jeopardy, murder-charge, racial prosecution of this persecuted man whose innocence was established in a court of law.

So Obama swiftly changed the subject.

“There are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me … before I was a senator.”

“There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.”

“That happens often,” said Obama. Undeniably. But why do black males awaken such apprehensions and fears? Is it their color?

Well, 13 percent of our population is black. Half of that – say, 6 plus percent – is male. Of that 6 percent, one in six – just 1 percent of the U.S. population – consists of black males age 18 to 29.

Of all black males 18 to 29, writes Ron Unz in “Race and Crime in America,” 28 percent are in jail or prison, or on probation.

The “liberal Sentencing Project organization,” says Unz, estimates that “one-third of all black men are already convicted criminals by their 20s, and the fraction would surely be far higher for those living in urban areas.”

Twenty years ago in Chicago, where black kids are gunned down daily, Jesse Jackson was quoted, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

That’s the same apprehension, Mr. President, those women feel on that elevator.

Obama traced the “violence … in poor black neighborhoods” to “poverty and … a very difficult history.”

But slavery and segregation were far closer in time to the black America of the 1950s, and poverty was far greater. Yet we never saw crime and incarceration rates like we see today in black America.

As Unz writes, El Paso, Texas, and Atlanta are cities of equal size and poverty rates. Yet Atlanta has 10 times the crime. Oakland and Santa Ana, Calif., are equal in size and poverty numbers. Yet Oakland “has several times the rate of crime.” Why?

Why are white folks nervous about strange young black men in the neighborhood? Perhaps because they commit interracial muggings, robberies and rapes at 35 times the rate of whites.

As newspapers avoid the issue of black racism and rarely give the stats on interracial crime, Obama dwelt lovingly on the indignities of racial profiling – without really addressing the root cause.

It was an uncourageous commentary. Weak as Kool-Aid, said Tavis.

But Obama was where he likes to be, leading from behind – this time behind Al Sharpton.

The complete column is HERE.

On who hates whom in my “Sacrificing Kids To PC Pietism”:

“Hate crimes are extraordinary in unexpected ways. In addition to being among the most serious crimes, NCV data show that approximately 84 percent of these assaults are violent—a sexual assault, robbery or simple aggravated assault.” And, “Blacks are less likely than both whites and Hispanics to be targeted for reasons of racial hatred.

A significantly higher percentage of victims of violent racial hatred say their attackers were black.” “Nine out of 10 of them identify their race as the reason blacks targeted them.” “For victims reporting white offenders, [only] about three in ten victims cited race as a motive.”

Moreover, and this is crucial, “The number of black hate crime victims was so small, that is statistically insignificant, that it precluded analysis of the race of persons who victimized them.” (Page 36)

As a perplexed alien from outer space will have noted, data don’t move the impious, progressive people of the West; a different drumbeat does. The tom-tom comes from the talkers on the television. Media megaphones dictate —and all political factions accept—that the category of hate crimes applies de facto to white-on-black crime.

Yet white-on-black hate crimes are practically (and certainly statistically) non-existent. These are manufactured myths.

“Who’s Killing Whom” is also a chapter in “Into The Cannibal’s Pot”. Read it.