EDWARD CLINE: FRIGHTENED TURTLES
http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2014/09/frightened-turtles.html
It is fine to discuss a philosophy of freedom. But discussing it also requires a good, hard look at the political realities that negate any chance of freedom in the near future.
Frightened Turtles
I would like to remind readers that we live in a country that is barely free. If we lived in ideal political conditions in which the only flaw might be a border closed to some or all immigration, the “open borders” argument might hold water. But we live in a growing authoritarian or police state.
This is an issue which many intellectuals – including some I should logically regard as moral and intellectual allies – shy away from like frightened turtles.
This country for too long has been the plaything of statists and “social engineers” of every stripe – Republicans, Democrats, environmentalists, welfare statists, special interests or lobbyists, and so on. President Barack Obama is the apex and end heir of every statist law and notion ever proposed or legislated, ever since ratification of the Constitution, even as the ink on it was barely dry – and Obama is the logical end of all those unopposed laws and policies. He loots without care or thought of whatever might replace the looted wealth and nullified rights – except for stage-managed anarchy and beating into submission the American spirit.
Obama practices Islamic taqiyya, which is saying one thing in his woozy, folksy style English, but meaning something else. Most readers here, instead of conceding that Obama is a nihilist, buy the official line that he is merely a rudderless, arrogantly insouciant pragmatist. Actually, his predecessor, George W. Bush, was a card-carrying pragmatist, formulating his policies on the premise that he could preserve that status quo – whatever that might have been – by denying the deadly peril of Islam. However, Obama, who administration has been top-heavy with Muslims from his first term, is a rotten-to-the-bone nihilist steeped in “community organizing” and a subscriber to the agenda of the “socialist transformation” of the country into a super-size European Union. Some intellectuals of my acquaintance deny that he is a nihilist, and instead call him a rudderless pragmatist or assign him some other non-condemnatory appellation.
This is not observing his behavior and actions with any kind of objectivity. It is an evasion of the evidence of one’s senses. Waiting for Obamacare to collapse? Waiting for Obama to okay the Keystone Pipeline? Waiting for him to put together a “Coalition of the Reluctant” to combat ISIS? Waiting for him to rein in our lawless Attorney General, Eric Holder, or to order any number of federal agencies to stop spying and threatening private citizens and organizations that question federal power? Take a number.
There are certain statements in Andrew Bernstein’s “Immigration and the Welfare State” column that I take grave issue with. The first is:
Open immigration is both morally right and economically beneficial.
I certainly do not disagree with that statement, but I would add this qualifier: In a free country.
Which it has become less and less of for well over a century.
Yes, immigrants in the past and in recent times have come to this country for the freedom to work and enjoy the fruits of their productivity. That was when the INS had semi-rational criteria on entrance to the country. But waves of Muslims with their own colonizing and settlement agenda and hordes of illegals from Mexico and points south have been streaming in almost unopposed. Mixed in with these numbers are also Muslims and jihadists of every terrorist stripe, especially now from ISIS. Not to mention criminals with records in their native countries.
Many illegals are not coming to America to reinvent the wheel. Many of them are coming and have come to game the welfare state, and are not truly “yearning to be free,” except on the dole.
Many readers here deny that is the case. But all they can do is talk, talk, talk the fine points of a philosophy of reason to prove their ideological purity, even in the face of their and America’s slow demise. “We stand for open borders, never mind that we’re being swamped with illiterate aliens whose room and board and education we are expected to pay for; never mind many of them are diseased – many of them children now being seated in public school classrooms with native born American children; never mind the malevolent designs of a president who is seeking to bolster the Democrats’ death grip on this country, and who has demonstrated repeatedly his hostility to this country, to Western culture, and to Western civilization. None of that is important.”
They think and say this while they’re being eaten alive by the drooling beast of Obama’s policies. They refuse to contemplate the horrible notion that they and every other American have been “played.”
Well, what’s wrong, one might ask, with enrolling illegal immigrant children in school? Does any reader here seriously believe that they will be imbued with the American spirit of independence and self-reliance? If native born American children are being brainwashed by Common Core and anti-American curricula in their studies, and the leftwing teachers’ unions to regard themselves as unexceptional and that “they didn’t build that,” what are the chances of illiterate illegals having flashes of insight that our educational establishment is a scam and has been for decades.
I think one of the most off-base remarks made in “Immigration and the Welfare State” is:
In addition to the economic gain, there is an important security benefit to an open immigration policy. Since it is a great boon to an immigrant to be in the country legally rather than illegally, the overwhelming majority, given the choice, will walk in through the front door, thereby initiating the process of becoming a U.S. citizen. The flood of migrant workers seeking to illegally sneak across the Mexican border will reduce to a trickle. The money and manpower currently deployed to keep Mexican workers out of the country can then be used to keep Middle Eastern Islamic terrorists out of the country.
Has the author ever heard of Obama’s blueprint for across the board “amnesty,” the Dream Act, of legislation sanctioning the instant, automatic citizenship, with full welfare state benefits, for numberless illegals? Isn’t this legislation grossly unfair to those who spent years working for their citizenship, and who might have had to wait years to gain admittance to the country per the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s now politically governed – and, frankly, racist – rules?
And is Obama really interested in keeping Islamic terrorists out of the country? To judge by his actions and his policies – one of which is for the U.S. to train “moderate” terrorists to combat “extreme” terrorists – I think not.
There is another statement by Bernstein that I take exception to:
Some argue that because of America’s current welfare state, the country cannot afford an open immigration policy. This is false for two reasons. One is that a welfare state is pernicious to both those funding it and those parasitical off of it; the former, because they’re robbed—the latter because its perverse financial incentives support men’s most indolent premises, and seduce onto the dole many who could otherwise gain minimum wage employment. From purely humanitarian considerations, the welfare state must be irrevocably dismantled, regardless of America’s immigration policy.
Yes, the welfare state must be dismantled and abolished. But, when will that happen? Those who come here either game the welfare state or wind up depending on it. They are supposed to replace the “simpering Americans” who regard the country as a paradise of entitlement. How? Our economy is moribund and few new jobs – middle or low-paying – are being created, except in the “public sector.” We have an expanding public sector and an ever-shrinking private sector. Where are the new jobs going to materialize? In a command economy such as ours, which sector will see the greater growth?
My main point here, however, is that because we are living in a virtual state of siege – the “homeland” is now “Fortress America” that refuses to identify a hostile, murderous foreign enemy, Islam, hampered by a plethora of controls and prohibitions on virtually every aspect of American life – we are in a no-win conundrum that will only resolve itself with a political and concomitant philosophical collapse of the altruist morality that sustains an ever-omnivorous state – or a revolution. These are scenarios which “official” Objectivists are reluctant to contemplate or discuss.
The Founders weren’t.
* * 30 * *
Edward Cline
Williamsburg, VA
September 2014
Links:
Clarion Project, replacing U.S. Constitution with Sharia
http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/popular-us-imam-replace-constitution-sharia
Discover Networks Muslims in Obama administration:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=844
U.S. Muslim population
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/155384
U.S. population census bureau
https://www.census.gov/popclock/
Coalition of the Willing vs. Coalition of the Reluctant:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2862343.stm
Bernstein Welfare State CapMag:
http://capitalismmagazine.com/2014/09/immigration-welfare-state/
Washington Post Stop and Seize article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/stop-and-seize/
ISIS and Mexican border:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/texas-isis-terrorists-interested-in-obamas-open-border-wmexico/
Dream Act specifics:
http://www.dreamact2009.org/
Job growth stats:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/sectors/item/17137-private-sector-shrinking-public-sector-growing-in-most-states
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