Potpourri
Once again my Firefox browser is beginning to look like a ruler, so it’s time to clean house by blogging some of the many things I’ve noted over the past week or two…
* Lew Rockwell proves that he’s not always doom-and-gloom, by giving an optimistic interpretation to the events in Egypt.
* Jeff Tucker reviews Tom Woods’ new book Rollback (which I haven’t read yet).
* Speaking of Tom, he has started video blogging. He has a much nicer office and so I am at a disadvantage in my own home-made videos.
* An interesting video on “How Could a Voluntary Society Function”?
* So, does anyone else think it’s a big deal that Predator drones are now surveilling the US-Canada border? (HT2 LRC I think.) It’s not hyperbole when some of us say we are on the road to a full-blown police state. We really are.
* I take on Alan Blinder on a carbon tax. Blinder ironically relies on William Nordhaus’ simulations to make his case, when so do I!
* Wow some libertarian economists have been concentrating their fire on immigration restrictions lately. (No links handy, but I have in mind David R. Henderson and Bryan Caplan at EconLog.) I love this observation from Steve Landsburg:
The LA Times reports that Republican lawmakers have called on the Obama administration to return to the Bush-era practice of sending jackbooted thugs into private workplaces to arrest illegal aliens — revealing (as if we didn’t already know) that virulent xenophobia is alive and well in the Republican party. (Note well the hypocrisy of complaining that foreigners sneak into our country to take advantage of the welfare system, and then addressing the problem by focusing your deportation efforts on foreigners who have obviously come here to work).
* And now, your moment of Zen.
Revolutions have a pretty poor track record when it comes to improving things. The record for non-violent revolutions is much better than for violent revolutions, but even in the case of non-violent revolutions the degree of actual positive change tends to be disappointing. Violent revolutions tend to actually make things worse, which can be hard to believe sometimes when you look at the old regime, but is nonetheless true.
“Note well the hypocrisy of complaining that foreigners sneak into our country to take advantage of the welfare system, and then addressing the problem by focusing your deportation efforts on foreigners who have obviously come here to work.” It’s only hypocrisy if the foreigners have also come here to pay taxes.
Can you elaborate?
I’m assuming he’s calling it hypocrisy because we claimed that we were arresting people who came here illegally and weren’t supporting our welfare system, but he thinks that we were really going after tax payers who were supporting the welfare system. In actuality, I would guess that the raids were happening against shady employers who weren’t verifying work eligibility and were also not fully reporting their wages. I could be wrong. I will concede that most illegal workers and employers might be willing to pay taxes if that didn’t bring attention to the fact that the immigration status of the employee makes the arrangement illegal. I just don’t see this issue as hypocrisy.
I think he meant that the standard objection to immigration is that “they’re coming here to leech off our welfare state.” But if they are coming here to work, that’s not the case.
I.e. if someone on Fox said, “I oppose open borders because I don’t want people coming in here and working,” that would sound weird.
But the borders aren’t open now, so someone on Fox would probably be saying something more like, “I oppose people crossing the borders illegally in order to take jobs where they are being paid under the table with untaxed income and unfairly competing with American workers who are obeying the law. And while they are here, they are taking advantage of services that are being financed by taxpayers.”
Am I the only one bothered by the fact that 99% of CO2 hysterics seem to be “progressive” Keynesians simultaneously demanding that the government artificially stimulate the economy in the direction of unsustainable growth while at the same time demanding that the government stymie alleged unsustainable free market growth with taxes and other rules?