On immigration, the Register forgets the welfare state

The U.S. welfare state is pretty big, devouring about 40% of the U.S. economy. Yet the Orange County Register’s commentary page doesn’t even mention it in today’s editorial encouraging open borders, republished from sister paper the Brownsville Herald in Texas, which ran it on Independence Day.

It’s eloquent about how Americans have formed one nation from diverse peoples. But it doesn’t point out that immigrants vote about 70% Democratic, a proportion that doesn’t seem to be changing. Moreover, the Democratic Party of previous waves of immigrants, those before the 1924 limitations, then was the small government party, while the Republican Party then was the big government party. By contrast, today’s Democratic Party, in general, favors more government than the Republican Party.

Yes, I know that under President Bush and the Republican congresses of 2001-2006 the government grew at an unprecedented rate. But only the Republicans produce such men as Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who favors abolishing almost all the government, and California state Sen. Tom McClintock, the state’s fiscal watchdog for 25 years. The Democrats just don’t have anybody close to that anymore, at least on domestic politics. (The libertarian Paul, by the way, favors limiting immigration, including “Physically secure our borders and coastlines.” )

The 2012 U.S. Census debacle

This problem will become acute in 2012, the first election after the next U.S. Census, when California becomes a one-party state, with Democrats controlling two-thirds of both houses of the Legislature. As recently as 1994, Republicans won both houses in Sacramento. But the massive increase in immigration has pushed state voting patterns dramatically into the Democratic camp. The change means that in, in 2012, Democrats will have the power to abolish Proposition 13, the property tax limitation measure, and raise the sales tax and the state income and capital gains taxes to levels higher than they ever have been.

The welfare state argument is the reason why I changed my own opinions on limiting immigration. Up until a decade ago, I was a big open-borders guy. Then I saw how too much immigration in too short a time meant I would be living in a state, and maybe a country, with one-party control of government. And that one party would favor massive increases in government and taxes.

At the national level, the welfare state’s costs are going to rise rapidly because the new immigrants have come in such large numbers, and work at such low-paying jobs, that it cannot be sustained. A Heritage Foundation study found that giving amnesty to 12 million illegal aliens would cost $2.6 trillion. That’s $2,600,000,000,000.00 of your tax money. It just makes sense that immigrants, who in general have much lower levels of education and job skills than do current citizens, won’t be able to support a welfare state that until now has been supported by workers with much higher levels of job skills that pay more on the world market.

As the late Milton Friedman said, you can’t have both open borders and unlimited immigration.

The Register/Brownsville editorial lectures us, “Our strength – and our birthright – stems from a homogeneity of purpose and ideals, not of patronage, and forged by blood that has been willingly shed in its defense, not the blood that has been passed on by generations of bluebloods.” Actually, it’s the bluebloods — the Bushes and Kennedys — who favor open immigration because it brings in cheap labor to boost corporate profits, while the rest of us — the non-blue bloods — pay the tab in higher taxes.

Monopolist Mexico

Why should American taxpayers pick up the tab because other countries, especially Mexico, can’t get their economic act together, as I explained in a Register column last year? Mexico’s horrible government policies were just dramatized when the notorious telecom monopolist Carlos “No Competition” Slim just became the world’s richest man, at $67.8 billion, surpassing Bill Gates.

Slim made his money using government to limit the competition. Again, why should we Americans pay for the Mexican government’s granting of a monopoly to Slim, which means he gets all the money by robbing common Mexicans, giving them another reason to go to El Norte?

The Register editorial also opposes “physical barriers between the United States and Mexico.” But the last I looked, the Register has a “physical barrier” around it, as it has for decades. A physical barrier is a fence.

And we Americans have a saying: Fences make good neighbors.

More Independence Day dependence

Steven Greenhut rounded up some stories on police over-presence on Independence Day, which is supposed to mark our independence from tyranny, not our dependence on it. He begins with my piece, then adds:

The Register had a piece on Wednesday about Newport Beach’s “safety enhancement zone” — a highly patrolled area where police cracked down on even minor incidents of misbehavior. In the quiet city where I live, police were prominently featured on motorcycles and in squad cars, just in case the parents and kids assembled there got out of hand.

Obviously, there needs to be some security in case some things get out of hand, but America has moved heavily toward the Orwellian idea of “ordered liberty,” in which we all shuffle along under the watchful eye of armed and aggressive government officials.

Kind of ironic on July 4th, no?

I remember July 4 celebrations back in Michigan in the 1960s, when riots were breaking out. In our city of Wayne there was no such police presence as I saw yesterday in Huntington Beach, or occurred in other cities in modern California. The police’ main job was to make sure the parade floats didn’t crash into one another.

Fireworks were completely illegal in Michigan, not just our city, except for sparklers. But the cops were pretty lenient. If they caught you with illegal fireworks, bootlegged in from Canada or California or Oklahoma, they would just confiscate the fireworks (and probably let their own kids set them off the next day). The attitude was, “Kids will be kids.”

The cops then were a part of the community. They didn’t mess with you unless you did something really bad.

The same thing was true when we took a trip out to California when I was eight, in 1963. On July 4, we visited my Great Uncle Fred in Orange. He was a U.S. Navy veteran of both World War I and World War II. He retired to San Diego, then Orange, then some years later to Hemet.

Back then, all sorts of fireworks were legal in California, including in Orange. My brother and I blew up a good part of his front lawn. “Don’t worry, boys,” Uncle Fred chuckled, “it’ll grow back.” I guess if you’ve been in two world wars, a few firecrackers don’t faze you.

The cops never came around. And it wasn’t just because they didn’t want to tangle with a wise old Navy veteran.

It was called freedom.

Bush didn’t read my essay on Independence Day and Iraq

President Bush gave a July 4 peroration yesterday to the West Virginia Air National Guard. He seldom goes before civilians nowadays because they so much disapprove of him. Better to go before the military which, even if they don’t like him, have orders to shut up. Bush compared his pointless and lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the glorious Revolutionary War:

Like those early patriots, you’re fighting a new and unprecedented war — pledging your lives and honor to defend our freedom and way of life. In this war, the weapons have changed, and so have our enemies, but one thing remains the same: The men and women of the Guard stand ready to put on the uniform and fight for America.

It’s amusing to see Bush talk about “pledging your lives,” when he bugged out of the Vietnam War by joining the Texas National Guard’s “champagne unit” to make sure the Viet Cong didn’t march on Dallas.

But that’s about all he mentioned from the Declaration of Independence. And he mis-paraphrased even that. The actual quote, ending the Declaration, is, “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

But as I noted in my Independence Day blog essay yesterday, America’s founders were not in favor of meddling in foreign countries’ problems. That was especially true of George Washington, the polar opposite of George Bush.

The only foreign action of Bush’s that the Founders would have favored would be going after al-Qaeda, much as Jefferson went after the Barbary Pirates. But Bush botched his chance to get Osama bin Laden by diverting U.S. troops from doing that to the Iraq war. It’s as if Jefferson, instead of suppressing the Barbary Pirates, instead sent U.S. troops to liberate Russia from Czar Alexander I.

Let’s quote George again — George Washington, that is:

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.

Huntington Beach police harass my friends and me

11:24 p.m., July 4, 2007 — HUNTINGTON BEACH — I witnessed first hand tonight the discourtesy and disregard of citizens’ rights by Huntington Beach police.

Two events happened. The first I did not witness. The second I did. Both occurred at the house of my friends in Huntington Beach.

The first incident occurred about 7:15 p.m. Several of my friends told me what happened. My friends were playing with water ballons. An unmarked van pulled up and four police piled out. They began harassing my friends about the water balloons. (Water balloons!) My friends were not drinking nor shooting off fireworks. Their child was frightened and ran into the house, then into the alley. Two friends walked into the house.

“Where did that kid go!” barked one of the cops. “Get him out here.” The “kid” is almost 30. The man and woman came back out.

One of cops was thumbing his billy club, as if eager to use it. The cops kept asking a lot of questions. My friends pointed out that water balloons are not illegal. Eventually, the cops left.

I came over shortly after that. We walked down to the beach to witness the great fireworks the city shot from the end of the pier. Then we walked back to my friends’ house.

I was there when five cops came walking up the alley behind the house at about 10:45 p.m. Five cops. They were looking for someone shooting off illegal fireworks. Some fireworks were shot off earlier a block away — but not by my friends. One cop walked inside my friends’ back gate, violating their property rights and privacy rights. He looked in their house. Seeing nothing, he walked back outside.

Then the cops shined their flashlights on the pavement, looking for signs of fireworks use. There was nothing to see. They shined their flashlights inside my car, which was parked in the alley, and saw only my usual jumble of books and newspapers. Finally, they walked up the street.

They never were nice about anything in either incident. They acted as if they were troops bashing down doors of suspected insurgents in Iraq. For crying out loud, the most they were looking for were misdemeanors involving fireworks. For that they had to march around like stormtroopers?

The water balloon incident was completely uncalled for. As to the fireworks, one cop could have been sent around to see if he could witness someone shooting off something, then issue a ticket. It’s on the same level as jaywalking. Many kinds of fireworks even are legal in Costa Mesa, Santa Ana, and other cities in Orange County.

These incidents show, once again, why more supervision of police is needed. Senate Bill 1019, by state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, needs to be brought back and passed. It would “provide some public access to police officer misconduct cases.”

Obviously, SB 1019 is needed to shine a light on such horrors as the shooting, by Huntington Beach police, of poor Ashley MacDonald, as my former colleague Steven Greenhut explained.

But oversight also is needed to prevent the common harassment of citizens such as I witnessed tonight. If police are unaccountable, they figure they can get away with anything.

Of course, they should realize that local and state failure to institute proper oversight is not the end of matters. A federal judge could intervene and take over the Huntington Beach Police Department, just as Judge Henderson has taken over the California prisons’ health care system.

And the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice could conduct a full-scale investigation of the HBPD, walking in and checking every file that’s there. Unlike with Scooter Libby, there won’t be any clemency from the president.

The second Rodney King beating trial was a federal trial and it found four LAPD officers guilty. It could happen here.

It’s especially ironic that these two incidents occurred on Independence Day, when we celebrate our liberties — the ones we used to have, anyway.

Independence Day: Time to return to George Washington’s foreign policy

Nowadays “patriotism” often is portrayed as supporting President Bush and his many wars and interventions. Today, the United States is engaged in two hot wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has more than 700 military bases around the world in more than 130 countries. The president, and most Democrats as well, portray this as being in America’s best interests and of advancing “democracy” around the world.

In fact, this is nothing but the establishment of a Napoleonic empire at the expense of the American people, our Constitution, and our way of life. America is a republic, not an empire. An empire is ruled by a Caesar, Napoleon, Tsar, or Kaiser. A republic is ruled by representative bodies chosen by the people. An empire is an expensive military camp which inevitably has a gargantuan, expensive bureaucracy and vast agencies that spy on its own subjects to keep them in line. A republic can waste money, too, but it also has the choice — which the empire does not — of keeping spending low and allowing great freedom to its people.

America’s greatest president, George Washington, set America on the right path as a republic. In his famous Farewell Address in 1796, Washington laid out the only way to keep America’s free republic from sliding into an enslaved empire: non-intervention in other countries’ affairs. The great man said:

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient government. the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.

Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.

Today’s foreign policy is the complete opposite of those noble words. For that matter, Bill Clinton’s foreign policies also opposed those of Washington. And likely the next president’s policies will do the same. The exceptions among the announced candidates are Ron Paul for the Republicans and Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich for the Democrats.

Let us look at some specifics.

• Despite the end of the Cold War in 1989, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States continues to maintain vast forces in Europe. America belongs to NATO, which existed only as a bulwark against the aggression of the Soviet Union, which no longer exists. America’s presence in Europe and membership in NATO exist now only to project the American Empire.
• Similar Cold War relics are American forces in South Korea, Japan, and other areas in Asia.
• America’s presence in the Middle East is a prime example of imperial folly. President Bush has said over and over that he wants to advance democracy there. Yet democracy has meant that radical Islamic groups have gained greater power: the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
• The “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower warned of in his 1961 Farewell Address has metastasized. Economist Robert Higgs estimates that the amount of U.S. military spending now is $1.028 trillion, more than double the government’s official estimate. Higgs includes such things kept off the official ledger as nuclear weapons research, military retirement pay, and veterans’ hospitals. Let’s put the zeros in: it’s $1,028,000,000,000.00 a year. No wonder our taxes and the federal deficits and debt are so high.
• Typical of any large bureaucracy, the military-industrial complex has only one mission: keeping the funding going. Military strategist William Lind writes this week that the Israelis have been learning from their defeat in Lebanon that a top-heavy military doesn’t work — but the Pentagon is impervious to such learning, despite its defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• The Bush administration’s fixation on Iraq and on setting up a supposedly democratic puppet state it can control in Afghanistan have prevented it from the one military action it should take: hunting down Osama bin Laden in his caves in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bush actually had a chance to grab or kill Osama and decimate al-Qaeda, but let him go when U.S. forces were diverted from that task to the Iraq folly.
• The last time the U.S. Congress declared war was during World War II, yet the country has almost constantly been a war since then. Presidents have usurped the power to declare war that the founders rightly gave to Congress.

It’s long past time to return to a patriotic foreign policy, following the wise counsel of George Washington. This would entail:

• Ending the Iraq war immediately and bringing the troops home to be with their families.
• Pulling all U.S. troops home from the world: Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
• Cutting defense spending at least by half, with the savings — all of it — refunded to hard-pressed U.S. taxpayers.
• Re-establishing the U.S. military on a Fourth Generation Warfare footing so that it can effectively go after al-Qaeda and other real threats.
• Re-establishing the U.S. Congress as the center of decision-making on war. Only wars declared by Congress should be conducted. (Unconstitutional approval for presidential action, such as that by Congress on the Iraq war in October 2002, is not a declaration of war and should not be used. Only real declarations of war count.) Any president who begins an undeclared war should be impeached and removed from office, beginning with President Bush.

If America does not take these corrective actions, she will continue descending into the violent bankrupt maelstrom of tyranny and imperial dictatorship. That was the path to the destruction of the Roman Republic and its displacement by the Roman Empire. America may not have long to avoid that fate.

V.C. in O.C.

In 1979 I was in the U.S. Army studying Russian up at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey when the Sino-Vietnamese War began. I was too young to have served in the U.S.-Vietnam War. But several of the older students at DLI had served in Vietnam. To a man, they cheered on the commie Chinese against the commie Viets. They had bad memories of North Vietnamese, who won the war after 58,000 Americans and at least 2 million Vietnamese were killed.

But times change.

Make sure you read Martin Wisckol’s piece today on the visit to Orange County by North Vietnamese — excuse me, just Vietnamese (without the “North”; I have to break that old Cold War habit) — President Nguyen Minh Triet:

But while Vietnamese-American demonstrators filled the streets outside the Dana Point’s St. Regis resort, it was also Vietnamese Americans who were filling the dining room with Nguyen – Vietnamese Americans eager to do business with Vietnam….One official on hand said Nguyen was returning home with $11 billion in business commitments.

Since junking socialism over the past 20 years, Vietnam’s economy has prospered and now is one of the hottest in Asia.

That long-ago war of 1979 played into the transition from socialism to capitalism of both China and Vietnam. The Vietnamese more than held their own against the numerically superior Chinese. Hanoi had a modern, Soviet-equipped, battle-victorious army, while China depended on the old “human wave” techniques from the Korean War — meaning get a lot of your guys killed, in this war up to 26,000 Chinese, although the number is disputed.

China’s military also had been badly damaged by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which was sort of like the 1960s here in America, but without the acid rock music. Vietnam also had satellite photos supplied by the Soviets, so they could track the movements of Chinese troops. China had no similar intelligence advantage.

The result of the war for China was that it showed the old socialist system couldn’t supply the goods to the Chinese Army, let alone consumers. So Deng’s capitalist reforms were given a strong impetus.

For Vietnam, the war confirmed that socialism worked, adding to the euphoria from the 1975 victory over America. But the 1980s were not kind to socialism, as the Soviet Union’s decrepit regime began tottering under the weight of seven decades of socialist incompetence and inefficiency. In 1986, Vietnam began some capitalist reforms. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself blew up. Hanoi’s patron was gone. It couldn’t get cheap military hardware anymore from Moscow, but had to buy it on the world market.

Meanwhile, China’s capitalist reforms have turned it into an economic powerhouse, which also benefited its military. Vietnam has seen this and has accelerated its capitalist reforms, as shown by President Nguyen’s visit to Orange County.

How would things have turned out differently if the U.S. had never become involved in Vietnam, letting the commies take over the whole place much earlier than 1975? The Hanoi regime might have given up socialism earlier for the reasons given above: to strengthen themselves against their ancient Chinese opponents. But the war would not have killed all those Americans and Vietnamese. And it would not have traumatized both countries in other ways. The Vietnamese boat people might have come here sooner.

We’ll be saying something similar in 30 years about another lost war, that in Iraq.

Americans should realize that our greatest weapons are not our mighty military forces, but our ideas of liberty and free markets.

That’s what Independence Day is about, too.

California state Web site admits this is “many states”

I just was looking at the California State Parks’ Web site about the state capitol and it encourages: “Discover the many states of California.”

Right. California is “many states” and ought to be broken up into at least six states:

• Los Angeles State
• Orange County State
• San Diego State (including desert areas)
• Riverside-San Bernardino State (including desert areas)
• Bay State (San Francisco, San Jose, and environs)
• North California State (above Marin County)
• East California State (everything else)

That’s just one fault line for the breakup. Others could be devised.

It’s absurd that there even is a state with 37 million people. The entire USA in 1776 had only 3 million, less than 1/11th that number, and the current population of Orange County. There’s almost nothing in common, for example, between folks In Orange County and folks in San Francisco. Why should we torture one another by staying part of the same state?

As a document we’ll celebrate on July 4, two days from now, famously put it:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.