Economist Milton Friedman once said you can’t have open immigration AND a welfare state. You can’t even have liberal immigration and a welfare state. The reason is simple. In a welfare state, people are not responsible ONLY for themselves. The government makes them responsible for everyone else, too.
In a free society, if you have children, YOU and you alone are responsible for their education, health care, child care, and the like. In a welfare state, you are responsible not just for your own children, but for the children of everyone else. In a welfare state, you are responsible for everyone else’s children, even if you don’t have children, or if your children are already grown. It’s not right. It’s not rational. It cannot end well.
When you pile unlimited and illegal immigration into the equation, which started in earnest during the Obama years, you get a real crisis. It’s important to understand why.
It has nothing to do with culture, race or racism. In a free society, you attract a certain TYPE of immigrant. You attract immigrants who WANT to be free, self-responsible and self-sufficient. In a welfare state, you will tend to attract the opposite.
The evil of the open border advocates is that they know this — and that’s precisely why they want it.
They want people who are NOT self-sufficient because it increases their power as politicians or wardens of the welfare state. People who vote for these politicians support them because it makes them FEEL morally superior and morally good, in their own eyes and in the eyes of their friends and associates whom they constantly virtue-signal. If you understand anything about psychology (and I do), it’s a painful and grotesque neurotic spectacle to watch. “Hey, look at me. I’m supporting the destruction of our country as we know it. That’s OK. I’m a good person”.
It’s wrong, but it also cannot end well.
I don’t know how it will all end. In all candor, I don’t know if President Trump and the people who support him can stop it. It’s already too late for California. California is gone. Texas may be next. I have read Republican Party experts there saying the red state is turning purple. Georgia is similar. In terms of the Electoral College, this has real consequences. Texas may go Democratic at some point if hordes of people come in for the federal welfare state. At that point, we will never see another President Trump again, not unless millions of Americans about-face and turn off their ignorantly leftist public school teachers, their Marxist college professors, their leftist sports stars, their leftist movie and television celebrities and their leftist media.
I don’t want to be negative, and I hope I am wrong. I have been a therapist for 30 years. I know all too well how good people can be at denial, evasion and self-deception when they want to be – and when they fear harsh judgment from others for facing the truth about any matter. I know for sure that mixing a welfare state and open immigration is a recipe for disaster. We’re witnessing it. Talk to rational people in California. They are horrified.
The only REAL solution is to get rid of the welfare state — at a minimum, get rid of it for immigrants. Let them fend for themselves and we’ll attract the right kind. Instead, politicians in both major parties (primarily the Democratic Party) want to do just the opposite. In California they’re doing it. It’s a disaster. It will destroy our country. That’s not racism, and that’s not being against any particular type of culture. What I’m against is attracting the type of person we now attract to America — not in every case, but in far too many cases: The type of person who is perfectly fine living off of others. And even if they’re not fine living off others, they’ll get accustomed to it because our power-hungry politicians — especially the Democrats and socialists — will, like heroin pushers, make them dependent on them. For life. Look at the permanent underclass of mostly black people in America’s cities. Generations of families dependent on the government. It’s a “benevolent” form of slavery. That will become much of America, on our current course. It’s unavoidable if we keep rewarding, subsidizing and enabling it.
It ends the same way ALL collectivism ends. Soviet Russia. Cuba. Today’s Venezuela. None of those ended well. America is not immune, not if we engage in the same policies that brought these countries to their knees. President Trump and his supporters are valiantly trying to stop it. They are met with hostility and hatred not seen since the Nazis in Hitler’s Germany. I don’t believe there has ever been as much hatred as there is today in America, coming from the left – nothing like this since the years of America’s Civil War. The hatred in the air is palpable.
We have to try and stop what’s happening, just the same. Let them call us racists. It doesn’t matter, because it’s not true.
Freedom and self-responsibility are not optional values. No individual — or society — can survive for long without them.
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