Category: Current Affairs

Conservatives Versus Libertarians on Immigration

Victor Reppert thinks that a conservative case can be made against immigration restriction but cites a libertarian article in support of his contention.  But as I see it, it is important to distinguish carefully between conservative and libertarian positions on this and other issues, despite several important points of agreement.  Pace Reppert, no conservative who understands his position can support open borders or tolerate the elision of the distinction between legal and illegal immigration.  There are no conservative arguments for open borders.  But let's turn now to the article in question.  Here are some excerpts:

. . . the false dichotomy between civil and economic liberties. Both incorrectly bifurcated forms of freedom are rooted in the same set of property rights, first and foremost in one’s own person and, by extension, in the tangible property one acquires justly through homesteading, gifts and honest market transactions. If Big Brother tries to comprehensively regulate immigration, he can smash economic freedom of association. And if the state has the power to oversee our economic lives, our personal freedom will always suffer in the process.

This is the type of excessive rhetoric that libertarians are known for.  Immigration laws obviously limit economic freedom of association, but to write that they "smash" it is to suggest that the limitation is some pure power move on the part of "Big Brother" without reason or justification.  But there are a number of solid reasons for border control none of which is  so much as mentioned in the article.  I sketch some of them in Immigration Legal and Illegal.  And what exactly is wrong with the distinction between civil and economic liberties?  The word 'civil' derives from the Latin civis, civis, citizen and civitas, civitatis, state, citizenship.  So I hope I will be forgiven for asking how a person could have civil liberties apart from his membership in some state or other, and how a person who has civil liberties in a state of which he is a citizen can have any civil liberties in a state of which he is not a citizen.  As an American citizen I have the civil right to the presumption of innocence.  But I don't have that right when I head south of the border.  I can see how economic liberties are grounded in the universal right to life, a right that does not derive from membership in any polis, civitas, Staat, state.  But civil rights and liberties are state-specific.  The right to vote is a civil right, but Mexicans don't have the right to vote in American elections any more than Americans have the right to vote in Mexican elections.  There is no universal right to vote wherever one happens to be.

This also is a good time to question the entire idea of the national government trying to “seal the borders,” pick winners and losers among immigrants, decide who gets all the welfare benefits of being a legal immigrant and who is not even allowed into our golden door. Invariably, when the federal government imposes its way on immigration, we get some immigrants who come in with legal sanction and quickly become dependents of the U.S. government—whereas illegals are probably not net beneficiaries of the welfare state, legal immigrants might very well be.

I'm sorry, but this is hopelessly wrongheaded.  Since the USA is a welfare state and under ObamaCare about to become even more of one, it is obviously suicidal  for purely fiscal reasons alone to open the borders.  Who would not want to come to this great prosperous nation of ours?  Do I really need to spell this out?  Only if the libertarians got  their way and succeeded in shrinking the government down to 'night watchman' functions (the Lockean triad: protection of life, liberty, and property), would this fiscal objection to open borders be removed.   But obviously this shrink-down is not going to happen.  Given that the USA is a welfare state and will remain one  — the only real question being how much of one — it is all the more necessary to control entry into the country.

Since conservatives often say our rights come not from the government but from God and the nature of man, it is not for the government to decide whether someone should have the right to live here or not—it is up to individuals and communities, which obviously are able to sustain a fair number of illegals.

This is very shoddy reasoning.  Conservatives maintain that there are certain natural unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the right to pursue happiness (which is not the right to be or be made happy).  These natural rights are not granted by governments but secured by legitimate governments.  They are rights that one has irrespective of one's being a citizen of a state. But it does not follow that every right that one has one one has irrespective of citizenship.  My right to vote is not a right to vote anywhere.  When I lived in Germany, Austria, and Turkey, I did not have the right to vote in those countries, nor should I have had that right.  Just as I don't have the right to vote anywhere, I don't have the right to live anywhere or travel anywhere.  When I lived in Turkey I could not stand on my natural right to live in Turkey: there is no such right.  I had to apply for a visa and be granted permission to live there for a stated period of time after I had paid a fee for the privilege.  Now you might not want to call living in Turkey a 'privilege,' but it is surely not a natural right that everyone has just in virtue of being a human being.

The author says that communities have a right to decide who shall live in them.  But a community is a political entity, a state writ small, and what goes for states writ small goes for states writ large.

. . . constitutionalists in particular should question the very notion that the feds have legal authority to crack down on the border, since immigration is not an Article I, Section 8 authority of Congress. Conservatives especially should follow Reagan’s example and embrace immigration amnesty.

This is just false.  "Congress shall have the power to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization . . . ." (Article I, Section 8)  As for Reagan's example, is this guy suggesting that conservatives should follow Reagan's example even in matters on which he acted foolishly or not like a conservative?  Come on!  Amnesty for those illegals already here and established may well be unavoidable.  But this is separate form the question whether the border should be sealed to keep out additional illegal aliens.

Top Ten Dumbest Things Said About Arizona’s New Immigration Law

Here.  The mendacity and journalistic malfeasance of liberal quill-drivers has reached an all-time high.

Their wild exaggerations and hysterical allegations will do more to help the new law achieve its objective than its actual enforcement.   Illegals are leaving and we can expect fewer to turn up here.  Why migrate to the land of nAZis when you can head for California?

Heather Mac Donald on The NYT’s Scurrilous Attack on AZ SB 1070

Here.  Excerpt:

The so-called 287(g) program acts as a “force multiplier,” as the Times points out, adding local resources to immigration law enforcement—just as Arizona’s SB 1070 does. At heart, this force-multiplier effect is what the hysteria over Arizona’s law is all about: SB 1070 ups the chances that an illegal alien will actually be detected and—horror of horrors—deported. The illegal-alien lobby, of which the New York Times is a charter member, does not believe that U.S. immigration laws should be enforced. (The Times’s other contribution today to the prevailing de facto amnesty for illegal aliens was to fail to disclose, in an article about a brutal 2007 schoolyard execution in Newark, that the suspected leader was an illegal alien and member of the predominantly illegal-alien gang Mara Salvatrucha.) Usually unwilling for political reasons to say so explicitly, the lobby comes up with smoke screens—such as the Times’s demagogic charges about SB 1070 as an act of “racial separation”—to divert attention from the underlying issue. Playing the race card is the tactic of those unwilling to make arguments on the merits.

The Arizona law is not about race; it’s not an attack on Latinos or legal immigrants. It’s about one thing and one thing only: making immigration enforcement a reality. It is time for a national debate: Do we or don’t we want to enforce the country’s immigration laws? If the answer is yes, the Arizona law is a necessary and lawful tool for doing so. If the answer is no, we should end the charade of inadequate, half-hearted enforcement, enact an amnesty now, and remove future penalties for immigration violations.

Exactly right.  Race is not the issue.  Either enforce the nation's immigration laws or get rid of them and open the borders.

More on Immigration Law: Arizona House Bill 2162. Response to Reppert

On Friday, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed HB 2162 which modifies and clarifies SB 1070 which was signed into law the week before.  Here is a passage from 1070 which is constantly misrepresented in the liberal press, including the Arizona Republic newspaper:

FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS  UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE,  WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON. (lines 20-26, p. 1)

The misrepresentors leave out (intentionally?) the bit about 'lawful contact.'  Where the bill has 'lawful contact,' the 1070 fact sheet has 'legitimate contact.'  It amounts to the same: lex, legis, is Latin for 'law.'  Now 'lawful contact' would naturally be interpreted to refer to contact between a law enforcement officer and a person during the course of a traffic stop and similar situations where a law has been broken.  Victor Reppert, in his response to me, makes a good point.  Because 1070 makes it a state crime to be an illegal alien, "it would seem to me that any attempt to determine whether the crime of being here illegally had been committed would constitute a legitimate [lawful] contact. "  Whether or not this is so, the house bill  provides clarification of 'lawful contact' and removes Reppert's worry:


Continue reading “More on Immigration Law: Arizona House Bill 2162. Response to Reppert”

More on Arizona Senate Bill 1070

Joseph A.  e-mails:

I greatly admire Victor Reppert for a number of reasons – I think the Argument from Reason is pretty amazing and effective when formulated and defended well, and Victor remains one of the most soft-spoken and polite bloggers around.

Agreed.

But a number of thoughts occurred to me when reading his and your post.

Victor shows some deep distrust of law enforcement officials – he mentions how there's plenty of Mark Fuhrmans on the police force, and basically asserts that he doesn't trust them to enforce laws like this appropriately.

Continue reading “More on Arizona Senate Bill 1070”

Arizona Senate Bill 1070

Arizona Senate Bill 1070 "requires a reasonable attempt to be made to determine the immigration status of a person during any legitimate contact made by an official or agency of the state or a county, city, town . . . if reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the U.S."  See here and here for the full text.

That illegal aliens and those who profit from them should object to this legislation comes as no surprise.  But it does come as a bit of surprise to find native Arizonan Victor Reppert, who to my knowledge neither employs, nor defends in courts of law, nor otherwise profits from illegal aliens, saying this at his blog:

Police in our state have now been given the authority to demand papers on anyone of whom they have a reasonable suspicion that they are illegal aliens. The trouble is, about the only reason for suspicion that I can think of that someone is in the country illegally is if they have brown skin, or speak Spanish instead of English, or English with an Mexican accent.

I'm afraid Victor isn't thinking very hard.  He left out the bit about " during any legitimate contact made by an official . . . ."  Suppose a cop pulls over a motorist who has a tail light out. He asks to see the motorist's driver's license.  The driver doesn't have one.  That fact, by itself, does not prove that the motorist is an illegal alien; but together with other facts (no registration, no proof of insurance, speaks no English . . .) could justify an inquiry into the motorist's immigration status.  Hundreds of examples like this are generable ad libitum.

S. B. 1070 is a reasonable response  to the Federal government's failure to enforce U. S. immigration law.  Border control is a legitimate, constitutionally-grounded function of government. (See Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.)  When the Feds fail to uphold the rule of law, the states, counties, etc. must do so.  If you don't understand why we need border control, I refer you to my longer piece, Immigration Legal and Illegal.

According to one 'argument,' Arizona Senate Bill 1070 disproportionately targets Hispanics and is objectionable for that reason.  That's like arguing that the RICO statutes disproportionately target Italians.  I don't know whether people of Italian extraction are disproportionately involved in organized crime, but if they are, then that is surely no valid objection to the RICO statutes.  The reason Hispanics will be disproportionately affected is because they disproportionately break the immigration laws.    The quota mentality is behind this 'argument.'

James Kalb on Illegal Immigration

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has signed into law Arizona Senate Bill 1070.   Illegal aliens are of course up in arms over it.  But why do the ruling elites tend to tolerate mass illegal immigration?  Why are they not upholding the rule of law? James Kalb (The Tyranny of Liberalism, ISI Books, 2008, pp. 49-50) writes,

As to immigration, the people value the ties that make them a people and believe that the country should be run for their own benefit.  Ruling elites, by contrast, are concerned with the power and efficiency of  governing institutions, the status and security of those who run them, and maintenance of the liberal principles that support and justify their rule.  It is in their interest to expand the human resources available to them, even at the expense of those who are already citizens, and to weaken the mutual ties that make it possible for the people to resist rational management and to act somewhat independently.  In addition, any moderately self-seeking ruling class prefers cooperating with members of the ruling class in other countries to representing the interests of their constituents. The practical result of such influences has the suppression of immigration as an issue in the interest of an emerging borderless world order. Restrictionist arguments are scantily presented in the mainstream media, and concern with cultural coherence, national identity, or even the well-being of one's country's workers is routinely denigrated as ignorant and racist nativism.

Kalb's book is proving to be an insightful and stimulating read.

Earth Day 2010

Maverick Philosopher doesn't celebrate anything as politically correct as Earth Day.  Maverick Philosopher celebrates critical thinking.  So I refer you to William Cronon's The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.  A rich and subtle essay.  Excerpt:

Many environmentalists who reject traditional notions of the Godhead and who regard themselves as agnostics or even atheists nonetheless express feelings tantamount to religious awe when in the presence of wilderness—a fact that testifies to the success of the romantic project. Those who have no difficulty seeing God as the expression of our human dreams and desires nonetheless have trouble recognizing that in a secular age Nature can offer precisely the same sort of mirror.

To put (roughly the same)  point with Maverickian aphoristic pithiness: Nature for the idolaters of the earth is just as much an unconscious anthropomorphic projection as the God of the Feuerbachians.

Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be.

 

Immigration Legal and Illegal

A reader from Down Under poses this question:

America is experiencing immigration problems somewhat like Australia's. The idea of  'multiculturalism' some would say is beginning to show its flaws. Who do you believe should be allowed to enter your country? Please feel free to be as politically incorrect as you like.

1. First of all, one must insist on a distinction that many on the Left willfully ignore, that between legal and illegal immigration. (Libertarians also typically elide the distinction.)  Legal and illegal immigration are separate, logically independent, issues. To oppose illegal immigration, as any right-thinking person must, is not to oppose legal immigration. So, to answer one of your questions, no one should be allowed to enter illegally. But why exactly? What's wrong with illegal immigration? Aren't those who oppose it racists and xenophobes and nativists? Doesn't everyone have a right to migrate wherever he wants?

2. The most general reason for not allowing illegal immigration is precisely because it is illegal.  If the rule of law is to be upheld, then reasonable laws cannot be allowed to be violated with impunity simply because they are difficult to enforce or are being violated by huge numbers of people.  Someone who questions the value of the rule of law is not someone it is wise to waste time debating.

3. There are several sound specific reasons for demanding that the Federal government exercise its legitimate, constitutionally grounded (see Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. constitution) function of securing the national borders, and none of these reasons has anything to do with racism or xenophobia or nativism or any other derogatory epithet that slanderous leftists and libertarians want to attach to those of us who can think clearly about this issue.

There are reasons having to do with national security in an age of terrorism. There are reasons having to do with assimilation, national identity, and comity. There are considerations of fairness in respect of those who have entered the country legally by satisfying the requirements of so doing. There are reasons having to do with the importation of contraband substances into the country. There are reasons having to do with increased crime. Last but not least, there are reasons pertaining to public health. With the concern over avian influenza, we have all the more reason to demand border control.

Borders are a body politic's immune system. Unregulated borders are deficient immune systems. Diseases that were once thought to have been eradicated have made a comeback north of the Rio Grande due to the unregulated influx of population. These diseases include tuberculosis, Chagas disease, leprosy, Dengue fever, polio, and malaria.

You will have noticed how liberals want to transform into public health issues problems that are manifestly not public but matters of private concern, obesity for example. But here we have an issue that is clearly a public health issue, one concerning which Federal involvement is justified, and what do our dear liberals do? They ignore it. Of course, the problem cannot be blamed solely on the Democrat Party. Republicans like Bush and McCain are just as guilty. On immigration, Bush was clearly no conservative; he was a libertarian on this issue. A libertarian on some issues, a liberal on others, and a conservative on far too few.

4. Many liberals think that opposition to illegal immigration is anti-Hispanic. Not so. It is true that most of those who violate the nation's borders are Hispanic. But the opposition is not to Hispanics but to illegal entrants whether Hispanic or not. It is a contingent fact that Mexico is to the south of the U.S. If Turkey or Iran or Italy were to the south, the issue would be the same. And if Iran were to the south, and there were an influx of illegals, then then leftists would speak of anti-Persian bias.

A salient feature of liberals and leftists — there isn't much difference nowadays — is their willingness to 'play the race card,' to inject race into every issue. The issue of illegal immigration has nothing to do with race since illegal immigrants do not constitute a race. There is no such race as the race of 'llegal aliens.' Opposition to them, therefore, cannot be racist.

"But aren't some of those who oppose illegal immigration racists?" That may be so, but it is irrelevant. That one takes the right stance for the wrong reason does not negate the fact that one has taken the right stance. One only wishes they would take the right stance for the right reasons.  Even if everyone who opposed illegal immigration were a foaming-at-the-mouth redneck of a racist, that would not detract one iota of cogency from the cogent arguments against allowing illegal immigration.  To think otherwise is to embrace the Genetic Fallacy.  Not good.

5. The rule of law is a precious thing. It is one of the supports of a civilized life. The toleration of mass breaking of reasonable and just laws undermines the rule of law.

6. Part of the problem is that we let liberals get away with obfuscatory rhetoric, such as 'undocumented worker.' The term does not have the same extension as 'illegal alien.'  I discuss this in a separate post.  But having written thousands of posts, I don't quite know where it is.

7. How long can a welfare state survive with open borders?  Think about it.  The trend in the USA for a long time now has been towards bigger and bigger government, more and more 'entitlements.' It is obviously impossible for purely fiscal reasons to provide cradle-to-grave security for everyone who wants to come here.  So something has to give.  Either you strip the government down to its essential functions or you control the borders.  The first has no real chance of happening.  Quixotic is the quest  of  strict constructionists  and libertarians who call for it.  Rather than tilting at windmills, they should work with reasonable conservatives to limit and eventually stop the expansion of government.  Think of what a roll-back to a government in accordance with a strictly construed constitution would look  like.  For one thing, the social security system would have to be eliminated.  That won't happen.  Libertarians are 'losertarian' dreamers.  They should wake up and realize that politics is a practical business and should aim at the possible.  By the way, the pursuit of impossible dreams is common to both libertarians and leftists.

8. Even though contemporary liberals show little or no understanding for the above arguments, there are actually what might be called 'liberal' arguments for controlling the borders:

A. The Labor Argument. To give credit where credit is due, it was not the conservatives of old who championed the working man, agitated for the 40 hour work week, demanded safe working conditions, etc., but liberals. They can be proud of this. But it is not only consistent with their concern for workers that they oppose illegal immigration, but demanded by their concern. For when the labor market is flooded with people who will work for low wages, the bargaining power of the U.S. worker is diminished. Liberals should therefore oppose the unregulated influx of cheap labor, and they should oppose it precisely because of their concern for U. S. workers.

By the way, it is simply false to say, as Bush, McCain and other pandering politicians have said, that U.S. workers will not pick lettuce, clean hotel rooms, and the like. Of course they will if they are paid a decent wage. People who won't work for $5 an hour will work for $20. But they won't be able to command $20 if there is a limitless supply of indigentes who will accept $5-10.

B. The Environmental Argument. Although there are 'green' conservatives, concern for the natural environment, and its preservation and protection from industrial exploitation, is more a liberal than a conservative issue. (By the way, I'm a 'green' conservative.) So liberals ought to be concerned about the environmental degradation caused by hordes of illegals crossing the border. It is not just that they degrade the lands they physically cross, it is that people whose main concern is economic survival are not likely to be concerned about environmental protection. They are unlikely to become Sierra Club members or to make contributions to the Nature Conservancy. Love of nature comes more easily to middle class white collar workers for whom nature is a scene of recreation than for those who must wrest a livelihood from it by hard toil.

C. The Population Argument. This is closely related to, but distinct from, the Environmental Argument. To the extent that liberals are concerned about the negative effects of explosive population increase, they should worry about an unchecked influx of people whose women have a high birth-rate.

D. The Social Services Argument. Liberals believe in a vast panoply of social services provided by government and thus funded by taxation. But the quality of these services must degrade as the number of people who demand them rises. To take but one example, laws requiring hospitals to treat those in dire need whether or not they have a means of paying are reasonable and humane — or at least that can be argued with some show of plausibility. But such laws are reasonably enacted and reasonably enforced only in a context of social order. Without border control, not only will the burden placed on hospitals become unbearable, but the justification for the federal government's imposition of these laws on hospitals will evaporate. According to one source, California hospitals are closing their doors. "Anchor babies"  born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income.

The point is that you can be a good liberal and oppose illegal immigration. You can oppose it even if you don't care about about increased crime, terrorism, drug smuggling, disease, national identity, national sovereignty, assimilation, the rule of law, or fairness to those who have immigrated legally. But a 'good liberal' who is not concerned with these things is a sorry human being.

I hope I have been politically incorrect enough for my reader's taste.

  

Scenes From a Tea Party

The party line of the Democrats and their fellow travellers is that the Tea Party Movement is fueled by racism.  The moral scum who make these absurd and scurrilous allegations ought to be ashamed of themselves.  I name names and go into details in other posts which you will find in the Race and Leftism categories.  But just to verify what I already had excellent reasons for believing, namely, that there is no racist motivation to speak of behind the Tea Party protests, I decided I'd better attend one, which I did today.  I visited one of the lesser gatherings of the day here in the Valley of the Sun, one held at Freestone Park, Gilbert, Arizona.  The main speaker was Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.  There was no racism apparent in the signs, the speakers, or the people I observed and spoke with.  No racism, no extremism, no xenophobia, no overheated rhetoric, no incitements to violence.  Just trenchant political dissent in the good old liberty- and free speech-loving American style, something that leftists don't understand, laboring as they do under the strange conceit that they own dissent, as if dissent were something inherently leftist. Here are some amateur shots of the event by your humble correspondent.

Continue reading “Scenes From a Tea Party”

The Racism Charge: The Left’s Attempt to Shut Down Debate

In The Faith of a Liberal, Morris Raphael Cohen writes that "The touchstone that enables us to recognize liberalism is the question of toleration . . . ." Now if toleration is the touchstone of liberalism, there is nothing liberal about contemporary liberals.  They should therefore not be called 'liberals' but leftists.  There is nothing tolerant about them.  They show no interest in open discussion, free inquiry and the traditional values of classical liberalism.  And they are poor winners to boot.  With the passage of the health care bill they scored a victory.  So why all the querulous fulmination against the Tea Party patriots to whom the  lefties love to refer as 'teabaggers'?  Why, in particular, the routinely repeated charge of 'racism'?

This is now the party line of the Dems and toe it they will as witness the otherwise somewhat reasonable and mild-mannered Alan Colmes in this segment, Political Hatred in America, from The O'Reilly Factor. Colmes begins his rant around 6:07 with the claim that "what is driving this [the Tea Party protests] is racism."  It looks as if Colmes is under party discipline; otherwise, how could so intelligent and apparently decent a man say something so blatantly false and scurrilous?  That something so silly and vicious should emerge from the mouth of a twit like Janeane Garofalo is of course nothing to wonder at. What idiocies won't HollyWeird liberals spout?  But Alan Colmes?  If we remember that for the Left the end justifies the means, however, things begin to fall in place.  The Left will do anything to win. Slanders, smears, shout-downs . . . all's fair in love and war.  Leftists understand and apply what I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle: Politics is war conducted by other means.

When leftists hurl their 'racism' charge, just what are they alleging?  Two possibilities.

A.  One is that the arguments brought against Obama's policies are not arguments at all but mere expressions of racism and bigotry.  But this 'possibility' is beneath refutation.  Make a simple distinction.  There is Obama and there are his policies.  Obama is black, or rather half-black and half-white, but his policies are not members of any race.  White leftists advocate the same policies. Arguments against the policies are not attacks against the man.  Need I say more?

B.  The other interpretive possibility is that the conservative arguments are genuine arguments, not mere expressions of racism and bigotry, but that the can be refuted by claiming that the people who advance them are all, or most of them, racists.  But of course it is egregiously FALSE that all or most or even many of these people are racists.  Only some of them are.  But then there are 'bad apples' in every bunch, so this fact is not significant.

But even if we suppose, contrary to fact,  that every single conservative who argues against Obama's policies is a flaming racist, that has no bearing on the validity or invalidity of the conservative arguments.  To think otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy.  Again, need I say more?

Feser on Stupak

Stupak's Enablers.  This is a very rich post bristling with important distinctions.  Excerpt:

There can be no question, then, that while the Church allows that government can legitimately intervene in economic life and in other ways come to the assistance of those in need, she also teaches that there is a presumption in justice against such intervention, a presumption which can be overridden only when such intervention is strictly necessary, only to the extent necessary, and only on the part of those governmental institutions which are as close as possible to those receiving the aid in question. This surely follows from the principles of subsidiarity and the priority of the family. And it surely rules out not only libertarianism but also the sorts of policy preferences typical of socialists, social democrats, and egalitarian liberals.

I wonder how many Catholic bishops could explain the principle of subsidiarity?  Too many of them are too busy being leftists to comprehend and transmit Catholic social teaching.

The Health Care Debate: What It’s Really About

Here.  Fidel congratulates Obama. Excerpt from the second article:

Doctors haven’t benefited very much,  either, from Cuba’s health care “miracle.” Because they earn the equivalent of only about $20 U.S. per month, Cuban physicians have quit the medical profession in droves — turning instead to the only industry that offers them any degree of economic opportunity: the Cuban tourism industry. It is not uncommon to see former doctors driving cabs, working as tour guides, or waiting tables in restaurants and family inns in Havana.

People need to bear in mind that there is more to health care than health care insurance.  The best coverage in the world is worthless without health care providers: doctors, nurses, lab technicians, and all the rest.  Socialist schemes, based as they are on ignorance of human nature,  remove incentives.  Why would any one put up with the rigors of medical school, internship, long hours, malpractice harrassment and the like to work for the government?

Welcome to Civil War

To Dennis Prager's "The bigger the government the smaller the citizen," I add my "The bigger the government, the more to fight over."  The more the government takes over, the more they violate the individual liberty of the citizens, the more they insinuate themselves into every aspect of your life, the more protests, the more lobbying, the more lawsuits, the more money and time wasted on pointless bickering.  I floated my observation months ago and recent events demonstrate its accuracy.  Brace yourself  for ever larger doses of acrimony as the months and years wear on.  Some are speaking of civil war.  It's a Civil War: What We Do Now.

David Harsanyi's The Mugging of Personal Freedom is worth reading.