Freedom Boot Camps - A Voluntary Free Market Middle Ground on Immigration

Perhaps the varying positions on the current immigration crises can be categorized into three buckets:

A.      The Conservative Position – “They broke our laws, round ‘em up and deport them.”
This in not going happen, not with this President or with this Senate.  Nor is it necessarily the right thing to do.  Do we really expect the Feds to do a clean and surgical job of breaking into people’s home and carting them away?

B.      The Libertarian Position – “Let ‘em stay and then sink or swim on their own merits just like in bygone days.”  This is also a pipe dream.  Clearly many immigrants will become productive, self supporting citizens and a handful will even become shining success stories. But many will also flounder and today’s America will not let them hit bottom.  Like it or not, many will become long term wards of the welfare state.

C.      The Progressive Position – “Bring it on.  We’ll take care of as many that come for as long as necessary.”  This is untenable and immoral.  It is the embodiment of Margaret Thatcher’s axiom that, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”

The reality is that most of the immigrants are here to stay and that, within a generation, about 30% of Americans will boast of at least some Latino lineage.  That voting bloc will nurture fond memories of those whom they believe were good to them and harbor resentments against those who were not.

My immigrant grandfather was an ardent New Deal Democrat.  Franklin Roosevelt was a god in his home.  Not only did he vote Democrat until the day that he died, so did my Dad, except for that brief moment when crazy long-hairs were burning flags in Sixties. 

Liberals are building an electoral force that may persist through the end of this century.  What to do?

Let me suggest a course of voluntary, positive action to put immigrants on the path of becoming liberty loving Americans. 

We all know that the Federal government is using our tax dollars to collect up immigrants and stash them away in empty spaces throughout the country.  In effect, they are planting the seeds of future political domination in each and every state.

Freedom lovers can do the same.  Big money libertarians and conservatives such as the Koch Brothers should begin to pony up money to take immigrants out of government hands and to place them into what I would call Liberty Boot Camps.  Additional funding should come from the many American CEOs who are calling for immigration reform in order create a cheaper labor pool.

In Liberty Boot Camp, newcomers would learn the skills needed to survive in America and also be exposed the virtuous philosophy of free markets, personal freedom and individual responsibility.  Likewise they would be taught about the horrors of overbearing and intrusive government.

As 501c3 organizations, these camps would divert massive sums of money from government hands. That can never be bad.

Such a project should not rely only on checks written by the big guys.  Think tank scholars from places like Cato, Mises, Acton, Heartland, Heritage and the Manhattan institutes should design and teach an easy to learn freedom curriculum.  Ordinary, everyday people can volunteer to help out.  Not only will this cut costs but it will allow immigrants to interact with friendly and helpful Americans who cherish the American virtues of self reliance, neighborly support and individual responsibility.  Think of this as one big Church-type mission to spread the liberty gospel.

Finally, let’s get the newcomers to work.  If we cannot get minimum wage requirements waived for camp residents, let’s find a way to put them into “work study”, internship of apprenticeship programs where they can gain skills to be self supporting and to set out on their own. Perhaps the CEOs could create programs within their companies.

I know that this sounds ambitious and expensive.  I am not a Pollyanna.  But do remember that billions of your tax dollars are already being spent to build a Progressive dynasty for decades to come.  It is the Tammany Hall and Chicago patronage model on a grand scale.

Related Posts:

Is The Democrat Party Shifting Bases?
Comping America’s Guests
Immigration - A Libertarian Case For Tariffs 

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon

D.C Gun Ban Lifted

Over the past weekend, a Federal judge lifted Washington, D.C.’s ban on carrying handguns in public.

This is a once in a lifetime chance for our elected Federal representatives to show their support for our right to defend ourselves by defending themselves.

I am begging everyone who sees this blog to write to their Congressman or Woman and their Senators and demand that they carry a gun to work in Washington.

If your representatives happen to be Republican or one of the rare RTBA supporting Democrats, I would suggest a note something like this:

Dear Congressman Runyon,

As I am sure that you are aware, the courts have reaffirmed the right of every resident and visitor to our nation’s capital to defend themselves by carrying handguns out with them in public.

I urge you to stand with your freedom loving constituents and to take advantage of this long lost liberty by carrying a hand gun to work with you in D.C.  This will serve as vivid testimony to the press, your colleagues and the voters back home that you take our Constitution seriously.

I firmly believe that a photo op of you and your staff, proudly standing up for the Right to Bear Arms, right in front of the Capitol Building, will do much to win the support and admiration of freedom lovers back in the Garden State.

I trust you to do the right thing.

Sincerely,

Joe Siano

For Democrats and other traditionally anti-gun legislators, a somewhat different approach is recommended.

Dear Senators Menendez and Booker,

As I am sure that you are aware, the courts have reaffirmed the right of every resident and visitor to our nation’s capital to defend themselves by carrying handguns out with them in public.

Truth be told, Washington, D.C. is no different than New Jersey.  Every day, poor inner city dwellers are terrorized by thugs, gangs and violent criminals.  Our overworked police forces are unable to protect these deserving citizens who are trapped in a cesspool of violence.  They cannot feel safe walking to the corner store, sending their kids to school or just sitting outside of their own front doors.

That is why I am asking you to lead by example.  I am urging you to capitalize upon our Capital’s newfound liberty by wearing a hand gun to work.

The example that you set will send a message to your beleaguered constituents that “we are not going to take it anymore!  We are going to take back our streets, our neighborhoods, our parks, playgrounds and cities from the scum who have held us hostage for too long.  We are not afraid, we will stand and fight.”

And you sir, will stand tall, leading the charge to reclaim New Jersey’s cities for decent, hardworking Americans.

I trust that you will do the right thing and make us proud.

If you do not own a weapon, the fine folks at the NJ Second Amendment Society will be happy to assist in finding what best suits your needs.

Sincerely,

Joe Siano    

I ask every reader to send such a letter to his or her representatives.  I also ask that you keep me posted with their responses.  Post it on Facebook or as a comment to this article.  You may feel free to use the above letters as a template.  The 2 Percent Blog legal team assures me that you can do so without fear of copyright infringement or incurring royalty fees.

This is once in a lifetime opportunity to call our elected representatives on the carpet regarding this fundamental right.

Related Posts:

God, Guns and Misplaced Faith
A Well Regulated Militia

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon

Ayn Rand - The Only Immigrant The Left Ever Hated

 Ayn Rand might be the only immigrant that the Left ever hated.

The American Left and its political arm, the Democrat Party, built a solid electoral base within the European immigrant community of bygone days.  In her book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Doris Kearns Goodwin recounts how an ambitious young Joe Kennedy was rebuffed by Boston's patrician Republican elite.  An angry Joe hitched up with the Democrats and sired a political dynasty.  In Parish Priest, historian David Brinkley recounts how Nineteenth Century Irish immigrants were unwelcome in WASPy New Haven.

 

The Left found a receptive audience for their schemes of guaranteed employment, social services and cradle to grave security among these ill educated yet hard working newcomers.  They are playing that game to this day.

However, one young Jewish immigrant from Russia wasn't buying it.  Ayn Rand saw firsthand the failure of state socialism and the misery that it created in her homeland.  Despite coming to America with a near-zero proficiency in English, Rand set upon a career in writing and found work in Hollywood.

Collectivists are hard pressed to deny the atrocities that occurred in Rand's native Russia or in other communist nations.  Therefore they have chosen a novel means of attack.  They reproach her for her Godless, "anti-Christian" philosophy.

Is this the best that these hypocrites, this brood of wipers who booed God at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, can come up with?

OK, so she is an atheist.  Got it.  So is about half of Western Europe and North America.  So is every Marxist, and proud of it too.  So they got her on the first four commandments which relate to man's relationship and duties to his Maker.  On the other hand she is probably at par with most of her leftist critics in this regard.

Despite her hard hearted public persona, she evidently honored her mother and father as she tried for years to rescue them from the Soviet Union.  Maybe Lefties are nice to their moms and dads too.  I'll give them that much.

However, on the backside of the Decalogue, those Commandments that relate to how we treat each other, Rand has her Leftie detractors beat hands down.

Let's start with C-10, the admonition against coveting.  The Left is all about envy and coveting.  Redistribution is all about having what others earned without the bother of producing it yourself.  Rand was all about producing.  Atlas Shrugged is all about Producers Paradise.  

Because they are covetous, Collectivists have no qualms whatsoever with lying, stealing or killing in the name of the Almighty State.  They employ whatever means is necessary, from brute force to currency inflation to confiscate honestly earned wealth and to redirect it to favored constituents.

Rand, on the other hand, preached a gospel of nonviolence and respect.  She stood tall for the inviolable dignity and property of each and every human being. 

This leaves us with the Commandments on sexual sin.  I won't go down that rat hole because pretty much no one passes the purity test.  Still, there are many well documented accounts of Statist regimes forcing women into prostitution.  Rand wins again!

Brand's chief vulnerability is in her open advocacy of selfishness.  In essence, her position is an awkward reworking of Adam Smith's invisible hand.  The point being that each person pursuing his own lawful interest improves not only his own lot but that of the community as well.

If you are a devout churchgoer, Rand may not be your cup of tea socially.  Still, she has done more to advance the cause of peace, human dignity, freedom and prosperity than almost anyone you can name.   Best of all she has exposed the truth that the kingpins of collectivism are wearing no clothes.  And for this, they can never forgive her.

Liberals are particularly incensed that Rand rejects the concept of altruism.  Altruism is the brainchild of August Comte, a Nineteenth Century Socialist.  It taught that the individual was to measure his actions based upon their impact on the community and not to his own benefit.  This is the exact opposite of the invisible hand theory and runs counter to human nature.  Praxeology demonstrates that the ethical acting individual takes action to improve his condition.  In a free society this often entails interacting and exchanging with others to each party’s mutual benefit, despite “selfish” intentions.  This individual autonomy that both Rand and Smith acknowledge and encourage is intolerable to central planners who want to shepherd a nation of sheeple, people who follow instructions blindly for a supposed “greater good”.

For this, the Left hates Rand and wishes that she was the one immigrant who they had turned back.

Related Posts:

How Socialism Makes You Stupid
Poking Holes In The “Anti-War” Left

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon

Anarchist, Theist, A-hole

Chris Cantwell is a libertarian blogger who self styles himself as being “Anarchist, Atheist, Asshole”.  Save for the letter A in the second descriptor, we may be twins separated at birth.

Cantwell professes that his disdain for The State and his disbelief in a deity are mutually exclusive, that one set of beliefs does not inform or influence the other.  They are compartmentalized components of his psyche.  I’ll take his word for that.

In my case, however, acceptance of higher authority colors my libertarianism. 

It is my contention that libertarianism is, first and foremost, instinctive.  Libertarians are people who chafe at arbitrary man made rules, who are confounded by the contradictions of authoritarians who impose their illogic with force.

Our instinctive response leads many of us to seek intellectual justification and social reinforcement for our feelings.  As I see it, libertarians rest their philosophical case on  one of three distinct, but not entirely exclusive, traditions.  These are the:

1.       Objectivist moral philosophy Ayn Rand

2.       Economics based Anarcho-Capitalist of Murray Rothbard and most modern Austrian economists

3.       Classic liberalism of John Locke and fee market economics of Adam Smith which provided the intellectual grounding of the American Revolution and informs true American Conservatism

All three traditions share the concept of individual self ownership.  This radical notion was first articulated by John Locke the late Seventeenth Century:

“The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule “

“(E)very man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”

Some 290 years later Rothbard concurred:

The most viable method of elaborating the natural-rights statement of the libertarian

position is to divide it into parts, and to begin with the basic axiom of the "right to self-ownership." The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a human being, to "own" his or her own body; that is, to control that body free of coercive interference. Since each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and means in order to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives man the right to perform [p. 29] these vital activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation.    (For a New Liberty)

Ayn Rand summarizes:

Individualism regards man -- every man -- as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.  Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights -- and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.

Theist libertarians, such as I, must dissent from the theory of absolute self ownership in one very significant detail.  As Locke explains, we are not absolute owners.  Rather we endowed with a proprietary custodianship of our temporal bodies by “Nature’s God” who created us.

“But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of license: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another's uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours. Every one, as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station willfully.”

And beyond our lives, neither are we free to forfeit our liberty, for to do so is tantamount to surrendering our humanity:

“This freedom from absolute, arbitrary power, is so necessary to, and closely joined with a man's preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his preservation and life together: for a man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power of another, to take away his life, when he pleases. Nobody can give more power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his own life, cannot give another power over it.”

Thus a Theist libertarian, particularly a Catholic such as yours truly, must first and foremost insist upon the sanctity of life and all that that implies.  In our eyes, liberty is founded on the priceless value of each and every human being born and unborn, young or old, healthy or near death.  Death by drone, “preemptive” war, abortion, terrorism, euthanasia or heavy handed law enforcement is never the answer.

Secondly, we will insist on the full right to practice our Faith.  This means more than praying together in a room each weekend.  We demand freedom from State or majority coercion to accommodate those things that violate our conscience in the workplace and in our business dealings. 

Nonetheless theist, agnostic and atheist libertarians have plenty of common ground to share.  We all believe:

·         In the non aggression principle

·         That war is murder – of the people we kill and those that we sacrifice

·         Taxation is theft

·         Conscription is kidnapping

·         Monetary expansion is counterfeiting

·         Welfare destroys character, families and communities

·         Corporate cronyism destroys also destroys character, competition, inflates prices and kills innovation

·         The unfettered free market is the only just, fair and moral system for allocating the resources and the optimal method for meeting material wants and needs

·         Statism and collectivism is “the root cause of “conflict, disharmony, caste struggle, conquest and the war of all against all, and general poverty.”  (Rothbard)

·         Government corrupts and destroys every civil institution that it touches including the family, business, religion, education, marriage, agriculture, arts and sciences

We believe that voluntary charity is a natural reaction to those who are suffering through no fault of their own or are temporarily down on their luck.  However, we also stand with St. Paul who self supported his ministry with his tent making skills.  Paul admonished the Thessalonians that “when we were with you, we instructed you that if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat.”

In the area of personal yet victimless “immorality” we find common cause.  The Church’s two preeminent philosophers did not believe that the civil authorities should prosecute victimless crime.  Such personal sins were evidence of man’s imperfection and were best left to be dealt with between him and his Maker.

As one might expect, many of us believing libertarians feel a knot in our stomachs when the conversation among our libertarian friends turns to abortion and euthanasia.  Remember that we, like Hebrew National, report to a higher authority.

So let’s agree to live by the adage of that masterful politician Ronald Reagan, “My eighty-percent friend is not my twenty-percent enemy”

Thank you, friend, for reading this.  We have of much work ahead to dismantle The State.  The rest can be sorted out later.

Related Posts:

Is Death The Answer?
The Separation of Marriage and State
Get Government Out of Marriage: An Austrian Perspective
The Diminished Value of Human Beings in the Dependency State

 

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OnFire Radio Show

Streaming  on Hamiltonradio.net

    Podcast at Blogspot, iTunes, Stitcher, Podomatic & YouTube

"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon