Maggie's Farm

I am hoping for a piece on the illegal immigration bill from The Dylanologist, who is well-versed in the subject. My own thoughts about the details are confused and incoherent despite my basic tendency to feel that folks should stay in their own homes and improve their countries rather than running away. Assuming people all over the world want to come to America for "opportunity" (aka filthy lucre), better to work in a manly or womanly manner to make your own country more like the USA. Nobody is sneaking across the border for political freedom.

Scott's (at Powerline) thoughts are not confused. I always agree with Scott: he is smarter than me. He prefers the status quo to the proposed bill, quoting Sowell's first piece on the subect.

Today Thomas Sowell has his Part ll  of The Amnesty Fraud at RCP, which makes similar points to Pat Buchanan's linked yesterday here.

LaShawn echoes what Dr. Bliss posted earlier today. She touches all of the bases. As our readers know, we are very concerned about black success in life here at Maggie's, and have sadly watched one costly government "program" after another, over decades, come a cropper by creating a dysfunctional subculture (which has had the dismal effect of nurturing a racism which no one wants to have, and which was well on the way to disappearing after the war). There is no government solution but, thankfully, blacks are doing better in life anyway. One quote from LaShawn:

In a society where the stigma against a big belly and no ring has disappeared like so much vapor, how does one convince young people to stop fornicating and making babies while unmarried? Or to build stable families, when their parents and grandparents weren’t married? Instead of passing down the kind of values that will push their kids to success, they’ve passed down a plethora of pathologies that require them to play catch-up for the rest of their lives.

A quote from our pal Coyote:

In Closing of the American Mind,  Allan Bloom tells the story of a question he used to ask his classes vis a vis income inequality.  He would ask something like "Would you vote for a law that reduced income inequality but at the same time reduced total wealth, such that the poor might get a larger slice of a smaller pie, and might even be worse off on an absolute basis afterwards."  Apparently, he would get solid majorities for "yes" and in fact I have been in classes where this same question was asked and at least 40% said "yes."  This is a situation a bit similar to the one above, but without it being personal.  In other words, no one has explicitly hosed you, they have just done better.

I hope you can see the parallel.  Large numbers of people are willing to pay (or equivalently make less money) to reduce the earnings of people who are wealthy and/or successful. They are even  more willing to do so if they think that they have been treated unfairly.  Which is why you see so many politicians and media outlets working so hard right now to convince the middle class that current income distribution patterns are somehow "unfair."  Politicians are pandering to this base human emotion, the desire to spitefully bring someone else down (in the case of income equality laws, someone the person has likely never even met or transacted with) even if it makes oneself worse off.   

I can understand why Pete Best might harbor a grudge against the Beatles.  But why do so many Americans harbor a grudge against people they have never met, just because they make more money?

Last I heard, Envy was a deadly sin. Whole piece here.

Comment from The Barrister: Coyote gets right to the point. America is not about making money. It's about having free choices to do what you want, and, as Bird Dog said yesterday, being adult enough to live with the consequences of one's choices. If you want to pursue wealth, great. If you want to pursue other things, great. All I ever wanted to pursue was a bit of modest comfort, work, friends, a relationship with God, and a happy family, and  I feel  blessed to have found those things. I love to make money (doesn't everybody?), but it has never been my main objective. However, I do hate being held up as an object of angry envy by pandering politicians just because my life plan worked. I had a basic life plan, and I just followed it. It was not rocket science. To maintain my plan, I will need to keep working - if I live - until I am 75 or more. No problem. I am happy to do that, as was my Dad, my Grandpa, and my great-grandpa, who died at 86 in the fields with his hands on the plow on his farm in CT just up the road from here. That farm was lost, to the family's perpetual resentment, to cover estate taxes and is now covered with absurd mini-mansions on 1/2 acre lots and has a street called Azalea Drive. Great Grandpa would be rolling in his grave if he saw that on the land that is soaked with generations of family sweat. And, if he ever saw an azalea (which I doubt, up here in those days), I am sure that he would have considered it a vulgar display. Even today, where I live, the wealthy happily drive rusty old cars, Yankee-style.

A disturbing brief video memory of Communism. Thompson. Thank God police-state-enforced socialism is in the past...or is it?

Fear not - the bold, brave, cantankerous, gnarly farm hands of Maggie's Farm are manning the barricades against those who want to "do us good" whether we want it or not. Do not do good to me. I am a moderately intelligent adult who is capable of making decisions and choices, for better or worse. My ancestors came here so people would leave them alone. Leave me alone, because I have the Yankee American attitude: I do not trust experts, and I am willing to live with my own mistakes without asking anything from anyone. Self-reliance, no matter how tough it can be at times. Reliance on God is good, but reliance on government is for the birds.

From Alphecca:

I really think most liberals are just developmentally arrested people who look at the world –regardless of their age– through the mentally immature eyes of a 12-year-old. How else to explain this silliness?

It's about guns.

A Ukrainian explains it (h/t, reader). One quote:

Anyone who had lived through the attempt by Soviet hardliners to take back the power and restore a Stalinist dictatorship would be astounded, just as I am, with allegations by today’s American “progressives” that George W. Bush is a dictator whose “junta” has usurped our freedoms and reversed decades of progress, turning America into a “fascistic autocracy.” Such people don’t even begin to know what “junta” really means nor what it feels like to live in a dictatorship. These pundits may think of themselves as enlightened “defenders of freedom,” but in reality they only expose their own moral blindness. By shooting in the wrong direction they are hurting the very cause they claim they fight for. Freedom cannot be attained by erasing the objective criteria of liberty and democracy. Dictatorship cannot be fought by misleading the nation about the true nature of tyranny and oppression.

Read the whole thing at Pajamas. The author of the piece is the creator of a humor site on our blogroll, People's Cube. Below is an image from Cube, and from the article:

From a review in The National Interest of two books by Paul Hollander on the violence and oppression of Communist states during the 20th Century (h/t, reader):

Communist terror varied from one country or region to another, and at different times within any one geographic unit; nevertheless, the common elements, both theoretical and practical, are easy to discern. Political police forces (known as “state security” organs), charged with controlling “ideological” rather than ordinary crime, tended to dehumanize the “class enemy” as historically obsolete and “destined” to become extinct. Abuse of the “mentally ill” designation also cut across communism’s manifestations.

Marx and Engels’ oxymoronic “dialectical materialism”, juxtaposing the inevitability of revolution with the imperative of party leadership and predicated on a quasi-divine belief in history as progress, allowed zealous disciples to justify terror and murder by transforming “is” into “ought.” Lenin understood perfectly that the next stage of history must be right, hence any means to bring it about were justified. Therefore, expediting the proletarian nirvana requires “eliminating” those who doubt the omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence of history’s anointed force, the vanguard of the proletariat, the Communist Party.

Not unexpectedly, as nirvana became more elusive, the number of concentration camp inmates grew. Their crimes were often simply accusations—or having been arrested. As the gap between reality and promise increased, so did the need to eliminate those most likely to notice. Repressive measures, including imprisonment and torture, were most frequently taken not against declared ideological opponents, but against members of an inherently “counterrevolutionary class.”

I think we understand that the atrocities and mass murders of communist states have been given a pass in history due to the reflexive sympathy to the Left's "the ends justify the means" ethic, on the part of the intelligentsia. I hope Hollander will help to undo that deception. Read the whole thing.

It's not a classical logical fallacy, but the Zero-Sum fallacy, when applied to money and wealth, is one of the most common fallacies around. We mention it often at Maggie's Farm.

It is a delusion commonly held by the economically ignorant - a delusion which Lefty politicians are never in a hurry to disabuse them of. We are fortunate that it is fallacious, because it means everyone can potentially have whatever degree of wealth they want without detracting from anyone else's.

Coyote re-posts his annual Wealth Creation and the Zero-Sum Fallacy.

Both links via RCP:

Edmund Burke on Sarko's election. This is a revolution he likes. By the way, I read his new book this winter. Essential reading. I think I read it in college, but forgot all of it.

E.J. Dionne: The Left is Reeling. Dionne is a real person, but he always makes for a perfect straw man anyway.

And also, Chirac's Legacy, at Ace