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THE KEY TO PROSPERITY: DON'T BE A DUMBASS
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In rich countries, there is a Mother Goose story for children about the goose that laid the golden eggs. A child understands that if you cut open the goose that lays golden eggs, you get no more eggs. But in Cuba
and Mexico, they tried to achieve prosperity by seizing foreign investments.
So they didn't get many investments for a long time, either from their own people or from the outside, and they got poorer.
A reasonably intelligent child in a developed country could have told you that would happen, but for the leftist "intellectuals" the third world listens to, "The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs" is just too complicated.
So nobody wanted to invest in those countries. Even inside such countries, people didn't want to invest. Instead of American investment in Latin America, those with money in Latin America have historically tended to put their money in the rich countries.
So we have just explained one of many, many, MANY reasons why public policy in the third world makes them poor. It is because it's SILLY.
The Industrial Revolution is now about a quarter of a MILLENNIUM old, and those countries have still not gotten to the level of sophistication offered by Mother Goose.
Leftists would make America poor by killing the geese that lay the golden eggs. George W. Bush would make America poor by flooding it with the kind of people who vote with less sophistication than is routinely expected of a small child.
The third world is poor because its people are not wise citizens and voters. But Bush tells us that, if we import the population of the third world, they will not bring those reasons with them.
Many people on the right imply what Bush says. They want the borders opened up. They can't say that it is the stupidity of the third worlders themselves that makes them poor.
This brings us to one of the most crippling aspects of respectable conservatism: If you are going to have liberals say you are "respectable," you can't talk in plain English. You have to watch what you say, so you can't say too much.
In Michigan, a lady in a restaurant was upset about all the Spanish-speaking customers, and she said - to her companion, "Why can't these spics learn English?" She was reported, arrested, and sentenced to FORTY-FIVE DAYS IN JAIL!
Yes, she was in America. And no, respectable conservatives are not going to make trouble about it.
The most obvious -- though not the only -- reason the third world is poor is because third worlders keep making the same dumbass political mistakes. You should avoid using insulting labels to tell them this. But they have GOT to be told, and there is no way to make it sound nice.
We can import the entire Mexican excess population, and become leftist and poor ourselves. Or we can make it clear that Mexicans have to convince the world that they are not going to be stupid any more, and prosperity will come to them. Those are the only real choices.
But if anyone says out loud that third world people are responsible for third world poverty, respectable conservatives will beg their liberal masters to allow them to lead the lynch mob against him.
So if you value political respectability above speaking plain English, you're going to lose.
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OUR IMMIGRATION POLICY SAYS THAT MONEY IS MADE BY MAGIC
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In my last years as a Methodist, the bishops of that church came out with a declaration on redistributing income. They had all sorts of standard leftist proposals, but what interested me was their constant repetition of their ideas about where wealth comes from in the first place.
The bishops kept saying "the land produces" over and over, as if land, all by itself, produced everything. All they had to do was redistribute what was magically produced by the land, all by itself.
Karl Marx said that labor, just effort all by itself, produced everything. He built Communism on that idea. He also said that it was ridiculous to say that water was worth more in the desert than on a pond, or to a thirsty man than to a man without thirst.
He said its value depended entirely on how much labor it took to get it.
Basically, leftists argue that money comes from Magic. What matters, they say, is just to redistribute it.
The Libertarian Party is one group that is great at knocking down this nonsense. They point out that money doesn't just come from effort, as Marx said, or from "land," as the Methodist bishops say. It takes brains, enterprise, and INCENTIVES. So if you take away everything a person should get for making money, he won't make any, and everybody ends up poorer.
As I say, Libertarians are good at showing how silly leftists are on this point, and in insisting that magic does not produce everything.
They explain that how money is distributed also determines how much money gets produced. So far, so good.
But then you start to discuss with a libertarian why the United States is richer than Mexico, and he has an instant answer:
He says that Americans have more money than Mexicans because of Magic.
So the Libertarian says that all it has to do is redistribute it. He says Mexican labor is worth more on this side of the border than on the Mexican side, so you should let all the Mexicans into the United States, and everything will be fine. Leftists say that the only reason one person has more money than another does is because of Magic. Libertarians say that Mexicans have a lower per capita income than Americans because of Magic, not because they are doing anything wrong.
Libertarians insist that third worlders should pour into America, because they bring in cheap labor, which is worth as much as our expensive labor. But labor is not all they bring in. They bring in votes. They bring in the same votes that produce the public policy that makes labor cheap in their own countries.
No libertarian would put his money where his mouth is. They say that there is no good reason why LABOR should be worth more here than there.
So if that's true, how about CAPITAL? If LABOR should be paid the same on both sides of the border, shouldn't CAPITAL be worth the same?
No way, Jose!
Try to get an American libertarian to put money into third world investments at the same interest rate he would take here.
No way!
And why is it that an American is not about to put money into the third world for the same interest rate he would ask in America?
Because MEXICANS are in charge of Mexico. His money isn't safe down there.
When it comes to real money, THEIR money, the idea that Mexicans are just as good as Americans for running a country is screamingly laughable.
But when it comes to bringing in cheap labor, they will look you straight in the eye and insist that labor is labor, period. This is a fatal bit of stupidity on the part of otherwise highly intelligent people. They get so tied up in their free-market philosophy that they finally lose contact with reality on a vital point.
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