On Open Borders

Here's an exchange with the late, great Milton Friedman about the idea of "open borders" - i.e. free immigration.

Q: Dr. Friedman should the U.S.A. open its borders to all immigrants? What is your opinion on that?

A: Unfortunately no. You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.

Q: Do you oppose a unilateral reduction of tariffs and if not how can you oppose open immigration until the welfare state is eliminated?

A: I am in favor of the unilateral reduction of tariffs, but the movement of goods is a substitute for the movement of people. As long as you have a welfare state, I do not believe you can have a unilateral open immigration. I would like to see a world in which you could have open immigration, but stop kidding yourselves. On the other hand, the welfare state does not prevent unilateral free trade. I believe that they are in different categories.

Maybe so, maybe so. 

Here's Robert Rector of the Heritage Institute, slamming the idea of open borders.

In a recent debate with Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute, I pointed out this paradox. Griswold replied that the key was to grant amnesty and open borders now and work on “building a wall around welfare” at some point in the future. The weakness of this response should concern all those interested in limiting the size of government.

While most open-border libertarians proclaim a desire to dismantle both borders and the welfare state, in practice what they offer is open borders today and a vague (and almost certainly illusory) promise to end the welfare state in the indefinite future. As Milton Friedman understood, open-border enthusiasts have the sequence wrong: Opening borders with the redistributionist state still intact will result in a larger and more confiscatory government. In response to libertarians who propose to open borders and dismantle the welfare state, practical conservatives should answer: “Go ahead. Dismantle the welfare state. As soon as you’ve got that finished, let us know, and then we’ll talk about open borders.”

Here's my take on it. 

As long as people are deprived of freedom of movement and freedom of association, as long as armed guards ask for your paperwork when you approach the borders of your cage, politicians and their ilk will own you. 

They can draft you, imprison you, tax you, and burden you with debt.  No one with the ability to move freely from place to place can be forced to serve a politician. 

Slaves in the southern U.S. were taught to respect the boundaries of their plantations.  We have all been taught to respect the lines of latitude and longitude near the place where our mothers went into labor. 

Politicians, like old-time slavemasters, love borders and boundaries. 

Screw them and the lines on their little maps. 

First Mexican truck to enter U.S. interior sometime soon. I hope.

From The San Diego News, via a link from Radley Balko:

SAN DIEGO -- The first Mexican carrier is set to roll into the U.S. interior within days, but American trucking union leaders and two California congressmen haven't given up on stopping the cross-border trucking program that had been stalled for years by safety concerns and political wrangling.

The stall has had little to do with safety concerns.  It is about the political wrangling and protecting the constituents of some politicians that they've bought at auction prices. 

U.S. Reps. Duncan Hunter and Bob Filner said they'll take a bipartisan stand at the border Wednesday in San Diego to voice concerns about the bilateral pilot project that will allow approved Mexican trucks to come deep into the United States. Hunter is a San Diego-area Republican, while Filner is a Democrat whose district includes California's border with Mexico.

They will join Teamsters union President James Hoffa and Todd Spencer, the owner-operator of the Independent Drivers Association, in a last-ditch effort to block Mexican trucks from being granted full access to U.S. highways.

The trucks are crossing a river, a river that has symbolic meaning because of a war we had with Mexico.  This river became known as a "boundary". 
Boundary (noun) (bound*a*ry) 1. In the geographic sense, an arbritrary listing of lines of latitude and longitude to be filled in on maps with different colors.  2.  In the political sense, the far edges of your cage.

Allowing Mexican trucking companies to deliver the goods rather than transfer them onto U.S. haulers at the border will put American jobs and highway safety at risk, the union leaders say.

Horseshit.  According to Marc Levinson, author of "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" the ancestors of these same union parasites once tried to unload and reload each shipping container as it entered U.S. "boundaries".  They didn't understand that the entire point of the shipping container was to load the thing at Point A and not have the load touched by thieving little Jimmy Hoffa hands until it was unloaded by the customer at Point B.  The unions insisted that they had a right to "strip and stuff" every shipping container, even if the load was going to be placed right back in the same shipping container.
All Jimmy Hoffa wants is to get his hands on the load.   

Washington on Friday approved the first Mexican trucking company, Transportes Olympic, nearly two decades after the hotly contested provision of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement set off lawsuits and a costly trade dispute between the neighboring countries.

If I want to hire Transportes Olympic to haul a load from Juarez to Fort Worth, it really isn't Jimmy Hoffa's business.  It is the U.S. government's business, unfortunately.  They own the roads.  But they've also established that it is illegal to discriminate against people for racial reasons, and that's the only angle these clowns have to fight with. 

Transportes Olympic employees were busy Wednesday finishing the preparations for its historic, maiden trip.

The long-haul truck will cross the border Friday at Laredo, Texas, and head about 450 miles north to Garland, Texas, to deliver industrial equipment, said Guillermo Perez, the transport manager at the firm in the industrial Monterrey suburb of Apodaca, about two hours south of Laredo.

The company was also the first approved under the 2009 pilot program before President Barack Obama's administration cancelled it. Mexico retaliated by placing tariffs on 99 agricultural products worth more than $2 billion annually.

As well the should have.  It's called NAFTA.  It is a free-trade agreement, kinda.  We've been in violation of the law for about 20 years. 

Mexico cut the tariffs in half this summer after Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon approved an inspection and monitoring program for the companies that had been approved in 2009. The Mexican government has vowed to lift the rest once the truck heads out of the border zone Friday.

"We're really excited," Perez said in a telephone interview Wednesday with The Associated Press. "Now we can provide door-to-door service so it's about a 15 percent savings for companies."

Eliminating and lowering idiotic trade barriers like this one helps you to afford the computer on which you're reading this rant.  It's how you got the clothes that I hope you are now wearing. 

Opponents say the fight isn't over.

Hunter has co-authored a bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., that would require the pilot program to be ceased in three years and Congress to vote on the issue again.

"There's absolutely no upside to the program," said Joe Kasper, a spokesman for Hunter's office.

Yes there is an upside, you flak-catching hack.  If I want to hire these people to haul a load, then I get to have my way. 
That's always an upside. 
Plus, I won't have to hire Hoffa goons.  (Remember Jimmy Hoffa?  The guy who said "let's take out those sons-of-bitches", in reference to The Tea Party?)  
And I get to save money, which means that in the long run, you get to save money.

 "It's a good example of foreign interests overtaking American interests, at the expense of jobs, security and safety. The program was a bad idea when it was created under NAFTA and it's a bad idea now. It should be stopped right away."

At the expense of jobs?  If it's about saving jobs or creating more jobs, let's just mandate that loads can only cross The Rio Grande on wheelbarrows and that they can only move up Interstate 35 on hand carts pulled by the less fortunate of our society. 
If it's about security, let's end the idiotic drug war.  Safety will increase 100-fold on both sides of the river that we  currently use as a boundary, just like safety increased when we ended our alcohol war with Canada at the end of Prohibition. 
If it's about safety, take a look at one of the trucks that Transportes Olympic will use on these loads and then compare them to the rigs that haul the U.S. Mail.  Case dismissed.  There will be no comparison. 

Criminal activity has been a problem for years even within the U.S. government's strictest trusted carrier programs. Drug trafficking organizations have smuggled tons of drugs inside trucks driven by approved truckers coming from inspected and certified facilities inside Mexico.

And they do this because there is a fortune to be made in doing so.  End the monopolies that we've granted to the Mexican Drug Lords and their U.S. Enablers, and the smuggling will end.  No one ever got rich by smuggling coals into Newcastle.  Or by smuggling more bullshit into a political protectionist argument. 

"The beneficiaries of opening borders will be few and the casualties will be plenty," Spencer told The Associated Press on Wednesday. His organization represents small independent trucking businesses.

He doesn't represent all of the small independent trucking businesses, as the article implies.  He doesn't represent mine.  (I'm the General Manager of one.)
Trade runs both ways.  The outfit that I work for sells stuff in the U.S., and we sell stuff outside of Jimmy Hoffa's boundaries.  We also purchase stuff from overseas and sell it inside the Hoffa enclosure in which most of you folks live.  I don't need Hoffa and his Washington puppets in the way.  
Anything is good as long as it helps weaken the cage so jealously guarded by  U.S. Reps. Duncan Hunter and Bob Filner and union boss Jimmy Hoffa.   

Proponents say especially strict safeguards are in place: The U.S. government is paying for electronic monitoring devices to be installed in all Mexican trucks used in the program.

Mexican trucking companies had to fill out an application, pay a fee and then submit the names of any drivers who will participate so they can undergo national security and criminal background checks by the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security.

Inspectors will check out the trucks for safety violations, verify the drivers' qualifications and administer oral English-proficiency exams.

The program's long delay has cost companies in both countries millions and hurt bilateral relations, proponents say.

"We certainly hoped that it cannot be stopped," said James Clark, director of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce's Mexico Business Center. "The U.S. has been in violation of the NAFTA agreement ever since the beginning of the trucking issue. Mexican trucks have every right to come into the U.S. under NAFTA as long as the trucks are fully inspected to U.S. standards and the drivers speak English."

About 70 percent of goods from the $4 billion trade between the two nations is transported by land to its destinations according to the Mexican government.

And all of that stuff is currently being unloaded at the border and reloaded onto another trailer.  That's a total waste. 
End of rant. 
Thanks for listening. 

"Fixed fortifications are a monument to man's stupidity" - General George S. Patton

Here's a video of two girls climbing the four million dollar per mile U.S./Mexico border fence.
The important thing about this massive piece of pork? 

1) The contractors who lobbied for it got paid.
2) Politicians came up with a piece of Performance Art to show that they were doing something. 
3) The fence looks impressive without actually stopping the flow of illegals, who help fuel our economy, and drugs, which help fuel the prison/counselor/police lobby. 

If seen in the context described above, this monument is more beautiful than Mount Rushmore. 


Hit the "tortilla curtain" label below to read an old post about how much this thing costs per foot. 

On San Francisco's city employee travel boycott

Let me get this out of the way first.....
If it weren't for the entitlement giveaways that our politicians throw out as if every day were Mardi Gras, I would favor "open borders". 
(Yeah, we would have to stop pissing off the rest of the world, which would greatly reduce the chances that someone would bring in a nuke from Toronto.  And we would have to reduce the size of government by about 90%, so the Statists would have nothing to gain by importing more Statist voters.  Probably a fantasy, but it would be nice.  The #1 predictor of whether you'll be wealthy or miserable?  The lines of latitude and longitude where you happen to be born.  That ain't right.) 

Anyway, because of the Arizona's recent crackdown on illegal immigrants, the city of San Francisco is banning travel by all of their city employees to Arizona.  Here's the San Francisco Chronicle's City Insider Blog:

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced today a moratorium on official city travel to Arizona after the state enacted a controversial new immigration law that directs local police to arrest those suspected of being in the country illegally.
The ban on city employee travel to Arizona takes effect immediately, although there are some exceptions, including for law enforcement officials investigating a crime, officials said. It's unclear how many planned trips by city workers will be curtailed.

I like that a lot.  I hope that Los Angeles, San Diego, Fresno, and Long Beach do the same thing.  And on the other hand, I hope that Phoenix, Tucson, Tempe, and Tombstone Arizona retaliate by not allowing their employees travel to anywhere in California.  Or anywhere else. 

I hope the Fort Worth, Texas, City Council doesn't allow its city employees to travel anywhere at all.  I hope that they tell all city employees to stay their asses at home and repair the potholes that are all over the East Side. 

It would be nice if the Booger Den, Mississippi, City Council declared that there would be no more travel on the government tit.  Never ever. 

Why restrict this protest to the city and town level?  I think the world would be a better place if Obama had a sit-down with Hillary and told her something like, "Mrs. Clinton, they've passed a racist, fascist, hate-filled anti-immigration law in Arizona.  And in protest, I need you to stay out of Arizona, China, Israel, Jordan, Africa, and Mexico.  Stay home."   

Would we have more money in the Treasury if we told our defense employees that they couldn't spend any more time defending, say, Germany and Japan, and that those nations were going to have to provide their own defense?  Would our boys and girls currently fighting in the Middle East Sandbox be better off it we told them to come home and get their feet back under their Mamas' kitchen tables?  Let's get them back to defending the borders, and nothing else.  That would solve any and all immigration "problems" right there.

The San Francisco Government Travel Boycott - may it spread far and wide.