2011
Gary Becker proposal
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2007 Randall Burns proposal
Randy who’s ancestry included the folks that held out in Missouri until a second Federal Reserve Bank overcome their influence there, passed away last year.
He and I had an association going back to the early 90s when I published “Race, Gender and The Frontier” which he admitted had red pilled him. Although he never made a public point of it he did understand the profoundly negative impact on young men and family formation in the United States by the last half century of immigration increase.
“Solving” lower fertility rates with immigration (as Becker implies is “inevitable”) is further lowering fertility rates. And no it’s not just lowering of wages by cheap labor. This is what will get the elites of the West killed by the young men as they try to destroy the civilization that castrates them before they are completely neutered.
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I agree the fertility argument is weak.
Becker strongest argument is charging an entrance fee, $50,000
Green cards should not be free because it’s a valuable commodity
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There would be many advantages to a policy of charging immigrants a fee. If a fee of (say) $50,000 were charged, it would ensure that economically active migrants who had a real commitment to the country were most attracted. This fee could be used to lower other taxes.
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Charging a fee would be a much more efficient way of controlling economic migration than the use of quotas and other bureaucratic systems of control.
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Randall makes a good point:
If we take the current theoretical value of citizenship at a midpoint estimate of $225,000: we can ask ourselves, is the American public really getting $1.4 trillion per year in value for current levels of legal immigration?
I would argue that it isn’t. In fact recent immigration—which is often unskilled, uneducated and often actively hostile to the existing US population— is creating nowhere close to that level of benefit.
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The reason I linked in Randy’s VDARE article isn’t just that it preceded Becker’s by 4 years (hence should probably have been cited by Becker) but because it contains this passage:
As a progressive, I would favor sensible expansion of US government social programs and economic regulation. After we have contained the excesses of corporate welfare queens like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, invested appropriately in US education and infrastructure, and adjusted the supply of immigration rights to something approaching the needs of the American citizenry, I’d guess the present value of US citizenship to be closer to $450,000.
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Becker wrote about selling green cards in 2006 or earlier.
I don’t know if he read Randall essay
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450,000 sounds like a lot but it isn’t when compared to price of a house or college tuition
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I did manage to get Randy to broach the topic of immigration policy in the context of a wealth tax – particularly since Trump had advocated a one time wealth tax – but unfortunately he never understood why I was so adamant that the 16th Amendment be repealed.
As an upper middle class/lower upper class scion he was always very concerned about what he called “expropriation” and advocated that only the increase in asset value following on the introduction of wealth tax be taxed rather than simply replacing the 16th Amendment entirely. It was as a result of his intransigence on this issue that I derived the formula for calculating the expected impact on asset value by abolishing the 16th. He responded by asking for a generalization that permitted a “transitional” calculation which would lard the wealth tax on top of the existing tax system – as Elizabeth Warren and other “progressives” always try to get away with, and which is guaranteed to fail. For a while I included that formula at my blog but then, when Warren pulled her stunt I decided that the idea was just too toxic to permit anyone to even consider it unless they were a fifth column on behalf of private sector rentiers, as I suspect Warren of actually being cultivated by her political handlers (however unintential on her part).
Moreover, he was convinced that a wealth tax should be progressive rather than the flat tax at the rate of interest on the national debt that I advocated in another 1992 paper that caught his attention. I challenged him with a number of issues that he needed to address to make his proposal be more principled (involving, for example, control theory optimization of his economic model’s parameters) but he never got around to addressing them. When I introduced him to the concept of Property Money, he just froze like a deer in the headlight since it brought up a substantial portion of his ego structure as it involved his family’s historic opposition to the Federal Reserve system that, had they thought of Property Money, could have deep-sixed both the 16th Amendment and the Federal Reserve Act.
Bottom line: People keep thinking they can get away with tweaks of the existing system because they just can’t face how horrifying the situation has become more than a century after that fateful year of 1913.
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1913 was a fateful year:
Federal Reserve act
Income Tax amendment
Popular election of senators
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What is the point of discussing anything like this when the border is wide open? Coyotes are making good money transporting people to the southern US border – where they are welcomed with free Obamaphones, free accommodation, free SNAP cards.
Yes, there are very strong arguments for selective immigration. There is room both for the young, smart, pretty immigrant and for the wealthy immigrant. But laws in the US discourage both of those, and instead promote the extra-legal importation of indigent people and those who may have ulterior motives.
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Repeal of the 17th was one of the planks that, as a Ron Paul delegate, I managed to get introduced to the Washington State Republican convention. It was quite surprising to me that the main resistance was from the Republican leadership of Washington State since returning power to elect Senators to the State legislature would return power to them. Very strange.
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Illegal immigration is not immigration in the first place. It is an invasion. And it is an intentional invasion of democrat voters. That’s why there is no economic/financial solution to it. There is no doubt it would be a good thing to allow a significant number of desirable and vetted individuals and families to immigrate to make up for inadequate fertility.
However, that is not the elites’ plan. It is to flood - especially the cities - with millions of illegal democrat voters. Since the dems are largely successful in keeping their efforts to block voter ID (whose only purpose can be to allow illegal votes, since ID’s are required to do anything in the US), one thing is clear: cities are lawless. That means that any and all law enforcement is political. Do you honestly believe that this rampant lawlessness does not extend to the county/state voting apparatus which administers every facet of the mechanics of voting? All it takes now in any city is a warm (and sometime not even warm) body to register an illegal alien as a voter. A small further action by rabid activists and exchange of a few dollars yields as many votes as needed to repeat 2020. Do you think the lawlessness doesn’t affect voting? Really? Who will stop them? Cowed police? Soros prosecutors? Lefty judges?
Like the entire (ill) legal system, the US voting apparatus is certifiably third world in nature and intentionally so.
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My only quibble is to describe these illegals as an invasion of Democrat voters. While factually true, it somehow implies that Republicans are better than Democrats. Again, while it is factually true that Rupblicans **are** (marginally) better than Democracts, the Republican/Democrat paradigm represents a false dichotomy where both parties are actually part of a finely-tuned ratcheting machine designed to distract the masses (on both sides) from the ultimate goal of their destruction. In my opinion, words like Democrat, Republican, Leftist, Communist, Marxist are totally meaningless in terms of affecting any real kind of change—they keep us on a kind of intellectual reservation where our thinking is more easily controlled—becuase they don’t reflect the ultimate, underlying reality of our situation. Just to be clear: I have no idea what the ultimate, underlying reality of our situation is—I only know that our so-called conservative thinkers and leaders have no idea either (assuming they are sincere, which 99.99999% are not).
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Look at the cities which are mostly one party. The bigger the city, more serious basket cases.
Cities also distort the politics of a state.
Example: Pennsylvania
Most of the state is right of center except for Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
State capitals are also one party towns.
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This is why I am pro work from home. It will hopefully put a dent into the massive damage done by having very large cities by allowing sane people the option to reside in a sane community.
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