Imagine no freedom, it's easy if you try

Everyone is talking about the Green New Deal, and how it would end domestic airline travel, the internal combustion engine, fossil fuel usage, most electricity generation and even ban cow flatulence.

You have groups guessing what the cost of the Green New Deal would be in terms of dollars on an annual basis coming up with figures in the trillions of dollars.

To everyone seeking to normalize this Green New Deal, please just shut up.

The Green New Deal is the baring of teeth by the new American communist.  A new breed unleashed that we have seen to the streets attacking people attending Trump rallies, screaming at teenagers wearing Make America Great Again hats, shouting down and rioting against conservative speakers on college campuses.

Here is the truth.  Socialism and communism are evil.

Putting a shroud of legitimacy and normalcy to the destruction of the American ideal is being a Menshevik in a Bolshevik Revolution, you cannot moderate the blood lust of those who seek to enslave you by trying to come up with common ground or discuss alternatives to meet their needs.  The revolution demands immediate payment.

So, let's stop talking about the symptoms which the New Green Deal represents and actually begin to dissect the disease that is collectivism.

First definitionally the only difference between socialism and communism is if you voluntarily surrender your freedom and wealth or have it confiscated.  Either alternative ultimately comes from the coercive power of the gun and are based upon the premise that those who have attained wealth used ill-gotten means to get it.  As a result, they have no moral authority to keep it from those from whom it presumably was stolen.

In socialism and communism, individual rights are not derived from God and guaranteed by the Constitution, instead everything you have and can expect comes from the good will of the government. It is no mistake that John Lennon's socialist anthem, "Imagine" starts with the following words:

"Imagine there's no heaven,
"It's easy if you try.
"No hell below us,
"Above us, only sky.
"Imagine all the people living for today."

In order to achieve a kingdom ruled by man unfettered by morality or rules, you have to nix a sovereign God from the equation.  If there is no God, then all rights are nothing more than those that the government chooses to allow you to have, and the only protections that exist are those which they grant.  The only question is who gets to be the one holding the keys over everyone else's life.

For the other "Imagine" songwriter, Yoko Ono, the dream continues as a lyrical assault on nations, religion, and possessions ending with the following two verses:

"Imagine no possessions,
"I wonder if you can.
"No need for greed or hunger,
"A brotherhood of man.

"Imagine all the people,
"Sharing all the world."

"You may say that I'm a dreamer,
"But I'm not the only one.
"I hope someday you'll join us,
"And the world will live as one."

It makes one wonder if Ono has given up 100 percent of her songwriter royalties to the song to the government as a show of solidarity for the dream.

And here is what they don't say, in order for the world to "live as one" with no possessions, someone is going to have to take all the stuff and hold it collectively for the common good.

In order for there to be stuff to take and most importantly eat in the future, someone is going to have to do the hard work to produce it.  Someone is going to have to figure out how to produce it, and someone is going to have to get it from where it is produced to where the brotherhood is living.  And then someone is going to have to distribute it being certain that everyone gets the same amount of gruel.

Socialism and communism are a recipe for scarcity as those who choose to not work are entitled to the same rewards as those who choose to work.  Soon, the numbers of those inspired to bust their backs plowing a field are few and far between and the state has to compel people to do necessary tasks all for the good of the common man. The result is effectively slavery, where the worker receives nothing more than the roof over their head, the clothing on their back and enough food to fuel his or her next day's work.

Medical, architecture and engineering schools are empty as those who would have been STEM professionals choose less rigorous pursuits or no pursuit at all.  Medicines become scarce because there is no one to invent or manufacture them because there is no reward for finding the disease curing needle in the haystack.

You may say that I'm a dreamer, but to me socialism and communism are a nightmare of hopeless poverty as the masses serve their overseers under threat of the whip or worse.

When contrasted with the overwhelming wealth that capitalism has spread throughout the world. The rebellion here in America is particularly ironic as anyone who wishes to have a job can find one.  A place where politics is accessible and a seat in Congress can even be won by a bartender with social media savvy. A place where energy is abundant, inflation is low, wages are up and renewed hope is stirring.

The collectivists will never understand that capitalism works because it isn't driven by macro-decisions from Washington, D.C. as much as it is by a series of millions of individual decisions in the market place. When politicians take their thumbs off the scales, those individual decisions are likely to be rational ones based upon the needs of each person, and this leads to an overall market place that picks winners and losers based upon merit as opposed to political favor.

Ultimately, capitalism is the individuals freedom of choice to not only buy pizza or a hamburger, but a choice of dozen or more different competing pizzas.  Each pizza maker vying for customers based upon a balance of price, convenience, quality, taste and sales panache.

And in the end, not everyone has to eat pepperoni, but instead there are choices upon choices.  These choices are not because someone in government demanded pizza choice, but instead because the market demanded it.

Over the months ahead, Americans for Limited Government will be exploring the subject of why capitalism works, and why individual rights matter in order to help meet the challenges of the 21st century.  I hope that you will join us on this exploration as we seek to educate those who are na‹ve to the evils of socialism and communism. Imagine the counter-cultural revolution that the truth can unleash.

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Walls Work: 9th Circuit Court Sides With Trump On San Diego Border Wall

President Trump on Monday notched a rare victory in the California-based federal appeals court by winning a dispute over the construction of certain barriers along small stretches of the U.S. border with Mexico.

The Hill reports,

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a district court ruling that sided with the Trump administration in a lawsuit challenging its authority to waive environmental and public participation laws to expedite the border construction projects.

A three-judge panel ruled 2-1 that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has broad authority under the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 to construct wall “prototypes,” replace 14 miles of primary fencing near San Diego and replace similar fencing along a three-mile strip close to Calexico, Calif.

A coalition of environmental groups, led by the Center for Biological Diversity, challenged the authority of DHS to waive dozens of laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, to make it easier to build the border infrastructure. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) also filed suit.

Steven Stafford, a Justice Department spokesman, said Monday that Congress has given the executive branch significant authority to build physical barriers on the U.S. border.

“Today the court has affirmed that authority, and that is a victory for the Trump administration, for the rule of law, and above all, for our border security,” he said in a statement to The Hill.

The appeals court decision narrows the path for environmental groups to launch legal challenges to Trump’s high-profile push for expanding border barriers, including his campaign promise to build a wall along much of the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Congress has ceded its authority to Trump, who has swept aside fundamental public safety and environmental laws to build walls that won’t work,” Brian Segee, a Center for Biological Diversity attorney, said after Monday’s ruling. “This lawlessness is destroying irreplaceable ecosystems and militarizing communities.”

The Supreme Court in December declined to hear the groups’ attempt to bring the case directly to the high court after losing initially in the district court. The groups warned the justices that the environmental impact of the projects authorized by the waivers would be substantial.

“The border walls are within, or in close proximity to, the habitats of rare animal and plant species including the burrowing owl, Quino checkerspot butterfly, Tecate cypress, snowy plover, two species of fairy shrimp, and the Otay Mesa mint,” they said in their petition to the Supreme Court.

A similar coalition is challenging a related legal waiver for border barriers in Texas. The proposed structures would cut through various protected areas, including the National Butterfly Center.

Environmentalists have argued that border barriers are disastrous for ecosystems and wildlife since they disrupt habitats, breeding grounds and migration paths.

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Walls along four Customs and Border Protection sectors—El Paso; San Diego, California; and Tucson and Yuma, Arizona—have reduced illegal immigration “by at least 90 percent.”

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.” That pithy observation is attributed to the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served in the Senate from 1977 to 2001. The final two years of Moynihan’s stint in the Senate overlapped the first two years of that of his fellow New York Democrat, Sen. Charles Schumer.

President Donald Trump, at a rally set for Monday night on the border in El Paso, Texas, should remind Schumer of Moynihan’s maxim in their fight over the need for more walls and fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border to help stem the flood tide of illegal immigration.

Schumer and his House counterpart, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., are entitled to their opinions about Trump’s proposed border wall, but they aren’t entitled to their own facts.

In their rebuttal to the president’s Jan. 9 nationally televised address outlining the need for a border barrier and his request for $5.7 billion in funding for them, both described the proposed wall as “ineffective”—Pelosi once and Schumer twice.

In her rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams didn’t echo Schumer and Pelosi’s “ineffective” claim, but she advanced an argument that was equally fallacious.

“America is made stronger by the presence of immigrants, not walls,” Abrams said, disingenuously omitting the key adjective in this debate, “illegal.”

Insisting that walls are “ineffective” over and over again doesn’t make it true. The facts on the ground—both in the U.S. and around the world—not only don’t support that opinion, they decisively refute it.

Walls along four Customs and Border Protection sectors—El Paso; San Diego, California; and Tucson and Yuma, Arizona—have reduced illegal immigration “by at least 90 percent,” according to the Republican National Committee’s Borderfacts.com page.

Byron York of the Washington Examiner recently cited figures from the Center for Immigration Studies showing that before construction of border barriers in Yuma, the Border Patrol apprehended 138,438 illegal immigrants in 2005, compared with 26,244 last year. While not 90 percent, that’s still a dramatic drop.

The comparable before-and-after figures for the San Diego sector, according to the Border Patrol, were more than 565,581 in 1992 and 26,086 in 2017—a 95 percent reduction.

Meanwhile, USA Today reported last May that “[s]ince the start of Europe’s migrant crisis in 2015, at least 800 miles of fences have been erected by Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Slovenia, and others.”

Do Schumer and Pelosi know something all these other countries don’t? Not according to Hungary, which said that fencing on its border with Serbia helped reduce illegal immigration by nearly 100 percent since 2015, according to the USA Today report.

Israel’s fencing along its borders with the Gaza Strip and West Bank, as well as with Egypt and Jordan, has likewise all but eliminated illegal immigration and terrorist attacks. (The Jewish state announced Feb. 3 that it was beginning construction of an additional 40 miles of 20-foot-high, state-of-the-art fencing.)

“Walls should not be controversial,” Trump said Jan. 25, when he called Pelosi’s bluff and agreed to reopen the government for three weeks so bipartisan negotiations on border security could proceed. “Every Border Patrol agent I’ve talked to has told me that walls work. It’s just common sense.”

But for Schumer and Pelosi, a crass political calculus trumps (pun intended) common sense.

Their only real reason now for opposing a wall that both previously supported—and with far more funding for it then than what’s on the table today—is to deny the president a win on border security.

“We’ve seen that walls can and will be tunneled under, cut through, or scaled,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar, another California Democrat, echoing the Pelosi-Schumer line, referring to walls as “archaic solutions” to a “modern problem.”

But as one of Trump’s presidential predecessors, John Adams, observed, “Facts are stubborn things,” and Aguilar isn’t entitled to his own facts, either, because in the absence of a wall, it isn’t necessary for illegal immigrants to tunnel under or scale it.

More walls and fences of the sort Trump envisions would discourage many would-be illegal immigrants—especially women and children, who would be unable to scale them—from even attempting to migrate here from Central America in the first place.

At a bare minimum, walls significantly slow down would-be illegal immigrants who attempt to climb over or tunnel under them, making it much easier for the Border Patrol to catch them than if there were no such obstacles.

The concept of the path of least resistance suggests that additional walls would funnel would-be border crossers to areas where there are none. The need for fewer Border Patrol agents in walled areas would then enable the agents to be redeployed to where they are more urgently needed.

“Our Border Patrol tells us they need physical barriers to help them do their job … strategically placed where traffic is highest,” said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.

That’s a keen grasp of what should by now be obvious, but even if Schumer and Pelosi don’t want to believe Trump that walls are effective, they should heed the Border Patrol agents who are the boots on the ground.

Those agents know better than either Schumer or Pelosi what works and what’s needed for them to do their jobs, and they have said repeatedly that walls are a must.

Even the head of the Border Patrol during the Obama administration has said that walls “absolutely work.”

“I cannot think of a legitimate argument why anyone would not support the wall as part of a multilayered border security issue,” Mark Morgan said on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News Channel program on Jan. 7.

“Why aren’t we listening to the experts and the people who do it every day?” he asked. “I don’t understand that.”

The president should have had a group of uniformed Border Patrol agents as his guests in the House gallery during Tuesday night’s address.

He could have turned around to Pelosi, sitting behind him, and pointed them out when he said of the wall: “It will be deployed in the areas identified by border agents as having the greatest need, and as these agents will tell you, where walls go up, illegal crossings go way down.”

It really is no more complicated than that.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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