The Immigration Bill and the Big Picture

 It is, as  writes, an outrage when the governing classes try to rush a major revision of the nation’s immigration law past the voters and past their legislators without what our liberal friends call “a national conversation.”

He has thoughtfully provided a critique of the Senate bill as it became available over the weekend.

Today he has listed a number of proposed amendments to the bill.  One of them is to establish a special category of aliens from jihadist countries.  No quick Z-visa for them!

 In the frenzy of day-to-day political combat, let us not forget the big picture.  It was one of President Eisenhower’s maxims that if he couldn’t see the solution to a problem he tried to make it bigger.

The big picture is that we are in the middle of a great human migration, perhaps the greatest ever since modern humans first crossed the Straits of Hormuz 50,000 years ago and spread across the whole world.

Today’s great migration is from the country to the city.  In China at this moment, about 25 million people are moving to the city each year. 

Not surprisingly, people are migrating to the best city they know about.  For many Mexicans the best place to go is not Mexico City or Monterrey.  As one Mexican immigrant said to me from the driver’s seat of his mammoth Chevy Suburban SUV: “In Mexico you have to pay someone to get a job.”

So they come to the great job-creating cities of the United States.

For us, this is all very well.  Just don’t all come at once.

It is the job of of our government, legislators, executive, and judges, to control the flow of immigration so that it does not create hardships for the American people.  We care about the Mexican people, of course.  But first we must take care of our own.

So the job of the government is to control, channel, and limit the flow.  That is something that the government has clearly not been doing very well at all.

That is why folks like Hugh Hewitt are right when they insist that before we start handing out amnesty to illegal immigrants the government must demonstrate that it has gotten control of the borders. 

How Much Does the Elite Know?

The great presumption of the twentieth century was that an educated elite capable of “rational, factual, socialist argument” was much better way at running the country than the higgling and the chaos of the market.

So it wrong to suggest, Thomas Sowell writes, that either economic interests rule (Marx) or that ideas rule (Keynes).   

My own view is that differences in bedrock assumptions underlying ideas play a major role in determining how people differ in what policies, principles or ideologies they favor.

But suppose that the bedrock assumption of our age, that the best government is government by a rational elite of experts, is wrong? 

No big deal.  It just explains most of the famines and economic disasters of the twentieth century, from the Ukrainian famine to the Great Leap Forward famine, to the extended Great Depression and the stagflation of the 1970s.

Opposed to this conventional wisdom that an educated elite knows best is the insurgent view of people like Thomas Sowell.

If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on Earth does not have even 1 percent of the total knowledge on Earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.
If no one has even 1 percent of the knowledge available, not counting the vast amount yet to be discovered, imposing from the top of the notions favored by elites convinced of their own superior knowledge and virtue is a formula for disaster.

What Sowell is doing here is dumbing down the central insight of two experts, Lugwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek. 

Mises said that the socialist commonwealth would fail because it could not compute prices (i.e., would lack the knowledge to know what to produce and what not to produce). 

Hayek said that the brilliant man in Whitehall or Washington could not outperform the millions of economic actors with their intimate knowledge of economic facts on the ground.

Today we have a report from Peter Ferrara that the Democrats in Congress are ramping up taxes and spending in their budget resolutions.

That is another way of saying that we, the committee of 535 best people assisted by government experts, know what is best for America.  We know how to spend Americans’ money better than they do.

Our Democratic friends are liable to wake up pretty soon with a bad cold.

Who Needs School Anyway?

Pity poor Marilee Jones, formerly Dean of Admissions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  She figured she needed a bushel of degrees to work at MIT so she faked ’em, according to James Taranto.  Fortunately, Taranto only works for The Wall Street Journal edit page.  So he doesn’t need all those sheepskins. 

I feel her pain, for school never agreed with me. I repeatedly found myself in conflict with teachers and professors. I left high school after my sophomore year; and although I spent several years in college, I never bothered to graduate.

Actually, it’s probably true that school disagrees with most boys.  Especially now that school is so feminized and gun-free.  As Ruth Dudley Edwards puts it:

The feminisation of education and the ensuing triumph of political correctness have turned generations of boys off reading, not least by urging them to get in touch with their feelings and despise that part of themselves that wants to see heroes biffing villains.

You mean the way that Brigadier Ritchie Hook used to go on about “biffing” in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour series?

Perhaps they could read The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden and

swot up on the solar system, learn about famous battles and read inspiring stories of incredible courage and bravery. Teach your old dog new tricks. Make a pinhole camera

and so on.  But it’s not just school that boys don’t like.  It’s classes in general.

Women are always going to classes to learn something, even if it is “tennis, wine-tasting, sailing.”  Then they complain because they don’t meet any men there, writes Ann Althouse.  It’s the old story.

Because, after all, you know that if you’re going to explain gender difference, you’ve got to assume that whatever the women are doing is good, and it’s the men who have the problem. So: You know those men. They think they’re so smart. You can’t tell them anything. They won’t ask for directions.

Let’s look at the male side of this, shall we?  Althouse continues.

Men prefer to look at something they have decided to do and figure it out on their own. They like to observe, analyze, and discover. They accept the risks and enjoy the excitement of trial and error. They don’t like sitting around having someone tell them what to do, and they aren’t intrigued by the prospect of meeting women who spend so much time doing something they loathe.

OK, she admits.  She made that up.

Then there’s this from Althouse’s comment section.

My daughter, just yesterday, looks at me as we were watching television and says, "What’s with this stupid female superiority thing?"
She elaborated a little bit... no matter what[,] the girls on TV were always right. Smarter, wiser, etc.

Out of the mouths of babes...

Dems Can't Break the Habit

Despite their promise of moderation and transparency last November the Democrats can’t break the habit of taxing and spending, reports Senate Minority Leader John Boehner writes that the Democrats recently tried to change the House rules to allow them to vote for raising taxes without leaving their fingerprints on the vote.  That’s not what Democrats promised last year.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Ca.) said in December, “[W]e promised the American people that we would have the most honest and most open government and we will.”

It’s sad but true that political parties do not get into office on the strength of their programs.  They get into power because the voters can’t stand the other party for another minute.

Iraq: After the Americans Leave

Conservatives think that when the United States leaves Iraq that all hell will break loose, and maybe it will.

But this article from StrategyPage shows that behind all the bombs and explosions there is a slow motion civil war and sorting out process going on.

Several years of having a Shia majority running the country has instilled a confidence in the Shia community that has not been felt in generations.

Of course there’s the question of Iranian influence.  But the Iraqi Shias  are beginning to think "we can do this."  Maybe they can survive without Iran.

Another interesting thought is what “counter-insurgency” will look like after the Americans leave.  Think Hamat in Syria.

But with U.S. troops gone, the Iraqi security forces will be inclined to wage war the traditional way. That means massive use of firepower against civilians in any neighborhood where the Sunni Arab terrorists show up, or are found. In Syria, the 1982 uprising by Islamic radicals was put down, in part, by the destruction of the town of Hamat, and the massacre of over 10,000 civilians there. That was meant as a message to the rebels.

It’s a message that everyone in the Middle East remembers, and a tradition that everyone understands.  And once the Americans leave, “that will no longer be a problem.”

Who Defeated the Soviet Union?

In hindsight, everyone knew that the Soviet Union was bound to collapse.  Conservatives knew that it was the firmness of Ronald Reagan.  Liberals suddenly discovered that the Soviet Union was bound to collapse anyway—although they had cleverly avoided telling anyone before 1991.

But  Yegor Gaidar in his book, The Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, has a different take.  It all started when the Bolsheviks were deciding how to develop the Soviet Union in 1928-29.  Should they allow peasant argiculture and the market system while still hanging onto political power?  Or should they choose another way?

The solution preferred by Joseph Stalin was the expropriation of peasants’ property, forced collectivization, and extraction of grain. Judging from the available documents, the essence of this decision was relatively simple. Bukharin and Rykov essentially told Stalin: "In a peasant country, it is impossible to extract grain by force. There will be civil war." Stalin answered, "I will do it nonetheless."

The problem was that the forced expropriation of grain to feed the industrialization of the cities (the strategy also used by Mao) resulted in widespread famine in the countryside.

That might be fine, temporarily, while the industrial sector got up to speed, but unfortunately, it never did.  The industrial output of the Soviet Union never came up to world-class standards. As Nikolai Ryzhkov, chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, put it

 "No one will take our machinery production. That is why we are exporting mainly raw materials."

And nobody has ever argued that the Soviets had a clue when it came to consumer products.

Fortunately, the Soviets got a lucky break in the 1970s.  The oil price explosion and oil discoveries in western Siberia enabled them to pay for grain imports by exporting oil. Then came the fateful day in 1985.

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

It cost the Soviet Union $20 billion a year that it needed by buy grain from abroad.  For a few years the Soviets were able to stay afloat by borrowing money from the West.  Then came the crunch.  The banks refused to continue lending.

Anatoly Cherniayev described the situation in Moscow in March 1991:

If [the grain] cannot be obtained somewhere, famine may come by June. . . . Moscow has probably never seen anything like that throughout its history—even in its hungriest years.

And that was the end of the Soviet Union.

So maybe now we can understand why the United States has had such a chummy relationship with the Saudis.  They threw the switch that ended the Soviet Union.

Now if only they would throw the switch on their Wahabi mosques and their poisonous imams.

Jerry Falwell and Enthusiastic Christianity

What are we to say about Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist Christian pastor who founded the Moral Majority?  Was he a moral hero, pushing back against a culture of immorality?  Or was he a hate-filled bigot?  For a lot of heat, but not much light, you can read the comments section after a recollection of Falwell by R. Albert Mohler Jr. here.

The facts of Falwell’s life, as reported by Kristen Gelineau, are these.

Falwell, who started a fundamentalist church in an abandoned bottling plant in Lynchburg in 1956 with just 35 members, built it into a religious empire that included the 24,000-member Thomas Road Baptist Church, the "Old Time Gospel Hour" carried on TV stations around the country, and 9,600-student Liberty University, which he founded in 1971 as Lynchburg Baptist College.

But what did it all mean?  The best place I have found is James M. Ault, Jr’s Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church—as experienced, we should say, by a liberal sociologist at the very apogee of the Moral Majority in 1983-84.

The pastor of the Shawmut River Baptist Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, was Frank Valenti, who started out as an Italian Catholic.  He’d barely learned to read in school and was badly wounded in Vietnam.  It was when lying wounded that he got religion, and ended up studying to be a pastor at Falwell’s Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg.

The curriculum at the college was heavy on hands-on education and light on academics, but “its modest reading assignments proved too much for Frank.”  But still, he graduated and founded his own Baptist church in Worcester.

Like Frank, the people drawn to fundamentalist Christianity are people on the cusp of literacy.  They are people making the transition from the culture of the spoken word to the culture of the written word.  And Bible study is the center of the experience, for it is through reading and discussing the Bible that fundamentalist Christians negotiate the transition from the world of the spoken word (tradition means passing on knowledge with the spoken word) to the world of the written word.

And reading is a challenge for them. “Wow, I skipped a whole bunch of words there,” says one man at Bible study.

Reading itself proved a challenge for others around the table, too, especially the men, whose time and attention at school had often been more limited than the women’s.

But the combination of reading and discussion creates a new culture. Here is one of the church members, Phil Strong.

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us answers.  He would open up God’s word and say, “OK, here’s what God has for you.’”

It is important to appreciate the radical nature of what has happened to a person who says that.  They are living right at the intersection of the traditional world of the spoken word and the newly experience world of the written word.  It is an experience that we, who cannot imagine an illiterate world, can barely grasp.

But of course to many the culture of the fundamentalist church is something to be stamped out.  As one Newsweek commenter wrote:

Jerry Falwell was a parasite who fed on fear, ignorance, and bigotry.

Well, yes—if you believe that exploration and creativity and tolerance are the most important, maybe the only values.  But fundamentalist Christianity is not for people in that kind of mind space. 

Fundamentalist or enthusiastic Christianity for people experiencing the “leap in being” from the world of power and powerlessness to the world of rules.  That is why it flourishes in the favelas of South America and the slums of southern Africa.

And for millions of people, it is the Bible and the desire to read it and understand it that brings them to literacy.