Thursday link roundup

• Church Sign Wars - very good
• What Russia Wants - written by my old Boss at Cato
  
• The path to citizenship - it makes illegal immigration much more understandable
• Making money twice - a very good read
• Julian Sanchez put it very well with

  we’re perpetually told the fundamental cause of the ongoing meltdown is Wall Street “greed,” as though that somehow counted as an explanation. How, pray, would we describe it if mortgage lenders had rejected many more applications from lower-income folks, on the grounds that they were poor risks? Well, greed, of course. Pretty much whatever they did, they’d be doing because they expected it to maximize their profit; the issue is their judgement, not their motives. Or put another way: The problem isn’t that people were greedy, it’s that they weren’t very good at being greedy.

• Ron Paul fades into further irrelevance
• More Bailout - Yglesias posits what is hopefully a liberal dilemma

  Simply put, if congressional Democrats manage to acquiesce in a plan that spends $700 billion on a bailout while doing nothing for average working people and giving the taxpayer virtually no upside in a way that guarantees that even electoral victory would give an Obama administration no resources with which to implement a progressive domestic agenda in 2009 then everyone’s going to have to give serious consideration to becoming a pretty hard-core libertarian.

• A nice article on Obama's community organizing days - notices the lack of anything measurable.
  

Finally, a problem we can blame on the Mexicans

It's not a major problem, but from some reason they (Mexicans) bicycle approaching traffic, which is the way it's done in Mexico, but not in America. This endangers the cyclist as the amount of time between perception and action is dramatically reduced for both parties, which means that they have less time to avoid each other. It's particularly bad at night. Also the Tullock Effect is reduced as avoidance is not the clear responsibility of either party.

I saw three people doing it yesterday.

We're entering the age of the Loner!

I came across this article on diversity and society somewhere on the City Journal. To quote:

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.

It all makes sense, the more diverse, the less one has in common with one's neighbors. The less one has in common, the fewer common goals, the more group competition and the payoff for community action is less. Therefore, you get less of it.

This would explain why people tend to live near people a lot like them. It would be upsetting to people who think we should all live in neatly arranged boxes supporting the "community" goals instead of our own individual ones. I think there's lots of hugging in those boxes too.

Immigration solved!

It would seem that Mexican women are having fewer babies. I'm always skeptical about stats from poor counties, but it is interesting. Immigration is one area where the demographic argument is compelling and probably correct. I've come to find the "Western Civilization is doomed due to low birth rates" argument viable.

An interesting article from Zakaria

It meanders a bit, but Fareed Zakaria makes a good case for optimism in this Newsweek article. One bit that caught my eye was

To recover its place in the world, America first needs to recover its confidence. For those who look at the future and see challenges, competition and threats, keep in mind that this new world has been forming over the last 20 years, and the United States has forged ahead amid all the turmoil. In 1980, the U.S. share of global GDP was 20 percent. Today it is 29 percent.

It's a staggering thought. 20% is a huge chunk relative to population, and for that to increase is massive. It's an interesting tidbit.

We should be more confident; America has never been strong because of political leadership, but the average person here has room to excel. 15 million illegal immigrants can't be wrong!

A good post on immigration

From Kerry Howley in Reason

The greatest distortion for Chadian farmers is not American cotton subsidies, writes Pritchett, but that “farmers from Chad have to farm in Chad—and not farm in France, Poland, or Canada.”

Lou Dobbs is the perfect man of the age

By repeating the dumber parts of the conventional wisdom in a solemn tone he continues to be taken seriously. Case in point, his newest CNN.com column (he drags down the whole franchise IMHO) A call to the faithful. It's an adventure in the non sequitur. While lauding the separation of church and state he points to examples of church based groups having opinions on matters of pure politics, i.e. Iraq and immigration.

Neither of those are religious matters. If they were trying to implement Sharia, force church attendance, establish a state religion or mandate that government personnel had to be of a particular sect, or any sect, that would be one thing. But these are either pro/anti war choices, or pro/anti amnesty choices, which have no inherent religious significance. Religious people may care a lot about them of course, but so can a lot of people. He then quotes Romans 13, with

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

In a democracy, the governing authority is the people, and the above verse would seem to encourage public participation in the process. Dobbs would seem to want separation of people and state.

Lou Dobbs continues his fight against the brown peril...

This time with verbal jousting against America's other adulterous, Catholic mayor Gavin Newsom. It produced this little gem

Dobbs, an outspoken critic of illegal immigration who hosts an opinionated evening news hour, criticized San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on Monday, saying he and immigrant protection advocates "might as well work for Hermann Goering. I mean, they're running so much propaganda, trying to confuse the debate, the national dialogue, by talking about immigrants rather than illegal aliens and legal immigrants. It's mindless beyond belief.

Never mind that Goebbels was the propaganda minister, (Goering commanded the Luftwaffe), and never mind that the source of the gripe is that Newsom is refusing to allow local police to enforce immigration law. Never mind that the appropriate German/Nazi comparison to draw (if one must be drawn, Godwin's law must be obeyed) is to Admiral Canaris (who helped hundreds of Jews escape the Nazis while he headed the Abwehr).

But don't think of that, just think of the huge social advances if we brought back dueling. Huge swathes of hacks, apparachiks and fashionable non-conformists would be removed from the gene pool at no cost to the taxpayer. Still others, when forced to put up or shut up, would shut up (or at least try).

We could finally resolve all the pointless debates; is illegal immigration a huge problem that we're not going to do anything about, or is it a charitable endeavor that we're not going to do anything about. We would finally know!

Perfectly put

Don Boudreaux put it very well in his open letter to Lou Dobbs. Why he's taken more seriously than Bill O'Reilly or Cynthia McKinney I'll never know.

Quick Monday rapid fire - fun addition

• On the matter of remittances by immigrants to foreign countries

  Moreover, remittances are far more likely to make their way to people who actually need them. American aid tends to be received by governments, which in most third world countries are not especially honest. So the majority of American foreign aid never makes it to actual poor people in the developing world. In contrast, Latino immigrants are wiring money directly to their mothers. They know exactly who’s getting the money, and they’d hear about it if the government stole it from them. It probably even has foreign policy benefits, as the remitters are likely to have a generally positive impression of America and to transmit that impression along with their remittances.

  And the best part about all this is that it doesn’t cost us a dime! All we have to do is let them scrub our toilets and pick our strawberries. We get lower prices on the goods and services we buy and we get the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing we’re helping to alleviate Latin American poverty. It’s such an incredible win-win arrangement that I find it rather depressing that it’s considered controversial in American politics. Increased immigration is a cause that should unite liberals (with their concern for social justice) and conservatives (with their belief in hard work and entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, that’s not how the issue has played out in the real world.

  Very well put.
  

• Gun toting robots!
• From the mouths of ad executives
• An original knife holder
• Easily the best use of Flash I've seen in months
• Quotes from Jim Webb, the Marine veteran and aspiring Democratic Senator from Virginia. Though nothing beats him saying "I wouldn't walk across the street to watch Jane Fonda slash her wrists."
• A FoxNews empolyee gets waterboarded, sadly it's not their web designers (their site gets worse by the day, though, still no Lou Dobbs, happily)
• Iron Man is about to be real!
• This looks quite interesting
  

Abortion and immigration

A long one.

I predict that soon someone will make some correlation between legal abortion and increased illegal immigration, similar to Steven Levitt's abortion-crime idea as told in his book Freakonomics.

For those of you who haven't read the book it spends a lot of time explaining his theory that abortions are disproportionately had by women who would otherwise bear criminal children (to put it bluntly). Those children are never born, which reduces the number of criminals, which reduces crime rates. He has a large amount of documentation and math to support this idea. Bear in mind that the 80-20 rule applies here, something like 20% of the women who get abortions have 80% of all abortions.

A similar idea (unique to me so far) is that were there no abortion, there would be many more children who would grow up to be low-skilled, low wage workers. That creates an artificial void on the bottom of the income ladder, which the Mexicans and other illegals fill.

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I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and it's all part of my emerging theory on open-source eugenics and artificial evolution, which I'll explain more when I flesh it out.

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On a related note, the pro-choice argument and the usual nativist argument are essentially the same. There is ownership in a country, as there is in one's body. It is up to the owner; the citizens of the country collectively or the individual woman to determine who can be there (to put it crassly). Every child is a wanted child, and every immigrant, is a legal immigrant.

Or that's what I think right now anyway. Thoughts anyone?

Wednesday rapid fire

• Immigrants' Jobless Rate Falls Below U.S. Natives'

  The jobless rate among immigrants fell below that of U.S.-born workers last year for the first time in at least a decade, according to new government data, during a hiring boom by construction, hospitality, and other companies that rely heavily on immigrant labor.
  
  Unemployment among immigrants was 4.6 percent in 2005, down from 5.5 percent in 2004. The jobless rate among native-born Americans was 5.2 percent, down from 5.5 percent a year before.

  That falls in line with Glenn Reynolds' comment of

  One difference between the demonstrations in France and the demonstrations in America: The French are demonstrating for the right not to work hard, while the demonstrators in America mostly want to work.

• How to Pull an All-Nighter
• Michael Yon is back
• Classic Tough Guy One Liners, my favorites

  
  "Fools get away with the impossible.",
  "She couldn't be all bad. Nobody is.' "She comes closest",
  and
  "You're better off than me... You got me for a buddy... I only got you."

• A nice general article on plug-in hybrids.

Well worth watching

On a related note, everyone should check out the most recent BloggingHeads, which features a very interesting dialogue between James Pinkerton and Mickey Kaus. Very good bigthink about the future (and a lovely new term, technological determinism) and immigration.

One quibble is that he reiterates the theory held by most people, which is that we could reduce illegal immigration to a trickle without much effort by building a wall. It's similar to the thought that we could win the drug war if only we tried harder.

The government can't keep drugs out of prisons, and the Soviets had the biggest police state in history, and they had tremendous drug problems. It's ridiculous to think while we can't successfully ban inanimate objects, we can successfully ban animate ones.

I imagine we'll do what we're doing with the drug war, which is spend a lot of money and civil liberties to create self-perpetuating interest groups (much like the classic bootleggers and Baptists unions of the prohibition era) and to deal with the actual problems as poorly as possible.

For the record I think sanctions on employers is the most effective way of dealing with the total number of illegal immigrants (not that it will do that much) and the main thing we should be doing (if we insist on some collective action) is to rapidly Americanize the immigrants that are here. Put simply, we need to change the Mexicans living here into Americans of Hispanic descent and throw this whole notion of multiculturalism away (the illegal immigrants did).

There's not much more to say.....

Everything that needs to written about the current green line conflict (to use hip internationalist jargon) in Denmark has been written. I suppose the underlying theme is the need for people to participate in a society to a strong degree.

It is a good display of spine by the Danes; I imagine we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future as multiculturalism wears thin for the Europeans, and diminishing marginal returns (as it becomes easier to move about that part of the world) on immigration.

I went back to Marginal Revolution, and came across this post, The Unreported Mexican Immigration Story which makes the point that Mexican immigration increases as Mexicans get rich enough to leave. Well worth reading.

Get riled up with the AJC!

Naturally I was drawn to Cynthia Tucker and her column "So . . . illegals can work but can't learn?"

Since 2000, Georgia's colleges have employed a sensible policy that recognizes the academic potential of some illegal immigrants without swamping the state treasury. The Board of Regents voted to allow public colleges and universities to admit them if they pay out-of-state tuition rates. But the regents also gave each college president the latitude to waive that higher tuition for a limited number of students. That policy has worked well.

When I took a public finance class (around 1995 or so) at UGA I remember hearing that tuition covered about 20% of the actual cost of college for the average student. Out of state tuition was about two and a half times that of in-state tuition, so even if illegals are paying the out of state rate taxpayers are still picking up part of the bill. They are also displacing legal students who would otherwise be accepted. Also note how government acceptance of illegal activity doesn't faze her at all.

She closes with

But Johnson has described employers who hire undocumented workers as only "part of the problem. If they [illegal immigrants] are here working and not using taxpayer funds, that's not as much of a burden." So, he said, he and his colleagues will take a close look at any proposal to crack down on hiring practices, making sure new laws don't "impose an undue burden" on employers. After all, business executives are a reliable GOP constituency, and they fight any move to curb their access to cheap labor.

Apparently, Georgia's official policy is this: We like illegal immigrants just fine, as long as they work for dirt and stay out of sight. They're welcome to pay state income tax and local sales taxes, but that's where the welcome ends.

Well, yes. You try to maximize the benefits while minimizing the price. How revolutionary. One thing to note, is that the current situation is entirely dependent upon the voluntary behavior of the illegal immigrants. Under the reign of cruel business they still don't have to come here.

About 9 years ago I attended a Future of Freedom Foundation seminar on illegal immigration led by Jacob Hornberger (who, if memory serves was a really nice guy and a class act in general) who suggested that we let them come over to work but deny them all health, social and educational benefits. His prediction was that our kids would work for their kids.

I think that's worth a shot. It's certainly better than the look the other way policy we have now. It would also keep the self selection going in the right direction.

Last of the old cell pictures

I found these old pictures on the cell phone so I figure I'll tell the story about them for prosperity.

Sometime last October Mark and I were out riding around downtown, afterwards we go to Moes' in Ansley. After we come out (this is in probably the most left-leaning neighborhood in a very Democratic city) we see this bumper sticker,



which really stood out in terms of humor and originality. All the other bumper stickers (on around 90% of cars) were fairly juvenile and stale.

We exchanged a good chuckle and I took the picture (note reflection).

Up comes a large steroidal guy who sees me taking the picture and goes "You want to see a good bumper sticker, look at this one". We then go to his car and he has this one.



He then mistook my saying "That's pretty good too" (which it is) for "Elaborate on the topic. Tell me all your feelings on immigration and how your background informed your opinion; don't omit anything. Go back generations in your family if you have to but make sure I understand your position completely."

Which he did for the next 20 minutes or so.