Borders and the Welfare State

“Milton Friedman, the great economist, said it’s just obvious that you cannot have free immigration and a welfare state." - Rush Limbaugh

While the American economy is faltering, millions of illegal aliens are flooding across the southern border, to the cheers of the leftists everywhere. In the fiscal year of 2022 alone, over 2.76 million illegal aliens were encountered at the southern border. Obviously, this number is low. Many more evaded detection. These people end up largely on the welfare system, which is already heavily burdened. 55% of noncitizen households were on at least one government welfare program in 2018, a number which has likely gone up with the influx of illegal immigrants and the government-ordered lockdowns that put people out of work. As of 2018, over 67 million people were on Medicaid alone, not counting other programs. In 2012, 21.3% of the population took government aid, a number that assuredly, between massive immigration, and the lockdowns, has exploded. As of 2015, 71% of the federal budget consists of entitlement spending, between welfare, social security, Medicare, and other programs. As a result, the national government is effectively bankrupt with a debt of over 31.5 trillion at the time of writing (not including unfunded obligations). Illegal migration is playing a role in bankrupting the United States.

Rush, quoting the late Milton Friedman, understood clearly the role that open borders would have in destroying the United States. “Milton Friedman, the great economist, said it’s just obvious that you cannot have free immigration and a welfare state. Now, the left and all of their members, the left says, we must have open borders. And they give as their reason social justice, and it’s all rooted in this cockamamie belief that the United States has spread misery and suffering around the world, and we’ve done it in any number of ways. Our superpower status derives from theft and consumption. We simply gone out around the world and taken everything we wanted. We stole it from there, we stole it from over there, we took it from that group, we took it from that country. We’ve enriched ourselves at the expense of the world, and so the world is in dire straits because we exist as a superpower. It’s simply, it’s not fair, it’s not right that one country should have so much and the rest of the world should have so little. And so the left believes in open borders.” Rush was prescient as always. He saw that the left was in pursuit of a form of international equity. Countries with a history of being strong, prosperous, and powerful cannot be allowed to remain so. That would be inequitable to the historically marginalized and oppressed peoples of the world. Therefore, the rich and powerful countries must be brought low, and the weak and poor countries must be raised up. While Rush did not use the term, there is a historical policy for such a reckless economic policy: Marxism. 

It is intolerable to the Marxists of the left that everything is not equal. Not equal for equality's sake, but equal for the sake of making people equally miserable. It is not misery purely for misery's sake, however. The leftist theoreticians believe that making people miserable is the way to turn them into revolutionary change agents. People who have a good life are unlikely to risk it by rioting against the regime to install a communist one. People who are suffering, however, are much more likely to rise up because they have nothing to lose. And revolution must happen for the statists to achieve the utopian end of history that they are desperately seeking. Therefore everyone must be miserable. 

With these two premises, everything the left does makes perfect sense. The left (and even sections of the right), has been completely captured by these beliefs. The actions of the left, at least at the top, are not well-intentioned gestures to help people. They are designed to create a class of revolutionaries to create their utopia. This is why open borders are a must for the left. Equity is the smokescreen they use to cover for the fact that they are intentionally trying to destroy the financial system of the United States.

Let me explain how this works. The left seeks to all allow the borders to be open. Millions of migrants, refugees, and illegal aliens flood into the country. They go on the government dole (not all, but many). To pay for the entitlements that these individuals and others receive, the government prints & borrows money, lots of it. Like anything else, the more common something is, the less valuable it becomes. The more dollars go into circulation, the less valuable an individual dollar is. In effect, this causes inflation. Prices rise and your paycheck no longer goes as far. If you were close anyway, maybe you too end up on a government program. Now even more money needs to be printed and it cycles down until the system can no longer support the financial strain and collapses. 

The above paragraph only considers one aspect of the problem. The incoming people need to live somewhere, so government housing must be built, or rooms rented for them. This costs even more money, which does not magically appear. It must be printed. That puts even more money in circulation, driving up inflation even more. That does not account for the increased demand on governmental services (police, fire etc), or the strain on the court system, the job market, or local governments become swamped with new arrivals. 

A welfare state can only work when it is highly limited and maintains a high population of people who are not taking from the system. Even in such a case, it is open to abuse, theft, and fraud. However, neither of the critical variables necessary for a stable welfare state is true now. Almost a quarter of Americans are on government assistance, not including all the illegals benefitting from it fraudulently. That number is only going up. Something has to give. Conservatives have been claiming to be interested in entitlement reform and closing the border for decades, yet entitlement spending continues to increase and the border remains wide open. 

As mentioned in the previous post on leadership, conservative ideas need to be presented and adopted on their merits. If they are not, if they dither, then the extreme left will have their national equity concepts unchallenged. If adopted, the misery that may  follow will match Manduro’s Venezuela where food is rationed and the currency is so worthless piles of it lay in the streets. The time to act is now. It will always be painful to close the border and defund entitlements but we cannot continue passing the buck. Someone will have to pay the bill eventually, and, if we refuse to act, it will be our kids. Conservatives need to step up and propose bold, effective action.   Where do we start?, balanced budgets, reduced deficits, reduced spending are great places to begin.     

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