I have long had a heart for those men who risked leaving family for a season to make good money with hard work to provide their family a better life. I too had to leave one state with my wife and kids and be employed in another necessitating weekend commutes and double housing expense.
I too know that the current distribution system of taking money from those working and giving a percentage of it to others who don’t work is fundamentally flawed, and then add on to that the giving of this money also to those that cross an imaginary line called a “border”. What most people do not understand that inside this line are other lines that reflect private property. The US footprint is not all government land, and, all government land is essentially, the people’s. But I digress.
The bottom line is that governments do not really care about people, they just want to be the middleman in all the transactions. They actually prefer that families break up so that they can be the “father” who provides for the kids. When you come to terms with the dysfunction of the government you then know why our society is getting increasingly dysfunctional. Government has become people’s god. For a good book on this, try Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “Democracy – The God That Failed” (there may be free PDF versions available).
The following Mises article from 2006 highlights the conundrum:
- The philosophy of individual rights and capitalism implies that foreigners have a right to come and to live and work here, i.e., to immigrate into the United States. The land of the United States is owned by individuals and voluntary associations of individuals, such as private business firms. It is not owned by the United States government or by the American people acting as a collective; indeed many of the owners of land in the United States are not Americans, but foreign nationals, including foreign investors. The private owners of land have the right to use or sell or rent their land for any peaceful purpose. This includes employing immigrants and selling them food and clothing and all other goods, and selling or renting housing to them. If individual private landowners are willing to accept the presence of immigrants on their property as employees, customers, or tenants, that should be all that is required for the immigrants to be present. Anyone else who attempts to determine the presence of absence of immigrants is simply an interfering busybody ready to use a gun or club to impose his will.
- … the philosophy of individual rights and capitalism implies that the immigrants do not have a right to be supported at public expense, which is a violation of the rights of the taxpayers. Of course, it is no less a violation of the rights of the taxpayers when native-born individuals are supported at public expense. The immigrants are singled out for criticism based on the allegation that they in particular are making the burden intolerable.
To satisfy both of these rights, one has to undo what the US has done since the 1930s when the welfare state was brought on the scene “for the common good”
What we see today is a reflection of a principle that Mises himself proposed, as George Reisman from this Mises article points out:
This is a classic illustration of Mises’s principle that prior government intervention into the economic system breeds later intervention. Here the application of his principle is, start with the Welfare State, end with the Police State. A police state is what is required effectively to stop substantial illegal immigration that has become a major burden because of the Welfare State.
Our government loves it that people are divided along this continuum since it is viewed as an innocent bystander to this hot-button issue.
Government is 99% of the problem. Those educated, inoculated and propagandized by the state will never see it.
-SF1