Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blogLike stray dogs drawn to an open sewer, after a bitter election, the Democrats and Republicans have found themselves drawn together to illegal alien amnesty.
Big business has always supported cheap labor, which is why the Republican establishment has always been eager to dash away from its base to back the latest amnesty gimmick. Illegal alien amnesty however is even more damaging to the voting base for the Democrats, but that hasn't stopped the AFL-CIO and the NAACP, organizations whose members will take a severe beating from an illegal alien amnesty, from joining the amnesty parade.
After a decade, illegal alien amnesty that leads to citizenship and family reunification will kill the ability of the Republican Party to win national elections. But it will also kill the ability of black men under 30 to find a job. Black unemployment is already staggeringly high and throwing in millions of new low-skilled workers will make urban centers more blighted and dangerous than they are now.
But nobody in D.C. cares about that, even though many of the blighted neighborhoods are not all that far away from the gilded centers of power.
Big government needs cheap voters. Big business needs cheap labor. Big government wants big business to pick up the tab for their cheap votes through higher taxes. Big business wants cheap labor without having to pay for their social welfare benefits. After the obligatory tug of war wraps up, the tab for all those cheap votes and cheap labor will be dumped on the middle class which is being forced to fund its own destruction.
Cheap labor can lower the cost of production, but raises the cost of government. Cheap votes raise the cost of government and that raises the cost of production. Cheap labor cannot outrun the cost of cheap votes. Non-voting cheap labor is a social problem. Cheap votes are a political problem. Either way you end up with a welfare state and a police state combining into a nanny state.
The traditional American way out of this cycle was through the middle class, but that is less of an option now. Big government is still promising that a college degree will turn anyone into a member of the middle class, but that's a myth meant to subsidize the government-academia complex which has dumped a huge burden of debt on the children of the middle class while handing out worthless degrees to all comers. The debt is real, the jobs aren't.
College degrees don't create a middle class. Neither does the occasional tech boom out of Silicon Valley. The American middle class had three traditional gateways. Small business, manufacturing work and government jobs. Only government jobs is still booming and big government can't hire everyone. The people it has hired have become a ticking time bomb of unfunded pensions that once again falls on the rest of the middle class.
The original middle class expanded itself. The new middle class is a government toll road paid for by the shrinking middle class. While the government talks about opportunity, what it is really doing is reducing the middle class to a taxpayer-subsidized bureaucratic caste that there will be no one left to subsidize.
Amnesty creates more "clients" for the government bureaucracy to oversee while making it harder for the lower class to make it up to the middle class outside the government's toll road. It feeds in more cheap labor and cheap votes into the machine with the same old results.
Big government does not need a middle class. It needs a large underclass to exploit for cheap votes. Without the middle class it can have no revenue, but its sense of mathematical realities is so poor that it treats numbers as imaginary and government as a creator, rather than consumer, of wealth. Like most parasites, it would rather kill the middle class and then die, then stop drinking the middle class dry at least long enough for it to recover.
Amnesty is a declaration of war by big government and big business against the American middle class. It is a statement that they have no room for the middle class in their vision of the country.
The latest amnesty deal has goodies for everyone. There will be cheap tech labor for Silicon Valley, some of which will eventually try to blow up skyscrapers, bridges and tunnels. But we'll pin a Green Card on them first and worry about the consequences later. There will be the promise of more border patrol officers, in the hopes of shutting up their labor union which has been rather vocal lately. And a guest worker program, which as any European country can tell you, is actually an emigrant program.Is the United States hard up for cheap labor? Hardly. Unemployment rates are staggeringly bad, and the average legalized illegal alien is here as unskilled labor. Even if the United States had a shortage of unskilled labor, importing unskilled laborers in large numbers has disastrous results during an economic downturn when the jobs dry up.
The American ghetto was created when the northern urban manufacturing jobs imploded, first as the GIs returned from WW2 and then as manufacturing moved overseas. Europe imported cheap labor when times were good and then watched them build No Go Zones when the times became bad. Cheap labor brought back street riots to European capitals and turned burning cars into a national pastime. It also opened the door to a whole new generation of terrorism.
Unskilled labor can go two places. To the legal economy and the illegal economy. Not only does the United States have high unemployment, but Obama's proposal of a minimum wage hike will make the bottom of the labor market even more blighted. If the employers of legalized illegals are exempt from ObamaCare, they will crowd out existing low wage laborers, also mostly minorities, and force them into surviving on government subsidies or working in the illegal economy. Probably both.
Either way unions looking to stem the illegal competition will still be stymied, but that is a problem for union members, not union bosses. The union bosses have decided that their interests lie in helping Democrats get ahead, no matter what. Their members may lose out but unions are dwindling anyway and turning toward a European model where they may not have large memberships, but they will enjoy guaranteed status in government contracts and on contractor boards. The unions will become a shell, but a very profitable shell, and they will continue to give the Democrats their small percentage of the white male non-college graduate vote.
The Democrats screw each part of their electorate separately, but balance it out with cheap goodies that seem like a prize in the short term. The Republicans back the cheap goodie giveaways and screw their own base collectively, and then belatedly wake up and begin asking who is going to pay for all the goodies. The answer, of course, is that the taxpayers will go on paying for it, directly and indirectly, as the economy continues being dismantled as a result of the destructive economic policies that have led to short term booms, but long term busts.
Both sides have a plan. The plan is to wait for the other side to collapse. The Democrats are waiting for the free market to collapse. The Republicans are waiting for big government to collapse. But neither is particularly sincere about it. Both are probably likely to win out in the end.
Government overregulation is making life harder for big business, but that just means that manufacturing goes abroad and those same products are made by Chinese workers and exported to the United States. Big business service industries will outsource what they can and weather the rest. Companies that can put down millions in lobbying capital and even more hiring experts who were formerly employed by Federal agencies to help them navigate the new regulations have only so much to worry about. It's small business that finds it nearly impossible to operate under those conditions.
Big government crafts overreaching regulations which big business fills with loopholes leaving behind a cage for small business. That describes ObamaCare and most of the regulatory state. And this is how it will go on being for the foreseeable future.
Big attracts big. Crony capitalism is a lot easier than actual capitalism. Why make bets when you can finance sure things with heaps of government money? America's new elite looks a lot like Russia or China's elite, an oligarchy that blends big government and big business, big bribes and big contracts.
The Chinese system makes up for its abuses by generating manufacturing jobs at a furious rate and expanding the middle class. Once it stops doing that, the whole system will probably crash, and half of China will turn into the rust belt, full of ex-farmers turned factory workers with no farms or factories to work at.
But the American system has become no better, tossing out technocratic gimmicks as meaningless sops to an economic disaster. In his State of the Union address, Obama promised to turn the rust belt into trading hubs full of 3D printers. He might as well have promised to hand out magic beans to everyone in the area.
The Democrats did their part to destroy American industry and their liberal base makes reviving it impossible. The furious attacks by environmentalists on the Keystone pipeline is why any plans to revive manufacturing in America are limited to Green Energy gimmicks and even emptier talk about trading hubs.
Having killed the industries in their states Democratic state governments face hollow economies that are big on big government and empty of a tax base. But the shift of industries to red states is likely to turn them blue as populations fed on gimme rhetoric follow them in search of jobs leaving behind a scorched earth of welfare ghettos only to create new ones in their new location. The future still belongs to the Democrats, but it's a short term future that will see them presiding over rubble and ruin. A hollow victory that makes them the Ozymandias of Detroit.State governments that experience a boom are pressured to "invest" that money in education and the rest of the social welfare network that will become a sinkhole once the boom ends. And when the boom ends, then Texas is likely to become another California.
The ability to expand and sustain the middle class is what separate a failed state full of cheap labor and cheap votes from a nation. And that requires forward motion. America still has enough technical skill to create technological revolution, but lacks the infrastructure to take advantage of them. The iPhone may have come out of America, but it's built in China. Until that changes, America will not have a secure middle class.
The American worker has emerged as the collateral damage in the war between big government and big business. Amnesty for illegal aliens is the one area where both sides can agree on a truce pursuing their short term interests, at his long term expense.
Daniel Greenfield
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