There are some legitimate concerns about the former. A nation ought to have a secure border and need not accept persons in the country unlawfully as a complete fait accompli, entitled to all the accoutrements of citizenship. But mass deportations are both unrealistic and undesirable and our economic woes are not caused by hard-working Mexicans.
Trump and Sanders' railing against free trade simply highlights their shared economic ignorance. And, no, the fact that you can make money on real estate deals and licensing your name does not mean you understand how governments ought to regulate - and not regulate - markets. It means you know how to get yours. Nothing wrong with that, but it is not necessarily a translatable skill in this context.
But Sanders and Trump are doing well (although neither will ever command a majority) and much of their appeal is not about the particulars of immigration policy or international trade, but, as I say, the sentiment. It is about the notion that our problems can be blamed on someone else. They are doing something to us. What we need to do is blame them.
The #BlackLivesMatter movement operates in an equally emotion-laden but fact free environment. There are indeed enormous problems - including enormous problems with violence in the black community - but they are not caused by the police. Even if we assume that all are unjustified, officer-involved shootings are, at most, a rounding error in calculating black victimization rates. Indeed, while the question is vexed, it is not clear that blacks who have contact with police are more likely than whites who have contact with police to become involved in a violent confrontation with officers.
Anytime a police officer uses force against a citizen a thorough investigation is in order. Because we must allow some people to use lethal force to enforce the law, we must ensure that they use it only to enforce the law and only to enforce it. But politicizing the question is flat out demagoguery.
And it is evasive demagoguery. It is the demagoguery of a grievance industry that has failed to deliver in much the same way as the nativists egged on by Trump and Sanders will fail to deliver.
Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.
And it is evasive demagoguery. It is the demagoguery of a grievance industry that has failed to deliver in much the same way as the nativists egged on by Trump and Sanders will fail to deliver.
Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.
1 comment:
Well, Rick, the arguments pro/con about closed economies were settled by Keynes when he wrote his first book, demonstrating that Keynesian pump-priming ONLY works in a closed economy. (Correspondingly, we find Ricardo's arguments to be circular.)
And yes: the problems with the US economy are the creation of its inhabitants/voters from roughly 1950-date. Fine. What, exactly, would the libertarians propose to remedy the problem? Massive deflation, or massive inflation? And how would either be more or less 'damaging' than deporting 11 million people who are here illegally?
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