He had no idea what he was letting himself in for when he came here; all he knew was that he wanted to be an American truck driver and have his own company. You and I probably couldn’t do that; we’re not psychologically prepared. We have monthly payments for, well, lots of things; our houses, our cars, our stuff. This young man had none of that; all he had was drive and determination. He had no monthly payments for anything, because he had nothing. Now he has something, and it’s paid for, and I predict he will have much, much more before he retires. That’s not to say there won’t be bumps in the road, setbacks and disappointments along the way. But he has something better than gold: the sure knowledge that it can be done. He knows that. It’s why he came here.

I submit for your consideration the argument that, this is precisely the kind of immigrant America needs the most. This young man exemplifies the kind of immigrants who really built this country and made it the richest nation on Earth. He is very much like my own grandparents, and perhaps like yours, too. I’m talking about people who came here with nothing, and who began building businesses and families on little more than hope, and faith in our absolutely unique American Dream.

We have quite enough well-to-do people here; we are up to our eyeballs in engineers, doctors, lawyers and professional people. Upper class people, professional people and rich people who choose to immigrate to America, basically, intend to come here to be safe, secure, free, comfortable, and live off the fat of the land. We all need to re-read the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty:

Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free;
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore;
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me;
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The one, main key word, among the many reasons to come here, for the kind of people addressed in that inscription, is free. They come here so that they will be free to improve their own condition and that of their current and future families. All they need to do that is to be left alone and unhindered, in a place secure from outside threats, and, most important: to be free.

People like that are quite valuable human capital; in uplifting themselves, they will, without even being aware of it, uplift their local communities and their new chosen nation. They will provide fuel for the economy, and they will generate entirely new wealth, where it didn’t exist before. The rich immigrant who comes here is looking for comfort, pure and simple. The poor immigrant who comes here is looking fulfill a dream, and to meet any challenge to that dream head-on, and overcome it. He will do something positive for our nation, whether he’s aware of it or not.

Obviously, we cannot open our borders to the whole world, or most of it would be here almost overnight. No civilized nation today allows unrestricted access across their national borders, and neither should we. We need to restrict immigration by some formula to keep the numbers manageable. But our national immigration law restriction criteria should favor the poorest over the richest, and I think today it might actually be the other way round. To our national detriment.

Regarding the Illegal Aliens: Amendment XIV of our Constitution was intended to assimilate all slaves and people of slave ancestry into the larger culture of free, voting, represented citizens. The first sentence reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

This well intended sentence has had the unintended consequence of opening a back-door path to unrestricted access to our territory for people who otherwise would be legally restricted from being here. Specifically, Mexican and other foreign citizens illegally enter the United States, give birth to babies who are then automatically American citizens, and their parent(s) is (are) thereby granted access to our territory that they would not otherwise legally enjoy. There is not much that can be done retroactively about the many who have taken advantage of this unintended loop-hole, but we can put an end to it, via the admittedly arduous path of the Constitutional amendment process. The sentence should be modified by amendment to read:

All persons born to American parents in the United States, or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

There is not much we can do about all the people who became citizens through this back-door approach taken by people who came here illegally, but we can certainly close that back door and put an end to its future use. There is nothing here that would “un-free” the slaves, since we now have no slaves, and no law may be passed and then enforced retroactively against people who may have violated it before it existed. No Amendment has any effect on what may have transpired before its passage.

Leftie-Liberal Obfuscation: The tortured Leftist terminology avoiding the term illegal alien used by those who hate national borders to begin with is both amusing and disgusting. Undocumented Workers is a popular one; and some of the millions of illegal aliens here may indeed be undocumented workers; but they are illegal aliens first. It’s pretty simple. They’re aliens, and they are here illegally. Another favored term is Illegal Immigrants, which is rather blatantly false, since they have no intention of immigrating here at all. They just want to skip back and forth across our borders illegally, make money while here, and take it back home to spend it, or to support family members. An immigrant wants to move here, to become a citizen, and to live here. That does not describe the illegal aliens at all, or, it describes damned few of them.

All we know for sure about these people is that they are alien to America and they knowingly violated the law of this country, and probably another one, in order to illegally come here. They filled out no immigration papers, they applied for no visa, or green-card, or anything else. They conspired with fellow illegal aliens, smugglers and other criminals to get here, and they periodically criminally re-cross our borders in the other direction, and then do it again. Since deporting them seems to only have the effect of having them get re-arrested here again for the same offense, they probably should be imprisoned.

One year for a first offense, five years for a second, ten for a third and each subsequent offense, each followed by deportation. It shouldn’t be too expensive or too hard to build very basic, austere, simple internment camps to house them all.

As I’ve said before, there’s nothing wrong with people crossing our borders, legally, in either direction. Thousands of people do it every single day. Doing it legally means providing the required identification and filling out all the required papers or applications, fulfilling the legal requirements of both countries involved, and then crossing the border. There’s nothing difficult about this. Every country on Earth has some similar requirements. That’s what passports and visas and similar documents are for.

Many of the illegal aliens who keep criminally crossing back and forth across our borders are other-than-smuggler type criminals and gangsters who are engaged in various criminal and gang activity, on both sides of the border. In accordance with the common criminal ethos, none of us should be surprised if these criminals cooperate with terrorists who want to criminally cross our borders too.

The real problem is this: The Leftie Liberals despise the very idea of national borders to begin with. They would prefer that we skip all other intermediary processes and move right into some form of internationalism, and call ourselves a Global Village or something similar. And they feel that we are arrogant and even nazi-fascist in our nationalistic pride when we disagree, and that we are “typical” Ugly Americans. Bottom line: Lefties are just dumber than doorknobs. To call them un-American would be a gross understatement. They are actually anti-American.

We oppose minimum wage laws and all other wage-price controls, because they make no economic sense. The minimum wage law is a nonsensical law that is violated every single day because it is so at odds with economic reality. Millions of migrant workers prove my point by working American fields and being paid “under the table” wages that are lower than the minimum wage. Almost every week some “sweat shop” is discovered and reported on in the news in American cities with bunches of laborers paid sub-minimum wages. There is a giant existing market for sub minimum wage work in America. This is not rocket science. The market will be satisfied. Millions upon millions of illegal aliens, many of whom come here every year, come here for the very purpose of illegally working at sub-minimum wage jobs.

I think some of you have misunderstood me on this. My problem with the illegal aliens is not that some of them are being paid illegally, but that they are here illegally. And my problem with their employers has nothing to do with how much or little they pay these people, but that they employ people who are here illegally. Employers convicted of knowingly employing illegal aliens should be imprisoned and heavily fined, and their businesses should be permanently shut down.

The overwhelming majority of American workers are employed at a level considerably higher than the minimum wage and are in no real danger of loosing any part of their pay. Any Americans who do not want to work for less than minimum wage do not have to do so. It is clear and obvious that a whole lot of people would have no problem at all with working in America for sub-minimum wages. The whole notion of a minimum wage induces in a population a sense of false security, in that a certain wage is an entitlement that is just due, and does not need to be earned. Big Government has a way of doing that, and establishing itself as the mommy state, and a segment of the population becomes mesmerized, and convinced that the Leviathan State exists to take care of us all. But, if the employer cannot make a profit because he has to pay a worker a minimum wage, then he will not employ the worker that he has to pay the minimum wage. Business exists for the purpose of making profit, not for the purpose of losing money.

Every time and in every way that the state interferes with wages or prices or profits the economy suffers in some way. Note that the very Leftie-Liberal Dems who call for higher minimum wages are the same ones who squeal when unemployment goes up, and who refer to all profits as “obscene”. Grand social planners just can’t leave any part of a free market alone and allow it to operate freely.

Eliminate the minimum wage and just watch what happens to the number of suddenly available jobs, and watch the mad competitive scramble of the employers to raise wages high enough, but not too high, to get the limited number of available employees to fill them. We might have to increase the allowed number of annual immigration applications to handle the overflow. You can safely bet that any employer currently paying people sub-standard wages under the table would prefer to do business more openly and legally. And that the truly exploitive ones would hate the sudden open and honest competition for their previously captive employees.

Opposition to Anti-Free Market Boycotts. Almost daily we see demonstrations and/or boycotts organized against companies such as Wal-mart because of a supposed exploitive-profit relationship between that company and some foreign “slave-driver” company and/or government, such as China. Companies like Wal-mart seek to provide products at the lowest possible prices, and that means looking all over the world for the best available wholesale prices for products.

Opponents say that they deal with the devil when they allow China, or a Chinese company, to pay workers what appears, in America, to be near slave-labor wages, perhaps some number of pennies per hour, to produce a shoe or a shirt that will be sold in America for a price that few if any in China could afford.

But the detractors do not see that they are comparing apples and oranges. The Chinese economy is not the same as the American economy. Ask the Chinese workers if they feel they are enslaved, and they probably will say no, they are not enslaved; they appreciate the employment and the ability to make money for themselves and their families, in the native economy where they work. Pennies per hour just might be pretty damned good wages in that particular part of China. You simply cannot compare some part of China to some part of America. All of this stems from the notion of equality of income and of housing and of stuff that is the central theme song of Marxism, but not of a free world market, which it opposes.

In the Leftie-Liberal view, everybody everywhere ought to be making the same wages, living at the same economic level and be exactly alike in all areas of their lives; that’s just impractical nonsense. Our money isn’t even the same. Nothing is the same, so why should the wages of a Chinese factory worker be somehow equivalent to what the average American factory worker makes?

When I was in Vietnam, there were people there who appeared – at first glance, to American eyes – to be impoverished. But over time, that first impression did not hold up. They simply lived in a completely foreign economic situation to the one we lived in; they did not consider themselves to be poor, and, in their economic environment, they were not poor. The fact, for instance, that Vietnamese money seemed ridiculously cheep, by our standards, and compared to our dollar, bore no relationship to whether the people were more or less rich or poor than we Americans were. The two different economic environments were simply too different to make any sort of comparison.

But the demonstrators and boycotters against companies like Wal-mart seem to think that those companies (or our government) should apply some kind of pressure to force wage controls, or some sort of a minimum wage, on a foreign entity not subject to our laws or our authority. Does that smell like Marxism to you?

If it’s not our country, we have no business telling them what to do. If the world’s free market is to remain free, it needs to be unhindered by extraneous interferences, most especially foreign ones. Where government interference to the point of control of a market occurs, the result is the sort of thing witnessed in the old Soviet Union. Empty store shelves; long lines of people trying to get toilet paper or something similar; shortages of everything; huge prices on things that are cheep everywhere else, and so forth. That’s what Marxist-enforced equality brings you.

Eliminating the Income Tax. Our whole tax structure in general and our income tax structure in particular has become almost impossibly complex. When most people cannot even do their own taxes, but need some form of help, or software, or professional services just to fill out their tax return, things have gotten out of hand. It may be argued that we never should have ever had an income tax instituted in the first place.

What I would prefer to do, at the federal level, would be to eliminate every form of tax save one: a national sales tax. No income tax, no property tax, no corporate or other business tax, no form of tax at all other than a sales tax, collected at the site and time of the retail purchase. If any other tax were allowed to remain alive, then this would not work, because another sales tax would just join the existing pantheon of taxes and we would merely have one more tax, and nothing much would have changed.

One immediate benefit would be that everyone who buys anything retail would pay it, with no way out. Even illegal aliens (and other common criminals) would pay it. Priests, ministers and rabbis would pay it. Every worker in America would get an immediate huge raise in salary, and every employer in America would lose a huge business expense. Last but not least, no one would need to file a tax return ever again. Think about it: what business is it of the Leviathan State how much money you make? What business is it of the government how much money your pastor makes? Why should you have to go through this humongous tax return red-tape rigmarole every year?

This would require somehow killing off Social Security taxes. How to do that? Well, pick a date, and call it the SS Date. When the SS Date arrives, everyone who is not yet retired stops paying Social Security taxes, and no one else retires on Social Security. Those already retired continue to collect their retirement payments, for the rest of their lives. Those not yet retired, as they attain retirement age, are paid the total of what they paid into Social Security plus interest over all those years. With that money, they can buy themselves a paid up annuity, if they wish, and begin collecting their monthly payments.

That could potentially put us into a temporary deficit situation, but, so what? A temporary deficit never hurt anyone, including our first deficit under FDR, and it won’t hurt us either. The important thing is that federal expenditures for Social Security would finally hit a point where they would be increasingly in decline rather than perpetual increase, as the retired population ages, people die and there are no new retirees entering the pool.

The inducement for American industry to expand would be huge. The existence of a retail sales tax as the sole form of taxation, meaning among other things no corporate taxation, would be a major attraction to off shore corporations (which is to say, employers) to relocate their operations to America. There are other offshore places they can operate without paying taxes, but there is no place anywhere near as physically secure as America where they wouldn’t pay taxes.

As the federal government would go, eventually, so would the individual states. The first state to abolish all state taxes in favor of a simple state sales tax would set off an extreme competition among states to attract and lure large corporations away from each other. States that abolished state corporate taxes would experience an economic boom, and states that didn’t, wouldn’t.

Of course, it would be curtains for all those IRS jobs, and it would be doom for companies like H&R Block who do people’s taxes, and it would not be good for Turbo Tax and other software vendors. All those tax consultants, and all those corporate tax accountants and attorneys, and a huge segment of the general accounting population, would have to find something else to do for a living. But all the rest of the economy would boom like never before.

A return to the American Ideal involves, first, getting out of the way of individuals and businesses trying to improve their condition. Removing hindrances rather than emplacing them. Reducing government rather than increasing it. Eliminating bureaucracy rather than multiplying it. The American Ideal represents the culmination of Western Culture history, and grows out of the Western Ethos. America is unique in all the world, and all the world knows it. We have something very precious here; imperfect, yes; with lots of problems, yes; but still, the best thing going in the world for freedom loving men. Reagan had it right; the path to increasing national wealth involves increasing freedom of citizens, and reducing government rather than growing it.

May God continue to bless the United States of America.

Sarcastic Acronym Hover-Link Footnotes: For the convenience of those readers using devices that lack a mouse, these footnotes are provided for all webpages, in case any webpage contains any hover-links. (If you don't have a mouse, you can't "hover" it over a link without clicking just to see the simple acronym interpretation. Click any footnote link to see the acronym and a detailed explanation; "Hover" the mouse over it just to see the simple interpretation.)

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Date: Fri Jan 02 16:24:53 2009
From: Henry Hendrickson
Email:
Subject: Gilding the Lily?
Comment:

Vic:

It seems to me that you are over-stating the case on how great opportunity is and has been here in America. Every life story of every poor immigrant who comes here does not end up as another Horatio Alger rags to riches story. Probably hundreds if not thousands who try to start a business here fail in the attempt. The success stories gain attention and news, but the failures should be at least acknowledged in a treatment of the subject such as this.

Cordially, Hank

Date: Sat Jan 03 07:01:28 2009
From: Vic Biorseth
Subject: Gilding the Lily?
Comment:

Hank:

You are quite correct; I suppose one in hundreds, or maybe one in a thousand business start-ups succeed at all, and only a small percentage of the successes are what we might call wildly successful. But, I maintain, the basic premise still stands. This is the land of opportunity, like no other in history.

My own grandparents didn’t immigrate here and start businesses; what they did was to come here and get jobs, and begin an economic life that wasn’t possible where they came from. Today those jobs look humble, even pitiful by today’s standards. And they were humble by American standards; but not by the standards of the rest of the world. However humble they might have been, they were a vast improvement over the economic and social conditions that were left behind in the old country.

This remains the case today, in spite of the growing obstacles to business thrown up by our government. I could site, for example, the idiotic law that is largely ignored everywhere which involves how much you might pay the neighborhood kid to mow your lawn in summer or shovel your sidewalk in winter. If over a specified amount, you are supposed to deduct Social Security for him, pay for a medical insurance program, and so forth.

This is, of course, preposterous on its face. But it shows the level of legal complexity and regulation our government quite typically puts out there to hinder people from bettering themselves, at all levels. Even in spite of all this, I submit that America remains among the most free lands on Earth, at the moment.

The people, if not the government, still adhere to the original American Ideal.

Regards,

Vic

Note:

Friday, October 26, 2012

As part of the ongoing effort to upgrade this whole website, upgraded this webpage to the new BB 2.0 - SBI! 3.0 release and to make use of the new reusable code features.
An earlier phase of this major conversion corrupted or adversely affected some fonts, alignments, quotes and tables in the previously published webpages. Not to worry; this phase is converting them all, one by one. Eventually, every webpage on this site will have the same look and feel as this one.
LOVE this new release!

Regards,

Vic

Date:   Tue Oct 14 2014
From:  Vic Biorseth
Comment:  

Changes pursuant to changing the website URL and name from 
Thinking Catholic Strategic Center to
Catholic American Thinker.

Pulled the trigger on the 301 MOVE IT option June 1, 2014. Working my way through all the webpages.  . 

Regards,

Vic

Date:  Mon Jan 05 02:53:26 2015
From:  WilliamZ
Email:   baronne53.mn@gmail.com
Location:  AusTxUS
Comment: 

Walmart provides goods and services with subsidization from US Taxpayers therefore it is a corporate free-rider . This country, great in many ways as it undoubtably is is still built upon much greed and exploitation and violates fundamental Christian tenets , the most important of which is " to do unto ones as neighbor as one would have done to oneself. Ex. The post 1st Gulf War economic sanctions against Saddam led to the deaths of 565,000 Iraqi children ( see The Lancet Report published by Johns Hopkins Medical Schl. epidemiologists . Also , consider the fact that there was an effort by the bastion of free market utopianism ,  The Heritage Foundation to suppress the report . 20,000 + people die each year from a lack of adequate health care due in part to the propagandistic efforts of the Heritage Fndn . , the same who initially designed and promoted universal hlth care as implemented in MA by Republican Gov. Romney who opposed the similar Obama Care .  Although , I agree with much that is said here

Date:  Mon Jan 05 2014
From:  Vic Biorseth
Comment:  

WilliamZ:

Yeah, right.  You have your indoctrination down well enough to spew it, but your committed and dedicated stupidassism is showing.  Check out the American Political Ideology tables to see where you fit; you should quite comfortably fall into the OWS column.

Regards,

Vic

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