Saturday, June 22, 2013

Letter to Congressman Chris Gibson Re Immigration Reform



Mike Marnell forwarded Betsy McCaughey's video about the gang of eight's immigration reform proposal. 

PO Box 130
West Shokan, NY 12494
June 22, 2013

The Honorable Chris Gibson
1708 Longworth HOB
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Congressman Gibson:

The proposed immigration law being put forward by the gang of eight is flawed and should be scotched.  Betsy McCaughey makes several points.  First, community organizations should have no role in the processing of citizenship applications, including those of immigrants seeking asylum.  Community organizations are partisan.  Marco Rubio and John McCain are committing direct partisan suicide by supporting this bill; I was skeptical of Mr. Rubio's conservative credentials before, and they have been discredited now.  

Second, the bill's proposed US Citizenship Foundation is a Trojan horse. It is outrageous that potentially partisan groups like this are being proposed to receive government funding.  Community organizations are fine as long as they are privately funded. They should not receive sanctions of law.  

Third, the Office of Civil Rights should not be involved in border security and enforcement.   

The America I once knew and that you defended is gone.  This is no longer the land of the free.  A government that regulates what you eat, forces you buy insurance, and, like this bill, uses soviets or community organizations to perform government functions is not the government of a free people.   Washington has failed America.  America's can no longer be called a great government.   

Have you thought about transforming the federal government into a defense-and-tariff treaty and downloading all other federal responsibilities to the states?   In its current form, from the Fed's garish monetary policy to social security to immigration regulation to the crackpot environmental proposals being put forth to federal gun control, the federal government is a failure.  I see massive net losses to the public from Washington. The federal government's only useful responsibilities are defense and tariff coordination. 

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you against ALL immigration?

Mitchell Langbert said...

I'm not against immigration. ACORN and other "community organizations" should not receive government money, nor should immigrants. Immigrants who work hard, save money and build businesses are a major asset. Most millionaires are either immigrants or first generation Americans. Immigrants should not be given access to welfare benefits. I am against welfare, government subsidies, and the Federal Reserve Bank. I'm not against hardworking immigrants who create wealth. I think America would be better off with hardworking immigrants than with 14th generation Americans who subsist on welfare.

Anonymous said...


Asians and Hispanics use the public school systems and CUNY colleges to educate themselves. They receive government aid in the form of loans and grants. Is that a "handout" according to you?

What so many people like you do not understand is that the working poor, and illegal Latino immigrants are in the same room. You think we do not understand the tone and content of what is being said. You and the Tea Party types dismiss people who desperately need healthcare as abstractions, or in which hard-working immigrants are simply told to hang around for a few more years, or “self-deport”. It bespeaks a disconnect between this country as it actually is – rather than as you would like it to be.

Mitchell Langbert said...

I have a better idea than you. I will move to China or Brazil, and the taxpayers there will subsidize me. I will hire an army of IRS-like gangsters, and I will incarcerate or murder anyone who refuses to subsidize me. I will be a Progressive in China.

Government depends on violence. Violence by its own nature begets violence. Eventually the social fabric tears.

This will be an increasingly ugly country, and the subsidy-seeking bums who dominate it will make life miserable for anyone who works and has integrity. I don't plan on sticking around in the American serf state, and I plan to leave.

You have no more right to use violence to compel me to support your ugly ideas than I, if I had the power, would have the right to compel you to subsidize me.

Poor people came to this country in the 19th century because of economic opportunity. My great-grandparents and grandparents came here because of the opportunities freedom afforded them and their descendants. I have benefited from freedom, but I live at the tail end of the great American experiment. The freedom that created this country's wealth is over, and I see no use in staying in a dying land.

Today, government uses violence to compel workers to subsidize a wide range of parasites, from Wall Street, to big manufacturing firms that our gangster-in-chief, Barack Obama, favors, to crooked green businesses that produce no wealth, to banks that should not exist, to welfare cheats.

Sadly for new immigrants, the violent government policies that subsidize the wide range of parasites have squashed economic opportunity for them. They will pay the price for the policies that you claim benefit them. They will see low standards of living and will not see their grandchildren progress. They will be the ones who leave because your ideas squashed economic opportunity for them.

Because you've been brainwashed by the Wall Street-owned media, you are unaware that the real hourly wage has not increased since 1970. Economic opportunity died here following the massive expansion of welfare programs in the 1960s and the massive subsidization of Wall Street that began in 1971 with the abolition of the gold standard.

Frankly, I am only remaining here because of family problems. I have no interest in supporting the self-destructive welfare systems here, or the claim that any bum who wishes to move here should receive free health care, or that the IRS has the right to murder, enslave, and imprison me.

In short, I intend to become an immigrant myself, but I don't intend to suck the blood of the people who are kind enough to allow me to flee to their freer country.

Anonymous said...

What is a "handout" according to you?

Mitchell Langbert said...

This is the definition of "handout" in dictionary.com. I am using definition 4, "something given away for free."

The trouble with government, though, is it produces nothing, so if it gives something away for free, it needs to first violently force someone to give it to the government; after it steals, threatening the person whose property it is with violence, the criminal government gives it to a welfare scammer, ACORN gangster, or some other Democratic Party parasite who produces nothing and uses state violence to compel productive people to support them. Of course, the productive people eventually flee the tyrannical state, heading for freer places like Chile, Uruguay, Singapore, Malta or Hong Kong.

handout

noun Informal.
1.a portion of food or the like given to a needy person, as a beggar.
2.press release.
3.any printed, typed, mimeographed, or photocopied copy of information, as a speech, policy statement, or fact sheet given to reporters, attendees at a meeting, or the like.
4.anything given away for nothing, as a free sample of a product by an advertiser

Anonymous said...

So if the cost of education is $1 and your tuition fees are $0.5, is that a handout of $0.50 according to your definition of a "handout"?

Mitchell Langbert said...

Education is a borderline commodity that some people consider a public good and others don't. A priori, I would not be opposed to public subsidies for higher education. Given the abuses I've witnessed at CUNY, I'm afraid the $.50 the students pay is too high (I think that they pay about two thirds of the cost and the state pays the other third, not counting capital costs). It's not so much that CUNY is a handout as that the students are being mistreated by a greedy, self-interested faculty that takes the state's money and uses it to satisfy itself at the students' and the public's expense.

City College was founded at the beginning of the laissez faire era (I think in the 1850s or so when it was called the Free Academy) and is mentioned in the great children's novel that invented the American Dream--Horatio Alger's "Ragged Dick."

A libertarian purist like Murray Rothbard is going to argue against any public subsidies to education, but my problem is not the abstract idea of a subsidy to public education but that the subsidies are converted into ideological indoctrination, jobs for life for a faculty that couldn't care less about helping the students and leaves them often unable to write or do math, and a wide range of boondoggles.

Anonymous said...

So according to you subsidies are okay.
Are you not contradicting yourself because you are giving a "handout" something for free, or at least at a price below cost?
And then where do you draw the line.

Mitchell Langbert said...

I don't have a quick answer. Two good books on this subject are Murray Rothbard's "For a New Liberty" and Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom." Once you've read those, you'll have a handle on the tradeoffs. John Locke's "Second Treatise on Government" outlines the basic concept: governments are instituted to maximize freedom. Without government laborers would be subjected to violence from predators. Government is instituted to eliminate predators. The danger is that government itself becomes a predator. The minimization of government necessary to limit predation is a basic rule. There are a few additional issues. Public goods cannot be easily provided by firms because they are indivisible. Why pay for a military if someone else pays. People like Timothy Geithner cheat on their taxes because of the free rider principle. Goods that are public goods and that are essential are best provided by government.

I do not believe that higher education is essential, except for the sciences. In a pure world I wouldn't favor subsidies to universities. Rather, I would favor vouchers that would subsidize students to student science and technology based on their ability as measured by SAT and achievement scores. Thus, poor students with high ability should be subsidized, not because it is fair to them but because society benefits from such students' studying science, engineering, and technology.

I don't think that universities benefit the public,and I don't really favor subsidies to them. Given that employers require college degrees, subsidization is a practical matter.

I know that is contradictory, but reality often requires inconsistency. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, according to Emerson.

To be consistent, one needs to be either 100% libertarian, an anarchist, or 100% statist, a totalitarian. Of the two, I of course prefer the former; also, such a world might be a great place to live IF all men are angels. They are not, so a modicum of government is necessary. The degree that maximizes social welfare is smaller than what we have now. Much government spending goes to special interests and is wasted.