The Razor

Over the weekend I attended an open house at an organic farm specializing in making goat cheese. Since I live on a large inactive farm I’m interested in learning about all aspects of small scale farming, and having grown up in the St. Louis suburbs there’s much to study. As I have learned more about growing things, I’ve come to appreciate organic methods that minimize or eliminate chemicals and work with the forces present in nature in order to grow food. Don’t get me wrong: Mother Nature will starve you to death and dine on your bones if you let her, but there are strategies such as avoiding monoculture plantings and pesticides that whack beneficial insects as well as pests that are worth pursuing for a hobby farmer such as myself. Additionally I’m becoming more aware of the sourcing of my food, recognizing that we have completely lost the ability to eat what’s in season when at the local supermarket we can buy strawberries in November and whole ear corn in January. I live among farmers, and I have seen the gradual creep of large agribusiness and the depopulation of rural America. Neither are good omens for our nation’s future, and though they may be inevitable, I’ll be damned if I contribute to the process. So I’m gradually buying more locally, and the trip to the farm open house was a way to get some ideas on my new lifestyle.

When we arrived the place was hopping, with young men directing people to park on a newly-mowed hay field. We parked, and as I walked past the cars I automatically scanned the bumper stickers, a bit of a habit of mine. The first one I saw as expected was an Obama ‘08 sticker, but the next one I saw surprised me: a Gadsden flag of the Tea Party along with a sticker that read “God Bless Our Military, Especially Our Snipers.” North Carolina is much bluer than I expected when I moved down here, and I’ve learned that while I might live in a predominantly conservative part of the state it is full to the brim with people of all political philosophies and walks of life.

All were represented at the organic farm. There were gay couples and old hippies, as well as clean-cut military men and their families, their kids petting goats and chasing free range chickens. A man dressed in a checked shirt beneath blue overalls stood alongside a young woman with more piercings than a rural stop sign, listening to one of the founders of the farm talk about its history and how it has grown over the years. Hispanics mingled with blacks who in turn stood in line with monied white suburbanites and their kids to take a turn at the pottery wheel and throw their own pot. Smiles were everywhere, and the place seemed as alive as the show hive of bees that stood on saw horses in the middle of a vegetable patch.

I was an odd child growing up. Some of my first memories are not of clowns or birthdays but of political events. I watched Nixon’s visit to Beijing broadcast on network TV in 1972. Two years later I rushed home from school and flipped on the Watergate hearings instead of game shows or cartoons. I grew up living and loving politics, and had I been born with a more gregarious personality I would have pursued a career in it. Instead I was socially inept, perhaps even autistic, so politics could never be more than a spectator sport for me, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it.

But I’ve lost that joy. It has been years since I felt something other than doom and dread about politics, and the organic farm reminded me why.

We are divided, almost atomized these days. It has been years since we felt unity, the last time being the unity of grief by the 9-11 attacks. Since then our leaders have failed us. President Bush famously promised to be a “uniter not a divider”, but then went and did what he wanted to do in Iraq and in the biggest failure of his administration, presided over an explosion of government and spending. The Department of Homeland Security wasn’t a Clinton creation, it was a Bush one after all. While I agreed with his policies in Iraq at the time, Bush failed to support his actions at home against his critics. He just did what he wanted because he knew it was right, but didn’t even try to convince people otherwise.

Obama hasn’t even attempted to unite us. He took office reminding Republicans that he won and has governed accordingly, ramming through his signature health care legislation without a single Republican vote. A year later Americans clipped his power by taking away the House from the Democrats and ending their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, but Obama didn’t miss a beat. Instead of moving to the center and working with the opposition to get legislation passed, he went to the extreme, and decided to wait things out to the next election, blaming the GOP and his Republican predecessor for the fruits of his own failure to lead.

Leadership in a democracy requires skills in the art of compromise. It’s hard to imagine but Ronald Reagan whom even Obama himself has claimed for his own never had a friendly majority in the House during his 8 years yet managed to pass budgets and legislation with bipartisan support with no less a political mastermind like Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. We have yet to have a single budget from the president even during the 2 years his own party held both the House and Senate.

In fairness to Obama he never was much of a leader. His career reflects the Peter Principle more than the exercising of leadership skills to make it to the top, always having a mentor in higher position who can push him further up the political ladder. Unfortunately Obama now finds himself at the top with no mentor other than his usual billionaire friends like George Judenrat Soros and Warren Buffet. While these men may support him with their financial acumen and deep pockets, there is no one above Obama that can protect him anymore so he must rely on his skills. The problem is that the process that led to his ascension to the highest office in the land avoided cultivating those skills.

George W. Bush had a similar rise through the ranks, although based on his name rather than mentors. Samuel P. Bush, George W’s great-grandfather, built a successful career as an industrialist and dabbled in politics during World War I. His son Prescott continued the path of mixing success in business with politics that lead to George Bush’s ascendance to the presidency in 1988. While George W. Bush showed the ability of a leader to make difficult decisions such as to attack Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, an upbringing where his name alone opened doors and convinced people made it unlikely that he would develop other leadership skills such as the ability to convince others and charm one’s opponents.

The last president that had such leadership skills? Bill Clinton. Clinton is a self-made man and rose through the political ranks solely on his wit and charm. During his 8 years in office Clinton was able to pass budgets and bipartisan legislation with die-hard partisans such as Newt Gingrich. Clinton understood how to work with Congress, and his domestic policy record proves it (on the other hand his foreign policy record was in retrospect a disaster, consciously ignoring the threat posed by al Qaeda even though numerous terrorist attacks occurred on his watch.)

We have gone 11 years with weak leadership and our nation has suffered. You can’t compromise with someone you call a racist. You can’t cut deals with a party you demonize as misogynistic and homophobic. Leadership doesn’t pit one group of people against another; it fuses them together in a shared purpose.

A true leader does more than call his opponents names and make grand promises in eloquently delivered speeches from teleprompters. He inspires but also delivers on his promises. He doesn’t hold grudges but also makes it clear that he will not be played the fool. He understands the responsibility that comes with his position and serves all the people, not just those who voted for him. Most importantly he appreciates and respects the ideals that bind us together as a people and a nation, recognizing that while we might disagree vehemently on issues big and small, we are all bound by the love of freedom and hope for a better future for our children and our country.

While it is clear that leader is not Obama, neither is it clear that it is Romney. But I do wish that both men could have taken a moment from their politicking to talk to the farmer selling hand raised beef, watched the Montagnard women weaving brightly colored fabrics, and tasted the red pepper goat cheese. Perhaps they would have understood that if we could put aside our differences at a goat farm founded by a woman driving around with two goats in the front seat of her Toyota looking for a farm in North Carolina, we are a people ready to be led, and who deserve a good leader.

After a lifetime of fighting debilitating shyness and social anxiety I have found a life that permits me to avoid human contact except on the rare occasions when I initiate it. Modern technology is perfect for people like me. I can be social without actually being social, leaving me to focus on what people are doing or saying without worrying or thinking about myself. Facebook has become a useful tool to keep tabs on memes floating around groups one usually no longer associates with. Since most of my friends are leftists of various stripes I watch as they share posts that are supposed to change the world. Most of the time I let these slide without comment since I understand that they lack a blog like this one to share their political thoughts and so are limited to Facebook posts.

Sometimes I slip.

A very good friend of mine shared a post that read, “Like, if you are a supporter of same-sex marriage. Share if you aren’t afraid to admit it.”

As a libertarian I have been a consistent supporter of the so-called “gay agenda” for decades because I’ve been around gays most of my adult life and I simply don’t see how one can support small government yet demand that it poke it’s bureaucratic head into the bedroom. Honestly I want to see the government completely out of the marriage business, and leave the sacrament up to religions to administer as they see fit.

But is this really necessary?

Changing people’s minds requires more work than sharing political messages among friends on Facebook. If I opposed gay marriage it is highly unlikely a Facebook post would change my mind. In fact, sharing a photo or message does very little because it’s preaching to the choir: how many of one’s friends posting this entreaty really AREN’T supporters of same sex marriage?

On May 8th North Carolina is voting to amend the state constitution to ban civil unions, domestic partnerships and other types of domestic legal unions, specifying marriage as the sole legal union between a man and a woman. I think this is stupid on so many levels that it makes me spit. Not only does it discriminate against gays and lesbians, it discriminates against straight, non-religious people who are committed to each other but view marriage as a religious vow. So instead of sharing the photo, I’m going to drive 15 minutes to the polling station, wait in line for probably another 15-30 minutes, and cast my vote on this one issue AGAINST a stupid law. That’s an hour of my time I’d rather waste doing something else but instead I’m going to vote. Given the opposition to gay marriage in my community where Baptist churches outnumber gas stations and fast food restaurants, there’s a good chance my vote will be only one of a very few opposing the measure.

I am a secularist. It’s a word that’s often misunderstood and abused by the religious minded and those who hate them. A secularist is not anti-religion. He or she is someone who believes there is a line between the sacred and the profane, and on one side there is religion, and the other politics. A secularist cares just as much when a religion is forced by the state to obey a law that undermines its core beliefs, as when a religion attempts to force its beliefs on the state. A secularist believes that both entities have their spheres in modern life, and trouble comes when they rub together.

The First Amendment of the US Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” This has come to be interpreted as the separation of Church and State put forth by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 in which Jefferson wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

Secularists can trace this doctrine back even further, to Jesus Christ’s answer to the Pharisees seeking to entrap him. “Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk. And they sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men. Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not? But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.When they had heard these words, they marvelled, and left him, and went their way.” Matthew 22:15-22. This doctrine was later expanded upon by St. Augustine writing four centuries later noting  the differences between an “earthly city” and the “City of God.” Martin Luther took St. Augustine’s ideas even further in his Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms which postulated that God worked his will through secular institutions as well as through divine acts. Luther also promoted secularism in his book “On Secular Authority,” writing that a government could not force spiritual beliefs on someone because such beliefs would be held insincerely and would therefore be invalid in God’s eyes. Luther’s ideas would then be picked up by John Calvin and other Protestant reformers, and later James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in the United States.

Even with a relatively clear and consistent philosophical lineage the United States has struggled with the concept of separation of Church and State almost since its inception. For the first hundred years of the Republic the First Amendment was viewed as applying specifically to the federal government; states were free establish official religions. Massachusetts supported Congregationalism until 1833. States continued supporting religion by enacting Blue Laws, abiding by religious holidays and providing other public concessions to religious groups. The Supreme Court finally began to weigh in on the issue, ruling in Reynolds v. United States (1878) that state laws prohibiting bigamy trumped religious laws (Mormonism in this case) that allowed it. It banned school prayer in public schools in its rulings in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963). Since then the Supreme Court has delineated a distinct line between religion and secular society. Nevertheless that line continues to be defined by lawsuits challenging the legality of public religious displays and the wearing of religious head coverings on the job, and the rise of gay rights requires further definition.

Marriage has been a component of government since Ancient Greece when Solon wrote a series of laws covering all aspects of daily life including marriage. Since marriage between men and women resulted in children, and children were necessary for the continuation of the State, the State took an early interest in marriage, an interest that continued through the centuries to the present. For most of history, God and the State were one in the same, and the idea of separating the two made little sense. It wasn’t until the modern era that the concept of marriage without the State could be imagined, but even today in states across the country one must acquire a marriage license from the state and have a religious ceremony conducted to make the contract binding. There is no other civil agreement that requires a cleric’s signature.

From a civic standpoint, marriage makes sense. It legitimizes property ownership and distribution. It tames young men and lays the foundation for the means to support children. It pools wealth. Studies continue to show that children from an intact marriage do better in school, and that on average a pair of married people are wealthier than two singles. But these benefits to society will not go away if the state gets out of the marriage business.

America continues to be a country of the religious. According to a Pew 2007 study only 16% of Americans claimed no religious affiliation. Marriage will not disappear. Instead it will fall under the complete control of religious authorities who can marry whomever they wish as they see fit. If a Protestant sect sanctions gay weddings, fine – but Baptists, Catholics and Muslims can forbid such vows without fear of persecution by the state. Separation of church and state cuts both ways, after all, and leaving marriage to the religions creates a barrier to prevent state meddling in religious beliefs.

What about the distribution of property? There’s already a document for that: a will. There are plenty of other existing legal documents that can be used to handle other situations usually covered in a blanket fashion by a marriage certificate like power of attorney and articles of incorporation. These documents can protect a pair (or more) of people regardless of sex, and treats them as equals before the law, something that existing law does not.

Disentangling marriage from the state and undoing 2,500 years of custom will not happen overnight, nor will sharing posts supporting the idea on Facebook change anything. But it is worth considering as the ultimate solution to the gay marriage issue and weakens the war on Christianity that gay marriage supporters unleash in response.

I have advocated the legalization of illicit drugs for a very long time. While my politics and party affiliations changed over the years, the belief that most if not all currently illicit drugs should be legalized has never wavered. Whether taking them decades ago or living the Straight Edge path for going on 12 years, I always believed that America would be a better place as a society if it legalized and regulated marijuana, cocaine and heroin.

Walter Russell Mead challenges that belief by comparing the arguments supporting legalization with the reality of prescription drug abuse. Try as I might I’m finding it difficult to argue with the points he makes. Mead writes, “Legally prescribed drugs are now regulated the way many legalization advocates think illegal drugs should be. The flourishing black market in prescription painkillers and the thousands of deaths associated with their use demonstrate that drug use will not be magically fixed by regulating currently illegal drugs. While legalization advocates argue that putting heroin and similar drugs on a prescription basis would reduce fatalities associated with their use, the high toll from overdoses of legal painkillers suggests that this argument is weaker than often believed.

The statistics about prescription drug abuse, to pardon the pun, are sobering. According to the CDC deaths from legal prescription painkillers now surpass those from heroin and cocaine combined. In 2008, 15,000 died from painkiller overdoses. In 2010 12 million Americans used legal painkillers to get high, and that year enough prescriptions were written to keep every single American stoned for a month. That’s 4x more drugs prescribed than in 1999. Today pain is the most common reason for physician visits in the US.

As with any complex issue, there is no simple solution. Until recently doctors had taken more of a “what we cannot cure we must endure” stoic approach with their patients when it came to pain. It wasn’t until the 1970s that doctors began studying pain and specializing in pain treatment and management. Progress has been slow. The foundation of pain management remains addictive narcotics with broad effects instead of the development of drugs that target specific pain. Worse, when used to treat chronic pain these medications may increase pain sensitivity. Even when pain isn’t chronic it may take months, sometimes even years for the underlying injury to resolve. If narcotics are the main treatment for pain, should we be surprised when a patient becomes addicted to pain medications?

There is a big difference between the perception of prescription pain medications and illicit drugs. Generations have been indoctrinated into viewing crack and heroin as “dirty” and socially unacceptable. It takes years for newer drugs such as methamphetamine and ecstasy to be recognized by society as a threat and subject to a mix of propaganda and truth to stigmatize the drug and curtail its usage. In the 1980s and early 1990s meth was underground and commonly used for all night cram sessions by college students and by long haul truck drivers. Now it has been stigmatized as a cheap high for rednecks a step above huffing paint. Prescription drugs have an aura of acceptability that illicit drugs currently lack but would attain if they were legalized. Legalization presents a legitimacy which in turn implies safety. People may naturally view heroin and cocaine as dangerous and consider Oxycontin as innocuous even though one can overdose on Oxycontin as well as heroin. People believe that because a drug is prescribed by a doctor it is somehow completely safe.

While it is possible that after legalization the negative perceptions of the formerly illegal drugs would remain, it is expected legalization would expand usage and abuse. Those favoring the legalization of illicit drugs need to accept this and modify their arguments to reflect this reality. One way to do this is to focus on the core arguments for legalization such as individual freedom and personal responsibility. In the case of prescription drug abuse, doctors need to recognize the danger of supplying patients with narcotics, including the likelihood that the drugs will fall into the hands of others. It is much easier for a physician to prescribe narcotics than it is to advise patients on non-medication pain management therapies such as deep breathing, meditation and exercise. Those that need more should be sent to pain clinics which specialize in pain therapy (and can be monitored closely by authorities).

People need to be educated about pain. Pain is a reality of life and in most cases such as injury it is an important component of the healing process. Dulling it at every opportunity may feel good in the short term but present long term dangers such as prolonged healing, re-injury or addiction. Similarly people need to learn the truth about pain medications. The narcotics on grandma’s shelves are just as dangerous as those being offered for sale on the street a few blocks down.

The solution for drug abuse, whether illegal or legal, is education along with treatment options offered by for-profit and charities. As far as solutions go it’s a lame one, but the alternatives such as the continued prohibition of illicit drugs and the jailing of addicts is far worse. Far better to increase awareness and encourage personal responsibility.

As a recovering alcoholic with 11 years of sobriety under my belt, personal responsibility is the one key component to wellness that gets ignored in the debate. To those sympathetic to the addict and those who take a hard line against illicit drugs, the addict is powerless to resist the drug so the addict must either be protected from his drug or kept away from it through its illegality. Hardly anyone dares tell the addict “You live in a world with your drug. You can have it and ruin your life, or not and live a decent life without it.” There is proof that addiction has a genetic component. For some it may have an epigenetic basis. But regardless of its origin, whether the addict was born that way or acquired it later in life, one is ultimately responsible for one’s own destiny, not Society.

UPDATE:
A documentary on the Oxy Express. The most chilling documentary I’ve seen in years.
An in-depth series on prescription drug abuse by the Delaware News Journal.

Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council: The Mellow Jihadi – Lance Corporal Donald Hogan, Marine Hero

Noncouncil: Family Security Matters- Muslim Children in America are Being Taught to Hate

Full voting here.

Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council: The Right Planet – The Talking Points Meme

Noncouncil: Allen West - Mr. President, please don’t play the race card in 2012…

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Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council: Joshuapundit – The Tale Of The Swine

Noncouncil: The City Journal- The New Authoritarianism

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Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council: The Noisy Room – 2011 – Turning Our Backs on the Gods of the Copybook Headings

Noncouncil: Sultan Knish- The Year We Lost Afghanistan, Etc. submitted by The Political Commentator

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Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council: Bookworm Room – A case regarding citizen journalists proves, once again, that bad facts make for bad law

Noncouncil: Victor Davis Hanson- A Vandalized Valley

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The best argument I’ve seen yet against Wall Street – and in a Conservative magazine no less – concludes:

They are the repo men, headpiece filled with subprime-mortgage derivatives, and they are looking to repossess the Republican party they abandoned in 2008 (see “Losing Gordon Gekko,” National Review, March 9, 2009). Free-market, limited-government conservatives should be none too eager to welcome them back, nor should we let our natural sympathy with the profit motive blind us to the fact that a great many of them do not belong in the conservative movement, and that more than a few of them belong in prison.

Privatizing gains and socializing losses is not fiscal conservatism. Upholding a hereditary noble class that manipulates the political system to support its own tenure is not democracy.

Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council: The Noisy Room–-Syria – The Tipping Point Into Hell

Noncouncil: Sultan Knish- Mr. Islam’s Blindfold and Machete

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Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council: Bookworm Room--My Mother’s War, Courtesy Of Pearl Harbor

Noncouncil: Barry Rubin- Middle East: We’re Going to Have a Revolution and We Can Do it the Hard Way or the Easy Way

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As a parent of a teenager and an intellectual who somehow managed to avoid Academia, I’ve  followed the higher education bubble stories carefully. Glenn Reynolds has written and linked extensively on the subject, and Virginia Postrel places the blame on federal student aid. While I completely agree with Reynolds that the trades have gotten ignored in favor of college and university educations, I’ve noticed that he and others working to improve the image of the trades in the minds of young people are ignoring one important issue: the impact of illegal immigration on blue collar jobs.

Having moved to the rural South I have spent the past two years renovating our home. This task has put me into contact with numerous plumbers, electricians, carpenters, roofers, and handymen. All of them have been born and raised here, and none of them would recommend the trades to young people interested in making a living because of illegal immigration. I wrote about my early experiences with talking to these men here.

They are especially bitter when it comes to illegal immigration. Mexicans have flooded into North Carolina and driven down wages for skilled and semi-skilled workers. They are constantly underbid by contractors employing illegals at a fraction of the going hourly rate.

These men face the competition of teams of illegals everyday. They are locked out of larger jobs that hire a single contractor employing teams of illegals instead of American citizen subcontractors. When skilled Mexican tradesmen are paid minimum wage (or less), it’s difficult for those who hire sheetrock hangers and carpenters at the going rate ($15-$25/hr in these parts by my estimate) to compete. The success of these illegal teams has led to their usage on ever smaller jobs, the meat and potatoes of general contractors, leaving only the smallest jobs for the local contractors to compete against each other for. These usually have low margins and being small are difficult to make a living doing when traveling and buying supplies is included.

Long time readers will know that although conservative and free market oriented, I am no Ayn Rand disciple. The older I become the more I suspect that, as Neal Stephenson predicted in the cyberpunk classic Snow Crash, globalization has smeared things out into a worldwide layer of “what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider prosperity.” With New Economy industries employing fewer workers than the factory jobs they replace, those with college degrees are finding themselves without job security. Companies are offshoring everything they can, and it is only a matter of time before automation begins to nibble away at the creative jobs previously considered “safe” from either of these forces. It isn’t clear what jobs will replace them.

In a prior incarnation I actively fought offshoring and labor dumping by the government through its policies of lax immigration designed to flood the domestic market with cheap labor. I learned that the government uses technical visas like the H-1b and J-2 to allow skilled foreigners to lower the cost of labor and price out domestic white collar workers. Because these workers are compensated in part by the prospect of working in America – and in the case of the H-1b, with the potential reward of a green card three to seven years after their arrival – they could be paid a lower salary than equivalently skilled American workers. In effect the H-1b visa holders are subsidized by the American government: they receive a salary plus a visa that doesn’t cost the government anything but which they accept in lieu of cash. Their employers get cheaper labor that boosts their bottom-lines and grants them the flexibility of underbidding firms that only employ citizens or green card holders. This forces competing firms to either hire foreign labor or go out of business.

The case is the same with blue collar workers. Illegal immigrants come to the United States accept lower wages because they are receiving a government subsidy in the form of future citizenship. The likelihood of being found out or deported by the federal government is miniscule, especially at a time when the federal government is actively fighting efforts to tighten border controls and demands to increase arrests and deportations of illegal citizens. Again, this subsidy doesn’t cost the government anything, yet it provides a reward that is almost as good as cash to illegals who are paid under the table.

But there is a cost to this meddling by the federal government in the labor market: higher unemployment and the social costs that attend it such as increased criminality, alcohol and drug abuse, and the breakdown of the family. But these social costs don’t appear in the statistics – just as the illegal immigrants don’t either – and are ignored whenever talk turns to economics.

If white collar jobs are threatened by offshoring, the trades are threatened by illegal immigration and all jobs are threatened by automation, is the American worker and the economic system that is based on him or her doomed? Some believe that the changes over the next several decades could spell the end of work as we know it, as something that is viewed with dread and a sense of fatalistic duty changed into a system whereby each person pursues creative talents that will be in demand and that require imagination and perspective that computers and perhaps even foreigners won’t know how to do. One wag characterized it as everyone planning everyone else’s weddings – an updated and more positive prediction that we would all someday be slinging hamburgers to one another after manufacturing’s demise.

I’m not so sure. Perhaps such a future beckons, but in the meantime I would prefer that the government stop meddling in the labor market by increasing the porosity of America’s borders with the world. Sealing the border with Mexico would be a good place to start. A free market pool of labor is supposed to be a compromise between two competing forces: employers and employees. Labor dumping through lax immigration and “open border” policies undermine that compromise, allowing employers to dictate what they are willing to pay for a given skillset while being protected from a tight labor market by government policy. Employees have no redress other than to change jobs or if they are old enough, retire. If the government stopped interfering in the market to favor one side over the other, the domestic labor market would begin to function as a free market instead of an overly regulated, skewed one. If plumbers are in demand, their salaries will rise and people will start considering them (as Glenn Reynolds, Virginia Postrel and others suggest). Similarly, if java programmers are in demand, their salaries should rise to the point where colleges and IT bootcamps pump out java programmers to fill the demand. In both cases supply of workers would eventually overshoot demand (because companies by their very nature strive to become more efficient), and these salaries would stabilize and eventually decline.

Until that happens, white collar and blue collar workers, skilled and unskilled, educated and trained will have to always look over their shoulders afraid of the boss’s unexpected call for a personal meeting at the end of the day on Friday. Whether the boss’s collar is clean or dirty won’t matter as long as the government continues kicking up waves in the labor pool.

Update: The Financial Time reports on the difficulties employers have with finding skilled employees. This is a myth that is trotted out whenever employers want skilled workers but don’t want to pay what those skills demand. It also reflects laziness on the part of the employer. For example it begins quoting Drew Greenblatt from Marlin Steel Wire Products complaining about the inability to find three sheet metal setup operators for $80k in salary and overtime.

The article doesn’t say what the going rate is for sheet metal setup operators in the area. While $80k may sound like a reasonable salary to most people, Mr. Greenblatt obviously needs to pay more to fill the position. Either he is underpaying or the job is so esoteric and rare that no one does it so he will have to train someone. If the latter, why doesn’t he approach a sheet metal setup operator working for his competition and offer them a higher salary than they are making? That’s the way the free market is supposed to work.

The article offers support to this conclusion:

Without in-house training programmes, companies have often been left looking for staff with specific skills. “A generation ago, employers would hire and train employees. Now, they demand trained workers,” says Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school.

“The skills gap is largely a figment of companies’ imagination,” says Mr Cappelli. “They cannot find workers to do the very specific tasks they want done. That is different from not being able to find capable workers.”

Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council: Joshuapundit–-Heart Of Darkness; Obama’s Campaign To Make Israel A Scapegoat And Fool America’s Jews

Noncouncil: AnDrew McCarthy- Fears And Smears

Full voting here.

Some of the responses I have seen to Operation Fast and Furious attempt to portray those who support the right to bear arms as being paranoid about the government’s sending guns to the Mexican drug cartels. CBS News has documents proving that the ATF used the secret government program to justify ATF demands for laws covering multiple gun sales.

This is the rough equivalent of burglarizing houses in a neighborhood to boost burglar alarm system sales.

We aren’t being paranoid. The federal government sent arms to the drug cartels to undermine a right explicitly set in the Constitution.

Somebody needs to be fired – and then jailed. This is the United States not Russia.

UPDATE: John Hinderaker from Powerline weighs in with the ultimate question to President Obama:

(W)hy in the world did the Obama administration not just allow AK-47s and other weapons to be shipped across the border to Mexican drug gangs, but encourage and even finance such transactions, over the objections of jittery gun shop owners and its own veteran agents? If the Obama administration wasn’t trying to set up an argument for more gun control, then what was it trying to do? That question has never been answered.

As I have said before, as a kid I watched the Watergate hearings after school instead of cartoons. Later in college I watched the Iran-Contra hearings instead of getting drunk with my friends. Now I’m watching the Fast and Furious hearings and without a doubt, Fast and Furious stands out as the worst scandal of the three. Why? Because no one died from Watergate.

Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council: Joshuapundit–-Rats in the Kitchen: A Parable

Noncouncil: The Passing Parade- OWS IT GOING, AND IT SHOULD GO FASTER

Full voting here.