Greenfield on Free Markets and Free Trade.

Friday, April 24, 2015
The Free Market is Not a Suicide Pact
Posted by Daniel Greenfield

Immigration has become the third rail of American politics.

At a time when the labor force participation rate has fallen to 62 percent and the employment growth for the last 15 years has gone to immigrants, opposing the Super-Amnesty of 12 million illegal aliens is still considered an extreme position… in the Republican Party.

So when Scott Walker merely suggested that Congress should make immigration decisions based on “protecting American workers and American wages”, he was denounced for it by… Republicans.

Walker’s belief that immigration should be based on “our economic situation”, rather than an ideological mandate for open borders, has become an “extreme right” position. And yet this scary “extreme” position that foreign workers shouldn’t be brought in to displace American workers is part of our immigration law. It’s just one of those “extreme” parts that, like the illegality of crossing the border, is being ignored. It’s not just being ignored by Obama. It’s also being ignored by the Republican Party.

Scott Walker’s common sense immigration populism was met with two sets of attacks. The first set came from senators like McCain and Portman playing the old song about all those “jobs Americans won’t do.” (Not that they’re given the chance to do them.) Senator Hatch claimed that, “We know that when we graduate PhDs and master’s degrees and engineers, we don’t have enough of any of those.”

America has no shortage of engineers. Companies aren’t bringing in Third World engineers on H-1B visas because of a shortage, but because they want to fire their American workers and replace them with cheaper foreigners. American IT workers are forced to train their H-1B replacements before being fired.

And that’s when the free market argument kicks in.

Walker was denounced for betraying “free market principles” and for “immigration protectionism”. But if lowering the rate of one million immigrants already arriving each year while Americans can’t find jobs is a violation of free market principles, then why have any limitations on immigration at all?

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Free market principles, like any others, must be reducible to the individual. Can importing millions of people who reject free market principles individually be in accordance with free market principles?

Only collectively, and collectivist free market principles are a contradiction in terms and a suicide pact. This collectivist version of free market principles destroys our ability to implement any form of free market in the future. The perversion comes from viewing the free market as an abstract idea expressed through our entanglement in a global network. The free market isn’t a global policy. It’s how we live. It’s our freedom to engage in commerce as we choose. It exists only as long as we are free. Scott Walker hasn’t abandoned free market principles. His critics have.

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We can sacrifice the American free market to a non-existent global free market, or we can protect the American free market while letting it serve as a model of domestic economic freedom for other nations.

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Lots More:
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2015/04/...rd-rail-of.html


Personal observationa: It's funny no one cared about violating free market principles when TARP was passed to save global financial institutions.