The Syrian Refugee Problem - Part 2

In Part 1, I posed the following questions regarding the problem of Syrian Refugees:

• Are the refugees fleeing a war?
• Are they coming here for a better life?
• Do we owe them a better life? 
• Are they coming here to conquer us?  
• Is coming here the best way for them to have a better life?
• Can we know they are not terrorists?
• Can we discriminate against refugees based on religion?
• Does the West have an obligation to absorb every civil war torn population?

These Muslim refugees are not innocent victims fleeing a war.  There is no war in Kosovo, and the majority were Kosovars in early 2015.  Even now, the majority of Muslim refugees are from countries other than Syria and without wars.    

Of the minority fleeing Syria lately, the majority of them, 72%, are fighting age men.  And they are Sunnis, not the more endangered Christians and Infidels.  These men are the rebels who tried to overthrow Assad and failed.  If they stay, they will likely be imprisoned or worse by Assad.   Assad's ally, Russia, is now actively involved in the fighting and that is a game changer.  As Russia swooped in, the Sunni rebels swooped out.  It's that simple.  The Syrians who are seeking refugee status are fleeing a war they started and now have lost.    

  

And yes, most refugees are seeking a better economic life than the one they currently have.  They are aggressively seeking out countries that have the best welfare programs and job opportunities, which is why they insist on getting to Germany and the US for example.  

But, do we owe them a better life?  We have historically been very welcoming to immigrants in the U.S.  Much of this occurred before we became a welfare state.  Now that we are a welfare state though, it is increasingly expensive and politically divisive to welcome unlimited numbers of needy immigrants.

But these immigrants present a new question:  Are they coming to conquer us?  Islam has a word, hijrah (hejira, or hijra, etc.), which means emigration jihad.  In other words a holy war conducted through demographic overthrow.  The idea is to infiltrate the West and conquer it from within.  The history of Islam is replete with such conquests, many of them successful.   So yes, they seek to conquer the West.

If a better life is all they seek, is emigrating to the West the best way to achieve that?  A better way is to create a better life for them in their homelands.  It is actually cheaper too.  This seems obvious, but there is no will to pursue this in the West, or from those engaged in hijrah.

Can we know they are not terrorists?  Of course there is no way to screen terrorists, or potential terrorists from this wave of hijrah.  

Which brings us to the real question:  Can we discriminate against refugees based on religion?  This is really an interesting question when it comes to Islam because Islam is not just a religion - Islam is also a violent political system.  These two aspects of Islam are, in current practice, inseparable.

Of course in the U.S., we don't care which God you pray to or what holidays you observe.  But if your religion is hell-bent on denying others their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we ought to discriminate against you.  If your faith imposes it's ideology on others against their will, we ought to discriminate against you.  But the duality of Islam is a paradigm we cannot wrap our minds around in the West.  We are incapable of understanding the difference between a mere religion, and a religious political movement which incites violence.

The grey area in the U.S. is what constitutes "inciting violence".  Courts have given wide latitude for hate speech in the U.S. and even allowed some speech which clearly incites violence.  In other words, an Imam at a Mosque in the U.S. can basically implore his congregants to blow things up and kill thousands in the name of Islam, but as long as he chooses his words carefully, we cannot legally stop him.

Finally, does the West have an obligation to absorb every civil war-torn population?  When the option of engaging enemies abroad is taken off the table, and when we are unwilling to identify the enemy amongst us, we have painted ourselves into a dangerous corner.

This is how democracies commit suicide.                    

     

The Syrian Refugee Problem - Part 1

Battle lines have been drawn on the issue of Syrian refugees.  (Whether or not the refugees are actually from Syria is beside the point.)  The questions everyone is struggling with are these:

• Are the refugees fleeing a war?
• Are they coming here for a better life?
• Do we owe them a better life? 
• Are they coming here to conquer us?  
• Is coming here the best way for them to have a better life?
• Can we know they are not terrorists?
• Can we discriminate against refugees based on religion?
• Does the West have an obligation to absorb every civil war torn population?

All good questions.  Before I answer them, please watch some Syrians sing about one of their favorite events:  

(YouTube has deleted this content, and as we now know this censorship is often done at the direction of the U.S. government in direct violation of the First Amendment to The Constitution of The United States.)



I'll answer the questions in my next post - Part 2.

The Syrian Refugee Problem - Part-2

Déjà vu à Paris

I wrote the following in March of this year:

Kinetic Islam Déjà vu 

In March of 2001 Mullah Omar and the Taliban destroyed two 1700 year-old stone Buddahs in Afghanistan.  One of them stood 165 feet tall.  At the time few westerners understood that act.  Six months later when the twin towers of The World Trade Center were destroyed we all got an education in how kinetic Islam feels about infidel idols and symbols.  

Fast forward to today and the exact same thing is happening in Iraq.  Islamic State, or ISIS, or ISIL, is summarily destroying ancient churches, statues, artwork, and symbols of the infidels.  This time we have some perspective on why this behavior is occurring – Islam, or at least a fundamental interpretation of Islam, leads its followers to destroy these symbols.  It turns out the Quran, like the Old and New Testaments, contains a fair amount of idol destruction.  The difference is Christians and Jews do not go about re-enacting these verses from the early days of monotheism.  Muslims do, particularly the kinetic radical fundamental type. 

What scares me is the timing of all this.  Six months after the Buddahs came down we got 9/11.  I hope kinetic Islam has a different schedule this time.

Anatomy of a Myth - Democrats are Better for the Economy!

The Wall Street Journal published a letter Nov, 3rd from two Princeton Professors, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, defending Hillary Clinton for saying, "The economy does better when you have a Democrat in the White House!"  They have written a well publicized research paper proving her assertion.  Alan Blinder is a Clinton advisor.

Robert Reich, (no relation), is another one who has written extensively about the miraculous economies of Democrats, particularly in the years after WWII.   Robert Reich served in the Bill Clinton administration.

The New York Times ran a related piece in 2008,  right before the election,  about how the stock market does much better under Democrats than under Republicans.  The New York Times is a long time supporter of both Clintons. (I refuted the NYT piece thoroughly at the time here.  I highly recommend reading it.)

We can expect much more of this as the 2016 election approaches.  Having studied these claims for years, I find this is all carefully calculated political sophistry, but very weak economics, and void of logic.      

The GDP assertions are of two types:

• Democrat presidents have a better record of growing GDP since 1947.
• During some of our best GDP growth periods we had much higher tax rates and a highly unionized workforce.  

Both assertions are factually correct - and meaningless at the same time.

It is true that Democrat presidents have a better record of growing GDP.  After all, Democrats are the party of growing government, and GDP includes government spending.  Ergo, when government grows, GDP grows.  Barack Obama borrowed and printed fourteen trillion dollars, all of which added to GDP, but must be paid back at some future time.   GDP doesn't account for that. It is a one sided account entry.  If you take away the fourteen trillion in debt and QE under Obama, growth is about ten trillion...negative, since he took office.  But that's not how GDP growth is reported. It should be if we want the whole story.   

Another factor is that Republican presidents have had two hands tied behind their backs when it comes to economic policy: power and interest rates.  No Republican president since 1947 has ever had full robust control of both houses of the legislature.  Democrats, on the other hand, had either filibuster power (40 votes) or complete control (60 votes) of the Senate every second since 1947. Democrats had complete control of the executive and legislative branches for 20 years since 1947. Republicans had all of 4 years.  Moreover, Republican presidents have had an interest rate headwind averaging about 38% higher rates since the Fed began setting rates.  Albeit, most of that discrepancy comes from the historically low rates from the Obama years. 

Additionally, presidential party affiliation has almost no correlation with economic policies over time.  JFK, a Democrat, was a tax cutting supply-sider like Reagan, and nothing like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.  Richard Nixon, a Republican, instituted wage and price controls, something Ronald Reagan would never have done.  Bill Clinton ended up as a free trader and a capital gains tax cutter.  The list goes on.

Finally, economic policies do not reveal themselves instantly.  Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security were passed by Democrats long ago, but only now threaten to explode in our faces.  George W. Bush was saddled with the 2008 sub-prime disaster, yet Bill Clinton and the Democrats set that disaster in motion in the 1990’s when they thought it was a good idea to offer mortgages to unqualified people.  Sub-prime boosted the economy smartly until it blew-up over a decade later. Barack Obama likes to claim victimhood for inheriting the sub-prime mess, yet he was a key supporter all the way back to his community organizer days.  He continued that support while in the Illinois state senate,  into the U.S. Senate in 2008, and continuing even to this very day as president.   

Alan Blinder asserted in his letter that the economy is healthier today than it was in 2009.  I calculated that if we had just given every family in the US the money added to the debt since 2009, plus the Fed’s Quantitative Easing under Obama, each household could have been gifted $120,000.  My Labradoodle could have improved the economy if you gave him $14 trillion to re-distribute!

Robert Reich waxes nostalgic for the halcyon days after WWII when tax rates and unionization were high and the economy grew like topsy.  He is making a classic "post hoc" fallacy mistake.  ("post hoc, ergo propter hoc" is latin for the logical fallacy, "after this, therefore because if this.") Correlation is not causation.  Yes, the post war economy was very strong for decades, but that strength had nothing to do with high taxes and unionization.   In fact it was in spite of that.  WWII left us the only intact industrialized country in the world.  Japan, Europe, and the USSR were smoldering ruins.  China was still in loincloths.  South Korea was on the verge of its own war.   Of course we grew!  We could do no wrong with that tailwind.

Despite being convinced that Democrats are not superior stewards of the economy, I cannot make the claim that Republicans are.  There's just too much noise in an economy.  Too many moving parts. And party affiliation is too weak an indicator of historical economic philosophy.  

It all comes down to where the parties are at a given point in time.  Today's Democrat party is a Demand Side Economics party, and there's one thing I know in this life; nothing good ever comes from a Demand Side Economy.  

(For my definition of Demand Side Economics see this.  And this.)    

Ted Cruz is Awesome! VIII

Watch for as long as you like, but the whole thing is worth seeing.
At least to this classical liberal observer, this may be the best political speech I've ever seen.

Here's the link in case the embed doesn't work properly. Remember, this is C-SPAN, a government operation.
http://www.c-span.org/video/?328980-12/senator-ted-cruz-budget-deal