Border Security, not Border Bigotry

The United States is often maligned by other nations, and by its own liberals, for the way it deals with illegal aliens, whom it is said to mistreat and oppress.

But deporting law-breakers is neither mistreatment nor oppression.  Much less is paying for their schooling, their food, their housing, or their medical bills, which is what we often do for illegal aliens, a policy that has helped generate the financial tsunami overwhelming California at this moment.

We are said also to be xenophobic, as if we are opposed to Mexicans rather than to the endangerment of America and to the trampling underfoot of her laws.

But this is not an issue of bigotry.  This is not about Mexicans -- or Guatemalans, or Latvians, or Italians, or Swiss, or Tongans, or Koreans, or Tibetans, or South Africans, or any other nationality in the world.  It's about border security, which is one of the few obligations explicitly required of the federal government in the Constitution -- an obligation at which the current administration is now failing miserably.

No one objects to folks who enter America through the proper legal channels.  God bless them all.  May their number increase.  America is made from them.  But criminals don’t make America.  They unmake it, and America is not interested in being unmade and undermined.  Legal immigrants are welcome in America.   Illegal aliens are not.  Illegal aliens are law-breakers.  They are criminals.

By merely being deported rather than imprisoned, illegal aliens are being let off easily, so easily in fact that they often repeat their crime multiple times.  That is not mistreatment or oppression by America.  It’s alien recidivism.

Let everyone who wishes to come to America legally do so.  Let those who are unwilling to keep the law be sent home.  By the way, the latest figures show that more than 10% of those who enter America illegally from the south are adherents of militant Islam.  Because the total number of illegal aliens is now in the tens of millions, you can begin to calculate how much more danger we are in because of the illegal influx of those who want us dead or destroyed.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, 30,147 illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico were apprehended in 2003; 44,614 were caught in 2004; 165,178 were nabbed in 2005; and 108,025 were detaied in 2006.  The great majority of them were apprehended along the U.S. Southwest border.  They came from 35 countries known to harbor Islamic terrorists.  Many were caught carrying terrorist literature, such as bomb-making guidebooks.

In other words, our border policy is about security, not bigotry.

In the theological circles where I move, Christian liberals go the accusation one better by throwing in passages from the Bible, like Exodus 22: 21:  "Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt."  But in this context that reference is misunderstood and misapplied.  That’s not what the current situation is all about.  If you want to find out what Exodus says about our current situation, you'll have to look up passages on the proper punishment of criminals.

Harvard and the Folks

In a brief essay called “Private Bates,” C. S. Lewis insisted that we discard the notion “that it is the masses who can be led by the nose.  The only people who are really the dupes of their favorite newspapers are the intelligentsia.”

Although he made that point in 1944, near the end of the last World War, Lewis’s observation still stands.  We’re talking about folks who ever wonder what the New York Times has to say about an issue, any issue, or at what Rachel Maddow’s latest foaming rant is aimed, or what made Chris Matthews’ leg quiver with excitement this week, or what Bill Maher, who can’t tell the difference between “smart” and “smart-ass,” thinks is funny.

I say “folks” because the left wing elitists I have in mind don’t like to be called “folks.”  That’s what they like to call others.  If you aren’t sure to what I refer, then try to count how often President Obama uses the word “folks,” and how often he declines to include himself in the group.

The “folks” I have in mind think more highly of themselves than to be lumped in with all the allegedly backward folks who live between New York City and Los Angeles -- minus, of course, the self-identified heroic, leftist savants who live in the Ann Arbor and Madison enclaves.

By “folks,” I mean those who’d never be caught dead with the citizens of Pennsylvania, who cling to God and guns, as President Obama so memorably put it.

By “folks” I mean those who wonder, even for the briefest moment, what Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Michael Moore or George Clooney have to say about any social, political, or economic issue in the world.

By “folks” I mean those who don’t yet know that if the Harvard faculty teaches it, it’s probably deeply wrong.  These “folks” treat Harvard as the postmodern Delphic oracle.  To them, if it comes from Harvard, it might as well come from God.  The “folks” I have in mind have never learned about the stupidity of the expert, even though it’s an old, old lesson.

If you are one of the “folks” I’m talking about, you won’t recall the connection between Jesus and the stupidity of the expert when He explained how God had chosen for His cornerstone the very stone rejected by the builders (Mark 12: 10).  The builders, mind you -- not the butchers, the bakers and the candlestick makers -- the builders themselves rejected the very stone of God’s own choosing.  Their putative expertise served only to pit them against Profundity and Wisdom Himself.  If you are one of the “folks” I have in mind, you also won’t know that when Jesus mentioned the builders and their twisted judgment in this way, He was quoting from a text that was already many hundreds of years old when He quoted it (Psalm 118: 22).

The stupidity of the expert is an ancient and enduring phenomenon.  It didn’t begin with Harvard.  Harvard is just its latest embodiment, and our President is Harvard’s latest legacy to under-informed but overly self-congratulatory elitism posing as wisdom and dazzled by a pedestrian rhetoric that cannot rise above bumper sticker offerings like “hope” and “change.”

That happens a lot at Harvard.  Their experts are fools, and have been for many, many decades.  But the Harvardolators among us seem never to have noticed.  Neither have those they idolize, “folks” who are pretty sure that if they pull an all-nighter, they can solve any problem the world comes up with, just like they did in grad school. 

I’ve often wondered how to exorcise the Harvard demon from sycophantic leftists.  The only way I can think of at the moment is to remind them that their arch-enemies also went to Harvard and that, if Harvard makes you wise, then the Harvardolators are going to have to worship at the altar of Bill O’Reilly, William Bennett, and Alan Keyes -- Harvard men all -- and therefore worthy of your adulation.

You remember Alan Keyes, right?  You know, Alan Keyes: the man who crushed Obama in the debates during their Illinois campaign for Senate.

Don’t believe me?  It’s all on Youtube in the most withering rhetorical defeat I have ever seen.  Check it out.        

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, who recently took Obama to school on Middle Eastern realities, also went to Harvard – and, for good measure, to MIT.  And if you want to look at his grades at either school, I bet he’ll let you.  Some Harvard sorts won’t.  You ask to see their transcripts and it’s like they think you’re asking for a birth certificate or something.

The conservative contrarians I mentioned above, who did not drink the Crimson Kool-Aid, understand that you take off best against the wind.  So they earned their wings flying intellectual combat missions into the wind coming from the left. God bless them for it.

Although it bothers “folks” when I bring up God in this (or any) context, it’s perfectly appropriate:  All three of these Harvard anomalies are devout Christians, which is partly why they believe what they believe -- and what Harvard does not.

I once attended a special benefit dinner for a small Christian college just outside Detroit.  One of the Harvard men mentioned above, William Bennett, was the keynote speaker.  He began like this:

“I have been here for nearly three days now, and I’ve noticed that this college is not like Harvard.”

He paused while an audible gasp passed through the room at his perceived insult: “Oh, no he didn’t,” they all thought.

Then he continued:

“Thank God.”

   

Serf's Up: Ag. Policy in America

Rather than letting American farmers decide for themselves what to plant, where to plant it, and when to plant it, the federal government pays farmers in some regions to grow selected crops and, in other regions, pays farmers not to grow those same crops.

That’s right:  On the one hand, the government pays farmers to grow corn.  On the other hand, the government pays farmers not to grow corn.  Some crops the government pays farmers simply to plow under.  Rather than farming their fields, some farmers farm the US Treasury.

That silly scheme -- letting the (literal) bean counters in Washington decide what amount of what crops ought to be planted each year, and where they ought to be planted -- and paying famers both to plant and not to plant the same crop -- predictably produces both shortages and surpluses.  In both cases, the outcome is bad:

(1.) When the supply of a product goes down, its price rises.  Crop shortages lead to higher food costs.  Exactly how much more we pay for corn and wheat you discover firsthand every time you go to the grocery store, where you often have to pay more than $4 a box for breakfast cereal.

(2.) Because surpluses need to be safely stored until they can be sold, surpluses lead to greater government expenses and, in time, to higher taxes.  We pay more than $5.5 billion a year just to store the surpluses that government micro-management of farmers now creates.  That figure does not include the money we already paid farmers both to plant and not to plant the same crop.

Only God Himself could know how much flaxseed, honey, oats, wheat, corn, soybeans, cotton, butter fat, grain sorghum, sweet potatoes, lettuce and peanuts ought to be produced in America each year, or by whom and where they ought to be produced.  That knowledge is simply impossible for mere humans.  Federal bureaucrats, who seem to think they are God, do not know such things.  Yet, in their insufferable God-aping hubris, they continue to impose their ignorance on the nation and its food supply.  They will not do what they must do:  Unleash the creativity and productivity of American farmers -- the best in the world.  Because each farmer knows his own land, his own equipment and resources, his own skills, and his own market best, farming freedom, not central planning, is the order of the day.

Consider the now legendary case of Stanley Yankus, who was the son of a Lithuanian immigrant and a chicken farmer in Dowagiac, Michigan.  Yankus raised wheat and barley in order to feed his chickens.  He sold none of the wheat and barely he raised.

Even though the Constitution protects us from the loss of life, liberty and property without due process, and even though it provides for equal protection under the law, Yankus was not free to raise feed for his chickens.  The Department of Agriculture decided that 36 states ought to have wheat-growing restrictions while the others do not.   Yankus lived in a state with restrictions.  Not to be able to grow wheat for his own chickens seemed to him the destruction of his freedom to make a living.  It made him feel like a second-class citizens, someone without the freedoms and privileges possessed by others.  So he grew his wheat and fed his chickens.  The Feds fined him for it.  His fines were equal to his entire year’s income.

In his testimony before Congress, Yankus said this:  “Many people have told me that I would lose everything by opposing these wheat laws.  What is everything?  Money is of no value to a slave. I think freedom is everything.”

For Yankus, being a self-sufficient poultry farmer proved impossible.  Loving his freedom and loving his chosen profession, he moved himself and his family to Australia.

We must not let the Feds turn our farmers into Washington's modern-day peasants and serfs.

  

Stanley Yankus:  http://www.life.com/image/50708520

Television and the Withering of Political Prudence

In America, we often repeat a very silly saying:  "The camera never lies."  The facts, however, are quite the opposite.  The camera does not bring the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The camera lies.  The camera always lies. 

It always introduces a degree of falsity, sometimes a very large degree.  Nevertheless, because the camera provides what film makers and news directors call "the illusion of presence," and because we viewers tend uncritically to adopt a naïve realism toward what we see on camera, we accept that visual falsity almost without question.  We tend automatically to take the perspective of the camera as our own, even though a television camera is an inherently superficial newsgathering device, not simply because it is inescapably perspectival, but because its very presence changes things.

         As your own eyes have shown you repeatedly, human beings do not behave normally in front of a camera.  Children, football players, talk show audiences, and mere passers-by all act differently, all act up, when the camera turns to them.  We now know that nearly everyone has a mother (Hi, Mom!"), and that nearly everyone is a champion (We're number one!).  We also have seen in multiple cases that rioting subsides when the cameras are removed.

         You must remember that politicians behave according to that same camera-based principle. When the camera turns to them, they act up; they stop talking normally and start acting and speaking for the camera.  Superficial snippets of perceived personality have replaced dispassionate analysis and discussion; on-stage demeanor has replaced deliberation and debate.  After the election, the same techniques apply; those in power operate by the same principles as those who seek it.  Because the media loom so large in contemporary politics, we are subjected to endless bouts of spin control and to government by leaks, the current democratic version of disinformation.

         Political advisors now think like television news directors:  If it bleeds it leads; if it thinks it stinks.  Political advisors know that tough pictures mean that tough policies cannot likely be widely accepted, or at least not for long, because the viewing public has no stomach for it.  To talk about the morality of war is one thing, to show maimed children and riddled corpses on television every evening, to broadcast the horrible reality of soldiers and civilians killing and being killed, is quite another, even in a fully justified war.  The viewing public cannot long endure the harsh face of combat. 

         This is the lesson:  If you want to stop a public policy from continuing in effect, or else prevent it ever from being so, then you must relentlessly broadcast its unpleasant consequences -- and every policy, no matter how prudent, has them.  Almost no amount of sober analysis and cogent argumentation can overturn the conclusion that a policy is incurably evil once these graphic images have been seared into the minds of viewers, however contrived and anecdotal those images might be.  All too often, policies are defeated on the screen, not in Congress; in the news editor's office, not in the public square, in graphic, full-color pictures above the fold, not in delicate, difficult, and sustained deliberation.  Emotional potency, not reasoned deliberation, has become the political tool of choice.

         When we think clearly and carefully, we understand that anecdotal arguments are not as logically compelling as principled and logical demonstration.  But in issues of contemporary public policy and morality, that fact hardly matters because television is inherently geared toward anecdotes, towards gripping pictures and shallow, slanted stories, rather than rational discourse.

         I am not saying, of course, that all television news directors try consciously to deceive society, though doubtless some do.  I say only that the medium itself has a built-in falsification.  To get his or her story aired on a news broadcast, a reporter must show something gripping, something unusual.  Consequently, news reporters and photo-journalists tend to search for images with considerable visual impact, not for plain, unadorned fact.  News reporters crave face time on the tube.  They shape their stories in ways that make them an effective means of personal promotion.  Career considerations can, and have, made a casualty of truth.  And if, as we have been told on the highest authority, the truth sets us free (John 8: 32), then as long as we continue to subject ourselves to the enslaving errors and distortions of modern media, slaves we will remain.

The American voter seems to have forgotten that the highest and surest qualifications for statesmanship are virtue and wisdom, and that it takes far more than intelligence, energy or personality to govern well.  Character, not charisma, identifies the statesman and sets the statesman apart from the mere politician. 

             

Inflation: Obama's Undeclared Tax Increase

         Contrary to common parlance, inflation is not rising prices.  Nor is inflation the result of rising prices.  Rising prices are the result of inflation.  Inflation is when the government floods the marketplace with printing press money -- as it now is doing.  The consequences of that flood surround us on all sides, as I aim to point out.

Like other commodities, the value of money is determined by the interaction of supply and demand.  When the supply of money increases dramatically compared to the supply of goods and services, the value of money declines.  In that case, it takes more dollars to do what fewer dollars used to.  Because the Obama administration prints money day and night without end, the gallon of gas that cost $1.84 when he took office now costs $3.92 just half way through his term.  The rise in gasoline prices is not the result of decreased supply or radically increased demand.  They remain basically what they were when Obama took office.  The difference is inflation and the wild-eyed speculation it engenders, which taxes you at the incredible rate of more than $2 per gallon of gasoline.

Naturally, Obama could not have gotten passed a new tax of more than $2 per gallon of gas. Just trying it would have made the mid-term shellacking he and the Democrats suffered even worse.  Instead, he simply amped up the printing presses, thereby stealing value from every dollar of every person who owns even one, making gasoline prices rise dramatically -- just as it did nearly everything else -- which you have noticed whenever you bought milk, bread, cereal, or meat for your family -- or bought gas.  Thank inflation.  Thank the president. 

Why would Obama do it?

He did it because inflation favors debtors.  The Obama administration, you’ll recall, is the world champion of debt.   In order to reduce its own financial burdens, the government induces inflation.  Inflation allows debtors to discharge their obligations with dollars of reduced value.  It steals from creditors.  Creditors, therefore, are reluctant to make loans because inflation makes lending more likely a losing proposition.  If borrowers can just print a batch of reduced value dollar bills in order to pay their debts -- in other words, if borrowers were counterfeiters -- lenders will be justifiably reluctant to give them loans.  You’ve probably noticed that loans are harder to get.  Thank inflation.  Thank the president, the Counterfeiter-in-Chief.         

Because inflation means that today’s dollar is worth more than tomorrow’s, inflation discourages saving.  If you get more for your money by spending it now than if you spend it later, you spend it now.  But if you spend it now, savings diminish.  When savings diminish, there’s less money from banks for investment.  Less investment means fewer jobs and higher unemployment.  That is, by undermining the value and stability of the dollar, government undermines capital investment.  On the one hand, investors can’t easily get loans.  On the other, they are reluctant to enter into long-term commitments when the very value of money itself is unpredictable.  They can’t calculate what they’ll earn or what they’ll owe.  Unstable money drives businesses overseas, to places where the financial climate is more predictable.  You’ve probably noticed both the high rate of unemployment and the flight of American businesses to other countries.  Thank inflation.  Thank the president.

         Think of inflation as government alchemy.  In the Middle Ages, alchemists tried everything they could think of to turn some other substance into gold -- with predictable results.  Governments try the same trick now.  When Roosevelt took the US off the gold standard, he wanted to make paper serve as gold.  Paper is more easily manipulated than gold, and he wanted to manipulate the money.  Roosevelt became the anti-Midas:  Rather than everything he touched turning to gold, the gold he touched turned to paper.  The value of the dollar dropped accordingly.  The results are devastating, especially to the poor.

For example, if you were born into a poor family in 1944, and if, over those intervening years, you worked incredibly hard and managed to increase your family income by more than 3000 percent, you’d have fallen even further below the poverty line because of government-induced inflation.  Inflation makes the escape from poverty even more difficult than it already is because it requires ever-increasing amounts of money from you to produce your escape.  Inflation is a chain that binds the poor to their misery.  Perhaps you’ve noticed that the percentage of persons in poverty in America rarely goes down.  The cliff of prosperity is too high and steep to scale.  Thank inflation.  Thank the president.

Think of inflation as a teenager’s credit card.  The teen gets the goodies and the parents get the bills.  For “teenager,” read “government,” and because government prints its own stage money, for “government” read “tyrant” and “counterfeiter.” With inflation, the tyrant-counterfeiter gets the goodies, and you are left to pay his bills with the reduced-value dollars he has printed.

Now do you see?

Inflation is a weapon.  This administration aims it at us.

Perhaps you are one of those who expect government to help protect you from thieves. Perhaps you think that government ought to track down, capture, and punish counterfeiters.  But what if the thief and the counterfeiter are the government?  What happens when, say, the government prints several hundred billion dollars or so in order to pay its bills, thereby stealing value from its citizens’ financial resources?  This happens:  Dollars lose their value; loans are hard to get; prices rise precipitously; investment slows; jobs go overseas; unemployment is high; the poor are chained; and the nation’s prestige is diminished.

Welcome to Obama’s world.

As long as he’s your president, it’s your world too. 

Begin Here

"The thing that is in danger is the whole structure of society, and it is necessary to persuade thinking men and women of the vital and intimate connection between the structure of society and the theological doctrines of Christianity."

                                                Dorothy L. Sayers, "Creed or Chaos?"

"But what is a practical joke in a world

Of nonsense, what is a rational attitude

Towards politics in a world of ciphers . . .?"

                                                Louis MacNeice, "The Blasphemies"

            We are not born civilized. 

            We acquire civility, if at all, only later.  The truest and best way to acquire civility is under the guidance of a wise moral order, and under the nurture of a well-functioning traditional family.  While other paths to civility are possible and sometimes work, the happy combination of family and wise moral authority is the most dependable way to gain access to the hard-won wisdom of our ancestors, wisdom gained slowly and painfully over the centuries in the crucible of real life and in the light of revelation.

            In other words, because we human beings are not born civilized, we are always only one generation from barbarism. We must domesticate each new generation, just as we were domesticated in our turn.  To convert the brutes we all are born into the civilized persons we ought to be requires nothing less than the wisdom of God.  Barbarism is not behind us; it is within us, and it is persistent.  Our demons die hard, if at all.  If they are to die, God must kill them.  Government cannot.  The deepest and most profound human ills have no political solution.  To think and act as if they do is foolish.  How much time, effort, and treasure we have wasted trying to do by means of government what can never be done is far, quite far, beyond calculation.

            Faced with the perennial challenge of civilizing the next generation, and fully aware that in order to civilize it they must begin with God, Christian conservatives turn first to revelation, to the works and words God Himself, works and words graciously bestowed upon this fallen and twisted world, a world utterly lost and never to be found without them.  Thus, while Christian conservatives might value the good, the true, and the beautiful, they know that without God we can never find them or preserve them.  Indeed, without God we could not even convincingly define them.  While Christian conservatives set about conserving things like justice, the traditional family, and even civilization itself -- things always at risk and under siege -- they know that the best defense of them is the revelation of God, by which, and only by which, can things be seen and done aright.  I am not saying that we cannot begin without God.  I am saying that we cannot begin well without God.

Labor Union Folklore

I leave it to the labor unions to tell you about their virtues and their successes.  They are quite willing and able to do so.  I take it as my task simply to tell you about their weaknesses and shortcomings.  In this case, I want to tell you about union folklore.  I want to tell you about some of the things people think are true concerning unions but are not.

Let’s Play Monopoly

First, labor folklore suppresses the monopolistic tendencies and intentions of the unions themselves.  Unions intend to monopolize the work supply the corporation needs to purchase in order to produce its merchandise.  Unions want to eliminate the competition among prospective workers.  They want to be sure that a union shop hires only union workers, that the shop has no freedom to hire others.  If there’s competition among prospective workers, then the workers have to bid against each other in order to offer their services at the best price for the corporation.  In order to keep their wages artificially high, unions aim to eliminate competition.  They do it in many ways, some moral and legal, some not.

The most common way to keep others from competing for jobs is to pay large sums of money to elect legislators who will pass laws that eliminate worker competition.  Unions want a shop closed to worker competition, a shop wherein the union monopolizes the work supply -- which the elected legislators provide by passing laws toward that end.  It’s a special interest system from Hell:  What the unions want, the politicians provide; what the politicians want, the unions provide -- all others be damned.  Unions strive after, and frequently attain, job sovereignty.  They enclose the labor pool; they assert union fraternity over employer and competitive worker liberty.  In effect, they place “No trespassing" signs in front of the hiring office.  By doing so, unions stage an invasion on managerial prerogatives, by demanding control, or veto, over hiring and firing.

Collective bargaining is not an instrument of liberty, but of control.  Unions wield it precisely in order to restrain trade, namely the trading of money for work and of work for money that occurs freely between company and employees -- absent third party intervention or coercion.  Unions try very hard to prevent companies from dealing directly with free employees and free employees from dealing directly with companies, which is why so much relevant discussion has centered around whether or not antitrust law (law designed to preserve competition) ought to be applied to labor unions.  When unions apply pressure across an industry to drive up their income, unions call it collective bargaining.  When businesses do it, unions call it price fixing.

Perhaps a commonly employed analogy will serve:  Imagine that a homeowner, John, and a prospective buyer, Sam, were negotiating over the purchase of John’s home.  Imagine that Sam were invested with the bargaining privileges now enjoyed by labor unions.  In such a case, Sam would be able to deprive John of all other purchase offers.  Sam would be able to physically isolate John’s home and thereby to cut it of from all deliveries of any sort, even food, as well as to prevent personal movement into and out of John’s home so that, even if John were, say, an ambulance driver, he could not ply his trade or make his living.  Sam could impose at will a virtual boycott, or embargo, of John’s business, even if John did not work at home.  Were you or I to exert such coercive pressures on John, it would be called criminal.  When unions exert them, it’s called collective bargaining.  

Victims

Second, despite their monopolistic practices, unions want you to think of them as the victims, not the victimizers.  When non-union forces try to re-assert their liberty, unions portray that re-assertion as fascist tyranny.  Unions want you to forget that just as collective bargaining is a legally protected activity, so also is opposing it.

Unions are not victims.  On the whole, organized labor stands quite well up in the rankings of worker wages and benefits, both here and around the world.  Nevertheless, the perception remains that union workers are downtrodden and oppressed.  This mistaken notion of victimization is not simply a matter of cultural lag or of perceptions not keeping pace with reality, but of propaganda.  Unions purposely portray themselves as the stoop-shouldered cannon fodder of capitalist emperors battling each other over filthy lucre.

The picture is false.  Unions work for consumers.  Unions work for you.  Consumers -- mothers, store clerks, assembly workers, farmers, and dental assistants, not greedy capitalist emperors -- determine who gets and who keeps a job.  They do so with their dollars.  If a product’s price is too high, or if its quality is too low relative to that price, consumers send their money elsewhere.  When they do, they fire not only management, but union workers as well.  The consumer’s dollars, not the owner’s greedy desires, are the rising tide that floats the corporate boat, or else their absence is the torpedo that sinks it to the bottom of the financial sea.

Unions want you to think that they are victims of greedy capitalists when in reality they are simply unable to compete successfully for consumer dollars in the marketplace.  They do not present their failure in this regard as their failure, but as their victimization at the hands of others.

Union folklore says that others are greedy, not union members.  As everyone knows who thinks about it even for a moment, human nature and its manifold weaknesses is fully represented on both sides of the bargaining table.

We are the world

Third, labor folklore asserts that what’s good for unions is good for America.  It’s an old myth, and widely employed by many groups for their own advancement, whether by farmers, retailers, wholesalers, or public servants, that whatever is good for them is good for the nation.  In other words, unions are not the first or the only small group to assert that their interests are identical with the interests of the country.

This myopic self-centeredness  ignores the basic reality that if money is allocated in one direction it cannot be allocated in another at the same time.  When one sector gets a larger share in the consumers’ allocation of money, another sector gets less.  But the whole country is not thereby either diminished or enlarged.  When group A prospers at the expense of group B, the nation is not thereby either richer or poorer.  The gains (and losses) are relative:  They are relative to other groups in the economic equation.  The nation isn’t financially enlarged, just one portion of it.  What one sector gained, others paid.  The benefit is unidirectional, not universal.  What’s described as better off for the nation is simply reallocation.  Reallocation within the system is not the same as increasing the system.  The pie is not magically bigger, just cut up in different proportions.  That’s not good for the country, just good for one sector.  I’m not saying that economics is inescapably a zero sum game; I’m saying that mere reallocation is.

Indeed, one might argue that, because no industry is truly isolated from all others and therefore is impacted by what happens in them, when other companies consent to raise wages because of union pressure, they must also raise their prices in order to absorb the additional labor costs.  That means that the corporations and consumers who wish to purchase that company’s products must pay more, raising everyone else’s costs accordingly, thus making them worse off than before.  Those who are now worse off believe that they must demand more, which raises the price of their products, and drives the cost of living higher in ever-rising circles of upward pressure.  In this way, what’s good for unions is bad for everyone else, despite union folklore to the contrary.