Cheap Labor

Cheap Labor
“Failed” Government Wars, Part 1 of 2
(On immigration, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, illiteracy, obesity, crime, poverty, terror, corruption, pornography, trade, ignorance, child abuse and bigotry).

Let's single out just one war and look at the problems of illegal alien migration for a moment. Let’s also try to do our examination objectively and somewhat differently from most widely held perspectives.

Unemployment (to the extent one can believe government statistics) is at or near its lowest level in decades, even after taking into consideration the 12, 20 or 40 million illegal aliens who are gainfully employed in the United States, part- or full-time. If the United States can employ everyone who ‘wants’ to work (citizens plus legal and illegal aliens), there is obviously a huge market demand for labor, both skilled and unskilled, and to some extent educated. Like it or not, disturbing or not, there is also an incredible demand for labor with less educational achievement and fewer expectations. We’re talking about “cheap labor.” For analytical purposes, ethnic origin, education and citizenship are irrelevant in the discussion of cheap labor because when you need a job done, one that requires menial labor, it is the job that is your focus, not the person or their education, or even their ability to speak English. If the only workers available to you are both willing and motivated to work, and in most cases grateful for the work, and all you can do is communicate with hand-signals, that’s good enough.

Part of this insatiable demand for highly motivated but minimally skilled workers was solved by outsourcing manufacturing jobs and entire industries overseas. Workers in India and China are plentiful, and willing to work at a fraction of the cost of labor in the United States. The situation is different in the United States. There are minimally skilled workers in large numbers. Unfortunately, they are far from being highly motivated.

Regardless of skill or education considerations, the labor pool in the United States is three-tiered, those who are highly motivated, and those who are minimally motivated or unmotivated. Minimally motivated and unmotivated workers have come to expect (demand) too much in the form of total compensation. It is difficult to entice them to work at all, particularly after Congress provided the social alternative of relying on income redistribution as a respectable livelihood. Imagine, choosing not to work and still be subsidized in every imaginable way (health care, housing, no taxes, cash subsidy, transportation, education, food, utility bills, etc.) by taxpayers. What is the incentive for minimally motivated and unmotivated workers to seek employment? Employment for them, in most cases, is a net financial loss. Nor is pride a factor as various demographic groups consciously seek, through sociopathic behavior and ignorance, to make themselves unemployable.

It should go without saying that manufacturing is the foundation of a global economy. Workers in India or China or Mexico can produce for a labor cost of $1.00 the same product of the same quality as a worker in the United States for a labor cost of $30.00. In order to compete, the United States’ worker had better be able to produce 30 times as much in the same amount of time. Meanwhile, the manufacturer has the objective, as does any business enterprise, to produce any product with the least consumption of scarce natural resources, including labor in order to maximize profit. Even though the concepts are economic in origin, think of it in environmental terms. In the course of all human activity, we should try to consume the least of all natural resources whenever possible, including labor. Most people of liberal orientation understand that it is far more efficient and humanitarian to hire 30 Indians than one American (for the same labor cost) – unless there are overriding economic or ideological considerations.

At the same time that labor costs were becoming prohibitively uncompetitive, with lesser-skilled labor demanding too much to get of their sofa, government was simultaneously imposing too much regulatory overhead for any business to profitably function as a domestic corporation. The absence of inexpensive labor in the United States, combined with oppressive government interference, were two important factors that weighed most heavily in corporate outsourcing decisions.

A wise man once remarked a long time ago, that it was a little late to close the barn door after the horses were gone. It isn’t always that easy to get them back. Yet in the case of many important United States’ industries, I think you will agree we must try.

We should pause for a well-deserved moment of silence in tribute to past and current Congressmen who have collectively engineered this debacle. The consequence of their ineptitude is that every manufacturing industry still remaining in the United States is facing increasingly stiff competition from overseas, forcing them to cut costs deeply, including wages and benefits, in order to compete with foreign rivals. So severe is the problem that since 1993, U.S. production has only met half of the increase in American demand for durable goods; the other half has come from overseas. So when you hear that Americans are “addicted” to foreign goods, that claim is patently false. Americans want quality manufactured goods, and are capable themselves of producing quality manufactured goods, but they are just not made in the United States anymore.

Why not? In the fewest possible words, American manufacturing and its associated jobs are gone, courtesy of failed domestic social and regulatory programs and foreign trade policies enacted by Congress and successive American administrations. The United States Congress, state legislatures and courts have literally and unwittingly undermined the profitability of American industry until most fled overseas for survival. Those that remain are circling the drain in an ever-decreasing concentric circle.

The root causes of the scarcity of inexpensive labor include such factors as federal and state legislation and local ordinances, administrative agency regulations to implement ill-advised legislation, litigation, equal opportunity, environmental restrictions, work ethic, union interference, worker’s compensation, mindless taxation, double taxation, political corruption, earmarks, occupational safety extremes, demographics, product liability, poor education, crime, etc. Far from last or least on the list of causes of labor scarcity are schemes intended to benefit special interest groups in return for their votes, i.e., income redistribution. The clearly visible but ignored effect of our national welfare state is to dramatically shrink the willing labor pool year after year. In the meantime, real incomes for middle-class taxpaying households were lower in 2005 than in the recession year of 2001. Democrat Jim Webb, who just won election in normally Republican Virginia, warned, “In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future.”

Why has the United States’ Congress, in their collective incompetence and Nero Syndrome, allowed America to become short the 20-40 million employees, educated or not, skilled or not, motivated or not, needed to sustain industrial manufacturing in the United States? That is a matter best left to ideologues. A lifetime could be spent analyzing past Congressional legislation and Supreme Court decisions that resulted in subsidizing whole groups of people, effectively removing them from the need to work, institutionalizing discrimination and disenfranchising American industry. It would be easier to understand if social engineering was being used by the courts and legislatures to advance the cause of socialism. What logical explanation could there be for Congress to have created a permanent and expanding underclass whose literal survival today depends on income redistribution through entitlement programs (in exchange for votes)? Did I answer the question inadvertently? Sorry.

If that were not enough, and regardless of ideology, there is still another factor that exacerbates the huge unfilled demand for workers, i.e., American citizens who would have entered the workforce by the millions, over twenty million, but were not born. The relevant point now is that demand for labor in the United States is far greater than the ‘willing’ supply. The shortfall in willing labor supply, even after outsourcing, is being met by vast numbers of illegal alien migrants. The behavior of the unwilling labor supply, i.e., sloth, ignorance and degeneracy, is being subsidized by taxes extracted from corporations and the top 50% of wage earners at the forceful behest of the United States government.

In the fewest words possible, it has been the unrelenting, broad and pervasive government interference with free markets, and abandoning long established cultural norms, that has caused a loss of manufacturing jobs and a severe labor shortage.

An abundance of skilled tradesmen and service jobs requiring lesser skills have replaced the manufacturing jobs. We have a knowledge and skill economy at the top, a tradesman and service economy at the bottom. The “middle class” who used to make widgets have become a highly endangered species. While it is true that both the population of the United States and the number of people employed has increased dramatically, constant-dollar real wages of the average American citizen has been decreasing for decades. With the Fed’s engineered devaluation of the U.S. dollar, with the worst yet to come, the standard of living of all but the wealthiest Americans is declining. That is not their fault – talk to Congress. As for what remains of the middle class, they struggle to maintain their standard of living. Consumption expenditures of the Middle Class, which once came from discretionary income and savings, have all but been replaced by consumption spending using debt as a funding mechanism, i.e., refinancing their home and buying what they cannot afford.

Instead of Upper, Middle and Lower classes in society, two new classes have emerged – those who are debt-free and the debtors. As the ranks of the debtors grow, and consumables continue to increase in price due to a combination of foreign manufacture and the devaluation of the Unites States' currency, consumption of durable goods will ultimately diminish.

Regardless of conservative philosophy or liberal ideology, illegal alien migration is factually and simply the “market” supplying a “demand.” Any market demand will be met by human beings seeking to profit by providing a supply – in this case, labor. The demand is so strong that millions of human beings, many of whom believe they have few or no viable economic alternatives in other parts of the world, are willing to risk their lives to meet the labor demand in the United States. Make no mistake. They’re not coming to the United States to become loyal citizens – that ended with the Era of Conservatism. They have no knowledge or respect for the borders of the United States or any of its laws. They’re coming solely to work and to avail them of an economic paradise on earth, a well-spring in social services and taxpayer funded benefits with absolutely nothing expected from them in return. Think of it as the illegal alien’s modern day California Gold Rush, but for social services and taxpayer funded benefits.

When viewed as a labor demand being met and satisfied, from an economic perspective, illegal migration is not a problem. This is a triumph of market forces. There are two big problems, however. The first one is that the triumph belongs to the “black market.” The triumph of the “black market” in labor is in stark contravention of United States law – just as is the black market in drugs. The second problem is the apparent illicit and prescription drug-induced psychosis to simply give away boundless American wealth and jobs to illegal aliens – to forcibly take hard-earned wealth from Americans and give it away, without any commensurate obligation from non-citizens. Those who support amnesty for illegal aliens, or their continued access to social services, are advocating nothing less than the wholesale transfer of American wealth to illegal aliens - and subsequent generations of illegal aliens.

Either the black market or the rule of law will ultimately prevail, but not both. In the “war on drugs,” which economic force prevailed? Was it the black market in drugs or United States’ laws? Where incredible demand exists, human beings will supply the commodity in their own self interest. There are no exceptions. You may say, “I wouldn’t,” but the fact is that someone will and that person may not speak English or be a United States citizen. Embedded among them may be some (or many) of our nation’s most deadly enemies.

Extending the analysis further, why does a black market in labor exist? Very simply, the black market exists because of government intervention. The United States’ government has been trying to circumvent natural market forces by regulating (imposing) wage scales and labor eligibility by every artifice imaginable. They have gone to the extremes of favoring one ethnic group over others, all of whom are in competition, either to avail themselves of the “cheap labor” pool as employers, or to become part of the labor supply.

The black market in labor has become a big problem for two primary reasons – (1) illegal alien migrants have been led by our elected politicians to expect goods, benefits and services from the different levels of government that only those citizens in the top 50% of wage earners must pay for, and (2), the actual overhead costs of the illegal alien labor pool far exceeds the perceived national benefits, particularly in crime and cultural degradation.

The most significant goods and services that illegal aliens have come to expect include: medical care, citizenship for children born in the USA, chain migration, and welfare in numerous forms, public school education of their children, in-state tuition, voting rights, affirmative action privileges, and preferential language consideration.

Overhead costs include a range of political demands by illegal aliens that impinge on people's expectations concerning the English language (such as ballots printed in multiple languages), security, property ownership, conferring civil rights without citizenship, repeated criminal victimization of American citizens, criminal injustice toward Americans, disproportionate incarceration of illegal aliens at taxpayer expense, the economic failure and closing of hundreds of hospitals, and fading political and cultural cohesion.

Statistically, 25 Americans die every day at the hands of illegal aliens. In one year, 9125 people die at the hands of illegal aliens; more than the combined total of our military losses and civilian casualties since the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983. In one year, more Americans die at home from the criminal actions of illegal aliens than the nation has experienced from a total of 23 years of foreign military adventures. You might want to re-read those last two sentences to realize the enormity of the overhead costs to society.

There is also the “small nagging detail” that illegal alien’s pay no taxes (except after engaging in document fraud in conjunction with identity theft) and contribute little to America except their labor, yet derive/demand a vast majority of the benefits.

There is the not-so-small problem of the justice (courts) and security (police) systems in this country, which don't work particularly well for citizens, much less for illegal alien migrants. And because politicians and judges have worked to the advantage of illegal aliens and disadvantage of citizens, more often than not, a citizen revolt such as the 2006 Mid-term elections was all but predictable. Add to the demographic equation the size and density of the illegal alien population, their distribution, vital statistics and capacity for expansion. Then factor in the dynamic balance with, or disruption of, the existing culture that is being displaced. Houston, we have a problem.

Rather than fostering free and open markets, the most serious problems (resource dislocations) have been caused by our own government’s attempting market manipulation and outright intervention, trying to artificially regulate the laws of economic exchange between rational human beings. Without our government’s intervention, everything could otherwise be a peaceful trading environment – in theory. The liberal mindset has prevailed for so long that it has become a pathological obsession to regulate everything, even human nature itself. By making the same mistakes over and over and over, Congress responds to crime by banning guns, Congress responds to bigotry by banning speech, Congress responds to terrorism by banning profiling and opening the borders, Congress responds to illegal aliens running wild within United States’ borders by discouraging enforcement of existing law, Courts respond to homosexuality by banning the Boy Scouts, Courts respond to secularism by banning Christianity, and Congress responds to child abuse by banning pornography. You can easily think of a dozen more examples. In every case, the programmed liberal mindset refuses to hold the individual responsible for the crime, including the illegal alien, and instead casts the crime perpetrator or illegal alien invader as the victim of an evil racist society or child abuse. Is it possible that there is more sanity in Alice in Wonderland?

There are still more issues, and one that is huge – multiculturalism. Federal, state and local governments are now presiding over a multi-cultural and multi-lingual land, that they created, that is incrementally becoming unstable. All levels of government are vainly attempting to “rule” using government-institutionalized discrimination augmented with force, suppressing the majority will of Americans in order to make room for illegal aliens and facilitate the inevitable advent of the North American Union.

The United States, with its rapidly decreasing cultural homogeneity, is becoming less and less politically and socially stable with each passing year. To better appreciate the future of America, think of the Jews and Arab Palestinians who occupy and claim the same “holy ground” in Israel. Now add to their mix a vast welfare and regulatory state, layered with multiple religions, disparate cultures and languages, and you can see why Israel has such an explosive situation on their hands. Israel’s national stability is inversely correlated with multiple cultures and beset with institutionalized government and religious discrimination. And we are not? Unless politicians change course soon, Israel’s present situation is a glimpse into America’s future, but ours will be on a much larger scale.

Before the November 2006 election, United States’ citizens were already taking to the streets and the internet in protest because the sources of their angst had not been and were not being addressed by politicians. What if the election had ended differently? Could there have been clarion calls by politicians in every state in the Union for a “war on illegal alien migration?” Not likely, and Democrats swept the polls. Most people have come to realize that there is less than 15 cents in difference between Democrats and liberal Republicans. Most relevant is a single fact: Democrats are now in control of Congress. The problems, from the viewpoint of border control advocates, and conservatives in general will grow worse – much worse. More citizens will probably join the anti-illegal immigration protest incrementally. Most will not realize the issues are wrapped around an axle called market forces, i.e., supply and demand – and nobody is addressing market forces. To do so would require Congress to increase the supply of cheap labor (workers) inside the United States from among American citizens by providing fewer unearned subsistence alternatives to working. There is no workable solution that does not include significantly increasing the supply of American “cheap labor.” Reducing income redistribution will not be a political Happy Meal among Congressmen. Odds-makers would probably give a 60-year old disabled veteran better odds of winning the Boston Marathon.

As long as the over-supply of jobs goes unfilled by American workers, it will be filled by foreign workers, and they will continue to flood into the United States just as a tide floods the lowlands. The only changes possible are to alter the natural geography (increase the cheap labor pool from American sources) or build a dam (wall) to keep the water out. As long as industry can be more profitable using less expensive foreign labor, vital industries that were once the cornerstone of the United States’ economy will not return to the United States. Congress has indeed squandered our national heritage.

One more example will suffice. Democrats coming into office have voiced concern about the plight of industry and loudly criticized the Bush Administration’s policies; but they don’t have anything that remotely resembles an alternative model that will meet the challenge. Their immediate focus is to insert provisions into two pending free trade agreements with Peru and Colombia that would restrict duty-free access to the U.S. market for goods made by child labor or by workers who are denied the right to organize unions. Democrats also want stronger environmental standards imposed on foreign factories. These measures, whose advocates must be experiencing a hallucinogenic flashback from earlier days, will not offset the wide range of subsidies, import barriers, currency and labor market tactics that foreign governments use to help their industries fight and win the international economic wars.

Democrats and liberal Republicans refuse to recognize that their role is twofold, (1) to increase the supply of manufactured goods “made in America,” which is the only solution to reducing the demand for goods from Peru and Columbia, and to increase the supply of willing cheap labor from internal sources comprised of United States citizens and “legal” aliens. While legalizing the “illegals” is the easiest solution, it is by far the most damaging to national sovereignty and dangerous to the American culture. Just as France is rapidly becoming a Muslim nation, the United States is arguably becoming a Hispanic nation. If the plight of Mexico and its citizens is what we want for ourselves, Mexico being our national role model, then we should make every effort to adopt their culture (or permit it to be forced on us).

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that no child labor laws, organized unions or environmental standards will do anything to reduce the demand from the United States for manufactured goods. Instead, the measures championed by the Democratic Party as economic reform will only increase the cost of everything manufactured in Peru and Columbia which will then be passed on to the consumer in the United States - once again reducing the Middle Class' standard of living.

What about a citizen protest? Will it do any good? Are the Minutemen effective? Yes, they have been effective in raising awareness and politicizing the issue. It is also relatively easy to predict that any U.S. government attempt to restrain or punish U.S. citizens for their effort to stem the tide of illegal aliens into the United States will only turn into civil unrest and possibly an explosive social issue. So, Congress and successive administrations have just ignored illegal alien migration.

Ask yourself, if the Democrats fail to stem the tide of illegal aliens, have they succeeded or failed? The more astute members of the Democratic Party know it has fallen to them to deal with illegal alien migration or be swept aside in the 2008 election. Regardless of political and media rhetoric, both of them realize illegal alien migration will still be an issue in 2008 because it will still be a matter of supply and demand. All of the politician’s made-for-TV hand-wringing changes nothing and it was never intended to change anything.

The Democratic Party leadership (and liberal Republicans) has a preferred solution. They wish to legalize every living creature within the United States’ borders, plus any other life form in our solar system, and make them all the responsibility of U.S. taxpayers in exchange for their votes. The tax responsibility to subsidize this mass of humanity will fall squarely on corporations (small businesses) who will then pass on the costs to the consumer. The tax burden will fall especially heavily on the top 50% of citizens who are the only wage earners currently paying taxes. None of the bottom 50% of wage earners (who vote), and all non-citizens who reside within the borders of the United States, will have to pay a dime to subsidize the social services of the growing numbers of illegal aliens.

There is a finite limit and there is a long-term price to be paid. Socialist government dependency can finally be yours with a vote for any Congressional candidate that is neither a conservative nor a libertarian. Why are conservatives and libertarians more desirable – and only them, and not neo-conservatives or paleo-conservatives? True Conservatives and Libertarians, not some hyphenated alphabet soup, are the only Americans who are espousing a very limited government, the rule of law, personal responsibility, low taxes, self-reliance and a military whose sole responsibility is to defend the United States.

Guess what the end result will be if we continue to elect advocates of liberalism: a vastly larger socialist government driven by ever more income redistribution. As socialism becomes more and more pervasive, existing problems of civil liberties and private property that rile American sensibilities today can only become much, much worse. Why, because civil liberties and private property DO NOT EXIST under socialism - nor does class mobility, personal wealth, small business or private enterprise. How could anyone but the most ignorant American wish that on themselves? And yet the latest express train to Socialism left the train station on November 7, 2006.

The political competition in 2008 will not be to become the President of the United States. It will not be between elected representatives who desperately want to improve the lot of all Americans. No, theirs will be a quest to rule, to become Caesar. President of the United States of America? What’s in a name?

Hopefully you consider yourself to be one of the proud indomitable Americans who were born free and intend to remain free with liberty and justice, defiantly refusing to live under the yoke of either religion, Socialism or Islam.

Posted November 26, 2006 10:48 AM
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