Donald Trump’s big announcement Saturday wouldn’t be the first time the word “compromise” was used as a euphemism for the government. Stealing even more of your money to pay for both big corporate political parties’ wish lists and all their friends and corporate sponsors.
The big compromise is: Donald Trump gets to spend five billion dollars of not-his-money, on none-of-his-business, to solve not-the-taxpayer’s-problem.
And in exchange for that, he will give the DACA kids, and other immigrants who have temporary protected status by the federal government, a 3-year extension. Not to come swooping into their school where they’re studying, or some place where they’re working, with a group of armed police, to arrest them and confine them like you would the most violent criminal, and then transport them to some other country far away from their home and drop them off.
What’s the difference between that and a threat? Give me your money, or I’ll take some police state measures on a broad group of people who aren’t hurting or threatening anybody.
In a paper for Law & Social Inquiry, the Journal of The American Bar Foundation (Spring 2012 ), Matthew A. Light writes for the abstract:
“The migration policies of the former Soviet Union (or USSR) included a virtual abolition of emigration and immigration, an effective ban on private travel abroad, and pervasive bureaucratic controls on internal migration.”
Communist countries are centrally planned societies, right? So from the communist point of view, the government should intervene in, control, and bureaucratize every aspect of humanity.
Whether it’s the number of workers in a certain industry (like when Mao Zedong forced so many Chinese farmers to go into steel production that the resulting famine killed 15 million people ), or how many immigrants should be living in an area, communists want the bureau to decide.
That’s why one of the Ten Planks of Communism in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is:
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
For the communist ideologue, the state’s prerogative to advance its agenda was the supreme consideration in a communist society, so no individual claim to fair treatment, or substantive due process, or liberty could be made against it. That’s why communism’s a nightmare.
“This idea that America is all one house and your own house has four walls, so why shouldn’t America have a wall?”–that is communist thinking. This is not all one house.
Nearly everybody has their own home inside of walls that they are paying for. Individuals should be responsible for their own walls and for their own personal safety.
That’s what we have the Second Amendment for.
In America, you’re allowed to take whatever measures you need to keep yourself safe, and that’s guaranteed by the Second Amendment, and that guarantee has been upheld very firmly and even heavily strengthened in multiple Supreme Court decisions over the last decade .
So you are allowed to be armed to a degree in America that half the people here think it is insane, but I disagree with them vehemently. I think it would be insane in a world like ours not to allow people to be able to defend themselves.
Guns make people dangerous, and in the American experience, it’s a fundamental human right to be dangerous so you can defend yourself so that you probably won’t have to.
If your neighborhood’s not safe that is not the taxpayer’s problem, and that is none of the federal government’s business. At most, it’s your state’s problem.
In his announcement Saturday, Donald Trump said:
“The lack of border control provides a gateway and a very wide and open gateway for criminals to enter the United States including the criminal aliens who murdered a brave California police officer only a day after Christmas.”
This is no different from the “progressive” gun control activists, who want a broad legislative solution from Congress that disrupts the lives and liberty of millions of people in response to an individual act of violence. And this is foreign to the American way of thinking.
What made America great was its elevation of individual liberty as among its highest ideals, and along with that, the idea of individual responsibility.
This is a basic, foundational conservative principle.
Just because two guys were born in the same country, that doesn’t mean either one is responsible for the other’s actions or liable to repeat them. There is no rational basis for treating someone like a criminal if they don’t have their police state central planning bureau papers up to date, just because they were born in the same country as someone who’s committed a violent crime.
But Donald Trump and these MAGA-hat wearing Wallitarians are infecting American conservatism and the Republican Party with ideas like class guilt, in which an entire arbitrary category of people (like bourgeoisie farmers, white people, or everybody who was born in a certain country) are held responsible for some kind of collective guilt.
It is a relief that Donald Trump didn’t go ahead and declare martial law within the borders of the United States like he was threatening he might do earlier this month.
To do so Trump would have had to use a law passed by Congress in 1976, the National Emergencies Act, a relic of Nixon era federal despotism among a number of such relics.
Taking this route, if the 1976 law itself wasn’t challenged in the courts as unconstitutional, Donald Trump would have then carved $5 billion out of federal budgets to build more “steel barriers in high priority locations” without an earmark from Congress.
But it would also entail what is essentially an indefinite federal police state occupation within the borders of the great states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
Which to me seems extremely un-American. It goes against our values and our national experience to live constantly under the shadow of a vast federal bureaucratic police state.
You may want to watch the video below.
This is an op-ed.