Free college for everyone

There is a video going around the internet of Joe Biden explaining how he and the President want to make education free for another two years beyond Bernie Sanders’ plan.  Paying for this would be simple.  There is a certain tax loophole that would more than cover for the cost of this program. 

A friend posted this on her Facebook page, and this was my response:

Oh, fix the tax loopholes.  Crap!  Why didn’t I think of that?

Let me explain how government works.  You may have noticed that our federal debt has increased from $9 trillion dollars in 2009 to $20 trillion dollars today.  The basic reason is that a large number of politicians don’t really care about paying for the things they want.  They are very happy just to borrow the money. 

So every so often we ask other countries if they want to loan us some money to buy things, like voters, and countries like China and Japan say, Sure, how much to do you want?  Nice people there.  The rest of the money we need, we just print, and that lowers the value of the money you already have.  That’s why prices keep going up, and your salary doesn’t.

They have been talking about closing tax loopholes ever since they have had taxes.  But that’s not really important.  They are not really concerned about how to pay for the program.  They just want the permission to spend the money.  After they get that, they will try to raise taxes again by closing loopholes on the rich.  As long as the Democrats run the show, they will get their tax increases, and maybe close a few tax loopholes. 

The Republicans will run on a platform of tax reductions.  When they get in office, they will reduce taxes, but the spending program will remain as it is, because millions of voters will vote against them if somebody tries to take it away.  And the debt just keeps going up.  And the cycle is repeated.

Politicians, Democrats more than Republicans, keep looking for things to spend money on.  What this does is develop classes of people who become dependent on government money.  Try to take it away, and you lose their votes.  This is what happened with Obamacare.  The program is unsustainable financially, so we just give it billions of taxpayer dollars to buy the votes of those dependent on it. 

What is surprising is how people do this with a straight face and think they are solving anything.  

What Nobody Wants to Talk About with regard to these Long Lines at the Airports

The news media have been talking a lot lately about the long lines at the airports.  We see these long lines, and we complain about it, and we ask what can be done about it, but nobody is even asking why we have any lines in the first place. 

They talk about a shortage of help and a new program that the TSA started to speed some passengers through, but nobody is talking about why we even have the TSA in the first place.

All these long lines and security screenings are to keep us safe.  But from what?  We never used to have security screenings years ago.  What is different now that we can’t bring liquids onto a plane, and why we have to take off our shoes and our belts and undergo intense screening before we can board an airplane?

We are afraid somebody is going to bring a bomb on the plane.  Has everyone gone crazy?  No, it’s not everybody.  There are only certain people who want to bomb airplanes.   They are terrorists. 

We have over a million people on our terror watch list that we try to monitor at a cost of billions of dollars a year.  And that obviously doesn’t prevent anyone of them from boarding an airplane, because we still have to screen everyone who wants to board an airplane.

And the reason the terror watch list is not enough is that ordinary people can become terrorists without our government knowing it.  They could be rich or poor, highly educated or poorly educated, they could have families or be loners.  This can happen without warning.  To anybody apparently.

So forever and ever, the new normal now is that we have to spend billions of dollars a year and spend countless hours waiting in line to board airplanes and now even to go to baseball games.

There is just one small detail we have left out.  These terrorists are all Muslims.  Oh, sure, non-Muslims have committed awful acts of violence, but it is specifically Muslim terrorism which has the entire world living in fear of somebody blowing themselves up or randomly killing as many people as possible.    

Yet our government insists on bringing millions of Muslims into our country.  And why?  Well, most of them are just nice people.  Well, nobody is questioning that.

But that’s not the point.  Terrorist organizations do not need to try to smuggle their operators into other countries.  All they need to do is see that Muslims mass migrate into all the countries of the world.  From there, all they need are mosques that enlist Muslims to the cause of jihad as their moral duty to Allah.  It’s not hard to find a good number of people in any country they are in who will take up the torch to wage jihad against the infidels.

So, again, why is our government insisting on bringing so many of them into our country?  Is it because they have a right to migrate here and we don’t have a right to stop people based on their religion?  So we are supposed to spend billions of dollars a year to protect us from threats which only exist because of people that we willingly bring into our country?

Does anybody remember our Constitution that says that we are creating our government to form a more perfect union, to ensure domestic tranquility, and to promote the general welfare of our people to future generations?  It seems to me that our government is trying very hard to divide the country, foment domestic instability, and lower the quality of life for everybody living here.

By the way, I read yesterday that these long lines at the airports are causing more people to drive rather than fly.  And it has been calculated that 2300 people died in car accidents who wouldn’t have died if they had flown instead of driving.  It’s like a bad medical experience where the medicine you are taking for one illness causes side effects that make you feel more miserable than the actual disease.

Muslim migration to the United States is easily one of the most important issues in the coming Presidential election.  Immigration is forever.  Bad taxes can be undone.  So can bad trade policies and bad laws.  But bad immigration cannot.

Taxes on imports, jobs, and the health of our country

When there are not enough good paying jobs for everybody, it drives people to depend on the government for financial assistance.  This is considered the compassionate thing to do, a safety net, but the result of this is to increase the role of government in the lives of everybody. 

Throughout history, there have been essentially only two forms of government: tyranny and freedom.  Most governments throughout history have been tyrannies.  Life isn’t necessarily miserable under a ruler, but our nation fought a war to get the kind of government and the freedoms that we have.

When we think of tyrannies, we usually think of kings or dictators where one person basically rules the country, but freedom can be lost piece by piece as people gradually trade freedoms for security, prosperity for a safety net, and responsibility for dependency. 

When you have a massive government with an ever increasing number of rules and laws, the will and the power to force compliance on more and more things that were not issues in the past, when the government believes it is responsible for the economy and is responsible for solving all the problems of society, then your government is going from freedom to tyranny.  For many countries today, freedom and tyranny exist together on a continuum with varying degrees of each.

Our nation is moving slowly from freedom to tyranny.  Instead of being ruled by a king, we are being ruled more and more by government officials who want to protect us from ourselves and the evil around us, but are just as likely motivated by the power and the money that comes with their position.

The issue of jobs is possibly the single most important factor in preserving our freedoms, because when a person can no longer provide for oneself or one’s family, they cry out for somebody to take care of them.   This causes the government to grow, requiring more of your money and expanding the government’s reach into every area of your life.  The loss of jobs reduces revenues to the government while at the same time creates pressure on the government to grow, assume more responsibility, increase governmental spending, and consequently government debt.

Our churches used to be the primary source of public charity in our country, but the government has now become responsible for the welfare of the people.  The government is now the protector and provider of the people.  The government has assumed responsibility for, and consequently the control of, the economy.

So the economy is basically about freedom, but according to Forbes[1], more than half the people in our country now receive some form of government aid.  When this happens slowly and each new generation is not taught what freedom is all about and each new generation gets used to the increasing role of government in their lives, freedom is traded for rulers who are now looked upon as our benefactors. 

The loss of good jobs has also been a large factor in the deterioration of our families and as a result the moral deterioration of our country.  Those who do work work more jobs and more hours to try to provide for their families and more and more parenting is done by day cares, and raising children becomes a lot like having pets.  Feed them twice a day, and see that they don’t soil up the house.   The lack of good jobs takes parents out of the homes and children are raised too often by people who have little or no vested interest in their lives. 

Broken families lead to more crime, but it also contributes to the moral breakdown of our country.  What I mean by moral breakdown is that there are a lot of things that are wrong but not illegal.  All kinds of corruption, mean-spiritedness, unkindness, abuse, exploitation, indifference, negligence, selfishness, hatred, anger, things that laws either don’t touch or can’t fix, come from the breakdown of the family.  Bringing American jobs back to our country will do more than probably any other one thing to help our country economically, but also in strengthening our country morally. 

So why did we lose all these jobs?  Labor has almost always been cheaper overseas, but the jobs didn’t leave to get cheaper labor.  

Our corporate taxes are among if not the highest in the world, but the jobs didn’t leave because of high corporate taxes.  Corporate tax rates were raised to help make up for all the money the government no longer was getting from working people.  We are told that we must lower our corporate tax rates to bring jobs back to our country, but if that isn’t why they left, it won’t make much difference in bringing them back. 

The jobs left as we stopped taxing imports.

We have forgotten that taxes on imports paid for almost our entire federal budget for most of our nation’s history.  There was no federal income tax before 1913. 

We are told that taxing imports will raise the prices that consumers pay for those goods.  Yes, but these taxes used to be collected in lieu of income taxes, so income taxes should be reduced accordingly. 

We are told that Herbert Hoover raised taxes on imports as the Great Depression was just starting, and that was responsible for prolonging and intensifying it.  But the Great Depression lasted for another eight years or so under Franklin Delano Roosevelt who raised all kinds of taxes and created all kinds of government programs, and nobody thinks that had anything to do with prolonging the Depression?

Without taxes on imports, the jobs will stay overseas. 

We are told that taxing imports will start trade wars, where other nations will tax the goods we send to them, thus hurting our export industry.  But this wasn’t an issue for the 140 years before we had an income tax, and this wasn’t an issue before we stopped taxing imports and sent our jobs overseas

We are told that the world now has a global economy, that we have to support a global economy, and that to resist it is economic suicide.  By a global economy, they mean simply free trade, no taxes on imported goods.  They use words like protectionism and nationalism to describe those who oppose this, as though we are supposed to understand these words as obvious proofs of these people’s folly.

But the problem is our own companies making our own products and then sending them back to us.   Foreign goods were always available in our country, and we always paid a premium for them.  But these were actual foreign products, like Swiss chocolate and German watches, not American companies making things somewhere else and then shipping those products back here.

Our political leaders have forgotten our Constitution, which our Founders fought a war in order to be able to establish it.    Our government exists to promote the general welfare of the people of the United States.  It’s like when parents give everything they have to their children.  That doesn’t mean that they hate or don’t care about the other children on the block.  But they can only be responsible for those that belong to them over whom they have some control or major influence.  We cannot control the events, the people, and the governments of other countries, so frankly they have to take care of themselves, except perhaps in the case of a major natural disaster.

We are told that globalization is good for everybody because everything is now cheaper.  What they are not telling us is that, with globalization, most people are making a lot less money as a global labor market keeps driving wages downward.  A global economy is like adding 3 billion people to the labor force.  There are always people who will work for less somewhere in the world, and wages go down everywhere else to try to compete with that. 

Rich nations become poorer, and poor nations stay poor.  The poor nations are not starting their own businesses; they’re just relying on ours. 

And, besides, it is a very dangerous policy to build or base an economy on exports.  That means that our prosperity depends first on the prosperity of other nations so that they can buy our goods.  Basing our economic health on a global economy ties the economic health of all the nations together such that a problem in one country affects all the others.  What this does is create a new normal of a sluggish world economy.  Some major country is always experiencing some kind of downturn or economic crisis. 

This ideal world of free trade also requires everybody to ‘play fair,’ nobody gaming the system by manipulating their currencies.  So the experts want to build a global economic system that requires nobody cheating for it to really work?  Seriously?   You want to build a system that every nation in the world is dependent on but that requires everybody to follow all the rules?  Can’t be done unless you create a new world system where everybody is subject to a new world government.

Quite frankly, I think the motivation behind this is resentment for the United States being so prosperous.  At least it used to be.  Before the jobs went overseas, our federal debt was minimal.  Now it is almost 20 trillion dollars and counting.  And, yes, the two are related, and we won’t fix the one without fixing the other.

How can we have a robust American economy when it is dependent on nations all over the world having the money to buy our stuff first?  We have 330 million people in our own country.  If that is not enough of a market for a company to prosper, please don’t blame our trade policies.

Before the jobs went overseas, we had plenty of jobs for everyone, good paying jobs, and our nation prospered.  When we made all of our own stuff, the jobs grew as the population grew.  Taxes on imports went away, and the jobs went away, government debt skyrocketed, and wages stagnated.  Now we don’t have enough jobs for all the people who are living in our country, yet at the same time the government keeps bringing millions more people into our country as well as allowing untold numbers of people to just come in however they can.

We now have record numbers of people on government assistance, which ends up lowering the standard of living of everyone through government borrowing, inflation, and higher taxes.

So how do we bring the jobs back to our country?  Corporate tax rates are too high.  But they are high only to make up for all the loss of revenue from the loss of jobs.  The jobs didn’t leave because tax rates were too high, though more have left since they were raised.  The jobs didn’t leave because labor was cheaper somewhere else.  Labor has always been cheaper somewhere else.

The jobs left because we stopped taxing imports.  And they will not come back until we do that again.  I should add that we have also lost jobs due to the increase in government regulations.  

The Presidential candidates all talk about the issue of jobs in various ways, but this issue needs to have a national debate and reach some kind of consensus.  The reason is that moving a company from one country to another is a major decision that can involve billions of dollars.  If one President instituted a policy which the next President might want to reverse or change, companies could be slow in doing anything differently because the cost of changing could outweigh the cost of staying put.

Right now most opinions you will hear on this matter support free trade.  Much of that I believe is due to do politically correct thinking that views taxing imports as the work of greedy American companies who want to charge high prices free from the challenges of competition or the outdated notion of putting American interests above that of other countries. 

But taxing imports again is the most important means for bringing jobs back to the United States.  I would suggest a blanket tax on every product brought into this country.  Let’s say 20%.  We can calculate the projected income from imports, though total imports should decrease a bit.  The tax is paid by the company, and the consumers will then pay them back as they buy their products.  Income tax rates should then be lowered corresponding to the projected income.  As jobs come back to our country, the revenue from taxed imports will decrease but more people working at better jobs will reduce government spending and increase government revenues.

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[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2014/07/02/weve-crossed-the-tipping-point-most-americans-now-receive-government-benefits/#56676bea6233

A Case for Donald Trump

The Herald (May 6) printed a reader’s case why he believes Donald Trump should not be our next President.  I feel compelled to vote for Donald Trump.  Everybody had his list of important issues by which he judges a candidate.  For me there are 5 issues that are the iceberg sinking the ship.  And if the ship sinks, nothing else is going to matter.  In each case, Donald Trump is either the only one who understands the problem, has the right solution to fix the problem, or is the only one I believe will actually do what is needed to fix the problem.

The first issue is jobs.  I believe the loss of jobs is probably the biggest reason for our country’s staggering debt.  It combines the loss of tax revenue with an increase in government spending for assistance programs. 

The jobs didn’t leave because of cheaper labor somewhere.  There has always been cheaper labor somewhere else.  They didn’t leave because of high taxes.  The high taxes came afterwards to help make up for the lost tax revenue.  The jobs left because we stopped taxing imports.

Taxes on imports used to pay for almost our entire federal budget.  We didn’t even have an income tax until 1913.  Yes, taxes on imports will raise the cost of foreign goods, but they will make possible a reduction in income taxes and will bring jobs back here.  Trump is the only one who believes in taxing imports.

The second issue is immigration, and Trump is the only person who you can believe will secure the border.  Congress has promised this since Reagan in 1986 with nothing getting done. 

Trump is the only person who challenges birthright citizenship.  We don’t give citizenship to children born to people here on vacation or to foreign workers, so why should we give it to children of people in our country illegally?  The American Indian didn’t even get this privilege.  That required an act of Congress.  With birthright citizenship, it is becoming almost impossible to deport families of people who have children born here. 

The third issue is Muslims.  The world is experiencing incredible violence and instability, whether in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, or Asia.  And, frankly, it is entirely due to Muslims.  Will America be any different?  You only need to watch the hundreds of videos coming out of Europe to know that it is only matter of time.  They just need to become a higher percentage of the population.  Trump is the only person who actually sees a problem here.

The fourth issue is the court called supreme.  This court has assumed a role in forming policies far beyond the role given to it by the Constitution.  In this case just about any of the Republican candidates would do, but those who are concerned about future court appointments need to be concerned about which political party makes the nomination.  So if Trump is the candidate, you can’t stay home and not vote if you don’t like him.  That just gives the job to the other party.

The last issue is the business as usual in Washington.  The entire political system in Washington is broken.  We need a lot of non-politicians running things there, who might, for example, replace a thousand-page bill with maybe a dozen 3 page bills, which they can actually read and debate.

Anybody but Trump will just give us more of the same.

A Progressive State Income Tax: Fair or Fraud

The Sun-Times had an interesting editorial Monday that provoked a lot of thought, assuming you are one to ask questions.  The article was advocating for a progressive state income tax and contained a lot of facts, but to me it left me with a vague notion that something wasn’t right about the whole thing.

The heading itself said that a progressive state income tax was fairer to the middle class.  I guess that would mean that it is not fairer to the other classes.  So there is no solution that is fair to everybody?  We have to choose which class we should be fair to, and the rich don’t deserve it, because what?  They don’t really work harder than anyone else?  They don’t really deserve what they make?  Or is what it really saying is that there are more middle and lower class people than rich ones, so we can vote to take more money away from them?

Notice that they don’t want to lock themselves into a fixed rate for a progressive tax.  This gives them what they feel is a never-ending revenue stream from a small group of voters who would be harassed and ridiculed if they ever protested. 

Notice also that they want to lower the income tax for everyone else.  A sure way to get everyone else’s vote to tax the other guy, the ones who are doing better than they are.

Frankly what really annoys me is that I bet Democrats spend every waking moment trying to think of new taxes to levy or creative ways to get more money out of people.  They can’t think of one way to cut expenses or reduce payroll.  Private companies tighten things up all the time, but not government. 

Our pensions are based on actual contributions.  Government pensions are based on wishful thinking.  Government workers feel entitled to their jobs and see the public as their servants who must take very good care of them, regardless of the cost.  

The Most Important Issues in the 2016 Presidential Race Part 3

Have you been to a baseball game lately, or at least followed the news?  Going to a game is not like it used to be.  You must now submit to a thorough security check. 

I’m from Chicago which probably has more gun violence than any city in the country, but these security checks weren’t started because they thought somebody was going to bring a gun into a ballpark and start shooting people. They’re afraid that somebody is going to blow themselves up. 

This kind of security is now the new normal.  You have to take your shoes off before getting on an airplane.  Why?  You might be carrying a bomb.  You can’t even bring a liquid in your carry-on.  Why?  You might have a bomb.

But there is something that is not being said here.  While it is true that any given person might have a bomb, why is it only now that this has become a concern?  We could say that it is because it is happening more often now.  But we are still missing the point. 

If it were not for one simple common factor in all of this new kind of violence in the world, the world would be generally a pretty safe place.  That common factor is that this violence, or terrorism as it is now called, is committed by Muslims.  If there were no Muslims, nobody would be worrying about terrorism.  If there were no Muslims, nobody would be worrying about bombs.  If there were no Muslims, nobody would be screened at airports or ball games. 

And, no, this is not xenophobia or Islamophobia.  It’s just a fact.

But certainly isn’t it unfair to think that any and every Muslim is a threat to the safety and security of our society?  Nobody is saying that, but the simple answer is yes.  But then the answer isn’t really simple, and nobody is really trying to understand the question in the first place.

Those who are willing at least to name this problem use expressions like Islamic terrorism, radicalized Islam, Muslim extremists, or Islamists, trying to distinguish the problem from the vast majority of Muslims. 

But they are missing something very basic here when they do that.  A radical or extremist is a person who takes something that is already there and then overdoes it. 

If a Christian becomes radical or extreme, he or she may sell all of their belongings and give the money to the poor.  They may fast for days at a time or pray all night, or they may give up everything to go to a remote jungle village and spend years developing a written language and then more years translating the Bible into that language.

If a Catholic (Christian) becomes radical, he may take a vow of poverty or celibacy.  He may attend mass everyday and go to Confession once a week.  He may say the Rosary numbers of times throughout the day.

If a Jew becomes radical, he may start dressing differently, mostly in black and white, mostly black.  He won’t drive a car on Saturdays.  He won’t even turn up the heat on Saturday, the Sabbath.  And he will only eat certain foods that have been prepared in a certain way.

If a Muslim becomes radical, he kills people.  Nobody noticed this before?  If a Muslim kills people as a result of become a radical Muslim, that means that there is something already in the religion that accepts or encourages violence in certain situations.

Every Muslim nation in the world became Muslim through killing people.  Is there an exception?  I asked an ex-Muslim once who was supposed to be knowledgeable about those things, and he said no.  No exceptions.  Even Mohammed himself formed an army and went out conquering the infidels. 

Muslims don’t send out missionaries to teach literacy to primitive people so they can read the Word of God in their own language.  They don’t start medical clinics to care for the sick.  They send in warriors to kill people and blow things up, mostly people.

Now certainly few Muslims will ever do anything like this.  The problem is that, if we don’t monitor their social media or the places where they pray, any Muslim can apparently become radicalized.  Doesn’t matter whether they are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, employed in a good job or not at all, whether they have a family or not.  It can happen anywhere without warning.  But this only happens with Muslims.

We are constantly being told that Islam is a religion of peace.  First of all, nobody would keep having to say that if this was either an obvious, observable fact or if the question was not a contested one.  As a Christian with college and a post-grad degree in all things Christian, I know a bit about religious controversies.  One thing I know is that controversies that are not settled early when the movement is essentially united never get resolved. 

Islam has been around for over 1400 years.  It is not going to resolve itself at any time in the future and decide that Islam is indeed a religion of peace, and thereafter all Muslim killing will cease.  Muslim killing in the name of Islam is here to stay, and it has been increasing as the dictators who have kept them in check have been removed, often by Western countries who think they are doing the world a favor. 

For most of the modern era, Muslim countries were either under European rule or under a dictator who kept things pretty quiet.  But the Europeans moved out, and we killed or encouraged the killing of those dictators, and Islam became free once again to be what it is.  Besides warring among themselves as to which of the two major Islamic sects is the true one, they have sparked their armies to continue their conquest of Africa and invigorated their persecution of Christians and Jews. 

Challenging the West is a different story.  A regular war wouldn’t work there, but I saw recently that the Muslim Brotherhood established a hundred-year plan for the destruction of Western Civilization.  It was written in 1928.  A major part of the plan is mass migration to the West and then using the freedoms in the West and the new values of tolerance, diversity, and multi-culturalism to gain acceptance and position, and their rapid population growth would increase their numbers to a critical mass necessary to change policies. 

This means that it is not necessary or important that the average Muslim even be aware of this long range plan.  He just needs to be part of the throng making its way into Western countries.  You can be sure that the Muslim leaders are fully aware of any long range goals for Islam in the Western world.

People talk about moderate Muslims, but you can’t judge a moderate Muslim in a country where Muslims are only 1-2% of the population.  If you want to see how a true Muslim lives, you need to go to the countries where Muslims are totally free to be themselves, a Muslim country. 

There are about 47 Muslim majority countries in the world today, and frankly there isn’t one that you would want to live in.  There isn’t even one you would want to visit, except for those few places that have either ancient relics or sites from the times before Islam came to be.  And if you are a Christian or a Jew, there are no Muslim countries in the world where you would feel safe, except for those countries where they still have that strong secular ruler or dictator. 

There are organizations that monitor the persecution of Christians in the world, and apart from places like China or North Korea, that don’t like religion at all, all the major persecuting countries are Muslim. 

Do you really think it would be any different here in the future?  In Europe, there are parts of countries or whole countries where there are substantial Muslim populations, and those areas are basically unsafe for non-Muslims.  Watch some of the hundreds of videos coming out of Europe today about the clash of cultures. 

But there is another issue at stake here as well. 

We are told that our country is based on freedom of religion, and so Muslims have as much right to be here and practice their religion as anyone else.

But you may have noticed if you have been watching the news that a lot of religious people, particularly Christians, are finding that their religious views and practices are being trumped by the ‘rights’ of other people.  So what does that mean, and what does that mean with regard to Muslims?

The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise [of religion].”

That can only mean one thing.  Religion, as understood at that time, was consistent with the highest values of our country and would promote the health and prosperity of it as well.  Otherwise our country could not allow or guarantee totally free exercise of religion.

We are being told today that our Founders established a secular nation.  But if that were true, then there would be secular values that would be higher than religious ones, and freedom of religious expression could not be guaranteed.  Something like tolerance, the newest supreme value, would require Christians to accept things they didn’t believe in to accommodate the beliefs and practices of others. 

The fact is that Congress had Bibles printed to be used in our public schools and that the Bible was used and taught in our public schools for almost 200 years before the court called supreme somehow found this practice unconstitutional.  So when the Founders were thinking of freedom of religious expression, they were thinking of Christian values.

But wouldn’t this freedom apply for all religions?  Several years after our nation’s founding, we went to war with five Muslim countries in northern Africa.  Our leaders couldn’t understand why they kept attacking our ships and imprisoning our sailors.  Their leaders then showed our leaders from the Quran why they had to do this.  They were Muslims, and we were not.  This is what Muslims do. 

I can’t imagine our Founders would have accepted or encouraged thousands of Muslims to come to our country and then encourage them to openly practice their religion.  We know from their writings that there were indeed some Muslims here already and that the Founders were not against their being here.  But they believed that the free exchange of ideas would convince people of what was true, and Christianity would win out in the end. 

Our Founders did not see religion as one’s personal taste in beliefs, like one’s taste in music or food.  They understood religion to be a description of reality, telling us what is true and false, right and wrong, good and bad.  So a religion is either true or false itself, and one could know which it is, if he really wanted to.  The issue can be debated and resolved with open, thoughtful discussions.  So to think that all kinds of contradictory moral values can be given free expression is not what they were thinking.  Take a poll of Muslims and ask them their views of honor killings or what they should do to a person who converts from Islam to another religion or if violence is ever justified in the name of Islam. 

We have already talked about immigration in the last article.  And we have noted that immigration is forever.  Hundreds become thousands, and thousands become millions.  Throughout our nation’s history, the vast majority of our immigrants came from Europe, and they assimilated seamlessly into our culture and society.  It would be inaccurate to say that Muslims don’t, won’t, or can’t assimilate, but the fact is that there are far too many differences between Western Civilization and Islam for this to happen enough.  Again, we have the hundreds or thousands of videos coming out of Europe that show this clash. 

It would be foolish to experiment with or jeopardize the entire future of our country thinking that it will be different here.  Again, see my article on immigration for a fuller discussion of the purpose of our government in the first place.  Our government exists to promote the unity, tranquility, and welfare of our people.  There is no room, place, or authority for our government to put that at risk, and for what?  To give some non-Americans a promise of a better life?  Living in the United States can probably provide a better life for maybe 7 billion people on the planet.  Unless they can all move here, other countries will need to learn what they can about how we became the nation they all want to come to and then duplicate what they can where they are at. 

Is this a cruel, heartless thing to say?  No, and frankly because we are no longer that rich, wonderful nation we used to be.  We have to borrow money now from other countries just to pay our bills, and we still don’t have enough to do that.  We print new money to pay bills with, and that just lowers the standard of living for everybody who already lives here.

This is the third in a series of article on the most important issues of the 2016 Presidential campaign.  I was going to call the issue terrorism and then discuss Islam in a separate article.  But then I saw that this would be redundant.  The goal of terrorism is to change a country into a Muslim country.  The goal of Muslim migration is to change a country into a Muslim country.  The goal of Muslim immigration to our country is to change our country into a Muslim country.  This is not the thought of every single Muslim who comes here, no, but this is the thought of Muslim leaders throughout the world, and massive migration is necessary to work that out.

Muslim immigration is unlike any previous immigration to our country.  We used to have an American identity that we were proud of and that immigrants gladly embraced and assimilated to.  We no longer have that, and there is nothing in Islam that a Muslim thinks should be accommodated to adapt to a new culture.  At least permanently.  We will need to adapt to them.

There is only one Presidential candidate who has even expressed a willingness to stop Muslim immigration even temporarily, and I know of no political leader who even sees a problem here at all. 

I have two children and a grandchild on the way.  Political and public policy is not just about what effect things will have today.  It’s about how policies affect the future.  I am old enough to see countless changes to our country that younger people see as the way things have always been.  I see the direction our country is going in where younger people don’t even know what road we are on. 

Our Founders and our Constitution stressed how the role of our government to unite our people, promote their tranquility, and secure our liberties for future generations.  Our political leaders have proceeded to divide our country into as many groups and subgroups of people as possible, almost all with competing interests, needs, and demands.  They have stifled our freedoms so as not to ‘offend’ even the smallest of those groups, even if only the slightest possibility exists such a thing might occur.  And they have cast everyone as either a victim or an oppressor in a never-ending clash of classes, races, and religions. 

With the growth of Islam in our country, this dynamic will be repeated yet different in a unique way.  And it won’t need any help from our politicians.  Our nation will bend to their will, first through polite accommodation, then through demands for equality and fairness, and then frankly you will be afraid not to give them everything they want because, frankly, you will be afraid of what will happen if you don’t. 

Bringing Muslims into our country could be the single worst mistake in our nation’s history.  Bad laws can be undone.  Bad taxes and bad trade policies can be undone.  Bad immigration cannot.