Illegal Immigrants: The Free Market People

Some Americans would think most illegal immigrants are socialists, wanting to come here and take over, and live off of welfare. While it might be politically true that their culture would tend to support big governments, they are living more of a free market lifestyle here in the U.S. than we Americans are. The ironic part about this whole immigration debate is that the Republicans, who often preach about the glories of a free market, have failed to see these people as an example of their principals and have instead reverted to socialism to punish them.

Some of you might be scratching your heads right now wondering how an illegal immigrants live in a free market. Well, it's not entirely Free Since they still must work around strict government rules, and it's more of a black market, but it is more free than what your typical American citizen lives in. Yes, they are breaking the law to do so, but ignoring the fact that they, or their employer, are breaking the law, or have to work around the laws, the image of a free market is still there. I'll give you some examples:

1. Illegal immigrants don't have to pay income taxes, pay into social security, or any of the other government mandated schemes. They still have to pay sales taxes when they buy something from a store, but overall, they'll be able to keep more percentage of what they earn than an American.

2. They can work bellow minimum wage. This is what makes it so hard for Americans to compete for lower paying jobs is because they will work for such low wages. Many of them will come here to work for a wage that no typical American could survive on, but they will take the money back home and thrive on it because it can go farther there.

3. They don't apply for government authorization documents. We get assigned a social security number, we get drivers licenses, and go through all of this government bureaucratic process just to carry out or daily lives. While many of them will obtain fake documents and break the law, they don't have to go through the same process we have to get these. The though that you have to get government approval to carry out the many things in your day to day life should anger anyone that loves the free market. However, many who say they support the free market, while supporting this war on illegal immigration, ignore the fact that this is what they are supporting.

4. They sell and transport drugs, weapons, and other banned items. Now, I'm not saying all illegal immigrants do this and certainly plenty of Americans do this, but I thought I would include this anyway. In a free market, you are allowed to buy, sell, use, or trade whatever you want as long as you aren't harming someone else without their consent. Everyone knows drugs are bad for you, but if you still want to take drugs, I think you should be free to do so. Government bans have no place in a free market. People against illegal immigrants will tell of horrible violence along the border, which is true, but it is from the war on drugs creating a black market, which is kind of like a free market, only it comes with many problems that a free market doesn't. A black market sells item x, which is banned, expensive, hard to obtain, and people live under the threat that government is going to lock them in jail. A free market sells item x, which isn't banned, cheap, easy to obtain, and there's no threat of going to jail. Black markets require the use of violence to stay in business. Free markets require peaceful competition to stay in business. Alcohol was banned at one time and we saw the black market explode and people killed each other over it all the time. It was then legalized and liquor store owners never kill each other to get ahead. I think later on I'll write a post devoted to comparing and contrasting the black market and the free market, but to stay on topic, I'll skip the long details.

5. Illegal immigrants are free to go as they please. When Americans want to cross into Mexico, we stop at a government check point, show papers, and get approval to cross over, or come back in. An illegal immigrant doesn't want to go through this process. Imaginary lines drawn on a map does not confine them to one area. The imaginary line that surrounds the area they came out of their mother in does not dictate what rights they have as a human being.

Now what I have just said is actually a black market instead of a free market. However, the only difference in the two is the presence of government rules. Most would think I'm crazy for making an argument to support the free market by using people that most think of as poor. However, they might be poor by American standards, but they are rich when compared to where they originally came from. The only reason they can't get rich here is because government rules won't allow it. It's harder for them to get an education without the right documents and it's harder for them to make lots of money without drawing attention and risk being deported. If we lifted government restrictions on them, they could flourish even more.

The main point I'm trying to make is that Republicans, Conservatives, and even some Libertarians that say they support a free market, but still support closed borders are missing a great opportunity. They see these people as a problem and want to punish them by making stricter government rules to prevent them from succeeding in life. I look at this see these free people not only surviving, but thriving under in a black market, which could easily be made a free market.

Americans against illegal immigration say they are a threat to jobs, so instead of doing away with minimum wage laws, income taxes, and other things that makes it hard for Americans to compete, they want to keep all that junk and spend more of our money to keep them out. If we were by some miraculous way able to keep them out, we would still be losing jobs in this country to countries overseas. I find it almost comical that the same people that want to use the government to protect their jobs from illegal immigrants will likely say how evil unions are and how much they hurt the economy. What bigger and more destructive union is there besides the United States Government? They see illegal immigrants as parasites on our welfare system, while ignoring the vast amount of American parasites who live on it. Instead of doing away with our welfare system and going to private organizations to help out people, we create more laws to discriminate who can and can't get help. They are afraid of all these violent illegal immigrants coming over hear and chopping people's heads off, so they want to put more money into border patrol and law enforcement to go after these people. They could end all the violence along the border and in most American cities overnight if they would end the war on drugs. Not only that, but they would be saving billions of dollars each year and freeing up jails for actual violent criminals like murderers, rapists, and thieves that threaten lives and property.

Instead of saying we should make these free people be more socialist like the rest of America, we should make America be more free like them. Bring ourselves to their level and let them be free and let ourselves be free from government rules. Let everyone compete on a level field for jobs. If we try to bring them to our level, we're going to spend billions, if not trillions more on border security and other government agencies to do so. Like the war on drugs, it will never be effective of stopping illegal immigrants. Besides that, we Americans will still be living under these same restrictive government rules. I say we make it easier for these people to come here by lifting the restrictions we ourselves live under. If we did that, the true supporters of free markets will be killing two birds with one stone.

9-11: The Tragedy That Keeps On Giving

Today is the 9th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks and all of these people say "Never Forget". However, I don't see the point in remembering it if you don't actually think about it, as in think really hard about what happened and what it has given us since then. To me, this tragedy has not ended and is still going on. The terrorists had hatred in their hearts for us and used violence as a way to react to that hatred. Our response to that hatred was not love, but more hate and the use of violence. The result of which has created more death, destruction, and sadness than the original attacks. We can use the excuse that we are freeing people in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of just killing them out of hatred, but that still doesn't change the fact that those civilians and our soldiers are going through the same death and destruction that those victims had on 9-11, just spread out more over time. There are people in this country that hate all Muslims for what a few Muslims have done. The hatred and violence is still there, just in a new form.

It has been 9 years and we haven't even started rebuilding at Ground Zero and it's still just a big hole in the ground. The main man responsible for the attacks, Bin Laden, is still on the loose. Ground Zero workers and others who survived the attack are now getting sick and dying from the the dust they inhaled. We could not save many who died on September 11, 2001 and there is no way to bring those people back to life. However, we have the chance to prevent more people from dying by ending these wars and finding peaceful solutions to our problems, but many of us refuse this idea. We could choose to love our enemies instead of hate them and try to make them not hate us, but many of us refuse this.

This tragedy should have been a wake-up call that we should change our ways and we did, but not for the better. We are no longer as free as we once were because we are so afraid of another attack that security is now more important to us than freedom. We are now at constant war instead of trying harder to find peace. We should have all come together as Americans and worked to make this country and the world a better place. That seemed to have happened for the first few months after the event, but we are now more divided than ever and more people in the world hate what we're doing.

When someone dies, you try to find some kind of positive meaning to come out of it, no matter how small. People want to be organ donors so when they die, others might live. Nobody wants their death to be meaningless, and they surely don't want it to bring more hatred, death, and destruction to the world. I don't know what kind of pain and suffering those victims went through in the last minutes of their lives, but I'm sure they wouldn't want anyone else going through that. I don't believe the victims of 9-11 have been blessed with having anything positive brought out of their deaths. It's not their fault though, it's ours. We failed to bring anything positive out of their loss and have used their deaths only as an excuse to cause more deaths. To me, that's the saddest thing of all about 9-11.

Review: Waltz With Bashir

Some people would say that war is beautiful. In an artistic sense, this can be true. It can offer some of the best colors, compositions, and subject matters for an artist, story teller, or photographer. The reason war is so beautiful is because it is so ugly and when you're talking about art, usually the ugliest of subjects are the most beautiful.

"Waltz With Bashir" has taken art and war and combined them into one of the most amazing films I've ever seen. It's an animated documentary, based on the stories of actual soldiers who were in the Lebanon War of 1982. The plot revolves around the film maker, Ari, not being able to remember what he did as a soldier during this war. He then sets off to question other soldiers who were there with him to try to regain his memory and mainly try to remember what he saw and did at the Sabra and Shatila Massacre.

The movie is mainly comprised of a number of flashbacks, dreams, and interviews, with some live action footage at the end. The animation is very unique, but I didn't find overly distracting. As you can see from the video, it kind of looks like a cross between 3D, cell shading, and rotoscoping. However, from what I understand, is actually done with Adobe Flash. The music in the movie was well done and actually fits well with telling the story instead of just being a backdrop for mood, or the setting.



However beautiful and entertaining this movie might be, at its heart is a serious message about a serious subject matter. Most war movies, at least nowadays, show the horrors of war, which this movie does show and it does show a lot of stuff that is not suitable for younger viewers. Besides gore, there are sex scenes and nudity. This is an R rated movie after all. However, unlike most other war movies, this doesn't go out to show how soldiers are heroes, to glorify battle, show the brotherhood of war, or to make it seem like some kind of test of manhood. This shows the opposite of that. It takes you into the lives of different soldiers as individuals and into their thoughts and feelings about the war they were in. What it shows instead of a group of soldiers bonding, is a single soldier alone with himself and his thoughts. In each of the stories is a sense of being alone and not belonging in a group. It shatters the whole notion of a band of brothers. This movie has successfully boiled war down to it's purest form, the individual soldier, and showed what he went through and what he was thinking. It shows the horrors that they saw that still haunt them, the actions that the still regret, and the fear that they went through.

I can see how many people would dismiss this movie just because it's a cartoon, because it might seem like Israeli propaganda, or just because it's a foreign movie with subtitles, but they'd really be missing out on a great and unique movie. I think the word "unique" really describes this movie since I really haven't seen anything like it before, and yet I just felt so comfortable watching it.

My only complaint was that some of the non-flashback scenes and interviews seemed kind of dull. It didn't look like a lot of effort was put into the background areas of these scenes, like they wanted to show them in a studio like a real documentary. It helped give the documentary feel to the film, but it also gave it a slight dull feeling one gets from watching documentaries sometimes. However, the film is mostly filled with eye catching visuals that will hold your attention.

It's hard to rate this movie since it's so original and there's nothing else out there to really compare it to. While this isn't exactly an anime, if your a fan of anime, or adult animated films, this ranks up there with "Akira" and "Princess Mononoke". If you're a fan of war movies, I think this ranks up there with "Apocalypse Now", or "Full Metal Jacket". "Apocalypse Now" is my favorite movie of all time, mainly because of the dark story and the beautiful visuals. To me, this was like an animated version of that. I loved the story, artwork, music, and everything so much that I have to give this movie a 10/10. There's always a few good movies that come out that everyone should see, that most people probably don't know about, and this is definitely one of them.