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I don't care, and I don't believe you. I don't think disease eradication is good for me at all. I think it's good for poor starving Africans who I don't care about, and don't want to pay for. You have a large hurdle to convince me that tropical diseases a two continents and one ocean away have anything to do with me. You cannot simply assert it blithely.
If I believed that these programs were actually useful instead of leftist patronage networks, then I might be willing to entertain some sort of intervention. But all of this shit is just patronage networks. It's taking money from me to redistribute to loyalists and partisans.
Burn it all down. If ebola flares up again we can simply close the borders, which are far too porous anyway.
AIDS and Malaria programs in Africa are largely Bush era, preach abstinence is best even when they hand out condoms, and tend to be highly effectual and sent through Christian charities when there's patronage networks involved.
Not exactly your typical NGO.
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You can't close the borders without restructuring major parts of the economy. As currently constituted, large sectors of the US economy depend on the cheap labor of, effectively, indentured servants from the third world. American consumers are simply not going to want to pay US citizen level wages to fruit pickers and landscapers. Even the most nativist Trump supporters, by and large, buy cheap Chinese products when they go to the store instead of seeking out things made in America, and they hire third world immigrants to do manual labor instead of seeking out American citizens, and it is likely that even if a nativist government forced consumers to buy American, those consumers would become annoyed because their living situation would feel worse for them. It would take major technological progress to replace the role of the third world indentured servants in our economy.
We should close the borders AND restructure large parts of the economy.
Specifically, labor laws; see this previous post from yours truly.
This is a self-inflicted wound that we could be corrected overnight. Again, read my earlier post. Our employment laws cause so much friction in hiring (and firing) that the entire reason we have this indentured servant class of illegal workers is because their very lack of citizenship is a competitive advantage in the marketplace. If you want to see what it looks like when a government screws over its own citizens, look no further than American employment law.
Predictions about rapid price inflation of basic groceries due to border enforcement paper over the fact that the American working class is already unable to afford their own lives because they can't get jobs quickly enough. Some simple math with reasonable assumptions;
All in, we're talking anywhere from 2.5 - 4.5 months between paychecks for a typical lost-job-need-new-job scenario. You can see how untenable this would be for a single person (let alone a family) living paycheck to paycheck. Lost my job at Waffle House? Oh, no problem, I've got four months of cash savings, right?
Contrast this to off the books cash labor which can and routinely does find work (and payment!) within a single week.
American agriculture is the product of hundreds of years of compounding laws and regulations. I've done a little research into the economics of "family farms" and have discovered that your median small farmer is technically a multi-millionaire, but with both assets and debts backed by oceans of Federal dollars. They pay cash for F-350s and also supplement their groceries with SNAP benefits. It's wild, but, with enough over-regulation, anything is possible!
And that's what we're really talking about. Horrible shit-ass legislation in one area (employment law) has created a wholly separate awful situation in another area (immigration). So it isn't about X or Y, but how X and Y interact.
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Better get to work, then.
A moral problem as pernicious as slavery ever was, to be sure. A great evil, indeed.
I disagree. Plenty of people buy expensive fruits now, and having a landscaper is a privilege unbecoming the American yeoman.
I think war with China is what it will take, because then we don't have a choice. If we don't go to war with China, it will be because they strangled all resistance and took over the USA without needing to fire a shot.
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