A solution for illegal immigration

Let me tell you up front: I'm a philosophical libertarian, so I don't really believe in national borders. Practically, I don't think they work or are fool-proof, particularly given the fools that run our national government. Ethically, I don't see where anyone has moral authority to forcibly stop or intimidate anyone else from exercising their natural rights to trade or travel to seek better ways of life. Economically, there's absolutely no justification for preventing the flow of goods, services and people, where not only participants but also the whole of society gains from exchange.

Alas, I support the general idea of amnesty to allow so-called "illegals" to remain in the United States without criminal sanctions. I have never had a problem with their coming to the United States, so I certainly don't believe in their imprisonment or deportation. I have no problem with them living in my neighborhood either, just so long as they are honest, nonviolent and self-sufficient, which they seem to be. Illegals are proof that our government's border security doesn't work and that as individuals we have no moral or economic justification to interfere with them, unless as individuals they do us wrong.

Having said this, I have only one problem with illegals, and a big one, for which our national discussion of a national border is universally irrelevant. The problem is not an economic one nor a moral one nor one of practicality. The problem is strictly a political one, and one which calls strictly for an easy political solution.

The political solution for illegals is this: give them amnesty from prosecution and deportation, but do not give them easy access to free government services, such as welfare, or to the right to vote via fast-tracking their citizenship. Living and working within the fifty states is one thing. Getting free government hand-outs and having the privilege to vote, and thus the power to steal other people's rights and property for self-interests, are altogether different. Perhaps if we can first prevent illegals from voting to convert other people's interests, then maybe we can eventually stop ourselves from the same insidious practice.

This political solution doesn't call for a stronger border, but instead a stronger will to prevent illegals from acquiring welfare and the privilege to vote. If they want such benefits, they need to first come here legally and qualify. Otherwise, let them remain citizens of their nations of origin, with natural rights to seek better lives here, but without any political privileges.

License lawmakers, not massage therapists

Indiana lawmakers should set up a bureaucracy to license themselves long before they set up a new one, at public expense, to license massage therapists. Hoosiers do not need the state's help distinguishing between legitimate massage therapists and prostitutes.

If public safety is the reason for licensing, as proponents claim, then lawmakers should be the first professionals to be licensed. Their incompetence profoundly affects the lives of more people than any other profession. Their negligence in making policy can wreak havoc in our lives. If licensing is such a good thing to keep standards high, let's license lawmakers first.

To be licensed and certified, lawmakers should be required to pass a litany of classes and tests, just as they require lawyers, doctors and realtors to do at considerable expense.

First and foremost, they should be tested on Indiana's constitution, which should be required reading even before they file their candidacies. Once elected, they should be required to cite constitutional authority for each of their legislative acts. If lawmakers read their constitutions, they'd realize how little authority they've actually been delegated, and how much they've just taken from the rest of us through plunder.

Lawmakers should also be required to pass ethics classes on the morality of taking property from some citizens to give to special interest groups. The classes might also help them find moral courage to resist voting for needless regulatory legislation just because of petty political peer pressure.

A simple economics class would show them that prosperity and wealth comes from having more individual liberty, not more government, which is largely parasitic and non-productive, just as a new massage therapy bureaucracy will be.

Lawmakers should also take control-issue classes, so that they don't just act out to fulfill their own prejudices when they vote to control other people's lives and to put others who merely offend them in jail. All incumbents should take Continuing Control-Issue classes.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, but our ganders should be licensed first.

(Co-written with Jon S. Zwayer)

Better government is as easy as standing up, mate

Those readers who watch television have probably seen a recent Geico insurance commercial about the ease of saving money. Check it out at Geico videos.

"Uh huh, easy money," remarks the Geico gecko in his adorable British accent. The commercial's message is that saving money on our car insurance is as easy as going to Geico.com.

"Which is like what?," asks the gecko, "(Like) asking you to stand up? (It's like I say to you), 'If you stand up, you can save loads of money.' What the hell, you're going to be like, 'No thanks. I'm so rich, I think I'm going to keep my seat.'"

Elections are a lot like shopping for car insurance on the Internet. Not only are they now dependent on computers, they're all about our exercise of choices.

What if there was one choice on the ballot that could save us loads of money, give us more personal choices and freedom, protect us from special interest groups and encourage responsibility in our neighbors? What if more prosperity, choices and integrity were as easy as voting for Libertarian Party candidates?

"But yikes, that would mean I'd have to vote Libertarian," responds a voter.

"Which is like what?," asks the gecko, "(Like) asking you to stand up? (It's like I say to you), 'If you stand up, you can save loads of tax money, gain your personal freedom back and quit being bullied into paying other people's way.' What the hell, you're going to be like, 'No thanks. I'm so rich, free and charitable, I think I'm going to keep my seat.'"

Should we license journalists?

Indiana has over 40 licensed professions - everything from licensed doctors and nurses to licensed lawyers and hypnotists. Every year these professionals pony up money and ask permission from the state to call themselves professional whatevers.

The justification for this licensing process and its continuing education requirements is to ensure quality service to the public. In effect, when you listen to or hire a state licensed professional, the state certifies that the professional has met certain minimum standards in educational achievement, board certification and the taking of continuing education courses.

This way, the logic goes, the public is ensured that everyone who holds themselves out, for example, as a doctor or lawyer or teacher will meet minimum medical, legal and teaching standards.

If government can set a meaningful minimum standard for professional services, shouldn't we want every profession to be licensed? Midwives were added to the list a couple years ago. Roofers, lawn cutters, gutter installers and car mechanics could be next. Why are we waiting? If licensing serves the public, we should be demanding that all professionals be licensed.

This includes journalists.

Otherwise, how do we ensure that what we read in newspapers, magazines and the Internet meets professional standards? The lack of standards is why Indiana University basketball coach Kelvin Sampson recently closed practices to the public, after a nasty comment he once made to a player showed up on the Internet. (see "I.U.'s Sampson closes practice, blaming 'dumb Internet'"). If journalists can't police themselves, then they need to be licensed and policed.

Plus, it can be easily argued that journalism offers society greater risks than most professions that the state licenses. Journalistic misfeasance and prejudices can affect millions of people, whereas lawyers and doctors generally only decide the fate of their clients and patients. If journalists are so important and risky to us, why don't lawmakers license them for our protection?

Journalists' standard answer is that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and exempts them from licensing. But I can point to the Sixth Amendment that guarantees my choice of legal counsel, regardless if my counsel is certified by the state bar, but tell that to politically partial judges today who allow only state licensed attorneys, like me, to make arguments in court.

Fact is, the First Amendment is as legally flimsy as the Sixth. It just has more political clout. It would be dying just like the Sixth Amendment if it didn't have the support of most journalists, who bang its drum.

If I licensed journalists, I would require them to know and respect all the Bill of Rights to the same extent as they do the self-serving First Amendment. Journalists' lack of vigilance over growing government and our declining individual rights will likely doom our civilization. If there was ever a reason to license journalists, it is this.

But few people seriously are demanding this, and I am not one of them. There's a good reason for this: Licensing doesn't ensure or improve quality of service. A mechanic doesn't need a license to fix a car. A doctor or lawyer with a license can botch a job just as much as someone without these credentials.

Private accreditation associations and referral services, such as Angie's List in Indianapolis, offer consumers more useful information than the state's stamp of approval provides.

We have licensing not because the public demands it, but because professional associations conspired for their members to be licensed and regulated. (When I use the word "conspired," I mean criminally conspired). That way they can exclude others without their qualifications, or with different ones, from competing against them for business.

Licensing is a neat little scam. It works for the licensed professionals because economics is economics. If they can control their supply through licensing and the certification of trade schools, then they can keep their fees artificially high and protect their status in the community.

This leads to a simple maxim of licensing: If there's a shortage of doctors, teachers and nurses, you can always blame the doctors, teachers and nurses. Licensing is a state protection racket for these professionals. Car mechanics and gutter installers would seek state licensing, too, if they were better organized and more politically astute.

This isn't to say that licensed teachers and nurses and doctors aren't good. It's only to say that it's not licensing that makes teachers and nurses and doctors good. Licensing is not needed to maintain or improve their professional quality. Licensing hurts professional quality by graying standards and stifling or eliminating competition.

Licensing would play particular havoc with journalism. Just think how expensive or poorly reported news would be today if journalists were licensed and in limited supply.

The public is just as qualified to shop for professional services as it is to decide which newspaper, magazine or blog to read, without providers being state licensed. One framed certificate from the state should mean very little to a consumer compared to the other certificates of education and achievement on a professional's walls.

Only competition through the repeal of licensing ensures the best overall quality of services. We have the best quality journalism in America because journalism is not licensed and is competitive. Let's raise the bar and demand this standard from all professionals.

Lost voters need your guidance

A letter to fellow Hoosier Libertarians:

Indiana voters desperately need your guidance on Election Day. Won't you step up to help them?

It's bad enough that fewer and fewer of them find their ways to the polls each year. Worse is that most voters are completely lost once they get there.

Just ask them. Few will know that this election determines if they have two or three choices on their ballots in future elections. (You'd think that the chance of losing a third of their choices might be important enough to know). Few will know that the only way to vote against Senator Dick Lugar is to vote for a Libertarian.

Voters need YOU to remind them of these important details that empower them beyond their typically narrow political consciousness, which is based on the limited information they pursue and are fed. YOU are the voters' last hope of using their votes wisely and powerfully, instead of wasting them on thieves who plunder our property and rights on behalf of special interest groups, be they sports franchises, penal businesses, moralists, licensed professionals or just the employees of our various bloated governments themselves, who vote for more government.

Except when our lawmakers are out of session or asleep, their plundering never stops. Let's never kid ourselves about what we're dealing with: at best, ignorant and fearful politicians whose auto-reflex is to try to control other peoples' lives without looking for non-coercive solutions. (Need an example? Not one Democrat or Republican elected official publicly proposed funding Lucas Oil Stadium with private capital).

Seeking government solutions is the common grotesque denominator of ALL non-Libertarians. Their use of government to bully or trick others into paying for their pet projects is the main reason why it's so easy, gratifying and imperative to volunteer at the polls to defeat them. They deserve to be challenged every day, not just Election Day. It's a full-time job. Have you done your part?

Won't you please help the voters this year by volunteering at the polls on behalf of your Libertarian Party candidates? Whether giving an entire day or just an hour before and after work, you can make a big difference in the lives of wandering, lost Hoosiers who have been looking for direction from all the wrong people.

I was once lost, but now I'm found. I hope you'll join me volunteering at the polls on Election Day.

Longing for better schools, shorting on all cylinders

The Indianapolis Star's headline "Blacks long for better schools" (August 13, 2006) should have read "Minorities vote against better schools for themselves."

In my numerous runs for political office as a Libertarian Party candidate, including a bid for school board, I have yet to meet or run against a local minority politician who advocated anything but mediocrity in education. This includes one of my first political opponents, Congresswoman Julia Carson. Unfortunately, most local minority children get the mediocre education that their parents predominantly vote for, and have few people but their parents to blame for it. Here's why:

Public education in Indiana is run and supplied by the government, which is a monopoly. This monopoly provides its curriculum and teachers from the same stagnant pool, which has no competition. This pool is fed from the same stale educational source - namely, college education departments - and filtered of brilliance and creativity by blanket teacher accreditation requirements. Government-created monopolies, by their very nature, give mediocre service because there is nothing to compete with them, or nothing to stir up the pool.

Most local minority politicians support mediocre education because they support this government-run monopoly to the exclusion of educational competition. They support this monopoly, not on behalf of the interests of school children, but because the self-interested organizations that benefit from the monopoly, including teacher and public-employee unions, help them get elected.

An alternative to this monopoly is to have the government continue funding public education, but to let private providers supply it. This alternative, called educational or school choice, would break the monopoly of government-run schools by giving parents a choice not to choose their mediocrity. No longer would politicians, with their horrible accountability and lines in the sand, determine who gets the best education.

If, as the Star's article indicates, 67 percent of area blacks want private education for their children, then all they have to do is vote for school choice. But this will require breaking away from most of their political leaders who are on the record opposing this competitive solution and who have historically led their community astray on behalf of the self-interested players within the public education monopoly.

All Hoosier children deserve better education than the mediocre cookie-cutter version that adult voters provide them today. But Hoosier parents and taxpayers, no matter what skin color, have little basis to expect better educational outcomes without voting for competition among education providers and for universal school choice for parents.

Open minds to immigration

This week Congress and the President may determine the fate of 12 million illegal, mostly Hispanic immigrants in the United States.

Some lawmakers want our current immigration laws enforced and to seize, jail and deport the illegals. Others want a wall built between the U.S. and Mexico to prevent future influxes. Still others believe that illegals already in the U.S. should be given amnesty, and that future government efforts be directed to enforcing the border with more manpower and technology.

The other choice - the one that gets no play in the major media - is the open immigration policy that the federal government employed for our country's first four score. It was only after several states passed their own immigration laws following the Civil War that Congress made immigration a national issue.

In 1875 Congress restricted the immigration of prostitutes and felons. In 1882 it barred the insane, the mentally handicapped, people likely in need of public care and Chinese immigrants. The Immigration Service was not established until 1891. Racial and national quotas became the norm during the 1920s.

This is to say that the federal government's role in controlling immigration is largely ahistorical and tainted with prejudice, which should be morally objectionable to all of us. Modern proponents say immigration control is necessary because of advances in technology, but their anti-immigrant attitudes began long before modern transportation and weapons of mass destruction.

Make no mistake that today's immigration debate is not about preventing white Canadians from immigrating to this country, but instead over people with a different skin color, language, culture and wealth than most of the Americans who object to them. Race and other socio-economic issues are at the heart of their objections.

The moral, political and economic answer to immigration is to embrace it, not fight it. There should be no barriers to opportunity. There is nothing moral in our use of threats and violence against people who peacefully seek better lives for themselves and their families. And we shouldn't blame them if we stupidly vote to tax ourselves to give them free benefits.

Open immigration and few government benefits was the policy of our lawmakers until about a hundred years ago, and is the policy of modern libertarians. Libertarians believe that government should be used to support freedom and opportunity for less fortunate people, not to give fortunate people control over opportunity.

We also should make immigration easier for those from countries other than Mexico. Current regulations and thin staffing at immigration offices force immigrants to choose between wasting time, effort and thousands of dollars to comply with the law or to risk deportation.

As confusing as the immigration debate may seem, our political choices are really quite clear. Either we support people's natural rights to seek better lives, or we vote for policies to suppress them. An open immigration policy does not preclude our federal government from screening for diseases, weapons and other contraband, just as it does today.

The Golden Rule says to treat other people as we would like to be treated. Wouldn't we find it objectionable, immoral and even primitive if Mexicans built a wall against us and used threats and violence to send Americans packing?

Bad monkey !

The email’s title innocently read: "Please sign the petition," so I clicked the hyperlink (http://www.indyzoo.com/content.aspx?cid=879) to see what it was about.

To my surprise appeared the following petition on the web site of the Indianapolis Zoo and Gardens. With all due respect to the Zoo, this petition is so politically senseless on so many levels that it's a perfect example of what not to do.

"We, the undersigned, ask Congress to provide $2 million for each of the wildlife species covered under the Multinational Species Conservation Fund program -- African elephant, Asian elephant, rhino, tiger, great apes and marine turtles. Thank you."

Unfortunately this petition will not help any wild animals by any measurable degree - only self-interested Homo sapiens.

The wild African and marine animals will get virtually nothing because it will take at least $2 million for the federal government to execute any plan to help them. This makes the $2 million request an insult to every animal on the list. Please don't sign a petition that insults politically helpless animals that can't speak for themselves!

I'm not a zoologist. I study political animals. From what I know about their governments, I would turn to politically tainted government programs as the last resort to save wild animals.

This is not to say that governments have no role in protecting wild African and marine animals - just not our federal government. Certainly the governments of Africa, for example, need to secure their public lands from poaching, and to prosecute violators. Good governments also promote the expansion of private property and provide legal systems to protect property rights, which offer wild animals their best chance of survival.

But otherwise, private organizations like the Indianapolis Zoo are wild animals' best hope - not governments. Other groups include the African Wildlife Foundation, American Oceans Campaign, Elephants of Africa Rescue Society and the Elephant Sanctuary of Hohenwald, to name a few. Petitioning government to help wild animals only competes with the organizations that can do the animals the most good. Each tax increase by government makes it more difficult to help wild animals.

There is very little that governments do well. By their very nature, they use and manage resources unwisely. This means that - to any extent possible - we should not entrust wild animals to government programs, which are far too subject to bureaucracy and politics.

If wild animals could speak for themselves, they'd likely ask us to funnel our contributions through private zoological organizations instead of government. It would be money much better spent.

Straight talk on school choice

Let me state up front that I am an unadulterated supporter of competition in publicly funded education, better known as school choice.

However, having said this, I think the Florida Supreme Court correctly struck down Governor Jeb Bush's Opportunity Scholarships - a voucher program for students attending failing public schools - as contrary to Florida's constitution.

The Florida constitution calls for “a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high-quality system of free public schools.” The 5-2 decision held that Bush's voucher program “diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools that are the sole means set out in the Constitution for the state to provide for the education of Florida's children.”

Don't blame school vouchers for this constitutional defeat. Vouchers will ultimately save Florida's public education from the people who run it today and are running it into the ground. Instead blame the defeat on Florida's archaic state constitution. It clearly calls for “a uniform ... system of free public schools,” which publicly funded vouchers in private schools clearly are not.

Unfortunately, Indiana's constitution suffers the same malady. Our General Assembly is mandated to provide “a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all.” Just as in Florida, this wording is all that the Indiana Supreme Court would need to strike down most voucher legislation. This is why we should not rely on our courts to do a political job. It’s the legislature’s role to change our laws to make real educational improvements possible.

Indiana's constitution is nearly 190 years old, and so are its educational provisions. The idea of voucher education just turned 50 this year. We must bring our state constitution and political discussion up to date by focusing on the value of competition in education.

If competition provides accountability among competing merchants, mechanics and ministers in our society - which it does - then competition should be used to bring accountability to our public education system, also.

Accountability woefully lacks in Indiana’s government-run monopoly school systems. While our students are being taught how to pass the ISTEP test, students elsewhere are reading books, doing math exercises and learning foreign languages.

Yet school-choice opponents say accountability is not the issue, that school choice proponents like me are just hostile to public schools. This is how Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union for Florida, put it: “What fueled Opportunity Scholarships and other programs was not the inability of public schools to provide the needed programs but rather the opposition and hostility to public schools and the desire to create a competing school system.”

This is both silly and disingenuous. Most school choice advocates oppose neither public schools, which I attended, nor public funding of schools. Most of us are motivated strictly against the government monopoly of educators that run and control our public schools to the detriment of children and our society.

Even the most socially democratic of nations such as Belgium and Sweden give parents universal choice where to send their kids to school. These liberal systems, which educate children far better than ours does, prove that there is nothing inherently contradictory between providing public education and allowing educational choice and competition among educational providers.

These social welfare systems can teach American liberals that it is only through competition that excellence in public education can be achieved.

If we can all agree that competition is good and monopolies are bad, then our discussion should focus on how to infuse competition into publicly funded education and how to bust the government's bureaucratic education monopoly.