Who Are We?

Do companies expect the same level of growth when they are large as when they are small? The answer is NO!

Growing a huge company by 10% is a major accomplishment. For a small company it is a failure.

Percentage growth is not the right measure.

It may surprise some people, but growth is not always a good thing. John Lukacs wrote a book over 20 years ago entitled “Outgrowing Democracy.” Lukacs made the point that the most feared disease of our time, cancer, can be generally characterized as uncontrolled growth. From this it is possible to view mass immigration (both legal and illegal) as a cancer that is destroying (has destroyed?) the United States of America, by first destroying its cultural unity and thus its political unity.

Just this week, we were given an example of how Neocons approach the immigration debate. The Frumster (i.e., David Frum) wrote an essay for NR (the magazine) in which he “re-thinks immigration.” For those who haven’t been following Neocons for long, the practice of having “second thoughts” is common for Neocons and fits in with their flexibility on most issues. But in particular on immigration, Neocons for some time have tried to pretend to address the issue as a way of preventing those to the right of them from getting traction. Frum however claims in his essay that he has favored a more restrictionist position since the late 1980s. The problem is there is no evidence he took that position then. I went over his comments on immigration in his 1994 book “Dead Right” and find nothing to suggest that Frum supported reducing illegal or legal immigration. He did note the issue was in play, for example in the reelection campagin of then Governor Pete Wilson in California and proposition 187. Frum also noted Peter Brimelow’s major essays advocating a reduction in legal immigration, first published in National Reivew as a cover story in 1992, however Frum didn’t come close to endorsing Brimelow’s (and at that time, NR’s) position. He seemed to cite immigration as one issue that a new dangerous non-Neocon right might use to gain power. He also seemed to say that it was because of welfare that the problems related to immigration existed, including illegal immigration (implying that illegal aliens are OK, as long as they aren’t on welfare).

In his blog comments this week in fact, Frum attacked Brimelow for starting his immigration website VDare.com, which Brimelow founded after he was expelled from NR for favoring reduction of immigration. Brimelow was expelled from NR at the insistence of Neocons.

In short, it appears impossible to defend Frum from the charge that he wrote an untruth (i.e., lied through his teeth) when he claimed that he has long favored reducing immigration, illegal or legal. For those who have followed Frum’s writings, this won’t surprise them.

The following is a transcript of Frum’s appearance on the C-Span interview program Booknotes discussing his book Dead Right in 1994. Note that Frum ties in immigration control with Buchanan, and that Buchanan is his least favorite conservative, along with Oliver North. This would appear to be further evidence that Frum was misleading this week when he claimed that he has supported a more restrictive position on immigration since the late 1980s.

http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/index_print.asp?ProgramID=1223

BRIAN LAMB: David Frum, where did you get the title “Dead Right”?

DAVID FRUM: I have to admit I didn’t get it. The publisher made it up. We were locked in combat for weeks over this, and I think the clinching issue was that the book’s jacket we knew was going to be small, so we needed something quite short.

FRUM: The central argument of the book is that conservative politicians, by and large, have lost a lot of their enthusiasm for controlling the overall size of government and are spending much more of their efforts saying, “Look, big government is a permanent fact of life; it is here to stay; let us use it to promote conservative ends.” Jack Kemp and people like him, people who are strong in Congress, say, “Let’s use government; let’s change the way it works; let’s make it more market-oriented. Then let us use new incentives to elicit good behavior from people at the bottom of society.” This is optimistic both because it is a sunny and happy message.

It says that really America’s social problems are readily fixable, but it’s also optimistic because it makes very heroic assumptions about what happens when you change the incentives that poor people face, that Kemp really does believe that poorest people in America are people that, if they faced slightly different tax rates and ownership structures, would be completely different. What moralists such as Bill Bennett think — I actually spoke to him recently, and he claims now to be rethinking a lot of this and to be himself moving in a more anti-statist direction, but certainly at the time I was writing the book what they think is, look, the problem is a perverse elite at the top of American society that is spreading poisonous values into the American people. We should create a new elite that will use the state to strengthen values in the American population.

The third group, the nationalists, are people who say our real problem is the changing character of the American country, not character in the moral sense but character in a demographic sense. The country’s becoming less European; it is becoming less like the country in which people like Buchanan grew up and that what we should do is use the power of the state to assert and defend the interests of the core Euro-American civilization through things like strict controls on immigration but also through a — this is less programmatic — but through a reassertion of who America belongs to.

LAMB: Is there any way you define your conservatism?

FRUM: First of all, I don’t like modifiers. I do like to just call myself a conservative, but my conservatism is a very strongly anti-statist variety.

LAMB: Why?

FRUM: I am very skeptical of the ability to use government to achieve conservative ends. I think that tools often dictate the uses to which they are put, and the power of government, especially the power of the federal government, inherently has got a subversive cast that is subversive of traditional values, that is inherently centralizing, that is inherently collectivist. I support many of the things that social conservatives want. I’m not one of these new-paradigm conservatives who is very much in sympathy with the main trends of the way American culture is going right now. I’m not a big admirer of pop music — I’m here wearing a necktie, after all — but the way you get social conservatism, or the only available way to achieve social conservatism, is through a program of limiting the scope and cost of the central government — state governments, too — but first and foremost the central government.

LAMB: Which conservative makes you cringe?

FRUM: Buchanan, to a great extent, makes me cringe. Oliver North makes me cringe worse — I think probably he more than anybody else.

Lawerence Auster addresses the issue of Frum and immigration at his website, View from the Right. Auster appears to have followed the Frumsters real record in this area closely for some time. Here is a link to his post and his concluding paragraph.

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/008090.html

Again, I have nothing personal against Frum and I had no desire to attack him, especially during this time when former adversaries are on the same side in trying to stop Bush’s Comprehensive Black Death Act. But it was Frum who chose this moment of all moments to write his self-serving National Review article, “How I re-thought immigration,” using it as an opportunity once again to attack and dismiss the people who actually built up the-immigration restrictionist argument over the years at great cost to themselves while Frum, ensconced in his various establishment perches, was alternately attacking them as anti-immigrant bigots and silently wringing his hands about the harm immigration was doing to America. As late as 2004, Frum’s comments at a Center for Immigration Studies panel on immigration were so ambivalent, tortured, and devoid of substance you wondered why he bothered showing up. Yet this is the guy who now situates himself as one of our age’s leading thinkers on immigration.

Posted by Lawrence Auster

Borjas is an immigrant himself, so to some extent he may have been talking about his own experience. At the very least, his thoughts are colored by it.