The Wall: A Response to the President

Good evening, my fellow Americans.

I realize that it’s getting late. You probably have been working all day, and the last thing you want is some politician blowing hot air in your face. But I do have something important to say to you, and I promise I will keep it short.

What we have just seen has to be the most remarkably dishonest use of the president’s Bully Pulpit in American history. The President of the United States has just told us about an alleged security crisis at our southern border and a humanitarian crisis there, as well. It was mostly cherry-picked details taken out of context, laced with alleged “facts” that simply are not facts at all. Little of what he told us is actually true, but that did not stop him from saying it.

I will leave the debunking to the professionals. Instead, I want to give you 5 basic reasons why building the President’s wall is a very bad idea. You can think about them on your own time, and decide for yourself.

1)   It’s contrary to the principles of our democracy. Only a small minority of Americans — less that 40% — actually support building this wall. This is an effort by a minority president to impose a minority opinion on all Americans. That is wrong all by itself.

2)   Something the President doesn’t want to talk about: It will require the federal government to take land from private citizens through Eminent Domain in order to build it. Any number of families living along the border with Mexico will be forced to allow this wall to be built on their property, sometimes actually dividing the property in two. It is really astonishing that our Repbulican colleagues, who constantly complain about Big Government, would actually support this.

3)   The cost. The President wants around 5 and a half billion dollars for this project. What he won’t tell you, is that that is only the beginning. Expert analyses, from both left-leaning and right-leaning think tanks agree: This wall will turn out to be much, much more expensive. Some estimates are as high as 10 times the 5-odd billion dollars the President wants. And remember: Every wall has to be patrolled and maintained. We will have to dramatically expand our border protection agencies and the services that support them. All of that comes at a continuing cost to the taxpayers…every year, indefinitely.

The wall that the President wants will cover only 200 miles of a 2000-mile border. That’s only 10%. So take that 50-billion dollar estimate and multiply it by ten, and you will get a better picture of the actual cost of securing our border with a high-tech wall. That is where this is all going: To try to secure our border with a wall will involve as much as half a trillion dollars. All this for a wall that we know will not even fix the problems.

So, summing up what we have so far: this wall is contrary to the principles of our democracy, it will involve the seizing of private property to build it, and it will be far more expensive than the President claims.

4)   There is no such crisis that a wall like this can fix. This is a little complicated, but bear with me. I’ll try to make it clear. 

When the President took office in 2017, illegal immigration was at an historic low. Yes, there has been a small uptick since then, largely because of the President’s own policies. But the best information we have, from agencies like Customs and Border Protection, is that the real illegal immigration problem is not people storming the border, as the President wants you to think. No, the vast majority of illegal immigration comes from people already here legally in the country: foreign visitors here legally who overstay their visas or work permits. This does need to be fixed, but no wall is going to do that!

The President insists that there is a humanitarian crisis at our border, and to some extent, he is correct. There certainly are staffing and infrastructure problems at certain points on the border that are creating humanitarian issues, and these problems have to be addressed. That is why the House of Representatives has passed an appropriations bill to address this problem. We urge our colleagues in the Senate to pass it and the President to sign it into law. 

However much of this humanitarian crisis is, once again, the result of the President’s own policies, especially separating families, deporting parents and so on.

Apart from this, there is no crisis. Before the last election, the President sent thousands of troops to the border, allegedly to protect us from hordes of invading foreigners. Of course, there were no such hordes. It was a cheap political stunt aimed at influencing the election. The soldiers got there and literally had nothing to do!

5)   And last, but to my mind certainly not least, is the environmental cost of this boondoggle. Wildlife, especially in the national parks and monuments along the border, depend on access to water – especially the Rio Grande and its tributaries – as well as freedom to migrate. The wall itself will endanger a number of important animal species, such as the black bear, bighorn sheep, and wild cats. This wall will produce local extinctions of these species, thus impoverishing the natural environment that Americans come to these parks and monuments to enjoy.

And of course, to build this unsightly thing in these beautiful natural settings that we regard as our common heritage will require heavy machinery, transport, roads, and so on, scarring the earth and massively disrupting natural habitats along the border. Much of that damage will simply be irreparable. We will be permanently scarring the earth, for the sake of a wall that won’t even do what we want it to do. It’s really unconscionable.

So summing up: Five reasons why the wall is a bad idea.

It’s anti-democratic.

It will involve government appropriation of private property.

It will be much, much more expensive than the President is letting 

     on.

It will not address the actual problems with our immigration 

     system at all.

Its environmental impacts will be devastating.

Once again, thank you for lending an ear, and may God bless you all.

Fun with libertarians

In my experience, libertarianism is chiefly a way for people with conservative beliefs to imagine they’re liberal. 

I have had many conversations with “libertarians”, and when I push them to get clear about what they really think, invariably one of two things happens: Either they back away from fundamental assumptions made by libertarians (“OK, but except for THAT, I’m a libertarian”), or else they wind up retreating into exactly the same policies espoused by “modern” (i.e. post-Gingrich) conservatives.

So Libertarians are conservatives — at least, the ones who are honest with themselves and those who are willing to actually think through the implications of libertarianism. This may not have been true once upon a time, but we are no longer living in the 1980s. The fact that the Cato Institute disagrees with Trump only means that they are more intellectually honest than most conservatives today.

And as for the idea of “left-libertarians,” I have met a few of them, as well. Like other less-than-clear libertarians, their arguments always collapse when you push them. They stand on the notion that you can somehow distinguish between social and economic issues, which is preposterous…if you’re paying attention. The economic is social.

Two issues invariably trip them up. First is the idea of the Commons, which everyone intuitively agrees with, but which is a dagger in the heart of ‘libertarian” property-rights arguments. Put simply, the idea is that there are issues that require government management of personal property, because everyone in society has a stake in them. The most obvious one is the environment: Not only does everyone agree that, for example, clean water and clean air are a necessity for the whole of society, and therefore must be managed by government intervention into the marketplace, but it is also easy to see that letting “the market” manage these things has failed miserably, to everyone's detriment. The worse the situation becomes with the environment, the greater the need for the government to step in and regulate.

From there it becomes clear that we are no longer able to cling to a principle of minimal government. On the contrary, we are talking about degrees of government management of private property. And that is exactly the traditional conservative-liberal debate.

No “left-libertarian” I have met has been able to withstand this simple point, because for the life of them they just cannot figure out a way to advocate for the environment without bringing government into the picture, since the free-market argument falls down completely. And it’s downhill from there.

The other issue that is fun to talk to libertarians about is social inequality. They’re opposed to it, of course, but they espouse the idea that “freeing everything up” will fix it. Maximum personal freedom, they call it. When I ask them for any examples of when this might have happened, when the so-called “free market” has produced more social equality, they cannot answer with an honest example. 

That’s because there aren’t any. Either they insist without evidence that “a rising tide raises all boats” — which sounds nice but which the history shows simply has never been true — or they are forced to acknowledge that a) there has never been a truly free market (so, there is literally no evidence to support their position); and b) every “free market” in history — such as it was — has been the product of the very government interventions that the libertarians want to avoid!

And of course libertarians, like honest conservatives, always decry the role of government in addressing social inequality. They claim that a “truly just” system would provide equal access to resources and equal opportunity to succeed. In this they are taking exactly the conservative line. It is a very seductive idea, and I’m not surprised that so many conservatives fall for it. The problem is the mechanism: How do you define a “truly just” society, and how do you create one once you do?

The “true libertarians” I have met have never been able to offer me a definition and a mechanism for achieving it that did not involve laissez-faire economics in one form or other. They hate quotas and call affirmative action “reverse racism” and so on. But it should be obvious to any honest observer that no “truly just” system can afford to ignore centuries of racism, sexism and classism that have baked privilege and social inequality into the web of society itself.  The powerful never give up their power willingly. They have to be forced…which leads right back to the very role of government that the libertarian objects to. Once again, we are talking, not about principles but degrees — the classic conservative-liberal debate.

So in the end libertarians always retreat either to stereotypically “liberal” positions on government by abandoning the idea of the free market, and so on (in which case they sound less and less like “libertarians” and more and more like “liberals”), or, more commonly, they ignore the problem and change the subject, because they have no effective answer to the question, and they know it.

Again: there is no way to separate economic from social issues. They are of a piece. You cannot be “left” on one and “right” on the other. It simply doesn’t work in the real world.

And this is why libertarianism is an internally incoherent point of view, one that merely allows some conservative-thinking people to imagine that they are not conservative.

But they are.

Something there is that doesn't love

Some of the things you don't love are really, really important!

There are walls, and there are walls. Not all walls are the same, and it will not do at all simply to build one, expecting that it will do what you ask of it. Not all of them work, you see, and every wall comes with an attitude that you will have to live with forever after, as long as you keep the wall around. And sometimes stuff happens that you don't expect.

So there are walls and walls, and you really must get to know them to understand the difference. 

It is not a bad idea to ask some walls, to find out what they are doing. Walls have their own wisdom, you see, and it’s good to talk to them about it. Don’t be fooled by those who would tell you that there’s something wrong with talking to walls. Trust me when I say that there’s a lot to be learned from talking to walls.

And when you do — I have done this myself — you discover that the ones that work, the ones that do their jobs best with the least expense are always those that are meant to keep stuff in, rather than keep it out. 

Almost every last wall that I have spoken with (and I have talked to a lot of walls, let me tell you) and all those I have read about that were built to keep stuff out, eventually failed. The big ones, anyway. The little ones, like the ones around my house, they usually do their jobs well enough, but then again, they often need help. Security systems, for example. Or CCTV. And that makes them even more expensive.

And of course that's because all walls everywhere need police of one kind or another. And the bigger the wall, the more police they need. It makes sense: If there are no police, well there’s nothing stopping someone climbing over it or digging under it or even just knocking it down. And if you’re building a really big wall, you need even more police. It’s pretty simple: More equals more.

So the really big keep-‘em-out-type walls all eventually fail — some of them sooner, some later, some pretty spectacularly. I once talked to a really big wall of this kind in France, and he (all walls are male, it seems) went on at length about how strong he was, how many soldiers he had had protecting him and on and on. He was very proud of how much money had been spent on him, and not without reason. He was indeed an impressive wall.

But then I asked him, “If you were such a fine wall, what happened? How come you’re all alone now, here in the woods?”

He just shrugged and said, “They went around me.” And then he went back to sleep and didn't talk any more.

Every wall I ever met had an attitude. I guess it’s just part of being a wall. But they always get their attitude from the people who built them. The nicer walls I have met in my life have all been all about practicality. Walls around a toilet tend to be friendlier than walls between neighbors’ houses, for example. Walls that keep out cold and snow are usually very friendly, as are those with lots of windows and doors. Such walls clearly have been built by loving people who want the best for those using the walls.

But a really big wall means there must be something really big you want to keep out. Or keep in. And they never, ever show much love. No, the big ones are also the most unloving…because they have been built by people precisely to show their un-lovingness. Ask ‘em. They’ll tell you, because it’s all part of their attitude: Stay out! Go away! You are not wanted here! That’s what they’ll say to you, every time. If you listen.

Of course, you can choose not to listen to walls. You can go about your business as if walls don’t matter much. Most walls prefer to be taken for granted, actually. It helps them do their job. 

But the most unloving ones, they cannot tolerate being ignored. Intolerance is their M.O. If you let them talk, they’ll never shut up about how strong they are, how big they are and blah blah blah. It’s as if they want to celebrate their un-lovingness. Because after all, that is why they were built in the first place, right? If they were about love, well, they wouldn’t even be there.

And finally, there's this: almost every wall I have spoken to personally had something to say about unintended consequences, stuff that wasn't planned but happened any way.

One wall I spoke with — right here in the good ol' U.S. of A., though I won't say where — was telling me about how happy he was that I had stopped to talk. He lamented the fact that so few people even paid any attention to him. I felt sorry for him, actually, and even more when he told me his story.

It seems that his Builder was a very greedy man. He was constantly planning how he was going to make more money, even though apparently he already had more than he had much use for. So anyway he owned a bit of land in a marshy spot next to a very pretty lake, and he got it into his head that if he could build a really nice hotel or something, he could make a lot of money from people coming to stay at the hotel and look at the lake.

But to do that, the wall told me, the Builder had to drain the swamp, so there would be enough dry land to put the hotel on. When the wall told me this, I took a look around, and sure enough: the whole area was wet and marshy. I remember thinking, "Hmm, so he wanted to put a hotel here?"

So my friend, the wall, was built to keep the lake out, so that the hotel could be dry. But two things happened, one that made my friend, the wall, unhappy, and one that made the Builder unhappy. 

First: the wall kept sinking and sinking, so that the Builder had to keep adding to it. So when I met him, the wall was this hodgepodge mishmash of concrete and stone and brick, row upon row...and yet the whole thing only stood a few feet above the water.

Second: To build the hotel, the Builder had to pump all the water out, dry the land and bring in a lot of machines and men. Before long, though, the place began to smell. It stank — even when I was there — from all the dead fish and frogs, and the algae and so on that collected by the wall. And the water, which had been like a blue mirror reflecting the sky, turned brown from all the yuck the Builder was putting in the lake.

The Builder was smart enough not to try to finish the hotel. The unlove he had brought was enough to chase away anyone who cared to look at the lake. It was just costing too much.

Paradise

He was not, however, kind enough to fix the problem he had created. "Too expensive," he told himself, as he walked away.

As I walked away, I looked around. No, I thought, I wouldn't want to come here now, either.

So this is what I have learned from talking to walls: They’re not very good at keeping stuff out; you have to make them bigger and bigger to do that; the bigger the wall, the more expensive they are and the more un-love they share with the world; and every wall comes with stuff you didn't plan on...but you have to live with it, anyway.

Yes, you. Because you are the one who built it. Right?