Politics: Shoot Japanese Devils Game

I heard recently that the Chinese newspaper People's Daily recently put up an online video game where the player shoots Japanese "devils", world war war criminals. Worsening relationships between the two countries have made it perfectly legal to throw the anger at Japanese. "Japanese devil" is a common racial slur for China's regional rivals. The game marked the same day as the Chinese government approved two national days, September 3 to mark Japan's defeat in World War II and December 13 to commemorate the victims of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, where six weeks of slaughter ensued on the wartime capital of China and ultimately culminated in over 200,000 casualties.

Both my parents attended university in Nanjing and my parents have many friends and some relatives there. My feeling about this is that neither country should stir up angry popular sentiment like this. The Japanese should stop paying respects to war criminals at the Yasukuni shrine where 14 class A war criminals are honored. Mutual respect requires both sides to own up to history and not continually bring up the past to assault the other.

If you're curious, the game can be found here. The game is all in Chinese.

Politics: American Immigration and Mars

On the talk show Here and Now right now, there's a well-educated fellow who says that we should reduce immigration of foreigners to the United States. Dan Stein is his name and he is the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). He seeks to control illegal immigration and reduce legal immigration to "levels consistent with the national interest of the United States". I agree that reform is needed but what needs to be addressed is not on reducing all immigration but reducing low-skilled immigration.

Just earlier today, I was re-reading the final chapters of the book Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin. Zubrin was saying that without a frontier to colonize such as Mars, America will be heading down towards stagnation. He revealed several specifics, among which dealt with immigration. In the past (from its inception until early 20th century), America welcomed immigrants since there was a limited work force. The western frontier presented a constant labor shortage. Today, however, "far from prizing each additional citizen, anti-immigrant attitudes are on the rise...thus in the late twentieth century, and increasingly in the twenty-first, each additional citizen is and will be regarded as a burden".

High-Skilled Immigration
More recently in 2012, Robert Zubrin wrote an interesting article called "Towards an Intelligent Immigration Policy" in the National Review where he dispels the pervasive but mistaken notion that increased foreign immigration destroys the prospect of Americans attaining jobs. Currently, many young foreigners who graduate from American universities or have demonstrable capabilities independent of American universities have to jump through many barriers to attain residency or citizenship despite their skills and desire to work in America. The rationality for denying these individuals the right to quickly attain citizenship is labor protectionism. Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, was archetypal of this view when she wrote,

"As for stapling the green card to the STEM diploma, this is little more than a marketing tool for U.S. universities to attract more foreign students into paying for degrees in fields that are already saturated. There is no shortage of STEM professionals in the United States; on the contrary, the census shows that there are 1.8 million American engineers who are unemployed or working in other professions."

This woman believes that the number of jobs is a fixed resource and that the American unemployment rates are caused by overpopulation. She fails to realize that jobs are created by people. Statistics show immigrants are highly entrepreneurial. According to the Fiscal Policy Institute, they are 13% of the American population but yet own 18% of small businesses. and were responsible for 30% of the growth of U.S. small businesses over the last 20 years.

As Robert Zubrin also points out, foreign students typically pay much more than their American counterparts for the same education. If the incentive of a green card upon graduation is assured for foreign students, many more foreigners will apply which means the education system can be subsidized to be made much more affordable for Americans.

Low-Skilled Immigration
On the matter of lower-skilled workers, I have to strongly disagree with Robert Zubrin. He believes that low-skilled immigrants should also be allowed in. He uses the example of U.S farm workers. Currently, over half of U.S. farm workers are illegal immigrants from Mexico. These people are willing to work long hours in the hot sun so that you don't have to. If they are all deported back to Mexico, America will starve.

Yet, he fails to note that most low-skilled immigrants provides not only no benefit but cost for society. Though there are many hardworking low-skilled immigrants, there are an equal number if not more of criminals or lazy immigrants who would love to live on welfare. The National Research Council (NRC) conducted a detailed study in 1997 which shows that since most Latin Americans immigrating to America are uneducated, they are creating a negative net annual fiscal impact more than offsetting the positive impact from Asians, Canadians, and Europeans. Using Zubrin's specific case for Mexicans, for the year 2000, 67% are dropouts, 21% are high school graduates, and only 12% have some college. The NRC study of 1997 found that the fiscal effect are -$99,919 for dropouts, -$14,122 for high school education, and +$163,452 for those with some college.

Take a look at the United Kingdom which has opened its doors to mass immigration where no skills are required. Their economy is increasingly a welfare state. California is also suffering due to their immigration policy.Consider the alternative of Canada and Australia where prospective citizens must prove they have skills or are financially self-sufficient. Many of my parents's friends have chosen to go to Canada instead of America since they know acquiring a citizenship in Canada is much easier than acquiring one in America with their skilled professions.

Conclusion

Americans constitute only 4% of the world's population but are responsible for half its inventions in the last century. I will argue that this is significantly due to attracting highly qualified immigrants and giving them the opportunity to flourish. The brain drain encountered in many other countries have been a significant boon for this country. Let us continue with this.

Politics: Towards a Better Government

Governments inevitably expand its control over the people with increased regulations, growing bureaucracy, and loss of freedom to its citizens which it is meant to serve. Constitutions and division of power serves as a mitigating factor to this growth in government but it cannot stop this inevitable trend. The growth is not only a consequence of mismanagement and corruption but rather is due to the fundamental nature of governments attempting to solve problems by introducing more regulations. Once a regulation is introduced, its removal is much harder since there are inevitably special interest groups that directly benefits from such regulations and they will fight hard to preserve the status quo. To counter this or to not feel left out, other interest groups also make their case and introduce their own regulations which benefits them. As the years go by, there is a snowball that grows ever larger. A government that grows too large and entrenched will inevitably mismanage its citizens due to accidental negligence or deliberate aim at control.

Such a government will also be extremely hard to reform and revolution does not guarantee any change except for those benefiting the revolutionaries. In many cases, a revolution is a convenient excuse for one group who has not been given power to seize power for itself, sometimes leading to a worse situation than before with even greater control. The solution guaranteed to work is to have periodic migrations and settlement in faraway lands where a new improved government can be built from the foundation with the culture and legislation to ensure its growth into a sprawling bureaucracy is substantially slowed. For instance, the US was built based on many of the enlightened ideas of European intellectuals. Today, currently much of the easy-to-access lands on Earth has been settled which makes it very difficult for new idealistic groups to form their own governments in distant lands. In the future, space travel and ocean settlements will allow new and hopefully improved types of political systems in self-contained societies.

Reform may be possible though if certain action steps are taken. These ideas I present are not original and have certainly been suggested in greater details by libertarians who actually understand American politics much better than I. Nonetheless, the suggestions I offer and the benefits that will happen if the actions are taken seem fairly self-evident to me.

1. Encourage private enterprise not connected with the government. This can come from tax incentives and direct funding. Often, the same service offered by the private company can do a more effective job than the government. In package delivery, FedEx and UPS often do its job more effectively than the US Post Office, delivering goods on time and charging competitive rates. In rocket launch services, SpaceX, a startup company initially funded by the personal checkbook of Elon Musk, provides launch cost at a price potentially ~$50M cheaper than that of United Launch Alliance, a company that's jointly owned by Lockheed Martin and Boeing with a much longer history and political and economic clout.

In the father of all future incentive packages since the inception of President Obama, i.e. the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, $82.2 billion was spent on protecting the vulnerable while $43 billion was spent on energy and only $7.6 billion spent on scientific research. Among the $82.2 billion, about half or $40 billion, more than scientific research and energy manufacturing and research combined, was spent on providing unemployment benefits so that unemployed people can continue to collect paychecks while essentially sitting at home and doing nothing.

If the same funds was reversed and $82.2 billion was spent on scientific research or the energy sector instead, the consequences will have been substantially more positive and greater than that of Joe and Jane sitting at home in their pajamas so that they have more time to look for jobs. This money could have spurred advancements in the space or energy sector, building up the technological infrastructure and advancement that can provide billions of dollars of return in the future while also creating new jobs. A new technological breakthrough can lead to the creation of ten companies worth billions of dollars that can then hire Joe and Jane to get off of their sofa and build the building as construction workers or work at the local bar that just opened due to the sudden influx of lawyers, businessmen, engineers, and scientists in the area from the growth in business. As usual, politicians are often influenced by interest groups that hold the majority of votes but often don't have the vision to see further ahead.

2. Reduce the power of federal laws for local regions by ensuring that local laws supersede federal laws. Often, federal laws are unpopular or not applicable to particular regions or to particular groups of people. To enforce the same law on everyone across a nation often benefits only some and harms everyone else. Furthermore, offering a national government this level of power can be quite dangerous. For instance, the passing of the Patriot Act passed during the administration of Bush gives the federal government almost unlimited powers in detaining people without trial in any US state or territory. Obama has extended this Act in three provisions by continuing US agencies to wiretap its citizens, search business records, and conduct surveillance on individuals.

3. Immigration should be re-opened. America was built by the hands and minds of immigrants giving it the nickname as the land of opportunity. Its gates in the early 20th century welcomed millions to its shores, with many of them being the poor from Europe and Asia that were leaving the turmoils or poverty in their respective countries. Through several generations, many of them developed their education and business to build the America that is today. No one will say that was a bad thing. Yet, now, immigration to the US is very limited and there's only talk on restricting it more with almost no one saying the reverse. Opening up the gates will jumpstart the economy in two ways.

First, with millions of unskilled immigrants willing to work twice as hard and at half the pay, American citizens can dedicate their time to other tasks. For instance, the daycare system for kids is abhorrently expensive in the US but millions of parents will pay the money anyway since there's little choice for someone to take care of their kids at home. Second, with tens of thousands of skilled immigrants, new technologies and companies can be formed leading to increased prosperity for all and technological benefits. From what I have seen, the US university educational system is perfectly willing to offer high quality education to foreign students only to kick them out a few months or a year later since they were unable to secure a full-time job in the US in time to maintain their visa status. This loss of human capital is quite regrettable.

I will put up more thoughts in a future post but for now let me stop here. What do you think?