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March 28, 2006

Nice Tie-in

On the same theme, Rush Limbaugh asked an amusing question yesterday.   If the government is powerless to enforce immigration laws, what would happen if 40 or 50 million of us just stopped paying taxes?:

So, since Senator Specter and since Senator McCain and all the supporters of this amnesty program say, "Well, 12 million, 11 million? We can't do anything about it! We've got to come up with some way to deal with them already here because we can't deport them." Fine, how about if I we -- and I'm speaking hypothetically…  What if 40 or 50 million of us just refused to pay taxes. What are they going to do?  …They don't have that many IRS agents; they don't have that much jail space. They might actually build jails for this, though (laughing) and call it the Rush Limbaugh Correctional Facility. They might actually do it. But then what would have to happen because the government obviously needs revenue, we need for our government to perform various basic functions. But it could be a way to change the tax code, because if 40 or 50 million people just said, "The hell with it and dropped out," they'd have to come up with an alternative way of raising the money, and that's how we would get reform.

In fact, this is more or less the basic premise of Atlas Shrugged, except there it was the wealthy that bailed out, and went into hiding.  Anyway, his actual point, regarding the current talk about immigration reform, is this:

…if the number of illegals is simply too large to deal with, the number of criminals is simply too large to deal with, and you're not going to have any enforcement mechanism, then all of this is just… designed to placate you and pander to you to make you think that they reeeally mean it this time.”

I"ll say one thing about the immigration debate:  Isn't it nice to have one thing to argue about where there’s some real certainty?  I mean, politics is the real of opinion.  It’s hard to say anything for certain is right or wrong, because so much of it deals with opinion, differing world views, and fuzzy social science.  Here, at least, is one thing that a clear thinking from either side of the immigration debate should be able to recognize, whether or not they are willing to admit it.  When you hear Senator Specter claiming one one hand that we can't deport everybody because we have no way of getting so many people to comply with existing immigration laws, and then propose as a solution to this the passage of still more laws, without explaining how we will suddenly, magically, be able to get those same people to comply with these new immigration laws, you can be pretty confident that he’s talking nonsense.

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