Tag: Foreigners

Killing Golden Geese

Anarchist thugs, BaconLettuceMayo, Business, Gummint, Marxists

The late and great Margaret Thatcher had it right (as usual) when she said of Communists that sooner or later, they run out of other people’s money.  What’s happening in many of the neo-socialist hellholes like New York lately is that the “other” (i.e. wealthy) people aren’t necessarily running out of money, they’re running out of patience with the filthy nest their government has created, and are running away.

It’s snapshot simple. The wealthy and the companies they work for pay most of the taxes. The poor consume most of the taxes through social programs. COVID is driving the wealthy and their offices out of the city. No one will be left to pay for the poor, who are stuck here, and the city will collapse in the transition.

Of course, that would be bad enough, because even if the wealthy folks came back to their Upper East- or West Side domiciles once the Chinkvirus had subsided, NYFC could continue to fleece them in the manner to which everyone has become accustomed.  But if their toney little brownstone houses and chi-chi apartment buildings are surrounded by homeless, aggressive beggars and rioting assholes of the BLM / Pantifa persuasion, the millionaires and billionaires will say (and are saying) “The hell with this shit” and leave for more hospitable climes — and their companies will go along with them.

I have another post bubbling under about the death of the traditional office-work model, but that can wait for another time.

What’s really interesting, from a socio-political perspective, is how quickly this has happened.  It might have happened at some point or another anyway, as the Blue Model metropolises collapsed under the weight of their underfunded pension plans and failing social services and infrastructure — but the Chinkvirus has been the Catalyst Supreme for our little domestic Lenins and Maos.  What’s even more interesting is that, being economic illiterates, our socialist pols have looked to Europe, their favorite model, and said, “But France isn’t collapsing!”

Oh yes, it is.  The difference is that rich Frogs can’t exactly load up U-Hauls and move to — where?  Germany?  Belgium?  Britain?  It’s the same situation in those countries.  There are no prosperous and successful business-friendly, low tax states in Europe like Texas, Florida or Utah — they’re all soft socialist states;  and the Chinkvirus is having the same effect on their economies and traditional business models as it is in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

So even in the best of times (booming Trump economy, no virus, no BLM / Pantifa riots), Illinois, California and New York — to name but three — would be sucking wind soon enough, and the writing has been on their walls for some time.  But in the current environment?  They’re screwed.

My only concern, as I’ve often said before, is that these fleeing rats don’t come to our happy little ships and infest them with their shitty ideas and political morality.

Quote Of The Day

Mocking Furriners

From the always-readable James Delingpole comes this outstanding zinger:

“Just when did Britain become so incredibly, embarrassingly shit?”

His take on the British people is curt and cutting (“an embarrassing mess: a nation of snitches and cry-bullies, tinpot fascists and mask-compliant bedwetters”), but that’s not his only target.

While Delingpole also hauls off at Boris Johnson (“a priapic lard-butted lightweight chancer who should never have been given the keys to Number 10”), he saves most of his ire for the Oily Little Shit Tony Blair (“closet Trotskyite”) and the mainstream media / government bureaucracy (“over-influential demagogues like the revolting Piers Morgan, not to mention the whole of the BBC, Channel 4, Sky News, and virtually every newspaper, the civil service, everyone in the judiciary…”).

It’s not often I read a rant which I wish I’d written;  but this is one for the ages.  Read it all, and chuckle.  (Or weep, if you’re British.)

And by the way:  if you see a large number of parallels to the United States… well, that was the whole point of this post.

Warm-Up

Advice, Africa

Every so often I get it right.  A few years ago, Mr. Free Market decided that he wanted to go hunting in Africa — South Africa, as it happened — and asked me for any tips I might have which would make his trip more successful.

There’s not a whole lot I can tell Mr. FM about hunting — he’s an excellent shot, has hunted all over Europe and despite all his skill, he’s always willing to learn more, whether from his guides or from other hunters.  Needless to say, he’s a very successful hunter, as I’ve occasionally noted on these pages.

I thought about it for a while, and really had only two pieces of advice:

Use enough gun.  African game is unbelievably tough, and what would be a killing shot on a North American whitetail with a .30-06 will not anchor a similarly-sized antelope (e.g. blesbuck) on the African continent.  Even a tiny warthog, when whacked with a light cartridge like the .30-06, will run for over a quarter-mile before dying.  The very fact that a .30-06 is characterized as a “light” cartridge should be a warning.  I used to hunt with either .308 Win or 7mm Mauser, but if I was going to shoot anything large or dangerous, I used borrowed rifles in either .375 H&H or (only once, because owie) .458 Win Mag.
But Mr. FM had that covered, using a .375 H&H Magnum chambering which could handle pretty much anything short of elephant or rhino.

The next piece of advice had nothing to do with hunting.

Get a suntan before going over.  Nothing quite prepares you for the African sun, especially if you’re hunting at higher altitudes than a few hundred feet above sea level.  You would think that as you go higher, the weather becomes cooler;  no, it just gets less humid.  (Think:  Arizona high desert vs. South Texas Hill Country, only with Arizona about ten degrees hotter.)
And Mr. FM is a Brit, with the typical fair skin — not, thank gawd, the fish-belly white of the Irish — that has led to all Brits being known colloquially as “Rooineks” (red necks, from the sunburn) by the locals.

So he did, visiting a tanning salon every other day for a couple-three weeks before setting out.  And on his return, Mr. FM said that of all the advice he’d been given, that was the best.  And even after arriving in South Africa with what he thought was a deep tan, he went still several shades darker after a week in the bush.  Had he not had the tanning sessions, he admitted that he’d have been confined to the indoors after the first day’s hunting.  And that’s no way to go through a hunting trip, son.

So why am I talking about this?  Because I was reminded of the topic by this picture, seen in The Sun [sic] newspaper:

In Africa, the girl on the right would burn slightly after a couple hours outdoors;  but the pale one on the left would blister after maybe fifteen minutes.  Yes, it’s that bad.

Americans Second

Bad News, Business, Gummint, Two-Minute Hate

Looks like the fix is in again:

U.S. employers keep roughly 600,000 foreign H-1B visa workers in jobs throughout the United States, according to an unprecedented report released by the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency.
The total number of resident H-1B workers has successfully been kept secret for decades, mainly because Fortune 500 companies do not want voters to recognize the massive outsourcing of jobs for themselves and their college graduate children.

Based on personal observation, I think that about a quarter of the above number live within a square mile of my apartment, but that’s a topic for another time.

Whenever people show faith in the powers of “the market”, I want to kick them in the balls.  Here’s why.

In the normal course of events, “the market” can and should address the problem of shortages by creating a price increase — in this case, if there are apparently not enough Americans to fill the skilled positions needed in Corporate America, the pressure is put on salaries so that existing skilled workers can change industries to take advantage of the higher wages, or (in the longer term) prospective employees can adjust their training from, say, a university-centric Women’s Studies major into an IT profession.

But that would Cost The Companies Money;  and gawd forbid that costs rise, affect the balance sheet and, most importantly of all, jeopardize executive management bonuses.  So said companies lobby the government saying, “Oh we need  skilled workers, and these lazy idle Murkins don’t wanna do the jobs so please pretty please O Benificent Government, can we import furriners to save us from going out of business?”

Whereupon Congress, whose members are all either stupid, unpatriotic or else beholden to Corporate America for campaign contributions (I know:  massive overlap) will turn around and say, “Sure thing.  Get these H-1Bs from anywhere you like — say, India or China — and just add a zero to your next contribution, will you?”

The fact that these foreign workers stay a while then go back to their home countries taking their expertise with them, is, of course, irrelevant.  (I should point out that I myself was one of the above H-1B workers back in the 1980s, except that I had skills which my sponsoring company did not possess at all, AND I was coming over as a senior executive to implement a brand new business model which I had created back in the Old Country and made successful.  Also, I stayed and became a U.S. citizen, and the rest you know.)

So “the market” works fine, mostly — except where the sticky and incompetent fingers of Gummint get placed firmly on the scale of surplus : scarcity, and the results are what we see now.

There’s another part of the article which engendered a scowl from me:

The USCIS report admits that “no unique identifier exists for all H-1B petitions in the USCIS electronic [system of record, so] we use a methodology of statistical inference.”

For those not familiar with bureaucrat-speak, “statistical inference” means “we took a wild-ass guess”.  Or, to be more polite:

For years, [DHS] has deliberately not stored [visa worker] information into their databases. They only enter selected information into the computers. That was deliberate so that no one could know what is going on. We have sent in all kinds of [Freedom of Information Act] requests, and often the response is “we don’t keep track of that.”

And to make matters still worse:

“Close to a quarter of the records — dealing with workers who often make $100,000 a year or more — there is no Social Security number.”

In other words, we let them in, and allow a situation where people don’t necessarily have to pay taxes.  How charming.  But it gets worse (and I’ve added emphasis):

The failure to track legitimate H-1B documents and workers — or to punish groups for using fake H-1B documents — is routine. For many years, business advocates have kept legislators in the dark by splitting and subdividing oversight of the visa-worker economy between the Departments of State, Homeland Security, and Labor, he said.
This fragmentation has helped to minimize awareness of the scale among journalists and the public. For example, very few reporters describe the scale of the H-1B population to their readers, and most rely on talking points from business advocates who say the program brings in 65,000 or 85,000 “high skilled” workers each year when companies cannot find U.S. workers.
In reality, up to 85,000 H-1B visas are given out to companies each year, while roughly 15,000 are provided to non-profit groups, including hospitals, research centers, government agencies, and hospitals.

Now let’s add a little “China is asshole” to the mix:

The new USCIS report does not estimate the number of fake H-1B documents in circulation despite myriad cases of fraudulent work permits and made-in-China green cards.

And in India, procurement of green cards is an entire industry, catering to U.S. corporations — I’ve seen it in action at first hand.

Several years back, I posited the situation where if one won a large foreign lottery (e.g. Euromillions), whether it would be better to bring the earnings back to the U.S. and pay the 40% tax, or just to vanish into a European tax haven like Monaco with the (untaxed) millions.  My conclusion was that I wouldn’t do that, because I am of course a loyal American citizen.  As I read stuff like the above, however, I’m starting to think that “loyal American citizen” is rapidly approaching the status of “sucker”.

Change my mind.