¡Viva la Status Quo!

As with so many policies produced by left-right Washington, the compromise immigration bill that the Senate effectively scuttled today was a lose-lose proposition from the beginning. It contained a one-time benefit for a chunk of our current illegals, but it didn't address the ongoing issues that compel Mexican laborers to stream over the border in the first place. It also contained billions of dollars worth of the same dubious enforcement measures that are currently failing, not the least of which was hundreds of miles of mostly symbolic fencing and a truly disturbing national employee verification system that would have increased the cost of every job in America and made the Federal government the final arbiter of every employment decision made in this country.

Although entrepreneurship is at an all-time high in the US, most of us still work for someone else, and so when the government comes along with a new scheme that demands businesses hand over yet another right to the government, too many Americans think little of it. And then a few years later, when the depressing effects of the new regulations come home to roost, the same Americans get angry and demand yet another government scheme to address it. It's pretty obvious that freedom loses in every revolution of this cycle, and when freedom loses, we all eventually lose.

It would be great if conservatives would realize that the market doesn't care one bit whether the expensive regulation imposed upon it is intended to protect us from Mexican labor or to protect some sub-sub-species of nematode, and thus there is no practical or moral difference between the two, but I just don't see this happening, with immigration nor anything else. Unfortunately for America, as this immigration bill demonstrated, when both of their policies are wrong-headed, any compromise between the two sides of the aisle simply compounds their error instead of counterbalancing each other, and thus the best we can hope for under the current state of affairs is that they both fail. In other words, under the Democrats and Republicans, progress = the status quo. Not very inspiring for the future, is it?