No matter how rigorously rational the reasons, how artfully articulated the arguments, how many millions of taxbucks the governcrats will burn through to build the Great Speed Bump of Mexico, it will never produce the results its cheerleaders insist on pretending it will.
Walling off the U.S.-Mexico border is ballyhooed as a magic bullet. It will stop illegal immigrants, stop drug-running Third World narco-gangsters, stop those fiendishly clever Middle Eastern Al-Qaeda interlopers from donning Juan and Julio costumes and smuggling radioactive dirty bombs into the Arizona desert.
Whether the wall should be built at all generates hot dispute, even amongst liberty-loving libertarians.
The Smaller, Constitutional, Vest-Pocket-Sized Government wing of the freedom movement wants the wall to protect the integrity of the American nation-state. The Radical-Anarcho school of thought declares that all nation-states are illegitimate because they violate people's rights by drawing imaginary lines on maps for the purpose of restricting people's freedom of movement.
But no matter what anyone believes - liberal, conservative, whatever - the wall will be built. There's just too much loot to be lapped up by the lapdogs of the Political-Industrial Complex not to build it. Bottomless taxpayer pockets need to be plundered and politically connected wallets need to be fattened.
The Great Mexican Speed Bump means business as usual.
As a fun but likely fruitless exercise, Great Wall supporters might want to consider how other great walls in history worked out.
Here are a few:
• Berlin wall. A tourist attraction today, it once did a good job of keeping East Berliners in East Berlin. It worked because they had barbed wire and watchtowers. Are Americans prepared to machine-gun Maria and Manuela when they come skulking across the desertscape with bambinos bound to their bosoms so they can commit the crime of cutting cauliflower in California?
• Walls of Jericho. Toppled with a few choice blues notes from a horn-blower named Joshua.
• The Wall, Pink Floyd. Didn't keep anybody out. Everybody got high together.
• And The Great Wall (actually, walls) of China? Historians contend that the northern hordes breached the Great Wall pretty much whenever. Seems that many of the gatekeepers were not so much Chinese as Chinese-Mongols with familial ties on both sides of the big horizontal rock pile. They simply opened the gates for their Mongol brothers-in-law.
So, how do we prevent that from happening here? By hiring only red-blooded, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired, English-speaking Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestant Super-Patriots with I Heart USA tats glistening on their sweaty biceps?
Oops, this is Politically Correctland. Can't have that. Everybody gets to play gatekeeper, regardless of ethno-racial DNA, theological preferences, hair hue, contact-lens color, or tattoo message.
Admit it. No matter how many millions or billions of taxbucks get blown on the great landlocked Mexican Barrier Reef, people with cross-border friendships and family ties and social relationships and mutual business interests and political connections and contacts with identity-theft rings and document forgers will all find an entrance into Club USA.
And opportunities for bribery will be so lucrative that folks will be fighting for (and buying their way into) border-guard jobs on both sides of the boundary line. Corruption is already rampant within the U.S. and Mexican border patrols, and the walling off has barely begun.
It's what realists point out to their friends as "unintended consequences."
A wall will simply drive up the cost of a bribe.
But if all you really want is taxpayer plundering and political parsimony as usual, go ahead and command your congresscrat to build it.
The wall will slow down a few folks on crutches and walkers. That's why the wall should be called a speed bump.
Need more wall history? Try Googling "Hadrian's Wall," "Rommel's Atlantic wall," "Maginot line," or "Siegfried Line."
They all failed. So will the Great Speed Bump of Mexico.
Patriotic gnashing of teeth and frothing of mouth won't make it otherwise.
Garry Reed is a longtime advocate of the libertarian philosophy of non-coercion that espouses personal autonomy and individual responsibility, civil rights and economic liberty, maximum freedom and minimum government. His website is www.freecannon.com.
Response
(Editor's note: The Davenport Levee Improvement Commission was given the opportunity to respond to "Farmers' Market Group Decries Treatment," last week's submission by the Mississippi Valley Growers' Association. What follows is that response.)
Davenport Freight House Farmers Market. 421 West River Drive, Davenport (Freight House). Wednesdays and Saturdays, May through October, 8 a.m. to 1p.m. Opening Day: May 3, 2008. Web site: (http://www.localharvest.org).
Products: Farm-fresh fruits and vegetables, delicious baked goods, poultry and meat, cheeses, wine, eggs, honey, jams and jellies, dips and salsas, candy, fresh-cut and dried flowers, bedding plants, annuals and perennials, house plants, garden art, wearable art, homemade soaps and toiletries, coffee, and massage.
Contact: Steve Ahrens, Development Director, Davenport Levee Improvement Commission, (563) 888-2235.
