Introduction
Well, on Christmas Eve I was accused of joining the ranks of Ebenezer Scrooge, along with Elon Musk. This wasn’t exactly on my wish list or on my bingo card for that matter, but St. Nicholas brings us gifts in all shapes and sizes. My friend Andrew Isker replied to a tweet of mine about the “fixed pie” fallacy, and he suggested that my thinking would crush the Bob Cratchits and Tiny Tims of America through the greed of corporate American. Then what followed was a goodish chorus of yowls and shrieks accusing me of “prosperity gospel,” of being Joel Osteen, and “blasphemy.” What had I said? I had written, “In God’s world, the “pie” of resources, job creation, and opportunity keeps expanding. This is part of the meaning of Christmas. If God can become man and save us from our sins, no eye has seen what God has prepared for those who love Him. Loaves and fishes, y’all.”
Now, I’m happy to grant that it’s certainly not my most poetic post ever, and I’ll also admit that it even verges on the sentimental. But there it was Christmas Eve, with the lights on the tree sparkling and I was all dressed up for our Christmas Eve service. And well, perhaps the general bonhomie of the moment had gone to my head, but in my defense, there is something absolutely sentimental about the Christmas story. Peace on earth, goodwill toward men? I mean, the angel just starts announcing that to poor shepherds out in the fields. And I mean, poor shepherds; you know, shepherds oppressed by Roman and Jewish tyrannies, shepherds who had probably been kicked to the curb by society, shepherds passed over by first century DEI policies. They were probably even white. How can you say “peace on earth, goodwill toward men?” How can you sing such a thing every Christmas while kids are dying of cancer and London is being overrun by radical Muslims? But the reply comes that I was saying that bit of “Christmas goo” in direct connection to an Elon Musk tweet that was related to immigration policy. In effect my tweet was read as the equivalent of those cringey TGC He Gets Us commercials about Jesus being a lonely skateboarder whose only car was his mom’s minivan and it didn’t even have the heated seats.
Look, I’m not saying I was doing something particularly clever, but I don’t think I was doing something so dumb or foolish (or blasphemous) as I have been accused of. So what was I doing? Two things very simply: cheering on something good Elon said and getting the anti-capitalists to shriek. But in order to explain, we need to back up and get a running start.
H-1B Visas
So this particular skirmish erupted over Trump’s appointment of a gent named Sriram Krishnan as Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who will be working closely, we have been told, with another gent named David Sacks, incoming “Whitehouse A.I. & Crypto Czar.” Laura Loomer kicked off some of the dustup referring to Krishnan as a “career leftist,” opposed to Trump’s America First agenda, accusing him of wanting to remove all restrictions on immigrant students who “can come to the US and take jobs that should be given to American STEM students.” And she shared a screenshot of Krishnan saying he wants to remove “country caps for green cards / unlock skilled immigration” saying that would be “huge.”
David Sacks chimed in with a point of clarification, saying that Krishnan was only talking about “country caps” limiting certain countries, but insisted that Krishnan wants an entirely merit-based program, where “a limited number of highly skilled immigrants” may be hired by American companies. And Sacks protested, “Sriram is definitely not a ‘career leftist’!”
This is all related to what is called an H-1B visa, allowing US employers to hire foreign workers with specialty education and skills, the largest category of visas granted in the United States for guest workers. And this is all particularly intense right now following the German terrorist attack by a 50 year old Saudia Arabian psychiatrist at a Christmas market last week in Magdeburg. High skill workers, in other words, may not have American values or interests in mind. No matter that the Saudi Arabian psychiatrist was apparently fairly anti-Muslim, but he was a psychiatrist, and that probably should have been our first clue, so there’s that.
But a fair bit of ink (or digits) has been spent decrying “high skill” immigrants over the last week or so because at the very least, in the current climate of multicultural globalist fascism, there is less and less stomach for the risks. As was pointed out to me recently, ousted Syrian dictator Assad was an Ophthalmologist in London for a few years before being recalled to Syria to bury many of his people in mass graves. In other words, there are at least two major red flags on the H-1B visa discussion for many: First, how many jobs are being taken from skilled Americans? And second, how many Americans will have to die from similar terrorist attacks? It has also been pointed out that the H-1B visa program has become something of a burgeoning industry of indentured servitude, where less than skilled immigrants are brought into various sectors, given minimal training, with the explicit or implicit threat of deportation should things not work out. So the question of perverse incentives looms large as well.
Following the X thread a little further, entrepreneur and investor Joe Lonsdale founder of Palantir Tech and others, chimed in saying, “My friend Sriram is America First. For USA to have the highest standard of living, generous govt services and strongest military, we need to recruit the best and brightest and build the best companies. I’m against more low-end H1B immigrants; but let’s win at the talent game.” Which Elon Musk shared and added, “The “fixed pie” fallacy is at the heart of much wrong-headed economic thinking. There is essentially infinite potential for job and company creation. Think of all the things that didn’t exist 20 or 30 years ago!” And enter yours truly. I was cheering on that tweet when I was called Ebenezer Scrooge. Following so far?
Miss American Pie
There’s a whole bunch of stuff tangled into this discussion, tectonic plates under tectonic plates so to speak, and not many are pointing them out. Vivek Ramaswamy came out swinging the day after Christmas arguing the hard truth that American companies often prefer foreign workers because they frequently have a better culture of creativity and hard work. Vivek wrote: “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.” Vivek even accused a bunch of us of growing up watching “Saved By the Bell,” which may have been a bit below the belt. Auron MacIntyre replied, “Turns out the ‘waste’ that DOGE wanted to cut from America was Americans.”
First off, let us put in a good word for the based bros. The Republican establishment has scammed Americans so many times with empty promises and smooth words that one can hardly blame them for being jumpy, angsty, and bit, shall we say, uncorked. The Republican establishment has lost all credibility. They lost it like Jack Nicholson lost his mind in that one Stanley Kubrick flick. So we have some sympathy with the crusaders and anons and based bros. We do not condone all of their rhetoric. We are not especially approving of their red eyed avatars and whatnot. But when you kick people in the head for several decades, one does imagine that the head is beginning to ache.
But there is no situation so bad that it is not possible to make it worse. Like I said, I have sympathy for the “end all immigration period” position. I would not be sad if our leaders decided on it for the time being. When the frat house is descending into Animal House chaos, it’s probably a good idea to generally end the influx. But this is not about “white people” saving their race; remember, it was a bunch of white people that did this to us. No, this is about a particular historical incarnation of Christendom in this place.
At the same time, Vivek and Elon and Krishnan have a point. If all you do is stop the influx, you’re left with our current cultural malaise. Now there are certainly some wisdom calls to be made about how to address that malaise. Some of the malaise is coming from that head-kicking via mass immigration. So ease up on the head-kicking and lighting people on fire on the metros and maybe some Americans get better grades in school. Others are pointing out that the plan really must be a more wholistic one of rebuilding American culture over decades. And sign me up for that. But if a non-woke businessman like Elon says he still needs access to some very high skill workers, why would we want to slow him down? He bought X, the very platform allowing us to have this banter. To demand that Elon slow down seems like cutting off the branch we’re sitting on.
At the same time, we are the people who let this head kicking happen. We have been popping pills, funding an exploding porn industry, chopping up our babies and selling their parts for money, and letting these corrupt, Madhatter politicians pay us off with welfare checks and food stamps. Which is to say that if weaponized immigrant globalism has become a cancer, we have been smoking crack and snorting arsenic like in that one Quentin Tarantino movie.
In other words, Miss American Pie has gotten obese and tumorous, which is not at all what we mean by the “pie” expanding and infinite resources.
Conclusion: Loaves & Fishes
Despite people accusing me of a prosperity gospel, the story of the loaves and fishes is not about easy-believism, name it and claim it, like some kind of Kenneth Copeland television special. In fact, one of the crucial elements of the miraculous feedings in the gospels is Jesus’ command to the disciples: “You feed them.” The situation was one in which Jesus commanded His disciples to get to work. Yes, in the midst of their work, Jesus did something miraculous that we cannot build business models off of, but the principle stands: in the midst of our faithful, obedient labors, God blesses and provides. He gives us our daily bread. And if Jesus were here, he’d say, stop pointing fingers at the Commies and the Jews, get to work.
When the “American Pie” (and by this we mean American prosperity and opportunity) is run by the federal government, that really is a Joel Osteen prosperity gospel pyramid scam. “Just send your checks to the IRS, and we will multiply your sack lunches into a communist utopia.” And those who see all the solutions coming from federal regulations, that’s just another version of that statist prosperity gospel. But the way God made the world is such that whenever a man takes responsibility for his own needs and the needs of his own household, he generally produces more than he consumes. And when there is a widespread culture of that, the American Pie increases. And therefore, within the limits of the Ten Commandments, we should want to maximize the freedom of local men to make local decisions about how to provide for their people, including their businesses.
Historically, this has been why the “county” was the most basic unit of government in America. One historian says that in the 17th century, when an Englishman referred to his “country,” it was likely that he was referring to his county. This is why historically land laws and property taxes and basic criminal law were all the jurisdiction of local counties. So if we want our country to preserve and recover a right love of places and people, as opposed to being bulldozed into a multinational economic zone, the power and responsibility for most meaningful decisions must be reasserted by local counties. If Washington DC is where everything important happens, our communities will continue to be treated like franchises. In order for a true Christian economy to flourish, one where family and community are at the center, you have to return the authority to local communities.
Lastly, it seems plain that big corporations have leveraged and abused H-1B visas for a kind of cheap indentured servitude. And while the loopholes and corruption allowing that should absolutely be stopped, we need to spend a lot more time and energy ending all the regulations, taxes, and codes heaped up on business owners. We should incentivize hiring American workers, but we should do that primarily by making it easier to train, hire, and retain American workers. Endless health codes, safety codes, insurance requirements, and mindless red tape and wage laws and taxes (not to mention, entitlement and laziness among some Americans) makes it harder to train, hire, and retain them. It’s understandable, good even, for conservatives to be jumpy about all of this, but it seems odd to accuse Elon of being Ebenezer Scrooge and anti-American.
So Merry Christmas and peace on earth, goodwill toward men.
Leave a Reply