15A009 A Different Melting Pot by Jim Davies, 2/2/2015    

I love to reflect on the formation of "America." People crossed oceans, in search of freedom. First came two waves of Siberians, many thousands of years ago, to scatter throughout the North and South of the Continent and become 'Native Americans" after enduring almost unimaginable hardships in the cold of the world West of the Bering Straits. Then much later came the Brits, fleeing religious persecution at home, then other Europeans and Asians who likewise brought their skills to where they could use and sell them to the best advantage... because government was minimal.

Some came from deep poverty, almost penniless on arrival, and they too made good; for freedom fosters prosperity. But the country was formed mostly by men who had skills and a little money, and the drive to use them to best advantage. They endured hardships, but saved capital, reinvested it, and became better off than they could have done in the Old Country.

The same is true today, I believe, of Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants. It's said they come mainly to leech off US welfare, but I doubt the general truth of that. I think they want the same thing that lower-class Swedes and Poles and Germans and Irish and Italians and Japanese wanted: work and opportunity and a degree of freedom. Then after a generation they become a new people: American. I think the dream still works; and in the future, when government has been tossed into history's ash can, it will work better than ever. The real America, to which immigrants are still attracted, is not the missile-spitting, world-bullying, supervising nanny-monster that its politicians have crafted during the last century, but the one that plain people were building during the three centuries previous.

Will their assimilation into that capitalist culture be slowed, by the present interference of government - and even by its propensity to place Spanish alongside English? Possibly, but not I hope by much. First-generation immigrants from every country used to speak their mother tongue at home, but after a generation or two they spoke the language of business so as to make progress. It's still a pleasure to find some who know German or Swedish here, but only as a second language. English is the world's lingua franca, or Latin, today, and will remain so unless Mandarin Chinese becomes the future language of trade and culture.

With that as background, it came as a shock to see and hear a PBS spokeswoman revel in the announcement that by 2043 today's caucasian backbone of America will be a minority. Her program "America by the Numbers" didn't so much merely predict that demographic change but delight in it; almost as if Maria Hinojosa sees whites as the enemy, and can hardly wait to see us defeated by a rising tide of other races. Watch her in the program's trailer, see if you too find it jarring. Not only is it flagrantly racist, but she contrives to build in to her list of future victors components like "LGBT" and "Multicultural." Funny thing, but I never heard of those countries. She is mixing apples and oranges.

"In 2043, we will be a majority non-white nation" she asserts, as if to anticipate the triumphant conclusion of a long struggle against oppression! If by any chance she means by "multicultural" some equalization of the Western culture based on unfettered capitalism, and cultures that have mired themselves into a quagmire of bigotry, superstition and poverty, it's very much to be hoped that her prediction is dead wrong. The prosperity Americans produced is unprecedented in human history; it sprang from approximately free capitalism, and it has been produced elsewhere too wherever it has been applied; for example, the Pacific Rim. Success has nothing to do with race (and certainly not sexual orientation!) but everything to do with those values. Failure, likewise, has always accompanied their rejection.

I neither know, nor care much, what kind of ethnic mix will characterize the population of the Former USA in 2043; it doesn't matter. What does matter is that the society will consist of free individuals, making agreements with each other to mutual advantage, without any government whatever. The level of resulting prosperity will be almost unimaginably high; PBS, as a government-funded broadcaster, will no longer exist; and Maria Hinojosa will have found a productive job. Those who relocate here after E-Day will come altogether for the opportunity that freedom provides, and will prosper to the extent that they work. There will be no welfare, and hence no welfare-seekers. They may come in large numbers at first, but when labor rates equalize, as they surely will, I think the flow will slow - especially when the governments of the "exporting" countries also evaporate. Why, then, would anyone want to leave home?

So the change from a governed to a free society will be infinitely more important than any change to the racial composition of folk who live here, and that change is one which Ms Hinojosa is almost certainly unaware. Fine by me; the quiet revolution will be all the more effective for remaining quiet, nicely under the radar.