The Wealth of Nation, <\/em>the basis of modern economic thought. In his treatise, Smith describes \u201cthe invisible hand,\u201d the equilibrium between supply and demand that establishes costs in a market.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSupply and demand concepts didn\u2019t begin with Smith, but his description of those forces clarified it. And while there have been many other theories and philosophies of economics since Smith, his fundamental description of market forces remains true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the United States today, we look at the nations to our South as \u201ca danger.\u201d Some want to militarize our borders, others want to \u201cWall\u201d ourselves off from the world. Many Americans feel threatened by all manners of evil from the border: drugs, criminals, sex slaves, terrorists; all have been described as crossing into the United States unfettered by the border guards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It makes some simple sense: put up a wall, and keep what we don\u2019t want on the outside of it. Many make the analogy of locking your house at night, preventing break-ins. And yet that doesn\u2019t seem to work, there are break-ins all the time. The next step, get a security system, alarms that will call police. But, while that has some deterrent effect, in the end houses with alarms get broken into as well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So some Americans then arm themselves with weapons, threatening to shoot any intruder. The problem: they spend the nights on guard, in fear of attack. And sometimes they do shoot the intruders, only to find their child was sneaking back into the house. So while weapons might stop intrusion, it raises the risk of accident, and makes a questionable moral statement: I can take your life for trying to take my property.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before we spend billions of dollars to build a wall, we should ask ourselves two questions: why are people coming across our border, and are they of value to us? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Honest migrants want to come to America for safety and protection. They are the reason for the UN Treaty on Migration: folks in fear of their lives, asking for asylum and protection in a larger, safer nation. We should all agree that this is clearly the moral thing to do, to offer that protection and safety to those who cannot protect themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Honest migrants come to America for jobs and a better way of life. And America needs those migrants to work; they do jobs that most American citizens don\u2019t want. Whether it\u2019s chicken factories in Arkansas, or truck farming in California, or housekeeping at the Trump National Golf Course in New Jersey; Americans need migrant workers. We, the United States, have created a demand for their supply. The \u201cinvisible hand\u201d of economics is filling that demand, regardless of border guards or concertina wire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If we want fewer migrants, legal or illegal, then we need to change THEIR supply.\u00a0\u00a0We could do that be altering their lives at home, by changing the socio-economic forces in their own countries.\u00a0\u00a0We are already seeing in Mexico, as conditions improve and fewer Mexicans leave for the US.\u00a0\u00a0Spending money to make Central America a better place to live, rather than on a wall, would be a better long term investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sadly, the United States has an almost insatiable demand for drugs. In 2010, the Rand Corporation estimated that Americans spent $100 billion on four drugs: heroin, meth-amphetamine, marijuana and cocaine. With the increased use of heroin and the advent of Fentanyl we can only assume that that cost has gone up, probably by several orders of magnitude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With that kind of demand, and the subsequent profit available, it\u2019s hard to imagine a simple wall would stop anything.\u00a0\u00a0Drugs come through customs, they come by air, they come through tunnels, they come by boat, the come in the digestive tracts of human drug-mules.\u00a0\u00a0Since Richard Nixon declared \u201ca war on drugs\u201d in 1971, the United States has done everything it can to interdict drugs, and punish drug sellers and users.\u00a0\u00a0We have locked the doors, put an alarm system in, and guarded the border.\u00a0\u00a0The problem has continued to grow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have even tried to destroy the supply, using chemical agents on South American coca crops. We have had little impact on drug supplies, but what we have done is encouraged a wide range of \u201ccreative\u201d ways to get drugs in. And when we do manage stop some, we find \u201chome brew\u201d drugs being manufactured: go almost anywhere in rural Ohio and ask about crystal-meth. The bottom line: a wall won\u2019t stop drugs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So how can we use \u201cthe invisible hand\u201d to change our border?\u00a0\u00a0First, we can recognize that the United States NEEDS a significant amount of the labor provided by migrants.\u00a0\u00a0We can alter our policies to allow for legal immigration for them, and then we can assure that employers both pay a living wage, and are punished for using illegal immigrants. \u00a0We can then try to change the environment in those countries in Central America where people live in poverty and fear. \u00a0By improving their lives there, we keep them from coming here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And while we can\u2019t stop policing drugs at the border, we should start looking at the reasons for drug use.\u00a0Drug-use prevention, rehabilitation and de-criminalization may (there are no guarantees) impact on reducing demand, thus reducing the pressure to supply.\u00a0\u00a0This is not a panacea;\u00a0\u00a0but our current strategy hasn\u2019t worked for almost fifty years, and \u201cdoubling down\u201d with walls, concertina barbed wire and guns at the border is expensive, and will have \u00a0little impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To solve our problems at the border, we need to look at ourselves, not those outside. The \u201cinvisible hand\u201d tells the tale: it is our demand, not their supply, that creates the problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Invisible Hand 1776 was a momentous year. Thirteen British colonies in North America banded together and determined to break away from King George III, joining in a Declaration of Independence. As Franklin supposedly said at the time, \u201c\u2026we must all hang together or most assuredly we will all hang separately.\u201d But Jefferson\u2019s Declaration wasn\u2019t the only … Continue reading “The Invisible Hand”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Invisible Hand : Our America - Essays on Politics and American Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/dahlman.online\/index.php\/2018\/12\/13\/the-invisible-hand\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Invisible Hand : Our America - Essays on Politics and American Life\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Invisible Hand 1776 was a momentous year. 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