The Migration Message

Migration is one of the great constants of human history. The very first humans, who emerged in Africa some 300,000 years ago, migrated north, south, east, and west. They found their way to Europe and Asia, crossed over into North America and then down to South America, and even took canoes to reach Australia. Even after the species had spread around the globe, people continued to migrate, and even today, when humans live everywhere humans can manage to live, migration persists.

What drives migration?

Easy - the search for something better. That's as persistent a human behavior as anything you can think of.

Even modern times see relentless migration. Sometimes it's driven by war or some natural event such as drought or flood or earthquake, but oftentimes it's simply "over there seems better than over here."

In the 20th century, the direction of "there to here" was overwhelmingly one of moving from less freedom to more freedom. Communist and socialist states penned their citizens in, often by killing those who dared try to get out, because that's the only way they could keep them from fleeing those systems.

America saw multiple waves of immigration across her short history. Dubbed "the land of opportunity," America offered a dream that older and more rigidly governed nations did not - a chance to make your own success. It worked, and those waves of immigration were fundamental to America's growth into the wealthiest and most powerful nation in human history. All that is a result of greater freedom.

The Biden-era wave of migrants, whether you want to call them "illegal" or "undocumented," tells the same tale, after a fashion. "It's better over there" remains the motivator. Unfortunately, that motivator has been corrupted by the "other people's money" cancer, the presumption that some of the migrants have (not all, mind you), that the government of this wealthy land will see to their needs.

Set that aside for now, because today's focus is not on the moral hazard of social safety nets. Instead, it's about those Best-and-Brightest who rail against capitalism (and by extension, freedom itself) in favor of managed economies (managed by themselves, of course).

Why is it that people flee from authoritarian and socialist states and to free states? Yes, that includes domestic migration from New York and California and other "blue" states to Florida and Texas and other "free" states.

Rhetorical question - and already answered.

Why, then, do our supposedly smartest people insist that capitalism is bad? That growth is bad? That idiocies such as "degrowth" catch on like wildfire among the intelligentsia and cognoscenti?

Again, rhetorical question. The desire to appear "smarter than thou" is a powerful force, and likely grounded in evolutionary wiring. When combined with the desire to control, the allure of power, and the biological impetus to stand above the unwashed masses, we get a toxic motivation to impose one's will on everyone else. This is why we find the totally discredited ideas of socialism and communism rampant in universities and similar "smart people" societal subsets.

Capitalism relies on the collective and unguided wisdom of large populations, whereas the various forms of statism rely on a relatively small number of supposedly "smartest" people telling everyone else what to do and how to live. We've seen the results, and they are irrefutable. The large and distributed intellect has proven superior to the small and concentrated one.

That is borne out by the greater success of free economies.

It is also validated by the ubiquitous desire to move from less freedom to more freedom. We saw none but a few misguided idiots looking to move to Iron Curtain nations during the Cold War. We saw few seek to migrate to the more calcified nations in Europe, barring those who already made their wealth in freedom. We don't see many, barring brainwashed religious fanatics, looking to go live in dictatorial and autocratic regimes in the Middle East.

Everywhere and every when, migration flows from less freedom to more. The leaders of the lands that have that freedom ignore that message when they look to curtail that freedom, and they ignore how less freedom translates to less wealth, less prosperity, and greater misery.

Yet they persist.

Why?

Because they rarely, if ever, suffer personally from the curtailment of others' liberty. Socialism is great for the people at the top. It gives them more access to Other People's Money and it shields them from having to succeed on their own merits.

The only way they can persist, however, is if the rest of us fall for their deceits as to the evils of capitalism and the benefits of collectivism. All the evidence is to the contrary, and the migrants banging on our borders remind us of that every day.