THE COMING COLLAPSE IN LAW AND ORDER And The Standard Left-wing Response To It

Jack Layton and his New Democrats, still steadfast in their congenital belief that a generous welfare state can be expanded in the face not only of an economic depression, but in the teeth of a Long Emergency of declining oil stocks, food and water shortages, climate change and biodiversity collapse, continue to argue for more child benefits, more daycare spaces, more money for our failing health care model, and even higher immigration levels. Everything can be funded if only “the rich and the corporations” are fairly taxed. Like that has never been tried before. Capital has wings. With the click of a mouse, investment money can fly from here to safer, more attractive tax havens. Move up the marginal tax rate a notch or two, and presto, the total tax revenue reaped from a more progressive tax regime actually falls.

This is the “Laffer” effect which the Swedish Social Democrats discovered 18 years ago. They realized that “less” was “more”. Lower taxes meant higher tax revenues, to a point. So where to get all revenue to pay for the endless socialist shopping list of services and benefits? Economic growth of course. That meant more immigration, especially from poorer nations that supply cheap labour, but cheap, unskilled labour, while remunerative for employers, is a proven fiscal strain on the state, which cannot tax them sufficiently for re-imbursement of their high claims on health and educational services. And so now, one out of nine Swedish residents is foreign born and not of demonstrable net economic benefit to taxpayers. But once established, the question then became, “How do we make these newcomers comfortable?” The answer was the same as governments elsewhere gave, governments like that of the Irish republic. Make “multiculturalism” state policy and renounce our own cultural heritage. So the Swedes disestablished the state “Lutheran Church” and introduced all the trappings of Canadian multiculturalism. The second-language training, the diversity “awareness” courses, the anti-hate laws etc etc. Ditto Norway, Germany, Holland and so on. A cultural make-over to make cheap labour feel at home in a foreign land. The discomfort of the native-born majority was just dismissed as bigoted nativism and parochialism. Socialists and big business joined hands to fight “racism” and provote “diversity”. The diversity of a formerly egalitarian nation now being segregated into richer elites and poorer service workers.

Aside from free speech and national culture, what will be the other major casualties of open immigration? The environment, the welfare state and law and order. As the vilified Milton Friedman said, the welfare state cannot co-exist with mass immigration. Only so many dollars can be spent on health and education, and to repeat, the fiscal burden of allowing hordes of poorly skilled migrants legal or illegal, from poorer countries, who cannot pay the higher taxes needed to defray their consumption of government services, will bankrupt the social safety net. One need only check out the hospital closures in America’s gateway states to corroborate that prediction. And educational costs for schooling ethnic minorities from Stockholm to Oslo to London to Vancouver to El Paso or Phoenix are degrading the quality of education to a noticeable degree. But what about law and order? The higher incarceration rates of poor migrants reflect the truth of the so-called “hysterical” alarm that the less reputable tabloid press sounds about ethnic crime. When governments everywhere must slash their budgets, law enforcement will suffer as well.

During the October federal election of 2008, Jack Layton wrung his hands with distress at yet more shootings in Toronto. He alluded to the many ‘friends’ he lost to gun violence. Yet never once did he mention who was committing this gun crime. He didn’t have the guts, for if he did, his reputation as a progressive would be instantly trashed. The preponderance of gun violence in metro Toronto was not being committed by whites. It was not being committed by African Canadians either. It was not even being committed by African Canadians from the West Indies. But, disproportionately, young male African Canadians from Jamaica, a phenomena that was documented by a five part series in Canada’s major newspaper, the Globe and Mail in 1992. It would be difficult to nail that point down with numbers because the federal government has banned the collection of ethnic crime statistics. Only ethnic statistics that can justify job discrimination against native born Canadians are collected. But the facts are evident to cops on the beat and to every objective observer with two eyes to see what has been happening for the last two decades. It is emphatically not a racial problem, but in large part an ethno-cultural one, and it issues not from ethnic minorities but minorities of those minorities. Hyphenated Canadians of any hue despise their own criminal element. What ever its source though, violent crime on city streets is a fact of life in Canada’s multicultural paradise. And you ain’t seen nothing yet.

So what is the socialist-liberal solution? Why even tighter gun laws of course. If the toughest gun laws in the world aren’t working, make them even tougher. Somehow, at some point, violent criminals will stop and make the same rational calculations that innocent law-abiding people make. That is, they will have an epiphany and say, “Gee, I better not carry a revolver because it is against the law and I might get caught and go to jail.’’ A look at all the semi-automatic and automatic weapons seized recently by Vancouver police from gangs would disabuse any normal person from such illusions. But not New Democrats, Greens or Liberals. They see the problem as “too many guns”, not “too many criminals” and especially not, “too much immigration too quickly from countries of unassimilable cultures where alienated youth find difficulty integrating into the Canadian mainstream.” Their answer is more gun control and more ‘diversity awareness’. Yet neither Jack Layton or those of his hopeless liberal ilk can document one case where a handgun leapt up from a glove compartment or a drawer by itself and into the right hand of an assailant, and then discharged bullets without a human finger being recruited as an assistant, directed by a human brain that made a conscious decision to fire at a human target. If guns cause gun violence, then matches cause arson. Will “match” control laws be in the next Layton-NDP election platform?

What gun control does is control the availability of guns to innocent, vulnerable people. Women, the elderly, and the weak are helpless to defend themselves presently. But if it is bad for them now, what will it be like when all of Canada will become like New Orleans was during the aftermath of Katrina? When there are no police in sight to protect us? How long would the LA riots have lasted if there were not police or national guard to quell it? Police and guardsmen who are paid for with oil economy tax funds? Even police states are unable to protect law-abiding citizens during emergencies of this scale and severity. If the Stalinist city of Leningrad in the early 1940s couldn’t stop looters and murderers, what could the miniscule numbers of cops and soldiers in Canada do in such circumstances? In the coming emergency we will not only have power-down, the collapse of medical care and education, the loss of our pension system, but the complete absence of public safety. Ask someone in Zimbabwe what it is like now, especially the white seniors cowering in their houses. It isn’t pretty.

One thing though, rampant crime in post-carbon Canada won’t be ethnic anymore. Collapse will bring out the nascent criminal element in all of us. Criminality is not a matter of genes. Canadian-born thugs of English Canadian descent will join the party and rule the streets, as some of them do right now. The money to pay the army of police officers needed to contend with them will not exist. We will have squandered all of it on Jack Layton’s welfare, immigration, multicultural and feminist agendas, and our shadow of an economy will never restore our former spending levels.

The following is an observation and comment, of what is now unfolding in the United States:

V.A. “ The Los Angeles pension system is one among many in trouble. Cities and counties around the country are strapped and cutting both pensions and current services. Police, fire, and libraries --- services that citizens highly value -- are often the first cut. This seems like a ploy to squeeze more money out of the few who have some left. Meanwhile funding continues for welfare, education and healthcare for illegal aliens. Politics being politics, one can expect those trends to continue. Which drives the need to look after oneself. Financial analyst D.N. recommends the following and adds a news article from the L.A. Times…..”

D.N. “This is an example of why I have been suggesting that those of you who have not done so, please make all haste to secure supplies of ammunition with which you can protect your family and property in the event that a worse-case scenario in your local municipality were to arise. Let’s assume that it does and that the city is forced to let go law enforcement officials, police or deputies or drastically curtail the size of those departments. What do you think the criminal element in that city would do? For that matter, what might otherwise law-abiding people who are hard pressed to secure food because of their inability to secure gainful employment might be tempted to do when faced with such a dire emergency?

Would you say that this is not possible? On what basis? Not only did California, the most populous state in the nation run out of money but one of the largest cosmopolitan areas of that state is facing severe financial strains. If cities cannot sell their municipal bonds and raise money because there are no buyers, where are they supposed to get the revenue they require to fund their day to day operations?

When all is said and done you are responsible for your own safety.

Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”

That sounds like good advice for Americans. But what counsel is available to Canadians, who have not only been disarmed by their government’s gun laws, but disarmed of their grasp of reality by decades of cultural and moral relativism and a pathological aversion to violent methods of countering violence? I know, lets quote the Delai Lama to murderers, thieves and rapists. Or make an emergency 911 call for a vegetarian Buddhist to be instantly dispatched from a health food store to come to your aid.

PS Tell me why this scenario will not unfold. Tell me that gun control laws will make me safer. One of the defining characteristics of civilization is that the state has a monopoly on violence. But what happens when the state becomes impotent in the face of illegal violence? What happens then is that we no longer have a civilization, but an every-man-for-himself free for all. Tim M.