One of the many pitfalls of our current climate in America is the severe breakdown in identifying causal links between policies and outcomes.  All too predictable in a country where science and logic are being trumped by emotions such as fear.

Let’s take an example from the 2018 frame.  Forget the raging immorality of separating 3,000 young children from their parents at the US border and throwing them in cages using my hard-earned taxpayer dollars.  Is it at least an effective policy?

The answer is of course, no.  It ain’t working.  We spend billions to protect our borders, billions to prevent illegal drugs from pouring in, and billions more to protect our cybersecurity.  But America is a total and absolute failure at all of these aspects of protecting Americans, which is the federal government’s #1 job.  American efforts in these areas are a complete joke and everyone around the world knows it.  Locking up kids in cages doesn’t work, either.

Emotions are quite simply the reason why we are in the current state we are in. Americans are overall pretty uneducated, misinformed, and ruled by our lizard brains.   We elect leaders who are disproportionately crooks that prey upon our emotions.  The solution itself is easy: pursue policies that make logical and scientific sense.

I can end illegal immigration in 1 month.  Requiring nothing more than manipulating the simple laws of supply and demand.  Pass a law that any corporation, restaurant, bar, farm, cab company, family, or individual who employs illegal immigrants will immediately be thrown in jail for 10 years.  Go out and arrest them en masse.  Such employers are explicitly breaking the law by hiring workers under the table.  Yet nobody ever goes after these criminals simply because they come out of the political donor class that fuels both parties.

But, uh, justice is supposed to be blind right?  F*** the political donor class.  After this swift administration of justice, let’s see if illegal immigration drops dramatically or not.  Yes, the president and his family and his cronies would be even more knee-deep in trouble with the law than they already are, because among other projects Trump Tower itself was built by many- you guessed it – illegal immigrants.

Of course the policy will work.  The supply and demand curves don’t lie.  Illegal immigrants would be unable to find work in America again, and they’d stop coming here soon enough.  But good luck keeping the child care, the factories, the farms, the armed services, the restaurants, the cabs, and the food supply running.  Those are different problems for different days.

Mahanth S. Joishy is Editor of usindiamonitor