Squeezing the Balloon

Whenever I hang a picture on the wall by myself all that I require is a child-sized hammer, a nail and one squinting eye.  When my husband gets involved, however, we have to drag out levels, drills, pencils, measuring tapes, stud finders, calculators, anchors, screws and other assorted tools that I can’t even name.  When we’re finished, you could hang a Sumu wrestler on my wall and he ain’t goin’ nowhere.  Once I asked the man, “If all of this is necessary, how come the pictures I’ve hung up never fall down?” to which he replied, “Because you don’t understand the laws of physics; therefore they don’t apply to you.”

As cool as it is being exempt from the laws of physics, I’m afraid I must prove him wrong.  I understand, for instance, that if I squeeze on one end of a balloon, the other end will expand as the air is forced into it.  If I squeeze hard enough, the balloon will burst as the air must find a way to escape.  It’s a simple fact.

Human nature and society are a lot like the air in that balloon.  People react to circumstances in very predictable ways and, left to their own devices, they will find a way around the obstacles that are placed before them, even if that means bursting the balloon.  If, for instance, the gov’t tries to reign in the cost of Medicare by reducing payments to medical providers, those providers will restrict their availability to such patients and/or will pass the shortfall on to non-Medicare patients by charging them higher prices.  Artificial constraints on Medicare act like pressure on a balloon, resulting in higher fees and insurance rates for everyone and opening the door to a duplicitous form of wealth transfer.

When the housing market went bust, liberals got busy trying to figure out ways to “protect” people from the consequences of their bad choices or the bad choices made by others that led to the bust.  They went to work meddling with the ability of banks to foreclose and to do what they naturally would to protect themselves, and this led to consequences for people far removed from the original transactions.  The balloon burst and the losses that banks were forced to absorb were passed on like escaping air to investors and other consumers in the form of higher fees, tighter credit and economic contraction. 

We can look at example after example of the unintended or INTENDED consequences that occur when those on the Left start messing with the balloon, squeezing it, pumping more air into, trying to make it into something it was never intended to be, until the balloon bursts.  On the horizon we see Obamacare, the trillion-dollar student loan mess that’s looming, welfare and other major crises-in-the-making, but for now I want to talk about illegal immigration because it’s the one crisis that many Republicans seem most clueless about. 

Immigration laws exist for a reason, most people understand that, and to paraphrase an astute observation made by Dana Perino of “The Five” the other day, a country without borders isn’t really a country.  That’s a simple but powerful truth.  America’s immigration laws, albeit tainted over the years, were designed to protect this nation and to ensure its sovereignty, its economy and its culture and traditions.  At least that’s what an immigration plan ought to do, correct?  A plan that’s properly enforced results in a balloon of a certain manageable size, and if and when the pressure gets to be too much due to demand the natural and ideal outlet, assuming that the forces are in place to keep the balloon intact, is for continual re-evaluation of and potential adjustment to our immigration policies.  Do we need more short-term or long-term workers?  What kinds of skills do we need?  Is immigration growing our resources or putting a strain on them?  All of those questions could be considered and debated with the proper deliberation and study they deserve when the balloon is treated with care and the air within it controlled but of course it’s too late for that.  Predictable forces from inside this country, including the unbridled appetite for cheap labor, bountiful rewards in the form of American taxpayer-funded services arranged for by the Left (and abetted by some who claim to hail from the Right) and neglect of the border combined to create unchecked demand that far exceeded the capacity of the balloon.  Illegal immigrants, like the molecules of air that were contained inside, have escaped and spread like water from a bursting dam, and the engineers who might have taken the time to carefully re-design or reinforce that dam are running to and fro, scrambling to catch up with the water everywhere it chooses to go in a hopeless effort to prevent the floods and erosion that are sure to come.

I may be no physics genius but I know a balloon that’s being stomped on when I see one, and right now there are balloons popping left and right. 

Can you hear them?

˜CW