The Great American Crisis: Mr. Ramesh Got a Job

Thomas Jefferson put the principle rather simply:

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

And again:

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

One suspects Mr. Jefferson might therefore have difficulty understanding the latest “national emergency.”

An Indian engineer voluntarily accepts employment from an American company. The company voluntarily hires him. Customers voluntarily buy the resulting product.

Quick! Something terrible has happened!

But what exactly? Where is the victim? If this is a crime, who has been injured?

• The employer?
• The employee?
• The customer?

Or is the real crime that two adults entered into a voluntary contract without first obtaining permission from a man on YouTube explaining the proper composition of the American nation?

Shifting the Geopolitical Machinery

If America wishes to reduce the importation of foreign conflicts, it might begin by stopping the manufacture of them.

• End Sovereign Bailouts: Perhaps do not prop up dictators until they bankrupt their countries.
• Abolish Centralized Safety Nets: Perhaps do not use institutions such as the IMF to socialize the consequences of political disasters.
• Prioritize Voluntary Association: Perhaps allow private individuals, firms, charities, and voluntary organizations to decide whether, and how, anyone should be assisted.

Better still: Private financiers will be intelligent enough to impose free gun laws, so that any clique which has captured power does not last. That is the only way they can recover their money. Then, one may find rather fewer refugees arriving at the border.

Shut down the machinery that helps create the flood before complaining that water is wet.

The Dynamic of Global Talent

To remove the emotional fog from the discussion, forget India and the United States for a moment. Consider any country.

A society that is open to peaceful, productive, and capable people has an opportunity to attract precisely those individuals who can create businesses, inventions, investment, and jobs. The alternative is not some magical ethnic equilibrium maintained by a “Department of National Identity.”

Either a country attracts the best people the world has to offer, or it can still attract the worst. The border bureaucracy does not possess a mystical device that separates saints from sinners merely by looking at a passport.

Frankly, it is highly unlikely that Mr. Ramesh, who came to write software, pay rent, and perhaps argue about cricket, is secretly planning to recreate the geopolitical conflicts of the subcontinent in a cul-de-sac in Texas.

Multiple Loyalties vs. The Approved Narrative

The narrator complains about foreign loyalties while apparently imagining the nation as one gigantic political family in which everyone must possess one officially approved loyalty.

But human beings do not work that way. A man may love:

• His family
• His religion
• His village
• His profession
• His adopted country
• And, if his intellectual condition is sufficiently advanced, cricket

This does not make him a foreign agent. Nor does attending a meeting. Nor speaking a language. Nor possessing grandparents from somewhere else. Nor listening to Mohan Bhagwat at Madison Square Garden.

Have we forgotten freedom of expression?

The Core Question

The real question is remarkably simple: Has the person violated the rights of others?

• Has he picked anyone’s pocket?
• Has he broken anyone’s leg?
• Has he committed fraud, theft, violence, or aggression?

If not, why should his ethnicity, religion, cultural association, or attendance at a meeting concern the federal government?

Of course, Americans are equally entitled to decide with whom they wish to associate. Nobody has a right to force himself into another person’s home, club, business, or private organization. But that principle cuts both ways:

• If individual Americans do not wish to associate with Indians, that is their affair.
• If individual Indians wish to associate with Indians, that too is their affair.
• If a private company wishes to hire Mr. Ramesh, that is its affair.

What does not follow is that a centralized political authority must decide which ethnic groups may work, gather, speak, organize, or possess the “correct” quantity of cultural memory. That is not the defense of national identity; it is merely replacing civil society with a federal human-resources department.

Conclusion

And so we arrive at the great American emergency: People voluntarily associating with other people.

• Mr. Ramesh got a job.
• Some Indians attended a meeting.
• Someone expressed an opinion without first submitting it to the Ministry of Approved Loyalties.

The horror.

Quick! Call the state!