In post-liberal America, the economy must be served with stagnant wages for the majority workers, and a large exploitable class of foreign workers. Rather than being ashamed of it, the social and intellectual elite extol this new economic order as a virtue. We seem to be reaching the point where we must decide whether the United States is a nation, comprised of citizens, or an economy made up of workers and consumers. The two are not the same. A nation is a cooperative venture in which all parties can be called upon to make sacrifices for the common good, and can expect, in return, certain iron-clad guarantees in their personal pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
Economies are purely relationships of convenience.
So long as there is mutual benefit the relationship works, but both the institutions and the workers can be freely abandoned when the winds shift. A nation that deliberately imposes policies designed to ensure that the majority or its citizens do not share in its economic prosperity, or which imports large numbers of people for the expressed purpose of exploiting their labor, has no right to expect loyalty and sacrifice when those virtues are called for. When the people serve the economy, rather than the other way around, the social contract of liberal Western democracies becomes null and void. Ira H. Mehlman is media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, in Los Angeles. All rights reserved.