The Severe Depletion of Social Capital

This essay by Takuan Seiyo is not new; it appeared in the New English Review last February. Even so, some choice quotes are worth repeating:

Even such work as is not exportable is increasingly performed by imported labor. Plasterers from Poland plaster Paisley, Filipino nurses nurse in Atlanta, and Indian IT coders code in Düsseldorf. All for the better, perhaps. But, also, tubercular Mexicans pluck chickens in South Carolina, and poisonous physicians from — in the immortal words of the Rt. Hon. Jacqui Smith — “all walks of life, communities and religions,” are busy blowing up Britain, and Nigerian nightclub barkers hassle passersby in Tokyo, and lavish welfare payouts to idle Kurd and Somali immigrants provide the frisson of S&M ecstasy that the coldness of Norway and Sweden otherwise denies to bien-pensant Scandinavians.

London is becoming a Capitalopolis — an extraterritorial hub of the global megadeal, where the world’s sharpest financial brains gorge on so much profit that the droppings from this horse, augmenting the oil stream from Scotland, are sufficient to feed the idle birds in the rest of the British Isles. Already, the collection and disbursement of said oats afterproduct feeds the largest government bureaucracy the Anglosphere has ever known, at least on a per-capita basis.

What remains to the natives is panem et circenses. Great Britain, along with most EU member countries, is coasting toward the 50:50 ratio: public expenditures that constitute 50% of the GDP, and 50% of the population that either works for or receives aid from the government. Without having to work, the yobs get their ale, porn, and footie, and immigrants from the 7th century get flats, monthly cheques, and government exemptions from life in the 21st century. Meanwhile, British indigenes are coerced to repeat daily that 7th century people come from all walks of life, communities and religions.

If there are differences in this between Western countries, they are differences in degree, not in kind. The capital explosion has created a large, distributable surplus. People who don’t want to work don’t have to. Equality-pushing, nonequal elites have found new ways to collect and redistribute this surplus in ways that satisfy their moral vanity while perpetuating their hold on power. When you rob Peter to pay Paul, Peter may successfully resist. But when you rob Peter to pay Paul, Pablo, Pavel, Panya, Bakhta and Boumedienne, the mobocratic features of democracy work decidedly for them and for the income redistributor, and against Peter.

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The postmodern, Western elites, though uniformly left-liberal, have been friendly to capital, as they depend on its droppings for campaign donations and payoffs to their state-dependent constituencies. When capital decided that Mexican labor was the answer to a shortage of Americans willing to work at manual labor for low wages, or that imported Pakistanis held a similar answer for Great Britain, the ruling elites were all too happy to oblige. But the foreigners were not needed in the first place, for there is no work that Americans or Brits “won’t do.” It’s just a question of more pay for work and less payoff to idleness.

And now Britain is under siege by the descendants of the alien people it brought over, and by their chain-migrating kin; while the U.S. has perhaps 30 million people whose first allegiance is to Mexico or Guatemala, and the 120,000 members of armed Hispanic gangs in Los Angeles alone are akin to ten divisions of a foreign occupying army.

Daily life in a Western European or American city is a lesson in the severe depletion of social capital caused by the ruling elites’ dumping of millions of Third World immigrants onto their subjects, allegedly for economic reasons.

Hat tip: LN.