{"id":114329,"date":"2026-01-01T18:49:42","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T00:49:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=114329"},"modified":"2026-01-01T18:49:42","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T00:49:42","slug":"114329","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=114329","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

UBI For Me But Not For Thee? When a nation is colonized from the inside out.<\/a><\/p>\n

Glenn Harlan Reynolds<\/p>\n

The explosive unveiling of the wildly extensive Somali-run\u00a0daycare scams<\/a>\u00a0in Minnesota has drawn attention to a huge shadow economy, and not just in Minnesota. America, it turns out, is full of people, companies, and organizations that basically live off of fraud. We\u2019re not talking old-fashioned waste, like $600 hammers or $1200 toilet seats. We\u2019re talking about entities whose sole reason for existence consists of being a conduit for taxpayer money to flow directly to the people controlling them, with some of the proceeds being diverted to politicians and political organizations.<\/p>\n

People are noticing.<\/p>\n

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This reverses an old joke told by my Nigerian relatives. A Nigerian visits his rich relative in the United States and is awed by the penthouse apartment, the limo, the private jet and so forth. \u201cHow did you make so much money?\u201d he asks. The relative points out the window. \u201cSee that bridge? 15%. See that shopping mall? 15%. See that train station? 15%.\u201d<\/p>\n

The visitor, inspired, returns home to Nigeria and becomes fabulously wealthy. His rich cousin from America visits and says \u201cHow did you make so much money so fast?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou see that bridge over there?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNope,\u201d responds the confused relative. The Nigerian cousin points at himself and says\u00a0\u201cOne hundred percent!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, this joke has now been turned around. Leaving aside that we don\u2019t really even build train stations, bridges, or even shopping malls in this country anymore, now it\u2019s America where people are pocketing\u00a0one hundred percent<\/em>\u00a0and not even trying to actually deliver any goods or services. That the people doing this are mostly Africans only adds to the irony.<\/p>\n

But what happened?<\/p>\n

Well, several things. At base, people defraud the government for the same reason that dogs lick themselves \u2014 because they can. One of the things you find in these programs is that there are virtually no controls to ensure that the recipients of the money are legitimate, that the money is spent as promised \u2014 in essence, that the bridges get built. (Or, in the case of California, the high speed rail lines.) That lack of controls, of course, is no accident. The systems are designed to promote fraud and to make it hard to catch or punish.<\/p>\n

Second, the culture is weaker. In a high trust society, people get angry when there is fraud and move to punish and ostracize the perpetrators. In a low-trust society, people expect it.<\/p>\n

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Older generations of politicians used to engage more in what George Washington \u201cBoss\u201d Plunkitt called \u201chonest graft.\u201d He defined honest graft as legally exploiting insider knowledge and opportunities from one\u2019s position for personal financial gain, while also benefiting the public or party. A classic example he gave was learning about upcoming public projects (like a new park or bridge) and buying nearby land cheaply before the plans became public, then selling it at a profit to the city. He famously summarized it as: \u201cI seen my opportunities and I took \u2018em,\u201d comparing it to savvy stock trading on Wall Street. In contrast, dishonest graft involved outright illegal acts, such as blackmail, embezzlement, or extortion (e.g., shaking down gamblers or saloon keepers).<\/p>\n

God knows what he would have said about simply taking money for nothing. Would his reaction have been horror? Or admiration?<\/p>\n

Of course, high-trust societies become lower trust when they import large numbers of people from low trust societies, as America has done for several decades now. Import individual Somalis and they acculturate to the larger culture, usually. Import whole clans and they perpetuate their own culture, which emphasizes clan loyalty (no snitching!) and sees exploiting outsiders as okay, and even laudable.<\/p>\n

Institutions that used to police breaches of trust \u2014 chiefly the press \u2014 have also proven less willing. With the press\u2019s decline into partisan tools, there\u2019s no time left for maintaining general social standards. CNN\u2019s response to Nick Shirley\u2019s exposure of fraud and graft in Minneapolis was to . . . attack Nick Shirley, because his revelations might harm Democrats.<\/p>\n

And even if people do get angry, the entire structure of the government and its hangers on is designed (yes,\u00a0designed,<\/em>\u00a0this is no accident) to limit accountability to voters and taxpayers. Unelected bureaucrats administer programs passed without scrutiny in massive omnibus bills, and often act through \u201cnonprofits\u201d and NGOs that further blur accountability. Judges, generally unelected too, often run interference for the machine. This is of a piece with the entire post-WWII institutional restructuring \u2014 here and in Europe \u2014 which was quite consciously designed to ensure that voters have as little impact on what happens as possible. It\u2019s mostly worked. In a sense, our managerial\/political class has colonized the nation for its own benefit, from the inside out.<\/p>\n

And finally, of course, there\u2019s just\u00a0so much money<\/em>\u00a0sloshing around out there. When it\u2019s raining soup, people tend to pick up buckets. When government spending is so enormous, it\u2019s easy to hide billions. And \u2014 and this is a crucial point \u2014 when the federal government doesn\u2019t have to balance its budget but can cover any overages by borrowing, incentives for scrutiny by political players are removed.<\/p>\n

In a balanced budget environment, more money for, say, Somali daycares means less money for other people\u2019s programs, giving those people at least some incentive to scrutinize competing spending. In an effectively unlimited-spending environment, those incentives go away.<\/p>\n

To some degree the news media failures are being offset by\u00a0Army of Davids type<\/a>\u00a0independent journalism like Shirley\u2019s, which I personally find quite gratifying. But on a larger scale, we need much more than that. Ultimately, cutting off the money supply is the key. As Sen. Mike Lee has\u00a0noted,<\/a>\u00a0we could eliminate most of this fraud (and the personal income tax) just by limiting the federal government to spending consistent with its constitutionally enumerated powers. Crunching the\u00a0numbers<\/a>\u00a0suggests we could cut far more than that. I\u2019ve\u00a0suggested before<\/a>\u00a0that the original enumerated powers \/ federalism divide was a powerful anticorruption feature of the Constitution, which, to be fair, is probably why our ruling class worked so hard to defeat it.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s how we got here. How to get where we need to go is a topic for another essay. Whether we\u2019ll get there without torches, pitchforks and hangings of corrupt officials remains unclear. But if Argentina could do it, perhaps we can too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UBI For Me But Not For Thee? When a nation is colonized from the inside out. Glenn Harlan Reynolds The explosive unveiling of the wildly extensive Somali-run\u00a0daycare scams\u00a0in Minnesota has drawn attention to a huge shadow economy, and not just in Minnesota. America, it turns out, is full of people, companies, and organizations that basically … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,14,9,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-editorial-o-the-day","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-immigration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=114329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114330,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114329\/revisions\/114330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=114329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=114329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=114329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}