“Are you cashing in on this?”

So asked the subject line of an email my brother sent me in early 2003. “This” was what was described in an attached news story from a trade journal — I forget which one — as a “huge” and “desperate” shortage of information technology professionals, particularly software developers.

That certainly came as a big surprise to me. I’m an independent software developer and had worked only sporadically in the field the past couple of years. Many of my former clients had outsourced most or all of their information technology operations — often to “body shops” that imported Indian software engineers under the H-1B and L-1 visa programs and then set up shop right on the companies’ premises. Most other software and engineering professionals I knew were either unemployed or underemployed. One was trying to sell real estate. Another had to move to another city and saw his job outsourced a second time. (Fortunately, he was outsourced with it; the “body shop” hired him to continue doing his old job.) Some had given up and had decided to retire. Read more »

Try, for just a minute, to imagine the following scenario. The New Republic, or some other stronghold of neocondom, has just discovered the website of the church Ron Paul has been attending for the last 20 years. At the very top of the site’s home page is the following statement:

We are a congregation which is Unashamedly White and Unapologetically Christian…Our roots in the White religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are a European people, and remain “true to our native land”, the mother continent, the cradle of civilization…We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a White worship service and ministries which address the White Community.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to guess what would follow. The story would be on all the evening newscasts, the neocon and Beltway libertarian talking heads would be all over the cable news channels expressing their disgust, and even the paleolibertarians would jump ship. No explanation he could offer would be acceptable. Ron Paul’s campaign would be dead. Read more »

I guess we should have expected it.

The Beltway libertarians, those polished public intellectuals at Cato and Reason, have been falling all over themselves the past few days in an effort to distance themselves from Ron Paul following the “outing” of his old newsletters last week by The New Republic. Not that they were ever that close to begin with. The Cato gang never liked Dr. Paul, and the folks at Reason only warmed up to him after his campaign began to catch fire on the internet. Now, their blogs are full of I-told-you-sos, denunciations, and warnings of dire consequences for libertarianism.

Typical of these was David Boaz, Cato’s executive vice-president, who told the world that “…over the past few months a lot of people have been asking why writers at the Cato Institute seemed to display a lack of interest in or enthusiasm for the Paul campaign. Well, now you know.” Even Radley Balko, a Reason editor and former Cato policy analyst whose research on police misconduct made him one of the few shining lights among the Beltway libertarians in recent years, has joined the lynch mob. You can find links to dozens of other similar comments here. Read more »