In recent years, I’ve sometimes invoked Rudyard Kipling’s The Gods of the Copybook Headings, usually when something goes wrong because people did something obviously stupid.
Well, to be fair, that’s the main subject of the poem: how being entranced by popular but dumb ideas leads to destruction. But there’s another side to it. When you do things that are simple and obvious — and, often, traditional — you can do pretty well.
And we’re seeing that illustrated, at home and abroad.
At home, the allegedly insoluble illegal immigration problem is being solved, via the simple and obvious, and traditional, approach of policing the borders and deporting people who are here illegally.
We were told that the problem was hugely difficult, and would require complicated bipartisan legislation from Congress. Nope. All that was needed was a very simple policy: Don’t let them in, and kick them out if they’re already here. From this change, various other allegedly difficult problems began to resolve: Housing prices, crime, employment for American workers, and even L.A. traffic (!) show signs of improvement. Even the federal deficit is under less pressure, as benefits are cut.
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