Heritage immigration study co-author penned articles for ‘na

[Welf]

Source.

Heritage Foundation analyst Jason Richwine, the co-author of a study claiming the immigration reform bill pending in the Senate would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion, wrote two articles in 2010 for a website founded by Richard Spencer, a self-described "nationalist" who writes frequently about race and against "the abstract notion of human equality."

Richwine's two stories for Spencer's website, AlternativeRight.com, dealt with crime rates among Hispanics in the United States. AlternativeRight.com describes itself as "dedicated to heretical perspectives on society and culture—popular, high, and otherwise—particularly those informed by radical, traditionalist, and nationalist outlooks."

Richwine's articles on AlternativeRight.com were posted within the first few weeks of the site's launch and were the last he wrote for the site.

The website has published several controversial pieces about nationalism and race since Spencer founded it three years ago. Spencer is now the chairman of the Montana-based National Policy Institute, an organization that describes itself as a think tank for "White Americans."

Richwine's articles for AlternativeRight.com, "Model Minority?," published on March 3, 2010, and "More on Hispanics and Crime," published the next day, push back on an American Conservative essay that argued that some conservatives have over-hyped the crime rate among Hispanics. (Richwine's article was cross-posted on the website of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington where Richwine was previously a fellow.)

"A proper analysis of the data indicates that Hispanics have a substantially higher crime rate than whites," Richwine wrote in the first piece, which he backed up with federal prison data showing the incarceration rates of whites and Hispanics.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported on Richwine's 2009 Harvard University dissertation, which examined whether the United States should exclude immigrants with low IQs and argued that "the average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population."

The Heritage Foundation Thursday distanced itself from Richwine's dissertation in response to the Washington Post story.

"The Harvard paper is not a work product of The Heritage Foundation. Its findings do not reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation or the conclusions of our study on the cost of amnesty to U.S. taxpayers, as race and ethnicity are not part of Heritage immigration policy recommendations," Heritage spokesman Mike Gonzalez said in a statement.

Emails and phone calls to the Heritage Foundation from Yahoo News were not immediately returned Thursday.

Richwine's study on the cost of the immigration bill, co-written with Heritage Senior Research Fellow Robert Rector, was lauded by some who oppose the ongoing effort in Congress to overhaul the nation's immigration system. But it was also criticized by economists on both the left and right.

In an interview Thursday with Yahoo News, Spencer defended Richwine's work and outlined his own philosophy of "nationalism."

Spencer said he does not believe in the "superiority" of whites over other races, but he takes no issue with conducting data-based research about whether certain races, in general, have higher IQs or stronger economies.

"I would, without question, characterize myself and most things I do as nationalism—and I think that word is misused," Spencer said "People might think of that as simply xenophobia or irrational cheerleading for your country or something. But nationalism is a much more serious thing.

"It's a belief that you are part of an extended family," he said. "You believe that you are part of something bigger than yourself, it's an extended family, and you want to pursue the future health of this extended family. That is nationalism properly defined."

He added: "Race is real. Race has consequences in the real world. Loving your race is healthy and normal. So if that is the definition of racism—which I would think of as nationalism, or you could say racialism—then yes, that is what I believe," he said. "I think white people should love their history and love their ancestors. Operating on some kind of infantile, abstract notion of human equality is actually a very unusual and unhealthy way to view the world."

Spencer pointed out that Richwine's article was one of the first published for the site when it launched three years ago, before some of the publication's more controversial articles were written.

"That was very early on in AltRight, and maybe we became a little too out there," Spencer said. "He does more mainstream stuff, so whether he supports other things that have been published in AltRight, I don't know the answer to that."

What a shock. Right-wingers with supremacist ties.

[Saxtonite]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

EDIT: I've been on that website before. It is seriously an amalgation of neo-fascists, PUA artists who turned into political theorists, and "Human Bio Diversity" type people. They -do- have some interesting articles I admit and I -do- like some of the stuff they do (They did some "Men's Rights" articles) but I can understand someone being a bit wary of some of the people on the "new right" and "alternative right" or "revolutionary conservatives" (yes, some of them refer to themselves as such).

What a shock. Right-wingers with supremacist ties.

No, no, no - they're White NATIONALISTS. You know, preservation of the White Race and all that stuff. But for some odd reason they focus a lot on race and crime, and race and IQ, because those PC liberals are suppressing the truth...

EDIT: I just checked the website. They sure cleaned up a bit since the past, you have to go through their archives for some good stuff - here is their link: http://alternativeright.com/

[Haruko]

Every time I hear Heritage Foundation I think two things. First, their study saying that the actual "poor" in America are negligible in number (most "poor" people are actually doing even better than the average European in some respects, such as living space). Second, a world politics textbook read for one of my politics classes where Heritage Foundation was cited to show that the United States is BY FAR (i.e., puts Europe to shame) the most economically free country in the world, though of course the definition of "free" is different from what the average European would consider.

[Surlethe]

Pretty sure the Heritage Foundation considers the US less free than such free-market luminaries as Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Chile, Mauritius, and Denmark.

[PainRack]

Pretty sure the Heritage Foundation considers the US less free than such free-market luminaries as Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Chile, Mauritius, and Denmark.

Have you guys read the huge mindtwist they made to suit Hong Kong and Singapore in the "free" category?:D

I LOVED their Free Government aspect the most though.

Right, Free Hong Kong, where the CCP has cracked down on free speech and democratic legislation contrary to the Chinese aims.

Ooooh. LIMITED government in Singapore:D
That's a shocker:D

[Welf]

Well, it's a government which is freed of the whining from the lower classes?

[General Mung Beans]

Singapore also has universal healthcare and most people live in public housing.

[bobalot]

Singapore also has universal healthcare and most people live in public housing.

It's also estimated that 60% of Singapore's GDP come from government owned corporations.

[PainRack]

Singapore also has universal healthcare and most people live in public housing.

The funny thing is, up to the seventies and maybe the eighties, the PAP called itself a democratic SOCIALIST party. While we backpedalled rapidly away from the label after the nineties and etc, its..... hard to reconcile the idea of the Singapore government being limited outside of the bullshit reasons the government themselves use.


Its just absurd though. The Heritage foundation for example ranks the Australians as being third, because of its 'poor' government spending and fiscal freedom, aka, taxes.

While the Singapore direct taxation system is EXTREMELY low, Singapore government spending doesn't play by the same rules in other countries. The main bulk of debt is afterall housing debt, which is owned to a government board. Essentially, our public housing agency pays the developer to build a flat, then recovers costs via selling it, but it also has financial instruments to cover home insurance as well as home loans. A huge, big Fannie Mae, but with DIRECT government ownership and operating as a government statutory board.
However, the costs of public housing isn't counted by the government because its not on the government books. Technically, its private debt as the agency sells and recover costs to the public. Indeed, the agency itself is profitable due to the fact that it gets land relatively cheap and sells the property dearly. No other housing developer enjoys such an advantage in Singapore, they certainly wouldn't have enjoyed the eminent domain policies in the early 60s and 70s which obtained land cheaply from private owners.
We can get DIRECT evidence of how the government undercuts developers because OUR government claims its subsidising housing costs because it sells flats at a discount to private developers. (The whole subsidisy is of course another round of bullshit. So, instead of taking the 100% profit, you choose 80% profit, and unlike private developers, another government authority sells land to you cheaply but you don't factor that in to your flat price because, pegged to market rates! But hey! DISCOUNTED PRICES COMPARED TO PRIVATE!!!!!)


The same thing goes for the restructured hospitals. They're 'private' enterprises so the government doesn't count those healthcare costs on its books, but thanks to the Ministry of Health scholarship bonds to doctors, they enjoy a contracted cheaper rates of doctors compared to private hospitals. Private hospitals of course enjoys no such benefits.(Nor would they, since to differentiate themselves, they sell themselves as NOT being teaching hospitals).

Its.... laughable to claim that this is the libertarian, free economic markets they envision, because of the strong role of government policies, enterprises underpinning the whole market. Hell, even our trade unions and retail supermarketing is under the aegis of the party, albeit, not the government directly. The close interwining of the party with the government has made many things extremely difficult to seperate, and we saw how confusing this was when the Workers Party took control of Aljunied and has to create a functional Town Council. From AIM to other hassles, virtually everything was entwined with the former political party and there is no functional governing infrastructure..... Of course, this itself was a political strategy back in the nineties, when PM Goh introduced town councils so as to showcase how different parties could run a town district, a form of governing experience as mayorship. But it ISN"T comparable when other party affliated councils enjoy shit such as national funds for upgrading of estates and etc while Hougang and Potong Pasir doesn't. Imagine a world where the Federal government determines federal funding given to the states by its political affliation....
Yup. That's Singapore.




I think the best way to understand our system is this book put forth in England, by Osborne and Gabeler "Reinventing government"
http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/osborne.html
Imagine a system like that, where the government 'steers' instead of directly providing services, but one with IMMENSE power to decide anything and everything it wants and fashion the system to play by its rules. Its in no way comparable to the libertarian world they dream of. Their narrow vision of government freedom because it doesn't directly spend money on services is obsolete.

[PainRack]

The arguments for Singapore being a libertarian paradise appears to rest on just two principles alone.

1. We have low taxes.

2. We have low regulations for businesses.

And here I was, thinking that the core principle of libertarianism is that of small government, regulations for both businesses and individuals. I mean, hell, let's tack on free markets just for the fun of it.


Just how on god green earth is any of that applicable in Singapore? Even the term free market is laughable. The decision to award a major train line to a governemtn linked corporation was limited to a limited, closed auction by the Land Transport Authority. The NEL line, by having TWO train operators, was supposed to prevent a monopolisation of our transport networks, because, Free markets!
They promptly showed how non monopoly they were when they shut down multiple bus routes downtown so as to force ridership on to their new train lines. Hell, this was even done under government aegis, because the Land transport authority has this bugbear about modal transport network, where you get off the train and bus and interswitch between various modes easily and efficiently. Odd how the CONSUMER viewpoint of convinence and cost somehow got lost along the picture of big corporations and business.

Oddly enough, having entered into a contract to open the NEL line, they promptly renegaded and shut down various stops such as Buangkok, because the existing ridership there was dismal. The new housing estates were afterall half completed and too little people lived there. And it was more convinent to take buses anyway:D
So, they exercised their political authority, saying that they owned the lines and had the right to shut down the station, that was built with taxpayer money, because the Land Transport Authority builds those lines and then sells it to a government linked corporation. But its competition! even though there's only two viable mass transit operators in the market! And the REASON why SBS got the NEL line is because the government wanted another competitor to SMRT and also for SMRT to expand its bus network.... But COMPETITION! Liberty! Free market!



Ok. Maybe a bad idea. Hey, how about Retail supermarkets? Anyone wonders why the various retail giants are pulling out of Singapore? Sure, Japan pulled out because of the AFC and the head corporation was sold to outside investors, but from Carrefour limiting their operations and etc....... its simple. The retail supermarket is dominated by one major cooperative in Singapore. The National Trade Union Congress, which operates a retail chain of supermarkets for the convinence of its workers. Because of the political blessing of the authorities, and of course, their sharp business accumen, they dominate every single aspect of retail supermarketing in Singapore. There exists true competition of course, its not a real monopoly here and there's no real shady business but if you imagine that the retail supergiant wouldn't have flourished without the political support of the government in its early days, you're delusional.



So, big government, lots of government authority in terms of steerage and policy/price setting via its GLC, the market is dominated by GLC and the relevant government authorities.... The only "free" point is the liberalisation of domestic banking and telcos....... Something every other single country did in the nineties.....

Its gets even MORE funny, because when you think free markets and entrepaneurship, you DON"T think Singapore. Singapore has a lower rate of business entrepaneurs than the US afterall........ Unless you count the government corporations and government 'assisted' corporations, even freaking social enterprise is governed by the aegis of politics.....

[K. A. Pital]

Singapore, a nation where homosexuals can go to jail for being homosexual, is free? Where a guy can get arrested for posting a critical webcomic (see Demon-cratic Singapore)? That's freedom, guys.

I mean, right, having sex is not a freedom, and free speech is also not a freedom. Only capitalists have the freedom, and that freedom is to make profit. All other humans have no rights. They are human resources, nothing more.

[UnderAGreySky]

The Heritage Foundation should have been laughed out of Washington when they released a study (that Paul Ryan latched on to, giving an idea of HIS incompetence) that stated unemployment could be driven to as low as 2% only if the US slashed and burnt its budget deficit.

[Sinanju]

Or that article that said there are no hungry people in America.

My sister actually writes for Heritage, so I've got some insight into the kinds of things they'll let fly. Example: a year or so ago conservatives were having this big to-do about a lady whose daughter found a baby woodpecker, and they were going to get a $500 ticket for interfering with an endangered species or something. My sister was going to use this as an example of how outrageous government oversight is. I found plenty of posts on conservative blogs and bulletin boards about the story, but they were kind of passing it around like something their audience should already know - no link to a source or anything. I finally tracked down the actual-factual news report that spawned everything.

At the end of the article, it was said that the government was not charging the lady with anything, or giving her a fine.

This wasn't even a follow-up article. It was the same one people ostensibly read to find out about the incident.

[PainRack]

Singapore, a nation where homosexuals can go to jail for being homosexual, is free? Where a guy can get arrested for posting a critical webcomic (see Demon-cratic Singapore)? That's freedom, guys.

That's....... not a fair parsing.

The actual legislation has never been enforced since colonial rule. There are two specific legislation here. Section 377a as well as the actual anti sodomy law S377, or the no blowjobs or unnatural sex if it did not end up in coitus. 377 has been successfully repealed, being converted to necrophilia, but 377a was successfully defended by the Christian conservatives in Singapore. The law in particular was passed by Britain in 1938, not Singapore in the first place and is an inheritance of colonial rule and Victorian mentality.
Given that the most likely target of such a section being passed was gay prostitution, you're going to have to do better than say an archaic law prohibits actual freedom, rather than being a colonial relic which was successfully defended by the Christian right. The last legal appeal which just ended this year collapsed after the consitutional hearings. So, its back to the political table where the christian right gets all the advantages.....


Demon-cratic Singapore is another issue altogether. He was placed under a cease & desist order for inciting religious and racial hatred, with a cartoon that attempted to invoke the spectre of racial discrimination and deliberately inciting xenophobia against new chinese immigrants pitched towards the Malay community. He deliberately chose not to do so, claiming that his comic protrayed a 'fictional' demon-cratic Singapura, although to be fair, the absence of free speech laws and satire probably prompted that defence.

Its a much grayer area of free speech vs hate speech and a particularly sore issue now given the extant xenophobia and our history of racial riots. Given that the Heritage Foundation has never proclaimed Singapore to be a bastion of human and personal liberties but rather, economic liberty, I don't think its fair to drag in such incidents to attack the Foundation.

[K. A. Pital]

The law in particular was passed by Britain in 1938, not Singapore in the first place and is an inheritance of colonial rule and Victorian mentality.

I am not saying Singapore should take the blame for the origin of such laws; however, their maintenance is not acceptable.

So, its back to the political table where the christian right gets all the advantages...

I do not consider nations where religious influence over political matters is very strong to be truly free. And of course I will blame the religious crazies for this and every other such instance of Dark Age legislation. However, I would say that the nations which keep their crazies at bay and away from the political power are more free in that regard. And often in many other regards as well.

Its a much grayer area of free speech vs hate speech and a particularly sore issue now given the extant xenophobia and our history of racial riots. Given that the Heritage Foundation has never proclaimed Singapore to be a bastion of human and personal liberties but rather, economic liberty, I don't think its fair to drag in such incidents to attack the Foundation.

I do not deny that HF is right saying that Singapore has "economic freedom" which is simply the freedom to set up and run a capitalist enterprise. In comparison to many other nations it might even be in the top 20 or whatever by the ease of running things (although if what you say about govt controls is true, that's simply not so).

I am simply saying that economic freedom is not directly connected to human rights.

[energiewende]

Singapore is a technocracy, not libertarian utopia, but it's run by disinterested technocrats of real ability, not brutal ideologues chosen for who most ruthlessly climbed the Party hierarchy. In the 1940s and 50s when everyone thought socialism was the future, PAP originally endorsed these ideas. When it became clear that socialism was a dead end however they changed their policies. As a result most people live in government owned houses - but built to many different standards of size and quality and "rented" on 99 year leases; there is universal healthcare* - but this takes the form of mandatory savings in an individual healthcare account, with some means testing for essential services; there are government owned companies - but they are run just like private sector companies via an managed investment fund**.

When it comes to social freedom, Singapore limits it as much as the government considers necessary to ensure social cohesion and political stability, which the US does not do (or at least, is constitutionally prevented from doing). On the other hand, Singapore is more socially liberal in some respects, notably it is much easier to immigrate to Singapore than to the US.

I would rate Singapore around the bottom of the developed world for social freedom (but much higher than the 2nd/3rd world), but its position near the top for economic freedom is justified.

* While this seems like some shocking thing to people from the US, the US is in fact the only developed country not to have universal healthcare, so at worst this caps Singapore's position in the ranking at #2. But if we look further than this boolean variable that happens to be politically charged in the US, we see that Singapore comes out much better than one would think. The US government alone spends about 50% more as a proportion of GDP on healthcare than Singapore spends on all public and private services combined. So the Singaporean system isn't actually "less private" than the US system; the US system is just far less efficient.

** The claim of 60% of GDP being derived from these companies in very dubious. The wikipedia citation seems to be an online newspaper/blog the link to which is broken. The page on Singapore's sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings says that the total value of all its assets is $160bn, which is about 60% of Singapore's nominal GDP. This is very different from saying that 60% of Singapore's GDP - which is not the total value of all assets in the country but rather the production of the country in 1 year - is derived from Temasek. Good returns on a fund that large may be around 5%, which would suggest Temasek contribures about 3% of Singapore's GDP. It's a government pension fund, not Gosplan.

[PainRack]

Singapore is a technocracy, not libertarian utopia, but it's run by disinterested technocrats of real ability, not brutal ideologues chosen for who most ruthlessly climbed the Party hierarchy. In the 1940s and 50s when everyone thought socialism was the future, PAP originally endorsed these ideas. When it became clear that socialism was a dead end however they changed their policies. As a result most people live in government owned houses - but built to many different standards of size and quality and "rented" on 99 year leases; there is universal healthcare* - but this takes the form of mandatory savings in an individual healthcare account, with some means testing for essential services; there are government owned companies - but they are run just like private sector companies via an managed investment fund**.

Just a nitpick. The PAP endorsement of socialism ranged around massive social engineering and government corporations. The PAP didn't reverse any changes. Public housing was always sold on 99 year leases, the thing that was tweaked was pegging property prices to market rates. Universal healthcare emerged only when the 3Ms scheme emerged, prior to that, it was subsidised care.

** The claim of 60% of GDP being derived from these companies in very dubious. The wikipedia citation seems to be an online newspaper/blog the link to which is broken. The page on Singapore's sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings says that the total value of all its assets is $160bn, which is about 60% of Singapore's nominal GDP. This is very different from saying that 60% of Singapore's GDP - which is not the total value of all assets in the country but rather the production of the country in 1 year - is derived from Temasek. Good returns on a fund that large may be around 5%, which would suggest Temasek contribures about 3% of Singapore's GDP. It's a government pension fund, not Gosplan.[/size]

The 60% figure is bogus, but you underestimate the scale of Singapore Linked Corporations.
ST Engineering, ST Aerospace, ST Food industries, Singapore Airlines, Singtel, the list of corporations go on, from the ports, to shipping, banks, to airport services, power plants...

The ST family alone operates over 100 subsidary companies, including stuff like food catering.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST_Engineering

DBS is one of the largest banks in SEA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmen ... _Singapore

Capitaland is also one of the largest real estate companies in Asia.

And then there's the very strange role of public transport companies such as SBS and SMRT. These companies were incorporated by what was essentially government mandate, when the government streamlined transport in singapore back during the 70s onwards..... The end result of the reforms and consolidation of private transport companies gave us what are private operators............ but operate with significant government largese and authority.
Fare raises must be negotiated through the government and of course, the whole train lines were built by the government before leasing it to the relevant companies like SMRT.

And that list goes on.Healthcare for example.
All the public restructured hospitals and polyclinics, creating approximately 3/4 worth of acute hospital beds and 1/3 of primary care are owned by corporations....... but they were set up via government assets. Afterall, Singhealth and NHG are essentially incorporated elements of the public hospitals owned by MOH.

The above companies aren't GLC, indeed, they're private companies, but they're tied extremely close to the government.