Compare & Contrast

My favorite president, and I'll wager I'm hardly alone in this choice, is Teddy Roosevelt.  I was reminded of Teddy while reading this unfortunate tripe regurgitated by a Mr. John Tamny at NRO last week who seems to see the world through mainly economic goggles.

He says...(bit to be rebutted by TR bolded for your reading pleasure)

One argument in favor of the existing visa caps is that an influx of foreign workers will drive down U.S. wages in the engineering and technology space. Aside from the supply constraints mentioned above, this is zero-sum thinking. Workers are in the end capital, and along the lines of the pin factory Adam Smith described in the Wealth of Nations, an increase in the number of skilled workers will increase output, and make all of us wealthier in the end.

Now, let's remind ourselves of the words of the great man...(I would bold, but this is so good you would simply end up with a bolded paragraph)

We cannot afford to continue to use hundreds of thousands of immigrants merely as industrial assets while they remain social outcasts and menaces any more than fifty years ago we could afford to keep the black man merely as an industrial asset and not as a human being. We cannot afford to build a big industrial plant and herd men and women about it without care for their welfare. We cannot afford to permit squalid overcrowding or the kind of living system which makes impossible the decencies and necessities of life. We cannot afford the low wage rates and the merely seasonal industries which mean the sacrifice of both individual and family life and morals to the industrial machinery.
– Theodore Roosevelt, speech before Knights of Columbus, New York City (October 12, 1915)

I know who I agree with, how about you?

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