The Wall

Hadrian's Wall

President Trump wants to build a wall along the US border with Mexico. Other people have built walls with varying degrees of success. The Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall (above), and the Berlin Wall all spring to mind. I have been meaning to say something about this and today Windypundit puts up a post and that pushes me off the dime. I start with a comment on that post:

Are we going to let the government decide who can cross the border and who can't? I'm pretty sure that has been one of the functions of government since the beginning of governments.
Building the wall is a bad idea. It would only work if you had an army of people to patrol it, and that would end up costing many times more than the wall would cost in the first place. Eventually, funding for that army would fade away and the wall would become just another barrier to be crossed, like a river, mountain or desert.

I've said it before (I'm sure), but I'll say it again. If Mexico wasn't such a mess, we wouldn't have so many people desperate to leave their home and travel north to that alien land of the gringo. Of course, it's not just Mexico that's a mess, pretty much all of Latin America, from the Rio Grande River to the tip of Tierra del Fuego is a rotten, stinking mess. Some of it is our fault, things like the War On Drugs and our incessant meddling in the governments and our ruthless commercial exploitation of anything we could find to exploit haven't helped matters.

But a bigger problem, one that goes back to the colonial era, is the system of property rights, or the lack of such a system. Near as I can tell, all property belongs to the head honcho, who is backed by the Catholic Church. Everybody is dependent on the governor granting them some property.

Previous related posts.