Renounce U.S. Claims to Puerto Rico
Hopefully the 'Donroe Doctrine' Doesn't Extend to America's Failed Welfare Island
Just as Trump proposes annexing Canada and Greenland as future states, Trump America should consider what kind of nation and continent is most desirable.
A large part of the problem America has faced over the past century has been the far left redefining what the nation even means.
The left would like to sacralize the stupid poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty, “the New Colossus”, where foreigners ‘yearn to be free.’
But a nation isn’t defined by who wants to come to it.
A nation is a group of people with a common history and a common heritage. A nation is a group of people who share a nationality.
The left has sought to redefine America as a ‘proposition nation’ where once you decide to be an American, through sheer willpower, you become one. It’s as though someone in Afghanistan can simply read the U.S. Constitution, desire to live in a meritocracy, want to learn how to code, and they are immediately transformed into an American.
The right has been afraid to state the obvious: an American is someone whose family has lived here, who is not an indian. An American is someone whose family immigrated here legally, whose ancestors were Puritans and pioneers, who came to a wild untamed continent and built this country up from scratch. These generations fought in its many wars, and suffered through its many mistakes.
To conflate an illegal Mexican immigrant with someone whose family came over here on the Mayflower and has spent centuries building this nation, is an obscenity.
Part of the left-wing program is always redefining the most obvious of definitions. It is the verbal aggression and sophistry necessary to make saints into sinners, criminals into victims, and frankly men into women.
Lacking firm convictions on this political point has meant that our political discourse is very one-sided. The left can verbally attack and never worry about countering an effective defense of America’s native stock.
Enter Donald Trump, who is the first politician in at least a century to even try to defend America’s rational interests.
And his desire to expand America is exciting, in that it represents a major change to the political order, but it is also concerning, because many of Trump’s policies have been aggressively molested in their implementation.
Seeing the reaction from the militant left saying “You can’t do that!” to a matter of mere political boundaries, from a group of people who so blithely rewrite biology and gender at the drop of a hat because someone expresses personal confusion about their own sexuality, is also amusing.
The New York Post put it best: The Donroe Doctrine.
But expansionism for its own sake is not a recipe for success. Expanding a nation to become an empire is a lesson in disaster learned by every empire in history: Rome, the Ottomons, the Russians, the Holy Romans, the British, the Europeans.
And it’s not hard to see the patterns: different groups of people have different characters and, ultimately, different and competing interests.
America cannot and should not merge with places that it can’t co-exist with.
Already, podcaster Joe Rogan is foolishly saying Trump should also expand America to include Mexico:
There are 40 million Canadians who are generally from a common ancestry to the native stock of America.
Canada has 3.8 million square miles. By contrast, the Louisiana Purchase was for 828,000 square miles, or 22% of the size of Canada. It also has 171 billion barrels of oil, making it, depending on which source you use, the third-largest country with such reserves.
There are 129 million Mexicans, who are generally from a completely foreign ancestry to the majority of Americans. That’s three Californias. It’s 761,000 square miles.
There’s somewhere around 175,000 Mexicans who work directly for the cartels.
A measly 58,000 people live in Greenland. Roughly the same size as Ithaca, New York or Monroe, Michigan. Greenland has rare earth minerals, which leftist politicians have sold off to China nearly everywhere else.
If the EU can barely hold on because of the differences in work ethics between Greeks and Germans, and if the industrial and monetary policies of Spain and Poland cannot be reconciled, then it’s doubtful that America could easily merge with too many other places.
Leftists in years past proposed merging America with the Philippines, Oceania, Cuba, and more. This is a concept that comes up surprisingly often.
But the one territory that America should never admit as a state is the one which has come up the most often in the past 70 years: Puerto Rico.
As a side note, it’s a bit of a forgotten item that in 1950 two Puerto Rican terrorists tried to assassinate President Harry Truman. In their attack, they shot and killed an officer, Leslie Coffelt.
I mention this for a few reasons. Not the least of which is the illustrative things that happen in its wake. As these terrorists tried to assassinate the sitting President, and killed an officer, the response was:
To give Puerto Rico a statehood referendum two years later.
To commute the surviving terrorist’s death penalty sentence to life imprisonment, until 1979 when Jimmy Carter simply released him from prison.
Let me put it another way: this was the response, in 1950, to Puerto Rican terrorists trying to shoot the sitting left-wing Democrat who presided over the victories in the Second World War. They gave them everything they wanted, and then eventually let them out of prison.
The political left is a mind virus that eventually kills its host.
In any case, Puerto Rico is a completely failed island, failed political system, and failed economy.
In 1984, Congress had to specifically ban the island from declaring bankruptcy.
Its government debts were downgraded to ‘junk’ status by 2014.
The feds had to step in and let the island declare a kind of state bankruptcy for the next eight years.
It has this happen even though their debt instruments are exempt from any federal, state, or local income taxes, making their debt some of the most attractive debt for bondholders to purchase.
The island only has 3.2 million people, but it has mismanaged itself into permanent bankruptcy. The population is comparable to the size of Iowa.
It’s tough to have perspective here, so let’s compare:
Bangladesh has $60 billion in debt and has 173 million people. Or $347 per person.
Philippines has $125 billion in debt with 117 million people. Or $1,068 per person.
Pakistan has $133 billion in debt with 240 million people. Or $554 per person.
Nigeria has $42 billion in debt with 224 million people. Or $187 per person.
Vietnam has $146 billion in debt with 99 million people. Or $1,474 per person.
Puerto Rico has $125 billion in debt with 3.2 million people. Or $39,062 per person.
It’s a fiscal mess. Extending statehood to any entity necessarily involves assuming their debts. Puerto Rico already considers its debts and fiscal mismanagement to be Washington’s problems to solve with bailouts. They have had this attitude for multiple generations. Making it a state would be a recipe for not only shoving its current debts onto the overworked American taxpayer, but it would send the signal to their political class to go hogwild with more spending.
It’s chronically mismanaged.
It serves as a backdoor to get into the United States.
Even though it might be a fine tourist destination, so are parts of Mexico. There’s no source of pride in expanding territorial claims that is worth the assumption of the extra debts.
This Caribbean proto-nation taken from Spain should be released and left to its own devices.
It makes the most consistent sense to leave countries in the Gulf of America to fend for themselves.
American politics isn’t working right now even for Americans. Admitting new states like Puerto Rico would dilute the voting power in the U.S. Senate, it would do the same in the U.S. House, and it would add billions in debt while massively complicating the fiscal and political problems in the United States. It’s a major net loss, not a net gain.
Yet by all indications, the American political system is trying to hold onto this island, and will even oddly defend its honor.
The far-left media tried to hype a random joke from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe last year into a major problem for Trump, when Hinchcliffe said at a Trump rally that Puerto Rico was a garbage island.
In terms of its finances and management, he’s pretty spot on.
And the best way to deal with garbage is to throw it out.
The solution to American expansion should be to acquire valuable land and to get rid of lands of liabilities. Puerto Rico is the latter.