[LewRockwell.com] Economist Bruce Yandle is known for (among many other things) authoring the "Bootleggers and Baptists" theory of government regulation. The gist of the theory is that many forms of regulation (and other types of government intervention) persist because of the political clout of one group ‐ the "bootleggers"‐that is only interested in money, and another group ‐ the "Baptists" ‐ that has some religious or ideological interest in a particular form of government intervention. The bootlegger and Baptist language comes from his analysis of alcohol prohibition, where bootleggers supported it because it made the competition ‐ legal alcohol merchants ‐ illegal, whereas "Baptists" is symbolic language for those who supported prohibition for religious reasons.In her new book, Open Borders Inc., Michelle Malkin documents chapter and verse of what has to be one of the biggest Bootleggers-and-Baptist operations ever ‐ the coalition of large corporations like Koch Industries and Apple Computer, along with arms of the Catholic Church, that seeks to abolish national sovereignty in the United States with open borders. The corporate interest is mainly in cheap labor, says Malkin, whereas the rhetoric of the Catholic Church is about compassion for "refugees."
There is a twist here in Professor Yandle’s theory, however, a twist that probably also exists in many of his other examples. The twist is that although the rhetoric of the Catholic Church is about compassion for the poor, it is not just coincidental that it rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year in government grants to administer its "refugee resettlement" and other illegal immigrant programs. The Church also views mass immigration from largely Catholic Latin America a solution to the catastrophic drop off in Sunday offerings (it lost some three million American Catholics between 2007 and 2015) in light of how it has handled its pedophile scandal. "Follow the money" is the main theme of Open Borders, Inc.