A CONVERSATION WITH MY SON (Or: Child is Father to the Man). Some of you steady S&G readers are familiar with my son Michael, who has led quite an interesting life for a 23-year-old: Tulane student and Katrina refugee, sometime blogger, Israeli journalist and man-about-town, Texas recluse, and most lately Austin restaurant worker. Let's just say that the kid (like his old man) hasn't exactly let any moss grow on him.
Among other things, we discussed illegal immigration. "If we deport all the illegals," Michael said, "expect to see your grocery bill quadruple." His point was that illegals work in meat-processing plants and pick produce and do dozens of other food-related tasks that no American worker would want to do — and that, if these operations were suddenly forced to use American citizens as labor (provided that they could find enough workers), costs would skyrocket overnight. I think he's got a point there. We've evolved to a point in this country where we have to import "guestworkers" from other lands (mostly Mexico and southeast Asia) because the little guy has gotten too big. We don't think that the little guy has any right to get ahead, to make a living wage, to have the same job protections and "perks" (health insurance, anyone?) as the rest of us, who work at...
... pretty much nothing, which is the other part of the equation. I wrote about this on the blog years ago and was already uneasy about the number of Americans making big bucks doing less and less and less. It's the employment variant of the "investment instruments" that were floated around by banks and insurers and brokers for years, "instruments" that, as it happened, were tied to nothing of tangible worth.
Michael's final assessment was that the day of reckoning was past due, and the American economy may be in the process of gradually (and, no doubt, painfully) readjusting itself to where those who produce something of value, those with a hard-won skill who don't mind working hard to get ahead, will once again be the driving engines of our economy... instead of the butt of jokes, hapless "has-beens" who can't afford health insurance and whose very fates have been tied for too long to ephemeral "investment instruments" on some faceless broker's desk.
Posted by Alois on
