Ready for some serious harshness on your Saturday mellow? Here we go.
Fruits and vegetables need to be picked. The work is back-breaking and of so little per-person value that pay is well below minimum wage. Right now, we bring in illegals to do it. Like these folks.
They should all be sent home. Instead, we need to slash social spending and start letting kids drop out of school. The dropouts can go pick the strawberries.
After back-to-school night at my daughter's public high school and conversations with her about her classes, it's obvious that many students place no value on education - theirs or anyone else's. And why should they? No matter how you behave, no one is expelled and even if you drop out, labor laws (not applied to illegals) and social programs ensure that you don't have to pick strawberries.
Kids learn that they can get away with anything in class.
As the really bad kids learn they can act up, the somewhat bad kids join when they see that it's all fun and no penalties. Mildly bad kids tag along and pretty soon, you get my daughter's Geometry class where learning is nearly impossible.
If you deported the illegals, you'd still need the fruits and veggies picked. If you did away with minimum wage laws, you could hire Americans. If you did away with the social spending, you'd have Americans who wanted the jobs. If you let kids drop out of school or expelled them for bad behavior, you'd have your workforce. At the same time, the other students would see there were penalties for not being serious about learning.
I would bet that in short order, you'd see massive improvements in education. It's win-win-win, except for the kids who drop out, but they aren't going anywhere right now anyway.
Inevitable: As Greece and Spain are showing right now, countries that borrow their way into insolvency to pay for lavish social programs end up like this as a matter of societal evolution. They may riot and burn and kill first, but in the end, they'll be out picking strawberries.
You're absolutely right.
ReplyDeleteI so agree with you. It's brilliant!
ReplyDeleteIf they'd un-"fix" some of the housing rules they had, perhaps the Americans who did do this as recently as when my mom was in college could make a living at it again. Heck, mom had migrant American pickers in some of the classes she taught, so it was still perfectly possible as an "American" job in the 80s.
ReplyDeleteLetting kids be hired to do the work would probably help, too, but that might cut into the "make school year-round" programs.