Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Obesity and Imigration, Two Birds, One Stone?

So you've probably heard alot about the immigration issue in the news lately. Lots of people making a big huff about people taking jobs, drivers licenses, potential terrorist entry points, blah blah blah.

You've also probably heard a lot of people talking about how Americans are getting heavier and how a higher and higher percentage of people are obese or morbidly obese and are going to drive up our health care costs blah blah blah.

I think I have a silver bullet answer to both problems.

We need a commodity manual labor market place. Some system so I can go find 1, 5, 15, or whatever number of hours of manual labor I can do for free.

When someone needs their lawn re-sodded or house repainted or whatever, they post it on some craigslist style service and I'll show up and work for free for however long I want. That way I get my exercise in for the week without paying gym memberships and on my terms.

Since I'm working for free there aren't any messy tax issues or ID issues. And since you aren't charging me I save on gym membership and I can pick and choose when and where. If you have something that needs doing that happens to be on my way home from work, bingo. I get a free workout and you get free labor.

Since most immigrants come and do unskilled or low skill manual labor it shouldn't be hard for most Americans to pick up the skills they need to specialize in some particular kind of labor. If you don't want to do that there would be a fair number of jobs that wouldn't require any skill at all, like moving shingles or pulling rocks out of someones lawn so they can plant a tree. That would lower the demand for foreign labor and solve our immigration problem since even Hispanics can't compete with free.

We all get healthier, we lower the incentive for people to sneak into our country and surreptitiously hang our drywall and fry our food, and we do it relatively free of red tape.

Of course this won't work because the liability issues surrounding letting someone come on by and pull rocks out of your lawn or work with "hazerdous" chemicals like latex paint are astronomical by American standards.

Oh yeah, and Americans are too lazy to actually get out and do any work.

But still, a guy can dream can't he?

1 comment:

azufelt said...

I think it's a fantastic idea.

In fact, in Colorado there was an issue about the whole American's out of jobs, but the city had tons of openings, and it was because the openings were cleaning up the parks, making $10/hr, and not WHITE guy was going to take that job, so of course they all went to the illigal migrant workers... hhhmm?