The American Spectator

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br> P.S. Both my parents were legal immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island in 1915, sponsored by family members who arrived years earlier, and learned English by attending night school; they became citizens. I never can I recall them flying the flag of their birth country. /p>

The unstated assumption of Mr. Chesser that the continued low cost of agricultural products should be some sort of national priority needs a closer look. Chronic agricultural surpluses result in greater farm subsidies (and higher taxes on the rest of us) to prop up prices. In some cases that is after taxes also went towards pumping water from hither and yon to grow the crops in question. As well, one can not seriously argue that the current expense of agricultural products is even noticeable to most consumers, considering our vastly obese society. It seems as though rampant obesity and more crops that only result in even more income transfers to prop up the prices are things to be prevented.

There are hardly any jobs that one will not do, if paid enough. The fields of embalming, septic tank pumping, prison guarding, pest control, and oil rig construction are not staffed by illegal aliens. Only if one insisted that those jobs, perfectly honorable jobs that need to be done, be performed for a few dollars an hour would there suddenly be a need for the border control to look the other way. If hard labor meant good pay, teens would at least try it, and their character would be much improved for having tried it.

The increasing expense of labor, and the increasing insistence on reasonable working conditions, is precisely what built American industry, and to unnaturally suppress the expense of labor is to remove the incentive for greater efficiency and to step backwards. If slavery had continued to exist in the South, there would have been little incentive to invent machinery to pick cotton. If skilled labor costs had not increased in the twentieth century there would have been no incentive to invent the industrial robot. If dirt cheap labor had been plentiful after World War I, maybe most people would have traveled about in hand made rickshaws instead of in Model T's. The use of technology to save labor, and to create better jobs in designing, building, and running that technology, drove the industrial revolution. If some agriculture simply has to be labor intensive, maybe it should be labor intensive somewhere else; at least then there would be no viscous cycle of income transfer subsidies and the locals would be kept busy.

p>The idea that we need a new underclass willing to work hard for hardly any pay is to turn away from the American spirit of invention and progress. One suspects that the Democratic Party is realizing that it is falling victim to a self-imposed declining birth rate, and needs a vast new underclass to hustle. Twenty years from now maybe they'll even be clamoring for reparations for the shamefully low wages of today. br> -- D. Lewis br> McKenzie, Tennessee /p> p> Nice try, Paul, but no cigar. (Not even a Dominican!) The simple answer to the problem of "jobs Americans won't take" is "END WELFARE," When the alternative is starving, Americans will find themselves suitably motivated to take whatever job is available and offered to them. As long as we continue to fund sloth, Americans will consider themselves "too good" for certain jobs. This is only one of the many reasons why SOCIALISM ALWAYS FAILS. Need evidence? See: France. br> -- David Cowling br> Dallas, Texas /p>

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