I’ve decided to start referring to pretty much everyone I know as “illegal drivers”, since I’m pretty sure everyone I know regularly violates the speed limit laws. Even if some don’t, the generalization is “true enough” that I won’t worry about lumping people in who it doesn’t apply to.
My next step is to lobby to have speeding (which is already illegal) made into a felony. While I’m at it, I’m going to tack on a bit about making it a felony for the gas and automobile companies to aid in these criminal acts by supplying those rotten illegals with the means to perform their nefarious activity, undermining the safety of our roads and our society.
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Oh please….get a life.
with a
on top.
I have a better idea. Instead of making speeding a felony, and punishing those that aide those rotten illegals, we could eliminate all speeding laws and create a program where those who speed on a regular basis could recieve gas vouchers enabling them to speed with greater ease.
While were at it we could take the words of a minority from one side of an issue and magnify them so that they become the words of everyone from that side of the issue.
“i” before “e” except after “c”
r-e-c-e-i-v-e.
I should proofreed before I submit comments rather than after.
Yeah, the cross-analogy doesn’t quite hold up, since one of the things we’re talking/joking about (speeding) actually *is* dangerous to other people, and hence it makes sense that it should be a crime.
Since you referred to that option, I would be totally fine with abolishing illegal immigration by making all immigrants legal (as I’ve talked to Nick about before).
But, see, the problem with that is you’d still have all of the problems that the anti-immigration crowd is complaining about right now, the severity of which I have doubts about, but that’s another story.
The legal status of workers entering the country to fill cheap labor jobs is irrelevant when there are employers willing to pay people less than legal wages to do said jobs.
Regardless of whether the workers are in the country legally or not, the employers will continue to pay them under the table in order to maximize their profits in pursuit of their personal “American dreams”. They would therefore still not be paying taxes and would still be using up all our precious resources, as some claim that they are doing now.
It’s important to note that even if the government were able to actually “solve” the problem and keep illegal immigrants out, (which they never could, at least not without seriously impeding on the freedoms of us “legal” americans), the employers that are currently relying on illegally cheap wages as a part of their business model will not be willing to part with their profits so easily. They will either find a way to continue to pay people less than a living wage (in which case we’re in the same boat as if those workers were “illegal” aliens), or they will raise their prices to compensate, which we will all end up paying for.
It’s also important to note that although Jared’s last statement sounds like it’s based on something substantive, it’s actually pure speculation.
Do you think that everyone who is waiting to become an American citizen should also be given citizenship?
Do you think that there should be any border at all?
Those questions are not meant to presuppose anything. They are honest questions.
meh … yawn.
My speculation above is based on the way people run businesses. I’m not predicting the future, just drawing obvious conclusions. Do you really believe that if the millions of “illegal” immigrants were gone that most of the businesses that employ them would just say “oh well” and keep on going the way they are now but paying their workers double (or more) than what they pay them now? That isn’t realistic.
What I think is much more “speculative” is the claims about how much “illegal” immigrants COST our economy, because for one thing they are usually not based on hard numbers and secondly (if they are) they usually do not balance it with the positive effects on the economy, which I attempted to do in my comment above.
Re: the citizenship thing - I’m not a huge fan of the concept of “citizenship” anyway, but realistically I wouldn’t have a problem with that. Granting citizenship and not having a border are two different things, though.
Nate, sorry to bore you. You asked for some political content, so I was just trying to oblige.
I don’t think we should round up the illegal immigrants and send them away, and I don’t think that even if they were all suddenly gone, that business would stop paying the wages that they do. They would just find new people to exploit. I do think that with proper enforcement of wage laws and labor laws, businesses would change how they run things.
I don’t really object to the speculation. I was just making a joke about your prefacing of the speculation with the statement, “It’s important to note”, making it sound more factual. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of studies showing the actual impact of increased wages on consumer prices. The only thing I could find was from the Center for Immigration Studies, which claims to be independent and non-partisan. They say that produce prices would be about 6 percent higher in the first couple of years and level off at around 3 percent after that.
Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly what I said above as one option of what the businesses would do: find other people to exploit and pay low wages to, which would still lead to all the problems that people refer to when they’re speaking of illegal immigrants. That’s what I’m trying to say: all the issues that are supposedly caused by illegal immigration are actually caused by companies not paying people a fair / legal wage, and don’t really have anything to do with their status as immigrants, other than they’re more willing to take those illegal jobs.
It’s not just produce prices either, though; agriculture is number 5 on the list of top industries that employ illegal immigrants, behind things like health care, food service, and others that I’m forgetting right now.
But, given those numbers, I’d be pretty impressed with any company that could keep the price increases within 6% after having to pay so much more in labor, assuming that they don’t go find “legal” citizens to exploit in the same way they’re exploiting immigrants, and if they do that, we’re in the same boat with the same problems we’ve got now.
Why only the people who you know? I am convinced that everyone occasionally does illegal things as they drive, some more consistently than others. So then you should probably call everyone, not just the people you know, illegal drivers.
I think analogies are inadequate tools, to put it nicely. They never lead to conclusion on matters. They only create more points of disagreement, and, due to the definition of analogies, they are never any where near as complex as the real issue.
I understand that they are supposed to be used to make some kind of point concerning a larger issue, but usually they just make the side of the arguer seem less credible.
No, not just the people I know, but I was just saying that those are probably the only ones I would actually be calling “illegal” personally. Of course, the point was that everyone does it.
As for the “analogy” aspect of it, the original post was meant more as political humor than an actual analogy, but I would say that analogies can be useful tools in discussing real issues. Of course they will always have differences from the actual subject being discussed, but they can be useful in uncovering things like double standards in arguments. Of course you still have to evaluate them, and determine when (and if) they apply, or what specifics of the original issue would make them invalid, but I still think they can serve a useful purpose in at least causing you to take a different look at the issue being discussed.
I think that analogies should make the person making them think more than they anyone else think, because it is in those “differences from the actual subject being discussed” that arguments for the “other” side of the issue exist. Analogies point out just as many arguments for other sides of issues as they do for the side that they are meant to support.
Which is why they’re so great.