Posted on 02/09/2007 11:45:59 AM PST by bondjamesbond
According to a congressman's wife who attended a Republican women's luncheon yesterday, Karl Rove explained the rationale behind the president's amnesty/open-borders proposal this way: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."
There should be no need to explain why this is an obscene statement coming from a leader in the party that promotes the virtues of hard work, thrift, and sobriety, a party whose demi-god actually split fence rails as a young man, a party where "respectable Republican cloth coat" once actually meant something. But it does seem to be necessary to explain.
Rove's comment illustrates how the Bush-McCain-Giuliani-Hagel-Martinez-Brownback-Huckabee approach to immigration strikes at the very heart of self-government. It is precisely Rove's son (and my own, and those of the rest of us in the educated elite) who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they're young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government. It's not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don't want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them.
As Tocqueville wrote: "In the United States professions are more or less laborious, more or less profitable; but they are never either high or low: every honest calling is honorable." The farther we move from that notion, the closer we come to the idea that the lawyer is somehow better than the parking-lot attendant, undercutting the very foundation of republican government.
This is why the president's "willing worker/willing employer" immigration extravaganza is morally wrong — it's not just that it will cost taxpayers untold billions, or that it will beggar our own blue-collar workers, or that it will compromise security, or that it will further dissolve our sovereignty. It would do all that, of course, but most importantly it would change the very nature of our society for the worse, creating whole occupations deemed to be unfit for respectable Americans, for which little brown people have to be imported from abroad. In other words, mass immigration, even now, is moving us toward an unequal, master-servant society.
To borrow from Lincoln, our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Saudi Arabia, for instance.
One does and one doesn't. Strange world isn't it.
Surely not!
NOT on FR!!!!
It went out with the moral ethic....
It also makes you appreciate the value of money, respect the process by which you got it, teaches you how to handle it wisely, and makes you bitterly resent politicains who want to steal if from you "for the common good."
I had some jobs when I was a kid that would make the guy from Dirty Jobs cough up a lung. You can bet mucking about in that kind of work was a powerful incentive for me to get a good and marketable education.
The sheltering of one's children from reality is called "spoiling" for good reason.
It's a shame what happens to these poor-in-spirit rich kids. There's always lawyering and government work, I suppose. ;^)
I don't know. I just did a search and posted it.
"Yes, and most Americans at some time in their lives (except the very rich) work at menial or unskilled labor jobs. It makes you appreciate your job later in life when you use your mind rather than muscle."
And some can even use both at the same time. ;)
You'll get no flames for me. I fully support legal immigration. I think that if people want to come here, and are willing to work hard and take on the responsibilities of citizenship, we should make that possible.
What I don't support is a two-tier system, where there is the Citizen Class and a Sub-Class of Guest Workers.
so in Karl's case, I sit corrected.
With my kid, I have her out in the garden in the summer picking tomatoes. Better than that, I have her weeding the tomatoes. I hate weeding.
She makes the beds inside the house, too. She's too young to be working outside the house, but when she is old enough, I fully expect her first job will be much the same as the work she has been doing for me.
A Google search of "Karl Rove + net worth" shows him at $3.65 million in 2005.
Not exactly a huge fortune but I doubt little Karl Jr. will ever be forced to pick a tomato.
Ok, thank you.
"...I have no interest in installing another hot water heater, so it's easier for me to spend money to get someone else to do it."
If you lived where I do, the city doesn't allow you to install/replace your own water heater. (Although I think of if more as a guideline!).
I remember working cleaning out dorms when I was in college. One day, while we were up to our elbows in the kind of disgusting garbage you will only find in an undergraduate male dorm, my co-worker turned to me and said we had to go out for a beer that evening, because he just finished his doctorate... in Paleontology.
Sometimes you do what you gotta do.
I guess slavery's cheerleaders never really went away.
In college, I had an instructor that picked tomatoes, growing up in Kali. What's the problem? Other than maybe a dislike for tomatoes afterwards...
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