The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 9 – 2
When I was a kid, my family decided to go off-grid and live off of solar power. When you first hear about solar power, you think “that’s a great idea, everyone should be doing this!” And it is – but it’s not as simple as you think.
As anyone who has ever lived off-grid will tell you, it’s not about pulling a plug out of the utility pole and plugging it into a solar panel. And I don’t mean that it requires lots of fancy electronics to turn sunlight into coffee. It does, but that’s not my point.
See, we were wasteful of power. By that I mean that we normal Americans; we used incandescent lights at night, used an air conditioner on hot days, had a microwave, refrigerator, electric oven, dryer, hot water heater, TV, and we rather imagined that all we had to do to be off grid was just to get some solar panels and keep on living.
But that’s not possible. Well, not practical anyway. See, there’s a limited amount of power you can get from the sun – or from wind, or whatever. But what’s even more limited is your ability to store it. Batteries are expensive, and a cinder block sized battery only stores enough power to last a few minutes with the typical American usage.
Successfully going off-grid is not about a change of supply; it’s about a change of demand. When you convert to solar, what really converts is how you live. How you think about power and usage. You learn not to leave lights on you don’t need. Not to use an air conditioner when a fan will work. Not to heat water with electricity, but with gas or, better yet, with the sun itself. To dry clothes with wind, not power.
But these things come with inconveniences; solar heated water only works in the afternoon, and only on sunny days. Clothes dried by the wind are crusty and stiff. Sometimes the sun or wind disappears for weeks and you have to forego hot showers, hot food, and greatly curtail all usage, just to keep the refrigerator running.
Now, it is possible to live on solar and not change your life at all, if you’re in a sunny area and have, say, $100,000 to drop. Or you could live on solar and radically change your consumption habits for, say $20,000. In either case, it will take decades to recoup your investment, but in the long run, it is a better way.
And since this is all the rage these days – mostly among people who haven’t done it – there’s a lesson to be shared here. Today governments are trying to get completely weaned off of fossil fuel, and trying to go green, by substituting solar power for coal; wind for diesel. By supplying current demand with more sustainable supplies. And in principle, I support this; after all, we are supposed to dress and keep the Earth, not turn it into a desert wasteland (Genesis 2:15, Revelation 11:18, etc.).
But governments face the same problem we did – in order to supply the demand of a wasteful, energy-drunk populous, it will take 5 or 10 times the supply it would require to power a more frugal people. This is why the green initiative is doomed to failure. It’s not quite impossible to provide enough power to waste the way we currently do, but it’s absurdly expensive and totally unnecessary if people could learn to turn off lights when they leave the room.
But you know this is just my icebreaker. For this principle exists throughout the world, in a thousand areas – for by trying to do the right thing the wrong way, the government is trying to fix by statute what only the wisdom of the individual soul can truly solve.
UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE
Take universal health care. Most of the rest of the developed world has some form of free, government-sponsored health care. You’re sick, you go to the doctor, it’s free. In some cases not quite free, but almost. This seems like a great idea, so recently the USA has tried to follow suit. But too late.
If the USA had done this in 1960, it would have been fine. Obamacare could totally have worked… then. Whether or not it was the right thing to do, then or now, is beside the point, it could have worked. But now it can’t.
See, right now to have a baby delivered in the USA costs, on average, over $30,000 if you don’t have insurance. This includes medical care during and after the pregnancy; the birth alone (shown on the chart below) costs about $11,000 by itself.
See the 2013 study by the advocacy group Childbirth Connection.
Compare this to say, the total cost of giving birth at the luxurious royal suite in London where the duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a British prince for “only” $9,000; the total costs for all care being about $18,000 out the door, a little over half what Americans would pay.
Meanwhile, the average woman in, say, Spain, pays about $2,000 for a hospital birth without insurance, in a private hospital! Again, this is the cost for a private hospital; to give birth in a public hospital is free due to their universal health care.
The point is, the cost of healthcare in the USA is criminal. It has shot up far in advance of inflation, fueled by greed, wastefulness, incompetence, and the costs of malpractice insurance to cover the incompetence.
And these costs of healthcare are despite the fact that the US has a lower life expectancy, lower surgical and disease survival rate, and overall lower quality of health than most developed nations that spend a half, or even a quarter of what we do.
Unfortunately, the American healthcare system is worth $3,000,000,000,000 a year – that’s three trillion, for those counting – which, if it were a country all to itself, would make American hospitals the world’s 5th largest economy. Simply put, it’s a mafia we can’t stop going to, and they know it. So they charge whatever they can get away with.
And this leads back to my metaphor; having the government try to negotiate with a lobby the size of the 5th richest country in the world, to reduce their prices when they know we don’t have any other option than to use them is impossible. They hold all the cards, and most of the money. So the only alternative is to have medical insurance.
But here again we have the solar panel problem; having the government subsidize health care costs might work if health care cost 1/8 of what it does, as it did in 1960; Perhaps not well, but that is more like what, say, New Zealand pays for it.
Trying to buy enough “solar panels” to fund the current cost of health care is not quite impossible – but it might as well be. Because if we do manage to do it, we’ll bankrupt everyone in the process. We’d have health care, but nowhere to live and nothing to eat.
I’m not endorsing hospitals; nor am I endorsing insurance or Obamacare or various versions of it. This is not even about the solution to the problems, because the only solution that will truly work is scrapping the entire system, with the flawed assumptions it was built upon, and starting over – because, as with solar panels, the solution is taking personal responsibility for your health. But that’s another very large topic we won’t go into now.
NATIONWIDE MINIMUM WAGE
The same sort of people who argue for universal health care also argue for a minimum wage that allows everyone to have the basic necessities of life. And I agree, that’s a great idea, and that concern for our fellow man should require us to do something about this (Deuteronomy 15:11).
The Bible itself, NT included, encourages giving to the poor (Galatians 2:10), and setting aside a third tithe for them every third year (Deuteronomy 14:28-29). There were restrictions on this, however, and God may not always define “poor” the same as we might (Deuteronomy 15:11, 2 Thessalonians 3:10).
On the other hand… I’ve been poor a lot in my life, and I’ve known a lot of poor people. I know people who have always been living paycheck to paycheck; I’ve seen them with good jobs, but no matter how much they make, they’re ALWAYS poor.
Forcing employers to provide enough money to keep wasteful people from starving is, like solar panels, not quite impossible – but it would bankrupt them in the process. Because the reason most of them are poor is because they don’t know how to manage their money (Proverbs 10:4).
I’ve never know anyone who was poor because of what they made – they’re poor because of what they spend (Psalms 37:25). They want it, they have the money in their pocket, so they buy it – just like any beast. These are the people for whose lustful eyes checkout aisles are filled with useless trinkets and overpriced lighters and candy.
Most people never think about how much chips and beer cost compared to beans and potatoes. They never think about buying a case of beer instead of buying one at a time. They never ask themselves if they really need a new phone, or Netflix, or games.
Guaranteeing such beasts $15 an hour to spend on these wasteful luxuries is the wrong way to solve society’s problems. They need to be taught to economize, not to be given enough money so they don’t have to.
People making current (2021) federal minimum wage, after taxes, earn about $250 a week. That’s a thousand dollars a month for the lowest paying job there is. And many minimum wage earners live with parents, have second job, or have another wage earner (or two or three) in the house to share costs.
Now that’s not a lot of money, to be sure, but my family has often lived on less than that, even when we didn’t have to. In fact, I’m pretty sure we’ve lived on a third of that (we lived in a camper, so didn’t have lodging expenses per se).
Now sure, it’s a lot harder to make ends meet if you’ve got kids – but that, too, was a choice a wiser person might not have made. Is it society’s fault that you had more kids than you can pay for? Or had them before you could afford to support them? (Proverbs 24:27).
So in spite of most poor people having much more money than we had, I know many people who just can’t ever make ends meet. Usually, because they stretched those ends too far apart by making bad decisions, and buying foolish things.
I notice an awful lot of “poor” people who manage to find money to own dogs; get tattoos; buy jewelry; eat in restaurants. Wasteful things they don’t need (Proverbs 21:17). First learn not to waste; then buy luxuries when you won’t miss the money (Proverbs 23:19-21).
First get a job, then make a life, then start your family. Is it God’s fault if you did those in the wrong order, and it made life hard… like He told you it would?
Surely by now you’ve seen my point; the solution is not to buy more solar panels or to subsidize healthcare or to give everyone fistfuls of money every month… the solution is to teach people to live more efficiently. Teach them to need less.
A PROPER SOLUTION
True though these things are, this world can’t be fixed. The government is run by the 1% as it has always been, and they are not going to make laws that redistribute their own wealth. They’ll redistribute the wealth of the middle class, but never the upper class.
And we’re not going to get clean energy unless and until it makes important people more money than fossil fuels do. The medical profession isn’t going to turn loose on its stranglehold on three trillion dollars. Poor people aren’t going to say “no, don’t give me free money, it’s my own fault I’m poor, I need to learn to make the best of what I have!” (Philippians 4:11-12).
Instead they’ll always vote for people who promise them more money, not realizing that it will only make employers automate them out of a job. Not realizing free money will jack up inflation, making it even harder for these same poor people to afford basic staples.
So, in short, the world is doomed. At the very least, the USA is doomed. We’re hurtling over the cliff on an unfinished bridge to nowhere, and we’re desperately trying to add track to the end faster than we approach it. Society continues as long as people maintain their faith in our currency; when that ends, so does our society.
But then, if the Earth was fixable, Christ wouldn’t have to come back. And so there is no real solution to the problems in the Middle East, the immigrant crisis, the healthcare problem, living wage and fair housing and affordable medication and so on.
No solution that wouldn’t break other systems even more (Isaiah 1:5). It’s built on a rotten foundation and cannot be repaired without Jesus destroying the whole world and starting over from scratch (Revelation 20:4). And yet, if you are to be among those people pictured there, you’ll need to understand exactly what is wrong with the world so you can go about fixing it!
Because these problems do have solutions, solutions that would work now, in this world, without divine intervention. Take the Syrian immigrant crisis in Europe of the 2010s, or the Mexican-American border crisis of the 2020s.
There are solutions to these things… but not solutions that the world would ever consider. The things I’m about to suggest will never happen, and couldn’t happen until someone had absolute power over a nation, as the saints will in the millennium.
That said, if it could be done, it would work. And this is the kind of thing the new government Jesus sets up will do. The kind of thing you might need to do someday… and the kind of thing you need to understand today.
IMMIGRANT VS. INVADER
Today, we are told to by the media to embrace immigrants, illegal or otherwise, because “the USA is a nation of immigrants”. And that’s not really true. The USA is a nation of invaders. See, an immigrant is someone who visits your country and stays because he loves the culture. Because he wants to be a part of that culture.
For example, I love Italy. I like the food, the lifestyle, the wine, the language, the people, and the food (worth saying twice). If I were to immigrate to Italy, it would be because I wanted to be an Italian. I would eat Italian foods, and I would very rarely prepare nachos or meatloaf in my Tuscan villa.
If I had wanted those things, I’d have stayed in my own country, where chili and pot roast are easier to find the ingredients for. I’ve already learned to speak Italian, and if I were to have kids in Italy they would be raised speaking Italian.
I would teach them English too, of course, since it’s the global language. But if I moved there from a country that didn’t speak a globally useful language, like, say, Thailand, my children would not be taught my language.
I would have left that country for a reason, and there is no reason to confuse them by teaching them a language they don’t need. In this example, I am an immigrant. But when the pilgrims came to America in the 1600s and 1700s, they were not immigrants.
They did not want to become Indians, learn the local language, adopt their religion. They wanted to take their land, take their wealth, and, if necessary, displace or kill them. These are invaders, and invaders always live by the code that “might makes right” and “to the victor go the spoils”.
No white man went to Africa, Asia, or South America because he loved the culture; they went there to secure access to spices, gold, slaves, or whatever had value. Because they were invaders. Invaders proudly maintain their heritage while sending most of their earnings back to their own country. They rarely bother to learn the language. They don’t adopt the local religion. They don’t love the native customs, laws and casseroles.
Now when a Mexican sees that there are better jobs and more comfort in the USA, he naturally lusts after them; so would I. He doesn’t love democracy, apple pie, Protestantism or the English language; he just wants a better life for himself, better economic prospects for him and his future. Can you blame him?
But if he illegally sneaks across the border and gets a job, he is not an immigrant. He is an invader. Like the white man who settled Australia or South Africa, he doesn’t change a single thing about himself. He is simply here for the money. For the opportunities. And that, I contend, is the hallmark of an invader, not an immigrant.
Now if you can’t blame him for that… can you really blame the white man for doing the same thing? Or said better, if the white man was wrong to steal the wealth of Africa, isn’t the brown man equally wrong to steal the wealth of America?
The Mexican had no right to invade the other country; no justification to siphon off their wealth, displace an American job, raise the cost of housing and bring his own ideas about religion, dress, food, and music; he did it because he could.
Now clearly, this violates the golden rule, just as the white man repeatedly did; for knowing he wouldn’t want to be invaded, he invaded the homelands of others. Of course, he justifies this saying “they would have done it to me”. Which is absolutely true, they would have done it, and have done it; just don’t pretend he’s any better than them.
RIGHT OR WRONG
The rights and wrongs of this are debatable; what we took from the Indians and bought from the Mexican government, they are taking back because they can. And they have every right to take back what we took from others. And yet… that makes him no better than the colonizers he claims owe him reparations.
Neither side has the moral high ground here. It’s just that now America is weak as a culture and as a society and so now the tables are turned and they are invading us, which we richly deserve as punishment for our national sins and abuses (Deuteronomy 28:43-45).
God gave the white man the power to take these lands, not because they were white, but because they had the Bible. Because they were more righteous at the time, by the rules of the Bible, than the natives. If that’s no longer the case… then the natives deserve to take them back (2 Chronicles 33:9).
So I don’t take issue with their right to invade the USA if they can. I take issue with calling this process “immigration”. An immigrant is a person who comes to a country for moral, cultural, or ideological reasons. An invader is one who comes there for financial or territorial reasons.
When a Syrian refugee comes to, say, Germany today, they keep their culture, their language, their religion and pass them on to their children, and their children’s children. They multiply, and never assimilate to the local culture. Thus, over time, the nation becomes divided between the natives, and the invaders (Daniel 2:41-42).
Sooner or later, the friction between these people will cause a war – whether through words, ideologies, or weapons, the stronger will win, and the weaker will diminish or disappear. This is just the way of things, and it’s not always a bad thing (John 3:30).
So when an East Indian’s relatives buy him a hotel in the USA, and he comes here, barely learns English, keeps his food, his religion, his culture, and does nothing in our country except siphon the money back to his relatives in India, he is an invader.
But when a Russian family came to the US in the early 1900s, fleeing persecution, their children didn’t learn Russian. It was never spoken again. These were immigrants. They were American, proud of it, and never looked back.
They didn’t think of themselves as Russian-American, they were simply American. Because our culture was stronger, nobler, and worthy of their pride. Today it simply isn’t (Isaiah 5:1-16). No nation in history has been as blessed as we, and no nation in history fits this chapter better.
If God breaks down the hedge, then let the invaders come; if Babylon comes to surround America, the true Christian will be first in line to surrender to them (Jeremiah 21:7-10). Because they deserve the blessings of God more than we do today, for they are more righteous than we!
IMMIGRATING TO ISRAEL
God’s system forbade an immigrant from entering the temple, and thus from being a full member of society, until the third generation (Deuteronomy 23:7-8). He also required circumcision, the formal entering into of the Old Covenant (Exodus 12:48).
Now this allows us to deduce quite a bit, because if, say, an Ethiopian came to Israel with his family, and lived in an Ethiopian neighborhood, sharing his culture and intermarrying with each other, then this would hardly make any sense.
So what if you had lived three generations in the “little Ethiopia” section of Jerusalem; how does that qualify you to enter God’s temple? In three generations his grandson would still be just as Ethiopian as he was, in every sense.
So the only way this makes sense is if God expected those three generations to fully assimilate themselves and their offspring – presumably through intermarriage, but certainly through adopting the religion of God (Leviticus 18:26).
Now that would have required learning the language of God. Because let’s face it, it’s impossible to live and work in a society in which you don’t speak the language unless you’re surrounded by other invaders from your own culture to form your own subculture.
So let’s say a Syrian wants to come to the USA and become a citizen. We can say no, and seem (and be) heartless and selfish about it. There is a humanitarian responsibility here, which we can support in the Bible (1 John 3:17, Leviticus 19:34, Luke 10:33-37, etc.).
So we could welcome this probable invader with open arms; who will team up with others from his country in some neighborhood in Sacramento or someplace, and undertake the enormous challenge of making a life in a strange new country, doing the most menial and awful jobs for terrible pay, while living in squalor because he can’t make enough to feed his family. Yet still, probably be better off than in Syria.
In these ghettos, his subculture will reinforce their own culture and become a snare to ours (Judges 2:1-4). Note that they are not snares because of their skin color, but because of their culture and their ideas about God. Those are the snares; but those things can be changed.
Our Syrian will start reaping the benefits of our civilization such as education, unemployment payments, and so on, while probably not paying taxes (or at least, not much), and giving us – as a nation – nothing at all of benefit except by very slightly increasing the housing crisis, the healthcare crisis, and of course – the immigrant crisis.
But the Bible has more to say about immigration; for one, he has to keep our religious laws (Leviticus 24:22, Exodus 23:9-13, etc.). Would a Syrian still want to come to the USA, knowing he would have to keep the Sabbath? And work on Friday? Only if he was truly an immigrant.
So God puts a price on citizenship; the price of becoming like His people. Now clearly, America is not ancient Israel, and we don’t keep the Sabbath, so why should the immigrant? Yet, the principle remains that the stranger had to commit, by circumcision, to abide by the statutes of God’s laws to live in Israel (Galatians 5:3).
TODAY
We are not of this world, nor of this country, and what happens to America or Chile or South Africa or Mexico are really not our problem (John 17:14-16). And yet we are in the world, and we can learn from their mistakes.
So how should a righteous OC America, faced with say, a humanitarian crisis in Syria or Guatemala, have dealt with it? In the not-even-old-covenant sense of the USA today, should we let refugees in? The correct answer is neither yes nor no.
It’s more like “how badly do they want to become a citizen?” In other words, the solution is to turn this problem: “how to give asylum to a citizen you don’t want”, into this solution: “how to make that prospective citizen earn his way”.
And the answer is easy; he would become an indentured servant. Now that sounds very, very bad today, so let me explain. Indentured servitude has many forms, and most of them have been horribly abused. But in its simplest form, a person who has no money but owes a debt, or needs to pay passage, becomes a slave until that debt is paid.
Again, slavery is a bad word today; the Bible uses the word “servant bought with money”, which as you learned in the previous lesson is quite different from slavery – but this term is a mouthful. So let’s use the word “bondservant” from here on out, as in Leviticus 25:39.
A bondservant is someone who, whether from theft, poverty, or a desperate need for money, sells the only thing he has left – himself – for a specific measure of time, usually not exceeding 7 years, during which time he is fed, clothed, and made to work at whatever his purchaser wants done.
So someone wanting to immigrate, having nothing to offer, would need to earn it by indenturing themselves; if Syria really is as bad as they say, this should be an easy choice, because in God’s world, no one can be a slave forever unless they choose to be (Exodus 21:5-6).
Now this needn’t mean picking cotton or breaking rocks. It might, but it would be better to think of them as employees whom you don’t have to pay; servants who do whatever jobs need done around the farm, shop, or country.
Since their term is strictly limited, and their treatment is guaranteed to be humane in the laws of Moses, use the Golden Rule: would you prefer to make your life work in Syria, trusting in your own gods, your own wisdom, your own people’s strengths to fix your own country… or, having lost faith in all those things, would you leave everything behind to become an Israelite?
Having absolutely nothing to lose, and seeing how prosperous Israel is because of the law, would you leave behind your gods, your culture, your language, to have a chance at a better life? And since you have absolutely nothing to offer your adopted country, the only tangible asset is seven years of your life. Is it worth that, for your later years and your children’s betterment?
BUT WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
The reason why the immigrant crisis is a problem is that we don’t look on it as an opportunity. Letting people with no marketable skills nor even a good grasp of the language into the country, then finding them a job which pays them money to live on, is difficult and impractical as Germany has found out in recent years.
Far better would be to create new work that they could do to help the country. The state always has jobs that need to be done, jobs which taxpayers have to pay for. Highway repair and maintenance; ecological repair, disaster cleanup like hurricanes and fire and floods.
Paying people minimum wage to hold up a shovel, as so many do in highway crews, is an inefficient method. But what can you do? You have to pay them a living wage, and many have no other skills; (and they’re not even that good at holding up the shovel).
But let’s say a few hundred Syrians came to the US as immigrants. They agree to be indentured for 7 years, per the laws in the Bible. They would need housing, and food. So find a piece of undeveloped land in, say, Nevada and have them use labor-intensive, environmentally friendly building methods like rammed earth, strawbale, plastic bottle-and-adobe, used tire-and-can, or any of a number of other ways of creating housing for themselves to live in.
Others could be set to working on labor intensive, but basically free methods of hydroponic farming, passive solar heating and cooling, auto maintenance and repair, food preparation, recycling and upcycling, and any other thing that would be needed.
Periodically, the immigrants would be reviewed at their jobs and encouraged to switch to a different industry within the project, to give them the widest possible knowledge base and a chance to pick a career they like the best.
They would do this without pay, with mandatory English classes, and whatever schooling they lack to equal at least a high school education. And there will be tests at 6 months – compare to the idea of the feast seasons with their attendant sacrifices and lectures (Deuteronomy 31:11).
If they can’t pass these tests two or three times, they can be deported (Titus 3:10) – which, again, if Syria is so bad, will be a powerful motivation to change their ways. And if they have repeated behavior problems or other issues integrating into American society, they are sent home.
Those who stay, stay because they earned it. Those who leave, leave because they weren’t worthy to be one of us (1 John 2:19). That way we’re not giving anything to them, and they’re not giving anything to us; both sides gain in every way. If it’s not mutually beneficial, then it’s not a good solution.
And once a neighborhood is built, they move on to building a new one, while the old one is sold at auction and applied to their maintenance, and the excess is set aside so that, when their term is over, they are not “sent away empty” (Deuteronomy 15:12-18). Thus, when they graduate, they are fully ready to begin a new life.
NOT A NEW IDEA
Back in the Great Depression, the government hired unemployed young men and put them in the CCCs (Civilian Construction Corps) and they build the national parks as we know them, which are now falling into disarray because of the expense of maintenance which the plan above would solve.
The CCCs, which operated from 1933 to 1942, had up to 300,000 men employed in it, who were given shelter, lodging, and clothing and earned the equivalent of $570 a month in today’s money (roughly half of minimum wage today).
But with a catch – $475 (5/6ths of their check) had to be sent home to their families (who, obviously, were poor American citizens, which kept the benefits in the country). This helped many families survive the Great Depression, which was far worse than anything seen before or since in this country.
It was a popular program and did a lot of good, but it was ended in 1942 so the money (and the young men) could be spent on the war effort, and after the war there weren’t enough low-income people to make it necessary. It has since been largely forgotten about.
But the principle can easily be adapted to immigration, or to anyone unemployable today. With this program, suddenly we would have a large, cheaply housed, efficiently and healthily fed, well trained labor pool who can be applied to beautifying public lands.
Building parks and picnic areas, and replacing the labor required in many agencies such as FEMA and the NFS, BLM, DOT, and so on all at almost no burden to the taxpayer. Compare this to the costs of giving stimulus checks, or various versions of welfare.
Then after their seven years, they would be given full citizenship, enough money to start a life, they would speak English like they were born here, have experience at a wide variety of fields, with years of experience in their favorite one. There would be no halfway houses, no immigrant poverty, no criminal element.
Employers would eagerly hire out of this job pool knowing a person’s reliability, responsibility, and commitment to making a life in the USA work. Everyone would know that anyone who went through this program could be trusted and was competent, or they wouldn’t have finished the program and would have been sent home!
THE LAW SHALL GO FORTH
But if they prefer to go back to their own country and teach them the skills and lessons learned here, they would go home with a decent chunk of money to go back and build a better life out of the mud in the desert because they’ve already done it here and know firsthand everything necessary to make it work!
Under these circumstances, I think many would choose to return home and live well with their own people, elevating them to a better quality of life, and teaching Biblical values, rather than to establish themselves as Americans. I think I would, were the tables turned.
But either way, they went from an immigrant with no choices, to an immigrant with no worries about lodging, food, or employment, and finally to a citizen with two great choices. Under these circumstances, everyone wins.
The right wing with its “stranger go home” will have nothing to complain about when the results of their work are visible in every national park, every roadside rest area, under every bridge and monument, all at virtually no cost.
Likewise on the left, this will ease the housing problem, it will reduce the number of federal programs paid for with taxes – in fact, it should generate income into the treasury, and allow more to be spent on programs like welfare for the truly disabled, all while reducing taxes for the right!
No one could deny that this person hasn’t contributed as much as anyone to being an American, and few would be so selfish as to deny them the rights and privileges thereof. Because everyone will know they paid to be here.
Paid with their labor, paid with seven years of their life, but mostly earned their place in America by breaking their spirit and imbibing ours. This is the kind of thing God meant in Micah 4:1-2, and this is one way in which it could be done even now.
And this need not be just for foreigners. Anyone who wants a better life can join the program. No more poverty, no more people who can’t find a job; there would always be a job here. And very little need for universities, either, since these programs would be teaching most important trades by doing them.
SUMMARYAND CONCLUSION
This will close the door on invasion, but welcome immigration – and spread a culture of righteousness and hard work around the world, to all the… shall we say, less industrious cultures of the world. We couldn’t be accused of being harsh when we offer open arms to anyone willing to earn their way.
Every “successful” state could have this program, such as Germany or Britain, and in this way the developed countries could actually benefit WHILE training people to develop and benefit their own countries.
This solves the problem of a minimum wage the right way – by teaching people how to live on less, not forcing employers to give them more. By making them actually worth more than minimum wage, not passing laws to make them worth more.
In passing, it makes us much better able to compete with other countries, without the use of tariffs, by having an almost free labor pool to help the skilled labor pool work more efficiently while teaching the cheap labor pool to be skilled.
In passing, it solves the green energy problem, by making the labor-intensive methods of alternative energies, recycling and passive solar paid for by immigrant labor, who in turn can take the lessons they learned back to India or Vietnam, countries which desperately need to understand the consequences of garbage.
I’ve been all over the world, and the world is not that full. The world is wasted, with yards that require water for grass and produce nothing in return. With shade trees that don’t produce fruit, when they could just as easily be pecans, olives, or peaches. There is plenty of land, in plenty of countries, to allow everyone to prosper and be self-sufficient.
But only if they learn to need less, to waste less, to be happy with less, and to love their neighbor as they love themselves. But only if they first become servants of the servants of God; which is why the one verse for this lesson is Zechariah 8:20-23.