1. People moved to those “square states” to get away from people. It’s unfair to stack their states with people just because other areas are overcrowded.

2. That still doesn’t solve the problem of finite resources. The more people there are, regardless of where they live, the more drain there is on non-renewable resources. At the moment, that’s primarily petroleum, but it also extends to things like steel (which has an exorbitant price right now).

The goal here is to stabilize and reduce demand for such resources until we have a way to replenish or substitute for them, and until we have a way to reduce their impact on an increasingly unhealthy planet.

Essentially, what I”m arguing is that we have already reached and passed the sustainable population for the planet with the resources and technology we have. We need to stop having so many kids until we can get a handle on what two centuries of heavy industrialization and population growth will mean for the future.

So here’s what I think. There’s this government program I dislike called Teach for America. It’s there to snap up college kids that are still wet behind the years and don’t know they’re getting horn-swoggled, and to pretend that they’re fixing the problem with inner city schools. What they do is they speed you through the credential and hiring process so that all you need is a BA in the spring, and you can teach, at full salary, in the fall. The catch is you have to teach at one of the worst schools in the country (and you can pick) for two years. After that, you’ll have your credential and two years teaching under your belt, and you can leave. What they hope is that the kids in the program will think it’s too much work to leave, and they’ll stay–and it works (one of my girlfriend’s friends now lives in Arizona because that’s where her two year program was. I mean, Arizona!).

So here’s my question: Why not do that with everything else? Go to LA, New York, NOLA, Houston, and Miami and offer incentives to live in places like Wyoming, Montana, and Nebraska? Offer job-placement services, cheap housing (since any housing out there will be cheap, anyway), and other things like that. Additionally, this could work to help alleviate the immigration problem. Right now, we’ve got a quota, and a waiting list, and that’s it. So for those that immigrate legally, once their quota’s up, they go straight to a major metropolitan area. So why not do this: Set up a waiting list–like a four year waiting list. Tell those immigrating that if they want to come to the US, they have to sign up, and wait four years. HOWEVER, if they would like to agree to live and work in a place like Montana or Wyoming for two to four years, they have the option to enter the country right away.

Ta da!

Now, of course, the Republicans would complain about policing, the new bureaucracy (lord, how they despise new bureaucracy!), and that these people would simply move out to major metropolitan areas after the time limit. The same exact arguments can be made for Teach for America. And I’m sure they do train some bad teachers that shouldn’t be teaching, and that a number of teachers do leave their home school after two years. What they don’t count on, though, is that familiarity is often more important than living in a better place. And if they’ve got a job and cheap housing in a crime-free area, why would they want to leave? They can, of course, but I’d bet you’d get a lot more people settling in the underpopulated states than we have now.

So, that’s my idea. Send it off to the government. Tell them I give it my seal of approval.