The United States should sell Texas to the highest bidder

With the short time that is left available to me, I will endeavour to duly address his two main contentions in turn. However, before I do so, I should like to defer to my opponent's far superior knowledge and experience of American politics but ask him to clarify why I might be wrong in understanding that there was already a substantial budget deficit under the previous Republican regime when President George W. Bush decided to bail out the failed investment banks with hundreds of millions of American taxpayers' dollars? Where I do concur with my opponent, by the way, is that China would be the most likely winner of the bid to purchase Texas. Notwithstanding, I neither agree that this arrangement would be immoral nor impractical as my opponent suggests. Legal issues aside – constitutions are subject to interpretation and amendment as required - the Texans cannot rely on moral precedents to support their case to prevent the United States from selling them off. Firstly, if put to a national referendum of US citizens who were given the choice between increased taxes and reduced public services on one hand, and letting Texas go on the other hand, I forecast that most people would vote with their pockets and put their own family's interests before the interests of some gunslingers in Arsekicker, TX, or wherever. Regarding the morality of allowing Texans to move to other parts of the US prior to the sale of the state or take their chances under a new regime, this represents a very civilised dilemma compared to the one that the original inhabitants of Texas – the American Indians – were presented with. Their choice was either to vacate their land or be exterminated, in the most brutal and unwholesome fashion, and by the very decedents of the present-day claimants of the state of Texas. The cruel and unusual manner in which the Indians were wiped off the map included infecting members of the tribes with infectious diseases [1] and sending them back into their communities to spread the malaise. This was o top of the usual guns against bows and arrows massacres that took place at regular intervals. In fact, by the late 1800's, almost all the Indian Americans had been exterminated, and those few thousand that had survived the relentless onslaught were deported to Oklahoma. [2] Moving on to practicalities, it is true (I know because I am a frequent visitor to Texas) that the locals can be an excitable, trigger-happy bunch who are very set in their (very charming) ways. When I first visited Dallas, nearly twenty years ago, I thought the locals dressed up in ten-gallon hats and tasselled-boots for the benefit of tourists. However, I quickly realised, on visiting some outlying rural counties, that this was really how they chose to dress. It was like visiting a Hollywood movie set! I like Texas, much of my family live in San Antonio, but I am slightly nervous of the amount of guns that are in evidence – as my opponent noted. I mean, if I have a disagreement over politics in a pub in London and it comes to blows, the worst that can happen is I go home with a bloody nose. Not so in Texas, where I daren't open my mouth for fear of upsetting some slack-jawed yokel with an Uzi in his jacket! But let's not forget, they are just civilians – albeit with guns – and the American armed forces would be repatriated to the US prior to the sale of Texas. Furthermore, the Chinese know how to deal with such troublemakers – remember Tiananmen Square? But I really don't think it will come to that. Do you remember the early nineties when Britain handed Hong Kong back to China? Lots of Hong Kong people feared living under the perceived yoke of the People's Republic and moved to London, Vancouver and San Francisco. But their fears were unfounded. Today, life goes on unadulterated in Hong Kong – the Chinese are astute enough not to interfere too much with the Hong Kong people's business and family lives and I don't see any reason why they wouldn't adopt the same attitude to the future Chinese province of Texas. Thank you. [1] . http://www.aigenom.com... ]2} . http://en.wikipedia.org...