A modest proposal

I was reading a well-footnoted paper called Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the origin of war, and at the end of the otherwise very well thought out paper, the author wandered off on a tangent, but it is a beautiful tangent:

An unacceptable--even mad proposal--would be to swap out the whole Iraqi population with Texans and rapture believers. It's not impossible from a logistics point of view (the US moves 25 million people through its airports in about a month). The Iraqis would get a place where the power was on all day-- which would improve their "income per capita" perception enough to shut off support for war and related disruption. The Texans would have oil, which would certainly make them happy, and with no fighting they could patch the country up in a year or two. If there really are as many people looking for the rapture as the polls show and some rapture leader got the idea that being closer to the Holy Land was a good idea, a voluntary population swap might be oversubscribed.

But then what would you do? The US doesn't need a 51st state in the Mid East full of people looking for the rapture no matter how much oil it has.

Sounds like a winner to me, and just imagine how great Texas could be with no Jesists, and all the hummus you can eat!