I trust you're enjoying the holiday season. This was my best Christmas ever. I'm house-sitting, and I didn't tell anyone where, so the entire day passed without incident or interruption - my idea of heaven. Ha bum hug, indeed.

Right after Boxing Day, however, all that changed and in the process I learned a lesson about the workings of the Bermuda economy, which I thought I'd pass on.

There would be no point in talking about saving today, anyway, since I'm sure you've maxed out your credit cards and the last thing you'd want to hear about right now is making sensible economic decisions. We'll get back to that next week.

The house I'm sitting is a massive affair, with a small apartment underneath.

The owners live downstairs and have rented out the house above to the chief executive of an insurance organisation and his wife, whom I count as pals.

Everyone left the Island for Christmas, but I like to stick around, so I was asked to house-sit and feed two dogs. I find dogs pointless in the extreme, but there we are.

Once the holidays were over, the cleaning lady arrived, with her husband in tow. She comes once a week and cleans both the upstairs and the downstairs.

While we were chatting, the gardening crew arrived, two gents from Sri Lanka. And so the five of us, none of whom earns the big bucks, formed a task force, assembled to look after the homes of those who do.

The owners of the property are Bermudian, obviously, but no one else I've mentioned is. We are all imported labour, here to make life easier for Bermudians.

If you were running a country, you could ask for nothing better than the production of many more jobs than the total number of your citizens. That way, everyone local who wants to work, can work. Plus, your citizens earn a share of the profit from the efforts of the foreigners.

Very few economies in the world achieve this state of grace. Of that tiny number, Bermuda is the only one I know of that has a problem with it.

The maths is easy enough to do.

A Bermudian couple has a home. They both work in jobs that have to do with counting the money of American companies with operations here in Bermuda. They pay their mortgage by charging foreigners a huge amount of rent, by global standards. They pay other foreigners to clean and maintain the property, which is work the Bermudians don't want to do themselves because they have busy lives and no time. (I'm the only freeloader in this equation, although I make my economic contribution to Bermuda in other ways.)

It's a situation in which everybody wins. The Bermudians win the most, which is as it should be, with Bermuda right behind them, since all of us pay income tax, sorry, tax on income, plus social insurance and all the other government taxes.

Bermudian grocery store owners, banks, restaurateurs, hairdressers, taxi drivers and all the other Bermudian businesses that we frequent are winners, because we have no choice but to visit those businesses if we live here.

Finally, the foreigners win too, because they have jobs, probably save some of their earnings, and have a chance to live here in paradise.

The cleaning crew, the landscapers and I number five in total. That means that, between us, we carry one government employee on our shoulders, almost certainly a Bermudian, who provides the government services to which we are only partially entitled.

We all use the roads, for instance, and have our trash collected. We all pay taxes, and someone has to collect them, count them and spend them on junkets overseas and all the other functions of government

That's fair. We share the pain. None of us have children in the public school system, however, nor will we be entitled to pensions, even though we pay in to them. That's OK, too, if you like that sort of thing. For foreigners, it's a cost of doing business.

Now, under such a system, you'd expect it to be the foreigners that would complain and the Bermudians who would sing long and loud about what a wonderful world they inhabit. Not so; in fact quite the reverse.

Most of the foreigners I know are deeply grateful to be here and to be able to share in building Bermuda. And most of the Bermudians I meet complain about the foreigners.

A fellow I met on the election trail two weeks ago even whined to me about foreigners coming to Bermuda and taking jobs away from Bermudians.

Ha! The fact is that foreigners create jobs for Bermudians, not vice versa. Whining about foreign workers is very much a national sport, rather like complaining about the rain, without which Bermudians also couldn't survive.

If foreigners were so rotten for the Bermuda economy, don't you think one of the governments would have banned them? They've managed to ban smoking because it's bad for you.

But the fact is that foreigners are good for Bermudians. As a new year beckons, I urge you to hug a foreigner every day and say: "Thanks for making my life easier. We really appreciate you being here and helping us achieve what we could not achieve on our own. We respect you deeply."

Now there's one New Year's resolution you'd never have to break. Try it. But however you might feel about foreigners in Bermuda, I wish you all the best for a happy and prosperous 2008.