I’m done, guys. If we’ve reached the stage of welfare-state decadence where it’s a selling point for a new entitlement that it discourages able-bodied people from working, there’s no reason to keep going. We’ve lost, decisively.This would be a good point to commission a poll. Are you really not working because you don't want a job, or because you can't find one? I'd like to know where the American people are on this. If it's the former, well, that's got consequences.
As a great man once said, remember me as I am — filled with murderous rage.
If it's the latter, maybe things could still be fixed. Of course, you're still poor from being unemployed, with no access to capital, skills that are degraded from being out of the workforce, and huge regulatory burdens including Obamacare keeping you from starting a business or getting a job with an existing one.
But at least we have a wheelbarrow.
5 comments:
Yeah--and all that unemployment insurance is an economic stimulus. And pajama boy and a so-so rapper can sell Obamacare.
They're parodying themselves, even though they're not self-aware enough to recognize it.
This is not cause for worry. Allahpundit would do well to put aside his apparently inchoate rage, and stay focused. The next four or five election cycles will tell the initial tale. After that, it'll be on how well we've taught our grandchildren.
Eric Hines
National Review declared years ago that if we could not repeal the sugar subsidy, we were truly in a new world politically, and conservatives had better adjust to it.
Liberals have done very well with partial victories that have permanent consequences. We should think like that, but we can't. We get caught up in standing on principle, which causes us to turn on our own too often. Yet when we don't do that and compromise, we seem to end up giving away the store. I have no solution, except that it is indeed a different world.
Now we see the clever kindness in the use of seemingly every administration policy to depress job formation. Jobs are a downer, man! People are unfairly forced to take McJobs to make ends meet, when they could be pursuing their bliss instead. All we have to do is tax the rich enough to pay the bills of everyone who'd rather weave baskets. Luckily, the rich inexplicably like working.
I say all this as a basket-weaver myself, or something very much like it, but at least I saved up money so I could be gloriously idle. That is, I worked twice as hard as was reasonable when I was young, so I could do as I liked when I was older.
Wonder what you think of Ace's post on the value of labor vs. idleness (and Monty's which inspired it).
Me? I think sometimes that's right and sometimes it's wrong. I know lots of grad students -- who would love to be more fully employed, or employed at all -- who are writing dissertations while idle. They're probably not creating the next great thing, but they probably are incrementally adding to the sum of human knowledge, and that's not nothing. I hear that Harry Potter, which I haven't read, was written on welfare.
On the other hand, the grad students probably do drink too much. But not a lot too much, because they can't afford it.
So there's that class issue, which really isn't about class in the usual American sense of wealth -- these people are poor as saints, and have been made poor precisely by pursuing higher education. Rather, it's about what kind of person they wanted to be. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to have a system that routed people like that to grad school, and found a way to pay them to incrementally add to human knowledge for a while.
That's probably what the White House is thinking about, but it's not what is going to be true for most people. It's not idle like a proofing yeast, in other words, left alone for a time so it can get ready to do the mighty work of raising the bread. It's idle like a swamp.
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