You may have often heard it said that the work ethic is what makes America/Canada/Lower Slobbovia great. This is bullshit of course. The driving force of industry and commerce always has been and always will be laziness.It was all started by the very first hominid who suddenly decided "I'm tired of hunting woolly mammoths. Why don't I get some other guys to hunt the woolly mammoths for me? To reward them I'll give them half the meat!". That was the most profound idea ever hatched. Every other idea followed from that first one. Slavery for example, was not such a big step after that. In slavery, you give a quarter of the meat to the slave drivers (after all they don't really work, do they?) and keep 3/4 for yourself. The workers get nothing, as they are no longer working for reward, but to avoid punishment.
The driving force of the industrial revolution was inventing gadgets to do the work for you. Then you invent machines to build the gadgets to do the work for you.
Notice how all the really really highly paid people either don't work at all or do something questionable that doesn't really count as work? The bankers who collapsed the economy get bonuses of $100 million dollars a year. Sports stars get millions for playing sports. Rock starts get millions for playing songs. People who take out the garbage get nothing. People who build cars lose their jobs and their pensions. Farmers regularly end up paying out more than they take in. Their only reason for farming is to wait for the city boundary to swallow up their farm and then they can sit back and coast on the money.
The goal is not to be busy all the time, the goal is to make some other poor dumb bastard be busy all the time working for you (paraphrasing Gen. Patton.) So don't feel too sorry for me when you find out I'm retired and I do absolutely nothing at all. I have simply reached the Nirvana we have all been seeking since the original good idea 80,000 years ago.
The millenia-old law continues to hold true: the rich get richer; the poor get ****ed.
ReplyDeleteBack in the 'bad old days' gimmicks like the 'divine right of kings' were used to justify the situation. These days it's bullshit about positions with higher risk meriting higher compensation.
But, in the end, it all boils down to the same old Golden Rule: those with the gold make the rules.
What never ceases to amaze me, though, is that so many of us without the gold continue to buy the propaganda put out by those with the gold, that regressive taxation policies are so 'good' for all of us.
The poster boy for this cut taxes for the rich propaganda is Joe the Plumber, who wants to pay more taxes so his boss can pay less.
ReplyDeleteI forgot to mention an obvious point in this blog, that the basic idea of spectator sports is also laziness.
Oh, golly ... 'Joe the Plumber' ... turns out that poor ol' Joe was neither a tax expert, nor even a plumber.
ReplyDeleteHe was 'thinking about buying' a business that would (might?) gross $250,000 a year and worried he'd be hit with higher taxes under Obama's plan.
Doh! ... what about the interest charges on the loan to buy that business? In fact, Joe would actually likely come out ahead under the Obama plan.
Just as well ... according to reports, Joe already owed $1,200 in overdue income taxes.
And an investigative reporter at the Toledo Blade discovered that Joe is also not really a plumber.
Of course, although the Republicans scored their points off the Joe story, none of the reality was ever mentioned.