AgnosticBoy wrote: ↑Sun Sep 13, 2020 2:25 pm
Genesis 3:19 By the
sweat of your brow you will eat your food. -- (No mention of NOT WORKING or being on food stamps in that passage).
Again, most able-bodied SNAP recipients
are workers. It's best to try to avoid letting political or racial prejudices blind one to real facts, when they are pointed out.
I'm actually glad you mentioned this verse; I'm not sure that ancient Hebrew mythology is particularly relevant to the discussion, but it's a convenient lead-in to the big picture/political discussion, as distinct from the smaller/racial focus. You're quoting it as if it were a good thing, but actually in that story the necessity of work is handed down as a curse. There's really nothing inherently good or laudable about selling your body to Walmart, Ford, Apple or the like, is there? Given half a chance kings and corporations would still have us working sixty plus hours a week on bare starvation wages, spreading propaganda chastizing all those "lazy" people who want to work a mere fifty or forty hours and demonizing any kind of suggestion that people have a basic right to a decent minimum standard of living.
Do you think that people have a basic right to a decent minimum standard of living, or not?
Do you think that we collectively and as individuals should aim to labour less, or more?
The story of the Garden of Eden is one of intelligence (knowledge of good and evil, increased pain in childbirth due to big brains), agriculture (fruit from the tree, the curse of working the ground for food) and hence ultimately of civilization; a sort of nostalgic allegory for the (comparatively) carefree innocence of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, or to a lesser extent the kind of nomadic pastoralism of Abel and Abraham. Benjamin Franklin - largely adopting the view common to his times that (poor) people should be "led or driven" to work for wealthier employers, landlords or nobles - nevertheless
noted that, given half a chance such as the relatively open lands of the American colonies, that scenario is very far from the ideal:
- The proneness of human Nature to a life of ease, of freedom from care and labour appears strongly in the little success that has hitherto attended every attempt to civilize our American Indians, in their present way of living, almost all their Wants are supplied by the spontaneous Productions of Nature, with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when Game is so plenty, they visit us frequently, and see the advantages that Arts, Sciences, and compact Society procure us, they are not deficient in natural understanding and yet they have never shewn any Inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our Arts; When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural [to them] merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger Brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and a match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness.
Though they have few but natural wants and those easily supplied. But with us are infinite Artificial wants, no less craving than those of Nature, and much more difficult to satisfy; so that I am apt to imagine that close Societies subsisting by Labour and Arts, arose first not from choice, but from necessity: When numbers being driven by war from their hunting grounds and prevented by seas or by other nations were crowded together into some narrow Territories, which without labour would not afford them Food.
Maybe this seems like I'm rambling, but I think a coherent political philosophy is important to having a reasonable opinion about the rights and obligations between individuals and society, and a crucial point is this:
The necessity of selling our labour to others is an unwanted condition imposed upon us by the demographic momentum of consecutive prior generations. Hebrew mythology notwithstanding, it's not actually a curse of God, and certainly not a command from God (in fact according to Matthew 6 Jesus seemingly advocated a partial kind of 'back to the garden' lifestyle like the birds and flowers, explicitly commanding his followers to work for God instead of money and trust in Him for their daily bread!). Work is indeed a necessity - and in the right circumstances can even be a fulfilling way to spend part of our time - but since it is for the most part an unwanted imposition, it seems quite obvious that we should not be pining for a return to sixty or eighty hour working weeks... instead we should be aiming, arguably as individuals and certainly as a society, to
reduce that imposition on our liberty even further, as much as feasible. Corporate propaganda notwithstanding.
Prior to Covid, countries like the USA and Australia generally had unemployment rates around 4-8%. What do you imagine would happen if the 'full-time' working week were reduced even further, from 40 hours to 30? Consumer demand and the need for labour would not decrease, and for most jobs employers would prefer not to pay overtime; so odds are that the overwhelming majority of unemployed or under-employed people would find it far easier to get adequate work while full-time workers would enjoy more time for rest and relaxation. Personally I think that management of the full-time working week (along with minimum wages) is more ideal as a primary approach than individual welfare, so that more or less everyone really can have gainful employment: But arguably there are risks of unexpected consequences from tinkering with the economy like that, so a more conservative approach is to just maintain the status quo and merely help with financial support of those who aren't fortunate enough to find adequate work, so that they can at least maintain some kind of
basic standard of living.
But judging by your reply to Otseng, neither of those is a vision of society which you share: Your answer is to work more, not less. If one full-time job isn't enough to meet the demands imposed upon you by demographic momentum and current policies, just get another one from the magical job wizard! Simple! And if the job wizard isn't available for everyone who needs him, I suppose before too long there'll at least be a few civil service jobs opening up to clean out of the gutters all the corpses of those who've frozen and starved...? In other threads we have already discussed the rather obvious problems of an undue emphasis on punitive policing (especially in the USA), and now in this thread you seem to be advocating a
purely punitive approach - arguing that there should be no upside whatsoever to law-abiding membership in society, no safety net for those that the system fails.
That's a pretty harsh authoritarian kind of worldview, but I think that it's often held by people simply accepting what they've been taught rather than really thinking through the implications. Maybe my rambling will provide an alternative angle to think about things