The Glade 4.0

This level of arrogance is just astounding to me, I'm sorry. Seriously, what percent of the US population do you think would actually go work long hours on a farm if their public benefits which require them to do nothing pay the same or more?

So public benefits are a disincentive to work?

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If someone can survive on government safety nets better than they can a minimum wage job, then you have no one but yourself and your candidates to blame, Xequecal. If indigent, welfare status is better than $7.00 an hours for 40 hours a week to feed yourself, then our government is telling people they're too good for work.

Well, guess what?

Get a ****' job. If you tell me there are no jobs, then I will tell you to get new ****' skills. If you tell me you can't afford that, I will tell you to have planned better for your future when you were 14. If you tell me that's not normal, and most parents don't care, I'll remind you I was homeless for about a year after my 14th birthday and still finished high school on time without a foster home.

So ... no ...

It's not arrogance; it's the height of arrogance to keep spewing your position, Xequecal. People are not too good for work. People are not too good for whatever job they can get it. You don't hold out for the job you want when real inflation is over 20%, unemployment is somewhere north of 30%, and the economy continues to shrink.

By the way, notice how all the first of the month reports were delayed for the election?

TANF payouts are at an all time high: 61% of households are receiving TANF and other assistance right now. 61% ...

The unemployment revision was to just shy of 10%.

The workforce has contracted no less than 75,000 people a month since Obama took office.

No, the arrogance here is yours: the presumption that you're too good to make a living a scooping up dog **** in a community park is precisely the kind of presumption that leads to a society stagnating under its own laziness and the government's incentives to be lazy, couch-sitting douches.

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Just as an outside observer, I think you guys are arguing two different and not entirely incompatible things.

Xeq isn't saying that people shouldn't have to work for a living. He's saying that in the current economic situation in the USA, it isn't laziness to make a better living on welfare than it is to work ridiculously long hours making less money. It's just common sense. Generally, it is intelligent to make the most you can for the least effort possible in some balance. If doing nothing nets you more than a certain job, you'd have to be stupid to take the job. If i could get a job tomorrow making 30% more than I am and working 3 days a week instead of my current five, taking it does not make me lazy. Xeq's objection is that people call it lazy to take the best option available to you.

Of course, if doing nothing nets you more than the job, there's something wrong with the current economic situation in the USA.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

They are mutually exclusive things, actually, Taly; the real institutionalized racism in the U.S. sees to that.

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Actually, yes, taking that does make you lazy. I'm not arguing something separate, I'm arguing that being willing to shirk just because you can make more by being leech on society than by being a producer makes you lazy.

Work ethic isn't the same as practicality. And if we want to discuss why you can make more being a lazy shirker than by working at a "minimum wage job," that's a philosophical discussion as opposed to a practical one.



It doesn't matter what the aggregate percentage is, nor whether you find it arrogant or not. The fact of the matter is that choosing to do that is lazy. Period.


Again, if you want to discuss the merits of a system in which a "better" living can be made through inaction and laziness than through work, that's fine. That isn't the discussion at hand though.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I don't really disagree with that.



Really? Why should "I" get a job? What if I have cancer or a long-term chronic illness that I need Medicaid to treat, Medicaid which I will lose if I get a job? Why should I work for less money than I get for doing nothing? This isn't starting a business or working a shitload of hours as a doctor, layer, or tradesman, those jobs have a future. This is essentially paying to work at a dead-end job that gives me nothing, and you insist that I have some kind of obligation to do so. It's complete bullshit.

Like I said before, if you want to slash welfare programs, I'm fine with that. What bothers me is when it's done from the extremely dishonest position that every single person that would lose benefits as the result of the cuts deserves to suffer because they are lazy or immoral, based on nothing but the fact that they are collecting assistance. The vast majority of Americans, if faced with the choice that welfare recipients face today, would not go out and collect dog ****. Sure, they made better choices and/or had better luck in the past so they're not in the position where they have to collect dog ****, but it doesn't change the fact that they would turn up their nose at this job if it was a choice between that or stay unemployed. Their work ethic isn't any better than that of the guy on welfare. So if everyone on welfare is lazy, then so are the vast majority of Americans.

I am honestly having a difficult time even reconciling what people here actually believe "lazy" means. Are you lazy if you work less than X hours per week? Is how much money you make per hour relevant to how much you need to work to not be considered "lazy?" Like, I make $24 an hour at my current job with about 10 hours of overtime per week. It's very much in demand, so recently I was offered a second part-time job (20 hours/week) on the weekend for a similar rate of pay. Not wanting to work 70+ hours a week, I turned it down. Does that make me lazy? Do I have an obligation to work 80 hours if I can get it? What if I just worked 20 hours a week for nothing but pot and rent money? Most people I think would consider me lazy if I did that, but under your definition it seems like I wouldn't be. I honestly don't understand. Is lazy when an unemployed individual doesn't take an offered job, regardless of the conditions? I'm sure I could come up with a job description that 99% of Americans wouldn't take, does that make a welfare recipient lazy if they don't take it?

Nobody has a responsibility to society. nobody has to try to make society a better place, or even avoid harming it. Everyone should do what is best for them and theirs alone, nothing more. That's what life does. Life survives the best it can in any way it can.

I present a counter argument. If a person's "work ethic" and sense of personal duty causes them to work long hours for less benefit than you they otherwise do by 'leeching off society', they are morons. (Note this is not the same thing as working long hours for less immediate benefit because you see a greater future upside to the job. then you're just forward thinking.) Laziness should be defined only by a work-aversion that results in harm to the lazy individual or those they feel responsible for.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

You're only looking at the very short sighted side of this argument. A well functioning society is the eventual outcome of the same argument.

Laziness is defined by self sufficiency. If you work enough to pay your rent and buy pot, that's fine, provided you don't also ask others to pay your medical bills or retirement.



Presuming you're not playing devil's advocate, I don't necessarily disagree with your counter argument, insofar as the short term is concerned.

Long term harms to the individual must be considered, and minimizing a work ethic only works for so long. View Greece, as well as many other countries, for long term outcomes of such a philosophy.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Those are quite some conditionals. What's the percentage of current welfare recipients that would meet those? What are your assumptions regarding the membership of the welfare system? Let's turn your query around. What if you're an able-bodied adult? Why should I pay money to support you?

Lazy is simply disinclined to work. Disincetivized is irrelevant. Are you not working? Is there work? If those answers are "no" and "yes" respectively, then you're lazy. If you are working, then obviously you are sufficiently inclined to work, and thus not lazy.

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Also, let's be clear, again:

Lazy and practical/pragmatic are not interchangeable in this conversation. They go hand in hand, but pragmatism is driven by incentives. Laziness is a pesonality trait.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I don't disagree entirely with you DFK!, but I think there is more to it than just being too lazy to hold a job.

I think there is a certain segment of the population that has a sense of entitlement when it comes to 'benefits'. Like it's the 'Governments' responsibility to take care of them and their children. When asked about it, they may make some excuse (i.e. physical or mental disability, etc...), but when it comes down to it, they just feel entitled. They learn to game the system to maximum benefit,and literally make a career out of defending their right to continue to do it, and to even raise a litter of society dependent children.

One can be lazy while also pursuing the rational course for self-interest. If doing so is the best way to provide for one's family (one's responsibility) being lazy could be considered a moral good.

The issue is not with the person who is acting in best faith for their family but with the system that creates the situation where one's rational interest and responsibility coincides with being lazy.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Well said.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

The problem here is that both sides are right. If you go on the dole rather than take a job, you ARE lazy. By the same token, you are also smart. Why should one pursue a work ethic when its detrimental (not merely harder than doing the right thing, or more inconvenient, but demonstrably economically disadvantageous) to do so?

The problem lies with the political position that has both A) advocated that illegal immigrants ought to be able to come here and take those jobs, thus driving down their earning power and B) has then advocated for public assistance to replace those jobs. It is vote-buying at its worst. The idea now is not merely that there ought to be a safety net for those who simply cannot obtain work, but one to replace work that a permanent underclass will now perform. Those on the dole, those sympathetic to that underclass, and people generally sympathetic to the poor are then tricked into voting for more of this nonsense by claiming those people will suffer, while the fact that policy has created the situation in the first place is simply ignored.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

What we need is to revise the mandatory emergency treatment laws to allow people to differentiate between trauma, heart attack/stroke, and everything else with the everything else having to go to some other kind of urgent facility.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

If people don't do the jobs that offer low pay than there is no other jobs in the country that provide you best pay.SO people work more for less pay just for survive not under any other pressure.