I came across this old thread on 
. The question brings out the core Conservative belief that some people are lazy or “worthless” and “why should I pay for lazy people” or “why should I have to work for someone else to live off my labor?”
Many, many people on this thread say outright that people who they deem “lazy” don’t deserve food or shelter or anything a human needs to live.
Is there a good counter to this talking point? It’s pretty disgusting TBH being confronted with this. I know it’s what they really believe but it still stings to read it out over and over again.
I don’t understand how some people can think humans don’t have an inherent right to exist. Not very “pro-life” of these people.
“Lazy” is an opinion and our society is built to treat people who aren’t helping a Capitalist make profit or become a Capitalist themselves like they’re burdens on society.
Life isn’t fair, it never has and it never will be. Maybe some of your money goes to help a person who doesn’t “work as hard as you”? There’s also people who are born millionaires, people who have investments paying them for no work, people who win lotteries and jackpots or marry into wealth and never have to lift a finger again.
Forcing people to work in order to live doesn’t sound fair to me. It sounds like slavery with extra steps. What kind of freedom do we truly have if we can’t choose to withold our labor or check out of the system altogether?
I’m struggling a little mentally with feeling guilt around my failing job search. Technically I’m working on building three income streams, maybe four, but it feels like “failure” because I’m not making enough just yet to cover all bills. It’s not for a lack of trying but there’s ti.es where I have no energy to do much and it makes me feel terrible. This part of Conservatism always drove me up a wall. Hopefully some of you have good ways to fight against it.
“You have no excuse to not be a productive member of society”.
I’d love to, but that’s not my decision to make. Take it up with porky, he’s the one who determines who gets to work and who doesn’t.
porky’s slacking off at the job creator factory, we should fire him
You jest, but this is unironically how I went from lib to leftist back when I was in high school
: “Hello random retail store, I would like to work!”
: “No.”Turns out the adult world was just like this
Ahhhh, yes. The healthy, able bodied person who chooses poverty.
You know who works really hard? Cleaners, food delivery drivers and other people who are the most exploited by this system.
Are they rich?
“Yes and”
Unproductive members of society should be removed. CEOs add nothing if value. Sales people. Bankers. Politicans. Landlords. Middle Men. Car dealerships.
Instagram influences at least add beauty. CEOs just leach off the hard work of others. If they didn’t show up to work we’d still do our jobs. If the janitorial doesn’t show up how long can you work with dirty bathrooms?
From there you can doubble down. A man is entitled to the sweat of his brow no? So an investor that doesn’t actually work is owed none of the profits.
Ask if they would trade lives with the person they’re punching down on
They will say no because they think that their labor entitles them to live better than other people and they have afforded themselves their specific treats. It’s expensive being poor and nobody is truly living on disability, and deep down they have to know that
I met this awful German guy in China and one time he pointed at a guy begging outside a park in Kunming and made some comment about how easy he has it, and I said the exact same thing. If it’s such a good life why don’t you adopt it?
He was living off inheritance from his parents dying.
He truly was awful. I guess I just had a lot of fun telling him that to his face. He was clearly very lonely and yet would still want to hang out with me even though I spent the whole time lecturing and berating him.
The “lazy” people you think are living off of your work get a tiny pittance of the taxes you pay, nearly the entirety of which only go to reproducing the economic system that rewards those who do not work but claim to, simply by virtue of their “ownership” of the things everyone needs to live a bare minimum survival. It is these non-working “owners” who live in obscene opulence and have unrestrained power over us all, dictating to us that we must toil while they only reap. The value you actually produce is being stolen from you by those same “owners,” and not even the table scraps are afforded those at the bottom struggling to survive in a system that is built around their poverty which serves a threat to all workers if they do not fall in line. The leeches are at the top, not the bottom. You absolutely should be enraged by those leeching off your work, but you’ve misidentified who the leeches are.
It’s true that everyone should be helping out the social whole to the best of their ability but to measure that solely in their ability to do a job making capitalists money then your measurement stick is fucked to begin with.
In a vacuum sure people should share the burden. They, we, have a responsibility to do that. Not fulfilling that responsibility could be called lazy. The idea that a job shows social worth is rooted in the assumption that the job benefits society. That any job does, really.
At the same time if my job is making mustard gas at the death factory then how am I helping society? If my job is selling candy to pre-diabetic kids does me not being lazy cancel out the social deterioration my job causes?
Proponents of capitalism are not qualified to discuss what laziness is because they can’t tell the difference between benign and malign activities so long as they make money.
Further, from a Marxist sense, telling someone they are lazy because they don’t volunteer themselves into a relationship where the bulk of their labor value is siphoned off so the money can sit in the Cayman Islands or whatever is laughable.
me when the value produced by my labor goes to non-working poors:
me when the value produced by my labor goes to my lazy, parasitic boss:
laziness isnt even real. capitalism has tricked humans into thinking wanting to chill like every other animal is always doing is bad. why? because it doesnt make some rich dude more money
Oh, you’re not willing to constantly be doing shit you don’t want to do for your entire singular lifespan? You sicken me, die immediately.
I’m jealous of most of the animal kingdom. Why couldn’t I be born a goose and just vibe in ponds
The lazy people living off of our labor are executives, chief officers, board members, stock traders, business owners, landlords, etc.
There are plenty of “hardworking” people who have a negative impact on society, hell, a negative impact on Earth in general. Measuring someone’s worth based on how much they wealth they produce for capital is ignorant of the incredibly complex and interconnected nature of existence. It is, in my opinion, impossible to accurately quantify the value of someone’s life because there are simply too many variables and subjectivites involved.
There are plenty of “hardworking” people who have a negative impact on society
hr, marketers, repo people, insurance agents, stockbrokers, mic factory workers, the list goes on
Anyone helping pull oil out of the ground.
Some level of oil extraction is still going to be unfortunately necessary until we get the infrastructure in place to fully convert to renewables and biodiesel.
took me too long to realise mic wasn’t short for microphone
but at the same time those people are enabling podcasters so maybe they SHOULD get the wall, much to think about
(this is drunken blathering, nothing of consequence is said past this point)
This is, actually, something that’s become a pretty core belief for me. Since waking up from the conservative idiocy I was raised within I mean.
The idea being that no grand atrocities were directed by lazy people. Related is my argument for the value of uncertainty, a person who isn’t quite sure that they already understand everything important.
(and I’m too drunk to tell if this comment is at all relevant to the context I’m posting it in…)
Good comment, no objections here
Tell them that you fully agree, and that’s why you want to abolish capitalism and follow a model like that of the Soviet Union, where unemployment was abolished and every able-bodied person worked, and the average time spent looking for a job after losing one was 2 weeks. Tell them that there was no unemployed in pre-agrarian societies or in feudalism, that unemployment is just a byproduct of capitalism and that people inherently want to contribute to society, and that’s why we want a collaborative society with guaranteed employment for everyone.
Able to work, able to get hired, and able to make ends meet are different things. Lots of people want to work, but can’t find a job, let alone one that will fully support them.
I agree that everyone who’s able should contribute to society, and that’s why I propose sending all CEOs, investment bankers and venture capitalists into forced labor camps
I think the USSR used to just give you a job, shelter, medical care and support but they did expect you to work barring disabilities that prevented you from doing so.
These posts and comments as you’ve presented them are just general misanthropy hidden behind assigning social worth to labor to wages, a rant on their learned helplessness to the sentiment of : why don’t I receive help? Why is my life so hard?. It is the cry of the alienated capitalist subject.
Yes it’s quiet simple really. Does society desperately need me to work? If yes, ok then give me the job, I’m ready. No? I have to look for it and make myself appealing to the boss? So that means jobs are a privilege. So if I let others who need it more have it and stay on welfare then I’m making a sacrifice for others by not taking a job from someone who’d like it more.
Somehow that doesn’t add up for a lot of people
