The government has just noted that Obamacare will likely eliminate 2.5 million full time jobs from the American economy over the next few years.
Russ Douthat, over at the New York Times, who I will not link, tries in his leftist way to say that might be a good thing. His twisted logic runs as follows:
"But it’s also possible to argue that as a rich, post-scarcity society, we shouldn’t really care that much about whether the poor choose to work. The important thing is just making sure they have a decent standard of living, full stop, and if they choose Keynesian leisure over a low-paying job, that’s their business."
Keynesian leisure, eh Russ? Sounds more like a license to be a lazy, good for nothing, living on the backs of those who still choose to work.
Meanwhile, over at Ace of Spaces, Laura reveals this idiocy for what it really is:
"Douthat's assumption is that this is a time of plenty and things will carry on this way forever. This assumption has had a 100% guaranteed failure rate over the entire course of human history and will fail quite reliably in the future, probably very much sooner than we would like.
Dependents, or 'poor people' in Douthat's formulation, are absolutely defined by their inability to handle adversity. They have no stores of wealth. They cannot do a thing to help themselves, and this is a problem when adversity inevitably happens and the hands of capable people are full.
While the enormous wealth of a rich country may be able to keep millions of people floating on the dole for a good while in good times, bad times are another thing entirely. What you want when the sh*t hits the fan is a lot of scrappy individualists with skills and instincts and a productive acumen. People who are independent and helping themselves, their communities, and each other, directly.
Not a massive burden of helpless dependents, and its attendant slow, resource-hogging bureaucracy. The presence of a lot of dependents is not helpful when the prosperity of the country is not-so-prosperous, never mind downright endangered.
But against Douthat's central assumption is this; we are massively in debt as a nation. How can he say we can afford for people to loaf, when at the same time we are counting on their future productivity to pay down these bills? I'm at a loss to explain this massive oversight of logic.
And Douthat doesn't refer to these people as actually unable to work. He just says they are poor. So he's not talking about the profoundly disabled or infirm - people for whom publicly financed social services were originally intended. He's just talking about people who don't have enough money. Well how are they supposed to ever elevate themselves from this condition, unless they are encouraged or incentivized to work?"
Touche! This appeal to "Keynesian leisure" is nothing more than an apology for immorality. As for me, if the lazy and worthless want to live off the labor and sweat of others, requiring us to earn enough to feed our families as well as theirs, then I'll predict that their days are truly numbered. When the day comes that it's once again a question of how to survive, then the parasites will have self identified, and there will be no question as to who will need to go in order for society of some sort to survive.
They won't be so happy with their life choices then, I'll wager.
Most assuredly.
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