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.
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.
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.
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
The lazy people living off of our labor are executives, chief officers, board members, stock traders, business owners, landlords, etc.
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:
You know who works really hard? Cleaners, food delivery drivers and other people who are the most exploited by this system.
Are they rich?
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
“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.
A functioning society takes care of everyone wherever they’re at. Don’t let people who’ve succumbed to propaganda pressure you into feeling guilty.
Look at the material conditions. Humanity produces more food than it needs. Because of technological process and efficiency, we have enough food to feed every hungry person, the only problems are transportation and access (aka capitalism and imperialism). It is literally more difficult for us to NOT give food to the hungry people who need it than it is to just let them have it. The leftovers restaurants/stores throw away could feed all the needy.
As for housing, we have the space, technology, and materials to build safe and comfortable housing for everyone on earth. But instead, cities are seeing a boom in “luxury housing” and simultaneously in slums where the poor and working class are forced to live with roommates or their families. This is an economic problem, and ARTIFICIAL shortage of housing, not an actual shortage of material needs. To go to the most extreme case, why can’t the government just build a bunch of new apartments all over, give control over them to social services, and comfortably house all the homeless? Or even run them with the assistance of charity groups or even religious charity groups in certain countries/regions where that’s the norm? Capitalism and imperialism are the only thing getting in the way of that. Ideology is the obstacle, not material reality.
I’m sure if every person had the financial means to support their “lazy” or even physically disabled family members, they would. They would build ramps/elevators in their houses, get them physical therapy, and counseling for their mental health needs. But in America everyone is forced to work, and housing, food, and healthcare are only given to those who sacrifice their lives to work, or who collaborate in the power structure that helps the working class control the workers. When Elon Musk plays video games, he is demonstrating his genius. When the peasants play video games, they are lazy. When Donald Trump golfs, he’s closing high-level business deals. When the peasants kick a soccer ball around, they are wasting time. When George W. Bush paints, he is bravely facing his trauma. When the peasants paint, they are choosing a useless career path.
Laziness is not a real thing in America, it is simply a word used to blame the working class for their own economic situation. “Grind more. Get another job. Invest. Get up early. Stay late. Be your own boss.” It’s the same mentality that leads to laws preventing people from buying chips or cookies with food stamps - the poor do not deserve to be happy, and in fact they deserve to be miserable, in order to incentivize them to stop being poor.
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.
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
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.
A society should be judged on how it treats its most vulnerable. They will always take it a step further with their criteria of who is lazy. Today it may be the unemployed. Tomorrow it will end up being pensioners. Children? None of em deserve to die and we’ve seen such people vote into being laws that harm all of these groups.
