My Work Here is Done?

Um, E. Worthington just commented on my blog that, as a child, he was given only a potato skin for warmth because his father had sold the meat of the potato for cheap brandy. Now that I've inspirsed a comment like that... I may as well hang it up.

Just kidding! But to the reader Mern... are Americans lazy? Come back and tell me if you think they are. Everyone I know works damned hard, to the detriment, most of the time, of their personal goals and aspirations. Is that okay with you? I want to know more about your point of view. Mine is that the point of all of our technology, built on the back of the work of people like your grand parents, is supposed to INCREASE our leisure time. Instead, it's just increased expectations and given capitalism's owners an excuse not to pay a proper living wage to a lot of people. And, to me, if you get to live to be 100 -- working until 65 is about enough. If you want to work more, if it gives you meaning, fine. But is 45 years of personal time too much to ask, considering that we only get to live once?

Do our politicians, by the way, understand that we only get to live once? Because it seems to me that the policies that guide the world's economics (and make no mistake, it's policy first -- economics are just a way to measure policy results) are acting as if they're sure there's some sort of after life that will make things just in the end. Maybe, I guess. But policy should probably assume the one time trip, just in case.

By the way, Liberman might have drifted to the anti-privatization of social security camp. He said so on The Daily Show. We'll see if Joe-mentum keeps going in that direction.

And, finally, friends... do not discuss Bush's plan with any word other than "privatization" because that's what it is. Karl Rove decided, last year, that Bush backers shouldn't use the word, because it polls badly. They want to convince you there's a choice... you can "choose" to put "part" of your money in a private account. It's a lie. The only way they can pay for people to make that "choice" is to reduce the guaranteed benefits of the system. So... as soon as a few people make the privatization choice, they have to cut benefits for the rest. And then it becomes idiocy not to "choose" the private account. If somebody backs you into a wall with a gun to your left temple and says "Go right, I shoot you, go left, I don't..." you don't really have a choice between right and left.