Work Ethic vs Lazy Ethic

You may have often heard it said that the work ethic is what makes America/Canada/Lower Slobbovia great. This is bullshit of course. The driving force of industry and commerce always has been and always will be laziness.

It was all started by the very first hominid who suddenly decided "I'm tired of hunting woolly mammoths. Why don't I get some other guys to hunt the woolly mammoths for me? To reward them I'll give them half the meat!". That was the most profound idea ever hatched. Every other idea followed from that first one. Slavery for example, was not such a big step after that. In slavery, you give a quarter of the meat to the slave drivers (after all they don't really work, do they?) and keep 3/4 for yourself. The workers get nothing, as they are no longer working for reward, but to avoid punishment.

The driving force of the industrial revolution was inventing gadgets to do the work for you. Then you invent machines to build the gadgets to do the work for you.

Notice how all the really really highly paid people either don't work at all or do something questionable that doesn't really count as work? The bankers who collapsed the economy get bonuses of $100 million dollars a year. Sports stars get millions for playing sports. Rock starts get millions for playing songs. People who take out the garbage get nothing. People who build cars lose their jobs and their pensions. Farmers regularly end up paying out more than they take in. Their only reason for farming is to wait for the city boundary to swallow up their farm and then they can sit back and coast on the money.

The goal is not to be busy all the time, the goal is to make some other poor dumb bastard be busy all the time working for you (paraphrasing Gen. Patton.) So don't feel too sorry for me when you find out I'm retired and I do absolutely nothing at all. I have simply reached the Nirvana we have all been seeking since the original good idea 80,000 years ago.