pooley wrote:
It is an awful thing to treat unemployment as a crime, and should be fought all the way. It is, however, also a crime to treat unemployment as some kind of career choice. I know loads of people who wont get a job as they are better of on the dole, and one of them told me he was proud that he had taken more out of the system than he had paid in - tosser.....
The bloke you mentioned may well be a tosser. But I disagree with your main point. I feel we need to fundamentally change the way we view "work".
While on the one hand, 'work' may be synonymous with 'economic activity' it is also -- in physical terms -- 'the consumption of energy'.
Energy resources are about to become a defining issue for our society in my opinion and our success or failure in dealing with this issue will be decided by our ability to sustain ourselves in the face of a radical reduction in energy consumption / economic activity / work.
People should be given every incentive to live low-impact, low-energy, largely localised lives. To do this truly effectively would require a significant shift in how we organise society, as well as a shift in how we view economic activity (from something that should be maximised, to something that should be minimised).
I don't think anyone expects that kind of thinking to emerge from mainstream politics, but it's still galling to watch them work so hard to move even further to the other extreme.
