The Age of the Labor Faker
By Robert Ringer
As cap and trade, universal health care, new bailouts, and more welfare programs are forced through a Congress too arrogant to read its own bills, the question is: Will a majority of Americans continue to sit by apathetically with a “Gee, what if the new ‘stimulus plan’ doesn’t work?” attitude — or will they grow up, get their heads out of the clouds, and take to the streets to peacefully protest?
Alert the media: Nothing this collectivist government does will work! Base your actions accordingly.
The U.S. has often been accused of being a nation of sheep. Personally, I think that’s a bad rap on sheep. Sheep are passive creatures who have never asked for anything from anyone. Gene Wilder even fell in love with a sheep in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex* (* But Were Afraid to Ask).
No, Americans are not a nation of sheep. The truth is that the U.S. is a nation overrun by what the late and great Eric Hoffer referred to as “labor fakers.” As state workers used to put it in the good old days of communist Poland: “Whether you stand up or lie down, you get paid just the same.” More simply put: “They pretend to pay us a wage, and we pretend to work.”
Sounds like that could have come from a General Motors “worker.” You know, the guys who get paid for reporting to a “Jobs Bank” every day and play cards, read, and watch television. There is no more U.S. auto industry. Forget about that fantasy. General Motors and Ford are nothing more than transfer-of-wealth programs.
Or the Social Security bureaucrats who just finished a three-day, $700,000 party at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel at the expense of … you guessed it … you! Make no mistake about it: The Age of the Labor Faker is in full bloom.
Even so, none of this would be impossible to overcome if it were not for the fact that more people are trying to get on the Labor Faker Train every day, while no one appears to have any interest in getting off. And at some point in time (soon), that train is going to become so overloaded that the engine — i.e., the productive individuals in this country — will not be able to pull it.
Is there a solution? Yes — educating the public. That’s why I started the Liberty Education Interview Series. But with those who worship at the Power Altar tightening their grip on our remaining freedoms, time is running out. It is critical for every productive individual not only to help expose the labor faker, but spread the word that the cost of government largesse is the loss of our most precious asset: liberty.
In The Liberal Mind, Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter gives us some insight into how so many people bought into the seemingly self-evident absurdity that they could live the good life without working — that their neighbors would foot the bill for them:
The adult citizen’s dependent attachment to government comes at an enormous price: the constant growth of the politician’s power to gratify his constituents is paralleled by a constant growth in his power to dominate them. Unfortunately, the resulting decline in the citizen’s freedom is gradual enough to avoid alarming them.
The liberal agenda’s favors seduce the people a little at a time, always playing on their regressive longings to be indulged. Favor by favor, accompanied by the constant drumbeat of entitlement propaganda, the otherwise intelligent citizen is led to an increasingly erroneous conception of the proper role of government in a free society. Like a child molester, the liberal politician grooms his constituents until their natural cautions against yielding power in exchange for favors dissolves in reassurance.
Why do people allow themselves to be so duped? … Despite a general tendency toward increasingly realistic perceptions of the world as they grow up, children easily acquire misconceptions about human nature and the realities of human life, about the nature of government, and about the economic, social and political processes that characterize modern societies. …
Some of these misconceptions can be attributed to simple ignorance. But some of them arise from neurotic and other irrational mental processes and not from lack of knowledge per se. … Some are characterized by delusions of grandeur, or infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation.
I can’t top what Dr. Rossiter has said, but I will add my own words from an article I wrote back on March 21, 2008, titled “The Real Danger: Obama’s Sincerity”:
“Because Obama is a truly sincere revolutionary, he should be taken at his word. While he is superbly talented when it comes to talking with a lack of specificity, just those few things he has shared with the American public all but guarantee that the invisible depression we’ve been experiencing for decades will become very visible sooner rather than later.”
Perhaps we are fortunate that sooner turned out to be the case. But if a majority of Americans persist in infantile claims of entitlement, indulgence, and compensation, we will all pay for their misguided view of reality with a loss of our remaining liberty.
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Copyright © 2012 Robert Ringer
ROBERT RINGER is a New York Times #1 bestselling author and host of the highly acclaimed Liberty Education Interview Series, which features interviews with top political, economic, and social leaders. He has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, The Lars Larson Show, ABC Nightline, and The Charlie Rose Show, and has been the subject of feature articles in such major publications as Time, People, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Barron's, and The New York Times.
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It’s simply a matter of natural law.
Fewer and fewer cannot support more and more for long.
The scavengers are standing by to glean the results.
Robert
Perhaps it would be just as well if the current government is just allowed to go to the ends they desire. After all, we know what the result will be — disaster. And forcing the people of this country to endure such a disaster may be similar to administering a vaccine. After that experience, it hopefully would be many years before a majority clamors for more. The only problem is that so many of us will have to endure the pain along with those who really deserve it.
Ever taken candy from a child? How about drugs from an addict? When you do so, who does the child or the addict think is the bad guy? Now, multiply that by a populace who has been addicted since FDR and whose tolerance for the drug (entitlement programs) has increased to an unsustainable rate. The nation is OD-ing right now, and it’s gonna kill anyone who tries to take its drugs away. I’ve tried. I talk to everyone I get to know at school, and do you know what response I get? “Oh, that’ll never happen”, “He’ll never do that”, “Go watch more Fox News”. It’s interesting to note that an essay I wrote a year ago, which was poo-pooed as being “Untrue, that’s not his plan for health care” was spot on the money. Give him 1 more year. Within 1 year’s time, we’ll hear that the economy can’t be fixed because he doesn’t have the power or the time. To remedy that, he needs “emergency powers”, only temporary of course, that allow him to do anything he wants, even if it takes more than 4 years. Do I hope I’m wrong? Yes. Am I? Probably not.
I think I am the resident cynic here. I don’t believe people will get off the “labor faker” train once they are on it. I believe they will simply have to fall off of it once it fails to be able to haul their lazy tails around any longer. When that happens their will be a catastrophic economic collapse (just like the collapse of the sub-prime housing market), which just like this election will bring yet another dictator with more smiles, speeches, and handouts. The “new” administration with promises of “hope and change” will quickly do huge new stimulus plans new welfare for all, because “Americans are suffering” and whole vicious cycle starts all over again.
This will keep happening until there is simply no producers left, which may take many turns of this painful cycle. For example, I am still trying to grow my business and live the American dream by working hard and saving. I just don’t want to believe this still can’t happen. As long as their are people like me there will always be looters willing to take what I create and produce “for the common good”.
At the beginning of your article you said the people had to rise up in peaceful protest. The problem is as long as most people are on the dole and don’t have to work to realize a reasonably decent life, or work very little to live a pretty darn good life, the number of protesters and their voices will get quieter and quieter until you can no longer hear them complaining any longer. Remember if you are robbing Peter to pay Paul you will ALWAYS have the support of Paul. Get enough Pauls in the world and the votes, voices, and outrage of the Peters will no longer make a difference. When that happens peaceful protest won’t be an option. It will be time for armed revolution because the process of removing corrupted officials and handout happy politicians will be permanently broken.
The question I have is how close are we to needing an armed revolution and not simply a peaceful protest any longer?
I have my misgivings about this blog entry, because it seems that you are giving short shrift to the vast about of work involved in labor-faking. A lot of energy is involved in mastering the various modes of shirking, of demanding handouts and immunity from the requirements of survival, of exuding contempt for those who do work for a living and for their rights, and so forth. Some people devote every waking moment applying themselves to this task; it is quite an arduous endeavor. And although it may be easier to destroy than to create, destruction on the kind of mammoth scale we are witnessing now requires a great deal of diligent deception, prodigious pandering, and brazen bulldozing.
Some Thoughts from a European ( I live in Austria ):
It may be that the process of ever increasing goverment control of the flow of money may level out on some niveau which may be similar to the situation in Europe.
Why will it level out?
My Answer: There is a certain percentage of people who want to be producers and who love freedom even if there is a high level of inconvenience associated with that.
If this percentage in the population is large enough then the system stabilizes at some level.
The European Level (in Austria) is as follows:
Middle class income people pay about 2/3 of their income to government and to its agencies like social security.
About 1/3 is to keep for yourself.
It works as follows:
About 60% of a middle-class income is to be paid for income tax and social security. (the exact percentage depends on the income. The percentage peaks at about 66% for yearly incomes of EUR 60000-80000. For higher incomes it gradually goes down to 50%. For incomes below EUR 40000, it gradually declines down to about 25%, which is the approximate percentage for social security payments without income tax.)
If you spend the amount which you are allowed to keep from your income, then you pay a 20% sales tax ( called VAT ). Some goods like food and renting an appartment for private use have a 10% sales tax.
In total this means about 2/3 of your income goes to the government. ( If you are in the peak payers group, about 3/4 goes to government and 1/4 is to keep for yourself. )
Now, most people don’t realize how much they are paying to government because a significant part of the payments is hidden from them in some clever ways:
1. The sales tax is hidden in the prices. ( It is displayed on invoices etc but most people ignore that… )
2. For employees, the income tax and social security payment never hits their bank account but is deducted from the salary before it is payed out. Each employee gets a sheet every month where these deducted numbers are shown. (I guess many of them ignore this sheet.)
3. About half of the social security payment is not even shown on this sheet because it is not deducted from the salary but has to be payed by the employer. Essentially this is just a way of lowering the official salary in order to hide a part of the social security payment from those employees who dare to read the sheets where their payments to government are shown.
So, the end result is that people don’t realize how much they are paying.
They just complain about low salaries and high prices … and blame business owners for it.
Why do we still have entrepreneurs and employees who are producers in Europe?
My guess is, that having 1/3 of your income to use as you please is still enough incentive to be productive. And being productive is the only way to get some level of freedom, which is generally true, and is even true in a system like that. The price of 2/3 of your income to pay for freedom is very high, but freedom is so valuable that many still pay the price.
My personal experience is that every Euro which you accept to get from government comes with some severe reduction of freedom.
Therefore there are many people in Austria/Europe who would have the right to get government handouts but they refuse to apply for these handouts because they love their freefrom more than some short term increase of their financial situation.
E.g., I know about several single moms who would have had the right to get financial help from government due to their challenging financial situation but they refused to apply for those handouts because they want be self-reliant and independent.
I, myself would probably have the right to get financial government support for my psychotherapy but I refuse to apply for that government support because I don’t want to give the government (nor anybody else) any information related to that. The deal from the government would be: We give you money and you give us information. I don’t like that deal, so I think: No thanks, I pay full taxes and you, the government, keep the money while I keep my information in order to protect my privacy.
Again, freedom is so valueable, that many people are willing to pay a high financial price for it.
When I look to the US, I see that it is fast heading towards the European model. Therefore the US becomes less and less attractive as a refugee place for successful European producers and/or for European capital.
Gotta agree, Robert. Had we not elected a “labor faker” president who lived off of his family’s wealth before getting taxpayer-funded paychecks for the rest of his life, we wouldn’t be in this mess now.
Had “screw the Constitution” and “borrow and spend to fund an undeclared war” George W. Bush never been elected, the country probably wouldn’t be heading in direction it is now.
The only real answer is for a strong, just man to take charge. But all those men are busy getting rich and protecting themselves from the collapse that’s coming. Obama doesn’t care. He’s read Gramsci and Alinsky and knows either the system will stumble along more and more encumbered, with the beneficiaries praising him or it will all collapse and he – an unjust man – will take charge.