Quick post by me over at the 80s' blog on work.

I haven't worked for four months now and have another two to go. This is the longest period I've gone without working since I left University except for that 9 or so months when I did a Masters.

That's twenty years of constant, full time, tax-paying work. There are some people in this world who simply don't want to work and would like to stay on the dole scrounging state benefits and living off hardworking people like myself. You might say that such people don't really exist, that they are a right-wing media fabrication but you're wrong, I know for a fact that they exist through bitter personal experience.

I'm one of them.

Do I want to work? Do I find my work enobling, essential, a matter of pride, socially useful? Not really. Would I have prefefred to spend all that time sitting around "doing nothing" as I have been for the past four months. Oh Yeah! Am I itching to get back to work. Bollocks am I.

I console myself that I have a reasonably pleasant line of work but I'd rather be on the dole, if only benefits were more generous. They could be after all, scrap Trident, increase the dole. I say that any genuinely pluralist society must recognize the legitimate desire of a sector of the population to loaf around. Surely we can come to some kind of agreement where those who want a job but can't get one can exchange places with those who have a job but don't want one, what we need is a system that would maximally redeploy and reallocate talent to where it is most needed. In this regard Government could be an indespensible aid to the working of the free market by boosting benefits so that no-one would ever have to take a job they didn't want and thereby reduce "productivity" with their general lack of enthusiasm, absenteeism/mental health issues etc.

After all, it's only realy a free market, freely enterd into, if there is the option of not working at all and no significant financial incentive to work. The problem with the current system is that it's not generous enough, forcing people like myself to take work, against their deepest inclinations and thereby skewing the workings of the invisible hand. Let those who want to work, work and let the rest of us live off their labours.

Have you been using up my tax money sitting around smoking dope and playing video games all day instead of having your soul-crushed by demaning badly-paid bullshit work? You're welcome to it! Have some more, I don't fucking blame you!