I’m working on the budding theory that, if you can afford to quit your job, it may be at least a little immoral to keep it. Unless, I guess, you’re much better at it than someone else would be and it does good for society.

Whenever someone tells someone else “get a job” or says “they should get a job”, you should ask them who they want to stop working in order to make that possible. After all, it’s not like there are a bunch of unfilled job positions lying around out there with no one bothering to apply. If they are upset that someone is on welfare, they should realize that they are just asking that person to trade places with someone else. Who will, you know, be on welfare then.

Unless, of course, that person has enough money that they can get by without welfare. Meaning that they should probably quit and let someone who needs the money take over.

If you don’t believe this, then it’s pretty important to admit that either (a) the idea that one’s survival or quality of life should be tied to the happenstance of having a job is silly or (b) people are fundamentally unequal and those on the bottom rungs deserve to die for it. While many conservatives seem to believe in a dog-eat-dog approach, I don’t think that many will actually say that those who happen to have employment deserve to live more than those who don’t. And while there are safety nets, it’s these nets that conservatives so often rail against as increasing laziness. What it’s actually doing is compensating for the unequal math that ensures there are not enough jobs for everyone.

I guess this raises the fundamental question of what the purpose of a job is. If the job is to fulfill the function of that job, then great. Stop tying it to people’s survival and let the people who are best do those given jobs. If the job is to enable people to eat in exchange for their labor, then they should probably all be distributed to the people who most need to eat.

I guess if we could just directly control the number of jobs in the society, then this would be a little less of a dichotomous and contentious issue. Of course, that’s not really in the plan with all the capitalism and the treating “The Economy” like a mystical weather phenomenon. The economy doesn’t exist, of course. It’s a series of decisions about our society that we’ve ceded to chance. It’s like if we had the option to create a system of weather where none existed before. Bring hurricanes to Kansas, say, or tornadoes to the Bahamas. Just to see if it motivated people a little, or sometimes ruined everything for no particularly good reason. And then we could have a Chief Meteorologist go on TV and say “we’ve decided to raise storm door allotments for Jamaica, just in case they get more tornadoes. Also, we’re going to all start facing west and breathing heavily to deter hurricanes from coming in from that direction.”

I’m being slightly facetious. But probably not as facetious as you think.

What I guess an actual conservative might say is that everyone who can afford to quit their job should do so and start a business and then create more jobs. Except that to actually make statements like that, with all that “should” and moral implication, would probably rankle the conservative’s sense of freedom. I guess this was the point that Ayn Rand was trying to make all along, advocating for the radical freedom to burn the world down just because you’ve exploited the economy sufficiently to be able to corner all the matches and outlaw fire departments. Which I guess would be all right if ability to exploit the economy were some kind of grand test of character or strength or intelligence or worth.

Instead, it’s mostly just a roulette wheel to which we’ve ascribed enormous import. But at a certain point, we all basically agreed to stop even trying to spin it, to just let the thing turn and turn and turn on its own and hope we can sometimes predict its trajectory to angle the ball in the right spot. And meanwhile a few people get 35-to-1 payouts while everyone else is going broke.

At least when you’re standing at the actual roulette wheel, no one tells you to go get a job.

How did we get to this point? I know that fascism was really abhorrent and I know that the people calling themselves communists were mostly fascists, but is the right response really to just make people feel bad for losing a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is designed to always diminish? Or at best stay stagnant? To have people’s guesses about what is a likely to increase or decrease in value determine every aspect of their quality of life? I mean, really, did anyone think very hard about this system at all?

There’s a way to reel it back in and at least get some control of it. We have to stop talking about the economy like it’s a thing. There are not bad economies or good economies. There are systems which make people thrive and cooperate and build what needs to be built (and avoid building what’s unnecessary). And there are systems which make people fight and cheat and steal and spend a great deal of time and energy on things that are useless. We choose these systems, we design and implement them. It’s when we believe that the systems are choosing us that we have the apex of a problem.

If the economy is bad, maybe it’s because the very notion of an economy is bad and we need to find a new system. And if it’s good, why is it designed to leave some people out, always? And what do you suggest we do with those people? Are you willing to trade places with them because you can afford to? If not, why not? Is this really a system of betterment and improvement of the society or is just about finding an excuse to behave as you might in the wild? A wild beyond our wildest actual observations, with interest rates and stock prices storming over the Sahara like a great tsunami of chaos, ready to wash away anyone and everyone in its wake.