We Have a Problem

First of all, I wouldn't force anybody to work. I just naively assumed that most people would rather work for high wages than get paid a lesser amount to not work. On the other hand, maybe not. You're right that there are a lot of people who seem to have no work ethic at all. I suppose it has to do with how you're raised. I think I have a stronger work ethic than you do because I had the opportunity to learn it in my daddy's store. You must have some kind of work ethic, though, because you paint all those pictures. Work doesn't have to be physically hard to be classified as work. It's easier to cut wood with a chain saw than a hand saw, but it's still work. I think what determines if something is work or not is productivity. If something is productive, it's work, regardless of how physically demanding it is. When I cut firewood, it's work, but if I expended the same amount of energy lifting weights in the gym or jogging up and down the road, it would be exercise, not work. Work can be fun or not. Whether you like doing it or hate doing it, it's still work if it produces a product or service that is useful to somebody, even if its only function is that it's pretty to look at.

I think I told you before that, when the paper mill closed, I considered starting some kind of business with my severance money. My hypothetical wife, however, correctly pointed out that I could make more money with less risk in the stock market. I seem to remember reading somewhere that half of all small businesses fail in the first year, and the other half fail in the second year, or something like that. Of course you can fail in the stock market too but, if you choose a conservative approach, you are less likely to lose all your money than you are trying to open a store on Main Street. I suppose the stock market is work too, because you make money, which is kind of like a product, but it doesn't feel like work to me, which is why I cut firewood. There's no money in it, but I don't need to make any more money than I'm already making in the stock market, so I can be productive on my own time. It's kind of like the farmer who won 10 million dollars in the lottery. When asked if he planned to retire he said, "No, I plan to keep farming till the money's all gone."

Michigan is way behind in their road repairs, so hiring more workers wouldn't displace anybody. Nevertheless, they'd have to train their new workers and, like you said, they'd have to instill them with a work ethic so they would even show up regularly. This might be easier said than done, so maybe this isn't such a good example. There is only so much "make work" that could be made, and they're already doing some of that, so maybe there is more to this problem than meets the eye. There may even come a time when most of the productive work will be done by machines, rendering our whole plan obsolete. Well, a lot of it is done by machines already. Of course those machines still need operators and mechanics to keep them running, but not for long. They already have a car that drives itself so, in the not too distant future, human workers might become as unnecessary as horses and oxen........... Back to the drawing board!

Either they taught you something different about race in school than they taught me, or one of us wasn't paying attention. Different races can so interbreed, it's different species that can't interbreed. All the human races are the same species: homo sapiens sapiens. (I'm not making this up, there are two "sapiens" in there, although people don't usually say the second one.) I think different races are like different breeds of dogs. Their appearances and behaviors are different, but they are still all dogs. The reason it gets confusing is that there are no pure races anymore because of all the interbreeding that has been going on for millennia. Hitler's Master Race was a myth. Hitler himself didn't look a lot like the Nordic ideal that he peddled to everyone else. I always wondered how he got away with that.