ants and grasshoppers

I guess you were planning on paying the poor more than I was.  Was your choice for the poor, work the good paying job or stay on welfare?  My choice was more cruel, in order to get the welfare you were getting for free, you will have to work for it.  The problem with your plan is it would cost a lot of money, the problem with mine is, how do you make them work?  I don't want to kick them off of welfare because they probably have kids and stuff, but without that threat how do I make them work? 

I think I have a different definition of work than you do.  To me work is something that you have to do to get a paycheck.  It may be productive or it may not.  What about those advertising guys who work at making you buy a product that is no better than any other product?  Where is the productivity in that?

You know I put in twenty hours a week painting, but I don't get paid for it.  Oh I may sell two or three paintings a year, but that's peanuts, and if a fortune teller told me that I would never sell another one I'd keep on painting.  I do feel productive after a painting session (look how I smeared that Prussian blue, all over that window, was that great or what?), but as far as the rest of the world is concerned I might as well be watching Perry Mason reruns. 

Your fishing and chopping may keep you well fed and warm in the winter. so it's certainly productive, but unless you are selling your fish or wood, I'm not inclined to call it work.

There is that other meaning of productivity, in that does it make the world any better.  I don't think my bartending made the world a better place, and contrary to our Mission Statement, I don't think we did anything to make the world a better place in my state job.  And even if we did, i imagine any other guy could have done the same job as I did.  The only job I had where I felt I was making the world a better place was in subbing.  The kids didn't want to be there and neither did I, but I think I did a pretty good job of making the experience less painful.

Well anybody can make up a definition, and it's not like any one is inherently better than any other one.  I chose my particular one because I don't think the poor are all that interested in doing something productive, what they want is a paycheck.  So I wouldn't want to make them do something necessarily productive, makework would be fine, picking up papers, sweeping the streets.  My idea would be since they have to work to earn their welfare any, they might as well get a real job and make real money.

I have this vague idea where some people are just driven to work, those people who put in sixty hours a week, and maybe they sometimes wonder what does it all mean.  And there are other people who just kind of wander around and think about things, and it would be their job, for which they would get paid a living wage taken from the taxes of the of the hard chargers to explain what it all meant.  Let's call the hard chargers the ants, and the dreamy wanderers the grasshoppers.  Well this sounds more like a science fiction story, but see, the grasshoppers write the science fiction stories and the ants read them and put them into action.

Well this concept needs a lot of work, but then so does our plan for the poor, as the blog keeps rolling along.

You're right and I was wrong about that race thing.  It is species that can't mate with each other.  It was races where you had the white and the yellow and the black and sometimes they made little subraces for the native Australians and Polynesians.