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It's more like they choose not work, most of the time, and live off society.


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Ah, but in Capitalism, they can choose not to work.

Most people don’t have the freedom to choose not to work.

or they can choose not to work at all in a shitty job. That's what's happening here.

It's so strange. It's almost as if people don't work if they don't have to.

Not necessarily. People who don't work aren't necessarily living boring lives.

But does that include choosing not to work (because you do not have to in order to survive)?

Oh, you just choose not to work a job! Never thought of that!

People don't like to work either, and yet they do it.

I think this includes people who are not working by choice (wealthy and idle, stay-at-home parent, student, &c).

Does that mean they automatically work for almost nothing? This is so different from what I’ve observed. I would love to see where people are getting this opinion from.

Might it be worth considering that choosing to not work and choosing to contribute to society in other ways could, for some people and in some circumstances, be slightly different decisions?

Few people can entirely avoid having to work for a living.

You cannot choose one thing, but then still expect to not have the drawback of that choice.

Except you can, and these guys are doing exactly that. They're not doing anything criminal. They're not doing anything immoral. They're not doing anything wrong. They're living entirely within the bounds of what society has decided is acceptable. They're living exactly how society allows them to live.

You may believe that welfare is a bad thing, and that society would be better if we just let people who don't have jobs starve to death or something, but society has decided as a collective group that we don't want that. Consequently we allow people to choose not to work. We pay their bills. That's how society works - the majority decides what is or isn't acceptable and enables that behaviour.

My belief if that society is richer by a long way if people can live life on their own terms. I would much rather people lived life on welfare playing video games all day than force those people to work jobs they hate. Sometimes you're just not in the right headspace to work. I took a couple of years off once and lived on my own money because I just didn't want a job any more. If I need welfare to do that again in the future then I will be very glad of it, and I will happily use it without any guilt that I'm not contributing.

And if the majority of people would not work..

Then the system would break down. But please note that hasn't happened. Most people choose to work, because living on welfare kind of sucks. Most people want more than that life affords them. The "what if!" argument doesn't work here because if it was going to happen it would already have happened, and it hasn't.


People who do not have to work work much less than people who do have to.

Some people have decided to live in a society where employees typically don't work consistently at the border between having a job and quitting.

If you do prefer a society where employers are not regulated at all, there probably are places in the world you can "choose" to live.


People who don't really want to work.

Nothing stops them. It's their own choice. And the government literally pays them to not have to work and be able to live like this.

They probably don't. Or rather, they have a choice the same way everyone chooses to have a job. Family and obligations are not so easily or callously discharged.

They never have to work. They may choose to do so. But in the end, they have that as a choice. We are talking of compulsory labor, where I have to do something to make someone else even more money, so I can have something to eat and a place to sleep.

The rest of us, don't have that luxury.

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