It’s as Simple as Work
(An open letter to the developed world from one of your citizens)


The secret to accumulating wealth is the work ethic, nothing more and nothing less. If you produce, you make your life better. If a collective produces, their standard of living increases. An economist measures it in GDP.

It’s really just that simple. Do something productive and you improve your life, and more often than not, the lives of others as well. (And it works just the same when you're in the hole.)

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So you’re in over your head with debt. How do you remedy that situation?

You work!! (It's the same thing - you're just starting from negative is all, but it's still about accumulating wealth).

Simple as that.

(Unless your debt is truly unserviceable. Then you default, or restructure, whatever is most appropriate for your situation, but you still go back to work – unless you want to die. Are you getting the picture? It’s called work, and there's no way around it - there’s no such thing as a free lunch, not even when you had credit.)

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The same thing applies to nations, or collectives of people. It’s the same equation just multiplied, and the solution is also the same, just multiplied. A collective remedies its over indebtedness by working (i.e. “growth” to use the modern academic euphemism). Whether it be simply paying down your existing debt, restructuring, partial default, or outright default, or combination of the same, the way you dig out of the hole is by working.

And don’t tell me that you also need to be resource rich because I’ll just pull out Japan and Argentina to refute both ends of that argument.

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When you get up off your butt and paint your house, or a part of your house, you’re being productive, and you’re bettering your life. You might not be getting paid, but you’re doing something that betters your existence. And someone had to make the paint, and someone else had to bring it to you, and those people even got paid. And they will probably end up buying something from you as they work hard to better their lives. This is a simple example, but it really is just that simple! It all comes down to work!

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From an enlightened self-interest point of view, your hard work actually helps other people better their lives too.

There are tons of people working in China, India, the rest of Asia, and Africa and South America who are busting their butts to scratch out the most basic of daily existences. The rest of us don’t necessarily have to choose to be so ungrateful as to stifle their prospects for a global economic expansion that offers them such great hopes. The rest of us don’t necessarily have to choose to stifle our hopes in their achieving better lives, much less in ourselves to do the same. We have the "other" choice of honoring the work ethic, the idea that is responsible for almost everything good we possess, and we have the choice of honoring our fellow man by passing on what we have learned.

Nobody should question the fact that the developing world will fuel the next round of world growth, neither from a viability standpoint, nor from an ethical standpoint.

In fact, I’d say we have a duty to get off our asses and work, a duty to ourselves, and a duty to them.

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Are our leaders capable of motivating us to take the pill, take the haircut, and get back to work? There is still much to be done. Are we capable of cutting back and working harder? Do we have any moral fortitude left in us?

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Europe, the United States, and the rest of the developed world need to tell their citizens to get off their ****ing asses and get back to work, for their own good, and for the rest of mankind, and we, the citizens, should have the decency and self respect to join in and work together in response.

It’s as simple as that.

But the collective, as with any team, needs a coach.

Anybody out there up to the challenge?

a little broken window fallacy thrown in there, but otherwise, yep. Time to work

I met a young woman recently, an immigrant from Russia. She said Americans work a lot. Work work work. Little time off for having a baby (compared to Russia), etc.

She thought she had access to better opportunities here than there.

Quote:

We are united in our resolve to promote growth and jobs.

We will work collectively to strengthen demand and restore confidence with a view to support growth.

We have agreed today on a coordinated Los Cabos Growth and Jobs Action Plan to achieve those goals.

We are implementing our structural and regulatory reform agenda to enhance medium-term growth prospects and build more resilient financial systems.

Etc., etc., etc.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/g20-s....

In total, 54 references to "growth".

Euphemism: the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant. ( http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionar.... )

Example: using “growth” as a euphemism for “work”.

The word work was used 32 times, and when not preceded with "we", that is to say, when not talking about themselves, or the IMF, or some other doublespeak institution, it appeared 3 times, and those instances were preceded with the words "decent", "rights at" and "quality" (as was basically the case with the mythical use of the word "jobs" - lots of quality jobs from infrastructure investments and structural reforms . . . not saying that those things are not positive, but, hey, even if we had the money, does anyone think we've got a panacea there? ).

What? Everyone afraid of getting their hands dirty?

As long as the collective is led to believe in magic bullets, the situation is not going to improve. As long as the collective thinks its leaders are going to "hatch a plan" to create "growth" in a continuance of their cradle to grave dependence, the collective is never going to lift a finger. As long as the developed, industrialized world keeps believing that more credit is the answer, the collective is never going to get off the couch (that is until even the couch is taken away).

Having reached the point of negative diminishing returns for every new unit of credit, the only viable option left on the table is to get the populace off its fat ass.

And that means talking about WORK, not growth.

Developed nations need to motivate their populations as though they were fighting a war. Indeed, with the debt overhang we currently are saddled with, "war" would be an acceptable "euphemism" to characterize the task at hand - indeed, it would not even be a euphemism since the characterization would be the opposite of "agreeable". The "war against our indebtedness" requires a national effort that is nothing short of any similar endeavor that has to deal with self-preservation. People need to get to work if they want to survive, and a war on debt would be an appropriately accurate characterization to express the urgency and absolute necessity regarding the issue to appropriately motivate the population to get to work.

Anyone remember the "Victory Garden"? Western society has a very good track record of coming together and busting butt when necessary. Such a "war on debt" would not just exhort the collective to shut the TV off and do something productive, it would also legally require public policy to adapt to the demands of the common effort.

Okay, so you say that such terminology and determination would undermine confidence and cause the current system to crash.

Okay, let's not call it a war then, but let's at least start talking about WORK. Let's start talking about rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty.

So what could be done beyond bully pulpit encouragement? How about a not so subtle change in public policy?

Unemployment benefits, welfare, food stamps and all other like kinds of government subsidies and handouts would no longer be free! The unemployment office would be turned into a career counseling center, for example, where the unemployed would have to put in 20 hours a week, mandatory (the majority of which would be outside cold calling on prospective employers, but there would be résumé work, interview workshops, cold call documentation to keep up-to-date, etc. etc.), and, if not, END OF BENEFITS, period. Welfare folks, 10 hours a week of community service and 10 hours in the above mentioned "career counseling center", with an exception for single parents being 10 hours helping the kids with their homework after hours AT SCHOOL (with teacher supervision - ah, school teachers: a real 40 hour work week) instead of 10 hours a week of community service. ETC., ETC, ETC.

Just some basic examples, that leave a lot to the imagination, especially the image of a socially active group of people networking as a by product of their underlying efforts - in short, the clearest image of community building possible with people making real contacts and real friends instead of the passively invented TV friends. People WORKING together to better their lives, and, indirectly, the lives of others.

Or are we just a bunch of useless, lazy, antisocial slobs - praying for that magic bullet promised by the welfare state that will never come - who will never be able to get off our fat asses? And our leaders simply a bunch of useless idiots?

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

It's called WORK, not growth (growth is a by product), and it's a war on debt that we're fighting.

Get used to it. You'll get over it.

And, when you do, you'll probably quit your aching and start doing something productive about it.

Highrev wrote..

Developed nations need to motivate their populations as though they were fighting a war... People need to get to work if they want to survive...

Personally, I don't want Babylon on the Potomac to "motivate" me or anyone else to do jack. Scarcity is an economic fact of life and survival is an innate human instinct. There is no need for government to "declare war" to make either of them operative to the end that people will work. The problem is moral hazard, the "Bernanke gonna bailout my bank/Obama gonna pay my mortgage" mindset. The only way to solve it is for government to quit interposing itself between the actions of individuals and firms and the rewards/consequences of those actions. IOW, quit looting the inventive and productive and quit subsidizing the lazy and profligate.

Pretty sad.