It is idle to quote the dictum:. "If a man will not work neither shall he eat." Such a dictum can only, in reason, be made to apply in the case of a community, which depends on the labours of its members to produce a sufficiency for all: in such a case it is only fair that the member who will not work should be the one to go short.
Unfortunately, however, the word 'work' has been given a moral connotation wholly inapplicable. For work is a means, not an end in itself; and while, in cases, moral judgment may be passed on the end for which one works, to apply such a judgment to work itself is to confuse the means with the end, and to make a virtue of a necessity.
But the result of such a judgment has been to give the 'worker' — as understood and determined by the Labour and alt Leftist parties — an undeserved prestige to which, nevertheless, it should be noted, no privilege is attached or allowed; for should he be displaced by some mechanistic device he becomes dependent on the state. Indeed he is at all times dependent, either on a job if he can find one, or on the state if he cannot, and it denotes a certain measure of realism on the part of the 'worker', that he refers to his work as a job, since he knows quite well that the end of the work for him is and must be the pay packet.
He is in fact and perforce a mercenary. It may be retorted here that the business man, the industrialist, the wicked profiteer, who employs the worker, is also a mercenary. And in the sense that, and in those cases, in which, with all the cards stacked against him, his living depends upon his making a profit, this is of course true.
By contrast the privilege that pertains to the privileged class, referred to by the 'worker' as 'the idle rich' lies in the fact that its members are free to choose the end and nature of the work they do, and to seek and find satisfaction therein.
Their security and freedom are based upon the surety and security of a free income, whether acquired from their own past endeavours and savings, or from that of their forebears, based in short, on an inheritance.
But the common, the national inheritance and its beneficial results of freedom and leisure, due to man's many inventions and discoveries, is denied to man. It has been filched from him, not for the sake of its material and cultural benefits which could be made accessible to all; but for the sake of that power with the intention to destroy man body and soul, and at the last to gain complete dominion over him, and which perforce must forever be the sworn enemy of man's freedom and leisure.
The plan to establish a Wold Government should make this clear and nothing could serve this plan better than to attribute the destruction of man's soul to mechanisation, for it helps to preserve the anonymity of the real perpetrators.
Further, the policy of Full Employment is perfect for their purposes. Although such a policy must clash with the increasing and continuing rate of mechanisation and must inevitably be the cause of tension and conflict, no one questions it.
Those who are free from the tyranny of such a policy, either from a jealous dislike of seeing their privilege extended to all, or through sheer stupidity, fail to see the inroads made upon their own freedom, by means of the many devious methods of taxation and inflation, with the intent to reduce them also, in the end, to the level of paid workers, or state dependants. Even the scientists who pride themselves on their fidelity to facts and reality make no protest. So there is no need for brain-washing and propaganda to induce people to accept such a policy, it works as it were automatically. Also, ironically enough, mechanisation can be drawn in to serve its purpose by putting it to the use of grandiose schemes and projects, not in the interests of man's well-being, but to foster man's pride, and create the need for a multiplicity of agents and employees to further them, and thus maintain the fiction of the need for Full Employment.
A. B. C. Best in The Social Crediter