15 Aug 2011, 2:43 pm
marshall wrote:
AceOfSpades wrote:
marshall wrote:
Philologos wrote:
Master_Pedant wrote:
Given that the hero of these fables is the ant, does that suddenly mean that conservatives think hundreds of thousands of workers should risk their lives and health so one woman can make hundreds of babies? Viva the welfare queen, I guess ... 
The fable itself, passing appropriately lightly over ruveyn's twist, has nothing to say about politics or social structure, other than that it is a typical piece of Socializer "learn to be like me" instructional material. It applies equally to the Socializers who imprinted on "no work no food" and the others who imprinted on "there is no I in team".
The political discourse of today has long since passed beyond the gentle "so now, kiddies, don't you see why we ought to .... of the Kindergarten oriented Socializers to the slogans and berserker howls of the Powervolk. Limbaugh has replaced Buckley, and no doubt there has been a similar change on the other side - certainly the tone has adjusted, but I have so little contact with conservatives I do not get to hear who they are.
Which means fables - and there are plenty eitgher side MIGHT have used - are pointless except as something to twist into a straw figure to to taunt the enemy, as has been done here and as is normally done in most PPR scriptural references.
Yea. Contrary to the current right-wing mythos, traditional capital 'S' Socialism is about work ethic. Contrary to the popular Ayn Rand pinko-mischaracterization, old school Socialism never tolerated freeloaders of any stripe (including those who make thier money by sitting on title deeds).
Well, what I hear a lot coming from certain people that want to equate progressivism / social democracy with socialism is that both ideologies are about "redistributing the wealth" from the "producers" to the "freeloaders". In reality though, the socialist "work ethic" and disdain for "laziness" and the American-right version of the same are not that different. The only difference is that one ideology has a different definition of what makes a "freeloader". Also, socialism seems to only value manual labor as true "work" in their glorification of the proletariat. In the end, both have to glorify/romanticize the idea of work ethic as a means to control society.
marshall wrote:
Also, Horatio Alger aside, I don't think working indefinitely as a hired chump to help someone else profit is inherently more motivating than working for "the common good". In the end, the only intrinsic motivation is people have to work to eat and survive.
Well when it comes to tedious, routine jobs that don't require any rudimentary cognitive skill money works as a primary incentive. I'm not into Horatio Alger myths or demonization of the rich. It's hard to tell whether either case occurs more often than not. There are way too many dynamics involved to resort to either generalization and it really depends what market it is.
