I Sure Am Sick Of All These Idle Rich People's Opinions About Work!
Does someone want to tell these people that being smug isn't a job?
Here’s Ben Shapiro talking about why people should be made to work until the grim specter of old age curls its icy claws around their throats as their trembling enfeebled hand struggles to keep the welding torch straight:
Elon Musk is still afraid of Substack stealing his precious bytes so I can’t embed the video
“Retirement is a stupid idea,” he spits, noting that everyone he’s ever known who has retired has been dead within five years because without our jobs we have literally nothing to live for and no purpose to our worthless existence. You would think that an orthodox Jewish Zionist would grasp the irony in preaching arbeit macht frei.
The whole thing is of course horseshit and even the most fundamental tenets of his argument fall apart under the tiniest scrutiny. Like if retirement really was some kind of insta-death then the parts where he complains about old people being a drag on the welfare system don’t make sense. They’re all dead, Ben, heartbroken and yearning for the canning factory.
But of course Ben Shapiro will never retire in any way that means anything because Ben Shapiro doesn’t work now. In so far as he is employed at all, he is employed by fracking industry oligarchs to help make people more conservative so they’ll reject environmentalism and keep petroleum viable for as long as possible. He’s a cog in a gigantic machine designed to try to engineer the ideology of our entire species for the benefit of a handful of industries that would die out otherwise. What he has is a role, it’s not a job.
Shapiro is very obviously being utterly disingenuous when he pretends stripping retirement from people is a benevolent act that protects them from losing their life’s purpose. It’s about social security and healthcare. Most people think that the reason rich people hate those things is because they require taxes, but I question how much concern Ben Shapiro really has about an amount of money he would never notice going missing. No, in the end all it’s really about, all it’s ever about, is that he can’t control who funding and public services are allocated to, and some of it might be going to people he doesn’t like. It’s a resentment thing.
And oh look, here’s beard-with-an-idiot-attached Matt Walsh arguing that we shouldn’t even be allowed to have any free time at all! Matt Walsh is still benevolent enough to let us have five hours of our lives when we’re not triaging bullshit emails between George from accounting and the lady whose job it is to make sure that the payroll department remains inefficient. How much free time do you think you should have?
I dunno, Matt, how much free time should you have? Matt doesn’t work either. His first job was as a local radio personality. He wound up failing upward because he’s really good at standing in as a surrogate emotional release valve for people who would love to be able to call a minority a degenerate in public but are scared of the real world consequences. People who want validation for the sexual attraction they feel toward their 14 year old cousin because that shit’s in the Bible but you know what isn’t in the Bible? Trans people. Whatever you’ve done that you feel guilt about is between you and Jesus and never the state, unless it’s queer stuff in which case you need a knock on the door from the Ron DeSantis Atomwaffen.
I’d already hammered out a lot of this piece this week before noticing my fave boy
has already dropped his own commentary about this infuriating horseshit and I definitely don’t want to Somerton him so check out his piece over at New Means as well.My beef right now is this—why the hell am I hearing what any of these people’s opinions are?
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A disproportionate amount of the social commentary that we absorb in the media comes to us from people who have no discernible talent or authority but got thrust into our precious limited span of attention via the spurious notion that having lots of money is some sort of thing, analogous to an occupation, regardless of how that happened. We live in market capitalism which is ostensibly a level playing field, based on merit if you read that with a straight face, and we’re not supposed to have aristocrats or baronetcies or oligarchs or people who don’t do anything but still wield influence because of their Station.
But we do have those things, so we came up with some tricks and workarounds to shoehorn into the machine to make it make sense without admitting it’s a caste system. One of those things is that we decided that owning stuff is a type of job. Like “owning land” is the same type of verb phrase as “mining copper.”
Do you own a house? Almost nobody reading this does, but congratulations. But do you own two houses? Wowee, now you’re a landlord, an actual, literal feudal term. Your job is owning houses, your customers are people who don’t like to die in a ditch and will pay money to not die in a ditch. You cannot, however, write on the “occupation” section of your census form that you own an Xbox. That’s different, for some reason.
We came up with a whole bunch of fake terms for things that aren’t jobs but sound like jobs and serve the same function as a job when someone asks them what they do, or when you hear a particularly shitty take from someone so you go to Wikipedia to find out what the fuck this person is and the article has to put something in the space that explains why they have a Wikipedia article.
I see it all the time. Almost every damn time some wanker goes off about how nobody wants to work anymore or there are too many poors in San Francisco and they should all get jobs and be fired from those jobs.
“Investor.” “Co-owner.” There’s a picture of a Cybertruck, which is a political virtue signal for people who think your wealth, opinion of Elon Musk, and willingness to drive a hideous car are three points in your favour when judging the value of your opinion. He even slips “media personality” in there like that’s not the entire mystery we’re trying to solve.
David Sacks is another hobgoblin who pops up like Beetlejuice to recommend firing everyone in the whole district if even one person utters the words “paid overtime” or “maternity leave.” A man who is conflicted about the concept of everyone bringing a tent to work and living in their cubicle but only because that technically means they’d be working from home, which he thinks should be a capital felony.
He's also very suspiciously enthusiastic about helping Russia win its war against Ukraine, which is something else a lot of these people are into as though they share some odd affinity for a political structure ruled by oligarchs, I wonder why that is?
Wow check it out. “Venture capitalist.” “Cofounder.” “Entrepreneur.” Shit, this man has three jobs, he must be run off his feet! We keep mentioning how people’s economic situations are so dire right now that people have to pick up multiple jobs to make ends meet, and this is exactly what we’re talking about.
Bill Ackman is another opinion-haver whose opinions you can’t go five minutes without hearing lately. He’s got a lot of big ideas about geopolitics, wokeness, the college education system and the purging of wokeness from said system, some dubious associations with race science advocates, and being the world’s most obnoxious Wife Guy. Oh and he also thinks you’re a lazy ingrate.
Sounds like an expert of many god damned hats, right? So many hats up in here he needs an extension on his mansion just for all those hat stands. But what the hell is he?
“Co-trustee” is another one of those bullshit labels that sounds like a thing but isn’t. But hell, look at that, it says here that he’s a CEO. Finally, I will grant that CEO is indeed, just barely, a job. So what does the big CEO man CEO?
Hedge fund manager! He invests and trades and moves money around for other financiers and investors and venture capitalists. Probably entrepreneurs, too. Maybe even philanthropists! I bet he knows quite a few founders and co-founders and maybe even deputy assistant junior vice presidents.
Man, like most people who live in the actual world of waking up in the morning, following orders for an arbitrary hierarchy, and then, with sincere apologies to Matt Walsh, spending a few hours for myself in the evening, I’m just trying to get by and figure out this world as best I can from other people who are living it. I don’t really have much patience for being force-fed poisoned life advice from people whose success trajectory involved the Tooth Fairy making a miscalculation one day and leaving fourteen billion dollars under their pillow.
If you look up Ben Shapiro’s Wikipedia the main thing he’s credited as is a lawyer. Now that’s an actual job, I will absolutely grant him that. But my brother in Christ if you read down the page it turns out he was a lawyer for ten months. This man wants you to work until you’re 105 but he worked for less than one solitary calendar year before earning money full time complaining about the left to people who already agreed with him but got a dopamine hit from giving him money to take their own opinions and say them back to them like paying a chef to feed you your own turds. That’s literally all that he’s done since 2004.
These aren’t men of grand experience who did their time in the field and now mean to pass their learning onto the next generation. At least in the days when we all lived in tribes we had traditions of respect for our elders who earned it through decades of fingers to the bone hard yakka. Now we have people like Dave Rubin who failed a stand up comedy career and then went straight into YouTube to tell our elders to go fuck themselves. And all I can think is, why am I hearing you at all? You’re unemployed. You won capitalism. Go to the Bahamas and order yourself whatever drink that is that they serve in a coconut half. You don’t even have to call it retirement if you don’t want to. Raise the rent on one of your investment properties and call it giving yourself a promotion.
I feel like we have the system we have now because the merchant class got pissed that they couldn't buy their way into the aristocracy. For the rest of us peasants it's meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
It was so much better when the rich were actually idle.