Nice Non-Work If You Can Get It
6th August 2022
The situation in Germany, and elsewhere in the West, has come to resemble more and more the scenario in “The Marching Morons”, a novella written in the early 1950s by C.M. Kornbluth. The increasing use of advanced technology has reduced the employment opportunities for low-skilled, less intelligent workers, whose numbers are increasing. In a high-tech society this creates a pool not just of the unemployed, but of essentially unemployable people. As pointed out by the translator of the following article, a large (but not precisely known) number of work-averse culture-enrichers may be added to the pool of citizens who subsist on what has become for all practical purposes a Universal Basic Income.
In the following report, Friedrich Merz, the leader of the CDU (the party of former Chancellor Angela Merkel), criticizes the state subsidy of hundreds of thousands of people who do not work, but are perhaps capable of doing “simple jobs”. He isn’t specific about what sort of work these not-so-bright people could do — perhaps polishing the shoes and the limousines of state functionaries such as himself.