Working When You Don't Need The $$$

[Singular Intellect]

Why not just take their their money and give it to someone who doesn't want to work anymore? That way they can keep working and actually need to do so. I'll sign up for that system!

[Todeswind]

The issue with arguing that financially secure people shouldn't work is that it implies that work is something undesirable or dirty. Ross Perot (who I'm still sad was not elected president) was famous for saying that "Work isn't a four letter word." I find the people who can afford not to work but chose to dedicate themselves to some sort of public service position, teacher, public defender, politician, to be commendable. Moreover one can not be a proponent of a meritocratic system and criticize someone else for not letting someone else have a turn.

[Gurachn]

All this talk of the moral benefits of allocating work "...to each according to his needs" smacks of damned commie ideology!
Was that 'Battleship' movie you were talking about earlier, by any chance the Potemkin??

Anyway, to restate what has already been said, the purpose of work is not restricted to maintaining subsistance+.
For many it performs a number of important psycological functions, e.g. providing concrete meaning and purpose to ones existance, a forum for satisfying social interaction, etc.
Depriving one person of their emotional/psychological needs, in order to benefit anothers financial ones is morally unsound.

In any case in a free society a persons need for a job is largely irrelevant. The availability of work and a persons capability to perform it should be the only determining factors.
If your poor friends are losing out the juicy jobs in favor of your filthy rich ones, then they should either upgrade their qualifications or move into another less competitive line of work.

If your rich buddies are happy doing what they love, then more power to them.
Its not their fault, and they should feel no guilt, that their skills and experience are more valued than their financially less well off competitors.

[Kanastrous]

The issue with arguing that financially secure people shouldn't work is that it implies that work is something undesirable or dirty.

Not at all. It suggests that access to the work is so valuable that people whose monetary need is zero might consider leaving to it to people whose need is in excess of zero.

[Lagmonster]

I don't know about every profession, but there are some where I really would want to know that my guy was the son of a billionaire industrialist playboy rather than the son of a ghetto thug who worked his way out of the gutters. Like, say, physicians. When it's my body on the line, everything else being equal, give me the guy who comes from seven generations of personal success rather than the guy who's working just to fight off the stress of paying his bills.

[Lusankya]

That's odd. I would prefer the one who worked his way out of the gutter.

The son of the billionaire industrialist playboy is far more likely to have only gotten into med school on the back of his parents green.

Not to mention that plenty of children of rich parents only go into medicine because of parental and peer pressure, rather than because of real desire to become a doctor. I would prefer a doctor who felt some passion for his work, rather than someone who was only there because it's an appropriate profession for Saints Old Scholars.

[Lagmonster]

That's a difference in our prejudices; we both have different appreciations for different approaches to the same conclusion, and value the positives and potential negatives of each story differently.

[General Zod]

I don't know about every profession, but there are some where I really would want to know that my guy was the son of a billionaire industrialist playboy rather than the son of a ghetto thug who worked his way out of the gutters. Like, say, physicians. When it's my body on the line, everything else being equal, give me the guy who comes from seven generations of personal success rather than the guy who's working just to fight off the stress of paying his bills.

That seems kind of silly to me. I wouldn't give two shits about my doctor's background so long as he had the expertise I needed and was competent enough not to fuck anything up while he was working on me. Chances are the guy that came from the rich family would be working in a private clinic or some other practice where he could bleed his patients dry for the money anyway.

[Kanastrous]

I'd prefer whichever physician has the most experience in dealing with my specific medical problem, and/or the one with the highest proportion of surviving to deceased patients. Billionaire families produce fuckups just like any other family, and in fact if I were confronted with an nth-generation-doctor billionaire's son-type I would constantly be wondering how much of his present success rests upon his family connections and wealth vs. his actual ability.* Whereas I don't have to think too much about whether doctor worked-his-way-off-the-streets got where he is by playing on family connections, and money.



* I am admittedly disposed to thinking this way thanks to listening to my parents who are physicians talk about this stuff. Draw your own conclusions.

[aerius]

There's some specialized fields where there's "institutional knowledge" or something to that effect where a person whose family's been working in the field for ages will know things & have certain skills that a 1st generation worker won't. There's trade secrets or tricks of the trade that get passed down among the most senior employees that others don't know about, there's better ways of doing things that don't get written down in the manuals and taught to everyone.

I don't know how likely it is for someone to run into a situation where this becomes important, custom yatch builders or pianos are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head.

[General Zod]

There's some specialized fields where there's "institutional knowledge" or something to that effect where a person whose family's been working in the field for ages will know things & have certain skills that a 1st generation worker won't. There's trade secrets or tricks of the trade that get passed down among the most senior employees that others don't know about, there's better ways of doing things that don't get written down in the manuals and taught to everyone.

I don't know how likely it is for someone to run into a situation where this becomes important, custom yatch builders or pianos are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Food companies come to mind. There's a number of famous restaurants with special recipes that they just don't share.