A heartwarming tale of a former professional baseball player who became Senator from Kentucky; a man of such principle and courage that he alone stood against the tides of opinion (and 99 other senators) to stop the immoral and wasteful extension of unemployment benefits to people who are just clearly too lazy to fight them Mexicans for jobs picking lettuce. He did this despite significant personal cost: he missed the South Carolina--Kentucky game.
Republicans (as noted by Krugman in his editorial today) have decided to revive the argument that welfare benefits (including unemployment benefits) provide a disincentive to work. The idea (or, well, "idea") is that people will only work if they are forced to do so--if the consequences of not working are homelessness, starvation, and a brutal death at the hands of a meth junkie in the cruel cruel streets, amidst the cold falling rain. This little story fails to explain why anyone in Western Europe works at all, when they could just loaf about the place, smugly drinking a nice little Bourdeaux.
Yet I think it also hints at a grim glimmer of truth about the kinds of jobs that are available in the United States today. Many jobs are so miserable, so meaningless, and so underpaid that people must essentially be coerced into taking them. Even jobs which pay well (corporate, white collar jobs) are totally soul-sucking. I hope the person who invented the cubicle is now in a cubicle for all eternity, where the only thing he will have to read are tattered Dilbert cartoons pinned to the cubicle walls. If we accept that the Republicans are the pro-business (and emphatically not pro-free market) party, then it is essential that Americans continue to accept this wretched state of affairs, earnestly working for Wal-Mart for $7.75 an hour with no benefits, paying a higher tax rate than the Waltons do, and thinking unions are the enemy.
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