Wingnut Media Agree: Paying People For Work Makes Them Lazy

It is truly unbelievable that the President of Our United American States of America (SFX: "eagle" -- actually red-tailed hawk) has absolutely no idea how the free market works. And how the free market works is that if you work hard leveraging the buyout of a business, you should be free to pay the peons who provide the actual labor as little as the market will bear so that you can maximize profits for your shareholders, and if you are a worker, you should shut the hell up, work harder, and be glad that you still have a job. And yet, in utter defiance of this basic law of economics, the Socialist Marxist wants to give all of the hardworking business owners' money to the indigent and lazy welfare bums who work 50-60 hours a week for them, just because he thinks they deserve 'fair pay' for 'overtime work.' Look, if these people were working so hard, they would own the business, they would not be stocking the shelves. Thankfully, the rightwing media hasmobilized to educate America about how being paid actually makes workers lazier. This does not, of course, apply to CEOs, who must get larger and larger bonuses and lower taxes, so that they will have an incentive to let other people have jobs at all.

Over on Fox & Friends, we were treated to warnings that Obama's radical new overtime rules -- which mostly just roll back rules put into place by GW Bush -- will fundamentally redefine the nature of work by requiring that employees who aren't really managers be paid for work over 40 hours per week. This radical new notion, they warned, could very well "undercut the work ethic." Briane Kilmeade predicted that the change will almost certainly result in "discouraging those ... that want to work more to get further along, with these new rules."

The Wall Street Journal also weighed in, explaining how the rules subvert the most basic principle of capitalism, which is that the longer and harder you work, the more money your employer should get for your efforts, and maybe someday you too will advance, who knows, it could happen:

The rules will particularly harm workers who want to climb the economic ladder by going the extra mile for their employers and demonstrating why they deserve promotion. Now many businesses will tell employees with ambition they can't work long hours.

This crazy new idea -- requiring employers to pay people for work -- is almost certain to consign America to economic doom. Lord only knows what horrors could result -- people getting paid for all the hours they work would have disposable income that they would just waste on goods and services, leading to a classic death spiral of positive economic growth.

The answer, of course, is for all of the jerb creators to go Galt, possibly in one of the new economic paradises being set up in Chile.

[ WaPo / MediaMatters / Illustration by MixerMike662 (aka FluffyMixer)]

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