Ah, the Tory brain. Never mind the super-rich, it’s paying plumbers cash-in-hand that’s truly immoral. This week we’re all being called lazy.

Whenever I read one of these Tory stories — which seems to be about every week — I’m always reminded of Buckminster Fuller, who had this to say about the ‘value’ of hard work:

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

— Buckminster Fuller, New York Magazine, 1930

A man well ahead of his time, and ours.