[at-l] On Topic Quote

[Malcolm Fuller <mfuller@somtel.com> (Malcolm Fuller)]

>> In the United States the average American Worker works 935
>> hrs more than his/her French counterpart.  No other worker,
>> in the world, works more hour than the American worker.  For
>> What?  To live in a house made of ticky tacky (apologies to
>> Pete Seager), drive on clogged roads so one can work 9, 20,
>> 12 hrs a day. And for What?  Low wages and abuse from ones
>> boss.  And then on the weekend we try to normalize or
>> relationship with our family and try to do all the work that
>> needs to be done around the house and try to get some
>> leisure time.

If the reduced number of hours in a French work week is
such an obvious good, then why is it necessary for their
government to sustain it by force of law?

> Those are exactly the problems MacKaye detailed in his Regional
> Planning article...

True, but had he carried out his plan according original
specifications people wouldn't have come. MacKaye's flaw
in reasoning, which was popular among intellectuals of the
day, was the belief that, in the future, people would be
forced into taking "excess" leisure as the then-current
standard of living could be satisfied by an ever-decreasing
amount of labor. Part of this commonly-held belief was
founded on untested Marxist economic theory, but it also
arose from an attitude whereby the masses were expected to
only want a certain egalitarian degree of affluence and
nothing more; that increasing absolute affluence wasn't as
desired as eliminating relative affluence.

Yet, given the choice between taking leisure time and
working toward greater personal affluence, most people
choose the latter. There is nothing to prevent individuals
in the States from living lives of greater leisure so long
as they're willing to take the ordinate hit on their
standard of living.

Such is freedom.

-MF