Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 62

Since moral equality is not, and is not held to be, an inalterable condition, it is possible for a society that is committed to maximum economic productivity and to the moral equality of men [sic] to renege on its committments by defining the characteristics that are economically dysfunctional as vices that diminish or cancel, moral equity. In this way the lazy, the spendthrift, and people who are unwilling to take jobs and are content to remain "welfare bums" are held to have renounced their equity. But this argument avails only so long as the functioning of the economy is itself accepted as moral-- which accounts, I suppose, for the oppressive moralizing of the Victorian age, intent on impressing masses of industrial workers into a new, and obviously appalling industrial system-- which promised them, in fact, very little.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg,
The Disposal Of Libery And Other Industrial Wastes
(emphasis JS)