On Mar 10, 2005, at 10:45 PM, Paul M Foster wrote:
> I don't believe hard or long work ever hurt anyone, and I don't believe
> Americans are overworked, even if they do work more hours. European
> workers are trying to live in that socialist paradise their leaders
> have
> been telling them about, and it's not working.
> I think the real problem isn't hard work. It's being _forced_ to work
> hard by an economic system that's been geared to penalize production.
> You used to be able to have a single bread-winner in a home and have a
> comfortable life. Those days are long gone, because our government(s)
> taxes us at a crushing rate. If it weren't for the ability of the
> American free market economy to innovate (and improve productivity),
> the
> U.S. would have become Mexico long ago. Tax cuts inevitably produce
> improved growth, productivity and investment for obvious reasons.
The push to produce more and more with less and less is definitely
damaging to people, and by extension the economy. My manager had his
first major heart attack at the age of THIRTY-TWO due to the stress
load he had to endure in his position. He finally learned how to tell
people "No". He is one of very few (I mean VERY few) managers in our
company that do NOT have a pager, cell phone, and/or fax machine to be
instantly contacted. I envy the guy. I look at the group that I work
in and note that we're doing about ten to twelve times the volume of
work we used to do with about half the people we started with.
Steven W. Buehler | steven@sanctuaryweb.org/swbuehler@yahoo.com
Web Page: http://www.sanctuaryweb.org | http://renaitre.iuma.com
Instant Messengers: stevenbuehlerfl (AIM) | swbuehler (Yahoo!/.Mac
iChat/Skype) | stevenwbuehler@msn.com (MSN Msgr.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 20:00:30 EDT