Bill's Planet

With all due respect to those who have lost loved ones to the COVID-19 pandemic illness, I’d like readers to consider what a guaranteed lifetime (until mandatory (?) retirement at 70 years old, for example) employment might mean. Should we compel people, once they reach the age of majority (eighteen years old, for example), to decide whether to continue with formal schooling or to enter the job market with the intention of being fully employed in an eight hour work day (unpaid lunch break)? What will we do with the students who wish to pursue the arts and crafts or trade skills rather than academics and policy oriented studies? These students/individuals are needed in our technologically advancing societies as well as those that decide to continue with their formal studies full-time. Then too, a fully employed young adult may be readying herself/himself for a comfortable family life with a loved one and possibly bearing a child (or children) for which society must provide the means and resources to help bring about the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (as collateral for ensuring its commitment to bargaining in a social contract with its citizens). These mundane and quotidian pursuits are foreseeable, respectable, and common yet costly. In response, citizens in return must be willing to participate in the protection of their society from infringements to its cohesiveness and to the ability to provide those necessary resources that its citizens enjoy. Furthermore, there are exceptional individuals who amass wealth, are adroit in some skill or intellectual domain that informs society and advances it with innovation or perspectives that increase life’s pleasures. These people receive not only accolades but generally are highly compensated more so than society’s ability to remunerate the average nine-to-five worker, at least for her/his average lifetime employment tenure. Greed may not be a rewardable virtue in a “relatively” free society but motivation to do well financially cannot be deprived by society so that this factor is not removed from humanity’s evolutionary behavioral responses. Nevertheless, it appears that the average person is willing to live a life in which s/he is guaranteed one of dignity, respect, comfort, and the ability to enjoy the blessings of liberty to the extent affordable by a society of this kind. (Are we playing/living in a “zero sum game” of winners and losers, so-to-speak?)