Work to Live: Death, Divorce, and Crime

The work to live ideology results in 700 deaths per year from freezing.  It is a major contributer to domestic violence as well as high divorce rates in the U.S.  It is highly likely that it also is a major factor in illegal drug use.  Of course, this does not even count the cases of starvation and other shelter related deaths.  Frankly, this work to live thing is imposing what amounts to serious cruel and unusual punishment on around 600,000 people (the government claims that this is how many people are homeless each night on average).

This is a shame, in a country that produces almost five times what it consumes of nearly all basic necessities (shelter may be an exception).  Even during the recent recession, we had a thriving economy, producing enormous amounts of nearly everything, and only a very small portion of that is necessary for survival.  A vast majority of our labor goes into producing things that we do not need.  We have too much of nearly everything (half of the food produced in the U.S. that is not exported gets thrown away), and yet, we are just letting people starve and freeze to death on the streets.  Why?

The problem is "work to live."  At the same time the U.S. is making great strides to abolishing the death penalty.  Last year, there were only 35 executions in the U.S. total.  The grand total since 1976 is 1,407.  Each year, 20 times as many people as were executed last year die from freezing alone.  It only takes two years for enough people to die from freezing to match the total number of executions since 1976.  The death penalty is not a significant source of death in the U.S., and more innocent people die every year in accidents than the grand total of innocent people that have died to the death penalty in all of U.S. history.  Why are we so vocal about the death penalty while huge numbers of people are dying constantly because of some outdated ideology that is based largely on a situation that never actually existed in known history?  We are evidently hypocrites.


Domestic violence, divorce rates, and drug abuse all go together.  These are all problems that are limited primarily to the lower class.  Domestic abuse in middle or upper class households is extremely rare compared to those living in poverty.  The most common cause of divorce is financial disagreements that stem from not having a high enough income.  Drug abuse is far more common among the homeless and poor than any other class.  In fact, crime in general (especially petty theft and violent crime) is most frequently committed by the poor.  The worst part is that a vast majority of poor people are not poor by their own choice, but they are punished for it and treated as if it were.  As with the death penalty, innocent people are being punished for not being able to work to live.  They largely have no choice, and multiple studies have shown that giving them sufficient money, even straight cash with no strings attached (the opposite of work to live), will alleviate most of these problem, and it will give them the means and motivation to permanently escape them.

Work to live has become a toxic ideology on our society.  It was the root cause of the recent recession, because even during the recession, goods were plentiful.  It causes people to keep jobs they hate, preventing other people who want those jobs from getting them.  It causes a great deal of death, far more than the death penalty.  It causes economists to make nonsensical statements revolving around the idea that reducing unnecessary work is bad.  It causes people to oppose valuable economic advances, again based on the idea that reducing necessary work is bad.  It is a major factor in  divorce, drug abuse, and crime.  Eliminating the work to live ideology (with, for example, a basic income) would do far more to reduce unnecessary death than eliminating the death penalty, and it would likely reduce crime far more effectively than the death penalty or any other law enforcement ever has.