I'm not even close to agreeing with everything blogger IOZ writes, but this little summary in a recent post really captures a lot of information and ideas in a very compact bit of prose. I must quote:
The problem is in fact not that people need jobs but that people need money, and hobbling them to a desk or factory floor is the only moral and legitimate means of funneling currency into their empty jugs. We need to have fuller employment so that more people are getting paid so that the consumer economy expands ad inf[initum] and repeat as necessary. There are, if you consider it even briefly, a half million or so unexamined assumptions underlying all of this.
He goes on to declare that both democrats and republicans are silly, which I can marginally agree with, but also that Barack Obama is a murderer (which I will grant is provisionally true, but only in the same sense that every modern American president trying to manage an empire ultimately beyond his control has been a murderer). I'm less comfortable with such rhetorical flights. But the preceding thought about jobs cuts to the core of the limitations of life on our increasingly Potemkin Planet.
His conclusion: "Beyond the merely pecuniary and the venial: what does your life mean to you beyond your paystub and your appetites?"
I'm working on the answer to this, and feel I'm making only a little progress. But I agree it needs to be sought.