The thing about Obama is that he thinks everyone wants what he wants, an easy life with no work and lots of free time to shoot hoops. To the extent we can actually find out anything factual about his days before politics – in fact, even about his days since he became the President – he seems to have be a vacuum of inertia, the farthest thing in the world from a work-obsessed dynamo.

Same might be said about most of the Labor Party front bench. University grads who went to work for a union seems to be the mould. Their assumption, like Obama’s, is to get more income for less work. That’s the union mantra. That’s all they can think of asking for. That all they want, more of what’s going with less personal effort required to get it.

To a limited extent, that’s what the private sector is designed to do, to increase the volume of goods and services while reducing the cost of getting what we get. Just that with the private sector, there is this one requirement. You have to work. You have to produce something. You need to put something into the communal bowl before you can take something out for yourself.

Socialists don’t see it that way. They are all about taking out. They never discuss putting in. And so far as they are concerned, society’s largest enemies are those who have put in so much that they have actually received a seriously larger income than the people they employ.

But you know, the people on the receiving end of these plundered goods, not only do they not appreciate what they receive, their lives are ruined by it. The promise of endless wealth on the condition of absolutely no work is no one’s model of Nirvanah.

Mark Steyn has a nifty article on just this sort of thing with this as the conclusion he reaches towards the end:

So what does every initiative of the Obama era have in common? Obamacare, Obamaphones, Social Security disability expansion, 50 million people on food stamps . . . The assumption is that mass, multi-generational dependency is now a permanent feature of life. A coastal elite will devise ever smarter and slicker trinkets, and pretty much everyone else will be a member of either the dependency class or the vast bureaucracy that ministers to them. And, if you’re wondering why every Big Government program assumes you’re a feeble child, that’s because a citizenry without ‘work and purpose’ is ultimately incompatible with liberty. The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neo-feudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn’t just be ‘economic inequality,’ but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.

Being on leave is a vacation. Being unemployed, even with more or less the same income to spend, is not a life of endless joy. It is the very essence of an empty life. This is what socialism brings, and the seething resentment that comes with it as well.