There are people who think that they speak for the working man. The question to ask these people is, “What do you mean by work?”

There are many things that are work that someone would claim not to be work. Pol Pot thought that businessmen and professionals weren’t doing real work, so he killed off the entire propertied and educated population of Cambodia. Closer to home there
are many people who see art as not work. I know more about the subject than they do, and I can tell that art very much is work. It takes a lot of effort to produce a good piece of art, and that qualifies very much as work.

Some people see social workers as being parasitical as well. In fact they are doing a valuable contribution. It takes a lot less money to hire a social worker to check someone’s criminal tendencies than it does to lock them up. What social workers do
is therefore beneficial to the taxpayer, and they deserve to be treated with respect.

The academia is frequently accused of being parasitical as well. What we have here is failure of comprehension. Most of what business sells is technology, and technology comes out of science. The true root of prosperity is not business but science; and
while business has a large role in it, without science business would be nothing more than exchange of basic commodities at the level it was in Medieval Persia.

Government – you know everything of which it has been accused. My response is that not all governments are the same. American government is nothing like North Korean government. It does not begin to compare in tyranny and cruelty. In America, the worst
abuses aren’t done by the government. They are done by private entities and individuals. Incestuous and violent parents, suffocating communities, corrupt networks in law and medicine, dishonest religious organizations, mafia and the gangs. And while it
remains necessary to hold the government accountable to the voter, real improvement in America stands to be gained by recognizing potential for wrongdoing in all entities – both public and private – and confronting that wrong-doing.

I seek to confront Pol Potism whether it be against propertied people or against creative people and whether it be practiced by government or by private entities. Most of the people they attack perform a function. Not all pursuits are immediately
compensated; many take a long time to mature or have a meaning that is only understood through expanded analysis. Art, social work and science very much are work. And it is important that this be recognized.

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