The class prejudice expressed here is palpable, never mind the economic illiteracy of blaming inflation on welfare instead of 40 years of unenforced antitrust laws and resulting monopoly and oligopoly all across the economy.
This post's unspoken assumption ignores a simple fact: the vast majority of workers have jobs, not careers. Amazon warehouse workers, Starbucks baristas, truck and delivery drivers, home health aides, oil field service workers, the air traffic controllers fired by Reagan, the usually undocumented people who pick your lettuce, daycare center workers who care for your kids. They work to live, not live to work, as the creative and entrepreneurial class does.
Most will never belong to the creative or entrepreneurial class. But they maintain the infrastructure that allows people like Sorokin and me to accumulate assets, both financial and creative. Showing contempt for those who enable you to have the life you lead and telling them not to ask for decent wages, benefits and time off from physically demanding jobs is biting the hand that feeds you.
The French experience with the 35 hour week raising productivity and numerous companies benefitting from a four day work week with no change in pay shows Bernie Sanders is right. Living in post-Soviet Latvia I've seen the damage Sorokin's social Darwinist model and asymmetric labor market failure has done in exporting underpaid talent (labor and skill shortages combined with high unemployment and low wages). And his ideology called "workism" makes even its privileged participants miserable: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/
I've been an angel investor in a dozen startups, verifying empirically that most fail. I certainly want my investee companies' founders and teams to work obscenely hard to get through the valley of death to scale the business so I can get an obscenely profitable exit. It's the one or two big winners that pay for all the losers.
But to apply that survival of the fittest model of work to the labor market as a whole is utter shortsighted idiocy. One more example of how most capitalists suffer from a blinkered collective narcissism that shows how "capitalism saws off the tree branch upon which it sits." ....until another Roosevelt comes along with the next dose of real anti-trust enforcement and socialism to save capitalism from the capitalists.
