Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.

This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my wages. If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for — business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.

There is a coarse and boisterous money-making fellow in the outskirts of our town, who is going to build a bank-wall under the hill along the edge of his meadow. The powers have put this into his head to keep him out of mischief, and he wishes me to spend three weeks digging there with him. The result will be that he will perhaps get some more money to board, and leave for his heirs to spend foolishly. If I do this, most will commend me as an industrious and hard-working man; but if I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler. Nevertheless, as I do not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me, and do not see anything absolutely praiseworthy in this fellow's undertaking any more than in many an enterprise of our own or foreign governments, however amusing it may be to him or them, I prefer to finish my education at a different school.

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

-Thoreau, from Life without principle

Supposedly the Nazis did an experiment like that in a concentration camp. One group of people was forced to haul a pile of rocks and use them to build something constructive like a wall. The other group was forced to simply move the pile of rocks back and forth between two spots with no constructive outcome. The second group ended up being more sickly,going insane and dying at a much greater rate than the first group.

Constructive work is an important part of who we are. A lack of work and lack of productivity is contrary to our nature. Excluding government employees, nearly all jobs, no matter how menial, have the satisfaction of contributing to something productive.

appropriate that your argument is based on experiences in concentration camps or prisons, lifeless monotonous environments intended to minimize liberty. no doubt it extends to slavery and indentured servitude as well.

constructive work and productivity are not being argued against. what is being argued against are...

infinite bustle
nothing but work, work, work
incessant business
meaningless labor

Work, work, work to support an unsustainable life style.

The biggest house, the best car, expensive clothes and accessories . . . .the more worthless shit you buy the less money you make per hour.

Classic stuff here:

When they struck, they wanted to create an atmosphere of fear. And one of the great goals of this Nation's war is to restore public confidence in the airline industry. It's to tell the traveling public: Get on board; do your business around the country; fly and enjoy America's great destination spots; get down to Disney World in Florida; take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed.

What a fraud.

consumerism rooted in the primacy of the economy. unquestionably one of the top 3 most pernicious ideologies of all time.

hard to be too critical of Bush here. he was just serving his office's master, the economy. when faced with the same circumstances, any president in recent history would have expressed the same sentiment, albeit in a much less buffoonish comic book style.