Since we have all be programed to believe that hard work is rewarded. This diary popped into mind when readings this article
If remote life forms were only to have access to our media to gain a sense of life on Earth, they would not think the hardest jobs on the planet were occupations such as logging, or oil well drilling, or mining, or demining, or hazmat diving. They would assume they must be gigs such as acting, running billion-dollar businesses, and being a prince.
Marina Hyde concludes:
The unthinking way in which claims of hard graft pepper so many immensely privileged people's public verdicts on themselves indicates how stunningly, depressingly out of whack is their perspective on the world, a world they have far more power to change than the truly exhausted ever will.
One of the replies to the article was a choice quote
13thDukeofWybourne Pyeshot
Indeed. Or as JK Galbraith put this prevailing attitude:
"The poor don't work hard enough because they're paid too much, the rich don't work hard enough because they're not paid enough".
How often do we hear this type of reasoning when talk turns to the minimum wage?
We also here the counter claim that if the highest paid are not even better paid they will go and work somewhere else.
How often do we here that nobody is irreplaceable, but somehow the masters of the universe buck this trend?
How often do you hear someone working three jobs just to make end meet, whine about their lot? They do not have that luxury.
I am not denying that if you work hard that you are more likely to succeed than if you you don't; but that success doesn't mean you will be rich in financial terms. In some cases success can mean feeding your children today and hopefully tomorrow as well. In some cases success can be reduced to merely surviving through to the end of the day in some of the world's pleasanter areas.
When talk turns to raising the retirement age this comes from those of us lucky to earn our money whilst sitting on our ass, and not breaking our backs and risking our lives to earn enough success to survive.
Most of us wont tell others how hard we work, however those of us lucky enough to succeed [in our own minds] will tell others how rewarding our work is, and how lucky we are to do what we love.
I would enjoy hearing from some of the excessively fortunate not about their work ethic [which is commoner than they would like to believe] but how the society we all built helped them to succeed.
Earning $0.5 a day or $1 a second is no measure of the amount of hard work carried out during that time. However the minimum wage is how we judge and how we reward the hard work of millions.
Personally I would say that the higher the minimum wage is set, the more we as a nation appreciate and respect hard work. If the highest paid executives feel that this will negatively affect their bonuses, I would remind them that the reality is; nobody is irreplaceable, no matter how loudly they object and pontificate.