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KEEP DOING THIS, PLEASE!

Hire whomever you need to promote the blog - pay the troll farms to carpet-like your posts, whatever you need, but this is essential reading, every day.

And spot on here, Peter, as usual. Thank you - and have a great NYE.

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Thank you, and enjoy both your Eve and 2024!

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Dec 31, 2023Liked by Peter Venetoklis

“Hard times don’t last; hard people do.” Seen at RECONDO School at Fort Bragg, 1985.

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Dec 31, 2023Liked by Peter Venetoklis

Brilliant, Peter! I just started reading Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” and wonder how the current slacker trend might influence man/technology fusion. BTW, I may have finally found a technical point of disagreement between us in your comment on living off inheritance as depriving society of needed capital for investment. In retirement I’m living off my IRA which is invested until I make my monthly withdrawals for expenses and imagine that slackers do similarly. HAPPY 2024! 😁👍

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I'm not arguing that living off banked money is per se bad. That'd be very unlibertarian of me. In a big-picture sense, every dollar you or I spend that goes beyond the basics of food clothing and shelter could be invested in a productivity-enhancing way rather than spent. Yes, the spending supports industries, businesses, and jobs, but in theory the economy as a whole would be better fueled if that money was used as business capital. It's a theoretical position, and nothing to do with real life or the priorities of enjoying the few decades we have on this rock. I brought it up as a call-back to this bit about self-made millionaires, slacker scions, and shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves in three generations.

https://therootsofliberty.substack.com/p/respecting-success

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Thanks for taking the time to write this (and all your pieces!). I've been meaning to explore the issue of our sidelined workforce and what it portends for society writ large. I would recommend Charles Murray's "In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government" and “The Happiness of the People” where in he lays out the "fundamental values" of faith, family, community and work (vocation). The slacker class finds itself divorced from all four values, leading to unhappy (meaningless) existence - most notably, in the context of your piece here, being "vocation". I believe that you, as a libertarian, would find his comments regarding pursuit of happiness "unless impeded" to be of interest.

https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/charles-murray-on-the-pursuit-of-happiness-1988

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Happy new year Peter! Excellent piece!

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