We Borrow the Economy from our Children...

...not really.  But for those who insist we borrow this or borrow that from our children, who complain about being "wage slaves", let me ask you:

What have you added to the world?  You, who sit there with your iPhone and iPad and computer and countless other devices that represent millions of hours of labor of the brightest minds of our species over the last two centuries, devices which took thousands of hours of skilled labor to create - have you created something commensurate?  Have you repaid society?

Here's fundamentally the question: Are you adding more to the economy than you're taking out of it?  If the answer is yes - if you've performed the labor equivalent of the goods and services you consume each day - then maybe you're worth paying more.  But let's face it, very few people are any more productive today than they would have been a hundred years ago, and they're getting paid hundreds of times more for the very same labor, living lifestyles that kings in ages past would have traded for, enjoying the fruits of labor they never put in, from the antibiotics that keep them alive (extortion!  They cost so much!) to the iPhone they call people a thousand miles away to chat about the weather on (exorbitant fees!  How dare they ask for a contract to pay back the cost of the phone they sold for a fourth of its production cost!).  Very few people are doing anything to actually add anything substantive back into the world for the next generation to enjoy, and we're all cruising along on those few individual's efforts.  Some of them are industrialists, some are artists, some are authors, some are scientists, and all of them, regardless of what they achieve, receive next to nothing in compensation compared to what they add to the world, and yet we demand ever more of them, especially those of us who never contribute anything to the world except complaints.

So you're a wage slave, are you?

You know what a wage slave really is?

Somebody who isn't adding anything back to the world - who merely exists, doing trivial labor, and probably taking more resources out of the world than they will ever put back in.  Somebody without talent or skill, who does labor more suited to a robot, but who we employ anyways because, for now, it would consume more resources to build a robot to do the work.  A wage slave is -disposable-.  Not disposable by necessity, but by choice.  A choice to be nothing more than an automaton, a disposable machine that does disposable labor in exchange for disposable goods.

You could choose to be indisposable - you could use the internet you're so fond of complaining on to learn a craft or a skill.  You could learn welding - we don't have enough welders.  You could learn to do plumbing - we don't have enough of those, either.  There are literally -millions- of jobs in this country that employers cannot fill, because of all the "wage slaves" who refuse to learn something -useful- to the rest of the world.  You want to make more money?  You want to contribute to the world?  There are employers out there who will train you in a craft, and pay you for the privilege of teaching you, because people willing to -work- for a living are so few and far between.

If you're a wage slave, it's by choice.