“We need more Texans.”

Gary Jones sums up the recent discussion about Rick Perry and the Texas job market, and explains why working beats living on the dole:

The chief defect is “social death”. You may have a safety net, welfare payments and rationed health care but you don’t have a job. You have no career, no status, no place in society, no respect, no prospects and so no life. You are a dead man walking, a rider of the purple wage, a “shitter”. Worse, you are watched and regulated tightly, your freedoms are defined and limited to those that the majority considers sufficient, that satisfy their views of an “adequate” existence.

Texans, wherever you are, pull up your socks, and get to work. And don’t forget to vote, in every damn election that comes along.

Updates (28 August).  Here’s your basic Social Zombie, the Perfect Citizen of the Blue State.  (Tip from Parkway Rest Stop) Mark Steyn weighs in on the subject, too.

Update (9 September).  Richard Fernandez takes our education system to task for the problem:

What globalization implied, once embarked upon, was the destruction of whole series of gates which defined the privileges of established Western society. Once down that road you either destroy all the gates and accept both the costs and benefits of globalization or you keep all the walls of the city up. But embarking on “globalization” while maintaining the guilds and social contracts of a welfare state does not seem to work. You get the worst of everything. And once globalization takes hold, credentials become progressively worthless. The only thing that retains its value is real skill, real human capital.

And my students wonder why I insist they learn skills along with theory….