Sheldon Richman on America’s Love-Hate Relationship With Work

From the start, Americans have had a love-hate
relationship with work. We tend to rhapsodize about labor, but, as
Sheldon Richman notes, the classical economists and the Austrians
(at least from Ludwig von Mises onward) stressed the unpleasantness
— the “disutility” and even sad necessity — of labor. Adam Smith
and other early economists equated work with “toil,” which is not a
word with positive connotations.

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