Lazy People: They're People, Too!

Liberalism's latest exercise in self-parody (well, if you don't count the anti-fur crowd's death threats against gay icon Johnny Weir) sounds like a joke one might have heard at last week's Conservative Political Action Conference. A British woman--and the British are getting increasingly good at this sort of thing--was recently told that her Help Wanted ad for menial hospital workers was discriminatory because of its demand for . . . wait for it . . . "reliable" and "hard-working" applicants. We already knew that the stupid and lazy can be sneakily good at guarding their perceived interests. We didn't know that they had managed to form their own protected class.

Despite the temptation, though, let's not waste time debunking the "thinking" behind such a policy. It's long been clear that Great Britain's recovery from centuries of imperialism and class strife has, like all political movements, fallen under the weight of its own excesses. Self-loathing and bitterly secular, today's Britain can't bring itself to expel from its borders the hundreds of thousands of radical (and radicalizing) Muslims to whom "Londonistan" is not a dream but an achieved reality. How, then, can it be expected to practice reasonable discrimination against the stupid?

It's in disregarding the word "reasonable," of course, that Liberalism fails so badly. Certain, as animal "rights" activist Peter Singer wrote in 1973, that "one should always be wary of talking of the last remaining form of discrimination," liberals have spent the last six decades searching for yet more entities and groups for whom the reasonably intelligent white male has been too harsh a bully. Singer had laboratory mice in mind, but the leap to the lazy human is not too great. Haven't they, too, suffered? Mustn't they, too, find rest in the bosom of the State?

Yes, it seems. And the Smarter among us can take solace in the fact that England, like America, will get exactly the citizens, the workforce, and the culture that it's asking for.