> Dude you're a fool if you don't think rich people put in hours and hours of work. They're almost never not working. Their entire lives typically revolve around work and nothing else.

This is most people, rich or not. The rich just don't have to do work they aren't enthusiastically choosing to do. The ~50% of normal folks' work that they're not paid to do—property maintenance, the boring kind of shopping, cooking, driving themselves and others around, fighting with insurance, keeping a schedule and making appointments, cleaning, childcare, et c.—are, tellingly, the kind of work that rich folks typically pay others to do for them. What remains is work that is done purely by choice. Not only no boss, but no personal work that isn't done by choice. That's the difference. The "idle" poor still have more work imposed on them—work they cannot avoid doing—than the "idle" rich, by a long shot.

So again: rich folks can have little to no work imposed on them (and in fact pay to avoid nearly all such imposition) and that's fine, but if poor people are in the situation of having merely a substantial part, but nowhere near all, of their required-work burden removed, that may be a bad thing for them and we should worry? That seems odd. My "idle rich" quip has you responding as if I've attacked something sacred, because, as you state, most of those folks stay plenty busy, but if that's the case, what's the motivation for worrying about poor people not being able to do the same?

It's also the case that having lots of money means being able to turn hobbies into "work", and maybe even money-making ventures, without ever having to do the parts you don't want to. That looks an awful lot like play, even if it's producing an income. Which, to be clear, I think is fine. Shit, that's exactly where I, and probably most people, want to be. The part where I get lost is when poor people gaining a fraction of that freedom is worrisome.

> Do you understand how this is achieved at all???? BY HARD WORK. Go out and create something of your own, no one is stopping you. If you think it's not going to be work I've got news for you. No one is going to just give you this freedom, nor should they because it would then be meaningless.

Where, exactly, the fuck, did I claim that getting rich if you're not already rich is not, typically, very hard work?

> I'm sorry but you just sound incredibly young, naive, and lacking in any real world experience.

This is perhaps the most appropriate time I've ever employed this: I'm rubber, you're glue.

[EDIT] Are we using very different definitions of rich, perhaps? I find this exchange baffling enough that I'm beginning to wonder if we're operating from entirely different terms. I wouldn't consider anyone who'd suffer a large drop in quality of life if they decided to stop working for several normally-work-aged years, to be rich. That's what I mean by rich. Not an entrepreneur with a whopping mid-seven-figures in the bank, or the owner of a modestly successful local chain of stores, or anything like that. People who hang out at expensive parts of the "Med" and ski the Alps annually, despite living in the US, who could afford a very nice new car every month if they decided that's what they wanted, keep a personal staff on payroll, and, crucially, who don't need to work to keep doing that kind of thing indefinitely, are rich. Fussell's "upper" and "top-out-of-sight", not his "upper-middle" (who may do much of the above, but can't keep doing it without continuing to work) and certainly not anything lower than that.