Once upon a time when I was a postgraduate student and there were around 10 unemployed for every registered vacancy in Australia a professor at my university was waxing lyrical about the lazy unemployed and what they should do to get off the welfare list. His said well “if they really wanted to work they could go down to the municipal tip and scratch together some scrap wood and some old pram wheels and build a cart, then follow the milkman around each morning and collect the horse dung and start a garden fertiliser business”. He wanted the unemployment benefit eliminated to get “these characters off their bums”. I remember the session vividly. That was his cure for the indolence of the unemployed. I put my hand up and said: “Two problems. First, the local council generally will not allow people to scour the tips for rubbish. Second, more importantly, the dairies now have trucks. The horse and cart milkmen were eliminated a few decades ago”. Much laughter followed. My relations with that professor soured a little more after that but the base (sourness) was already large so the percentage change was minimal. The same sort of idiocy is driving policy in the US at present with the US Congress enforcing more than a million unemployed Americans (that is, about 12 per cent of the total official unemployed) will lose their unemployment benefits this coming Saturday because the US politicians have decreed against all available evidence and research that this cohort is lazy and that the dole is standing between them and jobs.