A Simple Rule, A Hard Question
There's a decent old rule, older than any political party: if you are able to work, you should. Not because work is holy, but because dignity usually travels through contribution. Fine. Most people nod along to that.
The trouble starts the moment we try to apply it to an actual human being standing in front of us. How do we know whether the man not working is resting on others, or simply locked out of the door marked 'work'?
The Migrant Who Wants the Job
Consider the Iranians crossing into Turkey this year in search of wages, a story quietly reported this week. These are not people avoiding labor. They are people chasing it across a border, often at real risk, only to find employers who underpay them, withhold documents, or vanish before payday.
If one of these workers ends up jobless again next month, who exactly failed the 'work if you are able' test? The man who walked hundreds of kilometers to find a wage, or the labor market that took his effort and gave nothing back?
Ask a stranger on the street whether a migrant without a job is 'lazy,' and you'll often get a fast answer. Ask whether an employer who cheats a migrant out of wages is 'lazy,' and the word suddenly feels wrong. Interesting. The word was never really about effort. It was about who we were already suspicious of.
The Billionaire Who Didn't Bother to Pay Either
Now turn to a very different kind of non-contributor. The BBC reports this week that documents were falsified to help shrink the tax bill tied to Roman Abramovich's wealth — tax being, in plain terms, the modest fee a citizen pays for roads, hospitals, and the courts that protect his fortune in the first place.
Nobody calls that laziness. We reach for grander words — evasion, structuring, optimization. But strip the vocabulary away and the shape is the same: income without matching contribution to the shared pot everyone else fills.
So here is the uncomfortable symmetry. Society runs a strict laziness test on the poor and a polite paperwork review for the rich. One group is presumed guilty until they produce a payslip. The other is presumed innocent until a journalist produces the forged documents.
A Better Test Than Suspicion
The golden rule is useful here, as it usually is: judge others by the standard you'd want applied to yourself if your circumstances were reversed. Would you want a stranger to decide you're lazy from your empty wallet, without ever asking why it's empty? Probably not.
So the honest answer to 'how do we know someone who doesn't work is not just lazy' is: mostly, we don't know — and we should be slower to assume. Illness, disability, care duties, a rigged labor contract, a stolen wage, a border that took three tries to cross — these don't announce themselves on a street corner.
What we can fairly ask for is a system that checks capacity before it hands out judgment: honest unemployment offices, enforced minimum wages, real penalties for employers who exploit the desperate, and — yes — equally real penalties for the wealthy who dodge their own civic bill through creative paperwork.
Contribution, Not Performance
None of this means the old rule is wrong. A healthy society still needs people who can work to work; idleness is not a virtue, and pretending otherwise insults those who get up at dawn for jobs nobody admires. But the rule only earns its moral weight if it is applied evenly — upward as firmly as downward.
A republic that polices the unemployed with suspicion and polices its billionaires with a shrug isn't enforcing a work ethic. It's just enforcing a class habit, dressed up as virtue.
The fairer question isn't 'is this person lazy?' It's 'did this person get a fair chance to contribute, and did everyone around them pay their own share too?' That question is harder to ask. It's also the only one worth answering.