Most of us know what labor means.  Employers may engage in labor; but employers,
as employers -- in the rôle and function of employer -- are not engaged as laborers in
active/actual productive labor.




There is mental labor, and there is manual labor; there is intellectual labor, and there
is physical labor.

I have heard it said that "mind is the source of all wealth and all culture". But, what does
this mean? I suppose that one can say that the intellect is the wellspring of culture; but
the realization, and the fruition of mental labor is accomplished by and with physical
labor. Every form of art, for example, is the physical materialization, the active
objectification, of human intelligence and of human imagination. Literature is a
product of intellectual labor, and of physical labor -- i.e., writing, for example. A painting
is a creation of the imagination, and also of the manual activity of painting. Architecture
is both a mental and a physical activity. Education -- the passing on of culture from
generation to generation -- is both a mental and a physical activity.





There are wealthy people who are very smart, but who do no hard work. There are
some very wealthy people whose only smartness is in their shrewdness, in their
clever ability to acquire wealth that others have labored long and hard to produce.





"Hereditary wealth is in reality a premium paid to idleness."
-- William Godwin





"Labor is the divine law of our existence; repose is desertion and suicide."
-- Giuseppi Mazzini