How To Get Paid To Do Nothing

Consider this a public service announcement.

Recent economic events have led a great number of people in this country to be fearful about their individual financial circumstances. Job losses, real and potential, plague the populace and many wonder how they might free themselves from the rat race without simultaneously bankrupting themselves and their lacking-in-prosperity posterity.

For many the answer comes in the form of entrepreneurialism-- the art of seeing the future a bit more clearly than the rest, and having the confidence in one's own efficacy to realize that future in a profitable fashion. But many lack the "killer instinct" necessary to effectively execute on this vision, while more still have their hopes dashed on the rocks of regulation. Interventionism, it turns out, breeds not dynamism in affairs economic.

But it also doesn't breed nothing. And being by nature a wasteful and corrupting influence, it does manage to breed a form of opportunity all its own, namely, the opportunity to get paid to do nothing. You've read this far and your excitement is growing in direct proportion to your impatience, so if you'll only read a bit further you'll find the process explained by which you, too, can be paid to do nothing in our highly developed, technological, modern, division of labor economy.

How To Get Paid To Do Nothing, in 8 easy steps:

1. Find a social problem or dilemma which is an outcome of the policies of government intervention, upon which public opinion is about evenly split but in a most agitated fashion, which has absolutely no chance of ever being resolved due to these very circumstances (for example: abortion, gun ownership, etc.)
2. Form a non-profit advocacy/activism organization whose stated mission is to further one side of the debate, and install yourself as the chief executive
3. (optional, but helpful) Choose for your organization a name which is both solemn and serious with regards to the mission but catchy, abrasive and self-righteous enough to grab headlines and media appearances in the future
4. Begin fund-raising for your cause: set up "awareness" booths at local conventions, hand out flyers, attend public events as a featured speaker, begin a direct-mail campaign... remember, you can't get paid if you don't raise funds
5. Use the funds raised to pay yourself a handsome salary, for as chief executive of this noble cause you have earned it; use the rest of the money to hire eager and unquestioning staffers who will go out and do the hard work of raising funds for you in the future, as well as a small detachment of DC lobbyists to be your boots on the ground
6. As your prestige and importance grows, begin making appearances in the media as an "expert" voice on the subject, haranguing the misguided selfishness of your opponents while using the opportunity to make a "call to arms" in which you encourage your viewers to care deeply about this issue because you do, because we all should, because our future and freedom as a country depend on it! (Donate now!) Consider a book offer
7. If any cynics should point out that you seem to have found a way to personally enrich yourself even though no material progress has or ever could be made towards actually achieving your stated ends given your proposed means, accuse them of ignorance, dishonesty, hatred of the freedom of the common man, etc., generally work to impugn their character and motives lest anyone catch whiff of the stench emanating from your own
8. Finally, relax! You've made it! You've successfully managed to find a way to get paid to do nothing, and all in the middle of a global economic depression, no less

Free men have no need for lobbyists.