Mark Twain Re: Labor, etc.
This is from the 28th chapter of " A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". Hank is drilling the King so that when they go out among the common folk the King won't give himself away as "the King". If you haven't read it, you should, imo.
“Now, make believe you are in debt, and eaten up by relentless creditors; you are out of work—which is horse-shoeing, let us say—and can get none; and your wife is sick, your children are crying because they are hungry—”
And so on, and so on. I drilled him as representing in turn all sorts of people out of luck and suffering dire privations and misfortunes. But lord, it was only just words, words—they meant nothing in the world to him, I might just as well have whistled. Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to describe. There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about “the working classes,” and satisfy themselves that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because they know all about the one, but haven't tried the other. But I know all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down—and I will be satisfied, too.
Intellectual “work” is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him—why, certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair—but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also. And it's also the very law of those transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and kingship. End of Quote from Twain.
In our day the "royal" corporations are trying as fast as they can to do away with much of the labor of the past by automation and other means. Meanwhile the "royalty" makes hundreds of times what the workers make. It is suicidal but many workers, for now, don't seem to notice or care. Democrats need to remind folks of how important they are. We should never be afraid to address and offer aid to the true working class. We have, of course, but it needs to be supercharged, imo.
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But the benefits are astounding. Still have a nice library in our front room. Sometimes i do prefer an actual book. 
