ABSTRACT
Roughly speaking, only about a third of all Americans over eighteen are actively doing serious full-time work to make a living. The other two-thirds are a mix of still-dependent youths, retirees, and people who are disabled, unemployed, half-employed, hospitalized, institutionalized, or incarcerated—as well as the many who were previously counted as unemployed but have stopped looking for jobs. This huge dependence of perhaps two-thirds of the population raises a moral dilemma of unprecedented magnitude—and it's a dilemma whether people are an anti-welfare conservative or someone who'd be labeled something else, although any label people give others will be wrong. The dilemma is that one-third of the population can't carry the other two-thirds much longer at current levels of consumption without bankrupting the country and causing civil collapse, and the dependent two-thirds can't just be abandoned (or even cut back much further than they've already been) without gutting consumption and the GDP, and causing civil collapse.
