Daily Inspiration Quote by Bob Black

Bob Black’s line is a one-two punch that uses liberal reform language as a setup, then yanks the floor out from under it. The first clause sounds like a familiar, modest demand: make hiring fair, stop exclusion, widen access. The second clause detonates that comfort by treating “employment” itself as the scandal. It’s not a plea to improve the system; it’s an accusation that the system is the problem.

The subtext is an old anarchist move updated with a deadpan gag: equal opportunity is still opportunity to be controlled. Black isn’t merely saying that workplaces discriminate; he’s saying that wage labor is structured like coercion dressed up as choice. By mirroring the syntax of mainstream politics (“Liberals say... I say...”), he casts liberals as the managers of injustice, endlessly refining the rules of a game nobody consented to play. “End discrimination” becomes, in his framing, a way to legitimize work by making it look morally salvageable.

Context matters: Black’s best-known argument, from the 1980s essay “The Abolition of Work,” targets the moral halo around productivity and the idea that a life has to be earned through toil. The joke lands because it weaponizes the audience’s expectation of incremental progress. You think you’re hearing a policy tweak; you get a worldview.

It’s also strategically provocative. “End employment” is impossible in the literal sense for most people, which is the point: it forces you to notice how much of life is organized around jobs, and how even progressive discourse often treats the paycheck as nonnegotiable. The line doesn’t ask for empathy; it asks for heresy.