Leadership Quote by John G. Schmitz

A line like this is built to feel like common sense, which is exactly why it’s powerful politics. “Those who work” is doing double duty: it names a policy preference (reward labor) while quietly sorting the public into the deserving and the suspect. The blunt moral architecture is the point. “Ought” isn’t an observation about wages or productivity; it’s a demand about social order. And “live better” is conveniently vague, roomy enough to cover everything from pay and taxes to welfare, union power, and cultural status.

Schmitz, a hard-right California congressman in an era of backlash politics, is speaking into a late-20th-century argument about who the state is for. The sentence implicitly rebukes the welfare state and recasts inequality as virtue’s scoreboard rather than an economic outcome. It doesn’t ask why people “don’t” work (unemployment cycles, disability, caregiving, discrimination). It collapses those distinctions because the emotional payoff comes from a simple antagonist: the non-worker as free rider.

The subtext is less about helping workers than about policing boundaries. It flatters the listener as industrious and therefore morally entitled, turning resentment into righteousness. The phrase “live better” also smuggles in hierarchy: not merely that workers should be secure, but that non-workers should be visibly lower. That’s the quiet hard edge. It’s a slogan that can sound pro-labor while functioning as anti-solidarity, redirecting anger away from employers or systems and toward neighbors who are easiest to blame.