His solution: forced labour camps, where shiftless young people would be compelled to "shovel cow manure or dig ditches or sort laundry or mail - actually work every day for eight weeks in the summer", and would be indoctrinated with lectures about "the merits of work".
So He wants to bring back Stalin's work camps?
Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/op...=1&oref=slogin
My grandparents were Alpine farmers and it is true that while they worked really hard between April and October, they enjoyed relaxing during the cold winters. No it was not two hundred years ago. It was 20-30 years ago. So were they sloths who could not get their bums out of bed? Nop. They lived following nature's rhythm. They rose with the sun and went to bed at sunset. In the summer days were much longer, so they slept less, went to work very early in the morning and worked in the fields until late at night. They took cows to the pasture, milked them twice a day, fed the chickens, took care of the bee hives, grew a large vegetable and fruit garden, did a lot of canning for the winter months, padded up their reserves of wood for the stove, harvested hay for cows to eat in the winter... There was a lot to do and they often worked 15-16 hours a day during the summer. In the winter, days were much shorter and therefore they woke up later in the morning and went to bed earlier at night. On a farm in the Alps, there is not much to do during the winter with feet of snow on the grounds for most of the winter months, so people took it easy. Cows and chickens stayed inside, the vegetable garden was reduced to a few staples like cabbage, there was no hay to be harvested and no wood to be collected... So the winter months were reduced for domestic tasks, like mending, repairing tools, wood working... They lived on the potatoes and canned goods they harvested during the summer, eggs from the chicken and milk/cheese/butter from the cows.
Off course they could live like that because they had no debt (not even a mortgage), virtually no monthly bills to pay and lived on a shoestring.
But let's look at it for a minute: For about 6 months of the year, they worked 16 hours a day, so even if for the next 6 months they didn't do anything (which was not he case), they would still have worked 8 hours a day on average over the entire year, like any modern joe...
Off course there are other jobs where people work like mad for a few months and then relax a bit the rest of the year, like fishermen...
