However, its being common does not make it acceptable as a fact of life — at least not when taken literally.

Today, let’s try to reformulate the idea in a broader sense, to capture the abstract idea behind: individuals who chose to not contribute to society but benefit from it are parasitic and should be eliminated.

Unfortunately, this new phrasing is too general and must be specified to apply to the real world. One of the possible specific phrasings, applied to a world where work is the only contribution perceived as valuable (such as the world viewed from the middle-class), is the one in the title of this post.

Myself, I prefer to use this idea to define acceptable goals in life for individuals, that should be pursued during the lifetime to escape the state of parasite in which every child is born by default.

Some of the goals I have identified so far include:

• giving love
• teaching (as in: educating children, transmitting knowledge, etc)
• helping curing diseases
• producing food (up to the necessary quantity, not more)
• expressing emotions (including through forms of art)
• support other people through hardships

Note that the following items do not qualify as honorable goals to pursue under my model, although they can be combined with any of the above:

• working as a mean to create wealth
• giving birth
• searching for truth (either via science or religion)

Note also that people who are born with or were inflicted with handicaps that prevent them from contributing cannot be considered as “parasites” under the previous definition - the idea explicitly mentions “choice” as the selection criterion.