Laborare est orare: Work is worship. Once upon a time that Latin cry arose from scores of medieval monasteries. Their monks believed that—as Carlyle later put it–“all true Work is Religion: and whatsoever Religion is not work may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Spinning Dervishes, or where it will…One monster there is in the world: the idle man.” Nor were those old monks the first to believe in the religious nature of work, the blasphemous nature of idleness. In Hebrew the word for labor (avodah) is also the word for prayer.

But when Douglas Elmendorf, chairman of the (nonpartisan) Congressional Budget Office, recently announced that one of the effects of the new health law will be to reduce, by 2017, the total number of hours Americans work by the equivalent of over two million full time jobs, President Obama’s spokesmen were quick to praise this massive “disincentive” to work as a blessing in disguise. Jason Furman, chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, declared that “this is people having new choices they didn’t used to have.” From the White House itself came the declaration that “individuals will [now] be empowered to make choices about their own lives and…have the opportunity to pursue their dreams.” Another Democratic Dr. Pangloss celebrated this new opportunity “to spend more time with your children.” So much for the brave and religious nature of work in the Era of Obama.