Germany is inching toward liberalizing rules concerning working hours, which has spawned protests of course. It’s a sad fact that permitting people to make their own decisions concerning how much or how little to work would be considered liberalization, but there it is.
Here is an amusing quotation from Oscar Wilde’s Soul of Man Under Socialism:
I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours. Humanity has got beyond that stage, and reserves such a form of life for the people whom, in a very arbitrary manner, it chooses to call criminals. But I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.
