put to work for an excellent cause... myself.

If one accepts, with Max Weber, that Benjamin Franklin's counsel, "time is money," represented the epitome of the capitalist spirit, then it should seem peculiar that custom and law in the most capitalist of all lands, the United States, should blithely sanction the routine and wholesale confiscation of this purest form of private property, a person's time. The traditional employers' position with respect to working time is founded on the hypocritical proposition that liberty of contract is realized by the unrestricted right to offer one's time for sale but not by a corresponding right to retain it.

Any given alternative to the topsy-turvy work-and-spend ethic will have to makes some important time distinctions.

An alternative which takes this into account is neither a work ethic nor its polar opposite. It is definitely not the spectral refusal-of-a-refusal that passes for a post-ethical work ethic - the topsy-turvy work and spend ethic. It is the ethics of personal time/life management.