I try to be a "compassionate liberal" and see appeal in that argument

[A] certain class of pundits and politicians are quick to see any increase in income inequality as a problem that needs fixing -- usually through some form of redistributive taxation. Applying the same philosophy to leisure, you could conclude that something must be done to reverse the trends of the past 40 years -- say, by rounding up all those folks with extra time on their hands and putting them to (unpaid) work in the kitchens of their "less fortunate" neighbors. If you think it's OK to redistribute income but repellent to redistribute leisure, you might want to ask yourself what -- if anything -- is the fundamental difference.

The suggestion by analogy is clearly faulty: they would take away leisure hours from the "lucky" poor people, but they would not add any leisure hours to the "poor" Leisure Class. Do they really envy leisure hours?

I have to imagine that they consider working, or rather, making money, as the essential requirement for living on this Earth. If you do not devote more time for making money, you have less rights to breath, or something.

But taken literally, can people get a high status "by putting their uselessness on display"? What is usefullness/uselessness? A lawer defending a serial killer may be worse than useless to the public, but he is extremely useful to one person (or a few). In a sense, Leisure Class members are pretty useful to each other, exchanging financial, legal, recrational and other services intensively. They do screw a pool of others to do that, but you could almost envy their level of "communal partnership".

Will score points here:

http://www.trivia-library.com/c/excesses-of-the-rich-and-wealthy-bradley-martin-hall.htm

Before sailing to England, they launched a defense in the society pages:

The soiree was actually about putting money in circulation and helping the poor, said they.

I prefer to see them as misunderstood capitalist visionaries.

"When the abyss stares at me, it wets its pants." Brian Hopkins