In last Friday's New York Times, both David Brooks and Paul Krugman wrote about the transmogrification of our society, each in his own way. Brooks complains about the atrophy of family as a motive in our modern culture, which he attributes to the contemporary emphasis on career as the raison d'être for everything we do. In short, Brooks thinks that we subscribe the notion that work is an end unto itself and that it is the primary source of personal value in the world today. I agree. Krugman talks about the role of government programs, Social Security and Medicare in particular, in the determination of the quality of life lived by those on the bottom half, and more specifically the lowest rungs, of the economic ladder. He notes that those are the people to whom raising the age of eligibility for programs like Medicare and Social Security makes the biggest difference, and thus contemplating such changes in the programs in lieu of raising taxes on the rich is inherently unfair, and by implication, immoral. I agree with him too. But there is an overarching principle that covers both men's ideas, and it has been foisted upon us by those who profit most from it. That principle is the "work ethic," or what passes for it today. When Brooks complains about it having supplanted family as a human goal, he misses the point, and Krugman's condemnation of the fealty of some to the rich rather than the poor does too.
I remember having a conversation with my father one time when I was about fifteen. I don't remember what we were discussing, but my father posited the notion that courage is a virtue, at which point I asked him why. He didn't have an answer. I won't bore you with the arguments I made about blind acceptance of definitions of virtue versus defining virtue in situational terms, but there you have that umbrella issue I was just talking about. Why is working virtuous?
There are reasons, but in my opinion today as back when I was an adolescent, they are situational...not absolute at all. On one end of the spectrum, I had chores as a child, and my younger siblings did not as they were considerably younger than I was. But it was not unreasonable for me to have to work in the house considering that I ate and was sheltered there...and I learned a lesson about making a contribution from that experience...a lesson I have tried to pass on to my children. On the other end, there is the sign that was emblazoned over the gates of some of the Nazi concentration camps during World War II: "Arbeit Macht Frei" or work makes one free. As it turned out, however, that work...the work done in the concentration camps building German infrastructure and disposing of the waste created by mass extermination of human beings...made no one free. Somewhere in between those two extremes of the work ethic lies the current mantra of American capitalism: work hard and you can succeed. But there are many a man and woman who have broken their backs working in construction or factories for their entire lives and never prospered. And at the same time, there is many a person whose father or mother had wealth and passed it down to him...no work involved. There is the Hostess company's current situation in which management is unwilling to accede to labor's demands, and the company is going into bankruptcy...again. The company's compensation committee purportedly tripled the CEO's pay and all executive compensation was increased by 35% to 80% in anticipation of the bankruptcy in order to avoid the constraints that the bankruptcy court would have imposed. The CEO did renounce a portion of that pay raise according to the Wall Street Journal, but he jumped ship anyway. He was the sixth CEO in a decade to be hired and leave, and apparently none of them wanted to stay to help the company overcome its problems, which would seem to be the only way to justify the exorbitant compensation packages that are often hundreds of times what the average worker makes "on the line." It isn't hard to guess whose labor is more demanding in that context, yet as far as compensation is concerned, for the easiest job--that is, running the company when it is running itself quite nicely or in other cases wrecking a company and then taking a prearranged compensation package that makes it unnecessary to ever work again, even to maintain the lavish lifestyle that being an executive in America so often yields--the sky is the limit. But, while it takes perseverance to go to work on an assembly line every day for thirty years without praise or gratitude from above, never getting to the point of sufficient affluence that money is no longer a problem, those workers, who are indispensable to the production of the goods that yield corporate profits cannot get what they need to advance their life styles even a little. Over the past thirty years, statistics show, the average working person has gained no wealth from his labors when his income and assets are adjusted for inflation. Yet those in control of the nation's capital now want to make him work that much longer to solve the problems of the federal debt and deficit while they object to having to pay more in taxes even though the preponderance of their gains in affluence do not come from working but rather from allowing others to use their money. It is not fair to expect workers to borrow money that they can possibly never repay to get educated in the techniques that increase their "productivity"... a euphemism for producing more for the same pay...as current economic policy would require just because business and industry don't want to incur the cost of training their workers anymore. It is unreasonable to expect those on whose shoulders you stand to do more for what they earn when you already have more than you can ever use, and those on whom you stand have so little.
I look at it all this way. If it were as easy to become affluent as the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) insists it is, everyone would do it. We would all retire at fifty, and spend our summers on our boats rather than laying roofs and digging ditches in the heat. But that is not the way it is, nor is it even possible. Someone has to make the Twinkies that make the capitalists and the executives rich. Someone has to watch their children and do the actual work while they attend meetings on the golf course. Someone has to have a hard life in order for those barons of business and industry to have easy ones, and that is what American capitalists need to learn before they kill the goose that lays their golden eggs. We down here will go on working as long as it is reasonable to do so. But if you begin to take from the working person what little he has--the right to a modest retirement at an age when he can still enjoy it and to medical care that doesn't impoverish, or elude him altogether because he cannot afford it--that may not continue to be the case. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. To borrow the old Shakespearean quote from Henry VI, the first thing they'll do if the revolution comes is "kill all the lawyers." But the second thing, I'll bet, is they'll eat the rich, starting with the CEO's...if anybody can find them.
Your friend,
Mike
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