"Liberals, Conservatives, and the Meaning of Work"

Liberals, Conservatives, and the Meaning of Work

by Paul Waldman at The Prospect

http://prospect.org/article/liberals-conservatives-and-meaning-work

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On the other hand, it's hard to say that at the moment they're not being candid about what they really believe. Job lock never really bothered them before, and I think that's because it's a case of the market diminishing people's freedom. Conservatives get very upset when the government diminishes freedom, but if the market does it, well them's the breaks. If you got screwed by market forces, then that just means you're a loser, and they're the party of winners. David Atkins may go a little far here, but he's right to point to a basic difference in how people of different ideologies view what it means to be human:

It is not an inaccurate or extreme statement to declare that ideological Republicans do not understand what it means to be human. They view human beings as economic units to be plugged at their lowest possible price into a maximally efficient market that provides the greatest possible returns on investment to the wealthy few, with any resulting human resentment and misery dulled by humility before a pleasure-fearing angry God promising rewards to the obedient in the hereafter. It is a dark, meager, shriveled and cramped vision of humanity.

I'd modify that to say that while most conservatives may view lives devoted to non-money-making endeavors as frivolous, it's only when certain people take advantage of the kind of freedom we're talking about that they get genuinely perturbed. They aren't campaigning for a higher estate tax so the Paris Hiltons of the world will be forced to get jobs and contribute meaningfully to society instead of laying about all day spending their forebears' money. It's the idea of someone of modest means having the ability to organize their lives to work less that they find morally intolerable.

But conservatives should be quite satisfied with the way the American economy is organized, particularly compared to our peer nations. Unions are a desiccated husk of what they once were, leaving workers with little or no power. Wages are stagnant and benefits are shrinking, while corporate profits and the share of wealth held by those at the top are at or near all-time highs. Our safety net is, by international standards, quite meager. The United States is the only advanced industrialized democracy that does not mandate by law that everyone get paid vacation. If you're lucky enough to have it, chances are you get two weeks at most. The European Union, by contrast, requires four weeks of paid vacation for all workers, and some countries in Europe go beyond even that.




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