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| American coal miners |
If you won the lottery, would you
still work? No, you’d have the freedom
to indulge yourself in worldly pleasures: travelling, socializing,
thrill-seeking, etc. But eventually you
would probably find a life of indolence and hedonism unsatisfying, and would
long for activity that both engaged your talents and benefitted society. Without your millions, of course, you would
be compelled to work, and the extent
that a job gratified your talents would become secondary to the extent that it
gratified your need for food and housing.
That is, most people work to survive and only a lucky few find work
that’s deeply satisfying. Does a garbage
man find as much satisfaction in his work as an architect? How about a cafeteria worker or a data entry
clerk or a coal miner? No, most of the
work that most people do is drudgery, and most people would happily give it up
if not compelled to it by economic necessity.
It’s true that all honest work imparts dignity and there is some satisfaction
in simply doing your job well. And in a
society of equal opportunity – something to which our
society provides
at
best a
rough approximation – anyone with sufficient talent and determination can
become a successful architect or neurosurgeon or musician. But the great majority of people work not for
the satisfaction or the dignity. They
work because survival obligates them to a life of unsatisfying and unforgiving
drudgery. For most people, work is
coercion.
But imagine if some of that
coercion could be lifted. Imagine a
person working an unsatisfying job only
for the health insurance provided by her employer (that’s how most
Americans get health insurance). Maybe
she or someone in her family requires expensive medical treatment, or maybe
independent medical insurance is prohibitively expensive. But now imagine a change in the system allows
her to get cheap but good health insurance somewhere else. Now she can afford to quit her job and give
up the modest pay. Maybe she wants to
quit so she can stay home with her young children or her aging parent. Maybe she wants to go back to college or
start her own business. Maybe she wants
to retire a few years early. Or maybe
she wants to keep her job and simply work fewer hours and spend more time with
her family. Maybe she’s just happy
knowing that her expanded health care options give her more
choices and more opportunities, more control over her own life. Isn’t it a tiny bit like winning the
lottery? That is, aren’t we imagining
she has more freedom?
Well, you don’t have to imagine. According to a report
by the non-partisan and broadly respected Congressional Budget Office (CBO) there
are millions of people who will work less or not at all because they can now obtain
cheap and dependable health insurance through Obamacare. As Josh
Barro explains, “Broadly, one key goal of health policy should be to let
people make work decisions without worrying about how those decisions affect
their health insurance.” That wasn’t the
central intent of the health care law, but it sure seems like a positive
development. Well, there are many
conservatives who adamantly don’t think so.
Welcome to the latest battle in the Obamacare wars.
At first many conservatives,
blinded by Obamacare-hatred into abandoning either understanding or scruples, proclaimed
that
the CBO is reporting that Obamacare will destroy millions of jobs. Some
Republican politicians eagerly
misrepresented the issue for electoral gain. Even the supposedly liberal mainstream press thoughtlessly
parroted
stories
about “lost” jobs. There are no lost
jobs, of course, only defecting workers, as clarified in this exchange between
conservative Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan
and CBO director Douglas Elmendorf as the latter appeared before the House
Budget Committee:
"Just to
understand, it is not that employers are laying people off," Ryan said.
"That is
right," Elmendorf said.
There is a huge difference between
being fired and quitting, as anyone who has actually held a job knows. As Elmendorf testified:
The reason we
don’t use the term “lost jobs” is there is a critical difference between people
who like to work and can’t find a job — or have a job that’s lost for reasons
beyond their control — and people who choose not to work. If someone comes up
to you and says, “The boss says I’m being laid off because we don’t have enough
business to pay,” [then] any other person feels bad about that and we
sympathize for them having lost their job. If someone says, “I decided to
retire or stay home and spend more time with my family and spend more time
doing my hobby,” they don’t feel bad about it — they feel good about it. And we
don’t sympathize. We say congratulations.
Exactly! But some conservatives are so sure that no
Obamacare news is good news they simply pretend that the “lost jobs” tale hasn’t
been thoroughly
debunked and persist in their misrepresentations. Consider the semantically-challenged David Harsanyi:
“Obamacare is
inducing labor demand to shrink!” doesn’t have the quite the same punch as
“Obamacare is costing us jobs!” though both are accurate.
No, normal English usage compels
us to call the first sentence accurate, the second one inaccurate, and Harsanyi’s
point ridiculous.
Some conservatives deny that even though
Obamacare will let some people quit their jobs, that won’t constitute an increase
in their freedom. Charles
C. W. Cooke writes in the National Review Online that whatever else one can
say about taxing one person to subsidize another:
one cannot
claim that it makes either man “free” — at least not without twisting the word
and the concept that it represents beyond all meaningful recognition.
That’s because the need to scramble
for survival does not constitute coercion in any sense:
Does the Obama
administration really plan to make the case that negative liberty is but a
mirage and that, the state of nature’s “forcing” one to work being akin to
actual compulsion, the state must step in everywhere to liberate the citizenry
from reality’s harsh claims? One suspects not.
Let’s overlook Cooke’s rather
slapdash treatment of the theoretical concepts of negative liberty and the
state of nature, and rephrase his position in everyday terms: He seems to be
saying that the brutish struggle for existence is an unavoidable reality of
even a thoroughly free life; alleviating that brutishness does not increase
one’s freedom, only one’s comfort. Every
person, every creature, in every
situation, must struggle for sustenance and shelter. This feels intuitively plausible: it seems a
little odd to think of the demands of one’s own biology as coercions. But this argument overlooks two important points. First, there’s no reason an increase in
comfort can’t yield an increase in freedom.
To the extent that it’s actually possible to moderate the struggle for
survival such that one’s biological needs don’t consume one’s resources to the
same degree, those needs can be coherently thought of as coercive. If survival didn’t compel one to spend so
much time hunting down wooly mammoths or waiting on tables then one would have
more options, more control over one’s life, more freedom. Second, in modern
society both the freedoms and constrictions of economic life are not just
natural, but social as well; they manifest the rules we’ve agreed to live
by. There is a difference between the
hinter-gatherer chasing down prey on the savannah and the worker who through
lack of independent means is forced to sell his labor on the open market. In the modern world economic survival can be
made less or more harsh by (among other things) actions of society or the
state. Marginally liberating individuals
by subsidizing their health insurance is not like trying to counteract all of
“reality’s harsh claims”; it’s not like trying to repeal old age or gravity; it’s
more like a hunter-gatherer discovering a grove of abundantly productive fruit
trees. It’s more like winning a lesser
lottery ticket.
But, though Cooke’s logic does not
convince, it does illuminate. Misapprehending
capitalism, a social institution, as a purely natural phenomenon – like the
struggle for survival – is a widespread conservative
fallacy. Perceiving all political
and social issues as amenable to black-and-white moralistic solutions is
another. Put the two together and you
have conservative economics. To Cooke, when
the state tries to revise the natural workings of the market it commits both
arrogance and immorality. His conservative
colleague, writer Michael
Goodwin, likewise considers it a sin, and the abetting of sin: Choosing to work
less hours because the government subsidizes your health insurance is shameful,
if not downright un-American!
In [the old, pre-liberal] America, work,
any work, was honorable while being on the dole was cause for shame. Still is.
That is, liberals are blind to the
moral nobility of self-sufficiency; that’s probably why they’re always plotting
to ensnare people into government bondage:
This anti-job, pro-dependency tilt is the
crux of the nation’s polarization. In essence, it pits those who believe in the
sanctity of work against those who believe in penalizing wealth and
redistributing its fruits.
Sanctity! Goodwin beats even
Cooke in the competition for most abstractly moralistic understanding of labor
in the modern world. Cooke may believe
it’s natural but Goodwin actually believes it’s holy! Goodwin attempts to describe the essence of
our national polarization, but instead he embodies
it. Conservatives issue furious sermons
about the naturalness and sanctity of the free market while ignoring its actual
results. Liberals actually perceive capitalism’s
“harsh realities” – its coercion, its amorality, its inability
to deliver universal healthcare – and hope to moderate them in limited and
prudential ways that increase individual comfort and freedom. Moralistic, dogmatic platitudes vs.
pragmatic, prudential solutions. That’s
the real crux of our polarization. Here
it pits the absolutist, pre-ordained certainty that the state can’t possibly make
anyone freer against the practical reality that sometimes it does just that.
And there’s all the usual handwringing
about the evils of redistribution. As Repair_Man_Jack
of redstate.com puts it:
The freedom to
sit on your butt and do nothing at another citizen’s expense is expressly
parasitic and malignant.
Well, at least he concedes it’s
freedom! But all social insurance requires redistribution, from Social Security
to unemployment insurance to student loans to Medicare and Medicaid. Every government activity, even the provision
of education and highways and the military, includes those who pay who will not
benefit and those who benefit who have not paid. You can’t have anything like universal
healthcare without some redistribution;
the young, healthy and affluent have to help pay for the old, sick and poor. And once you subsidize the old, sick and poor
they may find less need to hold a job or work so many hours. To pay for Obamacare you do have to
marginally increase someone’s taxes and that does marginally decrease that
someone’s freedom. That is, you’re
redistributing not only money, but freedom.
You’re marginally increasing the coercion on the taxed worker so that
the Obamacare recipient can work less.
But much of the revenue for Obamacare comes from taxes on the upper economic strata
(and much of the rest from hospitals
and insurance companies), that is, on those who already have the most
freedom. Even the extravagantly hated
individual mandate to buy health insurance is really only a tax on not buying it, and a minor
tax at that. And everyone may someday
need government-subsidized healthcare; indeed, every American who lives to 65
qualifies for Medicare, a program even Tea Partiers seem
to love. Why is Obamacare is any
less defensible? If you believe they’re
all indefensible and the entire welfare state should be repealed, you’d better
be prepared for the quite harsh economic and
social conditions that prevailed before its creation. Would that represent an increase in freedom?
The person who worked 14 hours a day in deadly conditions his entire life
without hope of retirement might have found some appreciation in the purely
abstract freedom of his condition, but it’s doubtful that offset the
all-too-real crushing coercions he actually lived under.
But from the perspective of the
highly moralized conservative point of view, redistribution is robbing Peter to
pay Paul, and it not only cheats Peter, it diminishes Paul. As Jonathan
Chait explains, Obamacare recipients have become the new welfare queens. To John
Podhoretz such recipients risk the loss of self-sufficiency:
This is the
classic problem of a government handout: It can become more alluring to those
who receive it than the prospect of a life lived without it.
Charles
Krauthammer puts it rather less kindly:
In [Obama’s]
new opportunity society, you are given the opportunity for idleness while
living parasitically off everyone else.
Repair Man Jack gets downright visceral:
So behind all
the benevolent language about being free to quit is a call to greater personal
dependence instead of responsibility. Why isn’t this relief from responsibility
good? It is antipodal to good because it takes a free-minded, productive and
independent citizens and turns them into the human equivalent of intestinal
parasites. These parasites then degrade and eat out the sustenance of others.
Jack’s fascination with
intestine-eating aside, a person who works less or quits their job because of
government subsidies is not a parasite. What
have we come to that American workers actually need to be defended against such
vile slander? These are people who have
been working or looking for work, not looking for a handout. Health insurance subsidies do not “turn them
into” anything other than healthier, more secure, more autonomous Americans. Are
people who retire on Social Security parasites?
What about capable and healthy retirees?
Should Social Security be repealed so they’re forced to get off their
lazy butts and go hustle for jobs? Or
consider the G.I. Bill,
which provided government-sponsored mortgages, business loans and college
tuition for servicemen and women returning from World War II – did it turn them
into parasites? And just because
Obamacare allows a person to quit her job doesn’t mean she has stopped working
(especially if she is merely working fewer hours). A person who stays home to take care of her
children or her parents or her home is still working and still contributing to
society.
But, though government assistance
need not transform one into a parasite, you need not be a raving hysteric to
appreciate that it might weaken one’s self-sufficiency, it might weaken one’s
work ethic; indeed, it might weaken everyone’s.
Andrew
Sullivan almost agrees with Goodwin about the crux of our polarization:
It’s struck me
that there is an underlying anxiety to several of our current debates on
economic and social issues. That anxiety is that the American work ethic –
unparalleled in the developed world – is under threat. That’s the real critique
of Obamacare
Though it’s not clear he’s on
Goodwin’s side of that polarization:
The Protestant
work ethic we have, for example, is the imperative for industrious striving,
self-advancement and material gain. It is emphatically not about being happy.
And at some point, if those two values are not easily compatible, something
will give.
The Puritan work ethic has, to a
great extent, served us well, though it does have the downsides that Sullivan
touches upon. But that work ethic doesn’t
seem dead just yet. There is an ongoing tension
in American public life between the pragmatic
need to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism and a political folk culture
that worships self-sufficiency, and that tension is not about to ease any time
soon. And even if the liberal view of
capitalism came to dominate it would not necessarily mean the death of the work
ethic. One of liberalism’s fondest
dreams is that working people be fairly rewarded for their labor. Second-guessing capitalist outcomes looks
like an attack on the work ethic only if you believe the harshness of the market
is a necessary corrective to the enervating human desire for sponsored comfort. To conservatives, the unforgiving necessity
for hard work is positively beneficial in that it polices a naturally weak and
unambitious populace. But American
workers want just what liberals want for them: to work hard and to reap the
benefits, one of which might be working fewer hours because of a health
insurance subsidy. Should we really fear
that when the workers in question leave their jobs they will so casually fall
into inactivity,
despondency and sloth? At base, the
fierce conservative attack on the welfare state is about the Puritanical
dread of corrupting, lazy irresponsibility.
They’re convinced the freed man won’t feel the need for work, the urge
to create and produce and contribute we ascribed to the lottery winner; instead
he’ll embrace indolence, hedonism and immorality. So the workforce must be kept hungry; not
because hungry workers will work for less (though the investor class does not
object), but because hunger keeps them busy, it keeps them honest.
We see the political forces arrayed
against freedom for the American worker:
There is an ideological worldview that sees exemption from wage labor as
unnatural and morally debilitating, a culture that equates moral value with
economic value and freedom with self-sufficiency. There is the warped version of the work ethic
that’s convinced that inside each worker is a welfare cheat just aching to jump
out. And there is the ferocity of a
partisan movement in the grip of these mythologies, righteous in its insistence
that moralistic absolutes override the bread-and-butter concerns of people’s actual
lives. And, most fundamentally there are
the ideological blinders that prevent the clear apprehension of the coercion
that plays such a large part in the lives of working people. Cooke finds:
a great deal of
truth in The Economist’s observation that “a job is an economic transaction
between a seller and a buyer of labour, and can be ‘destroyed’ if either seller
or buyer walks away.”
It may seem here that Cooke is toying
with the pretense of some of his less scrupulous conservative colleagues that
the CBO report proves Obamacare is destroying jobs. But it’s not mendacity that tempts him to
support the
Economist’s laughable “observation”, it’s the constrictions of his own
ideology. In real life, no job is
destroyed when a worker walks away; there is always a line of people eagerly
waiting to take his place (especially during a weak recovery). A job is a thing an employer dispenses; it
cannot be destroyed by a seller of labor.
Labor is a buyer’s market; in the real lives of most people, the
employer holds the power. CBO Director
Elmendorf reminds us how we pity the man who’s been fired, but congratulate the
man who quits. That’s because the
quitting man has acquired the economic power to meet the boss as an equal, as
one who is free of the boss’s power. Such
a man has shed one of life’s coercions.
But there is no room in conservative
ideology to address that coercion; that’s why conservatives have been so
exercised
by a provocative tweet from the
Huffington Post’s Congressional reporter, Michael McAuliff:
There's an
irony in the GOP complaining that ACA lets people quit jobs. I mean, what's
wrong with freedom?
Conservatives can’t imagine a
subsidy recipient has been freed from a compulsion whose existence they can’t
even perceive! In their worldview it’s
not only acceptable, but essential
that families mold individuals, schools indoctrinate them, religion restrain
them, mores chasten them, and the market allocate them. But interference from the federal government
is the darkest tyranny! What’s actually wrong
with freedom – actual individual freedom – in the conservative mind is that it
dis-empowers families, schools, religion, mores and the market. The freedom that conservatives genuinely value
is the unconstrained power of those institutions to exert their traditional moral
authority over their charges, to manage
them.
To be fair, there is another side
to such freedom that conservatives value at least as much: the individual self-sufficiency
those institutions are charged with instilling and enforcing. To a conservative, individual freedom without
individual responsibility is no freedom at all.
Overlooking the semantic confusion, liberals value their version of
freedom because it allows individuals to pursue their own goals and develop
their individual talents and personalities.
Conservatives value their version of freedom because it produces righteous
and responsible providers and protectors (yes, it still includes a profoundly male tone). But it’s a strange sort of freedom that
requires ongoing and overpowering direction and enforcement from social
institutions like the church and the market.
Once again, it’s not clear how much conservatives trust truly free individuals to make their own choices. To a liberal, if a subsidy allows an
individual to develop herself more, then she simply is more free, regardless of
the financial source for the subsidy. To
a conservative she has forgone her freedom, her autonomy, for a gilded cage.
