Progressives argue it is ‘rational’ for people to sit at home if the government pays them more than would an employer. This is an argument for losers.
Progressives argue it is ‘rational’ for people to sit at home if the government pays them more than would an employer. This is an argument for losers.
O n Saturday, my wife and I took our kids to a local restaurant that has mediocre food and a poor selection of beers but makes up for it by featuring a bunch of vintage arcade games and enough TVs to show every sporting event in the world at the same time. It was absolutely packed — so packed, in fact, that the waitress told us before we ordered that the food and drinks might take a little longer than usual. Saturday, she explained, was supposed to be her day off, but, because the place was so chronically understaffed, her manager had asked if she’d be able to come in to help anyhow. This, she said, was the third Saturday in a row on which this had happened, which meant that she’d ended up working every single day for the last three weeks. “I’ll likely work all of next week, too,” she said, before catching herself, apologizing again in advance for the service being a touch slow, and rushing off to another table.
As we left, I noticed that there were no fewer than ten positions being advertised on the front door — for managers, waiters, cooks, and front-of-house staff, among others. Driving back to our house, we realized just how common this was. There’s help wanted at the gas station, at the hardware store, and at every shop in the town center. Landscapers are looking for help. Car dealerships are looking for help. Pest-control companies are looking for help. Everywhere you look, small businesses are appealing for help — and they’re striking out looking.
This is not unique to my town in Florida; it is the story nationwide. The dismal jobs report issued Friday paints the picture. Millions unemployed. Millions of jobs available. And, for now at least, never the twain shall meet. The National Federation of Independent Businesses reports that over four in ten business owners have positions that have not been filled, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics had 7.4 million job openings at the end of February. And still the Help Wanted signs proliferate.
Why? In part, the problem is political. Inexplicably, the federal government has decided to hand out a seemingly endless supply of no-strings-attached “stimulus” checks and massively enhanced unemployment benefits to Americans no longer in need of either, and then to affect surprise when those people sit at home. For a brief period during the pandemic, it made sense to encourage people to stay at home. Now, though, it most certainly does not. Then, we needed to relax our preference for work a little. Now, we should be repeating the magical five words that have done so much to build this country into what it is: “Go and get a job.”
There is nothing “mean” about our doing so. The “relief” money that Congress has authorized was sold as succor for people who cannot find work, not for those who don’t want to find work. This being so, Americans ought to establish a series of hard cultural expectations that will govern the next year or so. They ought to insist that it is as true now as it ever was that people who choose to work for a living are morally superior to people who choose to sit at home and sponge. They ought to demand, in consequence, that if a person is able to work — and most people are — that person should work. And they ought to make it clear that, in the long run, employers will prioritize those who showed up over those who did not. Unfortunately, there is no particularly effective way for the federal government to distinguish between the workers and the scroungers. But society can. And it should.
I am now hearing progressives argue that it is “rational” for people to sit at home if the government pays them more to do so than an employer will pay them to work. In a strict sense, this is of course correct: When, as the Wall Street Journal has confirmed, “the average unemployment recipient earns better than the equivalent of working full time at $15 an hour,” it will be tough to convince some people to get off their asses to do what’s right. But this, ultimately, is an argument for losers. We are not talking here about a labor market in which private businesses are forced to compete with each other for staff; we are talking here about a labor market in which private businesses are competing with federal handouts, from a cash pit politicians are increasingly convinced is bottomless. Or, put another way: We are talking about a labor market in which private businesses are struggling to hire because too many potential workers would prefer to take a share of actual workers’ pay than to get a job of their own. It is true that, when given this choice, some people will pocket the cash. It is also true that those people are deadbeats.
I did not like school much, and so, at age 16, I quit and went to work at McDonald’s for a year. I subsequently changed my mind, finished my education, and became the first man in my family to go to university, but, in truth, I learned just as much about the world working in fast food as I ever did sitting in a classroom. I learned that some people are hard-working and reliable, and that some people are not. I learned that this difference has meaningful consequences, because the hard-working and reliable people are invariably called upon to pick up the slack. And, perhaps most important, I learned that if you can show yourself to be hard-working and reliable, other people will notice. As a left-leaning kid, I had simply assumed that everyone was equally responsible and that incentives did not especially matter. Nothing that has happened in my life since has done more to disabuse me of that notion.
As a result of its extraordinary ingenuity, the United States of America has not only developed a vaccine that lowers to near zero the risk of returning to work; it has deployed that vaccine at such a remarkable scale that the supply has now outstripped the demand. In May of 2021, we have two main groups of people: Those who were scared of COVID and so got the vaccine, and those who were not scared of COVID and so refused the vaccine. Nobody in either group has an excuse not to work if they are able. The next big challenge is to ensure that they do.