Kevin Williamson takes on an idiot academic:
Labor is a resource, and American labor a particularly valuable one. Sensible people want Americans to work for the same reason that we want to make use of our natural gas and to irrigate California farmland: We want the country to be richer rather than poorer.
This sort of thing is utterly lost on Professor Hunnicutt, who produces from his pocket a particularly stale chestnut regarding Henry Ford, that he believed that paying higher wages was essential to “assuring adequate consumer demand.” I have often heard it said that Henry Ford was a genius for “paying his workers enough to afford his cars.” I very much doubt that Henry Ford believed any such thing, but perhaps he did; he believed a lot of crazy things. The actual history of Ford very strongly suggests that the firm paid market wages, higher than those paid by some similar firms largely because the company had difficulty keeping employees, who were quickly burnt out on its assembly lines. (Ford would sometimes see personnel turnover equivalent to the company’s entire work force in the course of a few months.) “Paid them enough to buy his cars” is a timeless, deathless myth, but it is economically illiterate on its face: Why doesn’t Ferrari pay its workers enough to buy Ferraris? Rolls-Royce? The belief that one can create a functioning consumer market for one’s own goods by overpaying for labor or any other input is magical thinking. But our academics have a weakness for magical thinking.
The newly organized anti-work faction for the most part is little more than the flashing of partisan gang signs: Obamacare apologists are abject, and there simply is no failing in the program that they will not attempt to defend. That is to be expected.
The real problem is that there are people who apparently actually believe this stuff. They have made an elementary conceptual error: National economies are not household economies. There are times in individuals’ lives when leisure becomes more valuable than the return from an additional hour’s work. We take vacations and retire for a reason. But you cannot put a national economy on vacation, much less retire it. To argue that Americans as a whole should work less is to argue that Americans should be poorer.
Yup. But it’s not like these people have even the most basic understanding of economics. They are stuck in the childishness of Marxism in their attitudes, even if they’ve never read a word of his works.
to purchase it, which will give me a small cut as well.