The Nation That Wouldn’t Get Out Of Bed And Go To Work
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/09/the-nation-that-wouldnt-get-out-of-bed-and-go-to-work/
A country of roughly 330 million has more than 9 million job openings, and 9.5 million unemployed. This is a disgrace, a clear indication that our American character and work ethic are slipping, a rolling tragedy that’s been authored by the Democrats.
Three years ago, before Democrat Joe Biden was the president, while the Republicans still held a majority in the Senate, The Saturday Evening Post wondered if “the American work ethic (has) gotten worse.”
“Have Americans lost their willingness to apply their noses to the grindstone, or to work hard for anything they get in life?”
The venerable publication concluded “that’s not what statistics show.”
Today’s data, however, tell a different story.
According to the Labor Department, there was a record high of 9.2 million job openings in May, and 9.5 million jobless in June. ZipRecruiter reckons as many as 15 million jobs need to be filled. Either way, millions are ignoring what MarketWatch describes “an insatiable demand for labor as the economy fully reopens and businesses scramble to keep up with soaring sales for their goods and services.”
We have arrived at this point in history because the Democrats have made sitting at home collecting a government check a better financial decision than working. We covered this in May, when we said “as part of Biden’s ‘American Rescue Plan,’ the Democrats included a $300 weekly bonus to those on unemployment that runs until September. The plan included various other handouts that are letting the jobless live comfortable lives at the moment.”
In some cases, taxpayer-funded benefits are higher than the wages recipients would receive in return for their labor.
When we discussed this in May, the most recent data showed 7.4 million job openings. So the problem has become worse.
Democratic Party newsletters such as the New York Times and Washington Post say the problem is that Americans don’t want to go back to low-wage jobs and “terrible” working conditions. This ignores our value system that says performing even the most humble job is more virtuous than living on handouts, and dismisses a fact we all instinctively know – that “getting paid not to work can be addictive.”
Those words are from columnist Cal Thomas, who also cites Proverbs 10:4, which says “lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth.”
Less divine, but still important, is the research at two Federal Reserve banks, which has noted that “longer benefits may reduce unemployed workers’ job search efforts and raise their reservation wage, decreasing their likelihood of becoming reemployed,” and “payments are likely to reduce job-finding and prolong unemployment spells for eligible individuals.”
A rancid soup of progressives, media cheerleaders, Democrat operatives, the left’s political leaders, and various agitators wonder why Washington just can’t pay some of us to lay about our homes and watch our flat screen televisions. Here’s why not:
One, work is ennobling. The U.S. intuitively recognized this since its beginnings. In “Democracy in America,” a Frenchman’s early 18th century observation of what made this new nation succeed, Alexis de Toqueville wrote that “the notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind, on every side, as the necessary, natural, and honest condition of human existence. Not only is labor not dishonorable among such a people, but it is held in honor; the prejudice is not against it, but in its favor.”
Biden himself has even recounted the story of his father telling him “a job is a lot more than a paycheck,” that it’s about “your respect, your dignity, your place in the community.”
Two, arranging for one portion of the population to perpetually support another isn’t sustainable. As Margaret Thatcher famously – and quite correctly – observed, at some point “you eventually run out of other people’s money” when trying to keep socialist programs afloat.
Democrats have long wanted to make as many Americans as possible dependent upon government, and eternally reliant on the generosity – using other people’s money – of the Democratic Party. They want a nation of serfs and subjects, not one of individual citizens, in which they are the ruling class. They want to reign rather than govern within constitutional limits. Authoritarianism and control are in their DNA. Eliminating the work ethic that powers capitalism is part of their plan to fundamentally transform this country in a way that benefits only them and their cronies.
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