A Snapshot Of Men Without Work

FOR DECADES we have been taught, nay ordered to believe that the unemployed were helpless victims, denied meaningful work by a cruel and heartless economic system.

Economists disagreed. Ludwig von Mises famously wrote that all unemployment in a free economy is voluntary. When we are out of work we do not take the first job that comes along. We wait, because we expect something better to come up. When we absolutely must get a job, we do.

When Booker T. Washington was traveling across the South after the Civil War on his way to get an education at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute he arrived in Richmond, Virginia late one night hungry and penniless.

[Next morning,] as soon as it was light... I noticed that I was near a large ship, and that this ship seemed to be unloading a cargo of pig iron. I went at once to the vessel and asked the captain to permit me to help unload the vessel in order to get money for food... I worked long enough to earn money for my breakfast, and it seems to me, as I remember it now, to have been about the best breakfast that I have ever eaten.

Unloading pig iron is probably one of the dirtiest, demeaning jobs you can imagine.

Today in America, according to Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt in The New York Times, there are about 4 million men in the United States who have withdrawn from the workforce because they don�t want to work at the wages offered by the system—and frankly, they don�t need to.

Many of them are just taking out mortgages on their houses, or living off their wives. Or they are going on disability.

[T]he fastest growing source of help is a patchwork system of government support, the main one being federal disability insurance, which is financed by Social Security payroll taxes. The disability stipends range up to $1,000 a month and, after the first two years, Medicare kicks in, giving access to health insurance that for many missing men no longer comes with the low-wage jobs available to them.

No federal entitlement program is growing as quickly, with more than 6.5 million men and women now receiving monthly disability payments, up from 3 million in 1990.

The rolls of the federal disability program are doubling every decade.

The trouble with the disability program, like all the government programs to assist the unemployed, is that it encourages people to stay out of the workforce. Unfortunately, job skills deteriorate rapidly. The longer you stay out of work, the less employable you are.

According to The New York Times the men that have dropped out of the work force are likely to be:

Less educated
Living alone
Released from prison

The Times invites us to observe the life of the Beggerows. He was laid off from Northwestern Wire and Steel in 2001 and since then has only worked occasionally as a community college instructor. His wife, Cathleen, is getting $12,000 a year from disability after suffering severe injuries in an auto accident. The marriage is the third one for both of them. Beggerow has an adult child from a former marriage; Cathleen has no children. Beggerow has no real plans to look for work.

This is the world that progressives and The New York Times have conjured into being in a century of political thinking and practical politics. And as the workforce participation of men goes down, the participation of women goes up.

Is this really the society that we want, with men dropping out into idleness and dependency? Shouldn�t we do something about it?

Because, as they say, when men go bad, released from work and responsibility, they go bad fast.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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