A primer on poverty, free time, and choosing to earn more money.
1. The United States is second only to Nicaragua in blaming poor people for their poverty. So, congratulations you libertarian you! You’re expressing the call of the fucking herd, participating in a dumb chorus, and are not representing the light of social, practical, intellectual difference. Fully one quarter of your herd feel poor people are responsible for the own poverty in spite of the overwhelming facts pointing out the opposite. (x, y) One of the reasons for such an exaggerated fiction is that US and UK people work some of the longest and strangest hours in the world. That’s all of us, not just the poor. (x) Our fictions are bound to be more exaggerated.
2. Owners and bosses make so much more money than the average employee that the exaggeration of unearned ambition (see Adam Smith, Part I, Chapter II, here) that’s been a problem in capitalism since its inception is much more exaggerated and problematic today. It’s understandable why you want to imply poor people don’t want to work, although the opposite is the solid truth. Capitalist society values work more than equality, and so even the poorest and unhappiest people are willing to work long and strange hours. We have to address how the division of labor works to promote a sense of fairness about income inequality.
3. We use vague words like inequality to address fairness. Fact is, we can address value very specifically. Workers don’t earn anything approaching appropriate compensation for the hours they work, while owners and employers are earning much more than they’re actually worth, in spite of working similar hours. (x, y) The fact is that, for some reason, we permit some people to say they are worth more than others. Likely, this is a result of the form cooperation between employee and employer takes in capitalism, where employees sacrifice earnings for a number of promises, such as safety at work, access to forms of insurance, compensation for injury, and provided tools and resources. I know from experience that Americans believe bosses pay out of pocket for these “materials”, but the truth is labor produces them. Without labor, we’d have zero wealth creation. That’s a fact. It makes sense to complain. If we’re not going to be compensated more fairly, then we should get more time away from work.
4. I’ve addressed in another post how talking about “wealth” instead of “value” helps generate momentum for the fiction that the long hours rich employers work and the amount of wealth capitalists possess prove they’ve earned their status and wealth. It’s not true. It never has been true. Simple analysis will illustrate that. Just look at the data gathered about work. It’s easily accessible these days. On the other hand, one needs analysis plus social engineering to be able to argue wealthy people have earned their wealth while poor people haven’t earned it yet. Your hero von Mises had to compose a social theory of human action that insists it’s best to think of people as consumers and business owners rather then employee and employer for just this reason. It’s easy to talk about choices, freedom, and liberty when we’re addressing bosses and consumers and wildly wealthy elites. To be antisocialist in a capitalist society insists one must agree about a few conditions before making any arguments about social equality and identity. The theory comes not from metaphysics but from social engineering; in other words, it’s propaganda.
5. But facts are facts. In 2012, for example, the majority of able-bodied poor worked. (x) Year in and year out, the poor work. And they work hard–multiple jobs, night and day, with little sleep. Look we all know that money earned is worth more to the poor than the rich; another way to put it, poverty is expensive. Spending to sustain healthy life takes all of our money. Wealthy people can afford to spend money on investments and entertainment. They tend to lead happier lives for obvious reasons. (x) The link shows that the wealthiest people in the US receive much more of their income from wages than the poorest people do.
6. Something in the assumed rationale in your claim above tells me you think that people earn more money because they have some skills associated with their social status and pay that poorer people lack. That’s simply not the case. We know that a college degree, for example, is worth less if the student and future employee is born poor and worth more if born wealthy. (x)
We can say, without a doubt, that spending what little leisure time we have away from work “bettering” (part of the capitalist myth about social mobility is that we can choose to become better) ourselves is not necessarily going to do anything to increase our value in the workplace.
7. I’m going to give you a little wake up call for your notion that people can choose to become more wealthy. It’s certainly true in the past that much of the wealth in the US was earned rather than inherited. And this only makes sense because much of the wealth (money and value) has been only recently created via economic booms (and recoveries from busts). There wasn’t massive accumulations of wealth to bequeath in the recent past. (Caveat: for a very small, minority of Americans there always has been great wealth and that was inherited. We’re not addressing them.)
We know wealth is an accumulation of excess income over expenditures over time. Wealth inequality is on the rise, all over the world. Thus, we know that these days, and even more so in the days to come, as wealth inequality rises, more people will begin inheriting wealth rather than earning it.
Choosing to be better becomes even more of a fantastic myth.
8. Finally, it’s an intellectual cop out to claim people can educate themselves for free. I’ve been teaching for close to twenty years. Much of the education that future employees exchange for better wages involves learning achieved from within institutions that engage different learning communities and wherein people can make various valuable social connections that permit them referrals, aid, cooperation, and affiliation, all of which costs a lot of money.
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