The pandemic is prompting a lot of rethinking about the nature of work and capitalism. Here is one way to think about employment: for most people, it vastly increases the value of your time, which is the most important capital you own.
Look at a few of the objects in the room where you're sitting right now. How long would it have taken you to create them, all by yourself? Could you do it at all? Would those objects be of comparable quality if you tried making them with your own hands?
You probably bought most of the things in your room, including the computer or phone you're reading this on. You made those purchases with money you earned by working at your job. Your paycheck therefore increased the value of your labor by several orders of magnitude.
Let's say you're reading this on a smartphone that cost $500 and you take home about $10 an hour from your job. That means you worked 50 hours to pay for that phone. You could not possibly have made such a thing yourself in 50 hours.
Your work, your paycheck, the willing sale of your labor to an employer, gave you the money needed to command huge amounts of specialized labor from other people. This is true of both the large and small resources in your life, not just fancy electronics but even your food.
Employment, for most of us, is an incredible force multiplier for the value of our time. The amount of time we need to invest in security the necessities of life becomes far smaller, and the quality of the life we secure with that labor becomes vastly greater.
The question is: how can we increase that force multiplier to the greatest potential? Under what system is the value of time for the greatest number of people increased the most? Capitalism is the winner hands-down. It's no contest at all.
The multiplier for the value of labor is much, much smaller under socialism, and smallest of all under brutal communism. That's why communism is mostly noted for sweeping poverty and starvation. Communal labor is a HORRIBLE system for increasing the value of time.
The problem with collectivist systems like socialism and communism is that compulsive force must be employed to extract value from work. The pursuit of profit is a vastly more efficient (and morally superior) way to get people to exchange their time for the greatest benefit.
A whole lot of people were very happy to devote a vast amount of labor (and skill) to create that $500 phone in your hand. You only "worked for them" for 10 hours to get it, and you were happy to do so. Everybody won. Nobody was held at gunpoint.
Under free-market capitalism, people tend to voluntarily discover highly efficient ways to trade their time. They find many surprising ways to do so, exchanges that would not have been envisioned by central planners. We trade time with each other a hundred times a day.
Of course, people are often unhappy with their jobs. That's just human nature. But we shouldn't let that sour us completely on the modern notion of "work," or let ourselves be tricked out of our capitalist freedom by fairy tales that work is unnecessary or exploitative.
Consider the alternatives - I mean DEEPLY consider them. Without free employment under capitalism, the value of your time decreases. It becomes much harder to trade your time with others for mutual advantage. Force will inevitably be used to extract value from workers.
Left to rely only upon your own labor, and those willing to communally work with you, the basics of your life - home and food - would become far more primitive, and luxuries would all but disappear. You'd soon be back to subsistence agriculture.
For most of us today, living with the benefits of capitalism, the multiplier for the value of our labor is well into the hundreds or thousands. Even at lower wage levels, one hour of your time can be traded for the product of hundreds of hours of skilled labor from others.
It's really hard to maintain a high multiplier like that. The economic engine that makes labor so valuable is like a high-performance race car engine burning the highest grade of fuel. Tinker with it too much and the whole thing blows apart.
I worked a lot of crummy jobs at low pay when I started out, and one of the things that kept me going was the happiness of knowing that my time had real value to someone, and I could now get real value for myself. I thought about how little my time seemed to be worth otherwise.
We should all think about that very carefully when we hear pitches from political snake-oil hucksters with promises of "free" stuff. How valuable is my time, really, if I can forced to give it to others for "free?" (Of course it's not free - the costs are just hidden from us.)
The best exchanges are as transparent as possible. Layers of political compulsion obscure the real value of costs and benefits. We don't really know who we're trading our time with any more, or how much we're getting in trade, or who it's coming from.
Never abandon your healthy ambition to make your time worth as much as possible, but also take a moment now and then to appreciate just how valuable even the lowliest jobs make each hour of labor you sell to your employers. Your time is worth so much! /end
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