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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Having come of age in the 80s, it's been amazing to watch the corporate world swing hard to the Left, while the Left switched from diehard anti-corporatism to fawning reverence for billionaires and big businesses that push the "correct" politics.
The cyberpunk dystopia is here, and guess what? It's giant "liberal" corporations controlling speech and using financial muscle to impose ideology on the masses. Left-wing media swoons while billionaire CEOs tell us how to live. The subversives and rebels are conservatives.
This is so completely, 180 degrees different from the corporatist dystopia liberals constantly predicted during the 80s. All of their visions were nightmarish distortions of their caricature of Reaganism. They either hid the true nature of corporatism or were utterly blind to it.
One thing people on the Right could learn from the Left: stop treating elections and court cases as either total victories or final defeats. The battle for truth, justice, and the American Way is never-ending. Never let either friends or foes convince you otherwise.
Granted, there is far too much centralized coercive power in our system, so a lot of bad things can happen after a national election. The stakes are always high - much *too* high for a constitutional republic of sovereign citizens.
But generally speaking, the Left has long been better about using power when they have it, and redoubling their efforts to regain power after they lose it. The Right is more susceptible to all-is-lost fatalism and hopelessness born of deep (and often justified) cynicism.
It's remarkable how perfectly Covid-19 slotted into all of the worst tendencies and most malevolent trends in Western politics. It made every bad trend much worse. It was rocket fuel for civilizational decline.
Control freaks had a field day. Authoritarianism and totalitarianism are flourishing as never before in the postwar era. It's the Super Bowl for expensive, ineffective, inept managerial liberalism. Tribalism is running wild. Collectivist moralism is everywhere.
Societies that were already going insane due to the constant neurotic fits of social media suffered complete nervous breakdowns. Panic and hysteria are rampant. The American election was turned into a joke by coronavirus-inspired "emergency measures."
Around the world, very much including the Western world, real power is measured by the ability to silence criticism.
The highest reaches of power are measured by the ability to force people to speak in politically-approved ways.
The ability to silence criticism is a signifier of power. It's how truly powerful groups and regimes recognize each other. If free people can challenge your ideals or mock you without fear, you aren't TRULY powerful, no matter how much authority you might nominally possess.
And if you can force people to speak, force them to use your preferred language, penalize them socially or legally for failing to signal their support for your agenda, then you've entered the winner's circle. Your government or movement has taken a seat at the highest table.
The U.S. central government grew relentlessly larger, richer, and more powerful during the decades that every problem faced by Americans got worse. Why does anyone think making the government even bigger would *solve* any of those problems instead of making them even worse?
This is not just a matter of government ineptitude and corruption, although both of those are major factors. Our problems get worse as the government gets bigger because the Leviathan State and its clients have a vested interest in making them worse.
One of the biggest lies of statism is that government and its employees are utterly selfless and immune to the incentives that drive people in the private sector. This is absurd. Every government agency seeks to increase its "business" and "profits," just like corporations.
I can't believe anyone who has been paying the slightest attention would be surprised by thorough Chinese Communist penetration of the Democrat Party. Of course, a hell of a lot of voters were kept in the dark about all this until the election was over.
For God's sake, did everyone forget about the Chinese nuns handing bags of cash to Al Gore? The Clinton administration handing China the keys to the high-tech future? Do you really think China wouldn't keep doubling down on political investments with that kind of payoff?
And look, how shall I put this delicately? If you're a Chinese Communist agent, you aren't exactly going to face a great deal of ideological opposition when you enter top Democrat Party political circles. Many of them openly admire and envy Chinese authoritarianism.