A common belief among conservatives is that liberals lean to confiscating through progressive taxation wealth among the upper class in order to lift the boat of poverty. The right argues that by lifting the yachts, the other boats will rise, too. To some degree it is true but it is only a targeted, limited lift. If you work the gambling tables, make the beds, wait at tables, cook in the elaborate kitchens at Las Vegas you minimally benefit from the happy-go-lucky rich. If you are a yacht builder obviously you need wealthy sailors to buy them. The great corporate skyscraper office buildings require high maintenance, employing thousands of stationary engineers and other skilled mechanics, not to mention untold thousands of white collar workers. This is simple Economics 101. A town needs only to lose its sole factory to dramatize the need for capital investment in labor.
But Economics 201 tells another story. Capital and assets do not come from heaven. Capital is symbolic of centuries of previous labors--intellectual, enterprising, and dirty--without which there would be no capital growth. Management sentinels the trust of capital; labor produces it. Conservatism tends to look at labor with contempt as if it is an activity tolerated in lieu of action respected. They pass off low skilled labor as constituting the ill-fit among whom ambition is foreign. A career Wal-Mart checker is somehow a flunkey of his or her own destiny, and can never be captains of their souls. That Tiger Wood says "if I can do it so can you" is utter fantasy and strangely denigrates the superhero. The you in this case presupposes potential talent and few are thus blest. It is a given that extraordinary talent generates the economy, whether it be in sports, entertainment or industry, from concession stands, caterers, ticket-takers, digital artists, window washers, assembly lineman to superstars and business moguls.
However, the economy, oblivious to capital and labor, is often taken for granted as an entity unto itself requiring little sweat. It is the free market that somehow rises above its infrastructure of shrewd investment and grimy labor. There are investors who think only of profit first, people second. Others put people first, fully aware that their workers and consumers are the essential conflation to enhance profit that generates not only private but common wealth. Conservatives are infamous in their view that without the aristocracy of capital there would be no jobs, forgetting whence that capital came to begin with--back-breaking labor. They tend to forget that their ancestral roots were coal miners, waitresses, laundresses, elevator operators, farmers, railway workers, teachers, nurses, highway and bridge builders ad infinitum. The few that do remember praise their ancestry for being hard workers so that their descendants can work smarter, but in considering those who still do not work smart is owing to a hereditary flaw earmarked as inferior natural selection. Liberals, too, forget their roots, yet somehow muddle through to at least see some value in common labor, which in real terms has earned a larger share of the pie--hardly confiscatory when labor's value is so essential to the well-being of the nation. Whether Wall Street, the executive offices of corporations, the White House and Congress stay open, a nation-wide labor strike would cause the economy to collapse.
Copyright © 2006 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: January 30, 2006.
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