Occasionally it helps to suspend the prejudices of belief
and unbelief to see what insights the ancient scriptures may offer on
contemporary concerns. In this instance,
the topic is work.
Human work, or “toil” as it is referred to in my Bible, is
first mentioned when God ejects Adam and Eve from the Garden. “Through painful toil you will eat…..By the sweat
of your brow you will eat your food until
you return to the ground”. (NIV)
Here is the story up until that moment. Adam and Eve are new to the world. They are essentially children in adult
bodies. Today we call them
adolescents. Like most adolescents, they
have no clue. They live in a home that
their Father provided, eat his food, swim in his ponds and play with his
animals.
Upon eating from the forbidden tree of knowledge, they were
rudely thrust into adulthood and sent out into the harsh world to work at jobs
for which they were ill prepared.
Thus it is embedded in our deepest traditions to regard work
as a curse.
Austrian economists call this the “disutility of labor”. Put quite simply, “Men prefer the absence of
labor, i.e., leisure, to labor, or as the economists put it: they attach disutility
to labor…….They are eager to stop working at the point at which the mediate
gratification expected no longer outweighs the disutility involved in the
performance of additional work.” (Mises: Human Action).
Returning to Scripture for a moment, the actual word “work” first
appears at the beginning of Genesis 2 when God, “rested from all the work he had done in creation”. In this sense, work is a blessing and not a
curse. Work need not always be tedious
toil. Rather, it can be rewarding participation
in the continuing process of creation.
When God expelled the first couple from Paradise, he did not
leave them helpless. They still had their arms, legs, hands and feet. They still had “dominion” over the things of
nature. Most importantly, they retained
their brains, their ability to reason. The
Creator never said that his children should remain poor and miserable. Mankind could mix his hard work and reason
with the abundant resources of this world to lift himself out of destitution
and to create prosperity, peace and abundance.
This is the essence of “production”.
Murray Rothbard
observes that, “Power over nature is the sort of power on which civilization
must be built; the record of man's history is the record of the advance or
attempted advance of that power.”
Mankind’s ability to sublimate nature to his own ends stems
from his power to think and reason. Ayn
Rand states that “The action required to sustain human life is primarily
intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and
produced by his effort. Production is the application of reason to the problem
of survival.”
A great many of our world’s problems, however; stem from the
fact that so few people link work with production. Those who see labor as purely a curse will
often demand compensation for their toil that exceeds their production. They think that their pay is merely
compensation for suffering drudgery, not a reflection of value created for
others. This lies at the heart of the
minimum wage fallacy.
And though God may have given mankind dominion over nature,
he never gave one man or women dominion over another. All God’s children are free and equal in his
eyes as our Declaration of Independence asserts. Yet there are those who prefer a shortcut to
abundance by attaining power over others as opposed to power over nature.
Rothbard explains: “Power over men, on the other hand, does
not raise the general standard of living or promote the satisfactions of all,
as does power over nature. By its very essence, only some men in society can
wield power over men. Where power over man exists, some must be the powerful,
and others must be objects of power….. Power of one man over another cannot
contribute to the advance of mankind; it can only bring about a society in
which plunder has replaced production”.
This is the mode of the corporatist welfare / warfare state
that expropriates lawful productivity for the benefit of elites and their clientele. This is a model for a society that is
unstable and unsustainable
The legal plunder of the all powerful state threatens to
tear down the American Dream that was built upon respect for individual liberty
and property rights. It portends a
return to the harsh days of humanity’s first parents who were sentenced to a
life of hardship on account of their hubris.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In the following graphic, Professor Rothbard neatly sums up
the differences between the ways of peace, liberty and productivity (The Market
Principle) versus the ways of violence and legalized plunder (The Hegemonic
Principle).
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Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
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