The Daily Signal - What’s With the Left’s Attempt to Abolish Work?

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

In the midst of the so-called Great Resignation, the far left is calling for the abolishment of all work. Leftist politicians and activists call for the government to step in and create a massive welfare state to eliminate the need for Americans to work at all. Robert Rector, The Heritage Foundation’s senior research fellow for domestic policy studies, joins the podcast to explain that work is crucial for a functioning and flourishing society. The left’s proposals to replace work with government handouts, Rector says, can have only bad consequences. “We’re now violating that contract when you [eliminate work],” Rector says. “Those who choose to work [will] have a double obligation to support themselves and their families and the families of those who choose not to work. Society will fall apart under that, and there’s no way of stopping it.” We also cover these stories: President Biden gives his first press conference since November, taking questions for over an hour and a half. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell accuses Democrats of trying to divide the nation for their own political gain. Fearing an imminent attack on Ukraine by Russian forces, Secretary of State Antony Blinken lands in Kiev for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, January 20th. I'm Mary Margaret O'Lohan. And I'm Doug Blair. In the midst of the Great Resignation, the Left is calling for the abolishment of all work. Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow for Domestic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, explains to us that work is crucial for a functioning and flourishing society and that the Left's proposals to replace work with government handouts can only result in bad consequences. But before we get to Doug's conversation with Robert Rector, let's hit our top stories of the day.

Nearing the end of his first year in office, President Biden gave a press conference on Wednesday, his first since he spoke at the COP 26 Climate Summit back in November. Biden discussed a number of issues during the press conference, including COVID-19, the economy and labor market, and foreign affairs. Here's Biden on COVID via the RNC on Twitter. I know there's a lot of frustration and fatiguing this. country. And we know why. COVID-19. Homercrom has now been challenging us in a way that it's the new enemy. Biden also discussed the mass of inflation affecting the country, claiming that most Americans got a raise, even as prices for everyday goods continue to climb via town hall. And for the first time, a long time, this country's working people actually got a raise, actually got a raise. People,

the bottom 40% saw their income go up the most of all the got a raise. Later, during a question and answer session, Biden responded to reports that Russia was building up forces at the Ukrainian border for a possible invasion via Disclosed TV on Twitter. I think what you're going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It's one thing if it's a minor incursion and then we end up. having a fight about what to do and not do, et cetera. He also commented on criticism to a speech he gave in Georgia on proposed election laws

where he compared people who didn't back the voting laws to infamous segregationists like Bull Connor via Aaron Ruper on Twitter. People heard the speech that you gave on voting rights in Georgia recently, in which you described those who are opposed to you to George Wallace and Jefferson Davis, and some people took exception to that. What do you say to those who were offended by your speech? And is this country more unified than it was when you first took office? Number one, anybody who listened to the speech, I did not say that there were going to be a George Wallace or a Bull Connor.

I said we're going to have a decision in history that is going to be marked just like it was then. You either voted on the side. I didn't make you George Wallace or didn't make you Bull Connor. But if you did not vote for the Voting Rights Act back then, you were voting with those who were. agreed with Connor. Those agreed with, and so, and I think Mitch did a real good job of making it sound like I was attacking them. On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell accused Democrats of trying to divide

the United States for their own political gain. The Kentucky Republican said that Democrats who are pushing for the elimination of the filibuster for a voting rights bill are creating fake panic and should instead be focused on real crises, such as inflation, the border, crime, Russia, or the pandemic. The filibuster requires 60 votes to pass legislation, meaning that Democrats are unable to pass legislation without GOP support. Instead, McConnell said, they've been consumed by a fake panic over election laws that seem to exist only in their own imaginations.

Here are more of his thoughts via C-SPAN. These radicals on the other side, in order to get their own way, are prepared to break the United States Senate. By taking steps, almost all of them, decried, as recently as a couple of years ago. Fearing an imminent attack on Ukraine by Russian forces, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken landed in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev on Wednesday to discuss plans with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

During a meeting with Zelensky, Blinken reiterated American support for Ukraine via today. So the president asked me to underscore once again our commitment to Ukraine's territorial integrity, to its sovereignty, to its independence. The U.S. has warned that Russia's buildup of troops on the Ukrainian border means that Russia could attack the country on very short notice. In addition to the troops on the border, Russia has also begun moving forces into Belarus, a pro-Russian country right next to Ukraine.

Russia denies it is preparing to attack Ukraine, but reports indicate that Russia is slowly recalling staff from its embassy in Kiev via the New York Times. Tensions between Russia and the U.S. boiled over last week when America rejected demands that NATO would not expand to Ukraine and other former Soviet countries or place military forces in them. Blinken plans to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva on Friday. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Robert Rector, as we discussed the left's attempt. to eliminate work. Conservative women. Conservative feminist. It's true.

We do exist. I'm Virginia Allen and every Thursday morning on problematic women, Lauren Evans and I sort through the news to bring you stories and interviews that are particular interest to conservative leaning or problematic women. That is women whose views and opinions are often excluded or mocked by those

on the so-called feminist left. We talk about everything from pop culture, to policy and politics. Search for problematic women wherever you get your podcasts. Our guest today is Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow for Domestic Policy Studies at the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity at the Heritage Foundation. Robert, thank you so much for coming on. Well, thank you.

Excellent. So I wanted to talk to you about work and the idea of work. There are increasing calls from many on the left to abolish the idea of work, to get rid of it entirely. And there's this hugely popular Internet forum that is against jobs as they are structured under capitalism and the state. So to start out with, why is work important? Well, as far as I know, all societies, even hunting and gathering societies, do require self-support and work in order to function. They may not have a market exchange, but there's nobody sitting around saying, hey, go find me some food and I'll sit here.

You know, nothing works like that. And work is fundamentally about self-support. If you think back, traditionally this would be someone building his own house, raising his own food, family making their own clothes, and so forth. Now, in a market economy, we don't do that anymore. but what we do is exchange our work for someone else's work who can do a particular thing more efficiently. If you are working, you're going to be able to actually exchange what you're doing for like a pound of potatoes. If not, you're actually not working, and the left likes to fudge that up.

I like to sing in the shower. I think I'm really good. But if I were to go around my neighborhood and say, hey, I was really good in the shower this morning. You got $10. I don't think it would be that successful. If I have something that is a value, I can exchange it for someone else's work. My work has value. You work has value.

We exchange it. We're in a balance. The left doesn't like that. But really what the left is about is taking control of all the resources and then allocating them according to their own power and their own ideology. And removing work is just a part of making the state far. much stronger in terms of controlling resources. But then ironically, this actually sort of comes out of anarchism, which is about making the

states smaller. Sure. And that's a really interesting point that you made. It's coming out of anarchism. Is this something that started with anarchism? Or is there another political philosophy that kind of originates with this idea? It comes in part from anarchism. It comes also from, in part from just the alienation from.

existing society that you find in the left. They're just angry about everything, and so they're angry about work. But socialist societies, communist societies, very much required work. You were forced to work in the Soviet Union to make a contribution. There was no toleration of free riders at all. And this is something, and most anarchist societies have fallen apart over the free rider problem. When you go to an anarchist society, like a communal society, existed historically, in most cases what you end up with is, say, an abundance of essays and music performed in a shortage of turnips, and no one is cleaning the cesspool for some reason. So they, they, when you want to do the formula from each according to their ability to each to according to their need,

which is the anarchist one, well, exactly what determines. who gets what and who gets to clean the cesspool is a big problem. And largely they've never been able to resolve that at all. So but when you're talking about removing work today, it's really about building the welfare state, building the government. The government is going to collect all the resources and turn them over and control them. And what you have with a UBI type system or anything like that, what you're really saying is, look, you are not, you as a recipient are not required to do anything to support yourself. You can choose not to work. However, if you do choose to work, you have a double obligation. You're going to support yourself and you're going to support this person that chose not to work. Now, virtually no one finds that fair or a good idea. If you look in our society, if you ask the question, should an able-bodied adult who gets cash, food, housing, or medical care from the government be required to work or at least prepare for work as a condition

of receiving that aid, 90% of the public say yes, including about 90% of people who identify as Democrats. Ironically, if you look on the extreme left of sort of philosophy with John Rawls, whose entire passion is to redistribute income, but Rawls had a surfer exemption. He said, look, if you just want to surf and you don't want to do anything to support yourself, then you should not be a recipient of this government redistribution. And on the other end, we have Hayek, who, the libertarian economist, who did accept some sort of welfare state transfer to support the less advantage, but basically said, we shouldn't be paying people to gaze at their own navels, which were

hippies in his day. Ironically, you have both extremes saying you can have redistribution, but it has to be redistribution with a requirement to take some steps to support yourself if you're able to do so. Now, I do want to talk about UBI a little bit later in this interview, but one of the things I'm curious about is what is the leftist argument that work is problematic? What are they saying is the issue with work? Largely, they, I think they don't advance that in practical terms. They just start by saying, oh, my goodness, we have poverty, and the best way to eliminate poverty is just give people more stuff. There's also a group here that I would call big government libertarians who've leaped into this. It seems like an irony, but they exist.

And they try to pretend that giving people free stuff wouldn't make them work less. But of course, all the evidence suggests the opposite of that, that you need to have an expectation and a requirement in to say, look, if you can, if you need assistance, we'll give it to you, but you have to take steps to support yourself. So on the extreme left, you have this work as we don't want work, but when you get like onto Capitol Hill or something, they're going to conceal that. They're not going to make that self-evident. And I think it's just an animus to society in general.

Again, all societies, I am not aware of any society where you get to say, oh, you know, I don't really want to support myself. You can support me. It doesn't seem like the basis for any sort of valid social contract. So there's a lot of pretense that work isn't available. A big one now is work is going to disappear. Automation is going to remove it all. Well, that's just a convenience for people who wanted to abolish work in the first place.

And it's not really a valid excuse. That might actually happen at some point in the future, but the people that are harping on that had other reasons for seeking to circumvent work. Now, we're going through something, speaking of kind of modern-day examples of this kind of excuses as to not working. We're going through something called the Great Resignation, where workers across the country are leaving their jobs en masse. Is this great resignation a result of anti-work rhetoric coming from the left?

No, I think it's a result of giving people a lot of money not to work during the last, during the COVID pandemic where you were paying vast amounts in really paying people more in unemployment insurance than they can earn in the marketplace. And I think that that developed some bad habits and also developed, at least in the short term, a need not to work. The old example of this that comes on the right was Milton Friedman's idea of a guaranteed national income tax, which was a support payment without a work. work requirement. And given the, if you don't remember history, you're condemned to repeat it.

After he advanced that, we actually had these very large random assignment experiments in the 70s and early 80s called the negative income tax experiments. And guess what? It found that when you gave families money not to work, they worked less. It's amazing, you know. I'm glad I can get paid to know stuff like that. And it's a good gig. And, um, and they, They found significant reductions in work, but interestingly, these were short-term random assignment experiments. They never lasted more than three years. But we found that even 30, 40 years later, when you went back into the families that got

these special payments that rewarded not working, that they're working less even today. So they sort of inculcated a habit of working less. It's not that they left the labor force entirely, but if they were working less. were between jobs, they stayed out longer, they worked less, and so forth. So not a good way. And it's obviously extremely costly to the taxpayer, but it's also extremely harmful to the recipients. The other impact that we saw with the negative income tax experiments was a decline in marriage. And I love Milton Friedman, but Milton Friedman didn't know anything about welfare programs and thought they were extremely boring. So he just said, well, we'll just get

rid of all this stuff and we'll have this really simple thing that I can draw on a chalkboard. Well, no, that's probably not the way you want to go about this. You really need to know how these programs operate, what they reward, what they don't reward, and how people in different classes interact with them. Following up on that, I mean, let's imagine that there is a big shift in how we are able to form our society. So like a Star Trek level, you know, everything is provided for you. You have this technology that can just give you resources. sources, should there be a society without work or does work fulfill a different need than just sustainability?

Right. So part of the problem with the welfare, with the left-wing welfare state is because they want to attack capitalism, they want to attack traditional society. And so they make a big deal, a largely false deal, about poverty and inequality, and they use that to expand the state. But all of their thinking is almost entirely materialistic. the way I look at the welfare state, I use Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which everyone has apparently studied for 50 years as an undergraduate, you know. And Maslow's hierarchy of

needs at the very bottom, the least important need are meeting these physical needs, right? Well, that's what the welfare state is all about. But right above that, you have a need for a security which comes from, in part, having capacity to support yourself. And right above that, you have a need that he called respect or achievement, and that's intimately linked to work, okay? If you can't support yourself, or at least make a significant contribution, I don't have to necessarily be self-sufficient, but a significant contribution to support yourself and your family, that's immediately a sense of achievement.

It gives you dignity, and it's immediately validated because, again, if you're working, what you're actually saying is, I have something of enough value so that when I do it, you're willing to work in exchange for me, you know. And if you don't have that, then you're in my situation singing in the bathroom and going around and saying, hey, please donate, you know. Right. And everybody instinctively understands that. It's very rewarding.

And then also when you remove work, you severely undermine the family. And that's the next order of Maslow's needs is family relationships, personal relationships. And one of the things we know is that when you come into society, eating start making the breadwinner unnecessary, making the father unnecessary, making unnecessary for the mother to work, the family collapses. And that's happening already all across advanced nations where the lowest income families, the marriage is largely eroded terribly. If you look at the United States today, if you have a mother that only has a high school

degree, 60% of those kids will be born out of wedlock. if the mother has a college degree, it's 10%. So our society is dividing already into those that are not married or have low marriage levels, and then the upper class where you basically have kids being raised by a married, college-educated couples. Those kids are hugely advantaged relative to the other. Now, if you take work out of the thing entirely, then that's going to even be a greater social polarization. It's going to dissolve even further. One of the things that we discussed a little bit earlier in this interview was the idea of UBI or universal basic income.

For our listeners who might not know what this is, what is this concept of UBI or universal basic income? Well, there are various versions of it, but the simplest version is that the government would tax people away, maybe with a value added tax, and give everybody $10,000 a year. Okay. Charles Murray has a version of this where I think it only goes to adults. Now, some of these try to be frugal, and they start out with the politically attractive idea of abolishing Social Security Medicare. Lots of votes for that in the House and Senate. But most of them don't try to pay for themselves at all. It's just we're going to give people stuff and magically tax it $1,000 per person for everybody.

That's about $1 and $6 in the economy. So it's about close to 20% of the whole economy. You'd have to have a massive tax to pay for that, but we're not going to talk about that too much if we're promoting this idea. The other thing to think about is clearly it's incentive structure. It's very important. And I haven't yet to meet a parent who's raising a kid who would like to have the government come and tell their child. You know, particularly the boys.

You know, when you turn 18, we're going to give you 10,000. a year for the rest of your life. Right. What change is going to happen to behavior? You know, that's really going to improve that homework, isn't it? You know, and you're really going to bribe people into very nonproductive, dissipated lives, and they're going to turn around when they're 40 and say, what happened, you know? We've already really hurt blue-collar young men by basically making it unnecessary.

for them to be breadwinners for their children, that basically rips the guts out of their lives. And they work less. That's actually where the opioid crisis is focused among men with a high school degree or less who are not married, okay, and who have no real role in our society because the state displaced them. Now we can displace everybody, basically, and it's a horrible idea. So can you expand a little bit more on, like, what these various ideas? have looked like in the forms of, is this just an American thing or is this abroad?

Like, where has this been tried? It's tried in this form, the UBI form here and there in various locations. It's always local. It doesn't seem to stick and they usually end. It's more rhetorical. And I would say the real danger is that we incrementally inch toward this rather than, oh, let's have a 25% VAT tax and give everybody $10,000. I don't think that's going to be what happens.

I think we're going to incrementally do this. So, for example, just this year in the Build Back Better Bill, the Biden administration was proposing a cash grant of $300 a month for each child, no work requirement. That was the key to it. They didn't care about tax. It's not tax relief either. It's a cash grant, but getting rid of the existing work requirement out of the welfare system, which the left has always wanted to do, and inching toward it. And basically, they never said that they were getting rid of the work requirement. They just glossed over that.

But that was the core objective was to get the government back in the business of subsidizing, particularly single mothers who did not work. In welfare reform in 1996, under Clinton, what we did was get rid of. of the cash program that paid single moms not to work, aid to families with dependent children. And we put in a partial imperfect, but a work requirement on that. And we found that poverty dropped dramatically. Employment went up.

The teen pregnancy and birth rates dropped that they've been rising steadily for four decades. All of a sudden they start coming down because you weren't sending out a message that said, hey, to a 15-year-old, hey, have a baby. We're gonna give you cash for the next 18 years. And we don't expect you to do anything exchange for it. It's a really, really bad message to send out, well, we needed to restore that message

according to the Biden administration. So far that's been blocked. But again, the key there was to go with this, and people did get this $300 a month. A lot of them are going to have to pay it back with tax time. But it was hidden. It was supposed to be tax relief from the middle class when it was really kind of a Trojan horse. to get us in the direction of cash without work. Do we see with things like the checks that came out during the COVID pandemic,

I believe there were a couple of different checks that went out during the course of those two years, do we see that as sort of like a test run for these types of programs in the future? Clearly that rhetoric was behind it. They will talk about how one thing they will say is, you know, if you pay everybody not to work, then employers have to pay a lot more to get them to work, which is, wow, inflation. Again, I get paid for making these conclusions, you know, it's an amazing job. But, yeah, that's an old left thing, that if you can get people so they don't have to work,

then you have to pay them more when they do work. But that implies that a lot of them are choosing not to work, which is not in their interest. So if you listen to the rhetoric and theory behind this, yes. But back when we passed this, it was all because people couldn't possibly survive. And then the amounts of money that we gave out, people didn't really understand and still we started giving it out. But right now, the main way they would like to continue this is through these unconditional child payments, which become a gateway to everything else in the future. In terms of long-term consequences if this type of policy, we've talked a little bit about the degradation of the family as a structure, the degradation of the role of men in terms of breadwinning.

What do we see could be a long-term consequence if these types of policies are allowed to go through? Well, you're basically creating a violation of the basic social contract, where again the basic social contract is that we have now in a modern world. welfare state is if you're an able-bodied person, we may give you some assistance, but we expect you to make some contribution to your own support and to the support of your children. If you need something to top that off, we'll help you. We'll give you free education, maybe give you free medical care, some assistance, but you do have an obligation to support yourself. We're now violating that contract when you do this, and you're saying everyone has a choice as to whether they will do anything to support themselves or whether they're going to basically focus on

singing in the shower. And those who choose to work now have a double obligation. So the recipient has no obligation. Those who choose to work have a double obligation to support themselves and their families and the families of those who choose not to work. Society will fall apart under that. And there's no way of stopping it. Most of these proposals are, well, we'll give a, we'll give it.

everybody $10,000 and that'll only be, you know, 16 or 18% of the GDP and we'll stop there. Wait a second. Why are you stopping there? Okay. Why wouldn't there the very next week you would have a proposal for $10,000, 500, you know, or on and on and on? So most of these schemes also then have some kind of Rube Goldberg contraption to say, oh, well, that really wouldn't happen.

Charles Murray's version has some huge constitutional amendment that is attached to it. And Yang's proposal also had this kind of thing to keep it from going out of control. But it clearly would go out of control. And then, in fact, every election is going to be about raising that $10,000. That'll be the vote over and over and over again. And you're going to destroy the economy and make everyone poor when you do that. But you're also destroying the well-being of all the people that you're moving, assigned and out of the society. The real vision here is Brave New World. That is what they're

really talking about here. And when you listen to people from Silicon Valley and things talking about a post-work world, they're not the ones that are not going to be working. They're going to be in these protected enclaves and they're going to have this vast population that has nothing to do and they'll be doling money out to them because they're going to be in control. That's a horrible thing. recipients there really have very empty lives. And I think the people that advocate for that kind of, they view them as having empty lives in the first place. Whereas I think all work has dignity.

You know, work is often doing something that you would prefer not to do, you know. And when you do something worthwhile, it only has worth if somebody else is willing to work in exchange for that. And that's the nature of work. And work is very important, both that kind of. economically as well as socially and psychologically. As we can to wrap up this interview, we've talked a lot about the impacts of not having work or meaningful work in one's life.

We've also talked about some of the proposed solutions that the left will offer, such as UBI. As conservatives, what should we be doing to both tamp down on anti-work rhetoric and to push back against proposals like UBI? Right. The first thing is we have to win the war about poverty. Okay. And I'll just simply say, because people will say, oh, well, the UBI is going to reduce poverty. That's their lead line, okay? And I'll just say, look, I have a proposal I can cut the poverty rate by about 70% in 24 hours, okay? 24 hours, just like that. How do I do that? Well, I actually count the trillion dollars that we currently give to people who cash food, housing, and medical care. Okay. What people don't understand when we say, oh, there are 50 million people living in poverty. Look at all these children moving poverty.

Well, poverty is having income below a certain threshold, but what do they count as income? Well, food stamps are not income. They're in income. Tax credit's not income. Housing is not income. None of the welfare state is income. It's all off the books. And that's not an accident.

It's deliberately held off the books by big bureaucracy and not counted so that they can say, oh, my God, look at all the poor people. We must spend more money. And the left either cynically or they've been. basically believe this nonsense. So the first thing to do is to say, look, we have a welfare state that combines, tries to combine marriage work and welfare together in a way, and it's very effective in reducing poverty, but you have to count it. You also have to accurately count people's earnings, which the government doesn't do. They're missing about half of low-income

earnings. So all their numbers are wrong, and they're deliberately wrong, in order to create this idea of a crisis of capitalism and therefore we have to have a new much bigger thing. And you know, the secret thing is if you had a UBI, they wouldn't count that either according to the way they accordingly doing these things. So it has no effect on poverty. The Biden buildback better bill, no effect on poverty at all because none of those benefits would be counted as income. It's all a big charade. And it's ridiculous that conservatives and the Republican Party have let them get away with this for 50 years. Why is it that food stamps are not income? Well, it's because if they were counted as income, the poverty rate goes down. So correctly count what we already

spend, correctly count what people already earn. The poverty rate is way down, and their impetus for doing these much more harmful experiments would, I think, dissipate, and then we would have a stronger idea for making the welfare state better. People don't understand that, let's say, let's take a mother who earns a minimum wage. She makes $14,000 a year. She's desperately poor. But we already give her about $11,000, $12,000 in cash and food and housing benefits on top of that. So she's actually out of poverty. That's a well-designed system of saying, you do what you can to support yourself and we'll supplement that. But we're not going to remove your obligations for self-support.

Right. That was Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow for Domestic Policy Studies at the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity here at the Heritage Foundation. Robert, I really appreciate your time. Sure. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast.

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