We can thank the Puritans and Protestants. Today, one of the biggest bugaboos that plagues any rational discussion of domestic tax, welfare and economic reform policy comes from the attitudes toward work held by these early American settlers. It is the belief that only those who work and strive deserve to have their lives improved. Everything we need to live, from food and shelter, to luxuries like televisions and the internet, require work and effort to provide and maintain. How can one deserve these benefits, they think, if one does not help with the work needed to maintain them? There's a flip side to this belief as well. Do you have a lot of wealth? Well, if you do, then it must be because you have worked to create and maintain that wealth, and if this is so then you deserve all that wealth, and no one else has a right to take any part of it away from you. But, as commonsensical as this seems, there's a problem.
What happens if there's not enough work to go around? It's important here that we do make a distinction. There's two basic kinds of work. Work you get paid for, and work you don't. Work you don't get paid for is almost always work you do for yourself. Washing your dishes, taking care of the kids, laundry, etc., are all jobs that must be done, but nobody gets paid for doing them. Of this sort of work, there will always be enough for anybody, since this work mainly involves taking care of one's own self. But this sort of work typically doesn't improve your life, rather, it keeps it from deteriorating. But this work doesn't pay you, and presumes you already have some wealth and assets that need maintenance. How do you get that wealth?
This is the second kind of work, work you get paid for doing. Typically, the benefits that accrue to this work don't directly come back to the worker, but rather, go to the person you're working for. In return for this, he pays you wages. Where the first sort of work can't really improve your life, this second kind of work can, and indeed, one of the main reasons we engage in it is because of this promise.
Now that we've set the stage, we can see the problems this attitude poses for economic and social reform. This attitude is seductive. In order to have your life improved, you have to deserve that improvement, and the way to deserve that improvement is to work and earn wages. Any notion of welfare or a tax policy that redistributes wealth works counter to this ideology. Giving money to those who aren't working? Anathema!
Like all other ideologies, when challenged, they come up with ad hoc defenses of their principles. This particular ideology likes to engage in a bit of pop psychology. Give people money when they haven't earned it through working, they say, and these people will lose any incentive to work. Why not sit at home and play Xbox, chain smoke blunts, and lounge your life away if there's no need to do anything else? Like all other pop psychologists, those who tout this explanation exempt themselves and others like them from its effects. People who are already poor, who, by definition of their ideology, aren't working or aren't working as much as they should, these are the people who will be lazy if given the opportunity. The elites, the upper and upper middle-classes, you know, "real Americans" will continue to work because of the nobility that comes from having "really worked." They recognize the benefit that comes from such effort, and posses a unique desire to make their lot better. They echo my mother's old accusation against me, that the poor would be just as happy living in a pig sty, and wouldn't know the difference either.
From a realistic, progressive point of view, this is an ideology that cannot be accommodated. From my own perspective, progressivism minimally strives to improve everybody's lot in life, from rich to poor. An attempt to reconcile the Protestant work ethic with the progressive project would require that we establish a "right to work" in the strongest sense, that everybody has a right to a job that pays a living wage. It is only in this way that we can promote both ideologies, the requirement that we provide a means of improving one's life, together with the requirement that everyone who's life is improved deserves that benefit, where deserving means having worked for it.
From a practical point of view, such a right is economically untenable. There simply aren't enough jobs to go around. Furthermore, even with massive government intervention, subsidizing hiring and wages, promoting new technologies, even hiring people to do "make work," won't provide enough jobs for a long enough period of time to achieve our goal, and the "make work" option makes things worse. It's true that we may be able to offer a job to everyone who wants one in the short term. When we consider how we've let all our infrastructures degrade, there will have to be a massive amount of employment and work to refurbish them. At the same time, we'll be working to shift our energy infrastructure from fossil fuels to more sustainable sources. It is conceivable that we could achieve 100% employment as we tackle both these problems at once. But, once these tasks are done, these infrastructures will only have to be maintained, not continually rebuilt. The need for workers will drop as maintenance is easier than construction.
And there are further practical problems to a right to work. The inexorable logic of capitalism requires constant increases in productivity to maintain profitability in a competitive environment. This means either new technology that can replace workers, or making workers work longer for less wages. While new technology can create new jobs by opening up whole new realms of economic activity (e.g. the internet) the whole reason it is put in place is because it reduces jobs in the currently existing economy. A single computer can replace dozens of clerks. An agricultural combine replaces hundreds of field workers. Technological progress very nearly guarantees a reduction in future productive jobs. And even without this technology, the pressures on wages and hours worked have much the same effect. The whole point of capitalism is to be able to do more with less, most especially less work. It is absurd to employ a system that is constantly reducing the number of jobs and the amount of work to be done, while at the same time requiring everyone to work to get any benefit.
Still, we might think the Protestant work ethic ought to be preserved over the progressive project, because this ethic seeks to improve our character. There is something seductive about their "just so" psychological story. No one really wants to be the lazy lout described above, and we don't want others to be like that either. People should have to work for what they get, or they'll become like the spoiled children of rich moguls, expecting everything to be given to them for nothing. Man is naturally evil, exploitative and lazy, and must be prodded along to become good and industrious, just look at our politicians and CEOs and the slums of our cities if you need an example of this. Give them an inch, and they'll steal the clothes off your back, and anything else you have of value as well.
But such an outlook is entirely depressing. If the Protestant view of mankind is correct, no progress is really possible. Rather, we are in a constant war with our worst tendencies, and no guarantee that our better ones will win out. It makes us distrust one another, and prefer to try to take on life on our own, encouraging selfishness. And, combined with the practical reality of the job shortage, it condemns as evil and undeserving those who never had a chance.
Progressivism, on the other hand, makes no pretensions to the essential goodness or evilness of mankind. Neither does it seek to establish the standards of desert. It recognizes the practical impossibility of securing the income to those who need it through providing jobs. And, while it certainly does not stand in the way of job creation, or in the way of natural market pressures for greater innovation, lower wages and more hours worked, it recognizes that economic activity is not the sole determinant of value and desert. While a right to work might be a practical impossibility, a right to a livable income is almost certainly not. The global economy produces far more than enough to provide everyone with the food, shelter, clothing and other basic needs they require. And while a job might be the "best" way to provide that income, it cannot be the only "deserving" way, or millions, perhaps billions of people won't "deserve" to live. Surely, no ideology which condemns so many to die can be long supported.
So, while the Protestant work ethic may teach us important things about human nature and character, it cannot be our economic guiding star because it requires too much. We should recognize the truth it teaches us that working for the things that make your life better improves your character, and for that reason, we should encourage work as the primary source of income. But we cannot forget that we simply cannot provide a job to everyone who wants and needs one. And we cannot hold that individual who wants to work, but cannot find a job, responsible for her poor economic condition. She has the appropriate character, but lacks the opportunity to express that character.
What is left, then, is to provide a social safety net of some comfort. Those who lack jobs lack them through no fault of their own. It is economically untenable and unfair to require business to employ them when they are not needed. "Make-work," or work that adds no new value to the world, but which you get paid to do anyway, only exacerbates economic troubles. By competing in the work force for labor, it raises wages everywhere, which raises costs, and inflation looms. By competing in the work force for laborers, it takes skilled workers from jobs where they could be really productive and employs them in doing nothing, lowering the real value produced by the economy. All that is left, then is to guarantee people a minimum, livable income, regardless of whether they work, that can be built upon to improve one's life by finding or creating a really productive job to augment that guarantee. Ideally, it should be structured like the EITC, but be expanded to childless couples and singles, and the credit expanded so that it can provide a livable income all on its own. And the "phase-in" of the EITC should be eliminated.
The Protestant work ethic had its place and role in our social lives. Born of the early American frontier, where economic scarcity was the rule of the day, it promoted an industriousness and responsibility of character that was essential in settling and industrializing that frontier. Without it, we may well not have a USA today. But it is an ideology suited to an earlier era, which does not fit well with the realities we face today. There is no longer the problem of not enough to go around. Now, the problem is that there is more than enough to go around, but those who need it cannot get it, because they were necessarily excluded from its creation and maintenance. Since we cannot reasonably include them in that process, we must find a different rationale for distribution, or consign the vast majority of the human race to death.