Maybe this should be titled "Fighting the Intellectual War over Economics" because it's not clear liberals have been waging one since the 1950's. During this time the left has seen innovative thought in identity politics and environmentalism, but have stood by while neoliberal economics and Randian Objectivism ran roughshod over us in the realm of ideas about the economy. If Chris Hedges is right, this may stem from the House Unamerican Activities Committee witch hunts that succeeded in purging economic leftists from university faculties. It's as good an explanation as any as to why it feels as though we've been on defense all these years.
It's time to turn things around. We need a vibrant new defense of progressive approaches to the most fundamental economic problems. We can't rely on the constructs of the past because the right has had a half-century to absorb, develop resistance to and eject them intellectually. There is, I believe, a vibrant counterpunch to be dealt which utilizes the language of individualism, of industriousness and ingenuity which the right has successfully made part of our culture for the forseeable future.
It came to me reading Atlas Shrugged of all things. At one point in the seemingly interminable novel (I swear Rand could have made her point in one tenth the pages) she explains why steel magnate Hank Reardon never had a problem with unions. He did so by simply hiring productive men and paying them more than union wages because they were worth it due to their productivity. While this is a notion you might easily blow right past on the page...it's actually at odds with free market economics. Workers are absolutely NOT paid "what they're worth" they are paid no more than it would take to pay someone to replace them. If a worker is paid a certain amount to do a job making a product, and the only thing that changes is that the supply of labor goes up (other production costs, prices for and sales of the product remain constant) that worker's wage will go down or he'll be replaced.
But why should that be the case? If a worker adds X amount of value to the final product, that worker's pay ought to be some function of X...not the amount it would take to hire his or her replacement. In an enlightened market economy, that is how it in fact DOES work, I theorize. I read recently that in some businesses in Germany workers and ownership act together in the best interest of the whole company. Workers' wages are determined collectively and on some basis of how much value they are providing the company. In a rough form that's how unions operate, by allowing workers to get their "fair share" of a company's revenue, even if sometimes this means reducing pay and benefits (if the company is in dire straights and the union is acting in an enlightened fashion).
This isn't really new thinking. In fact the first person I know of who put this into place was noted innovative capitalist Henry Ford. Ford paid his workers nearly double the standard rate and found that this created a "wage motive" helping him acquire and retain the best workers. Furthermore, his employees could actually afford one of the cars they were building. Perhaps he understood the concept that demand drives production as much as the availability of capital and labor.
So I'm not an economist and this might all be well-worn territory. If so...how come we don't have a language to talk about the economic value of labor in a way that motivates people to support labor at the ballot box? We need to start talking about demand, worker productivity, worker value and how these things need to be linked for a healthy economy and we need to do so in a visceral way that will reach working Americans.
A phrase I like to use when talking about the condition of the working class in America is "self-hating workers." These are the people that call up Rush Limbaugh and complain about how Longshoremen get six figures. Translate that into 1975 dollars and compare it to what our parents were making and you know what? That's what a middle class wage now looks like. Thirty grand in 1975 is worth one hundred and eighteen grand today. That's a good wage, no doubt, but it's not like those Longshoremen are driving Ferraris. The right has managed to make working people hate themselves. They hate that they take money from their princely, wealthy owners. They hate that they need health care for their kids. They hate that they want to take pride in what they do and not have it cheapened by shaving pennies on materials and parts.
They need a little of that Ayn Rand arrogance. Workers need a bit of that Fransisco d'Anconia swaggar about what they do. If you're drawing a wage, you are doing valuable, productive work and you are owed every damn penny you make and probably more. Your genius boss is just a fat old bald guy whose pants don't fit without you busting your hump for him day in, day out. A lot of those clowns on Wall Street couldn't do what you do for one damn hour, let alone a day, a year, TWENTY years.
You. Are. Worth. It.
Wage stagnation is our issue. The Wage Debt that is owed to the working class by corporate America due to outsourcing, offshoring and other bad labor practices is enormous. We are owed and we want our money back. And we'll get it by re-empowering labor and creating businesses that incorporate enlightened economics into their business models. And those businesses will win in the marketplace. But we need a legal framework to make that happen. We need a party to enable this new economic model. A party that can represent workers but understand the needs of businesses. A party that can shed its ties to the outmoded special interests of the past, and take a chance on an innovative new way of sharing the goods of society.
We need Democrats.