A Snapshot Of Men Without Work

FOR DECADES we have been taught, nay ordered to believe that the unemployed were helpless victims, denied meaningful work by a cruel and heartless economic system.

Economists disagreed. Ludwig von Mises famously wrote that all unemployment in a free economy is voluntary. When we are out of work we do not take the first job that comes along. We wait, because we expect something better to come up. When we absolutely must get a job, we do.

When Booker T. Washington was traveling across the South after the Civil War on his way to get an education at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute he arrived in Richmond, Virginia late one night hungry and penniless.

[Next morning,] as soon as it was light... I noticed that I was near a large ship, and that this ship seemed to be unloading a cargo of pig iron. I went at once to the vessel and asked the captain to permit me to help unload the vessel in order to get money for food... I worked long enough to earn money for my breakfast, and it seems to me, as I remember it now, to have been about the best breakfast that I have ever eaten.

Unloading pig iron is probably one of the dirtiest, demeaning jobs you can imagine.

Today in America, according to Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt in The New York Times, there are about 4 million men in the United States who have withdrawn from the workforce because they don’t want to work at the wages offered by the system—and frankly, they don’t need to.

Many of them are just taking out mortgages on their houses, or living off their wives. Or they are going on disability.

[T]he fastest growing source of help is a patchwork system of government support, the main one being federal disability insurance, which is financed by Social Security payroll taxes. The disability stipends range up to $1,000 a month and, after the first two years, Medicare kicks in, giving access to health insurance that for many missing men no longer comes with the low-wage jobs available to them.

No federal entitlement program is growing as quickly, with more than 6.5 million men and women now receiving monthly disability payments, up from 3 million in 1990.

The rolls of the federal disability program are doubling every decade.

The trouble with the disability program, like all the government programs to assist the unemployed, is that it encourages people to stay out of the workforce. Unfortunately, job skills deteriorate rapidly. The longer you stay out of work, the less employable you are.

According to The New York Times the men that have dropped out of the work force are likely to be:

Less educated
Living alone
Released from prison

The Times invites us to observe the life of the Beggerows. He was laid off from Northwestern Wire and Steel in 2001 and since then has only worked occasionally as a community college instructor. His wife, Cathleen, is getting $12,000 a year from disability after suffering severe injuries in an auto accident. The marriage is the third one for both of them. Beggerow has an adult child from a former marriage; Cathleen has no children. Beggerow has no real plans to look for work.

This is the world that progressives and The New York Times have conjured into being in a century of political thinking and practical politics. And as the workforce participation of men goes down, the participation of women goes up.

Is this really the society that we want, with men dropping out into idleness and dependency? Shouldn’t we do something about it?

Because, as they say, when men go bad, released from work and responsibility, they go bad fast.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.