Mark W. Hendrickson

Mark W. Hendrickson is a faculty member, economist, and contributing scholar with the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College, Grove City, Pennsylvania. These articles are from V & V, a web site of the Center for Vision & Value, and Forbes.com.

The War Against Work and Wealth?

The Congressional Budget Office's recent analysis of the Affordable Care Act concludes that it will result in the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time workers leaving the work force to preserve their taxpayer-financed subsidies for health insurance.

This is troubling on several levels: In terms of fiscal impact, it will exacerbate the federal budget deficit, both on the revenue side (fewer taxable hours being worked) and on the expenditure side (Obamacare's new subsidies). Economically, our country will be poorer than it otherwise would be. Work produces wealth; less work means less wealth, and also less upward mobility for those who drop out of the labor force. Politically, as the number of unproductive citizens dependent on government increases and the number of productive citizens whose taxes finance government decreases, the unproductive may achieve a permanent majority - a political hegemony - as happened in ancient Rome with dire consequences.

News of fewer Americans working should come as no surprise with the current administration running the show. Whether it be the unproductive "stimulus plan," increasing the minimum wage, suffocating regulation, increasing unemployment subsidies (miscalled "compensation"), adding record numbers to the disability rolls, etc., the Obama presidency has been a job-destroying machine from the start, as I noted four years and two-and-a-half years ago. Even as the heroic efforts of industrious Americans manage to keep our economic nose above water, the labor participation rate has fallen.

What is remarkable about the all-too-predictable loss of jobs resulting from Obamacare is the administration's response. Jason Furman, the chairman of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, tried to spin the projected net reduction in productive labor as a positive. He said, "This is not businesses cutting back on jobs, this is people having new choices they didn't use to have." Team Obama's attitude seems to be that it's bad for society when businesses reduce jobs in the face of increased cost burdens - as if the primary reason businesses exist is to "give" somebody a job rather than to produce wealth and serve consumer needs - but it's good for society if individuals cut back their work hours and increasingly live on government support. Note the double standard: If businesses respond to Obamacare's disincentives to employ people by reducing employment, that's bad (and the IRS, without statutory authority, will play the grand inquisitor, and demand to know if Obamacare was the reason they cut employees' jobs or workweeks) but if individuals respond to Obamacare's disincentives to work by reducing their hours of work to qualify for larger government subsidies, that's good.

Referring to a record number (over 100 million) of Americans not working, White House spokesman James Carney hailed this lost economic production as a wonderful development. Or, in other words, "a milestone on the path toward the ultimate complete liberation of the American worker from the drudgery of work," to quote Lewis K. Uhler and Peter Ferrara. This utopian vision of a world without work is uncomfortably close to the economic irrationality of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

At their 2012 May Day rally in Chicago, the Occupy Wall Street members prominently displayed signs saying, "If you have to work to live, is it a choice? If you have no choice, are you free?" Sorry, people, but, we aren't born with a lifelong supply of sustenance accompanying us, and so we are not free from the necessity to produce what we consume - that is, to work. Those who lament that they aren't free if they have to work seem remarkably unconcerned about the freedom of their fellow citizens. To reword the slogan on the Occupy Wall Street sign: If you don't work, and you expect your fellow citizens to work to support you, can your fellow citizens be free?

This administration's desire to make it easier for people not to work and to live at taxpayer expense makes no economic sense. It reduces the amount of wealth produced and keeps people from ascending the ladder of individual economic progress. Politically, though, it makes a lot of sense to Obama and his progressive allies. By continually increasing the number of citizens economically dependent on the political process, Obama comes that much closer to achieving the Curley Effect and securing a permanent Democratic majority over an increasingly shrinking productive sector. Should that happen, the war on producers, and therefore on wealth, will escalate, resulting in a poorer America. The longer Team Obama's war against work continues, the more they cripple the wealth production upon which our standard of living depends.

The State of the Disunion

Americans are deeply divided in 2014, suggesting that this year's elections will be another bitter clash. One major fault line that divides us is that many Americans view the federal government as their benefactor while others perceive it as a grave threat to their well-being.

A recent Pew research project found that 53 percent of Americans think that today's government threatens personal rights and freedoms. (Incidentally, this isn't the first time Americans have felt this way. As historian Burt Folsom reminds us in New Deal or Raw Deal, at the end of Franklin Roosevelt's first term in 1936, a Gallup poll indicated that 45 percent of Americans thought that FDR's policies could lead to dictatorship.)

Government aggression against Americans is indeed rampant. The IRS has targeted conservative groups, persecuted individuals who have tried to expose election fraud, and will now act as the grand inquisitor of businesses that have laid off workers due to Obamacare's costs. The rogue EPA is hounding energy companies and others, the National Labor Relations Board has once again shown it isn't impartial by helping to get Volkswagen workers to join the UAW, and the NSA's snooping seems ubiquitous.

Perhaps most worrisome is that even elected leaders are becoming bolder and more overt in expressing their hostility to individual rights. It's almost as if they feel they are so close to achieving an unbreakable political hegemony that they don't even have to pay lip service to tolerance, pluralism, or the rights of conscience any more.

Here are a few examples: Last month, New York Governor. Andrew Cuomo, stated on live radio that "extreme conservatives" (Americans who are right-to-life, Second Amendment absolutists, and those who do not embrace the gay agenda - far too sizable a percentage to merit the pejorative "extreme") "have no place in the State of New York." (Cuomo's team went into damage control spin mode, claiming that all he meant was that conservatives couldn't win statewide elections.)

New York's senior Senator Charles Schumer followed Cuomo's outburst a couple of days later by openly calling for the IRS and other government agencies to continue to hamstring tea party and other conservative groups so that he and his fellow progressives can exert more control over national policies. Apparently, Schumer no longer fears a public backlash from advocating the suppression of free political speech.

Then, of course, there was the ominous irony of the president declaring in his State of the Union address that, if Republicans wouldn't work with him to adopt the policies he wants, then he would bypass the people's elected representatives completely and rule by executive fiat.

And don't forget Senator Harry Reid's decision last year to jettison Senate rules by reducing the votes needed to approve key presidential appointees from 60 to a simple majority. Critics at the time thought Reid's decision was short-sighted - that he might rue having changed the rules once the Republicans regained a majority. But what if Reid doesn't think the Democrats will fall from power? What if he, Cuomo, Schumer, Obama, and company believe that by ignoring precedent, defying the constitution, and usurping power, they will never relinquish control of the government to Republicans - that they are so sure of their own rightness and good intentions that they feel entitled to rule and that the end justifies the means?

Some of you on the right might regard these brazen statements on the left as a godsend, on the grounds that surely the majority of Americans will perceive how tyrannical the left is, thereby paving the way for a conservative counterrevolution. Although I hope that is the case, the question then becomes: Who are you going to turn to as an alternative - the Republicans?

The problem with today's Republicans is that they do not offer a unified, principled opposition. Recently, they have capitulated on the debt ceiling issue and helped to pass the $956 billion farm bill "with strong bipartisan support." Runaway spending continues unchecked. Central planning is alive and well in Washington, the welfare state is undiminished, and cronyism remains firmly entrenched as the basic modus operandi of the federal leviathan. Combined with the internecine feuding between the GOP "establishment" and the tea party, constitutionalists, and conservatives, prospects for a significant change of direction in Washington in 2014 seem dim.

It appears that those Americans who want to use the government to redistribute wealth outnumber those who feel victimized by the predatory state. This is the true state of our disunion in 2014.