Suppose that you are a secretary who has just been put out of work by a word processor and that you are abducted by the Seven Deadly Sins, which really aren’t mortal sins but disproportionate desires and who take you aboard their space ship.
Fortunately, two Jedi Knights come to your rescue and a stunning sci-fi action set-piece results.
Jedi Ben Ken uses his light saber to dispatch Lust and Gluttony straight away. They never have a chance to lay a hand on you. Then he uses his laser sword to intimidate Sloth into inaction. He never gets a hand on you, either.
Meanwhile, Jedi Nick Ken uses his light saber to puncture Pride, following which he and Anger have a protracted duel, which both lose–mortally wounding each other in the process.
Unfortunately, while the Jedi are dealing with these enemies (the Easter Bunny lurking sinisterly in the background the whole time), Greed bites your leg with his sharp fangs. Worse yet, Envy gives you several vicious bites.
Seeing your peril, Jedi Ben leaves Sloth and quickly dispatches these two before taking the body of his fallen comrade, Jedi Nick, to be fitted with new robotic parts, so that he’ll be more machine than man now.
The Easter Bunny, grinning evilly, then takes you back to Earth and drops you off at the headquarters of the MoveOn.Orgpeople who are currently fanning the flames of class warfare in America.
Still stinging from the (infectious!) bites of Greed and Envy and being out of a job yourself, you find yourself really agreeing with the people the Easter Bunny left you with when they heap scorn on the fact that, even though the economy is growing and wages are going up, "The gap between rich and poor is widening." They regard this as a clear "injustice," and you find yourself agreeing with them.
You go home, buy a bottle of iodine for your bite wounds, and think about all this.
Next day, a friend of yours who is an accountant at your friendly neighborhood defense plant (working on a mysterious project) calls you up to tell you exciting news! He know that you, like many secretaries, were recently put out of work by word processors, but he happens to know of an actual secretarial job that’s open!
He then recounts to you a conversation he had with a local doctor who makes $70 an hour for medical work but who has to spend half his time on secretarial work. The accountant, who was in to see the doctor following a glue swooning, pointed out that everyone would benefit if he just hired a secretary, and he agreed!
You interview for the job, get a quite competative offer of $15 an hour, and are on the verge of accepting, when a thought occurs to you based on what the nice folks that the Easter Bunny left you with told you . . .
- Currently the doctor spends half his day, or four hours, doing medical work, which at $70 an hour means that he makes $280 a day.
- You, being out of a job, make $0 a day.
- The gap between him (rich) and you (poor) is thus $280 a day at present.
But what happens if you take the job offer?
- He’ll be able to devote eight hours a day to doctoring, meaning that he’ll take in a total of $560 dollars a day.
- He’ll pay you $15 an hour for eight hours work, meaning you’ll get $120 a day.
- His pay will thus be $440 a day ($560-$120).
- The gap between the two of you will then be $320 a day ($440-$120), which is more than the $280 it was before! In fact, the gap will have widened by $40 a day!
You feel Envious of that $40 that he will make and regard him as being Greedy for widening the gap in this way. He should not benefit at all by hiring you. That would be unjust. You should be just as well off as he, even though he spent eight years in medical school and racked up huge debts and is taking the risk of an entrepeneur and paying vast sums in medical malpractice insurance. All people should make the same income regardless of life choices. That’s what the nice folks the Easter Bunny left you with said. Nobody should be benefitted by hiring a new employee, but they should hire them anyway.
Smiling self-satisfiedly like the Easter Bunny, you decline the job offer and go home.
What does this teach us?
That the Easter Bunny is not to be trusted?
We need liberal concealed-carry laws so you can bring your own light saber?
Glue-swooned accountants will blab too much info?
That there is an imbalance in the Force?
Yes! It teaches us all of these things!
But it also teaches us something else: The fact that the income gap between the job-offerer and the job-holder increases is not a sufficient reason to turn down a job offer. It is better to have a job than not (unless an Easter Bunny-inspired welfare state makes this not the case).
What is important to you is how you benefit, not how someone else benefits. In every free economic transaction, whether it is a job offer or a purchase in the supermarket, both parties perceive themselves to be benefitting–and both are likely to benefit through the creation of new wealth. But if the parties start eyeing each other enviously, worring that the other party is benefitting "too much"–to the point that it disrupts the transaction–then both are deprived of the benefit they would otherwise gain through the transaction.
What matters is increasing your own benefit, regardless of how much others may be benefitting. If you refuse a transaction not because it doesn’t benefit you enough but because it benefits the other party too much then you are acting from Envy and cutting off your nose to spite your face, contrary to the virtue of Prudence.
The Easter Bunny is EVIL? For the rest of my life, I’ll blame my parents for not telling me the truth. Perhaps I’ll sue them.
I just want to know;
a) where the nice doctor works
b) will he give a long term stay at home Mum a chance to get back into the workforce ?
C) can I work flexi hours to fit in with the children…forget the $40 gripe!
God Bless.
You didn’t know? Jimmy has been pointing this out for some time now.
I’m not a Democrat myself. My love of Republicanism has waned considerably over the last half decade though.
Quite frankly, “class warfare” is not about suppressing the rich. Class warfare is about insuring a place for the poor. American capitalists can wax all they want about the joys of mutual agreement. What joy there is in a contract that provides wages insufficient to provide housing and feed a family escapes me. Even slavery obligated the owner to provide this little. Yet we condemn slavery as a horrible evil and celebrate the immorality wrought by the aristocrasy on the poor. We would condemn a man enslaving Costa Rican girl as a cook, but we similiarly don’t condemn the patrons or the restauranteer that don’t allow the dishwasher to even achieve half that which the Costa Rican girl has been provided. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
As an evangelical endeavour it is certainly important to convince people of the importance of fair wages.
It would seem apparent, though, that the free market has emerged as by far the best way of “insuring a place for the poor”.
We have the wealthiest poor in the world.
Let alone the fact that, before hiring, the docter is making INFINTE TIMES more than you, and after hireing he’s only making 3 1/3 times more…I’d say that’s CLOSING the disparity!
The underlying assumption of the article is correct – society must be ordered so that risk is rewarded and generally, people are organized in a pyramid structure of wealth with a large base of modestly wealthy people supporting a small number of rich.
The danger is that the pyramid can become extremely tall and narrow but with a huge base, as the rich get richer and the rest of society does not advance.
Left unchecked, society would change to a model similar to feudalism. The average person wouldn’t be bound to the land (or cubicle) by law or obligation, but by economic reality.
That said, I think that nobody who is willing and able to work is going to starve in North America. It’s still the best place to be poor.
Dag nabit Jimmy, you referred to a light saber as a ‘laser sword’! How could you man? *hangs head in shame*
j/k
“The hypocrisy is breathtaking.”
– M.Z. Forrest
What hypocrisy? Nobody is forcing the dishwasher to stay a dishwasher, as opposed to the Costa Rican girl who is forced to stay a cook.
I started in the workforce as a dishwasher. It gave me work experience to move on to other, better paying jobs.
Also, please look at the definition of “poor” in America.
According to the Heritage Foundation, 41% of the “poor” in America, own their own homes. That is some definition when you own your home and you are considered poor. The article I am citing is a bit dated, but you get the idea.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/wm187.cfm
The article makes a good point about how being poor is determined. Income is often underreported (think cash transactions) and ignores accumulated wealth/income from previous years.
Two years ago, I was unemployed for a year and my wife worked just part time. According to the gov’ment, my family was “poor.” Yes, we tighened the belt, but through savings and re-financing the house, we made it through just fine. I didn’t think we were poor.
George Lucas put the words “laser sword” in reference to a light saber in the mouth of one of his characters.
After a close reading of my state’s concealed-carry laws, I have come to the conclusion that I don’t need a permit to have a lightsaber in a hidden holster. Jimmy, where can I get one?
Brian makes an great point about how we define being poor in this country. I’m not poor & have steadily worked up the *salary ladder* but I still can’t afford to purchase a house in the area I choose to live. Didja get that? “Choose to live.” I have a cousin who recently moved from Northern Cali to Georgia ‘cos it was cheaper to work & raise his young family there. I could move, too. But I choose not to. So, if I can’t afford to own my own home, that’s really a choice on my part. I’ve weighed the trade-offs & made my decision. I’m not going to blame others for that choice. Some do. Some folks I work with, who are also very fairly compensated for what they do, hold the belief that they’re “workin’ for the man” & allowing the “rich to get richer” while they eek by. But every one of them owns a home!
I’ve never known what to say to them when they bring this up. Now I do. Thanks, Brian!
JohnH . . . Have you tried Target!
😉
No, no, no, no. This story is an example of over exuberant capitalism polemic gone bad. In a good capitalist economy we want her to feel like she deserves more. That’s how the whole thing works. Let’s pick up the story where we left off:
First we’ll ignore the fever pitch nightmare that our erstwhile heroine suffered (our newest author proving himself sexist). She realizes that it was just an allegorical vision about how natural desires can be corrupted into sin. She therefore spends a moment meditating on whether she’s allowed her desire for capital cross the line and become greed. She decides that she hasn’t and calls the doctor back.
In this conversation she realizes that both the doctor and her are competing to establish a wage. The doctor wants to pay as little as possible. She wants to make as much as possible as the Nightmare Easter Bunny pointed out. She counters with a number that is more than she wants to make. She figures if the doctor is making $70 an hour she may be able to talk him into paying her $22. The doctor listens to the counter, counts up his costs and takes a couple of things into consideration. First, she came with a referral from his accountant. He trusts his accountant. Second, if he decides to look for another secretary that’s going to cost him quite a bit of money. He’s going to loose the opportunity cost of not hiring her right now (since he’ll have to continue as a secretary and make lest money) plus the cost of the ad in the paper and additional interviewing. He counter’s with $20 and they shake on the deal.
The gap is reduced. In fact that’s what we’d expect to happen in a perfectly competitive economy. The gap would settle at a fixed rate as consumers (employers) and suppliers (employees) bickered over prices. We wouldn’t expect it to go up. However it does go up for perfectly sound reasons. Usually there are competitive disadvantages between the employer and the employee. There is also usually a knowledge (not necessarily intelligence) gap between the two. In modern capitalist economies these are usually mitigated by unions and employment laws (which have their own problems).
I can’t help but think back to a Forbes article that was talking about the value that employers would place on loyalty after the crash a few years ago. I chuckled. This is an attitude we really need to get over if capitalism is going to work at the scale of the employee and employer. Employees need to get much more aggressive about negotiating wages and moving employers. As a culture we need to be careful to view the risks that they are taking when attaching themselves to an employer. If we don’t we’ll run down the wrong rabbit hole.