We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jafnski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well, and to
the premium version of our website at at the Federalist dot com. We're joined
today by Michael Lynd. He is, of course, a contributing editor for
Tablet Magazine and a senior fellow at New America. He is also Germaine to
our conversation today, the author of Hell to Pay, How the Suppression of
Wages Is Destroying America. That book is out on May second. Thank you
so much for joining us, Michael Lynd, for of course, I think
this book is fantastic, provocative, so interesting, and lands on a fairly
cohesive theory of the case for why we look around and wonder what's going on
with not just our economy but our social fabric. So I want to start
with the one of the epigraphs. You have a Frederick Douglas quote in the
sort of Gilded Age era. I think it's from eighteen seventy one, where
he writes, cheap labor is a phrase that has no cheering music for the
masses. Those who demand it and seek to acquire it have but little sympathy
with common humanity. Can you tell us a little bit more about why that
quote resonated as you were putting this book together? Well, what lines behind
my new books altay is my experience and addressing audiences of Republican conservatives, progressive
Democrats, centrists independence over three decades. In one line I find always work
with every audience, right wing or linking, and that line is people who
work forty hours a week should be paid enough that they do not have to
depend on welfare. And that's just the unanimous of clauseline in any audience,
ideologically or politically. That is not the system we have. We have a
system in which a substantial part of the population and it varies depending on the
welfare program. So there's not a single number, but it's tens of millions
of people are the so called working poor, a category which has only existed
in the last fifty years or so. Before then, if you worked,
you were not poor. In the middle of the twentieth century and the working
poor are those who have to have two sources of income merely to buy food
and pay the rent for one person, forget a family, and the sources
of income are your wage, what your employer pays you. And if that's
too low, then you have to have not just one but a number of
usually means tested welfare program stack one top of each other. So you have
to fill out a forum, and you have to get food stamps, you
have to fill out a form, get a housing b you have to fill
out a form, you know, for the earned income tax credit once a
year, and so you know. The question that motivated me write this book
was how did we go from a system in the middle of the twentieth century
under Republicans and Democrats on Life in which if you work forty hours a week
you did not have to go on food stamps and you did not have to
add your wages top to by the earned income tax credit to the present system,
which I call the low wage high welfare system. It's not high welfare
in the sense that welfare state is generous. It's not terribly generous, but
welfare payments are a high aspect of the income of the so called working for
an America. The libertarian critique might be, and I'm obviously you're familiar with
this because you talked to a lot of those audiences, and I'm sure you've
heard it over and over again, that welfare essentially functioned as a giant subsidy
to corporations. For instance, you write about Walmart, which is absolutely fascinating
the statistics on how much the average taxpayer is forking over to support somebody who
works at Walmart Walmart over the course of the year because they have to rely
on subsidies. So the libertarian argument might be, obviously, then the problem
is the welfare state, not with the corporations that if you have no Well
that's my argument. I'm not sure that's the libertarian argument. We can get
into that in a second. Yeah, there is no doubt that welfare payments
means tested ones. In particular, you are not eligible unless you income from
wages falls below a certain account means tested welfare, whether it's in the form
of cash like the Armed Income Tax Credit and wage subsidy, or in kind
benefits food stamps, you know Section eight housing vectors. Those are in X
subsidies two employers. They allow the employer to get the benefit of the labor
while paying a subliving rage. The reason I questioned characterizing that is libertarian,
I think it's conservative argument, or a certain kind of conservative is because Milton
Freeland and Charles Murray and other libertarians have been in favor of a substantial welfare
state. Yeah, in favor of a negative income tax, which is the
ancestor of the etc. Precisely in order to allow employers to pay low wages.
And so what I was going to say is, if you go a
step further, the libertarian because you start in a really interesting spot with debunking
the human capital theory and oh my gosh, the Larry Summer's arc that you
outline just beautiful. But the libertarian might say, because of those subsidies,
we have a completely distorted version of what labor is worth, that we don't
know the actual value of labor because we're not in this sort of Randy in
utopia where employers are in a position to determine the value of labor because the
system is flooded with government subsidies. But as you go from point A and
Summer's argument to point being, Summer's argument, can you flesh out to us
why it's so important that we understand how or understand our very failures to understand
the value of labor and our struggle to sort of put a number on the
value of labor. Oh, of course, there are two theories of how
wages are determined. The oldest, which is ironic since a lot of contemporat
libertarians claim to be classical liberals. The oldest theory, since it is the
modern economics developments, that of Adamis Smith in John Stuart Mill and Alfred marsh
another class room and what these were generally pro market people that they said that
the wage is determined by the bargaining power of the worker and the employer.
In other words, there's not some mystical automatic process that says a worker is
worth this much. It depends on relative bargaining power. And Smith pointed out
that employers masters as you call them, have much more leverage over workers than
workers to masters over employers. And for that reason these layer nineteenth century classes
with erals John Stuart Mill and Marshall, who were quite free marketed other respects,
they said, well, obviously we have to an units because the individual
worker has an empower. Give an example, most Americans in the private sector
today work for corporations that have more than five hundred employeees. Okay, so
it's a joke to say that a janitor is negotiating over his or her sell
with a corporation that s five it's given. I mean, there's just no
no contract. And this is a principle of Anglo American commonal too, where
there's no bargaining power, the contract is involved. So the way to think
about this correctly is that capitalism is great. It's the best most dynamic economic
system in human industry. The way it works is you have a firm.
It creates a good service that it then sells to consumers. After it pays
off its costs and expenses, it then has a profit. The profit is
divided. Let's keep it simple. We'll forget stock options for now. The
profit is divided among shareholders, the owners of the stock who get dividends,
the managers of the corporation to get a salary, and the employee get a
celle paid. How that is divided is not based on markets. It's based
on the relative power of these three groups. And it turns out in the
last fifty years without pooled labor power in the form of unions of some fort
and I don't defend our and carried it system of borrianized labor. I think
it's collapsed from something we can get into that. But without that countervailing power
of pooling their labor, workers have gotten less and less of the share and
guess what, the managers and the shareholders get more. Yeah, And speaking
of that, that's exactly where where I was going to go next. Because
you look at the decline of organized labor and it's acceleration in the nineteen eighties
and the nineteen nineties. It coincides with an acceleration of globalism, of private
equity, of immigration. And I'll set immigration aside for the moment, because
you write about that at length in a very helpful way. But how do
you globalism and the rise of globalism, the rise of private equity, the
rise of global markets, and the rise of you all. Everything that we
saw with Wall Street in the nineteen eighties until today has affected bargaining power and
our ability to sort of understand that contract between a worker and an employer.
Well, the key concept is labor arbitrage, which is kind of a technical
term, but it's used in the business. They're quite blatant about it.
Arbitrage appears when you have two separate jurisdictions with different standards. So you can
have a tax arbitrage, you can have regulatory arbitrage. You can also have
labor arbitrage. If you have two states of the United States, for example,
and one has proo labor laws and the other has anti work programs,
then the employer can simply shut down the factory in one state and move it
to another. So in the fifty year period reseating globalization from the nineteen fifties
until the nineteen nineties, many firms in the US took advantage of geographic labor
art approject within the United States, you know, they shut down unionized steel
textile bods in New England and opened them up in southern states with so called
right to union laws which are making very difficult to organize unions under the nineteen
thirty five National Labor Relations Act system. So there was a massive migration from
northern Midwestern states to Southern states and Southwestern states to take advantage of cheaper labor
that was unionized. Well, guess what, during the Cold War, the
companies could not do that outside of US borders, for example, Mexico and
Latin America very protectionists. The communist countries, we had an embargo on women
and they weren't inviting capitalist companies in. After the Cold War, suddenly had
a couple of billion works went on, created a global labor prop and both
communist China, communist Vietnam, post protectionist Mexico. They all decided, well,
we're going to try to lure these factories from the US and so all
of these southern conservatives who used to be Democrats, now many of them are
Republicans, and I'm going to Texas. They thought, oh, we were
so clever. We lured these factories away from the Northeast and the Middle West
and the Great Lakes because of our lower wages. Boom, they go to
Mexico, they go to China, you know, they go to Bangladesh,
they go to Vietnam. So you literally, in my view, you cannot
have a middle class or a prosperous working class unless you have limits on the
ability of your corporations to replace American workers with foreign workers who have lower wages,
regardless of their union status, even if they're unionized, if their wages
are lower, why would you have your factory in the events right, and
your section on H one B, I think is super helpful in understanding how
our immigration system distorts the value of labor in and of itself. Can you
talk a little bit about why these tech companies you're right about Apple, Facebook,
Google, Intel. We obviously have Chips reassuring that's happening right now,
and it's been a struggle they say to higher American workers to do some of
the high level work at the chips factories. But what can we learn from
their reliance on H one B visas and how it relates to this broader problem.
Well, you can learn that practically everything that comes out of Silicon Valley
about labor is a lie. The words and in the to use an old
choke, we are told that unless you have this constant importation not of legal
immigrants are not legal immit, it's legal immigrants are legal permanent residents who LPRs,
that's the technical term. They come here. They have a green card,
They can work anywhere in the US. If they're mistreated by their boss,
they can go to another job. They have every right of an American
worker, except for citizenship. Only when they become citizens can they vote.
But other than that, they have equal labor rights. In H one bs
who are in the tech sector, a's and H two vs in the low
wage sector are in denture servants. They are not free workers. They are
service They are bound to their employer, and their employer is either a big
company directly like Apple or Microsoft or JP Morgan Chase, or in many cases
it's a body shop, you know it's and it can be an American consulting
f they call themselves concerted sulting firms. They're basically temp agencies. They're their
global temp agencies. And a lot of them are Indian because just as a
matter of accident, after the Cold War, India is now the most populous
national earth, surpassed China, and they're the huge pool of the English peapers.
And so these Indian body shops began renting these indentured servants to American tech
corporations. And I know a lot of them. Many of them are talented
people. The vast majority are not super geniuses. We're not talking about Albert
Einstein and Alexander Graham Bell. Some of them are entrepreneurs, some of them
are right, but they're overwhelming the vast majority of h wins come from one
country, India, and they're overwhelmingly like seventy five young males in their twenties.
Now, that should set off a warm pats, right, So Silicon
Valley's trying to tell us that these young men, mostly these young South Asian
men who have college education, sometimes think of the college education and us on
a chief eason and then they convert it to an h and go to work.
We're told that they are vastly more brilliant than any Americans, and Americans
are so stupid, you couldn't possibly have a tech industry without, you know,
all of these indentured servants from one country, Indian. Now, the
curious thing about that is the entire tech industry was built between the nineteen thirties
and the nineteen eighties by either Native orn Americans or in some cases you had
brilliant European immigrants, you know, who were fleeing from Hitler or fleeing from
Song, But we didn't have Like what happened? Did the United States becomes
stupid? Did the IQs of American engineering students go down suddenly in nineteen eighty
No, it's it's in this case it's not necessarily cheap label, although,
as I point out, the h onebs are cheaper than either American nationals or
for that matter, legal permanent residents from the same country from India because you
don't have to provide them health benefits. You don't you know their contractors,
they're not. They lack all of these labor rights. The real reason is
they can't complain. They can't complain because the nature of an INDENTUREUS servant under
these guests worker visas is if you get fired either by the body shop or
by a company you're working for directly, like one of these big tech terms,
you lose your ability to remain in the United States. You have to
go home to your country. That has an enormous intimidating effect. Can you
imagine being bound to your boss so that if you quit you cannot get another
job in the United States. You have to literally leave the country if you
are fired or if you resign in protest. And this is something that Adam
Smith, the Great class equip will put it out too. He said,
even if cost was not a factor, employers would prefer slaves to free workers.
Adam Smith was not a big fan of employers he said, And the
reason is the human love of domination. Right. Employers don't like but he
workers bargaining power. They don't like bargaining power. Yeah, they don't like
somebody says, either treat me better or raise my wages, or I'll quitn't
work for the other guy. Well, a great thing about slavoring an interest
servitude is you can't You literally cannot quit. The most fundamental economic right is
the ability to quit your job and get another job in the same country.
And that also it strikes me that consolidation along the lines of what Matt Stoller
has been on the show writes about, especially at tech sector sector, has
hurt the competition also that you would rely on as an employee. What's the
point of picking up and going to another shop if the shop is either owned
by the same place or in a duopoly where it's operating exactly like the other
company. That seems that it has to be a part of it too.
It's a very minor part comparative nice labor. And the reason is and the
anti trust school associated with some smart people Leadakon and Matt Stoler in Beryland.
I know, I know most of them, the very bright people but I
think they exaggerate the ability of individual workers to play companies off against each other,
particularly in concentrated industry. So in the Democrats, unfortunately it picked up
one. I say unfortunately because it's just it's not real. That is,
let's change my janitor example. If you have if you're a chan editor and
you work for Facebook, and now the Justice Apartment breaks up Facebook into five
facebooks, okay, and each of the five facebooks has half a million employee
us, all right, has the janitor's bargaining power really gone up then much?
I say no? But what if you have a system of sectoral collective
bargaining where the representatives of the janitors meet with the five facebooks, the baby
facebooks, and have multi employer collective bargaining, which we don't have in the
units except for railroad workers and a few others, but it's commonplace and other
parts. And then you simply say, okay, for the next couple of
years, here's the starting salary of the intrigued janitor, right, here's the
vacation time, and here are the benefits that would do vastly more for the
janitors than breaking up Facebook into five baby facebooks. Let me like, throw
another example out there, because I remember when Marco Rubio was opposing or supporting
actually the union done in Bessemer, the Amazon warehouse union don in Bessemer,
that was trying to form. His argument was essentially that you could see this
coming down the pike with cultural issues, that if let's say a Christian Conservative
didn't want to work for a company that betrayed its values like Amazon, they
should have the ability to sort of bargain collectively and in an environment dominated by
ESG, if you want to go somewhere else, you don't pick up shop
and go somewhere else for political reasons, you don't want to work for an
employer. And I'm saying it's a smaller issue because I don't think this happens
that often yet. But say you wanted to in an environment dominated by ESG,
I think it would be really hard to find another employer. And I
guess I'm curious as to what to change the day. Yeah that's right from
Google, Google. Yeah. Well, look, in the nineteen fifty the
most powerful person apart from the president in the unionized workplace was the shop steward.
If you felt you'd been mistreated, you went to the shop steward and
he or she complained, you know, to the boss. In today's corporations,
the most powerful person is HR. HR works for the management, right,
HR, the human relations person is the hatchet man or hatchet woman of
the boss. Right. So it's just surreal, Like if you have a
problem, you're supposed to go consultant HR, and then HR says, well
you're fired, right, we reck then you de terminated, you know.
So so that's that illustrates the total act of bargaining power and people are for
things which if they were represented by labor. So for example, I remember,
remember there's a biker who shot the finger at President Trump, remember this
video, and she was fired by her. See, that wouldn't happen because
if the labor representatives were hated Trump and were liberal, they wouldn't you know,
they had to represent these people. That's their job, right right.
There was a hearing with Howard Schultz. I think this was on the Senate
side, so obviously the former CEO of Starbucks. Well, I think he
joined back again because they were having some trouble after he left. But Republicans
treated him so interestingly. This is a guy who's been union busting for I
don't know a year or more now, he's been on essentially a listening tour
that turned into a union busting tour. But he got harsh treatment from Democrats
and then a tongue bath from most Republicans basically who were fawning over him for
being a champion of the free market, for creating jobs, etc. Etc.
And I just want to ask you about this. This really gets at
the premise of your book. If we live in a country where CEOs are
paying horrible wages and Republicans are convinced that because of the full slate of ESG
and DI, they are bad people. They are you know, chrony capitalists,
they are cultural Marxists, all of the names that the right will throw
at this current crop of CEOs. Why do they not also extend that same
skepticism of their treatment of their own workers when it comes to wages to those
CEOs. Because Howard Schultz, for instance, his bathroom policy, there's a
great quote in Jacobin I returned to all the time put his workers in a
position where they were asked to behave like unpaid social workers, untrained social workers.
Why are Republicans not thinking of Howard Schultz in that framework instead as the
sort of again the Randian champion of free markets. How has that transition not
taken place yet? Well, complete hostility don't organize labor stirning rests historical in
the Republican Party. Let me read you from the Republican National Platform in nineteen
seventy two. Okay, the nation's labor unions, comprised of millions of working
people, have advanced the will being not only of their members, but also
our entire free enterprise system. We have the Republican Party reaffirm our strong endorsement
of organized labor's key role in our national life. Nineteen seventy six, Gerald
Ford, Free collective bargaining remains the best way to ensure that Americans receive a
fair price for their labor. Which is the thing of my book is the
Republican National Platform. And the Republicans at that time were not were much less
working festival. They were more of the party of CEOs in big business.
But they understood, as a result of the depression in World War two,
in the Clone War, that you can not have national unity, particularly in
competing with postile great powers like Nazi Germany then and Soviet union in China today,
if your elite class is trying to crush the workers and grind them down
and pay them as little as possible. So there was a sense in the
business community, in the Republican business community in the middle of the twentieth century.
And these were not liberal people necessarily, they were not necessarily thrilled them
unions, but they said, look, we're going to collective bargaining as part
of American life. If you go back to the nineteen twenties, Calvin Coolidge
was always being paraded around by Amity Schleiss and other terians as a model of
free marketeer. Not only was he a protectionist because he thought that American workers
should not have to compete with cheap foreign labor, but also he signed the
Railway Labor Act, which is one of the major forms of a basis of
collective bargaining in the United States. I mean that was news reason. It
is actually more enlightened in one respect than the National Labor Relations Act, which
covers most workers outside of transportation, and that is the Railway Labor Act allows
multi employee bargaining. It allows all of the unions in an industry to negotiate
with all of the employers at once, with binding results on all. Now,
why is this better for business? It means less disrupted Under the National
Labor Relations Act system, Not only do not unionize all of the employers in
a field at once, you don't even unionize an entire national company if it
has different establishments. So have you ever wondered about that? Like, why
don't they just unionize Amazon? Why are they unionizing one Amazon warehauts? Because
under our nineteen thirty five National Labors Act, you do its site by site,
unionistic And this is a terribly adversarial, disruptive system. I'm not defending
it by any means. It's bad for business. If it's extremely disruptive,
you have strikes and tickets and all of that. Now suppose they went,
suppose you unionize one firm or one warehouse at that firm, At that point
your rivals can pay lower wages and undercutting same distance. Right, So A
you going to do it properly, You should do it at the sectoral level,
at the industry level, not firm by firm. But as I said,
we have a perfectly good example of this. The Railway Labor Act covers
railroad workers, transit workers, and airline workers curiously enough as a multi employer
bargain. Nobody's ever heard of it, and it was signed and pushed by
Calvin Coolidge, mister rock ribbed Conservative Republic. So if you look at it,
as I've done in an part of the for American compus, if you
look at Republican platforms, the nineteen eighty platform has the usual proctorgaming language.
Ron Regan obviously was you know, for our union, president of the Screen
Actors Union, vote exactly and in eighty four. In the nineties it changes,
And so why does it change? And my interpretation is you've got this
influx of ex Southern Democrats who had come from the right wing of the Democratic
Party when it was part of the rights of everybody else's they were segregations,
and these ex Southern Democrats like Tom Delay and the rest, they flooded into
the Republican Party and they brought the Southern syst that we can lure factories to
our states by being, you know, paying low wages, low minimum wage,
low worker rights. Now unions and some subsidies, sub subsidies, exacting
purpose cities. And in the long run, I would argue that is economically
suicidal, as many of these southern and western low wage states found out,
because there's always a country outside of the US that it can give you more
subsidies and pay lower wages. Yeah, exactly. It's it's I think so
important to make that point because we don't exist in this perfect like free market
lab setting. It's just not how the world works anymore. And I wanted
to actually ask you about that with the Walmart example, is such a good
one, or any of these huge multinational corporations. It's so different from the
old days where you know, maybe you had a factory town and hey,
the guy who ran the factory lived in town, had to show his face
in church, had to show his face at those institutions of civil society that
have been crippled. So I guess how much of this also relates to the
spreading. You know, Tim Cook's responsibility to the factory workers in shinjong Uh
that doesn't really exist because he doesn't ever have to interact with them, He
doesn't know them, he can't put a face of the name for the most
part. So how much of this also is us grappling with the rapid expansion
of some of these countries across the globe, or companies across the globe.
Well, Henry claimed Frick was Andrew Carnegies h henchman deputy for Carnegie Steel.
Right. Uh, you know he was nearly assassinated by an anarchist during a
labor riots at Arnarchy Steel Plan. And like as you say, in those
days, Uh, you know, Frick's mansion was on the first town near
the factory. The capitalist could literally be attacked in right the workers right,
Uh, if they're in South China, what are they gonna do. They're
gonna like riot against China and then the communist states. Uh. And and
you know Tim Cook in these other CEOs who've all shored all of this production.
They let other people do the dirty work for them. And what that
does to the economy in the United States when you all shore a lot of
your production. Well, let's be clear. When they say most manufacturing jobs
are never coming back, we should hope that's true, because we should hope
that we have highly robotic, automated production in the future. That would be
a good. Nevertheless, Okay, let's say, is it better to have
a robot factory in the US or a sweatshop in China? From the point
of view of the majority of Americans who've always worked in the services. At
its peak in the twenty century, only about a third of Americans work in
manufactory. Everybody else work in agriculture services. So in real life, farmers
went into the service and a few of them became factory workers, but there
was never a factory worker of matulity. But nevertheless, having factories in your
city or county set makes a huge difference. So let's say we have two
counties. One county. The major business is international business consultants, and they
work from their home or from the little office. Uh. And they do
everything, you know, for foreign companies, and they get payment, you
know, through the banking system from overseas. So they then send that money
on you know what rich people spend money on. They have caterers and dog
walkers and so on. So you get this very stratified kind of class system
with with you know, this service sector elite and then a bunch of you
know, fairly menial many of them are to serve maids and gardeners and pool
boys and chauffeurs and so and that have become sure society. So the county
next door, it has a factory that employs only a few people, but
it makes let's say, mufflers or global automobile companies, doesn't make all a
card. It just makes them muffling using advanced robotic equipment and a few employees.
Well, that means you have to have warehouses, you have to have
you know, business insurance, you have to have infrastructure, need highways,
you need maybe rail lines or access to seaports. And the workers who work
in those selary occupations are going to be fairly well paid. So why are
they well paid. It's not because they're more skilled in the dog walker in
the jounty next door. It's because money is pouring into this county. Every
time they make a muffler and they sell it in Africa or Asia to the
rising middle class. Even if it's not an American company, even if it's
fokes by time, Urbins or something. Money comes into the county and you
know, maybe the CEOs and the shareholders live in Majoia, California, but
some of that money is going to leak. It's going to leak into the
county. That's the difference between what economists called the traded sector and the non
traded service sector. The non traded sector is consists of goods and services where
they have local customers and locals. So think of home house construction, or
let's say a harrison The audience of the consumers of a harrisonon are limited to
people who have been driving distance of the Hairsalona and the Harmans. Right,
the potential customer base of the same town's muffler factory are two or three billion
Chinese and Indian and African car drivers in the right. So having the traded
sector in your economy's like having it's pumping money in from the rest of the
world where most of the demand will be in the future. One thing I've
really appealed to me about this book is how you're able to sort of trace
a lot of the different cultural problems that ail us and that you know,
the sort of post Trump und autocracy has developed a new interest in. Even
though, of course, you know, Charles Murray Timcarney had had written about
them for a while before some of the elite media stumbled onto them. You
really are able to trace a lot of them to specifically the wage issue.
I want to ask about the chicken and egg formulation there. I'm really persuaded
by Mary Eberstat's book Primal screams that the kind of sexual revolution is the genesis
of a lot of these problems. But at the same time, the sexual
revolution is itself fueled by um, you know, capitalists who are looking to
make a book on birth control or whatever else. So I know that's a
little bit of a different issue. But when you start peeling back the layers
of this onion, do you see the wage issue as being a fundamental one
that caused a lot of these problems or do you think it's it's interacting with
a lot of these problems and fueling them, making them worse, and vice
versa. Well, I looked into the sociology of class in the parties and
fifties, and and if you go back and read the scholarly literature, they
distinguish between the poor and the working class and the lower middles these groups,
and they refined distinctions. And the lower middle class consisted of two groups.
They were very well paid workers. Okay, you were like an air conditioner
installed because of tight labor markets or because there's little immigration in the fifties,
or unions or a combination. You know, you had lower middle class lifestyle,
right, and some of the lower middle class folks were the small business
owners, right, So this is a class that pretty much has ceased to
exist, and we've seen a polarization where people who would have been in the
lower middle class, these prosperous workers have sutten down into the working class proper.
Some of them have moved up enjoying the professional class above it. I
don't get into the small business owners because a lot of that is, I
do think, is your reversible technology. Technology does explain why you have staples
instead of completely separate and were operated hardware city. I don't think we're going
to reverse that, think it's necessary. But if you look at the labor
side, even in the thirties and forties and fifties and sixties, the height
of worker bargaining power through runs, the un unionized workers had a lot of
the social pathologies they had. Divorce was rampant among people with insecure jobs,
and in those days it was also desertion. It's not divorce because the divorce
was legally difficult. Its men deserting their rights in the forties and fifties and
sixties. You know the other I respect Mary, and she's right about all
stuff. I tog out where I disagree with her. But there was a
story on the right in the late twentieth century, you know, Murphy Brown
with that character from the TV show dan Quayle back in the Bush years.
So the idea was that, well, the upper classes in the US are
all, you know, sort of becoming swingers and not getting married and having
kids out of wedlock, and then this inspires you know, working people to
immunate these behaviors. If you flash forward to the two thousand, twenty ten,
twenty twenties, it's quite a different pattern. It's actually the educated elite,
including the educated left wing political democratic elite. It's much more likely of
traditional marriages and to have kids in little it's the working classes of all races
and all parties, including white Republicans, who are having kids out of wedlock,
never getting married, broken homes, higher levels of divorce, all of
this. And when the scholars I'm relying on the scholarship here, they asked
them why it's almost always financial stults. You postpone marriage until you hope one
day you and your boyfriend will have enough money that they can have a big
wedding and have a free standing home, and all of this and it never
comes. So in some cases they have kids out of wedlock, they give
up, they get tired of waiting. You know. At the same time,
if you look at falling fertility rates, a fraud issue is something we
have to talk about now that the population will shrink at an accelerating rate because
the total fertility rate has fallen below replacement in the US as in many countries
of the world. If you have women who to date are the only what
people who can have children. I know that's a controversial of you, but
you know this scientifically. You know, if you postpone marriage and family and
childbearing until the thirties or the forties or you know whatever, even with reproductive
technology, that means that families fall short of their desired fertility moment. Stone
is writing about this and he attributes a lot of the decline in so called
achieved fertility. A lot of the reason why couples in women say they wanted
to have more kids than they ended up happening. It has to do with
the delay of marriage even if they get married twenties. Who was that as
Elizabeth Runick right, Yes, yes, the scandalized people by by in the
times, how old was she when she had her first kid? Like twenty
eight or something like twenty It might have even been younger than that, but
not not obscenely young. Well, I'm of Applachian descent. I mean,
you know their grandmother most of my ancestors. So so yeah, So I
think basically the whole the whole system, the family system and homeowning and all
of that. It's basically designed for the benefit of companies that can essentially use
they can use credentials to screen people. Right, So if you go back
and look like when we put the Apollo astronauts on the moon, it's like
maybe ten or fifteen percent of the population rate to college. It's like a
lot of these people, these engineers said NASA, we're high school edrically right,
dumber than we are now. I talked about the credential arms space because
your parents tell you, well, you to get a good job, you
have to have a BA at least that's true. But it's only true because
we allow corporations to use a diploma as a screening device to weed people out.
The truth is they may not know anything that the fact they have a
diploma says they. And I was I've been a university teacher Harvard in at
University of Texas, John Sumpkins. But you know, let's say you're the
Starbucks manager and you only look at people with ba's because and I choose that
because, first of all, you mentioned Howard Schultz, and also because the
Federal Deserved which I put in my book says about a third of people that
PA's are working in jobs right now that only require high school deployments. So
the Starbucks manager thinks, well, at least we know this person completed four
years of education, and so she or he will show up for work and
you know, probably can learn to make coffee. Who knows right now,
but it's less of a risk. Right. So the other thing that we've
inherited from the old male supremacist phase that women should really be angry, in
my opinion, is the entire it is a timetable for making partner at a
law firm or getting your PhD and getting tenure and all that. It was
for thirty five year old men right between verry five and forty. So the
men had this apprentice phase in their twenties and thirties, and then either you
made partner or you were in a second tis the rest of the life you
didn't make the right You've made a tenure, or you did and you taught
at school. Okay, Well, it was assumed that these men working as
professors, as lawyers, as doctors in their twenties and thirties would be married
with kids. And so once you made partner or made tenure or got your
MD, at that point you've been you were supporting a wife and kids in
a starter home and now you like moved up into the big suburban McMansion your
law firm, right, and you take better vacations. But but when you
when you put women in this system that was designed for married men, you
know, in the twentieth century, before the sixties, then you basically and
then you say you're going to post apone marriage until after you make them right,
then you end up looking at that these statistics where an enormous number.
I think it's like a saw a statistic like it. It's a third of
women with college educations may never marry or have families. And now if they
don't want to, that's fine. But if they're not marrying, they're not
having families because they want to. But our system prevents it. Then there's
the system that has to change and of the people, and I think the
chicken and the egg thing is sort of non stop. Mary would probably say
they don't want to because birth control has decreased women's bargaining power sexually, because
men concerned to do what they want, and that puts women in a tough
spot. But I think you're you're correct that when you look at what women
and men say, more often than not, the financial reasons, at least
right now are coming up and are what they're saying as silient for delaying.
Well, this is we can equival about it, but we would agreed.
This is a fatal social experiment. Right when most of your people of all
classes are unhappy. Yeah, and they say I don't like my life.
I wanted to have kids and I don't have Yeah, I wanted to have
three kids, I want did R, I don't want to get married.
I'm single at fifty. When much your population is miserable and they're not achieving.
What are this is not like I want to, you know, win
the lottery. This is like wanting to have a normal human life right that
has its and proletarians passed right, and when even college educated people cannot attain
this, then you don't blame the people, it's the structure that needs to
be changed. I was reading Um Gordon Wood on the sort of small our
republicanism throughout American history, but especially in the Founding Um last night for another
podcast I was prepping, and it strikes me that also our conception of what
free markets need was rooted in that Enlightenment idea of small our republican civic virtue.
And some people Marxists might argue that's always necessarily self defeating, but it
also seems that it's it's the John Adams quote, you know, our constitution
was meant for a moral people, and he also adds religious to that.
But a moral people is some of that falling apart in the market, where
you just see that that kind of we don't have that fabric that incentivizes good
behavior from employers because we've kind of lost that consensus on what moral behavior actually
is. Well, the link between virtue and economics in the agrarian level was
the assumption that most citizens would be small farmers and male small farms in their
wives, and the male farmer would be would own his own small business run
by him and his family right be a juror, you know, to keep
a check on the judicial system, being the militia, to make sure you
did not make permanent military cast that could lead a dictator should And once you
move from the ararian era to the industrial era, that that whole theory just
kind of fall apart. And in the link between virtue, this is where
a lot of conservatives, I think they will emphasis on the religion. In
a let's say Swisserland, right, which was kind of an agrarian The reason
why they were sober and industrious and not like wildly alcoholic and discipline and so
on was because if you're a small farmer, you go bankrupt, you lose
your farm, if you become a drug addict or a party every life or
something like that. So there, it wasn't just a moment. There's like
a pract people use it to be disciplined. Uh. Now, so once
you've become a proletarian in the Romans sense, the word proletarian goes way back
to Romans works. It means someone who has no property. Uh, you
know, you're you're a wager, all of you your you can't live without
selling your labor to your employer, and this becomes the majority of people in
the US and in Western Europe and now the world, and it's going to
be that way for centuries to come. Probably, I think it's a fantasy
to think we're all going to go back to small businesses and small farms.
But so then you have this problem in the wage earners. It's the same
problem faced by slaves and serves and indenture servants. Why should I work if
the profits are going to the pos and not to me, right, why
should I, you know, not accidentally wreck the machinery. It's not my
machinery, I don't it And these are not like socialist questions, is like
as if you're infecting communist countries in communist countries in the Soviet Union, East
Germany is my perfect recent So the Germans, I mean, you know,
if they had this reputation from being incredibly disciplined and efficient, after a couple
of generations of communism, East Germans workers had the reputations of being flawful,
inefficient and result because communism turned out to be like a parody of the worst
aspects where the Communist party was the company because the owner, right, not
only did you have no free unions. If you disagree with the boss,
you got shot or sent to a labor team. So you get this culture
of sabotage and deliberate laziness and subversion. Why are you going to work hard
in study and improve your skills if you're not going to get a raise as
a result. And also why are you going to be personally disciplined? If
the boss mistreats you and you only have enough money, uh, you know,
to last until next week? Why not go get drunk on Saturday night?
Why not have a little fun in your miserable life? You know?
So? So I don't it is a chicken in anything, But I think
that if you, I think the communist example shows communism took hard working,
disciplined wage earners and turn them into lazy, subversive you know, undisciplined people,
all right, corrupt people. If you look at all the communist countries,
what happens when communism falls? Who takes over? Is it the pre
labor unions? You know? Is that the churches know it's the mafia's right.
Because the only way to function effectively in a system where the party controls
all of the avenues upwards, an economic mobility was to be a gangster.
And so I don't I don't blame these inner city kids. I still live
in Washington, DC. I would see this right like you know what you
see as a teenage guy with four hundred dollars speakers. I mean, I
understand this psychological right that is, you know, we tell people, oh,
well, you know you're born to this uh working poor family, but
if you study real hard, you get married, etcetera, etcetera. Well,
then YouTube can be like a partner of film of sex. Right,
But he knows that's not true. Right. The only way you get out
of that milieu in our presence system is you become a pop star or a
basketball celebrity, or or a gangster. Right. So, so I think
you can actually change culture institutionally. Just happened with single uh so Singapore of
old now a party friend of mine knew it, but it's part of my
invasion in nineteen fifties third world country people you know spit and defecated in the
streets, and you know, just they slept outdoors. It was like San
Francisco today or leak one who comes to power as authoritarian state and outlaws public
spitting. You know, it's the broken windows, stry But at the same
time, so he did all of these, you know, very conservative singing
public order things and anti crimes, but at the same time they had these
these multi year plans where they would raise the minimum wage every four or five
years to force businesses either to go out of business or to work productive and
pay their workers. So I think the chicken and the is you have to
have to have the chicken, and you have to have jobs that pay decently
and that pay a living wage, and maybe you know, have family benefits,
and then you have family values. But if you preach family values to
a couple where there are part time workers, you know, they don't know
what their scheduled is next week. Both of them are paid so little that
they even as individuals, they can't play off without welfare. Then I just
I think that's only half of the story. I have one quick policy question
left. I could keep it doing this all dimensions, so generous with your
time. Is there a Is there a smart immigration solution to what you've been
writing about a lot lately, including in this book the birthrate problem, something
that's definitely concerned too. I know a lot of our listeners and conservatives in
general, is you know, we talked about h nbs we are going to
need if we want to compete. Well, maybe maybe I'm wrong on that
premise. I would argue that we would need a more robust population to compete
with other countries on our own. But is there a smart immigration solution to
that problem or is the problem you need to have Americans specifically start having more
babies. Well, realistically, we need both because given our low fertility,
Now, even if you raised a somewhat with making family formation easier, it's
still not going to be replacement level for generations. So we need some degree
of immigration. Uh. You know, my view is that we should be
selective. We should favor high skilled inmigration within limits. We don't have a
shortage of poor people. We don't have a shortage of illiterate people. And
I am a descendant of illiterate Swedish peasants, and you know, Scotts and
Irish tenant farmers and someone must you know, are one way or the other.
But I would not want you know, millions and millions of poor Swedish
peasants entering the labor market in the year twenty twenty three. That's just where
the developed society with a welfare state. So I think our immigration policy should
discourage low skilled, low wage ination, the best thing that can happen and
conservative likeness because the government doesn't have to have necessarily all these other policies.
If we have a tight labor market for ten or twenty years, it will
do wonders to prime reducing poverty in facing families. It's employers who constantly say,
oh, we're running out of workers. They're not running out of workers.
They don't want to raise wages in those fields. If they raise wages
in those fields, they'd find plenty of American ms. But even when you
have skilled workers, and I'm in favor of bringing more skilled people, I'd
love to see a brain frame from Europe, in Asia and Africa and South
America to the US. But they have to have labor rights. They cannot
be h one nights, not being interest servants. So one Britain, Canada,
Australia they have was called a merit system of emigration, where the government
chooses the future properly the country. Google and Apple and Microsoft do not,
so you get points. It's a points if you speak English. That's if
you have a college education, that if you have particular skills, that's a
point, and then then you're admitted. And once you're admitted under the points
system as a skilled immigrant, then you have all the rights of American worker.
You're not going to drag down through their wages. You can quit your
job and do whatever you want to. Hopefully you get a you aspired a
cizenship as soon as possible. So so I think our immigration polishy should create
time leader markets at the low end and continue to welcome skill the workers,
but not in as indentured servants as free legal permanent residence with the Green courts.
Sounds good to me. The book is called Hell to Pay, How
the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America. It is out on May second.
Michael Lynde, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you appreciate
it. Of course you've been listening to another edition of Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm Emily Jashnski, culture editor here at the Federalist. We will be back
soon with more. Until then, he lovers the freedom and anxious to send
fry All right, what are you wrong