Conversations With C.

The other day, I had a rather revealing conversation with my right-wing, Tea Party friend C. We used to work together at my old job, but he left that company shortly after I did and is now a client of mine. I provide peer review, quality assurance, and administrative support for his new business, and he keeps his overhead low by using me only on an as-needed basis rather than hiring full-time employees. Although we used to get in rather heated arguments, we get along fine now and can even talk about politics.

So the other day, he claimed that the government is making unemployment worse by extending benefits for the roughly 14 million Americans currently without work. By compensating them not to work, he reasoned, we were encouraging the unemployed not to seek jobs, and the unemployment rate isn't going to go down anytime soon if people don't have a motive to find a job.

I told him that I saw it differently. No one likes living on the roughly $300/week unemployment pays, and there's plenty of motivation to find work, such as providing for your family, meeting the cost of living, and finding a little self-respect. The problem isn't motivation to find jobs, it's a lack of jobs out there. Many of the industrial clients I've worked for over the years have closed down, and their factories and facilities have remained shut down for years.

Not surprisingly, he did not agree. "There are plenty of jobs out there," he claimed. "I see 'Now Hiring' signs all over" ("Where?" I wondered silently). "Lots of businesses are slowing down or even closing shop," he continued, "because they can't get anyone to work for them. At lunch today, service was terrible - I had to wait forever - because the restaurant did not have enough waiters."

One of the reasons I've seen for the nation's slow recovery out of the recession was that although some businesses had recovered somewhat from the crash of 2008, they've learned over the past several months how to do more with less, how to get by on fewer employees, and given the uncertain shape of the economy, weren't rehiring back to their old levels. This, in turn, keeps unemployment high and continues to keep the economy unsteady, which, in a negative feedback loop, keeps them unwilling to hire. I explained to C. that the nationwide loss of manufacturing jobs forces people who used to work at the shuttered factories to just barely get by (if that) on unemployment, and they have no discretionary cash left over to support retail stores or the kinds of restaurants at which C. suffered such poor service.

"But that's exactly my point," he said. "They just keep sitting around waiting for their old jobs to magically come back, instead of looking for new work. But they don't wake up to the fact that their old jobs aren't going to return and they're not taking perfectly good jobs at Wal-Mart or McDonald's or Starbucks to make ends meet. They may have to move to find a job - go to some other city or state - but that's how the market works - people are drawn to those areas that have opportunities, instead of wishing that opportunities came to the people."

"Let me get this straight," I said. "Take someone who worked as, say, a machinist for 20 years at a factory, or in sales, or a manager, or for that matter any of the blue- and white-collar jobs associated with manufacturing, with kids in school and parents living nearby. You want them to tear their families apart and move away from their friends and relatives, take their kids out of their schools, maybe walk out on their upside-down mortgage, so that they could take a minimum wage job with no opportunity for advancement? Wouldn't it be better to invigorate the economy so that decent jobs that can support families and communities were available to more people?"

"If they don't have other skills, that's their problem," C. replied, "and nobody put a gun to their head to buy a house they can't afford. It's sad, but it's better than the government forcing a 'planned economy' on the country."

This is one of C.'s big worries, that the country is drifting off into some sort of neo-Marxist socialist republic. He believes that the Obama Administration is engaging in "class warfare" by suggesting that the temporary tax cuts for the wealthiest 5% of the nation he repealed and their taxes be allowed to return to 1990's levels. He considers that a "redistribution of wealth," like in some left-wing banana republic.

But what he fails to see is that forcing the middle class into minimum-wage jobs, converting the old manufacturing workforce into servants, attendants and service providers for the wealthy, is in itself class warfare of the most demoralizing kind, war on the middle class. It is nothing short of redistribution of wealth, but in this case, toward those already wealthy.

He can't see this, and in fact he even thinks that he "won" the argument because I let him have the last word. There was no chance of turning him around and I saw no point of discussing it further. Besides, I don't want to make him angry as he's a client, and my job is to provide him with my services for an hourly wage.