Let's begin this discussion with an example that would
normally be considered pushing one's case to its absurd extreme just to prove a
point ... then back off and go from there. It must be said, however, that the
unfortunate reality is that such cases are practiced in real life, as absurd as
they may sound.
That would be the case of illegal immigrants brought to North America by smugglers who, for all intents and
purposes, own them as if they were slaves. They get them to work as hard as you
can imagine till they pay in full the debt they owe for being brought here; a
debt that never seems to get paid off because of the accumulated interest that
keeps accumulating.
Is this a good thing because there is glory in work, and
because the smugglers have found a way to make people work hard? No. No one
sane would answer yes to that question but Professor Casey B. Mulligan came
close to doing just that in an address he gave at the Manhattan Institute on
June 25, 2014, an adaptation of which was printed as an article in the Wall
Street Journal on June 30, 2014. The article came under the title: “A Recovery
Stymied by Redistribution” and the subtitle: “Public policy intended to make
layoffs less painful actually made layoffs cheaper and more common.”
He sums up his philosophy like this: “Helping people is not
free. The more you help low-income people, the more low-income people you'll
have. The more you help unemployed people, the more unemployed people you'll
have ... That's a cost. For example, you have people out of work who would be
productive if it weren't for the help. So there's a trade-off: More help, less
economic efficiency.”
What he is saying is that there is glory in working because
work leads to economic efficiency. And to articulate the point, he tells the
story of a recruiter who told him about applicants receiving unemployment
benefits refusing to accept a job offer because when they take into
consideration “the forgone benefits, taxes and commuting costs ... conclude[d]
that accepting a job would net them less than $2 per hour, so they stay[ed]
home.”
And to Mulligan, this is proof enough that paying people
unemployment benefits encourages them to remain unemployed longer. The problem
with this example, however, is that he gives only that one number, the $2 per
hour. He does not say how much the applicant was making before being out of
work, and how much more than the current offer he could realistically expect to
get by waiting a little longer for another job offer to come by.
Mulligan then invokes the work of Friedrich Hayek in which
he “explains how economic information is not and cannot be fully known by a
single person.” He uses this assertion to say that the recruiter could not have
known all there was to know about the economy for which he was recruiting. He
goes on to say: and neither were “Most of those who voted Democrats into the
Senate, the House and the presidency.” Is this a little politicking?
At this point you start to wonder where the author is going
with this meandering ... till you hit on the following passage: “his [the
recruiter's] story makes the unemployed seem lazy. But you could just as well
say that this situation arises from the employer's failure to up his bid so
that it competes better with unemployment benefits. My point is not to assign
fault but to illustrate that a lot of different actors contribute to market
outcomes.” Still, he continues to attack the expanded programs for the
unemployed and the poor on the grounds that they make layoffs cheaper. And
while he is at it, he attacks ObamaCare for that same reason.
And now he pours cold water on the whole thing, leaving you
completely confused: “It's not just politicians or journalists who do not see
the full economic picture. It's the top economists in the world, from the
International Monetary Fund to university professors...” Well, it seems that
the only thing professor Mulligan seems to be certain of is that work is good,
and the harder you work, the better.
And so the question is asked one more time: What does he
think of the illegal immigrants who are brought to North
America by smugglers that get them to work as hard as you can
imagine? Is this a good thing because there is glory in work, and because the
smugglers have found a way to make people work hard?