By Rich Lowry
Friday, March 22, 2024
Karl Marx would be proud. Bernie Sanders has
proposed taking another step toward the philosopher’s envisioned utopia by
proposing to mandate a four-day work week.
Marx wrote how in Communist society, workers would be
liberated to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, raise cattle in the
evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming
hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”
Needless to say, that’s not how Communism turned out. Yet
the belief that work is basically a capitalist imposition that is unnatural and
bad for people still holds sway on the left, and Sanders is, accordingly,
proposing to move from a 40-hour to a 32-hour work week to make us healthy,
wealthy, and wise.
“It is time to reduce the stress level in our country and
allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life,” the Vermont socialist
insists. “It is time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay.”
The last clause is the key one. If everyone can work less
and produce and earn exactly the same, why not? And if this is possible, why
stop at four days a week? It’d be positively cruel to make someone work four
days when they can work three days with the same outcomes.
Of course, the promise that we can work less and make the
same is the socialist equivalent of Mexico will pay for the border wall. It’s
not just promising a free lunch, but a free breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with
room service delivering a late-night snack gratis.
What we earn is not an arbitrary number, but is linked to
what we produce. To simplify, if everyone were to work 20 percent less without
becoming any more productive, GDP would decline 20 percent. The pie would
shrink, even though Sanders is saying everyone’s slice would — impossibly — be
just as big.
It’s certainly true that Americans work more than people
in other countries. France has a much-vaunted 35-hour work week, although that
stricture only applies to blue-collar workers. Still, France works less than we
do, and — in a sign that basic economic laws aren’t so easily suspended — its
workers make less money. The average net disposable household income in France,
according to the Week magazine, is $34,375 a year, whereas it
is $51,147 in the U.S.
If Sanders were being honest and weren’t a socialist,
he’d say he has a great deal for Americans — they can work less and become
poorer. There probably wouldn’t be many takers.
Sanders complains that American workers are 400 percent
more productive than they were in the 1940s, yet they are still working long
hours. Over time, though, we have worked less. In 1830, the average working
week was more than 70 hours, and over the course of the next century, it
dropped by almost half.
If we were all content with 1940s living standards, maybe
we could go all the way and adopt a two-day work week. From a 21st-century
perspective, though, returning to 1940s-era housing, plumbing, technology,
transportation, and health care would feel like impoverishment, and it would
be.
What Sanders misses, as the economist David Bahnsen
argues in his new book, Full Time: Work and the Meaning of Life, is
that work is good for us, indeed an inherent part of the human condition.
Moreover, the problem isn’t that Americans work too much, but that too many
Americans aren’t working at all. Noting the long-term decline in labor-force
participation, Bahnsen points out that if the participation rate were the same
as it was in 2000, an additional 10 million Americans would be working, with a
concomitant increase in goods and services.
In short, the Sanders idea is a frank expression of
economic illiteracy. Instead of working so hard to propose and publicize such
baldly ludicrous ideas, it’d be better for everyone if the senator found more
time for leisure pursuits and resolved to put in fewer hours on the job.
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