Workforce concepts and applications

Workforce

For Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie, work was intrinsic to an individual's sense of self and personal worth. "God helps them that helps themselves," said Poor Richard, Franklin's pseudonym -- in other words, striving to work hard was next to godliness. According to Franklin's alter ego, leisure was a waste of time, and so was luxury and excess. This meant if someone lived beyond his or her means or fell upon hard times, that person was not simply financially imprudent but morally questionable. Spending lavishly on knickknacks and fine clothing is sinful, according to Franklin's tract, given that it means that the individual may be springing a small leak in his financial ship that will lead to the poorhouse for a family. A creditor can deprive an owing man or woman of freedom, thus spending on credit is an affront to human liberty. Franklin's tone, although extreme, resonates in the heart of anyone who has recently watched the news about the epidemic of credit card debt and mortgage foreclosures: "Poor Richard says, buy what thou hast no need of, and ere long thou shalt sell thy necessaries" (Franklin 215). Poor Richard would of course disagree with the idea that predatory lenders or anyone else were responsible for individuals taking on too much debt, though, and place the moral responsibility squarely on the head of the individual and say people should spend no more than they have!

Poverty thus creates evil, according to Franklin, while for Andrew Carnegie, wealth fosters goodness in the heart of the individual. It creates the opportunity for philanthropy and employment, and the ability to give back to society, as well as help the wealthy person's descendents. Carnegie says that according to his "Gospel of Wealth," it is not a bad thing if wealth becomes overly concentrated in the hands of a few people in society, so long as the wealthy take the moral responsibility to spread the wealth they have earned back into society through philanthropic efforts. They benefit from the moral benefits of working hard and their children benefit from their wealth, but by giving back to others they show the essential goodness of capitalism and check its excesses.

A refreshing contrarian argument to Franklin's gospel of saving and Carnegie's equation of moral worth with wealth is found in the British philosopher Bertram Russell's statement: "What people who say such things forget is that what a man earns he usually spends, and in spending he gives employment. As long as a man spends his income, he puts just as much bread into people's mouths in spending as he takes out of other people's mouths in earning. The real villain, from this point-of-view, is the man who saves" (Russell 560). In other words, as we are instructed to do during a recession, we must spend money to fuel the economy -- if everyone saved, there would be no economy! Russell decries a moral system where leisure is viewed as evil, and 15 hours a day an acceptable workday to keep idle hands from being the devil's plaything. "The man who invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is therefore injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger" (Russell 560). People who work often do more harm than good and fundamentally distort the basic and good human drives to enjoy life and to treat their friends with kindness.

Part 2

In their essay "Proletarians and Communists" Marx and Engels point out notable abuses of the capitalist system of their era (Marx & Engels 96). Marx and Engels propose a solution to the social inequalities of bourgeois democracy (or non-democracy, as they think of it) in the form of a dictatorship of the proletariat, where everything is owned in common, and decision-making takes place in a common fashion. The problem with Marxism in action, however, is that such a consensus is difficult to achieve on a mass scale, and Marx and Engels are proposing a mass scale, international revolution. The result is that to enforce a proletarian dictatorship requires a strong-armed leader and bureaucracy, and the administrators of that bureaucracy become the new 'haves' of the system, as existed in the politically corrupt Soviet Union.

Eric Hoffer's distrust of mass scale revolutions in general reinforce a wariness to create dictatorships of 'groups,' given that poor systems of decision-making are likely to result, equally if not as bad as those lead by individuals in democratic capitalism. The one virtue democratic capitalism has, in the instance of a poor 'collective' decision, such as electing a poor leader, at very least, is that it offers greater flexibility and change. A modern capitalist democracy can become more capitalistic or slightly more socialistic, depending on the needs of the historical moment. This evidenced in America's shift in economic policy, from the rampant capitalism of the robber barons at the beginning of the century, to the public works designed to bring back the national economy during the New Deal, to the deregulation after the 1970s, to now. In contrast, in an official Marxism there is an official ideology that does not shift.