The Fruit Of Our Labor

Monday, September 7, 2026

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, ” Labor Day is an annual celebration of the social and economic achievements of American workers.”  So we have a national holiday to celebrate work.  But we also have an entire national bureaucracy that enables those that don’t work.  It is a fascinating juxtaposition.

I got thinking about this when a tweet crossed my path.  It begins:

Sixty-two years and $22 trillion later, the U.S. poverty rate sits at roughly 11 percent, almost identical to where Lyndon Johnson found it in 1964. The government ran the most expensive social experiment in human history and produced nothing measurable. Bureaucracies perpetuate themselves, and this policy worked exactly as designed.

Suddenly, Jesus saying, “…you always have the poor with you…” seems downright prophetic.  The statistic that the poverty rate is unchanged in the years since LBJ’s “War on Poverty” is a truly stunning one.  But there is far more bad news that has flowed from those efforts than merely bureaucratic perpetuity while being entirely ineffective.  I want to look at two of them.

For one, the so-called “safety net” disincentivizes actual work.  That raises a certain cognitive dissonance on a day intended to celebrate work.  If parents keep housing and feeding their kids well into their late 20’s and even early 30’s why should the kids ever get serious about going to work?  And spare me the cries of unaffordability.  It’s a question of priorities.  The daily ten dollar cup of coffee (or two) and the several hundred a month phone would go a long way towards paying rent.  When the country makes work unnecessary to scrape by, you can bet your bottom dollar some people are going to scrape by.  And so, there are always poor people.

But that is secondary to what bothers me most about the whole thing – it disincentivizes charity.  The nation was once dotted with religiously based charity hospitals.  Now they are few and far between as Medicaid and Medicare have forced hospitals into areligious conformity.  Where once church-based food kitchens practically defined the urban landscape, now the vast majority of church based charity flows overseas.  The anti-poverty programs of LBJ turned charity into a turf war.  And needless to say the US government won.

So now people are not encouraged to charity, they are simply taxed.  Rather than developing the care, heart and selflessness that charity creates, they begrudge the size of their paycheck withholding and absolutely hate filing their returns.  Further, with less in their paychecks, they have less disposable income to be charitable with.  Such policy does not encourage character formation – it discourages it.

I would think the best way to celebrate my labor would be to share its fruits.  Unfortunately, the government has already helped itself to a good chunk of those fruits – supposedly to help the poor.  Instead they just evaporated the money, decreasing the value of my labor immensely.  Some celebration.