Mom’s Thoughts on Labor and Immigration

My mother, age 90, often says that the government should pass laws requiring business owners to provide healthcare to their employees. She may be 90, but she’s smarter than most people I know. She’s neither beholden to a major news corporation nor running for reelection, so she speaks the unabashed truth as she sees it, unlike the pundits and politicians in America who, in my opinion, are shameless grifters.

I told her that her desire to help American citizens is noble, but America didn’t always work that way.

In the early days of the American economy, no government mandate required employers to provide health insurance, pensions, paid vacations, or many of the other benefits we now associate with the American middle class.

Over time, workers organized, unions fought for higher wages and better working conditions, and employers increasingly provided benefits as part of compensation. Government eventually became involved as well. Employer-sponsored health insurance, for example, became widespread largely during the World War II era.
I would argue that these actions thwarted nascent communism, which was front and center in America shortly after the Great Depression.

There is an important distinction here: the primary purpose of a business is to make a profit—not to create a middle class.

Remarkably, American capitalism produced a middle class partly through the unintended consequences of businesses competing for workers, workers organizing for a larger share of the prosperity they helped create, and employers offering better compensation to attract and retain those workers.

In sociology, this is sometimes called a “latent function”: an unintended consequence of an institution that nevertheless has enormous social importance. The manifest function is an institution’s intended function.

And there is a lesson here for both sides of the political debate.

Businesses aren’t charities, and government isn’t a substitute for a healthy private economy. When labor costs, regulations, taxes, and other expenses change, businesses respond—sometimes by raising prices, sometimes by investing in technology, sometimes by moving production elsewhere.

The history of American labor isn’t simply a story of government forcing businesses to do the right thing, nor is it a story of benevolent business people creating the middle class.

It is a much more complicated story of workers, businesses, unions, markets, government, and competition interacting—and sometimes producing social benefits that none of them originally set out to create.

Never forget another fundamental part of the American story: unlike collectivist societies that place greater emphasis on what the state or society should provide for everyone, America has traditionally valued the individual enormously.

The American immigrant story is filled with people who arrived with little or nothing, no guarantees of success, and no promise that the government would make them prosperous. They came believing that if they were willing to work, take risks, save, build, and sometimes fail, they might create something for themselves and their families.

That’s the story of Uncle Vito, who sailed here from Sicily with nothing but ten dollars stuffed in his butt cheeks—and somehow turned that ten dollars into a fortune.

That, in many ways, is the American idea: you weren’t promised that you would become rich. You were given the freedom to try.

And perhaps that distinction is worth remembering when we debate what government should require businesses to provide. The American economic story was never simply about government providing for people or businesses providing for people. It was also about individuals believing they could build something for themselves.

My mother also has some excellent thoughts on immigration.

Last night we were watching a very liberal news network that was advocating for open borders, and she was scratching her head in disbelief. She remembers a time when coming to America meant arriving at places like Ellis Island, going through an organized process, being inspected, documented, and admitted under the laws and policies of the time. It wasn’t simply a matter of showing up and walking across the border. This process is exactly how her parents came to the United States from Russia, but my mom was born here.

She also remembers when immigration was a much more deliberate, structured process, with quotas and legal pathways designed to admit people from many different countries. Her point isn’t complicated: America has always been a nation of immigrants, but it also had a system for deciding who could enter and how.

What strikes me is that at 90, my mother isn’t stuck in the past. She’s looking at the present through the lens of what she remembers—and asking some pretty basic questions that don’t always seem to get asked anymore.

That’s my mom. Ninety years old, paying attention, thinking for herself, and still making me stop and think. I hope I’m that sharp when I’m 90. I hope I live to be 90!