Good Jobs at No Wages
Even many supporters of the
recent welfare reform acknowledge a small flaw: The new arrangement requires
welfare recipients to take jobs, but does nothing to assure that jobs will be
available. President Clinton's original notion of "ending welfare as we know
it" was to require work and also, if necessary, to supply it (plus training,
day care, health care, etc.). But that kind of welfare reform costs more, not
less, than just writing a check. So the Republican version, which Clinton
signed, leaves out the second part of the equation. It supplies less money, not
more, to the states, frees them to cut off benefits, and largely leaves the
details to them to figure out.
The states face quite a
challenge in finding employment for all these people. And the federal
government, as is so often the case, makes the task even harder with
unnecessary, job-destroying regulations. Many of these regulations have come
under withering scrutiny in recent years by right-wing think tanks,
conservative editorial pages, and Republican members of Congress. Yet one such
piece of federal red tape has escaped the criticism it deserves: the 13th
Amendment to the Constitution ("Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude ...
shall exist within the United States"). Possibly due to misinterpretation by
activist judges, this job killer forbids American citizens--acting voluntarily,
of their own free will--to sell themselves into slavery. Or, to put it in terms
even a liberal might understand: It denies women the freedom to control their
own bodies, albeit by selling them to someone else.
Critics
of government welfare programs often ridicule the notion that people would
starve in the streets or die of untreated diseases without AFDC, food stamps,
Medicaid, etc. Private charity, they say, will provide for truly needy cases.
We may soon find out if this is correct. However, the logical defect is not
hard to spot. People are unlikely to invest in the feeding and care of others
if they are not in a position to reap the benefits. But this defect can be
easily remedied.
An analogy might be made to the situation of
elephants in Africa. In 1989, under pressure from groups alarmed by the
destruction of African elephant herds, President Bush banned the import of
ivory. Most of the rest of the world soon followed, and the ivory trade was
devastated. The best thinking now is that this was a bad idea, because it
destroyed any incentive Africans might have to nurture and protect the elephant
herds. A better approach is to make sure that the elephants' human neighbors
have a commercial stake--through reasonably regulated hunting and ivory
sales--in seeing the herds thrive. That way, you can "turn what heretofore have
been liabilities into assets," as an article in the American Spectator
once explained.
Similarly,
America's welfare recipients can be turned from social liabilities into social
assets. The best way to assure that private individuals will come forward to
supply food and health care--and even job training!--to those who are about to
be freed from their debilitating dependency on government is to allow these
giving individuals to acquire an economic interest in the nutrition, health,
and skills of the former welfare recipients. The employment arrangements that
have been traditional in this country since 1863 are obviously not adequate to
the task, because there is nothing to stop a healthy, well-fed, well-trained
person--once raised up to this desirable state through private-sector
initiative--from taking her services elsewhere. Repealing the 13 th
Amendment would solve this problem, by allowing people to contractually commit
their future good health and skills to an employer.
Rich people, it should be noted, already have
this ability. Various devices such as bonuses and stock options enable
companies to reasonably assure themselves of the continuing employment of key
executives without violating the 13 th Amendment's onerous ban on
what should more accurately be called "contracts of permanent employment." But
poor people are usually not in a position to demand stock options. Therefore,
they are unable to make a convincingly binding commitment to an employer. The
13 th Amendment prevents it. As is so often the case, a seemingly
compassionate government regulation--enacted with the best of intentions--has
the effect of hurting the very people it was intended to help.
Beyond its practical
effects, repeal of the 13 th Amendment would restore to every
American what we now know is the most important freedom of all: freedom of
contract. The issue of a person's God-given right to contract for his or her
permanent future employment is really an extension of the recently concluded
debate over the minimum wage. Although the reactionary forces of Big Labor and
Big Government won that battle, House Majority Leader Dick Armey was, of
course, absolutely right to note again and again (and again) that the effect of
a minimum wage is to deny workers the opportunity to contract for their
services at a price employers are willing to pay.
Clearly abolition of the
minimum wage, as Armey and others advocate, would be an important step in
fulfilling America's promise of a job for everyone who wants to work (and, for
that matter, everyone who doesn't want to work). But it is only a first step.
One might argue that abolishing the minimum wage is close enough to
relegalizing slavery, since it would free people to work at whatever wage they
chose--including no wage at all. But this alone would not liberate people to
commit their future labor in a way that potential employers can reasonably be
expected to rely on. Only a contract can do that: a contract of permanent
future employment, which the employer can call upon the government to use its
powers to enforce, if necessary. Now that Washington has stopped guaranteeing
welfare benefits, a compassionate government surely owes its poorest citizens
no less than this.
