Labor Has Done a Great Deal for Us

Everett Gross

[A letter printed in The Crete News, Crete, Nebraska, 13 September 2000.
Reprinted in GroundSwell, 2000]

This is being written on Labor Day 2000. Just this morning, on the radio, I heard a stirring speech about what labor has done for our wellbeing, I agreed with every word of it.

Next was a list of the rights which labor should have the right to enjoy. I also agreed totally with that. It was not clear to me whether the speaker had in mind some sub-class of labor, or whether he would include, as I would, union and non-union, such as surgery, accounting, legal counseling, managerial effort, and numerous others often excluded from the lists of kinds of labor. Almost all of the rights that the speaker mentioned are miles away from being enjoyed at this time, and any progress in that direction is not very noticeable. But one huge right not mentioned, yet granted and enjoyed with apparent gusto, is the right of all kinds of laborers to shoot themselves in the foot.

I refer to their willingness to tolerate, generation after generation, an economy so sick that it cannot hire all of its people who want to work. They accept without question the word of so-called economists that this rare occurrence of 4 percent unemployment has to be considered full employment. They accept so-called experts' words that business cannot operate unless there is a supply of idle workers competing for crumbs. They quietly accept massive government debt and inflation of the currency.

We are told that these are separate problems, but they are not really separate. They are only inevitable results of our long-standing tradition of taxing backwards. . . . Find an encyclopedia and look up 'single tax' and follow it up. . . .