The nation, in 1900, was divided into farms of 160 acres. Eight or nine of every ten Americans were involved in agriculture. Then, steam-powered machines were invented. They revolutionized farming.
Threshing crews with powerful steam engines would start harvesting in the South in late summer. They moved North, following the ripening waves of grain. A farm that once required the labor of a farm family assisted by a hired man and his family needed far fewer people.
Bigger machinery got cheaper. Soon, individual farmers could afford tractors, combines, planters, and other equipment. Threshing crews disappeared. One farmer could do the work of ten. In a few years, bigger machinery let one farmer did the work of twenty. Then, fifty. Now, one well-financed farmer and his giant machines can produce as much as 95 farmers used to grow.
Now, immense, automated tractors are being steered back and forth across the fields by GPS. They are directed from satellites. They do not need a driver. We have nearly reached the point where no actual farmers at all can produce as much as a hundred farmers a century ago.
The same, relentless, cost-cutting destruction of jobs is happening in every sector of the economy. Transport ships are bigger, trains are longer, banks have fewer branches, and most costs are lower. Organizations are consolidating and expanding. Fewer people provide the goods and services that recently required everyone to be hard at work.
Government responds with make-work. The English Navy now has more admirals than ships.
Such make-work abounds in other areas. Bigger airplanes, better scheduling, fuller flights, and consolidating airlines need fewer people in every area. Governments respond to such automation by mandating make-work. Now, airports have around-the-clock crews of unnecessary security pers0nnel. Make-work provides the illusion of meaningful employment.
Like the TSA in airports, the new, overcomplicated health care is forcing the hiring of tens of thousands of totally unneeded medical personnel. They will “guide” people through the many barriers to medical care that were erected to provide fuller employment even as hospital visits are shorter and less frequent. Medical make-work.
Make-work is rife in public education. Utterly unnecessary “administrators” have increased by 700% while the number of students has barely doubled. Make-work abounds at every educational level. In some universities, the number of administrators now exceeds the number of teachers.
Wherever we look, make-work abounds. As more jobs become dependent on government-directed cash flows, governments become more important. Bureaucrats become richer. People, as we see most clearly in Greece, Cyprus, and Spain, become poorer. Everyone is against make-work, except where their own job is concerned. All who are taxed to subsidize make-work are driven into ruin.
A new consideration:
History and economics meet religion on the issue of make-work. For a thousand years, Europe had a fairly stable technology. There was the Church, the state, and a largely agrarian economy directed by land-holding nobles who’d inherited their properties and positions. From one end of Europe to the other, crops were raised by muscle-power.
Automation destroys jobs, but, if we don’t have automation, is drudgery good? If we stop automation, are we guilty of enslaving people? Are we better off to be laboring night and day in the fields, like Amish, doing another type of more tiresome make-work? Or, are we better off to be free from such labor so we may better serve God, neighbor, and family?
How can we have automation’s freedom from drudgery and not have to suffer with the even greater indignity of make-work? That is the real question of economics and social policy.
There is an easy way to provide automation’s benefits to all Americans. Just send every family a check for three thousand a month, eliminate all bureaucracies, and we’d all have more money. Those who wanted to work harder and make more could do so. Those who didn’t, wouldn’t.
But, doing that would destroy all the make-work jobs in all the agencies associated the the current welfare distribution systems. They’d rather not lose their jobs, no matter how poor everyone else is.
