Part-time America: Makers who are also Takers

I thought I’d grown numb to the media’s relentless efforts to manufacture good news for Barack Obama, but the June unemployment report really takes the cake.  It was almost universally reported as phenomenal good news, with caveats brusquely related 10 paragraphs into print stories, if at all.  Almost 300,000 jobs created!  Recovery Summer is here at last, five years after Obama promised it!  Pop the champagne corks, America is back in business!

In reality, this was a horrific unemployment report, and there is nothing ambiguous about why.  The headlines should have read “Full-time employment crash: Half a million careers disappear in June.”  Quite simply, and to use round numbers, we got to the headline “300k jobs created” because the economy created 800,000 part-time jobs, while losing 500,000 full-time positions.    

That’s not a recovery, it’s terrifying – a Great Leap Forward in the Obamanomics transformation of the American economy into a shrunken, underemployed workforce.  Normally, the best thing that could be said about a surge in part-time job creation is that it might be a harbinger of more robust full-time job creation in months to come, but that’s a difficult case to make when the same reporting period saw 500,000 full-time jobs disappear.  How long would it take Obama’s economy just to fill in that half-million career hole, even if it returned to the best pace of full-time job creation seen during this Presidency?  The rest of 2014, I’d wager… and there’s no reason to think full-time job creation is going to surge back to even those modest levels, any time soon.

Every time I write about how the transformation to Part-Time America is a deliberate, although of course secret, Obama policy goal, someone asks me why his ideology would demand reduced full-time employment.  It’s very simple: because part-time workers are the socialist ideal.  They’re Takers who are also Makers. 

The old paradigm of socialist revolution envisioned a day when pure Takers – the people who collect redistributed wealth, without contributing much beyond the hidden taxes everyone pays – outnumber Makers.  At that point, socialism would go on autopilot.  There would never be a working electoral majority in favor of cutting government spending or reducing taxes.  The shots would forever be called by people with no skin in the game.

That doesn’t really work in practice, and the Left deserves credit for figuring out why.  When the dividing like between Takers and Makers is crystal-clear, the Makers grow resentful and cautious before autopilot levels of socialist imbalance are reached.  Furthermore, the Makers can successfully recruit Takers to their cause, by pointing out that the socialist utopia is unsustainable.  A lot of people truly, sincerely want to contribute; even an American society ravaged by decades of faculty-lounge left-wing indoctrination still boasts a population that, for the most part, does not want to make a hammock of the social safety net.  When the weight of supporting that net drags the entire economy down, a pure Makers vs. Takers division begins to tilt inexorably in the Makers’ favor.

But if the aspiring socialist overlord can create a vast new class of people – Takers who are also Makers – the lines are blurred enough to keep that political imbalance from appearing.  The great goal of the Left is the defeat and subjugation of the Middle Class, which they hate, although political necessity requires them to posture as its champions.  The true Middle Class is defined by its independence.  Get them hooked on government subsidies, and they lose that independence.  Make enough of them truly dependent on those subsidies for the necessities of life, and their political threat is permanently neutralized.

Socialized medicine is a big step in that direction, and ObamaCare was a bold leap toward true socialized medicine.  Already, even in the weird socialist/capitalist fusion created by ObamaCare, we see people with very solid Middle Class incomes receiving hefty subsidy payments for their health insurance.  They are being conditioned to depend on the bounty of the State for what they perceive as a necessity of life.

Part-Time America is an even bigger step toward socialist stasis.  A part-time worker is working hard, contributing to society, earning his own keep, and not inclined to think of himself as a welfare-state dependent… but he also cannot make enough money to live the Middle Class lifestyle, and he doesn’t enjoy the benefits or stability of full-time career work.  He’s not on a path to increase his career profile or grow more invested in the company that employs him, either emotionally or literally, through investment benefit plans.  He is forever alienated from his employers, and such alienation is the meat and drink of socialist revolution, as Karl Marx explained at length.

You’ll notice that Democrat rhetoric about the welfare state and minimum wage includes loud and frequent statements that people who earn minimum wage cannot live well.  People who make the minimum wage over a long period of time tend to be part-time employees, a status that also reduces the benefit of receiving small raises above the minimum wage level – an extra fifty cents an hour doesn’t matter as much when you’re only working 25 hours a week.  Part-Time America needs the State and its redistribution programs to taste the Middle Class lifestyle, but also tends to think left-wing appeals to the Sainted Middle Class are pitched at them, too. 

The end of prosperity lies with a growing class of people who have good, solid economic reasons to believe that prosperity is something the government must seize and redistribute.