Yesterday, we all got to see the very first unseemly games of the Obama approach to governance. Last minute workers in Indianapolis were irate over showing up for their pay only to find an empty, locked office and a sign saying someone would arrive at 1:00. At 1:30, they started to get angry and police were called in. As of yesterday morning, several were saying the pay they eventually got was far less than what they were owed and they intended to file formal complaints.
The paper breaking the story disabled comments, ostensibly because there were too many to moderate.
As of today, the link to the original story goes directly to a lovely piece about how Obama’s people have made all well and right. Getting to the original story takes some effort. But you’ll find in that story that the regional Obama office never reported the expenditure or paid taxes on the wages, as if they never had any intention of paying anyone at all.
Now, let’s think about this. People were unwilling to give up their free time until someone else was willing to pay $10 an hour for that time. With an incentive, they worked hard, and they also showed up first thing in the morning the day after the election to get paid.
When they finally got their money, they were angry that it was less than what was owed.
What’s going on here is an economics degree in about half a day.
People work hard and trade value when there is an incentive in it, something worth more to them in the future than what they are giving up immediately. In this case, $10 an hour for each hour of your weekend, to be paid on Wednesday morning.
And when the person who extracted the value of hard work for a promise of reward breaks that promise, these people became spontaneously angry. They were angry over being expected to work their hardest for someone else’s benefit without any reward.
Yet they voted for and worked for a man who plans to base his entire economic policy on the theory that people will happily slave away, unrewarded, for someone else.
When they found that the Obama campaign’s behavior indicated an intent not to pay and when the pay they got was less than what was owed, they were angry over being lied to, treated like fools, and used.
Yet their annointed leader plans to fashion a social policy that treats all individuals like cogs in a statist machine, beings whose innate dignity may be summarily dismissed to pursue some greater end.
Presumably, these Obama supporters intended to screw someone else over to get well. Yet they find themselves the screwed. This is what always happens when we think we can vote ourselves rich. Maybe they’ll reflect on what they hoped for and what they can do to change it.
Dwell on this: “If, after five years of Communism, you cannot put food on a man’s table or provide shoes for his childrens’ feet, he will not believe that Communism is a good thing, no matter what you tell him. Call it what you will, incentives are what get people to work hard.”
Who said it? Nikita Kruschev.
