The Patriot Post® · Sanders and the Central Planners

Senator Bernie Sanders knows a lot about not working. The 82-year-old Vermont socialist who caucuses with the Democrats has made a lucrative career effectively majoring in it. And now he wants to cut back on everyone else’s work as well.

He’s calling it the Fair Labor Standards Act, and it would lower the standard work week from 40 hours to 32 hours. A recent Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing chaired by Sanders was titled, “Workers Should Benefit from New Technology and Increased Productivity: The Need for a 32-Hour Work Week with No Loss in Pay.” He claimed that removing a full day’s work from the average American work week “is not a radical idea.” As, er, proof, Sanders pointed to France and its 35-hour work week to defend his assertion. What a surprise.

Of course, Sanders, being a socialist, argues: “Today, American workers are over 400 percent more productive than they were in the 1940s. And yet, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages than they were decades ago. That has got to change.”

Well, American workers might be more productive, and much of that has to do with developments in technologies that have helped work efficiency. But like so many socialists, Sanders doesn’t seem to take into account the reason for the development of technologies that have made the American worker so much more efficient.

It was the freedom to enjoy the fruit of one’s labor that drove people to work and innovate. Indeed, Sanders attacks the very means by which Americans today enjoy the living standards that we do, as he vilifies capitalism and profitable companies as the problem.

“The financial gains from the major advancements in artificial intelligence, automation, and new technology must benefit the working class, not just corporate CEOs and wealthy stockholders on Wall Street,” Sanders asserts as if that’s actually reality. “It is time to reduce the stress level in our country and allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life.”

Those greedy CEOs. They actually run companies that contribute real value to the U.S. economy, unlike Sanders and his fellow leftist politicians.

As Indiana Republican Senator Mike Braun observed, “If you’re wanting to take advice from a place like this that now is borrowing $1 trillion every six months, I’d say don’t put much credence in the people that [have] been committee chairs or running this place to take advice for Main Street.”

When Sanders was pressed by Fox Business reporter Hillary Vaughn about his support for raising the tax rate on corporations, his response was both telling and predictable. He yelled, “I can yell as loud as you.” Vaughn’s question was perfectly sensible. Had it not been interrupted multiple times by a defensive Sanders, it would have sounded like this: “Democrats want businesses to be taxed more, pay their workers more, lower prices, and now pay their workers not to work. How are businesses going to survive all that?”

But Sanders, who has never owned a business, apparently doesn’t care about those basic economic inconsistencies, at least not when pushing his tired and repeatedly debunked socialist ideology.

Furthermore, Sanders’s devaluation of work itself shows a profound misunderstanding of the basic nature and needs of humanity. People need work for their personal well-being. Productivity is important for human happiness and flourishing. Society itself prospers most when people are actively engaged in work that, in turn, benefits others.

Idleness and laziness harm both individuals and the group. Dependency breeds insecurity, unhappiness, and unrest. Sanders’s demand for less and more is thus a recipe for creating further societal dysfunction and decay. Far from bringing progress, Sanders would usher in the exact opposite.

However, when greater dependency upon the government is the ultimate goal, one must play to people’s vices rather than their virtues.