Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream

7. Challenges to Full-Time, Full Employment

Criticism of Roosevelt’s new vision of Full-Time, Full Employment was widespread during the Depression and began again after the war. Examples abound. Two of the best are Frank Lloyd Wright’s and Robert Hutchins’s. After the Great Depression, Frank Lloyd Wright reiterated his original claim that free time was bound to increase, strengthening his argument by pointing out that the machine was obviously capable of creating enough of the basics of life for everyone.1 The forces that humans had harnessed “in this Machine Age are the forces of Nature. They have so increased production as to have made poverty an anachronism in fact. The income of rich and poor added together cannot begin to buy the goods at anything like the rate at which they can be produced.”2 The Depression was an irrational development—a case of “starvation in the midst of plenty.”3 Malformed and “overbuilt,” modern economies “such as ours must end in periodic national catastrophe . . . [d]epressions [or] . . . war.”4 Economic collapse had been caused by poor design—by poor distribution of the abundance that all should share but that a few had mismanaged. Consistently critical of Roosevelt’s work-creation programs, Wright pointed out that it was far better to accept the free time that the machine made possible than to struggle to maintain full employment.5 Roosevelt was reenslaving men and women in new kinds of work that government was inventing as surely as corporations had enslaved them by controlling the means of production: It is absurd to desire to compete against the fertility of mind and resource in devising labor-saving schemes and appliances. The important thing is to digest these energies so that men are set free by them for . . . enjoyments 7 Challenges to Full-Time, Full Employment CHALLENGEs To FuLL-TIME, FuLL EMpLoyMENT 123 no longer directly concerned in “making a living.” No man should be Time-bound. Nor should any man be slave for a living. He should do, in the main, what he really wants to do. That really is the legacy we have received from the past that is valid. only under Democracy can he collect his legacy.6 Wright was consistently critical of Roosevelt’s policies that were designed to provide the “full-time employment . . . that we continually hear about.”7 He insisted: “Employment” is not enough . . . dangling employment before a man now may be, after all, only the means of keeping him tied to a form of slavery— now [to] some money-getting or money-distributing [government] system that amounts to some form of conscription. . . . “Full employment” as we continually hear about it is not enough for the democratic citizen if this country still means what it declared in 1776. No. “Full employment” is not enough because it may be and often is only a more subtle form of rent or conscription. . . . It is the baited hook to keep the worker dangling. . . . The modern crime of crimes against Democracy is conscription in any form, because conscription is inevitably a form of confiscation. Conscription is . . . most hateful to democracy because it soonest destroys freedom at its very source.8 The growth of government and bureaucracies that required armies of “white-collarites” (lawyers and other professionals) had to be paid for. Governments defended public debt and taxation, what Wright called new forms “of rent bred by government,” by promising to ensure the nation “full-time employment.” In pursuit of “full employment” government was adding to the “rents” on money, land, and machines that modern corporations had long assessed , creating new forms of wage slavery for average citizens. Governments had become complicit in this return to serfdom and the abandonment of the American “ideal of Freedom.”9 once upon a time the Jeffersonian democratic ideal of these united states was, “that government best [governs] that governs least.” But [now] . . . the complicated forms of super-money . . . making and holding are legitimatized by government. Government too, thus becomes [a] monstrosity . . . enormous armies of white-collarites arise . . . [creating] more bureaucracy . . . collecting “legal” extractions from the citizenry if for no other reason than to maintain such phenomenal bureaucracy. . . . Multifarious . . . laws [are] enacted by our promise-merchants, the politicians.10 “overgrown government” had conspired with the Machine to make “man . . . a parasite,” promising “him ‘employment’ but on the terms of a wage-slave.”11 124 CHApTER 7 Just when the machine seemed to be liberating humans into leisure...