should have a holiday to honor its work. The high standard of living that Americans enjoy is hard-earned and well-deserved. But the term “Labor Day” is a misnomer. What we should celebrate is not sweat and toil, but the power
should have a holiday to honor its work. The high standard of living that
Americans enjoy is hard-earned and well-deserved. But the term “Labor
Day” is a misnomer. What we should celebrate is not sweat and toil, but
the power of man’s mind to reason, invent and create.
Several centuries
ago, providing the basic necessities for one’s survival was a matter of daily
drudgery for most people. But Americans today enjoy conveniences undreamed of
by medieval kings. Every day brings some new useful household gadget, or a new
software system to increase our productivity, or a breakthrough in
biotechnology.
So, it is worth asking: Why do Americans have no unique
holiday to celebrate the creators, inventors, and entrepreneurs who have made
all of this wealth possible—the men of the mind?
The answer lies in the
dominant intellectual view of the nature of work. Most of today’s
intellectuals, influenced by several generations of Marxist political
philosophy, still believe that wealth is created by sheer physical toil. But
the high standard of living we enjoy today is not due to our musculature and
physical stamina. Many animals have been much stronger. We owe our relative
affluence not to muscle power, but to brain power.
Brain power is given a
left-handed acknowledgement in today’s fashionable aphorism that we are living
in an “information age” in which education and knowledge are the keys
to economic success. The implication of this idea, however, is that prior to
the invention of the silicon chip, humans were able to flourish as brainless
automatons.
Contrary to the Marxist premise that wealth is created by
laborers and “exploited” by those at the top of the pyramid of
ability, it is those at the top, the best and the brightest, who increase the
value of the labor of those at the bottom. Under capitalism, even a man who
has nothing to trade but physical labor gains a huge advantage by leveraging
the fruits of minds more creative than his. The labor of a construction
worker, for example, is made more productive and valuable by the inventors of
the jackhammer and the steam shovel, and by the farsighted entrepreneurs who
market and sell such tools to his employer. The work of an office clerk, as
another example, is made more efficient by the men who invented copiers and fax
machines. By applying human ingenuity to serve men’s needs, the result is that
physical labor is made less laborious and more productive. An apt symbol of
the theory that sweat and muscle are the creators of economic value can be seen
in those Soviet-era propaganda posters depicting man as a mindless muscular
robot with an expressionless, cookie-cutter face.
The best and brightest
minds are always the first to either flee a dictatorship in a “brain
drain” or to cease their creative efforts. A totalitarian regime can force
some men to perform muscular labor; it cannot force a genius to create, nor
force a businessman to make rational decisions. A slave owner can force a man
to pick peanuts; only under freedom would a George Washington Carver discover
ways to increase crop yields.
On Labor Day, let us honor the true root of
production and wealth: the human mind.
Fredric Hamber is a senior
writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif. The Institute
promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The
Fountainhead.
