By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

[The following is an excerpt from Jeffrey Tucker's book, Spirits of America: On the Semiquincentennial.]

"I'm not straightening ties for $4.50 an hour."

Those immortal words are still with me. They were uttered to me in private when I worked at a men's store when I was 17. It was from a coworker. The boss had just walked by and suggested that so long as there were no customers in the store, we should get busy making the products more wonderful.

My co-worker balked at the idea. It got me thinking. The store was not paying him to stand around. They were paying him to put value in order to get value out. They also have to pay the bills otherwise, which means that arguably an employee needs to add far MORE value into the company than he takes out.

The employment contract doesn't work like a vending machine. You don't stick money in and get a snack out. Employers invest in their employees, paying them far more than they are worth in the training period in hopes of subsidizing the losses on the other side. This is why anyone on the clock should be thrilled for the opportunity to work harder, become more valuable, and give back to his benefactors.

My friend did not get this. Sure enough, he was fired a few weeks later. As it should be. That kid wanted a "work/life balance." He got it but without the remunerative work. By the way, I despise that half-century-old phrase. It implies that work is not part of life, and that a good life consists mainly of sloth. What an awful ethic!

The second chapter of Eric Sloane's wonderful The Spirits of '76, as published in 1973, covers the topic of work beautifully. He says that hard work is a great American virtue that has seen much better days.

His chapter is mostly about finding love in one's work, doing it not for the money (which is a sign, a symbol, a necessity) but because you adore making value with your hands and your mind. You will never really end up doing anything truly wonderful based on a financial incentive alone. Nor does competition - beating the other guy - suffice. Great achievements are born from within, a result of a dream, a dedication, a true love of making your life worth something.

I adore this chapter because all of this is completely forgotten. It's much worse today than it was in the 1970s. For two and a half decades, the Fed has mostly been running a system of zero interest rates, which has ballooned up the corporate and financial sectors to appalling levels. For decades now, hiring has not really been about value in and value out, but the purchase of warm bodies with credentials.

Several generations now have been raised without remunerative labor in their teens, so they graduate from colleges with one, two, or three degrees without having the slightest knowledge of or experience with actual work.

During all their prime years, from 16 to 25, they have learned all the wrong habits: sleep late, stay out late, do the minimum to get by, party like crazy, always put sloth above focus, friends above obligation, and comfort above anything that would result in stress, toil, or pain.

You can't build productive economies this way. You can't build happy lives this way. Even worse, you end up with a caste system: the well-to-do who live on the Internet versus everyone else.

With that has come a routine judgment of others based on their job and status: the less you have to work and the higher your pay, the greater the status. The more you have to work for every dime, the lower your status. Some people will simply not do a "low" job because they imagine themselves better.

This is not the attitude of a free society; it is the bias of a caste system. It breeds not community but disdain.

Something has to change. It likely will. It already is. Firings in general are on the rise in every sector. People assume that is a terrible thing. Actually, it could be the best thing that ever happened to people.

Here's a story of a young woman I hired on...