Here’s a letter to a self-described “young socialist.”
Mr. Hanley:
Thanks for your email.
Unhappy with my sharing, at Facebook, Peter Suderman’s essay “The DSA, MAGA, and the New Policy Nihilism,” you write that “for all its problems, Trump supporters are right to go along with the DSA at resisting US capitalisms’ cruelty in discarding workers.” It is, you add, “brutal that the employment relationship is so insecure.”
I could respond simply by asking you to provide credible evidence that households in socialist countries – or even in countries that increase employers’ difficulty at firing workers – have a higher standard of living than do households in the U.S. I doubt that you’d find any such evidence (but would welcome you sharing it with me should you encounter it).
Instead, though, let’s look at some data. If it truly is “brutal that the employment relationship is so insecure,” then in the U.S. workers inflict such brutality on their employers much more frequently than employers inflict such brutality on their workers. From 2000 through 2019 (just before covid) the percentage of total job separations caused by non-retiring workers voluntarily quitting their jobs was 56% while the percentage of total job separations caused by workers being involuntarily discharged was 38%.* (The remaining job separations were caused by events such as retirement, death, and disability.)
If workers were as expendable to employers as you suppose them to be, workers would be desperate for jobs; few would quit and many would be fired. Voluntary quits would be far less common than involuntary discharges. Yet the opposite is true: Workers are much more likely to quit (that is, to fire their employers) than they are to be discharged (that is, to be fired by their employers).
And you can’t blame the high rate of quitting on stagnant wages. Scott Winship found that, for these same years (2000 through 2019), inflation-adjusted hourly compensation in the nonfarm business sector rose by about 33%.** He found also that this pay increase closely tracked – just as economic theory predicts – the increase in worker productivity.
Any one of the above-mentioned facts is nearly impossible to square with the DSA-MAGA notion that American capitalism generally mistreats workers. Taken together, these facts practically disprove this notion.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030* I got these data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly “Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey,” and had Claude do the calculations.
** Scott Winship, Understanding Trends in Worker Pay over the Past 50 Years (American Enterprise Institute, May 2024), Table 4.
