What constitutes labor, and what is it really worth?

There’s a lot of discussion these days about raising the minimum federal wage to $10.10 an hour. Many people think that is too much to pay for labor.

To put things into perspective about what labor is worth, let’s say, for instance, the Smith brothers build five houses a day for 365 days. Now that’s a lot of labor for two men to accomplish by themselves. We’ve all seen how long it takes a crew of five men to build just one house.

Now let’s assume that the Smith brothers earn $100,000 per house for their effort. At that price, the homes will not be too shabby. At the end of one year, the Smith brothers will have earned more than $182 million. Sounds like a lot of money, doesn’t it?

I recently received a newsletter from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. In the letter, he states that the two Koch brothers more than $11 billion last year. To make (I won’t say earned) that much money, the Koch brothers built or produced nothing. They merely shuffled money and assets from one place to another. As hard as the Smith brothers labored to build five houses a day, even if they humanly could, they still made only 7.5 percent of what the Koch brothers made.

I say these things because we have completely lost sight of the true value of labor. You might say that the Koch brothers made so much because they worked so hard. Well, you have just read the numbers. That dog don’t hunt.

You might say that the Koch brothers were much smarter than the Smiths. If that were true, why weren’t they smart enough to solve world hunger, universal health care and homelessness all in one thinking session?

Peter P. SiroisMadison

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