The most durable narrative told by liberalism, acknowledged by almost all liberals of all factions across the political spectrum, is that liberalism lead to gradually improving labor standards within Western countries. The planks of this story are:

• Work-hour reduction laws
• Environmental protection laws
• Minimum wage guarantees
• Workplace safety legislation
• Mandatory unemployment insurance
• Outlawing of child labor
• Workplace-centered tax collection legislation
• Abolition of slavery, indenture, and heavily regulation of apprenticeship
• Transference of workplace training to the regulated school
• Gender equality legislation
• Banning of hiring practices that lead to disparate racial, gender, and sexual orientation impact

The trouble with this story is that it did not actually end any of these practices in the world. It simply displaced many of the older labor patterns into the ‘third world,’ which is where the West shoves all the practices that it finds aesthetically and morally displeasing to make their own countries more appealing to their moral aesthetics.

On occasion, there is a temporary moral craze about labor practices overseas, but those crazes are always short-lived, because the only way that liberalism can be maintained is by shunting the necessary labor that goes into supporting it out of sight, into foreign countries.

The shunting of these labor practices overseas creates a pervasive sense of guilt on the part of those inculcated into the higher strata of liberal spirituality, but part of that guilt can be abrogated by importing more third world inhabitants into living in the purer, more moral states which they inhabit.

Making a great show of how ‘anti-racist’ and ‘tolerant’ these liberals are makes up for their denial of the unpleasant (to their sensibilities) work must go in to supporting their shining cities, which are not really all that shining at all when judged against the great cities of traditional Europe.

The moral pretenses of the progressive labor theology are coming undone financially, as it becomes more difficult to maintain the currency-and-bond schemes, redistribution, and enormous global supply chains which mandate an incoherent, insupportable foreign policy.

In order to adapt to the failure of this set of religious beliefs which tries to shunt all the ‘dirty’ labor onto lower castes of foreigners, we have to learn to accept that some practices which we have long considered morally abhorrent are really not so bad after all.

We should also recognize that many of the theological planks motivating the labor laws were never supportable either in law or in reality. Ask any salaried worker if they have a ’40-hour work week.’ There is a good chance that such a work week is a legal fiction for them. Schools are not preparing people for labor, but stuffing their heads with nonsense ideology and immorality. Nor are schools appropriate institutions for preparing people to be laborers.

Welfare is morally corrosive as compared to labor. We have to re-learn to be accepting of social arrangements that are often permanent and hierarchical, rather than holding the pretense that we are all equal market participants.

This is the most profound challenge in handling labor issues today: almost every single thinking person in the West has accepted without question every plank of liberalism, while denying vociferously all the loopholes that make the pretense feasible. Liberals have turned away from the working classes of their own countries by pretending to have abolished the working man.

Pointing out that this is not true, and can never be true, punctures a pervasive and false world view. Providing a plausible vision for a society in which more people have legally and economically feasible roles would relieve much of the broadly-felt anxiety throughout the Western world, in which realism has died in favor of the promotion of various dreams which have little to do with the real world in which we must all work and suffer together.

That those roles are liable to be highly stratified, unequal, and unfairly distributed across lines of race and gender makes it more difficult to advance, but it must be advanced in any case.

It’s an old historian’s saying that sound money and morals are intimately connected: that when the sovereign debases the currency, the public morals also become debauched. Which one causes the other might not be a terribly important question to tease out, but nonetheless, I would like to reason out why this must be.

Sound money is of a common weight. It contains as much valuable material as it says that it does. It is held as something worthy of trust, even internationally, without the need to refer to any treaties or legal statutes. It is what it is, and what it is can be objectively assayed.

The idiom is used because a common coin makes a certain, distinct sound when struck, identical to that of its sister-coins, so that when you drop one, she sings the same tune as her siblings.

Money is a tool of calculation used in trade. When we make calculations, it is better that they be accurate than they be inaccurate, because we use those calculations to inform our economic decisions. Should we buy a pound of butter today, or wait until tomorrow? What is the price of butter? What is impacting the price of butter? When the currency is a stable unit, these questions become solely about the unit in question, rather than complex monetary matters.

When we use imprecise units in calculation, we must harm the quality of our calculations, and thereby harm the quality of our decision-making processes. It harms our ability to coordinate with the surrounding society in a way that consistently produces positive-sum exchanges .

A currency of fluctuating character, in which what the unit is changes by the day or by the hour, makes it so that economic relationships past the immediate circle of trust are continually not as they seem to be. Further, trades can subjectively appear to be ‘bad trades’ after the fact due to monetary fluctuations that had nothing to do with the trustworthiness of either trading partner.

This becomes especially obvious in our modern foreign exchange market, in which companies that do not hedge effectively can suffer enormous costs that had nothing to do with anything besides purely monetary-financial fluctuations, which do not occur in a sound money international system.

The other major issue with a fluctuating monetary standard is that it adds risk to the accumulation of savings. It systematically punishes prudence and future-orientation in order to encourage the frequency of exchanges in the economy.

Exchanges with high frequency do not necessarily result in better quality trades when assessed over the long term.

When we think about this in the most basic terms — that of a person thinking over a significant purchase — it’s possible to conjecture that most purchases that are well-researched are more likely to result in trades that both parties believe were good. When both parties spend time determining one another’s interests, when both understand the terms of the trade, and understand the alternatives, the risk involved in the exchange decreases.

Soft money systems, especially those involving a currency that’s rapidly depreciating, creates incentives for people to make many poorly-considered purchases instead. They purchase items on ‘impulse’ that may not be especially durable, that may not meet their requirements or desires, that may be at the wrong price.

However, when a state earns money from each transaction through a sales tax, its members will have a strong desire to encourage these frequently-made, ill-considered consumer purchases. When there is an income tax, the state will want to encourage people to work for their entire lives, spending imprudently, because it can tax both of those more effectively than it can tax savings and investments, especially when those investments result in the accumulation of physical capital equipment, antiques, relics, or hoards which can be unwieldy to seize.

While a sound currency is a means of encouraging prudence throughout a society, its opposite encourages graft and impulsiveness. Which aspect encourages the other is less relevant than making the traditional argument in favor of prudence and foresight in all things.

From the WSJ on the plummeting business ownership rate among the young:

Roughly 3.6% of households headed by adults younger than 30 owned stakes in private companies, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of recently released Federal Reserve data from 2013. That compares with 10.6% in 1989—when the central bank began collecting standard data on Americans’ incomes and net worth—and 6.1% in 2010.

There are perhaps some other factors at work not mentioned by this article. I can suggest some reasons as to why this has happened.

Number one, there are not enough qualified customers for anyone, anywhere.

Number two, there is a lot of competition to deal with, either international or domestic.

Number three, the entrepreneurial community, perhaps with the exception of institutions like the Kauffman foundation, are excessively focused on the world of venture capital rather than the more common world of more conventional startup companies that have no intention of climbing up to the public markets.

Number four, millennials are terrible.

Additionally, Sarbanes-Oxley, held as the usual culprit, really does a lot of damage to the ability of companies to access the big capital markets without a lot of private investment to get there. Jim has written frequently about how much damage that Sarbanes-Oxley has has done to accounting standards in the US.

Low interest rates also greatly damage the ability of people to save and re-invest those savings into new businesses.

The Journal’s findings run counter to the widely held stereotype of 20-somethings as entrepreneurial risk-takers.

The stereotype exists because PR people created it, because it dazzles people, because it fills movie seats, but not because it’s actually true in most situations. The average successful entrepreneur is a mid-to-late career professional with extensive connections in both the financial world and the corporate world in their area of expertise.

Even the famous Gilded Age entrepreneurs tended to take some number of years before really starting a company. The romance of the 20-something entrepreneur is a relatively new one, and it does tend to be a romance rather than a work of nonfiction.

Young entrepreneurs also often have extensive connections, through their family or their extended university network, which tend to never make it into the press releases, because that ruins the Horatio Alger narrative that amuses Americans so much. There is no level playing field. And that’s just fine. But Americans like to pretend that there is.

The WSJ and countless other publications like to focus on raising money or getting loans, but I would say that it’s all bullshit. You can’t act all google-eyed when entrepreneurs behave exactly as what Hayek would tell you that they would: savings must exist before investment can happen.

When you try to get around the saving process by printing money and handing it to investors, you create unsustainable booms that are followed by inevitable busts.

This has happened, will continue to happen, and will happen forever so long as the monetary policies advocated by the bums at the Journal continue to be pushed.

To finish up, the problem is less one of mindset, which is the typical advice (“just believe in yourself” / “come up with an idea and execute” / “build a prototype and raise money” / “buy lunch for one new person a day”) and is more one of some combination of inborn talent, skill, and financial means. Focusing instead on temperament (‘hard work’) flatters the egalitarian world-view.