A Free Lunch? Fuhgeddaboutdit

The Culture Chronicles

February / March 2008 By: Paul Short Volume 6 Number 1

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Our educational system is clearly failing us. Though I'm concerned about math, science, literature and writing, I'm particularly worried that we are economically illiterate.

Economically speaking, we can't even read Dick and Jane. Our unshakable belief in the free lunch has far-reaching consequences, not the least of which is dysfunctional work environments.

I started thinking of this when I read of the —€˜universal coverage' health proposal that New Mexico's Governor Bill Richardson just proposed. Now our health care system will be designed by the same people who wrote the tax code, and it's inevitable that the two will be similarly convoluted. Employers will be forced to pay the cost of something in which they have no business being involved. Employees will suffer for it.

Economics is the study of the way in which resources are distributed. It comes down to one simple rule: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Every decision comes with a trade off.

Because we don't understand that, we've developed a sense of entitlement about employment. We think we're entitled to a job. Not only that, we're entitled to the job we have now; any change to it means our rights have been violated. We're entitled to corporate-paid health care and paid time off for every imaginable scenario. And if someone in the workplace cracks a joke we don't find funny, we're entitled to have them fired.

In our economic ignorance, we view jobs as static things that exist in static quantities. There's only so much to go around. If you have one, someone else doesn't. If someone in India has a job, it means some American doesn't have one.
As Colonel Sherman T. Potter would say: "Mule Fritters!"

We think that health care will be free if corporations pay for it, but there's a trade: we are giving away the ability to make our own decisions about it.
Corporate bureaucrats will make decisions based on what's right for them, not what's right for us.

We pay for all the things to which we think we're entitled with the Dilbertization of our companies. Every entitlement is another set of decisions made for us instead of by us. It's no wonder then that employees are treated as if they are children with no decision making capability. Our boss has to tell us precisely what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. We don't get to think on the job. Yet, outside the job we make complex decisions about complex issues, from politics to home ownership, and we do a darn good job of it. It creates the attitude that life and work are separate. Outside of work, we're functioning human beings; on the job we're morons.

I hate the concept of "job." It's time to get rid of it.

Let's be clear. Jobs are not real. Companies are not real. Government is not real. We made all these things up. We created the concept of a corporation so that we could organize our economic efforts. But you can't find the corporation. You can find the building where a corporation's employees work, you can find the products it provides, but you can't find the corporation. It doesn't exist. We made it up.

Jobs are not real. They're something we made up so we could divide up work, but we think of jobs as real in the same sense we think of oil or coal as real. Jobs, or economic work, is not limited in any real sense. There is an infinite amount of work we can do —€“ and therefore an infinite number of jobs.

The only real things are people. We can make up different ways of working together. We can make up different rules.

Around the house, we don't have the same sense of entitlement. We do what needs to be done. Yes, we often separate the tasks; around my house I do most of the cooking, while my wife does laundry. But if I have to do laundry or she has to cook, that's what we do. We cross the "job" boundary and do whatever needs to be done.

We need to think of economic work in the same way. Smaller companies tend to be more successful at that —€”there's much less hesitancy about crossing "job" boundaries. People just do what needs to be done, but coerced policies like employer-paid universal health care will force small companies to be more like the fake company Initech in the movie Office Space.

If you want those things to which you feel entitled, you have to live with the trades. If you want your boss to pay for your health care, then don't complain when he treats you like a commodity. You've commoditized yourself. Don't demand a free lunch unless you're ready to pay for it.

Paul Short is CEO of Quadric, Inc., and runs culturechronicles.com.