“Houses of correction” were first established under Elizabeth to punish and reform able-bodied poor who refused to work. A “widespread concern for the habits and behavior of the poor” is often cited as the reason for the poor laws regarding vagrancy and the establishment of facilities to “reform” the idle poor by confining them and forcing them to work at hard labor. But Chambliss reported that “there is little question but that these statutes were designed for one express purpose: to force laborers (whether personally free or unfree) to accept employment at a low wage in order to insure the landowner an adequate supply of labor at a price he could afford to pay.” Such laws clearly reflected the transfer function of government.

In this case, prisons were used as institutions of violent coercion meant to establish work discipline, enforce the work ethic, drive down wages, and thus transfer wealth from poor and working people to landowners.

Prisons served a similar function in the American South after the 13th Amendment was passed. The 13th Amendment prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude, but it makes an exception for those convicted of a crime. This provided a loophole that Southern states quickly implemented in order to preserve slavery. They passed laws known as the Black Codes that criminalized a litany of harmless behaviors specifically for black individuals. Then they imprisoned blacks in large numbers and leased them to businesses and governments to perform slave labor, in what was known as the convict lease system. This was yet another use of prisons and the criminal law as a wealth transfer, this time from former slaves to the state and elite economic interests.

Prisons are still used for the profits of entrenched interest groups today. Sometimes that means transferring wealth from taxpayers to for-profit prison operators like Corrections Corporation of America, GEO Group, and the Management and Training Corporation. Sometimes it means price gouging prisoners and their families through your state granted monopoly on phone calls to prisoners, as Global Tel*Link does. Medical contractors like Corizon profit by providing inadequate medical care after being granted a monopoly in a prison. The agribusiness industry protects their profits by sending activists to prison for calling attention to abusive conditions in their facilities, through ag-gag laws and the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.

But it’s not just for-profit firms that extract wealth from prisoners and the public through the prison industrial complex. Prison guards at “public” prisons are just as much of a concentrated and selfish special interest group. The California prison guards union has pushed prison expansion and draconian “tough on crime” policies in order to ensure their members’ job security. Democrats Dick Durbin and Cheri Bustos praised federal funding for the maximum security Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois on the grounds that it would create jobs. They essentially treat prisons as a make work program for their constituents.

These are just a few of the ways prisons operate as statist wealth transfers to politically connected groups. Like all such transfers, they distort the market, create unseen opportunity costs, and encourage further rent seeking by privileged interests. But prisons are a particularly brutal institution to use for wealth extraction. The costs of prisons are not merely economic. Prisons rob people of their liberty, subject them to rape, bake them to death, scald their skin off, and institutionalize psychological torture. Prisons should be understood as another form of what Bastiat called legal plunder, and a particularly brutal one at that.

“Work!” –Maynard G. Krebs, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, circa 1960

From the start, Americans have had a love-hate relationship with work. We tend to rhapsodize about labor, but, at least in our personal lives, we praise labor-saving devices and condemn “make-work” schemes. (Unfortunately, public policy is another matter.) Emerson and other pillars of American culture — whom for these purposes I will call the moralists — associated work with dignity and purpose. Historian Thaddeus Russell teaches us that when the slaves were freed from the Southern plantations, they were pounded with the gospel of work. “Slaves generally considered work to be only a means to wealth, but after emancipation, Americans told them that work — even thankless, nonremunerative work — was a virtue in itself,” Russell writes in A Renegade History of the United States. He reports that the Freedman’s Bureau admonished the former slaves, “You must be industrious and frugal. It is feared that some will act from the mistaken notion that Freedom means liberty to be idle. This class of persons, known to the law as vagrants, must at once correct this mistake.” Russell notes that “thousands of black men were rounded up for refusing to work.”

The message was that work is not just an honest and proper way to obtain the necessities of life without mooching off others. The activity in itself is a source of goodness, even saintliness, and should be engaged in unceasingly, taking time out only for eating sleeping, other bodily functions, and tending to one’s family duties. One didn’t work to live; one lived to work.

Whites had been subjected to the same harangue for ages: work was a reward in itself, apart from remuneration, because “idle hands are the devil’s playground.”

We must be clear that the message was not merely that work could be a source of satisfaction apart from the money. The message amounted to a vilification of leisure, indeed, of consumption. (Some conservatives seem to hold this view.)

In a good illustration of the “Bootleggers and Baptists” phenomenon, the moralists were joined in their labor evangelism by employers, who needed uncomplaining workers willing to spend long hours in unpleasant factories. People preferred leisure and looked for every opportunity to indulge in it. Hence, “Saint Monday,” which, as Russell notes, Benjamin Franklin sneered at because it “is as duly kept by our working people as Sunday; the only difference is that instead of employing their time cheaply in church, they are wasting it expensively in the alehouse.”

We get a different picture of labor from the economists. The classical economists and the Austrians (at least from Ludwig von Mises onward) stressed the unpleasantness — the “disutility” and even sad necessity — of labor. Adam Smith and other early economists equated work with “toil,” which is not a word with positive connotations. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith writes,

The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it and who wants to dispose of it, or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people. What is bought with money or with goods is purchased by labour, as much as what we acquire by the toil of our own body. That money, or those goods, indeed, save us this toil.

Frédéric Bastiat carried on this tradition by emphasizing that exchange arises out of a wish to be spared labor. One accepts the terms of an exchange only if obtaining the desired good in other ways would be more arduous.

For Bastiat and other early economists, exchange was the foundation of society. “Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges,” Destutt de Tracy wrote. It follows that the penchant for economizing effort  — the preference for leisure — is a beneficent feature of human nature. (Somewhere, the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein has a character say that the wheelbarrow must have been invented by a lazy person.)

Further, Bastiat explained, technological advancement is valued precisely because it substitutes the free services of nature for human toil. In his uncompleted magnum opus, Economic Harmonies, he wrote,

It is characteristic of progress (and, indeed, this is what we mean by progress) to transform onerous utility into gratuitous utility; to decrease [exchange-]value without decreasing utility; and to enable all men, for fewer pains or at smaller cost, to obtain the same satisfactions.

By onerous utility, he meant utility bought with sweat and strain; by gratuitous utility, he meant utility provided by nature free of charge. When ingenuity is applied to the making of a good, “its production has in large measure been turned over to Nature. It is obtained for less expenditure of human effort; less service is performed as it passes from hand to hand.” Needless to say, this is a good thing. Of course, some of the freed-up time will be devoted to producing other goods that were unaffordable yesterday, but some will be devoted to consumption, or leisure. The proportion set aside for leisure will likely increase as living standards rise (assuming government interference doesn’t deny workers their rewards for higher productivity).

The goal of all men, in all their activities, is to reduce the amount of effort in relation to the end desired and, in order to accomplish this end, to incorporate in their labor a constantly increasing proportion of the forces of Nature.… [T]hey invent tools or machines, they enlist the chemical and mechanical forces of the elements, they divide their labors, and they unite their efforts. How to do more with less, is the eternal question asked in all times, in all places, in all situations, in all things.

(Bastiat elaborates on this in his remarkable chapter 8, “Private Property and Common Wealth,” which was the subject of my article “Bastiat on the Socialization of Wealth.”)

Bastiat agreed with Adam Smith, who wrote, “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.” Hence the economists rejected the moralists’ view that production is an end in itself.

We see this same lack of enthusiasm for work in John Stuart Mill, an influential classical economist as well as philosopher. In 1849 Thomas Carlyle published an article lamenting that the end of slavery in Great Britain meant that white people couldn’t make sure that blacks worked enough (for whites). (“Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, December 1849.) Indeed, this is why Carlyle dubbed economics, which was premised on free labor, “the dismal science.”

Mill wrote an anonymous response (“The Negro Question”) in the following issue. He protested Carlyle’s suggestion that blacks were meant to serve white people. Then, as I wrote previously,

Mill … turned to “the gospel of work,” praised by Carlyle, “which, to my mind, justly deserves the name of a cant.” He attacked the idea that work is an end in itself, rather than merely a means. “While we talk only of work, and not of its object, we are far from the root of the matter; or, if it may be called the root, it is a root without flower or fruit.… In opposition to the ‘gospel of work,’ I would assert the gospel of leisure, and maintain that human beings cannot rise to the finer attributes of their nature compatibly with a life filled with labor … the exhausting, stiffening, stupefying toil of many kinds of agricultural and manufacturing laborers. To reduce very greatly the quantity of work required to carry on existence is as needful as to distribute it more equally; and the progress of science, and the increasing ascendency of justice and good sense, tend to this result.

In Mises and Murray Rothbard we find similar views: work is to be economized. Mises devoted an entire chapter in Socialism to refuting the state socialists’ claim that work is unpleasant only because of the market economy, and that it would be blissful if private property were abolished and the market were replaced with state central planning. Under any system, Mises wrote, labor may afford a small (and insignificant, he thought) measure of direct satisfaction, but that soon passes. Yet people must keep working to obtain its indirect satisfactions, the goods it enables them to buy.

Mises may overstate his case here, as did his mentor Carl Menger in the other direction (in 1871, mind you): “The occupations of by far the great majority of men afford enjoyment, are thus themselves true satisfactions of needs, and would be practiced, although perhaps in smaller measure or in a modified manner, even if men were not forced by lack of means to exert their powers.”

Mises mocked the state socialists by putting scare quotes around the words joy of labor, asking, “If work gives satisfaction per se why is the worker paid? Why does he not reward the employer for the pleasure which the employer gives him by allowing him to work?”

What people often take for the “joy of labor,” he said, was actually the satisfaction of finishing a task, the “pleasure in being free of work rather than pleasure in the work itself.” Mises quoted the medieval monks who appended to the manuscript copies they had just painstakingly produced, “Laus tibi sit Christe, quoniam liber explicit iste” (which he translated inexactly as“Praise the Lord because the work is completed”).

For Rothbard, leisure is a “desirable good,” a consumer good, which people will forgo only if at the margin the fruits of a unit of labor undertaken are preferred to the satisfaction that a unit of leisure would afford. Rothbard acknowledged that labor can be satisfying and wrote,

In cases where the labor itself provides positive satisfactions, however, these are intertwined with and cannot be separated from the prospect of obtaining the final product. Deprived of the final product, man will consider his labor senseless and useless, and the labor itself will no longer bring positive satisfactions. Those activities which are engaged in purely for their own sake are not labor but are pure play, consumers’ goods in themselves. Play, as a consumers’ good, is subject to the law of marginal utility as are all goods, and the time spent in play will be balanced against the utility to be derived from other obtainable goods. In the expenditure of any hour of labor, therefore, man weighs the disutility of the labor involved (including the leisure forgone plus any dissatisfaction stemming from the work itself) against the utility of the contribution he will make in that hour to the production of desired goods (including future goods and any pleasure in the work itself), i.e., with the value of his marginal product. [Emphasis added.]

Rothbard’s mentor, Mises, made a fundamental point about human action when he wrote, “Even if labor were a pure pleasure it would have to be used economically, since human life is limited in time, and human energy is not inexhaustible.”

That being the case, I will reserve further thoughts on work for another time. Meanwhile, Laus tibi sit Christe, quoniam liber explicit iste!

Our betters in the Food and Drug Administration know better. They know what my teachers and peers did not, and are prepared to implement a nationwide cookie-cutter pain management plan for every single one of three hundred million Americans. In their infinite wisdom, they have decided to make hydrocodone/acetaminophen combinations — the most well-known of which is Vicodin — harder to come by and to require patients to see their doctors — and pay for an office visit, of course — every time they need a refill of these fairly mild drugs.

And mild drugs they are. Opioid pain killers are measured by how they compare to morphine taken orally. Hydrocodone is 1.5 times as potent as oral morphine, which compares very poorly to some of our modern pain killers, such as hydromorphone (Dilaudid) — five times as potent — and fentanyl, which delivered via patch on the skin is eighty times as potent as morphine. And in Vicodin, a mere 5mg of this weak tea opioid is combined with a standard, over the counter dose of acetaminophen (Tylenol) to provide a pretty mild analgesic effect.

But of course it’s not their pain relieving power that concerns our betters. The real issue is that some people use these pills to feel good, and sometimes go too far and suffer for it. No one is shoving pills down anyone’s throat. These unfortunates are taking the pills because they want to, because medicating themselves into oblivion seems like their best option. But in true progressive fashion, rather than wonder what it is about the suffocating state capitalist system that drives people to such fates, our betters in the FDA would rather plunge even more innocents into misery in the name of preventing a few of their victims from using chemicals to escape for a little while.

We can tell it’s pleasure that is the problem, as some of the most dangerous drugs on the market are available freely over the counter even to small children. Tylenol, for instance, sends 80,000 people to the emergency room every year, but it does not make anyone high, so it does not draw the interest of our Puritan masters.

Among the dangers lurking in the doctor’s office and the hospital Vicodin still does not impress — the most lethal thing that happens in our health care system is not people getting high but doctors and nurses screwing up. 98,000 of our fellow Americans die from simple mistakes every year, mistakes often made by overworked nursing staff on inadequately staffed floors run at a substantial profit by politically connected businesses and executives paying themselves absurd salaries. But this too does not exercise our progressive friends, as that most insidious of dangers — people feeling good — is not here lurking.

No, our progressive friends in the FDA and the Obama administration want to save you from the danger that you might use a chemical to feel good, might like the experience, and might want to repeat it. And they will not even blink at the thought of trampling over the care of people in pain to stop us from getting high. Suffering, after all, purifies the soul, while demon pleasures tempt us away from the puritan, progressive path.