Don’t forget to celebrate capital on Labor Day, too

FEE's Lawrence W. Reed writes, "Labor is essential to our standard of living. We don’t live in a Garden of Eden, so if we all quit working most of us would starve in a matter of weeks or months.

Labor is ennobling because it’s an important source of such values as self-esteem, personal fulfillment, responsibility, accomplishment, and voluntary cooperation. It’s both a vehicle and an outlet for our talents and ambitions. Good parents instinctively teach their children that work is a virtue and a benefit, while idleness and laziness are to be avoided.

But all of that could also be said of another vital ingredient in our standard of living—capital. Most of us would starve without it. Creating it and then deploying it to increase material wealth is ennobling just as much as labor is, and for the same reasons. The creator and user of capital is furthering his talents and ambitions in the process. And every parent who tells his child to mow the lawn hopes he’ll do it with a piece of capital equipment like a lawn mower instead of his teeth.

Any good economist will tell you that as factors of production, labor and capital are not only indispensable but hugely dependent upon each other as well."

Read the entire column here.