Why I Don’t Celebrate Labor Day, especially 2021

The inspiration for the first American Labor Day came from an alliance between the American Federation of Labor (AFL), craft unions, and local central labor federations in 1882. Waves of strikes followed lasting through the middle of the 1890s, reaching a crescendo that called out the police, and ultimately the army, to control the situation. The Pullman Strike, led by future Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs in 1894, was crushed, and Debs was imprisoned for his involvement. The problem was being pushed to a breaking point.

In the Northeastern United States the unions and federations had traditions of summer holidays, and the government decided a day for labor, where beer drinking and family fun was the plan of the day, would help quell the unrest. Shortly after the end of the Pullman Strike, Democrat President Grover Cleveland rushed a bill recognizing Labor Day through Congress. The Democrats had been bruised by the fact that they were largely behind calling in the police and army, and needed a way to mend fences.

Not a single elected official in Congress voted against this measure.

President Cleveland chose the September date in order to set the American holiday off from European Mayday. An AFL resolution of 1909 declared the first Sunday to be the proper Labor Day, and eventually all States and the District of Columbia affirmed the holiday status for their residents. In 1968 Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. The act moved several federal holidays, including Labor Day, to Mondays, and Labor Day has been celebrated on the first Monday of September ever since.

Labor Day is supposed to be a celebration of the worker, and in that celebration the laborer is rewarded with a special day off for his labors. Tradition has added cook-outs, trips to vacation spots, and just about anything else you can throw in the mix. For some, Labor Day even marks the end of summer. For socialism, Labor Day is the one day of the year that Marx’s claim of wage slavery and class struggle is recognized in America.

Labor Unions, being a part of the mix when it came to bringing about laws to protect the workers, existed for the purpose of collectively representing the interests of the workforce, bargaining with employers in order to improve the rates of pay and other conditions of employment. The right of workers to form unions has been an important part of our history. But these unions have abandoned their original intent, and have become political entities and money laundering operations for the Democrat Party. They are too liberal, too corrupt, or too authoritarian over their members.

Today’s unions are aggressively supported by the leftist commie Democrats, and the politicians use their influence with labor leaders to force rank-and-file union members to support socialist causes and left-wing candidates financially, despite the fact that those members may strongly and unequivocally oppose those causes and candidates.

In addition to the Marxist impact that unions wield, they have also adversely affected our economic system, demanding rates of pay, benefit packages, and lifetime pensions from corporations that are ultimately unsustainable when it comes to maintaining such demands over the long run. These benefits for the workers force companies into financial difficulty. Rather than recognize the problem as being of their own doing, unions push for more pay and more benefits, until finally the host collapses under the weight of the persistent attacks by the parasitic labor unions.  In the end, however, that is the goal.  The private industry is the enemy in a Marxist construct, so pushing a privately owned company over the cliff financially is simply par for the course, and moves America even closer to its, according to the purveyors of the whole thing, eventual communist condition.

Government labor unions, like SEIU, have even become thuggish strong-arms of the Marxist Democrat Party, using their muscle to influence the vote, and to bully any opposition to progressive policies.

Now, as the socialist policies following the sub-prime mortgage culture, and doubled down during the COVID manufactured crisis, has collapsed our economy; and as heavy spending in Washington is counted in the trillions of dollars rather than the billions, especially with the new Biden Administration, through which they are efficiently and effectively wrecking our economy, Labor Day has a bittersweet aura about it. Not only is a high unemployment rate the new normal, but people don’t even want to work.  Despite the climb of wages even for entry-level jobs, government assistance and a promise of a government-sponsored universal income have left the younger generation in a position of being unwilling to go get a job, and perfectly comfortable at home with their parents.  Corporations are finding themselves in deeper trouble under the onslaught of the collective bargaining agreements forced upon them by the liberal labor unions, and the reality that they have to do to keep who they have because a new workforce is unwilling to participate.

So, today, socialism on Labor Day is being celebrated as the country continues its collapse under the back-breaking weight of the labor unions, and the hard left socialist policies of the Democrat Party. And yet there are people out there celebrating the madness. Celebrating the rise of big government socialism in this country.

Historically, liberalism, wherever and whenever it is tried, fails; ultimately, in the long run, the producers will fall into a failed eventuality, leaving he shelves empty and the consumers wondering what happened.

Labor Day, while a socialism-influenced day for the workers, could become something else if only we were willing to make it so.  We could be using Labor Day to celebrate America’s greatness, or even exchange it for September 17 (which is Constitution Day) so that we can celebrate our history as one being populated by rugged individualism, hard-working folks who have been self-reliant and who have been utilizing our free market to achieve a better life through their labors, and opportunities.

I get it.  We enjoy Labor Day as an opportunity to take a break from the daily grind, and get a little back for the hard work. We spend the entire year working for a fair day’s pay for a good day’s work, while hoping to keep most of what we produce. Then, on Labor Day, it’s like we get a quick thank you, and a full belly at a Bar-B-Que.

Every working day of every year we go out and make a living.  We do what we can to produce enough wages for our family to survive. Taking care of one’s family is one way to exercise our individualism. Despite the economic dire we seem to be surrounded by we want to do what it takes to produce good wages through good labor. I, myself, have been a military man, a banker, a salesman, a financial adviser, a city government worker, a construction worker, a truck driver and a constitutionalist. Each job I have had was not my dream job (except maybe what I do now with the Constitution, including two radio programs and classes I teach).

As a fierce individual, I was as a younger man always willing to change careers, even if it meant doing something I was not real hip about.

It’s a part of doing whatever it takes, being responsible, and being a productive American.

Throughout history we have have proven over and over that hard work, and self-motivation results in a successful life. It is because we live in a free country based on individual liberty that we have been able to pursue the various opportunities such a system has to offer.  

The Democrats, however, disagree.  President Barack Obama once said, “What if the person has no bootstraps to pull on?”

President Biden questioned what an American is, and even went so far as to say that nobody could define it.

Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, after visiting the United States from France, was amazed at how well American Society operated without government influence.  He saw a society of rugged individuals who used only the local government to worry about local issues.  The federal government stayed out of the picture, keeping itself occupied with only its authorized powers that largely deal with external issues, or items that concern the protection, promotion, or preservation of the union.

How could it be that Americans were so capable of surviving while refusing assistance from the government?

The socialists who have infiltrated American Government does not understand this mentality. They believe that nothing ought to occur without the government’s consent, or administration. They believe government alone can create jobs out of thin air, and that our jobs should be performed not because we desire to make a better life, but because our contribution to the collective is beneficial to the common good.

Government does not create any jobs that have any positive impact on the economy. The liberal left commie Democrats claims we must increase consumption, as we let go of manufacturing and production.  We must get people to buy things, and let China put together all of our products.  But, from an economics standpoint, what good is increased consumption without an increase in production? Business owners create jobs, and goods. Sometimes individuals create their own jobs with an entrepreneurial spirit. Large corporations also create jobs.  When there is production, employment increases, and then consumption naturally rises, but, hopefully, with the purchasing power aimed at American goods.  Don’t get me wrong, trade with other countries is a good thing, but total consumption without any production is a recipe for disaster.  Especially, when you have a government determined to simply regulate, collect money, and then redistribute those monies to people who, thanks to the hand-outs, don’t wish to participate in the production of any goods or services.

The private sector is what encourages economic growth. The free market makes an economy healthy and wealthy by encouraging profit, and innovation. That is how America became the richest nation in the world in the first place. We did it with free market capitalism.  If we abandon what works, as the Democrats are pushing for, people starve, people die, and the shelves are empty.

As the economy suffers under the socialist grip of the Biden Administration, and their iron grip on America through Marxist policies largely driven by the COVID scamdemic, we are seeing raises and benefit increases in the government sector while the unemployment rate continues to rise along with the rise in prices and the collapse of the supply chain.  Gas prices are high, food prices are rising dramatically, and when Americans are at risk the Biden Administration has shown its willingness to leave them to be slaughtered by foreign adversaries who hate American Liberty, and our prosperous past.

If I was to celebrate Labor Day it would be to celebrate the hard worker because it is the individuals who toil day in and day out in the private sector that makes the economy grow, not some faceless bureaucrat somewhere on Capitol Hill, or a confused President who can’t find the door. It is the taxpayer, not the tax collector, that makes our republic great. It has never been government. It has never been bureaucracy. The U.S. Constitution was designed to limit the powers of the federal government for a reason. The founding fathers knew if too much power was obtained by the government, people like the socialists of the Democrat Party would take possession of the government and try to change the American Form of Government.

On Labor Day, if we are to celebrate it, let’s celebrate individualism, hard work, and the real America. 

Instead, what we see is a celebration of the working class; a fist-raised determination to kill what America has always stood for so as to enable a rise of a communist revolution in America.

— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary