Several years ago, aspiring presidential hopeful John Edwards spoke about there being “two Americas”. Basically, the gist of his assertion was that there was one America for the rich and one America for the poor. The years since have seen variations on this theme from the 1% vs the rest, rich whites vs poor minorities, the disappearance of the middle class, etc. However, I would posit that the real economic divide in this country is increasingly between those who take life seriously and those who don’t.

In 2009, a Brookings Institution study found that Americans who finished high school, acquired a full-time job and waited until age 21 to get married before having children had a 98% chance of not ending up in poverty and had a 74% chance of ending up in the middle class (defined as more than $50,000). On the other hand, those who violated all three norms had a 76 percent chance of winding up in poverty and a 7 percent chance of winding up in the middle class. Another study a couple of years ago had the factors as finish high school, don’t have kids before marriage, and (married or not) don’t have kids before the age of 21. This one found a 94% chance of not ending up poor if one does all three things.

Not finishing high school is pretty obviously a way to hinder ones job prospects. High school is one of basic building blocks for having even a basic sort of entry level job. However, I believe that the underlying cause of not finishing high school is often a fundamental lack of seriousness. The average standards of the modern public high school are such that maintaining a pulse and simply showing up can often be all that is required to graduate. While a rigorous high school curriculum that one failed to finish could often of course mean that one simply, despite ones best efforts, was not intellectually gifted enough to complete it, the simple fact is that what often passes for a high school curriculum is not terribly difficult. Failing to finish, is often likely due to simply not taking it seriously enough to show up.

As for having kids at a young age or out-of-wedlock, the availability of birth control mitigates against a large number truly accidental births. The fact that over 40% of all live births in the United States in 2012 were out-of-wedlock is simply an indictment. It simply isn’t reasonable to suppose that almost half the births were the result of ‘oops’. Having a child is the most important duty that a civilization and our species assigns. Without children, our species which has survived for millennia can’t continue, and children who don’t grow up as functional adults (as so many children who grow up without fathers don’t) won’t be equipped to allow our civilization to survive either. It is a decision and an act that deserves to be taken seriously, and the over 40% number is an indication that it isn’t.

If people don’t take the decision to finish high school or to establish themselves before having children seriously, it is not a hard stretch to suppose that they don’t take other decisions (getting more education, upgrading their skill set, saving money, managing their money, etc.) seriously either. While simply not ending up poor isn’t the same as saying that one will be rich; not ending up poor is not an unreasonable goal to have. It is hardly surprising that a person who doesn’t put much effort into something (say sports) isn’t going to be very good at it. A person who doesn’t take life seriously isn’t going to be very good at it either, and they are going to continue falling further behind those who do take it seriously. And they deserve to.

One of the fads that has sort of taken off in recent years is that of people putting solar panels on their homes. Often, some people balk at buying them when they realize that the loan payment that they have to make will be more than what they currently pay for electricity. If the system could be made cheaper, obviously more people would buy them.

But what does this have to do with political conservatism? The fact is that many of those folks who pound their chests about the Constitution often wonder why people don’t get more exercised about real and imagined constitutional violations. What these individuals fail to understand is that the Constitution was written for a pre-industrial society very different from our own. Specifically, 200 years ago, most people were either farmers or small shopkeepers. In other words, the food on their table came largely from their own efforts or the efforts of those with whom one was acquainted. A king, governor, or other faraway government official who tried to pass a sweeping law to restrict or manipulate the market was going to have a direct and visible impact on the ability of a large swath of the population to put food on their table, and consequently would face overwhelming opposition. Today, if one listens to economic arguments from the right (lower taxes, less business regulation, etc. etc.), they are focused on that swath of the population that is either self-employed or is employed by others but sees the health of the business environment being tied to their own economic well-being.

However, we don’t live in a society any longer where how one lives is almost entirely and visibly a function of one’s own efforts. We live in a society in which the multiple and complex interactions of a multitude of factors determines how one lives on a day-to-day basis. We are dependent on the power company for electricity, the town/city for water and sewer services, and on local government for police and fire services. We are dependent on our boss for a paycheck, and the agendas of other people who we haven’t met as to whether there is even a job in existence at all. And given that most of us have to make 30 years of payments until we even have a roof over our head that we can call our own, most of us cannot be said to be economically free. While some on the right (and sometimes on the left) decry a loss of political freedom (i.e. the NSA, the IRS, etc. etc.), the truth is that most of us have never been truly economically free and independent in the sense that the colonists were when the Constitution was written.

So what does this have to do with solar panels? If those on the right want a modern society that is responsive to, shall we say, traditional constitutional concerns, then they need to find ways to use government to make people less dependent on anyone (including government). Often, the extent of the right’s thinking on this score is to “cut government spending” and “reduce regulation”. Then they fight a (mostly losing) battle to make this happen. But “cutting government spending” is cutting off someone’s paycheck and so the opposition is fierce. However, subsidizing solar panels (for example) is something that would make people less dependent. While solar won’t provide all of a household’s energy needs, it does reduce dependence on an outside power source, and thereby (depending upon where a household lives) increase the economic independence of the household. Further examples of using government to foster some independence would be land use policies that encourage the building of homes where people need to be on wells and a septic system, rather than being dependent city water & sewer. Or, the automatic payroll deduction of taxes can be eliminated and people can save up the $5k, $10k, 20k etc. of taxes that they owe each year and pay it in one installment. The point is that if people have to save up the money rather than having it taken from them bit by bit, they will feel the bite more acutely and perhaps pay attention to what the money is going for. Also, it will keep the government honest as any action the provokes bitter opposition would allow those opposed to refuse to send in their taxes and force the government to spend time and energy chasing down the multitude of tax miscreants. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. But if the right (and sometimes the left) want a country responsive to traditional constitutional concerns, they need to use government to create a more economically independent citizenry whose day-to-day lifestyle is less dependent on others. Subsidizing solar panels is an example of a step towards this goal.

As economists are celebrating a strengthening U.S. economy even as a global slowdown appears to be increasing in likelihood, the last seven years have fundamentally changed our understanding of the American economy. One of the lessons that we have learned is that it is possible to have high unemployment and many employers unable to find employees at the same time. Also, we can have immigration (illegal) continuing as people come here looking for work along with millions of native born Americans unable to find it. What explains this? While political partisan have their favorite explanations and scapegoats, I believe that the answer is more structural than political.

The primary factor is that the nature of work itself has changed. In economic models that assume a flexible (and free) labor market, people can move from one job to another and from one industry to another fairly easily. In the pre-industrial and early industrial society, this was true for a lot of jobs. Working on a farm or in a factory was the sort of job that could be taught fairly easily, and to the extent that the jobs were repetitive, a person could master them within a few days or weeks. Loss of a job at the automobile factory could be easily replaced by a job at the soup canning factory. A job milking cows at one farm could be replaced by milking cows at another farm. My grandfather, with no special skills, left his father’s farm in Illinois and worked for various farmers, traveled to Wyoming where he worked as a ranch hand, and then moved on to Seattle where he intended to get a job with the fishing fleet, until the army recruiter caught up with him. His experience was not that atypical for many men.

Today, however, the labor market is much more specialized and movement between jobs is much harder. For example, while a person can learn a job, so much of what makes a person effective is experience in that job. An auto mechanic can be taught how to tighten bolts fairly quickly and learn the basics of how engines work, but troubleshooting what is wrong with an engine can take years as he builds up a reserve of experience to know that when an Audi engine sounds one way, it can mean 1 of 3 things, or that when a small Toyota truck engine sounds another way it can mean 1 of 4 things. Or a worker at ABC Company can spend 10 years learning how to be effective specifically at ABC Company. However, retraining an auto mechanic to be a plumber means that he now has to spend years building up a new reserve of experience dealing with plumbing problems. Or the worker at ABC Company may find that his skills are very ABC Company-specific and don’t translate well to a similar position at XYZ Company. Thanks to the internet, companies can now look to hire people with exactly the skill set they are looking for, rather than people who have kind-a, sort-a, similar skill sets who can theoretically be trained into the job that the employer really wants done. What this does to the labor market is that many people who lose their job have a very difficult time finding a similar job. The result is that you end up with a group of discouraged people who drop out of the labor force, or they are forced to take other jobs at reduced pay, or they are forced to start their career over completely in another industry (at reduced pay).

Going forward, while government and social institutions will pretend that they can fix this problem (and consume large volumes of taxpayer cash for doing so), they really can’t. A specialized labor force has delivered high quality customer service and has produced an iphone world where many things are delivered when you want, in the quantity you want, and with the quality you expect. While the system has been disruptive on a personal and social level, is not, along with the internet, going anywhere anytime soon. Consequently, we can expect a mismatched labor market to be with us for a long time to come.

With the Obama Administration in its sixth year and with Administration opponents leveling charges of “lawlessness”, it is tempting to view this as just more partisan sniping from predictably partisan people. However, with the economy seemingly on the mend, “lawlessness” as an issue is easily seen as a distraction from what is really important (economic growth). But the truth of the matter is that “lawlessness”, especially when it involves the government, is even more important than a single jobs report or GDP number.

The first problem with confronting supposed lawlessness of the Administration is that many don’t see it this way. They see a President confronting what they regard to be unprecedented opposition from the opposing political party, and being forced to take action to solve pressing problems. Some concede that perhaps Obama is going too far with some of his actions, but that is usually excused by the hardened political opposition that Obama faces.

What these defenders of certain questionable (from a legal perspective) actions of the Administration fail to take into account is that legal stability is a prerequisite for the economic strength that America has historically had. The questionable actions of the Obama administration didn’t begin with unilaterally (and illegally) suspending controversial parts of Obamacare, or his questionably legal executive actions on immigration, but rather his action during the GM bankruptcy which overthrew a couple of centuries of bankruptcy law which says that first priority creditors get paid in full before second priority creditors get paid anything. In the negotiations, Obama used the power of government to force first priority creditors to accept 29 cents on the dollar while second priority creditors (such as the United Auto Workers, a campaign supporter of Obama and the Democrats) recovered substantially all that it was owed.

The problem with actions such as these is that they undermine the basis of trust and belief that legal contracts will be enforceable as written. Businesses and other economic actors make decisions based on laws that are written, and the belief that those laws will be enforced by whoever is in power without prejudice. An Administration that refuses to enforce laws that it doesn’t like, or enforces laws in certain cases (where it likes the outcome) but not in others (where it doesn’t like the outcome), or invents rights and privileges for certain controversial groups that Congress refused to authorize, undermines this trust.

The economy of the U.S. is based on people/businesses making long-term investments. Buying a house is a long-term investment. Building a factory is a long-term investment. Starting a partnership to build a business is a long-term investment. When people start to doubt that their contracts will be enforced, or that the likelihood of that enforcement will depend on the unknowable political situation existing at some specified point in the future, they will make fewer of these investments. The result will be lessened economic activity and the U.S. will be poorer for it. Nor is this idle speculation. We can see the result of societies operating with politicized extra-legal actions/ politicized law enforcement around the world. We don’t really see world class economies operating in this bunch.

The other problem collectively with Obama’s actions is that they seem to show a pattern of behavior (as opposed to a one-off response to a national emergency like 9/11, or even the market melt-down in 2008 when it appeared that the global financial system was about to collapse). A pattern of behavior has the potential to change the culture, especially when partisans for that side excuse (and some cases praise) these excesses as desirable, because they support the ends (ends justify means). The problem is that the other side may (and the longer this goes on, will) conclude that they are justified using the same tactics to achieve their ends, ends which they are as fervently attached to as Obama’s supporters are to their ends. Or, normal people will conclude that the law is only there to be manipulated by the powerful and will feel morally empowered to ignore the law where it is inconvenient (ie. to cheat on their taxes, the way those in Greece do today). Neither of these outcomes bode well for economic strength and stability.

Simply put, following and enforcing the law, especially when you don’t specifically like the outcome (or it is politically inconvenient), is a prerequisite for a strong and stable economy. A system in which the law, or application thereof, is dependent upon the political interests of the powerful and politically-connected is not one that is going to have what we now know as a first-world economy. While suspending the natural democratic processes temporarily during times of national emergency like WWII or 9/11 may be unavoidable and necessary, it can’t be allowed to become a pattern of behavior without doing serious damage to the system. Maybe suspending parts of Obamacare were desirable as policy (i.e. the law would have been better without those things), but it wasn’t a national emergency. Maybe legalizing millions of illegal aliens is a good policy, but it isn’t a national emergency. Maybe effectively suspending bankruptcy law to benefit the United Auto Workers was good policy, but it wasn’t a national emergency. Those who support this ends justify the means approach are contributing to its normalization. This will ensure its use by the other side when they get in power (and maybe even in a more expansive way), which will result in the destabilization of the basis for a strong, modern economy.