The Division of Labor

A few days ago the seriously mentally challenged columnist David Brooks almost got something right. It does not happen very often, so it is worthy of note.

Brooks chose to expatiate on the concept of the division of labor. You know it from Adam Smith and perhaps David Hume. The most basic treatise on it dates to the late nineteenth century, to the French sociologist Emile Durkheim.

All of these authors are well worth reading. Brooks normally is not.

The division of labor involves specialization. You specialize in producing what you are good at producing and I specialize in producing what I am good at producing. Then we engage in commerce, in free trade where I sell you what I produced in exchange for what you produced.

The alternative is to see life as a zero-sum game, where one person wins and the other loses. Thus, an effort to exploit others, even to steal what they have built.

Naturally, Brooks wants to politicize the issues at hand. He denounces Donald Trump for being opposed to the division of labor and he pretends that senile old Joe Biden, the man who is campaigning on his hatred of what he calls MAGA right winger, can revive the division of labor.

Better yet, Biden says he can heal America’s divisions while he is stoking them.

True enough, Donald Trump suffers from certain mercantilist longings. He has wanted to stop interdepending on China and has wanted to move more manufacturing home. It is called onshoring. It has certainly continued under the Biden presidency.

And yet, in a complex interdependent world this is easier said than done. How much of what used to be exported from China to America is now exported to Vietnam and Mexico, only to fly under America’s tariffs.

In the largest sense, Brooks is trafficking in nonsense. The Trump presidency was defined, I content, by the Abraham Accords. The Biden presidency has been defined by warfare, massacres and serial horrors. 

Moreover, the Biden presidency has seen an explosion of leftist anti-Semitism, a corollary to the left’s anti-Americanism. It is based on the notion that those who have succeeded in America have cheated. That applies to Jews, to Asians and to white people. No division of labor there.

No administration has more clearly supported and sustained this way of opposing free trade than the Biden presidency.

Let us not forget that the concept of the marketplace of ideas, inaugurated when Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. introduced the concept of the free trade in ideas, is the political and academic equivalent of the division of labor.

In today’s academic institutions, from elementary school to college, the basis for education is indoctrination and brainwashing, forcing children to believe the right beliefs, regardless. No free exchange of ideas is allowed. If you reject the prevailing dogma you will be downgraded.

The current dogma has it that the world is divided between oppressors and the oppressed. Oppressors must do penance for their ill-gotten gains. The oppressed must be in constant rebellion against their oppressors. The oppressed have every right to rob convenience stores, with impunity.

Now, Brooks thinks that this is all some Trumpian worldview. He suggests that, to Trump, what is good for immigrants is bad for Americans, and that what is good for white people is bad for black people.

He is grievously wrong. If you ask who thinks that what is good for white people is bad for black people, the answer would be-- radical leftists, the ones who want to attack white supremacists and who rationalize the black crime rate.

In principle, Trump and the right wing embrace capitalism. Now, the Hamas terrorists in Gaza reject capitalism. They do not believe in working together with Israel. They believe in destroying Israel. Their horrors have been visited on Israel during the inept and pathetic Biden administration. 

They seem largely to be the consequence of Biden’s lust for a renewed Iran nuclear deal. As opposed to the Abraham Accords, the Iran nuclear deal is a poison designed to empower the mullahs who refuse to do business with Israel but who only want to destroy it.

As for Brooks, his thinking is not just muddled. It is duplicitous.