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Happy Labor Day! — 11 Comments

  1. July Fourth is its early peak, with the promise of many long light-filled days ahead.

    I dunno. June 21 –the first day of summer each year– really bums me out, because from that day onward, all the way to December 22, the days get shorter. And since I live above the 45th parallel, it’s particularly noticeable. But, then, the winter solstice gives the solace that each day thereafter all the way to June 21 will be longer than the day before. So there’s that.

  2. But Labor Day is summer’s last gasp,…

    That was always my take as well. The last great blast of summer, as I’ve always thought of it.

    The only difference is that now, thirty plus years removed from high school, the dread of heading back to class is only a vague memory.

  3. For perspective on how far we’ve fallen, here is a perspective on some labor laws from 1910.

    For instance, it is a primary principle that an Eng-
    lish free man of full age, under no disability, may control
    his person and his personal activities. He can work six, or
    four, or eight, or ten, or twelve, or twenty-four, or no hours
    a day if he choose, and any attempt to control him is impos-
    sible under the simplest principle of Anglo-Saxon liberty.

    As for where all the interference in labor relations comes from:

    You can have regulation of the hours
    of labor of a woman of full age in general employments, by
    court decision, in three States (Massachusetts, Oregon, and
    Illinois), … but the Oregon case,
    decided both by the State Supreme Court and by the Fed-
    eral Court in so far as the Fourteenth Amendment was
    concerned, after most careful and thorough discussion and
    reasoning, reasserted the principle that a woman is the ward
    of the state, and therefore does not have the full liberty of
    contract allowed to a man.

    –Popular Law-making: A Study of the Origin, History, and Present Tendencies of Law-making by Statute, Frederic Jesup Stimson (1910)

    So really instead of women becoming equal to a man, men were dragged down to the ward of the state condition of women and the coincident loss of liberty.

    But freedom of contract in this connection results
    generally from personal liberty itself; although it results
    also from the right to property; that is to say, a man’s
    wages (or his trade, for matter of that) is his property, and
    the right of property is of no practical use if you cannot have
    the right to make contracts concerning it.
    ….
    But of late years
    in these socialistic days (using again socialistic in its proper
    sense of that which controls personal liberty for the interest
    of the community or state) it is surprisingly showing its
    head once more.

  4. I was always ready for school to start again, to see friends that were away during the summer, and by the end of August, with early dark, I had done most of what I had wanted during the 3 months off.

  5. Old friends
    Old friends
    Sat on their park bench like bookends
    A newspaper blowin’ through the grass
    Falls on the round toes
    Of the high shoes
    Of the old friends

    Old friends
    Winter companions, the old men
    Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sunset
    The sounds of the city sifting through trees
    Settle like dust
    On the shoulders of the old friends

    Can you imagine us years from today
    Sharing a park bench quietly?
    How terribly strange to be seventy

    Old friends
    Memory brushes the same years
    Silently sharing the same fear

    A time it was, and what a time it was, it was
    A time of innocence
    A time of confidences

    Long ago it must be
    I have a photograph
    Preserve your memories
    They’re all that’s left you

    Simon and Garfunkle

  6. Time it was, and what a time it was, it was
    A time of innocence, A time of confidences
    Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
    Preserve your memories; They’re all that’s left you

    Simon and Garfunkle

  7. JK Brown

    An interesting and useful retrospective.

    It’s similar to why serfs and those loyal to aristocrats, had their healthcare and living expenses taken care, at the expense of Obedience.

    Modern welfare is closer to feudalism in this one singular point. Modern democratic socialism isn’t so much a progress forward, as a leap backwards.

    The Democrats in the South not only treated black slaves as inferior beasts that should be happy to work in the fields, as their modified religious heresy stated, but they also treated the womenfolk as inferiors too. Favored inferiors, as in agnatic cognatic succession, but inferiors nonetheless.

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