The Opportunity to Labor, an American Ideal

Thank you for spending a few minutes with us this morning as you and your family hopefully enjoy some relaxation over the Labor Day weekend.

One reason I love America is that I have the opportunity to work. I believe work is not a burden to be endured but a calling to be embraced, and that has much to do with my faith. 

In the Bible, we see that God himself is a working God. He is described as creating, shaping, and forming the world before resting on the 7th day. He gave me the same purpose: to work.

In Genesis, we’re created in God’s image and given responsibility to care for creation. Adam is placed in the garden to tend and keep it. This tells me that labor was part of God’s good design from the beginning. When I work, it becomes an expression of faith: a daily opportunity to reflect His character, exercise the responsibility He entrusted to me, and glorify Him through diligence and purpose rather than mere obligation.

Every day I live the American dream. The opportunity to work and be all I was created to be is humbling and amazing. So I’m thankful for a day that recognizes our labor. And I’m thankful to live in America, where our Founders foresaw the American dream they were creating.

I consider Walter Isaacson (Einstein [2007]; Steve Jobs [2011]; Elon Musk [2023]) among the world’s best biographers, so I sped through his latest book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, when it came out late last year. It helped that it’s only 80 pages long!
 
His piercing message seems especially relevant to Labor Day, so I submit to all of you these reflections, anchored in Isaacson’s brilliant analysis. Thank you again for the privilege of entering your inbox a few times every year.
 
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As you may have guessed from the title and my own obsession with history, the “greatest sentence” Isaacson writes about is the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
 
This statement beautifully combined the purpose of both an economy and a political system. This concept isn’t as abstract as it seems.
 
“What is the purpose of an economy?” Isaacson asks. “To increase wealth? Yes, that’s good. Growth? Yes, also good. But the purpose of an economy is also something deeper. Its purpose is also to create a good society. A good, stable society where individuals can be free and flourish and live together in harmony. That requires nurturing the sense that we share common rights, common grounds, common truths, and common aspirations. Democracy depends on this.”
 
Put another way, our political stability depends on a social order that our economy is supposed to deliver – a society in which every person has the opportunity to reach their full, God-given potential. How they use that opportunity is up to them, but so long as the opportunity exists, the social order – and therefore the political system – will remain healthy.
 
This is what the American Dream really means. As Isaacson recounts, author James Truslow Adams popularized the phrase in a 1931 book: “The American Dream is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable.”
 
So where does the American Dream stand right now? Is our economy creating a social order that supports our democracy?
 
The latest AP-NORC polling finds that just 34% of Americans think the American Dream – defined as “if you work hard, you’ll get ahead” – still holds true. For people ages 18-29, the figure drops to 22%.
 
Isaacson’s most compelling pages attempt to answer why:
 

“We all used to sit in the stands at the ballpark and go through the same entrances, buying the same beer and soggy hot dogs. But now there are VIP entrances and skyboxes. We have separate lines at airports. We have more neighborhoods that are gated…
 
“The same has happened with media and information and ideas. We go to our different cul-de-sacs online, dive down different rabbit holes on the internet, listen to different ends of the talk radio dial, and let algorithms turn our social media feeds into echo chambers. The technology that promised to connect us found a better business model in dividing us…
 
“For the past forty years, we pursued economic policies based on a consensus belief in free trade, free markets, free movement of capital, and free movement of people. This led to offshoring jobs, closing factories, and having immigrants to do low-paying work. These policies were, for the most part, intended to fuel economic growth, and in that regard they succeeded…
 
“It created an economy where people could buy a flat-screen television very cheaply at Walmart on a Sunday night. But on Monday morning, they were no longer able to take the bus to a job at a local factory.”

 
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I’ve spoken often over the years about the purpose of business, specifically the notion that what we do as business leaders is about more than mere numbers.
 
As I read these pages, I was struck by a corollary to that. All businesses – the entire economic system – fit within our larger social project. If the economic system fails a critical mass of people – if we fail to preserve the unalienable right to the pursuit of Happiness – then our political system cannot long endure.
 
The far left has long caricatured the free market system as the ruthless pursuit of maximum returns to the exclusion of all else – environmental protection, health, and even individual rights. That’s a reckless and poorly reasoned accusation.
 
But you can find a kernel of overlap between that thinking and Isaacson’s construction. There is a purpose to business beyond the balance sheet, and it fits within the larger, classical conservative worldview. It’s to maintain a social order that prizes individual opportunity, leaving open to all the ability to reach one’s full potential.
 
I’ll leave you with this final passage from The Greatest Sentence Ever Written:

“In short, we can try to be more like Franklin. He not only helped craft the sentence that defines our common ground. He lived it.
 
“He organized police, fire, and street-sweeping corps; a public library, hospital, and school; a widows’ pension fund and a mutual insurance cooperative. He ran a newspaper that was dedicated to publishing a wide variety of opinions and following no party line. He bequeathed a revolving loan fund for young people to start enterprises. He donated to the building funds of each and every church in Philadelphia, and he helped lead the fundraising for a new hall that would provide a pulpit to visiting preachers of any belief, ‘so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.’
 
“And on his deathbed, he was the largest individual donor to the Congregation of Mikveh Israel, the first synagogue in Philadelphia. So when he died, 20,000 mourners watched his funeral procession, which was led by all the clergymen of every faith, including the local rabbi, walking arm-in-arm.
 
“That’s the ideal of common ground and the American Dream that our founders fought for 250 years ago. And that’s what we must continue to fight for today so that we can preserve, for ourselves and our posterity, the rights and aspirations that we all share, including to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Respectfully submitted,

Chuck Fuller
C.E.O.
The Results Company