The Case for Human Flourishing – Inside Sources

The American labor force is 1.4 million below its late-2025 peak. That understates the problem.

Had the labor force participation rate remained at its level at the start of the COVID pandemic, 4.1 million more Americans would be working or actively looking for work today. They are not missing because they were fired or laid off. They simply never re-entered — or never entered in the first place. That is a different kind of problem, and a harder one to solve.

We are aiming too low.

Economist Milton Friedman understood something that contemporary workforce policy has forgotten. As he wrote in “Capitalism and Freedom,” “It is widely believed that  politics and  economics are separate and largely unconnected; that individual freedom is a  political problem and material welfare an economic problem. … The thesis of this chapter is that such a view is a delusion.”

Economic freedom and human freedom are not separate things. They are expressions of the same underlying reality. A person who cannot find meaningful work is not merely underemployed. He is constrained. His choices are narrowed, his dignity is diminished, and his capacity to contribute to family, community and country is reduced.

The American worker is not an input; he is a person.

According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS data, there are 7.6 million job openings in America today — more than enough, on paper, to absorb the 7.3 million Americans currently counted as unemployed. The jobs exist. What is missing is not opportunity but the human capacity to meet it: the skills, habits, confidence, and sense of purpose that connect individuals to meaningful work.

If the goal is simply to match bodies to job openings, then training programs will do. However, if the goal is to develop people capable of sustaining free institutions, raising families, building communities, and participating fully in American life, then we need something far more ambitious.

Work is not merely a source of income. It is a source of identity, discipline and purpose. It connects effort to achievement, responsibility to reward, and individual talent to collective prosperity. When work disappears from a person’s life, something else disappears with it — often gradually, sometimes suddenly and rarely without consequence to those around him. Research confirms what most people already sense: unemployment consistently increases the risk of depression, anxiety and psychological distress. Re-employment reverses it.

The decline in participation is concentrated among younger and older Americans. Some younger workers are extending their education. Many older Americans accelerated retirement during the pandemic. These choices are rational. However, aggregated across millions of people over years, they represent an enormous loss — not just of productive capacity but of the human energy that sustains civic and community life. The costs extend further: social isolation, which unemployment accelerates, increases the risk of early death by nearly 30 percent — rivaling obesity and physical inactivity.

One of Friedman’s most important insights was that free markets work not merely because they allocate resources efficiently but because they respect the dignity and agency of individuals. The price system leaves decisions to the people best positioned to make them. Workforce policy built on that foundation would expand apprenticeships and career education, ensure artificial intelligence amplifies rather than displaces human purpose, and build environments that develop character, instill discipline, and make clear that effort has consequences worth pursuing.

Strong economies and strong communities reinforce each other. This is not sentiment; it is economics. A nation whose families are weak, whose communities are fragmented, whose institutions have lost public trust, will not remain competitive regardless of how many credentials it produces. Human capital is more than skill. It is what people become when they believe their work matters.

America does not lack workforce programs. According to the most recent Government Accounting Office count, the federal government runs 43 of them, administered across multiple agencies, at a cost of $14 billion a year. The GAO has found that little is known about whether most of them work. What America lacks is a clear understanding of what those programs are for.

If the answer is jobs, we will keep building programs designed to fill vacancies. If the answer is human flourishing — citizens capable of self-governance, productive contribution and genuine freedom — then we will build something far more durable.

Friedman was fond of pointing out that the market, left free, tends to produce outcomes no planner could anticipate or replicate. The same is true of human potential. Liberate it. Develop it. Respect it.

The workforce problem is real. It is, at bottom, a human problem. And human problems require more than bureaucratic solutions.

America needs workers. More urgently, it needs citizens who are free, capable and purposeful enough to become workers, entrepreneurs, parents, neighbors and leaders.