Work is often unpleasant in our fallen world. But it contains within it the seeds of its own redemption, and ours. It often fails to make us happy, but happiness is a fleeting emotion. Work gives us something more lasting and sturdy than happiness: fulfillment.

Thus begins a manifesto called “Getting Back to Work” by economist Michael Strain on how the U.S. federal government can help workers succeed and achieve self-actualization. The essay is part of the “Room to Grow” series by the Conservative Reform Network, which began in 2014 with the goal of developing innovative solutions to challenges facing the U.S., challenges largely created by an overindulgence among politicians to engineer social outcomes.

Strain, who studies labor force participation rates and work incentives, argues that public policy does play a role in job creation by enabling a vibrant job market. He acknowledges that a safety net is critical to ensuring that those on the bottom rung of the economic ladder have a support system. But he also notes that the support system has made it harder for people to get off that first rung.

He starts with a somewhat poetic look at the roots of man’s love and need for work before discussing how public policy has gone down the path of diminishing the value of labor.

(M)illions of people doing their particular jobs a little bit better than anyone else can create enormous wealth and, more important, improve the opportunity for individuals to lead truly flourishing lives.  Work helps us to flourish by allowing us to provide for our children. (Not all of this work, of course, is paid.) And work is a cure for boredom, one of the worst parts of modern, comfortable life.

Work creates community, something all humans need for flourishing lives. Members of your work community often become lifelong friends. Work educates our passions, directing them to productive ends, emancipating us from them. Work allows us to express ourselves, and in its proper understanding is deeply spiritual: In the Abrahamic faiths, the Supreme Being works, creating the world out of nothing. Saint John Paul writes that we are ‘called to work,’ arguing that we find ‘in the very first pages of the Book of Genesis’ the ‘conviction that work is a fundamental dimension of human existence
on earth.'”

Strain also suggests multiple solutions:

• Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, a federal earnings subsidy for low-income households, to homes without children.

• Expand Work-Based Learning Programs that include apprenticeships and retraining worker who have been displaced by technology or globalization.

• Modify the safety net so that it better encourages work and doesn’t define disability as a a binary state rather than a continuum.

A person may be disabled in the sense that he can’t stock shelves, but not disabled in the sense that he can’t sit behind a desk for 25 hours per week.”

Other suggestions from Strain include cutting payroll taxes as well as commute times, making it easier for former prisoners to find jobs, and reducing occupational licensing rules. Strain also breaks through some myths about barriers to work, and points out polling that demonstrates the benefits of his positions.

In all, bringing back the sense of American pride is one key to getting people back into the labor force. Included in this, according to Strain, is the effort to recover “a culture wherein more Americans feel an obligation to build a career, even from a low starting point,” a position that has been hampered by politicians creating policies that are intended to ease the burden of job loss but have resulted in building barriers that make it harder for people to return to the workforce.

Read more from Michael Strain’s report on Getting Back to Work.