A much larger number of us live off the efforts of these producers. Not quite like parasites, I admit. We think about how the producers could do it better, and cheaper, we arrange the distribution of their goods to market, we produce forecasts of demand and supply that help them do their job better. And some of us provide entertainment that makes the job of the producer more pleasant and perhaps easier.

Some of us busy ourselves with telling the producer how to do his job, though few of us have had actual experience with it. As a youth I crawled down mile-long rows of sugar beets, thinning them by hand to improve the yield. Another time I worked herding sheep on the Colorado plateaus, chasing the smelly, stupid beasts (quite different from Mary’s nursery rhyme pet) into camp to be docked and painted and eventually shorn or slaughtered. Yet again I worked as a carpenter’s apprentice. After a year of varsity sports I was supposed to be in good shape, but on that first day the sheer rigor of the morning’s labor so staggered me that I was unable to eat lunch.

These experiences taught me respect for those whose work is intensely physical, who work with their hands, but they in no way qualify me to stand with the producers or to tell them how to do their job. One of the most galling things to producers is the unsolicited advice from a dilettante from the Chattering Classes telling them what is good for them. Until your life and livelihood depend on getting the crop into the ground, or the fish out of the sea, or the copper out of the mine, you should approach the producers with hat in hand, and a very large measure of humility.

And thanks. That is something the farmer, the miner, the fisherman rarely gets from those who would starve without him. Without these dedicated men and women, there would be no environmentalists, no newspaper reporters and editors, no elected government officials, and no bureaucrats, and no computer geeks. Their skill, their dedication, their willingness to work with their hands and their muscles, is what keeps the rest of us alive. Were we to disappear, they would go on living. Their lives might be solitary, nasty, and brutish, but they would continue. Were they to disappear, the lives of most of the rest of us would be short, as we quickly starved to death. Their reward, all too often, is disdain, or worse. Too often they are accused of destroying the environment they use to supply the rest of us with our necessities and luxuries.

Labor Day started as a marketing tool by big labor. Today, there isn’t much big labor, in the sense of the major trade and craft unions. Unions today are made up of government employees—actually themselves card-carrying members of the Chattering Class. If it is no longer appropriate to pay homage to Labor in the old sense, let’s at least pay homage to “labor” in a different sense, in the form of those men and women whose willingness to produce allows the rest of us to consume. At least on this day let us give them the respect they deserve, before we go back to harassing them and bullyragging them for the rest of the year.