From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

It just seems like there's something that is psychologically built into us to work, and that leisure does look really attractive, but it's on the basis of arrest from something.

So it's a cessation of work that makes it

attractive, but that work sets it up. This is your host, Scott Bertram. And that's Daryl Hart,

our first guest on today's program. Daryl is Distinguished Associate Professor of History at

Hillsdale College. He's recently written a piece at real clear public affairs.com titled

The American Virtue of Hard Work. That's what we discuss here today. Dr. Hart, thanks

for joining us. Great to be with you, Scott. Why is hard work an important American virtue? It

does it help distinguish us from Europe? In a sense, because we're not a class-based society, even though there'd be lots of people

that criticize that, there is a sense in which the Horatio-Alger myth really does make a lot

of sense and people work their way up.

Even the immigrant narratives where people come here and make

a way for themselves. The society is one in which, going back to colonial times, I guess, even,

I would say, where people just distinguish themselves, you make a place for yourself, you make a way of

life for yourself by your work. It doesn't depend on your status,

on your family. Over time, those things matter. But still, there's something basic, it seems to me,

about that. And I would even add to that something that's hardwired into human beings,

and if you believe the Bible accounts of creation, et cetera,

that people are created to work.

So there's just something about that.

But America allows people to work and then actually accomplish things

and potentially move up in their social standing

...