The emphasis on skills in discussions of world-historical atrocities like American slavery and the Holocaust points to a pattern in contemporary right-wing thinking — a bizarre and ahistorical obsession with the redemptive potential of labor. Whether styled as the Horatio Alger myth, the doctrine of personal responsibility, or the bootstrap narrative, the idea that work liberates has near-religious potency among conservatives. For Republicans and some centrists, work is not merely profitable, respectable, and moral. It is the American dream writ large, the ultimate realization of one’s human capital. In the minds of conservative labor enthusiasts, to work for wages is only human. To maximize human capital is divine.