The Future Of ObamaBusiness

They still don’t get it:

“I have seen the future of Obamabusiness and its regulations (my primary responsibility as a business is to provide jobs, not make a profit) and have responded by not hiring in the traditional manner at all – ever. I will now use temp agencies. Almost no paperwork, no disputes, no benefit costs, no HR department, no lawsuits, no commitments. Welcome to the future of being an employee.”

Emphasis mine. The notion that the business of a business is to create jobs is a Marxist one. As the president remains, despite his shellacking.

27 thoughts on “The Future Of ObamaBusiness”

  1. The comeback is:
    “So my all-volunteer business is worthless?”

    No wonder there is such disdain for pure charities and so much more respect granted to “non-profits” that happen to have many actual employees.

  2. It’s kind of a weird statement. The definition of “profit” is “revenue matches or exceeds expenses, including salaries paid.” So how can you provide jobs other than by making a profit? Even in a People’s Republic, where no evil money technically changes hands, if the value your organization creates doesn’t exceed its expenses — i.e. something exists that you can easily call a “profit” — it’s mathematically doomed.

  3. Sure, the purpose of a business is rarely (according to its creator) to create jobs. However, assuming it was possible to run a business without creating jobs (perhaps in a peri-Singularity future in which nanomachines do all the construction work and AIs do the books) and everybody does it that way, who’s going to have any money to buy the products of that business?

    The real truth is that the purpose of a business is not singular. The business owner wants to create a profit for himself, obviously. However, the goods and/or services produced by that business and the jobs it creates are also purposes, as far as the rest of society is concerned.

    Henry Ford, hardly a socialist, figured this one out. He paid rather well; as a consequence, his employees had enough money to buy cars, mainly Fords.

  4. “Henry Ford, hardly a socialist, figured this one out. He paid rather well; as a consequence, his employees had enough money to buy cars, mainly Fords.”

    This is a myth. It might even be a myth created by Ford as a sort of marketing. The reason that Ford paid his workers more was because his factory workers may have required less skill a skilled artisan, but they required more skill than “basic labor.” He had to train them, and they had to perform well. To get that he had to pay them more. That’s it.

    It’s also stupid to think that his employees being able to buy Ford cars is what made Ford a success. That’s a perpetual motion machine. Do you think that Boeing is successful because its employess can afford to buy plane tickets? Obviously not; the market is much, much bigger than that and Boeing would be a success even if none of its employees flew (and it would be a failure if no one but employees flew). Same for Ford.

    “assuming it was possible to run a business without creating jobs (perhaps in a peri-Singularity future in which nanomachines do all the construction work and AIs do the books) and everybody does it that way, who’s going to have any money to buy the products of that business?”

    We’re already seeing this, almost. There are factories in Europe and Japan that are “dark.” No actual people work there, so they don’t waste energy by turning the lights on. It’s all machines and software. Materials go in one end, and products come out the other. LEGOs are made this, for instance, with the factory taking in plastic, dyes and cardboard and spitting out crates full of those boxes you buy at Toys R Us.

    What do people do? They find things to do. There will always be work for people, even if it’s just playing a guitar for tips at the local coffee shop.

    The “main” problem is income inequality. The family that owns the LEGO factory is immensely wealthy, while all the bohemian guitar players at the local coffee shops are just sort of getting by. Japan already looks like this, where 80% of Japanese under the age of 35 make (equivalent to) $20,000 or less per year. Eighty-friggin-percent. And that’s in a country with a high cost of living. It’s no wonder so many of them live with their parents and don’t marry or have kids.

    All arguments of natural rights and “earned wealth” aside, that’s not a recipe for a stable or healthy society. I’m not sure what the answer is though, other than highly redistributive taxes.

  5. The problem, Mr. Fletcher, is that individual companies never have the information to make decisions on a macro level. Even in a recession, almost half of businesses are growing and slightly more than half of businesses are shrinking. You can’t tell which one you from the view “on the ground”, and you can’t go from one to the other without making changes, and without changes the whole thing falls apart. The role of the price system is to communicate all that information to the business owner, and his only way of maximizing his social contribution is to maximize profit.

    So, while it may be the government’s goal that businesses keep employment high, the only thing they can do is structure regulations and policy so that the price system transmits the signal to hire workers (without breaking the system itself by using fiat prices). It’s not realistic to expect the business managers to have a goal of keeping hiring high, because that could destroy the whole business, laying off everyone, or to expect the business managers to know how to keep and who to let go that maximizes “social value”, because they don’t have access to that knowledge. And the point is that government isn’t taking the best actions to transmit the price data to the companies, it’s trying to “push on a string” by forcing businesses to do what they are not capable of doing.

    Examples like Ford are disingenuous, because 1. Henry Ford didn’t want to do it (small nit to pick; his partner made him), but, more importantly, 2. it was done because, if they paid the best, they could get the best labor away from their competitors, make better cars, and charge more. It’s still about profit maximization, and I’m not arguing against doing that. You’re really only arguing against maximizing profit _badly_, and from my perspective it’s a straw man.

  6. If the government wanted to maximize employment, it could outlaw technologies that displace workers. For example, one skilled backhoe operator can dig as much per day as dozens of manual ditch diggers. Outlaw backhoes and you’ll create manual laborer jobs. Likewise, outlaw industrial robots and you’ll force businesses to hire more people to work on the assembly lines. Remember the people from the 1960s who were displaced by computers in the workplace? Get rid of computerized accounting systems and hire manual bookkeepers, perhaps letting them use calculators.

    Do all of that and the government can say it “created jobs.” That is, until the companies go out of business or relocate out of the country because the higher labor costs and lower productivity are driving them out of business.

  7. Brock says:

    “The “main” problem is income inequality. The family that owns the LEGO factory is immensely wealthy, while all the bohemian guitar players at the local coffee shops are just sort of getting by.”

    All by the choice of the bohemian guitar player. He/she is getting paid based upon the market’s opinion of what his/her labor is worth.

    Who is holding a gun to their heads forcing them to stick with guitar playing at coffee shops?

    “I’m not sure what the answer is though, other than highly redistributive taxes.”

    So you are seriously saying that we should raise taxes and pay the bohemian guitar player the same amount as the guy who:

    Thought up the idea of automated Lego production
    borrowed the money to build the factory
    took the risk that the idea will pay off, and if it didn’t knew he’d be bankrupt

    Is this what you are saying? You must have had a talk with Pelosi

  8. Brock,

    I don’t think the issue is so much income inequality, but rather that the younger people have sufficient income to do the things that society needs- start a family, raise good children, contribute to the community (volunteering and the like). I agree with you about Japan’s problems, and they are becoming a serious issue in many place in North America as well.

    I’m not sure income redistribution via confiscatory taxes will be a good solution, however. My parents tell stories from the 60s in England, when those with money, faced with high taxes just relocated to the Channel Islands or somewhere more hospitable.

    The real solution, as far as I can tell, is to figure out what roadblocks are in place that are preventing young people from making a decent living, and remove them as soon as possible. I have great difficulty believing that there are no jobs- that automation has removed the need for so many vital tasks in our society.

  9. Regarding the guy at the link who’s only going to hire temps from an agency:

    Besides the fact that it sounds like a “I’m going to take my ball and go HOME!” whine, he will actually create more jobs. Not only will he hire the temps, the temp agency has clerks and salespeople who will have a job supporting the temps. Plus, the temp agency is owned by somebody, who will be making a profit from the deal.

  10. Yes, but Chris, notice the interesting fact about temps: no benefits, no Obamacare, no unions, no job security. It’s a return to 19th century jobs. What he’s pointing out is not that he’s not creating jobs — your straw man — but that if the government decides to make 21st century jobs unrealistic they’ll get 19th century jobs instead, skipping right over the more pleasant 20th century jobs we’ve all gotten used to.

  11. who’s going to have any money to buy the products of that business?

    The people who design better nanomachines and program smarter AIs? What a dumb question, Fletch. The only purpose of commerce is to exchange labor: I do foo, at which I excel, or which I mind doing less than you, and in exchange you do bar, for which the converse is true. It’s impossible for the desirability of such exchanges to vanish because it’s impossible for everybody to be identically equal in capabilities and interests. You might as well have asked us to assume it was possible to run a business that relies on violating the First Law of Thermodynamics.

    However, the goods and/or services produced by that business and the jobs it creates are also purposes, as far as the rest of society is concerned.

    This statement has vacuous underpinnings. What is “the rest of society?” You can’t point to it, you can’t ask it questions — you have no method whatsoever of determining what “it” wants, because “it” doesn’t exist. There are only millions of individual men and women, who each have individual wishes and ideals, often inconsistent or even incompatible with each other. There’s no rational way to sum up or average what they think to arrive at some single opinion of “the rest of society.” This sentence is an illustration of the Lewis Carroll Rule: that it is quite possible to construct perfectly sound English sentences that are logically incoherent.

    Henry Ford, hardly a socialist

    Ford was even worse than a modern socialist. You only got his fancy wages if your life outside the assembly line passed muster with Ford’s “Social Department,” which kept an eye on your moral character by spying on you. Besides that, it’s likely his real reason for paying better wages was simply because he could (his company was profitable by then), because he wanted the best workers, and to reduce turnover given he needed to invest more training in his people for his novel type of work. The famous rationalization you quote, beloved by share-the-wealth redistributionists ever since, was probably made up to appeal to the Wilsonian/Progressive Spirit of Everything For A Grand Reason Of Social Uplift upper-class cocktail crowd of the day. Ford was a snob, among other things.

  12. I have a micro-example of the sort of thing I’m talking about – low wages leading to low profits which leads to low wages. I fully realise that it isn’t a perfect example, not being anything like a closed system, but here goes:

    I live and (try to) run a business in a holiday town, where some very high proportion of jobs are minimum-wage and/or seasonal – because there is virtually no industry other than tourism, and everyone knows that catering and hospitality pay cr*p. (Which is probably inevitable – AFAIK the industries with low labour costs pay well and ones with high pay badly.) The almost total lack of any other industry is held by many here, including me, to be the result of lobbying verging on, or crossing over into, corruption coming from several very large tourism operators who don’t want competition for their workers. Anyway, as a result of the extremely low average wages there is very little money around – which in turn means that retail profits are garbage, too. Which in turn means that locals who happen to own businesses here have low incomes, too, which leads to them not spending much which…

    Yes, I know I should have left as soon as I realised this; unfortunately, I own the building I’m trading in (having inherited it, but there was and is a big loan secured on it) and can’t get rid of it except at a huge loss.

    The point is that wages, sooner or later, become someone else’s income. And another point about wages levels can be summed up in one pithy old phrase; “pay peanuts and get monkeys.” People prepared to be conscientious while doing a minimum-wage job with no prospects are rare.

  13. Fletch, you’re focussed on the money, which makes no sense. Money is just a symbol, and prices just a signal. They aren’t, in and of themselves, of any importance or value. Thinking they are is what happens with the person who thinks the problem of everyone being poor is logically identical to everyone not having enough Bank of England notes in his pocket — so the solution is obvious! Just print loads of banknotes up and distribute them!

    The problem in your neck of town is not “low wages” — it’s low production of value. Whatever people are doing there isn’t valued very highly by everyone else. No one is willing to pay more for it. No one is willing to travel from somewhere else to get it. Don’t be confused by the fact that the very same product or service may sell for more somewhere else — when people buy a product or service, they don’t just buy the thing itself, they buy all the “packaging,” including where they can buy it (which is why gas stations near the freeway can charge more), when they can buy it (which is why 24-hour shops can charge more at 1 AM), the atmosphere in which they can transact business, the social interaction accompanying buying it (four-star restaraunts charge more for their outstanding wait service), customer service (lifetime warranties and cheerful returns staff raise prices) — even such things as the social status among their own crowd being seen buying it entails (keeping the prices of Mercedes-Benzes a tad higher).

    So your question ought to be: why is what gets done here of low value to others? Is it because others are ignorant? Then advertising if your friend. Is it because you’re being outcompeted by someone subsidized by tax money or favored by regulation? Crony capitalism is the enemy. Is it because people there are focussed on the wrong goods and services, not playing to their strengths (and everyone has a strength, if nothing else the cheapness of their labor if they are utterly unskilled and desperate)? Then you need some entrepreneurial vision, inspiration — how to make lemonade from the lemons. Id est, in that case you do need a Henry Ford.

    Are there ideas and good labor, but not enough capital to prime the pump? You need a capitalist angel, which probably means a creative and convincing business plan. (Ford had several angels, rich investors, when he got started.) Or is it, finally, that the place and people are simply inhospitable? Some places are simply no good for business, because of their location. You can’t run port operations when you’re not on a river or bay. This seems less relevant these days. But some places are inhospitable because the people there have got out of the habit of independence and enterprise, and are content to sink into the mire bitching about how unfair it all is.

    In the last case, yes, you need to get out, and maybe set the loss on your building against the loss of extra years of your life — the opportunity cost of not going somewhere where your own talents and energy will find better uses. You may being sent an important signal (“Move!”) by the weirdly low price of your labor in this location.

  14. Nonsense, Chris. The 19th century jobs became 20th century jobs because of capitalism — because of the clever deployment of capital that created wealth-creating industries which could afford to pay higher wages.

    You don’t think so? Then why didn’t, say, farm workers of the 1820s unionize and demand higher wages? Why didn’t railroad workers in the 1840s? It’s not because they were stupid and the thought of collective bargaining never occured to them. It’s because it would have been futile. The industries were barely scraping along, and there simply wasn’t any wealth to put into higher wages.

    Unions are a symptom, not a cause of high wages. When an industry enters a sustained period of very high profits, particularly after a period of struggle and low profits, you can expect people to start asking for higher wages. If they get them, because the industry can afford to pay them, you can then expect labor to explore all options for getting still more, including unions. But wages will rise, whether or not unions exist, simply because they can, and a free market in labor guarantees that the price of labor will be as high as the profits allow. How fast they will rise, and whether unions accelerate or retard that growth, is a very interesting question. But one which I doubt we can easily answer, since clean comparisons are hard to make, and the subject is encrusted with powerful social mythology.

  15. Carl – corporate profits are high and rising, and the income spread between rich and poor is approaching levels not seen since the 1920s. There’s plenty of room for businesses to afford higher wages.

  16. I think you’re wrong, Chris. You’ve forgotten to account for the truly massive superstructure of government erected on top of the private sector now, which was essentially absent in the 20s, and which transfers massive amounts of wealth from one sector to another. Your rich/poor disparity is based entirely on nominal incomes, I expect, and does not take into account the fact that quite a lot of people — perhaps as much as 30% — now derive much or all of their income from government wealth transfer programs, and the fact that the well-to-do (not the super-rich) are taxed like never before.

    There’s plenty of room for businesses to afford higher wages.

    If you say so. I don’t know what makes you privy to the finances of vast swathes of corporate America. You have good spies? God or a little bird told you? But anyway, if they can afford it, they’ll pay it, it being the nature of a free market for every input to rise to the highest price the market will bear. And if they don’t — well, you need to look at external constraining forces, the most likely source of which is (coming full circle here) government interference that favors the few at the expense of the many.

  17. Gregg,

    Way to totally skip my points about how the “problem” of income inequality it isn’t about fairness and is about social stability. Bravo, Sir. You win a medal – of weapons grade selective stupidity.

    A Nobody said:

    I don’t think the issue is so much income inequality, but rather that the younger people have sufficient income to do the things that society needs- start a family, raise good children, contribute to the community (volunteering and the like).

    Those are the same exact issue. We have continued to grow GDP but quality of life is stagnant or falling for most of the popualtion – because 100% the gains in wealth since the 1970s or so have by captured by the top 5% of the population (and 80% have been captured by the top 1%).

    I’m not sure income redistribution via confiscatory taxes will be a good solution, however.

    Neither am I! I’m just not sure what IS a good solution. The minimum wage is an even worse policy tool.

    The real solution, as far as I can tell, is to figure out what roadblocks are in place that are preventing young people from making a decent living, and remove them as soon as possible. I have great difficulty believing that there are no jobs- that automation has removed the need for so many vital tasks in our society.

    Well we certainly need to improve our education system, but I’m not sure there’s any easy answers. There’s a real gap forming between the “elite” and the burger flippers. As an example from my own field (law), attorneys continue to work but thanks to MS Word and Dragon Dictation we’ve been able to reduce support-level employees a great deal. Where each lawyer used to have his own secretary 40 years ago, today you’re lucky to share one with 5-10 attorneys.

    And where do those other 4 to 9 paralegals go? They can’t all become lawyers, and most of them end up making less money than they would as a paralegal. Thus increasing income inequality.

    Fletcher Christian said:

    I have a micro-example of the sort of thing I’m talking about – low wages leading to low profits which leads to low wages.

    Your example isn’t one of low wages. It’s one of force low labor-productivity. Your friends and neighbors could be creating more value with their time than they are if they were allowed to work in a free market system, but your system has been captured by special interests trying to keep labor costs low.

    But those special interests can only benefit by this if they have a high-income area to attract tourism dollars from. That high-income area has high income in the first place because it creates surplus amounts of value.

    It’s the value you need to keep an eye on, not the income. Your “high wages leads to high income” is just inflation of the numberic variable, not actual economic growth. That’s the difference between Nominal GDP and Real GDP. Nominal GDP is just higher wages without higher value, and doesn’t matter for squat. Do you think Zimbabwe factory workers are actually wealthier because they make 4 trillion dollars a day? Hardly.

  18. That’s the point, isn’t it? The income of burger-flippers, waiters, bar staff and amusement-arcade attendants is low because what they are doing isn’t worth much and also because they are extremely easy to replace if they leave. Sure, that is blindingly obvious. But they are the only jobs available in my town, to a first approximation, and although I have no proof I am sure that this is because of the malign and corrupt influence of special interests who want to keep it that way. Added to this, the fact that the tourism in the town I’m in (Blackpool, in Northwest England) is bottom of the market. That problem is structural – too many fleapit hotels chasing too few customers. The only solution for that is a bulldozer.

    As for moving out: Sure. But the bind I’m in is that if I did that I would have nothing to work with. Also, I’ve been going down an increasingly narrow blind alley (health supplements) for many years. I am in fact quite expert in my field, but…

    If I was in charge I would do quite a few things – have a good half of the crappy hotels and bedsits bulldozed, give incentives for industrial development, generally attract non-tourism business to my town. But I’m not. And I’m not going to be.

    Sometimes the problem can’t be solved. If I was 20 and healthy, maybe, but I’m not that either. 52, and anything but healthy – 6 months of intensive chemotherapy do that to you. Especially when that is two years after a heart attack.

    I’m not asking for sympathy. This whole thing was an illustration, chosen because I know something about it. And by “low wages” I meant “low wages compared to those in other towns”. An economic illiterate I am not.

  19. If the “quality of life” amongst young people in the U.S. is lower nowadays, it’s because they’ve inflated the idea of what constitutes “quality of life”.

    Young people in the U.S. aren’t starting families because they’re a) not getting married in their 20s in droves anymore, and b) too concerned with having the latest iPhone (and its concomitant $100/month cell phone bill to be able to afford to feed themselves.

    I’m no curmudgeon or anything, but when “lower quality of life” means “I can’t have an unlimited data plan” or “I can’t have my super-mega sports package on my High-Def cable”, or “I can’t drink top-shelf vodka when I go get blitzed at the bar 4 nights a week”, I have little sympathy for such whining, and I certainly don’t see it as a problem that my tax dollars should be used to address.

  20. If the “quality of life” amongst young people in the U.S. is lower nowadays, it’s because they’ve inflated the idea of what constitutes “quality of life”.

    More than a few young people somehow believe they’re entitled to start out with the same standard of living that their parents needed decades to achieve. Three of the most financially dangerous words in the English language are “I deserve this.”

    Young people in the U.S. aren’t starting families because they’re a) not getting married in their 20s in droves anymore, and b) too concerned with having the latest iPhone (and its concomitant $100/month cell phone bill to be able to afford to feed themselves.

    My wife is a nurse who does case management for an insurance company. There are a lot of lower level employees there who are making perhaps 1/3rd of my wife’s income. She tells me that most of them arrive at work every day in a fairly new car, Starbucks coffee in hand. They go out to eat lunch every day (my wife and I brown bag). How can these people make it when they’re making such poor financial decisions?

  21. I’ve been an outsourced employee since 1996, doing I.T. for various companies in a variety of industries, so I have to chime in here to speak in favor of outsourcing. Are the folks emptying your company’s trash employees? If not then you have outsourced your janitorial needs. Are the folks who mow your grass employees? If not then you have outsourced your lawn care. Are the folks who process your payroll employees? If not (ADT) then you have outsourced part of your financials. Are the folks you deliver your product employees? If not (FedEX/UPS) then you have outsourced part of your shipping department. Outsourcing allows you to focus on your core business (the reason they are in business in the first place) and pay somebody supply your non-core business needs, and since that service may be their core business they might be better (and cheaper) at it than you are.

  22. although I have no proof I am sure that this is because of the malign and corrupt influence of special interests who want to keep it that way.

    It’s not malign per se to want to keep wages low. Look, you want to keep your costs of business low and your prices as high as possible, right? So you can pay off your loan, not worry so much about the future, et cetera. Nobody else is any different. It’s true you and they may differ on what exactly is a “fair” price or wage, depending on whether you’re receiving it or paying it, but…eh…you and they probably differ on whether Jane Austen is readable or whether monster truck rallies are fun, and more besides. You can’t call differences of opinion malignant.

    It’s only corrupt if the people who want to keep wages low can use force, i.e. government, to do the job, and are not restricted to persuasion and competitive advantage. Only you know if your fellow “capitalists” are working the system of government to screw you.

    52, and anything but healthy

    C’mon, Fletch. Never say die. Or to quote your irascible Mr. Churchill, whose own “Wilderness Years” as a washed-up failure began at age 55: Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never–in nothing, great or small, large or petty–never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. His enemy might have been tanks and planes, and yours might be prejudice and ignorance and slimy dishonesty, but the principle is the same.

    Somewhere out there in a world of 6 billions is your niche, where exactly the skills and knowledge and experience you have are highly valued. An online guide to health supplements for cancer survivors? Tips ‘n’ tricks on nutrition and home remedies during chemo? “Mythbusters” for the supplement biz? Redecorating the store with retorts and skulls, hiring salesgirls to dress as Nineve and selling alchemical love potions (with some mildly useful nutritive value) to the American tourists? Mail-order to odd countries that don’t speak English, because you know Arabic or Finnish? Find it! What have you got to lose? It’s not like any of us are getting out of here (i.e. life) alive, ha ha, so we might as well reach for the brass ring. You can do it! Anyone who can fight his way through chemo clearly has the courage of a lion and tenacity of a python.

  23. Globalization means that governments can no longer over tax the super wealthy (who can vote with their feet and move their wealth faster than the government can tax it) so the super wealthy are not actually taxed that heavily (comparatively). Globalization also means that the low skilled in a rich country can not justify an income above the low skilled in a poor country – so the rich country’s government has to subsidize them in order to prevent inequality based social rebellion. The only way that the government can tax the economy is via the middle class – who are trapped. The middle class is being eroded away and the young (of the middle class) feel the brunt of this the most – many are just giving up with no hope for the future, not marrying, not having children, not buying homes, etc. It is much easier for them to just be poor, then the government leaves them alone and they get to enjoy life – they are making a simple rational choice. What is the point in being clever with their money if it comes to naught? Where are the incentives? Why not just give up and have fun instead?

    Globalization is a great thing, it has lifted a great many people up out of poverty and done far more good than harm. Morally an unskilled person in a poor country should have just as much opportunity for a job as a similarly unskilled person in a rich country. Open labor markets are the ethical thing to do.

    So what does this mean for the US? How to again give hope to the middle class so that the young might educate themselves, work hard, buy houses, have children, build the country?

    A flat tax would probably be a start – tax the super wealthy and the poor at the same rate as the middle class. Bureaucracy is cheaper in bulk, it disproportionately burdens the middle class, keeping them down and the super wealthy up – this also needs to be rectified.

    Currently the financial sector absorbs ~35% of world profit, this is far beyond the value they add and their monopoly on money needs to be broken. The financial markets need to be opened and government and big finance/business needs to be separated. Somehow capital needs to be better linked to productivity.

    With people now living a lot longer, the monopolies that arise purely from longevity also need to be restrained. The concept of government funded retirement probably needs to be abolished, work as long as health allows or savings enable you not to. This expectation that one should get a fully paid holiday from the age of 65 to 100 really needs to go.

    Maybe virtual private governments could be created on line – that selected and taxed their own citizens (from the middle class) and in return dealt with governments in bulk. If they could make it viable to be in the middle class again, by grouping individuals together into super wealthy collectives and reaping the benefits therein, then maybe there would be hope.

  24. Brock Says:
    “Gregg,

    Way to totally skip my points about how the “problem” of income inequality it isn’t about fairness and is about social stability. ”

    I skipped it because it’s an unsupported, ridiculous assertion.
    I gave it all the attention it deserved.

    Income inequality isn’t about social stability – it’s because the value placed upon the labor is unequal.

    Scroll up and read Carl Pham’s input..and learn something other than to throw ad hominem replies.

  25. There is only one solution to income disparity. Government sharing the wealth ain’t it. This just raises the overall poverty level. Unions raise the overall poverty level. The solution is one word:

    Competition…

    corporate profits are high and rising …because government involvement reduces competition; competition is the only thing which creates jobs and lowers prices. Barriers to competition insure income disparity.

    Life is a path where you start naked, learn something, get any job, get a better job, earn a retirement, retire. This only happens with opportunity. The easier it is to compete the better everyones chances are. Take away chance and most will live poorer than they do now which is pretty bad already.

    The current situation is evil because we’ve allowed rampant crony capitalism. We need to change to more open competition and less government fingers in the pie.

    Do you like pie after everybody’s fingers have been in it?

  26. Answering Chris Gerrib’s”‘There’s plenty of room for businesses to afford higher wages” Carl Pham writes:

    “If you say so. I don’t know what makes you privy to the finances of vast swathes of corporate America. You have good spies? ”

    Don’t be sarcastic, Mr. Pham. You know darned well spies would be useful only to someone gathering facts. When you’re in the Cult of the State, you don’t need no stinkin’ facts. Any more than you need any stinkin’ logic.

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