Homestead mailing list

[Steve Oliphant <steveo AT crecon.com>]

tvoivozhd wrote:

> No business which depends for existence on paying less than living 
> wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.
> — Franklin Delano Roosevelt

So newspapers shouldn't be allowed to hire paperboys, or McDonalds hire 
the teenagers, or a self employed person shouldn't operate if their 
profit per hour happened to drop below some arbitrary point?

Why do you want to discriminate against companys that hire teenagers, or 
people who want a job as much for social reasons as for pay?

It is attitudes like that and the laws that those attitudes have spawned 
that has caused the great job outsourcing to other countries and the 
illegal immigrant problem here to happen.

Didn't Roosevelt admire and want to emulate "Uncle Joe" Stalin's 
economic ideas?

What ever happened to a truly free market, and not the fascist corporate 
run government that we have now?

Besides - what is this crap about *business* having rights? Only 
*people* have rights. And when someone tells me that they won't allow me 
to sell my labor or the products of it for a certain price - even when I 
have a willing buyer -  it is *my* rights that are getting infringed.

Tvo, I have admired your advice and wisdom about business. It seems to 
me that the only way to ensure that one has a *living wage* is to start 
one's own business. And government regulation is the number one 
stumbling block for people wanting to do that.

I don't understand this coming from you or on a "homestead" list. It 
seems that most of us would rather live frugally, and work for what 
others would see as much lower than a "living wage" in order to enjoy 
our life style. You are threatening this?

-Steve