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  • From: tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] I'll second that
  • Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 17:02:25 -0500

Steve Oliphant wrote:

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?


tvoivozhd----newspaper boys here get a living wage, as they do elsewhere---doesn't matter if the newspaper doesn't make a profit on delivery, the newspaper digs into their advertsing profit to pay delivery costs or the newspaper doesn't get delivered, putting the newspaper out of business. You've got a problem with that?


McDonalds for the past forty or more years, like every other business, is by law, forbidden from paying less than minimum wage---hasn't harmed them in any way whatsoever---as a matter of fact you would have to hunt pretty hard to find a McDonalds that paid minimum wage today, they would have to close the doors. Not that it matters, you could use the same specious argument against ANY increase in business costs, whether it be an increase in rent (happens all the time), increase in insurance premiums (happens all the time), increase in utility bills (happens all the time), increase in taxes or increase in fuel bills (happening right now),

And what is this econobabble about a self-employed person stopping operations if their hourly profit dropped ? Hourly profits always vary and normally do not have much effect on a business. Now if you only have enough capital to run a business for twenty four hours, you shouldn't be in business at all and won't be very long.


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?

tvoivozhd---methinks thou dost protest too much---or have an exceedingly lurid imagination. I have from concept through profitable operation, started, managed, and owned businesses all or in part in many countries---some small, the last one in Taiwan a multi-million dollar enterprise with about a thousand employees. Companies don't hire employees for social reasons, they hire them make a profit on their labor---generally fifty percent. Employees work to pay rent, transport and food, sometimes to gain a skill (as in an apprentice electrician or plumber) Employees that work for social reasons is another bit of disinformation that has no relation to the real world.



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.


tvoivozhd---bullshit and you know it. The job outsourcing to China and India is primarily for high paying, skilled jobs., not low-wage ones---and what relationship have you dreamed up between moving jobs and entire industries overseas ,to millions of Mexicans flooding in across unguarded borders? There are now so many of them they are unstoppable by cowardly politicians who in an age of close elections are paralyzed by the thought of losing a single vote, whether it is from a tomato-grower or a Mexican resident that wants to surround himself with brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins or former neighbors.

I might add that no job requiring face-time will be moved---witness the growth of the healthcare industry. Nor is Dell going to move its manufacturing operation, because it has become so efficient it can rely on the freight differential all companies used to rely on for a profit vs competitors more than a couple hundred miles away.



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


tvoivozhd---no---and didn't


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


tvoivozhd----the Supreme Court gave corporations all the rights of real live citizens. After that the free market took over---government went up for sale to the highest bidder---megacorporations with the most money are the highest bidders who rent Congressmen, Senators and the President. Free markets work only when they are fully, accurately informed and competitive Without ALL these conditions, they don't work at all---you don't believe that, move to Haiti or Gaza as a convincer.


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.


tvoivozhd---as I repeat so often with no apparent effect---NOBODY has any rights they cannot enforce.---especially unarmed people. Business has many enforceable rights becaause business bought the government which has lots of guns, lots of police, an Army, Air Force and Navy to bend you to the will of rented politicians. I would like to see a change but after the Supreme Court gave corporations the rights of people, there is no legal means of restraining corporations in any effective way. Bluntly, to alter that situation would take another Great Depression, a desperate populace and another Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I was ignorant enough to support a do-nothing Hoover. Learned from my error and thereafter voted for Roosevelt who made life better for millions of Americans.


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.



tvoivozhd---Phrase it differently---IF you have sufficient good sense AND good health (plus some good luck) the ODDS of your achieving your financial requirements are vastly improved by starting your own business. It will not "ensure" that you do so---only improve tthe odds. Be prepared to fail, learn from your failure, and NEVER< NEVER stop trying. Persistence is the most valuable trait you can have---look around. Most successful businessman are not geniuses---merely bulldog-persistent.

And government regulation is the number one stumbling block for people wanting to do that.

tvoivozhd---Not the all-inclusive term "government regulation" No capitalist enterprise can survive without an extensive tax-paid public infrastructure and regulations. A few things that qualify as a stumbling block exist that did not until after about 1948---these are better described as cost-of-entry stumbling blocks. For example, then I always typed my own one-page corporate charters with all powers not specifically excluded in the charter or by a pretty skinny set of State Statutes---cost me about $15 to record it and NO annual fee. Business permits of any king were not required. The total cost of entry was pocket change. I don't like the cost-of-entry increases---they were and are unnecessary, yield little net taxes beyond cost of administration.



I did my own taxes and returns for a few others as well---then the entire Federal Tax Code resided in four thin loose-leaf volumes on a shelf behind my office desk. Now of course, as sand in business bearings you or I would need to hire a Tax Accountant.










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

tvoivozhd---forget the canned definitions. There is no such thing as a standardized homestead, other than it is usually rural and involves enough acreage for a woodlot to provide heat, and possibly woodgas to run a pickup truck (and for added independence woodgas to run a truck engine driving an electric generator) The "threat" you recite is wholly imaginary, as is a one-size-fits all scale of "frugality". Some people value leisure time above more money. I don't---I've been locked into the hard goods manufacturing so long I can hardly imagine not starting and running one on the farm---if my age and precariious health permitted'

A "living wage" is not the same for every homesteader either---believe me, it is not that hard for a small farm factory, or well-located berry PYO to net $100,000 a year---and the bottom-end "living wage" on a small farm can be a fraction of the amount required in a city.





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