Controversial opinions

A fantastic, unrealistic viewpoint, born of inexperienced, youthful idealism . . . I think any one can have class mobility without employment, but the mobility will be downward. If one wants upward mobility then employment, whether working for someone else or for oneself, is essential.

How exactly do you think the employers started out? As employers?

 

It always bothers me to see comments like this one. I am an employer. I do not earn as much as my top producing sales lady. When my place does well, it absolutely is distributed among those that did the work...... I am sure that there are statistics and left leaning news that paints all us employers as greedy bloodsuckers. I would only say that by and large, most employers are far more like me than they are the newsmakers.

 

You're not the problem, I'm sure you don't send lobbyists to Washington, right?

It's that final set of companies in the chart below that's problematic. The 500+ employee businesses that are employing more than half the private workforce.

 

You need to spend less time reading Marx’s Capital and the “Communist Manifesto” and more time reading history, economic theory and learning some reality. Since you claim that you didn’t learn any of this stuff in college because you challenged away all of those courses, you must have learned it in high school.

Your prose reads like the editorial page of “The Daily Worker.”

Here’s a little historical fact for you. The working classes don’t get any power in the socialist system. All the money, all the power and all of the luxuries go to government officials. That fact is repeated time after time, but guys like you can never read between the lines.

Here in America, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are multi-millionaires. Sanders has three houses, including some lake front property. The only thing “preliterate” about him is his rhetoric. The man is a fake and a con man, but you love him, don’t you?

 

I get it. Problem is that the legislation that will tie those five hundred mismanaged corporations will also tie the hands of the thousands of properly managed businesses like mine.

 

Essential, but not still not probable in terms of achievability. That's where we seem to differ here.

Sometimes, yes. What did the Walton family do to own their company? Sure, the original walton built it, but once something becomes that large they essentially turn into corporate dynasties.

 

You've got a point, there's definitely potential for that. Surely there must be a middle ground though where we can impose greater regulation based on net income or number of employees for corporations.

 

Big companies hire a lot of people. What is unusual about that? What is to stop a minority person from getting an education and working for those companies for high salaries? The best boss I ever had at the first company that hired me out of college was a Black man. He had CPA, was really sharp and treated the people under him fairly.

This “you are frozen in your class” stuff is a lot crap. That’s far truer in Europe than it is here. There are many opportunities if you are willing to work for them.

Here's a fact for you. Those big companies give more support the Democrats more than the Republicans. Why? Because they support the globalist policies the Democrats push which make it easier for them to work through the government bureaucracies. The Republicans are the party for small and medium sized businesses.

 

Okay, but you literally just complained that socialism would concentrate wealth on the politicians and followed up by describing how capitalism has done that.

 

And impartial "god" are you going to find to devise and enforce the regulaitons that will make everything perfect in your mind?

You have got a lot of growning up to do. Power like that breeds corruption.

 

Why would I get upset by that picture? Trump's net worth is a lot more than mine. So what? He earned it in the private sector, not the government. He has a right to enjoy it.

I have a nice house in Florida, with a pool in the backyard, drive a top of the line Cadillac and have no debt. I’m happy. I don’t care what other people have. I don’t need it.

I don’t want to live in freaking New York City. Aside from the theater, there is nothing there that attracts me. The place is dirty, noisy and now it’s crime ridden. I lived there in the 1970s and was dating a New York model whose father was a senior executive at one of the big New York banks. It was glamorous at times, but the taxes and the rents killed you.

Do you want to own property there? Forget it. A co-op the size of a chicken coop costs you over $2 million plus the monthly fees. I know. My niece and her husband and kids live there with their kids.

Your precious Bernie Sanders has never had a decent job in the private sector. He and his wife have lived off the government and political contributions from his supporters. He’s always arranged to give members of his family high paying jobs when he was running for public office. His wife pulled down over $250,000 a year running a state sponsored college that she ran the ground. The place is closed now, and it was run at taxpayer expense.

 

Fixed that for you.

It should bother you because we have wealth concentrated at the top with people dying from not being able to afford insulin...

Like you keep saying wealth concentrated at the top with the general populace suffering is the inevitable end of socialism/communism/etc. But that's EXACTLY what we already have, and it's been accelerating.

 

I can tell you how that will play out. It will be defined as a higher corporate tax rate and will rob hard working people like mine of things like a very nice health insurance plan at no charge.... Mark my words, that is exactly how it will play out simply because greed and business have been defined as evil entities in today’s environment and the left will gobble it up and proclaim to all that they have finally put all of us evil businessmen in our place.

 

First off, we could fix healthcare with universal government healthcare, as many other developed nations employ currently.

2nd, here's an example of how a minimum wage increase was handled in Minneapolis recently:

 

I hear you. While I am not a proponent, I think that is a different discussion. Working hard to achieve success should not be defined as greed. That is my biggest beef with the Democratic Party. These are people that have achieved success at the ballot box. They have no idea what it means to meet payroll so they have managed to define hard work and success as bad simply because they have no intimate knowledge of what these things mean. There is a distinct difference in flying around the nation twelve hours making speeches and shaking hands and defining that as a hard day verses a person that puts in twelve hours to pay the vendors, the payroll taxes, the corporate taxes, the staff and hope that there is something left in the till for him. And until the left defines hard work differently, I will never vote a democrat into office. Working hard to achieve success is an honorable goal.

 

True, and if poorly run, they soon become family legacies.

I know how it works . . . I worked 18 years for one of the oldest family-owned businesses in the nation (about 300 employees). Those family members that now run the company were introduced at the ground floor, and trained through multiple facets of the business before going off to receive advanced education that best fit their chosen direction within the company. Upon their return, they worked through numerous additional positions, accumulating more experience and perspective before getting anywhere near executive level. Were they just handed cushy jobs within the company? No, they worked through a succession plan, and those that didn't work out work elsewhere. Walmart is probably little different, the main difference being their size, and that the company I worked for is 100% family owned.

Beyond my point that those employers do not start out as employers, they also are not the sole beneficiaries of the productivity of their employees. Investors have lent them money for shares of their stock in their portfolios, in their mutual funds or in their 401K or 403B accounts, and that money allows those companies to create more jobs. Furthermore, I doubt if there are a significant number of companies among the top 500 which do not pay significant profit-sharing / bonuses out to their employees.

There is one duplicitous member of Partisan Lines who enjoys railing against capitalism, while simultaneously putting his money to work in his and his wife's maximally-funded 401K accounts. I submit that someone of integrity must make a choice. Either pull the money from those investments, or stop slamming capitalism.

 

making the stock market "too big to fail" and using 401k's as an excuse isn't capitalism.

 

And all this government meddling will do is to discourage well run smaller firms that are will from growing. Such firms are exactly the companies you want to encourage because they are the employers who are most liking create good jobs at good wages.

Provisions of Obama care did exactly the same thing. Once firms reached a certain size, they were discouraged from crossing the threshold because their costs would go up dramatically, not from changing in the economic environment, but from government bureaucrats who think they know everything.

Guys like you think you have all the answers. All you have to do is snap your fingers, regulate everything, and the world will be perfect. Well it won't. When you miscalculate, you hurt people. When get paid off by a political contributor to make a certain decision, people get hurt. If you don't think that happens, you are not in touch with reality.

Which gets me to the minimum wage farce. Years ago the main proponents of the minimum wage were labor unions. Why? Because it placed a floor under their negotiations when they went into collective bargaining. Now all it does it make it harder for teenagers and other low skilled workers get jobs.

If you can't enough productive work to be worth $15 an hour you won't get hired. If the management can purchase a machine that will do the work for less money, they will buy, and those workers will left in the cold.

Have you been to McDonald’s recently? If you have, you will sell computerized ordering stations that have replaced the cashiers. As we go to a cashless society, which getting a big push from the pandemic, those devices will become more common. The people that will get hurt are the low income, low skilled workers.

But then I guess in your world it's better for them to be on welfare that to be working.

 

hey dummy. universal healthcare means that employers no longer provide it.

 

Screwing up a business is a lot easier than running it well.

Back in the 1980s I worked for the world's largest company, AT&T. In the old days, when you got a job there, you were set. The company had a monopoly in many places, and many segments of it were well run.

Then the senor management made a number of bad decisions. They banked on land lines, not cell phones. They grabbed all of the "profitable" services from the operating companies during the divestiture. It looked like a wonderful strategy except that all of the products they took over were in their mature stage. They were "cash cows," that badly needed innovation or replacement.

Senor management didn't do that. They kept on doing things "the old company way," and they went bankrupt. Another company bought the shell that was left mainly for the name.

The old General Motors, K Mart, Sears, Woolworth, Chrysler, Bed, Bath and Beyond and Macy's are all nationally known names. All of them are either bankrupt and gone, or are on the rocks.

As the old saying goes, nothing is certain except death, government and taxes.