02-06-2021, 07:47 AM
(02-02-2021, 06:50 PM)random3 Wrote: Americans voluntarily choose to work at a job for a wage and then turn around and scream that they are helpless and exploited victims because there is only one company in the world and you can't quit, start a business, or learn a new skill.
Basically, work is a necessity but also a privilege. Big Business knows that it can keep employees in fear. Maybe there are some remaining wage and hour laws that prohibit employers from compelling a worker to work off the clock to get paid for 'official' hours, that bosses do not have the right to ask for sexual favors, and that employees are not obliged to make contributions to political causes and candidates. Still, anyone can be fired without cause or explanation.
Labor unions have weakened because states must compete in a race to the bottom for pay, at least in manufacturing jobs. We are fortunate that the political system has yet to outlaw trade unions, the only protection that many workers have from egregious exploitation.
We often hear "free enterprise" lauded. But is it simply enterprise free to do what owners and managers want it to do... to workers and customers?
Starting a business requires capital. Training for a job takes capital. Those who own the capital control the access to what passes as the Good Life, and they can commit whoever they dislike who can't find some other patron to suffer. They can make slums out of cities by pricing people into slums.... and ruining places that used to have opportunity to live the American Dream. That was the Detroit Dream at one time. Try making a living in Detroit these days. A hundred years ago it was the equivalent of what Silicon Valley is today, a place to which people turned modest dreams into adequate realities. Video:
It's not entirely the politicians' fault. Maybe thirty-five million people occupying a few narrow strips of land because the rest of the state is either inaccessible, uninhabitable, or economically unsustainable cannot get away in living in low-profile housing. Sorry folks, but individual ranch houses that one can put on open prairie for fifty miles in every direction from downtown Dallas, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Kansas City, or Minneapolis just isn't possible any more near San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, or San Francisco. If you like the delightful climate, then if you are not going to have Calcutta-style poverty, then you are going to need housing more typical of Seoul or Tokyo. Bye, bye tract homes! Cities like on coastlines and in mountainous areas have obvious limits on how much housing can be built in a fifty-mile radius; fifty miles east of parts of Chicago are across Lake Michigan... in Michigan. It is probably a good thing, in view of the topography, that New Orleans is not that big a city.
On the other hand... why can't cities like Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Detroit be livable again?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.