I don't disagree. That is why for the most part I avoid it :yep::DL

:rotfl2:
And we'll all be there someday.

Skybird, you can see it that way, but black markets crop up in virtually every human situation naturally. You can have a free market with no threat of violence—you cannot have regulation/socialization without the threat of force, period.

What examples are there of nation-states that have 100% voluntary "regulation" and control of the economy?

I missed you post suggesting forced wage caps at 25X lowest income. What an awful word to live in that would be. No incentive to do more than laze around. That sort of law would be well past my "to arms!" tripwire.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...NewsCollection

What walmart is really lacking, as I said well above, is quality customers. The problem with being cheap is that visiting the store is like visiting an urban bus station.

Incentive...? Is a freaking several tens of thousands of dollars not enough for doing an office job? You guys seem to think that if a company makes millions in income due to a director having made a certain decision, that at least parts of that profit his is personal property. It is not! The man makes decisions, that is his job, his damn duty, that'S what he already is being payed for - you can be polite and say "thanks" - but already that thanks is not mandatory, for he just fulfills his damn duty for which he additionally already gets payed...!

One million income per month - no sports, no show act, no movie, no business is worth it as long as you do not save the planet and bring peace to mankind or find a cure for a lethal epidemic.

Incentive is all nice and well - but they can be in relation to what is being done in workload and success - or can be totally disconnected from any such realities. And the latter all too often is the case.

If you think the top manager achieving orders by customers that secure a million-.heavy profit for the company earns that manager one of these isnanely high incomes - then figiure what that decision, that catching of custimer orders would be worth if the worker and staff refuse to process the order. Woithiut the lower ranking workforce, the top staff would acchieve NOTHINg. You do not only need a clever factory manager, you also need the workers running the factory. Both are mutually deopending on each other, and this shoudl be reflected in a fairer, more reasonable relation between his and their income. but if workers get fired and their wages cut and their income even more reduced by ifnlation some bastard bankers have pushed by causing a mess the taxpayers have to fix, while the top class of leading managers quadruple their incomes within five years and sign themselves in for additional bonus payments while they already go home every onths with hudnreds of thosuands and even millions, then this system may be called capitalistic or not, but it remains what it is: sick, unjust, undeserved, and in disregard for a realistic perspecrtive on things.

The strong eats the weak - that is all there is to this model.

You either accept that, or you decide to speak out against that. Both possible actions and replies tell something about your own personal morality.

Fair enough, Sky. I think people who earn enough money to buy clothes at Macy's and tools at Sears already make the decision where to spend their money. We could ask middle-income people to avoid Wal-mart, but the choice is still theirs and a lot of them prefer to stretch their dollar at WM. Besides, if more people avoided WM, that would not induce the company to pay their employees more, I don't think.

However, there are many other reasons discounters like WM can offer lower prices. You know they put a lot of thought and effort into making their supply chain very efficient. They have some really outstanding management practices, that save them costs. Wal-Mart is a very smart company.

I respectfully disagree, and I am not trying to change your opinion. The minimum criterion for a fair wage is what people will accept. I cannot buy into socially engineered pay structures. You mandate a "fair" pay that covers all those areas, there is less incentive for people to strive. I do not think that will work over the long run. Ask GM.


Wow, that is so true.

Money is not zero-sum, sorry.

If someone gets paid 1 million a year by the stockholders (otherwise known as "the public") it's because they think that he is worth that money.

Just like it's worth it to Hollywood to pay someone 10 million to make a movie, or 3 million to throw a ball.

An ARBITRARY cap is just that, arbitrary (and stupid).

All of a sudden making 25.00001X lowest wage is immoral (and illegal) while 25.000 is just dandy?

What about all the people that make money selling stuff to people with money?

Nothing against the Chinese, but I refuse to buy anything "Made in China".

And who makes that decision? You? Me? I think American senators and congressmen (and the president) are vastly overpaid for what is supposed to be a public service. I would have to convince enough congresspeople that it should be changed, since they are the ones with the power to make that change. It is absolutely not going to happen. So how exactly do you propose making top corporate people make what you think they deserve?

Again, exactly how do you mean to change that, without removing all freedom from everybody?

Please sir - put down the crack and step slowly away from the pipe.....

Skybird - how much does an education cost? Assuming your talking about JUST "primary" education - aka small children through high school - how much is that cost PER child? Using the "family of four" standard that has been bandied about - and using my own state's average cost per child (which was $8023.38 for FY2006) - and its fair to note that my state ranks fairly low in their per child spending - this just added $16k to the cost of that one employee... Now of course - to feed a family of 4 - which I have btw - our weekly grocery bill is between $150 - 200. We will use the $150 - multiply that by 52 weeks a year.... That is a grocery bill of $7,800 dollars a year just to feed everyone. Now we have a house payment and car payment - we will make it easy (as well as way too cheap just to prove the point) and include all the insurance and licensing costs with that - $1000 for the house and $300 for the car. So thats $15,600 for those. So right now we are at 16k + $7,800 + 15,600..... That equals $39,400.00

Now - Utilities (electricity, gas, oil, etc) - lets be gentle and make that $150 a month. Fuel for the vehicle - again using my own family experience that is about $200 bucks a month (I drive to work and back - thats it). So that adds another $4200 - and we haven't touched the costs of stuff like property taxes, or the cost of the health insurance, much less your "secure his life's evening when he has become old and does not work anymore." ideal.

So at this point - we have a total cost of JUST $43,600 not counting your very happy worker's contribution to his 401(k) - which lets say he decides to do a 3% contribution (which is also rather low) so thats an additional $1300.

Your ideal world will pay this employee more than $44,900 dollars a year (since I already noted there were other costs I haven't counted) - for putting boxes and cans on shelves, or running a cash register 40 hours a week.

But this STILL isn't the total cost - because it neglects payroll taxes ($2,783 for SS, $651 for medicare taxes, amounts for FUTA and SUTA will vary) , the company match to the 401(k) ($1300), health insurance costs paid by the employer, etc etc...

Just in taxes and the retirement push the cost of that employee well over $50,000 dollars a year. The health insurance is a substantial cost that will be specific to each employer - so I can't give numbers there.

$50,000 - Figure 260 paid work days a year (2 weeks vacation/sick time - total 250 days worked) - you have a person costing $200 a day - for 8 hours. That breaks down to a "realistic minimum fair" COST to be $25 dollars an hour for a stockboy putting cans on a shelf to that company.

Whats funny - is we didn't even count ALOT of additional costs for the family - so the real final numbers would be alot highter. So I challenge you Skybird - find ANY economic system - free market or fully socialized - that can sustain that level of burden long term without massive inflation (rising costs of good). There isn't one. Its not a perfect system we have - but your "utopian" one is doomed to catastrophic failure whereas a capitalist one is not.

You know what, i don't give a rats ass about all this lofty BS pro suspender man wallstreet job robbing talk.

Here's what i know and what i see.

Manufacturing jobs have been, are, or are going. Being outsourced , or "offshored" or "3rd partied" to places like China. IT jobs along with them from where im sitting. My own job is liable to be "3rd partied" before too long.

My father's workplace is a great example of SKILLED CRAFTSMAN being replaced by cheap specialized labor all so boardmembers and executives can have HUGE f*cking salaries and bonuses. Let me rephriase that. Americans are losing their livelyhoods so this upper 1% can get paid more.

Over the years, I've see cost of living increasing, jobs decreasing, no raises and stagnant income, all the while executives see increased salary and bonuses. I see more and more people sharing apartments because they can't afford to rent their own apartment, let alone buy a god damn house.

Written language does not adequately describe my disgust for this. Sure, go walmart, go ahead and put Americans out of good jobs while your exeuctives clean house. Yeah.. aren't we so lucky to have them, and their pro company men to explain to us. Brav -- Oh!

I guess I don't understand what the alternative is.

As long as buying products from China is legal, someone will fill the role of walmart. Punitive tariffs are not possible given the PRC's t-bill holdings, it's a trade war we'd lose.

You can chose not to shop walmart, but you also need to not buy anything from China—which is virtually impossible as I try not to, myself.

So I really can't fault walmart, if it wasn't them it would certainly be someone else. The fault is farther back with the idea of "engagement" with commies. Of course had we not engaged China, the conversation might be about India, instead.

<shrug>

There are a lot of people who have felt the same way throughout history. Their jobs are all gone now. Back in the day, it was the peasants and sharecroppers and later the mill-workers and who were getting all bent out of shape about mechanization stealing their jobs.

As it turns out, all their whining didn't change a thing, and thank God it didn't. Labor-intensive agriculture was eventually streamlined, making food cheaper and more readily available. The mill staff got smaller and smaller, and the textile industry has pretty much ceased to exist in the US, though the battered remains of their once-mighty lobby of dinosaurs still manage to extract tariff and subsidy concessions from Washington when they run sob-story ads about the mill closing in some bass-ackwards town.

Now we get most of our clothing from CAFTA countries, China, Indonesia, India, and Taiwan; places that actually appreciate textile jobs and can use them as a way to climb out of poverty in the same way western nations once did. The US remains a leader in agriculture, but now machines do most of the work, and it's the agriculture conglomerates like Archer-Daniels Midland, Conagra, and Monsanto that control the industry and give us affordable and plentiful food.

Is the country worse off for that? No, not even close. There are a lot more jobs now then there were when the heel-draggers first started protesting industrialization and mechanization and the jobs pay a lot better.
Here's what i know and what i see.

That may be what you see, but it's what you and others with similar opinions don't see that will cost you your job. Manufacturing jobs have been lost in the millions in the US because the firms became complacent. The US auto industry is a great example. After ww2, the US was the premier auto manufacturer in the world. It was already heavily unionized, and the industry was primarily concerned with making cars bigger, faster, more stylish, and more luxurious. The industry was rich and the workers did well.....for a while.

What US automakers failed to realize was that the world does not stop turning just because they're on top. While they stuck to their business modeland kept churning out battleships on wheels, the rest of the auto world was quietly innovating. We all know what happened after that, of course. Once the gas crisis manifested itself in the late 70's and fuel prices rose, the industry tanked because it didn't change quickly enough. Foreign automakers gained tremendous market share over the subsequent few decades, and still maintain control over large amounts of it. When you snooze, you lose.

And that's as far down the road as you can see? It's true that there are "corporate raiders" who sit on some boards and sell off assets or downsize solely for the purpose of enhancing their bonuses, but the companies they lead don't last for long unless idiotic and/or unethical policymakers bail them out. Case-in-point, American Airlines. That company should have been dufunct years ago, but the government has saved it on several occassions, the most recent being the $15 billion bailout after 9/11.

The rationale behind this was the too-big-to-fail argument coupled with an emphatic argument that the airline's insolubility was not its own fault. The complete opposite was true. American was a lumbering, unionized, failure that should have gone out of business and been replaced by an efficient airline where former employees could have attained jobs. Instead, we're still stuck with AA and the board members are still a bunch of counterproductive a-holes. Most recently, there was a dispute between labor and management when the company returned to profitability but voluntarily lowered union wages were not increased, though the board got huge bonuses. Capitalism and progress didn't do that, the government is what made it possible.

Your father may be a skilled craftsman, but if his industry can't compete, or a machine can do his job, or no one wants to buy the things he crafts, there is no point in keeping his job around. It would be like paying to keep boilermakers around after we quit using steam engines; just economic dead-weight.

I don't know what your father's situation is, or yours for that matter, but you should also consider that whatever firms employ you, unless they're just closing entirely, may actually be preserving jobs by outsourcing yours. If the firm can remain competitive, it can remain in business, and at least some people won't lose their jobs. The ones who will get your job need it more than you do, anyway, because they're poorer and they don't live in a rich country.

Of course, if you really don't give a crap about the guy in India whose malaria-ridden family is starving in a crowded hovel with sewage for a front lawn, there is a way to end this recession and bring good jobs back to the US and create newer, better ones in very short order. All we have to do is cut corporate taxes to 0%, disband some expensive regulatory frameworks, sclae back anti-business legislation, and remove tariffs. Lots of outmoded and uncompetitive industries would die immediately, but the move would create a lot of jobs as firms from other nations flocked to the US and new businesses sprang up. It would be like Switzerland or Hong Kong, but on a world-dominating scale. To put it another way, who cares if the factory is in China if the company owns China?

Can't really argue with that, but I think you're misidentifying the causes of it. When Wal-Mart or whoever runs a successful business, it does not make the standard of living decrease. It's easy to see how one could think that just by looking at a Wal-Mart greeter working for $8.00 an hour, but what you don't see is the 75-yr old guy sitting at home and going bankrupt with no way out because he planned poorly for retirement and has no job and no way out because there is no job. You don't see the 16-yr old kid not bagging groceries to save money for a car because he has no skills worth more than 8 bucks an hour. Wal-Mart creates employment for the otherwise unemployable, and creates services for the consumer of little means. Their motto, "Save Money. Live Better", is actually true.

By contrast, when the government taxes people, and when it agrees with heel-draggers who whine about their jobs being lost and steals money from others to keep them unproductively employed, the economic pie really does get smaller. The income does allow them to buy things and particiapte in the economy to a degree, but overall they create a net loss. That's why the government is so heavily in debt, and why companies get so spendthrift; they have to keep pace with the costs of doing business.


Wal-Mart execs, like most execs, get payed the big bucks because they do big things. The arguments have already been made that their salaries are a drop in the bucket, comparitively speaking, and I mentioned corporate raiders, but I'd also like to mention "caring capitalism" and CEO bonuses. Ben and Jerry's ice cream company tried limiting CEO income on the grounds that they could not justify the wealth disparity between execs and line workers. They limited the salary to five times the wage of the lowest paid workers. They got exactly what they paid for; the absolute worst execs caring capitalism could buy, and ended up paying a CEO 14 times what the lowest-paid worker earned. He wasn't good enough either, so they ended up paying another CEO even more and then they sold the company.

I understand how frustrating it can be to live in a world where your livleyhood can vanish in an instant; whisked away to some foreign shore because you were too expensive while the big-wigs make obscene salaries. It seems wrong on the face of it, but that's the way forward. You can choose to hang on to your lousy, endangered job and cost everyone else or start playing the same game that the execs do and think ahead. Innovate. Make sound, long-term investments in commodities or education. Discover the miracle of compound interest. Make your income count.

Admittedly, the state is making that harder and harder to do with the increase in capital gains tax, inflation, and taxes, taxes, taxes, in general, but there are still a lot of opportunities out there if you work hard and plan wisely.

The cute thing is so many people seem to WANT to be serfs serving a tiny, predatory elite. Licking the hands that beat and kill them. And that tiny, predatory minority has hired guns who's only job is to warp reality and make servitude sound reasonable. And OF COURSE these people want government small, or non-existent. Bullies don't like it when there is no teacher monitoring the schoolyard, either.

Hrm... I havent seen anyone mention one of the main reasons that Wal Mart is so hated...

Any guesses out there?

Competitors.

I've always been bothered by people who 'know' they're right. You don't discuss, you preach. You don't argue, you condemn. Anyone who disagrees with you obviously likes being wrong, or being stupid, or being a slave.

Of course we love being slaves to the evil corporations, but the salvation you have in mind for us lies in the wonderful, friendly, loving government? Some of us actually see the people in the government as worse monsters than your hated CEOs. Can you show me that I'm wrong about that?

Has it ever occured to you that you might be wrong? Is it possible to have a discussion, or does it have to be a shouting match? Or a put-down match?

Men that don't want to be serfs don't act like children.

You know what, even children don't need adults messing with most of their playground interactions. Asking a grown up to fix it for them means they never learn how to fix it themselves.

I read a great article by Jonah Goldberg. He said in effect that his kids had it great. They had loads of free time, everything they could possibly want, nice vacations, etc. He said he'd stop working and live their lifestyle—but he can't, because someone has to be the grown up.

On that note, I can't remember the last time Wal-Mart's "predatory elite" ever forced me to serve them. If I don't like Wal-Mart, I can go shop at Kroger, or Albertson's, or about ten thousand other retailers. I can go to work for 22 million other US companies.

The only elite that has ever preyed on me can come to my house and take away my rights and property and force me into improsonment or kill me if I don't surrender a significant portion of my wealth and my will to whatever cause they deem is best. They can send me to fight and die for them for a cause I don't believe in by giving me a draft number. They can make decisions that affect hundreds of millions, and sometimes billions of people around the globe negatively, and they are almost never held accountable for their mistakes.

Nope... I waited a full day and no one got it.

Wal Mart is anti Union.

Holy hell, Didnt even know my region of the country had that many walmarts.

Hmm, I say we lynch Arkansas, It all started there.:rotfl2: