What We Got Here
Progressives on libertarianism
“What we got here is … failure to communicate.” spoken by The Captain, played by Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke
Those words came to mind recently when I read a blog on Salon. [CAUTION!] Doing this could be injurious to your mental health.
Are libertarians misunderstood?
Teresa Cotsirilos
A conversation with Reason editors Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch: “I don’t think either of us are anarchists…”
I read the Q&A format and then started on the comments. I stopped after about 20%, didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. No need to twist their words, just copy’n'paste:
- people who shout the loudest
- Freedom=crime, law of the jungle
- the libertarian mindset. Nauseating.
- implementation of the Republican/Libertarian wish list leads to economic collapse.
- their psychological dysfunctions
- libertarians so often ally with the Republican party
- Libertarians are greedy morons
- shills for rich right-wingers.
- ridiculous, unproven, unprovable social philosophy
- (Libertarianism) sounds appealing to the intellectually lazy
- states rights is a way for the lazy and bigoted
- Libertarians I talk to on this forum are ideology-bound nutcases.
- believe in this fanciful notion that “the “benevolent market”
- their weird Randian utopia
- the Republicans believe
- the same people who complain bitterly about taxes…don’t seem to have any problem tithing 10 percent of their income to church
- That’s what a minimum wage law prevents: a race to the bottom
- Somalia … the libertarian paradise.
- hypothetical-utopia sissy slap-fight for bragging rights
- Recent studies suggest that an individual’s partisanship actually increases with his or her I.Q. and knowledge of the political process. So the rise in independent voters just reflects the fact that there are more and more ill-informed people out there.
- I think th No tax libertarians are selfish bastards who want to deregulate our government for their selfish interests. They are really just republicans in disguise.
- This country started heading down hill when politicians started listening to the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
- Libertarians are just really cheap Republicans.
- If you are still reading Rand or entertaining libertarian dreams past the age of 16, it’s time to grow up.
- The state got into education because religious schools and private money weren’t educating the workforce well enough for the needs of the economy or of civil society or democracy either.
- If libertarians favor capitalism and oppose government controls except to protect private property and oppose civil rights in the name of “freedom” they would be fascists.
- (the internet) such a decentralized system could never have been created by the “free market capitalism” that they worship.
- Outside the US, “libertarian” is synonymous with “anarchist” … American Libertarians are a relatively recent phenomenon, philosophically cut off at the knees by the contradictions of their creed, born in the political and historical ignorance of America.
- Libertarian socialist is the same as anarchist.
- Fox News and generally the Murdoch entities
- (the present system of ours) inherently it’s a GOOD system. It’s just been fucked up beyond all recognition.
- So save that silly bullshit about the Minimum Wage. Because we both know, you’re talking out of your ass.
- Small-l libertarians reject war and government and private property and money and every form of “authority”.
Not a glimmer of rational discussion – and no ‘cherry-picking’ on my part. Maybe there were some good examples later, one could always hope … the odds are, though, “The Captain” was right.
StuckInNJ says:
For context … and convenience ….. I think it’s worthwhile to copy and paste the original Q&A session. It’s fairly short.
===============================================================
Are libertarians misunderstood?
A conversation with Reason editors Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch: “I don’t think either of us are anarchists…”
By Teresa Cotsirilos
Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, the editors of the leading libertarian publication Reason, see hope in their fellow Americans’ increasing disenchantment with the political system. In their new book “Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America,” they note that independents now account for the largest bloc of voters in the country and urge more defections from the two major parties. Only by dismantling this hierarchical system of power, they maintain, can we achieve real deregulation of government-run services, which will lead to increased consumer choice and a more thoroughly democratized society.
Say what you will about libertarian arguments, but they’re always fun to discuss. So we sat down with Gillespie and Welch earlier this week and talked about their philosophy over a sushi lunch:
Your book urges the American public to embrace an unregulated market free of government control. But you also include a quote from Julian Assange, a self-described libertarian, stating that “a free market ends up as a monopoly unless you force it to be free.” So basically, some external body has to exist to ensure the freedom of a market — doesn’t that imply that free markets are inextricable from some form of government control?
Matt Welch: I think a lot of people, when they want to initiate a discussion about or with crazy libertarians, hold them to a standard that other people don’t.
And crazy libertarians are… you guys?
MW: [Laughs] Oh yeah. They wanna go immediately, “What is the logical conclusion of this philosophy? Would you have the state build roads? And you wouldn’t even have a fire department, and that kind of stuff!” That logical question isn’t given to progressive or conservative groups — they’ve been around longer, and there’s also an explicitly or self-consciously philosophical bent to libertarianism.
We don’t really spend a lot of time talking about “libertopia” around here. It tends to be kind of practical-minded — like, if we’re going to spend the same amount of money on education, just as a starting point, how about we spend it this way?
So you’re not advocating for zero governmental regulation or control?
Nick Gillespie: I don’t think either of us are anarchists — it’s not a question of that. We’d like to define libertarian less as a noun and more as an adjective. So it’s like, [you're libertarian if] in any given situation, you’re moving towards a kind of individual regulation.
Politics is built upon — and it has to be, and this is why we’re not anarchists — areas of common concern where you need to forge a national, state-level or citywide consensus.
What are those areas?
NG: Things like national defense. To a certain degree, I would say school funding — I mean, I would rather have the state out of education, but it’s not gonna happen anytime soon. Certain types of air pollution regulations. Frederick Hayek is one of our big intellectual heroes, and his book “Constitutional Liberty” just takes for granted that there’s going to be some social welfare state provided by the government. You could argue that it doesn’t have to be, but look — we assume that it is. The idea is that you squeeze down those areas where there really does need to be a [governing] consensus to the smallest degree possible — because when you have that, you definitely have clear winners and losers: 51 percent of people get to make the other 49 percent eat shit, basically. You still have to make a case for why what you’re doing is worth purchasing if you’re a businessman, but it’s not a win-lose proposition. It’s much more about persuasion and voluntary cooperation than forcing people to do one thing or another.
Just more broadly speaking, you can see in places such as the Internet, which is relatively unregulated, how markets in general and voluntary associations — and a kind of libertarian world — would work. It creates a lot of value. It sends out huge amounts of information. It creates reputation and branding. That becomes more important than regulation by people with guns.
In your book, you talk a lot about using market principles to deconstruct the duopoly of America’s two-party system. Can you expand upon that?
NG: Well, we’re always going to have two major parties. We’re not saying, “OK, we’re gonna have 50 different parties.” But the two main parties have lost huge amounts of market share.
MW: I mean, Republicans in many ways created the Tea Party by being hugely big government and routing the limited-government side [of their party] for more than 15 years. Democrats are going to be flirting with this. Obama is persecuting medical marijuana shops and spending more money on drug war enforcement than his predecessors did, being lousy on civil liberties in general, lousy about Guantánamo, lousy about starting wars.
And you don’t think Obama’s policies are responding to the needs of the time?
MW: No, and he’s taking all those liberal votes for granted.
NG: Parties can benefit, we think, if they decentralize decision making to the lowest level possible. So like with schools, with K-12 education, giving students and parents choice is a huge selling point — the satisfaction rates of people who choose their schools versus people who get assigned them, I mean, they’re not even close. And if you keep doing that in a variety of different issues, what you have to do is you have to give up your ability to dictate.
And for political activists, if you wanna be successful, you have to realize that these parties are not going to be able to make people do what they want, and that you’re much better off going after specific issues and creating kind of ephemeral, ad hoc syndicates that push certain issues. We know this group that’s pushing school choice, and it includes people like Dick Morris, the toe-sucking fetishist and Republican presidential advisor, and Joe Trippi, who was Howard Dean’s campaign manager. So it’s a broad coalition of people who have nothing really in common. Besides sucking toes, which I’m sure Trippi is into as well.
The underlying argument in your book is that deregulation leads to a decentralization of services, which in turn leads to a democratization of services and increased freedom for everyone involved. But I can think of situations in which the deregulation of a system would not lead to the decentralization of power — like in any situation in which a monopoly is formed. And I can think of examples when even if an industry did decentralize, it wouldn’t lead to the democratization of services — like any situation in which you had asymmetric information flow between the producer and consumer.
NG: Right. Can you name an example? I mean, you said you had examples.
Well, you guys wrote your book in the shadow of the Great Recession, but the book never actually addresses how the recession happened in the first place. And critics of libertarianism often cite the different actors in the subprime mortgage crisis, arguing that they took advantage of an unregulated system to consolidate power, and took advantage of a lack of understanding amongst consumers to sell them products that they didn’t fully understand.
MW: It’s a big question, so I’ll just take on little bits of it. One is the notion that the financial crisis was caused by deregulation… The central libertarian argument about what to do in the wake of a financial crisis is let the people who made these terrible decisions go bankrupt. And when appropriate — and do it early and often — send the motherfuckers to jail, you know?
If they did something illegal. But one of the problems is that if the system’s been deregulated, then it’s not illegal.
NG: But fraud is always illegal.
MW: Yeah, fraud has never been deregulated.
NG: When you talk about — OK, think about it this way. If mortgage companies knew that they were on the hook for the mortgages they underwrote, they would be very careful in who they lent money to… What happened was that every mortgage originator basically knew that they would get $500 to $2,000 in fees for simply originating loans, and then when they sold them they didn’t sell them to simply derivative companies — they sold them to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Because the government told these guys to buy every loan that they could get. They kept pushing banks and said, “We’re going to regulate you to extend credit to more and more people who might not meet the gold standard credit regulations.” … In fact, the housing collapse tracks with a libertarian understanding in that it’s caused by government interventions in the private sector.
Regulatory bodies, if you look closely, are never put in to restrain business. They’re called in by big business in order to freeze the market at a certain place in time … And look at this in terms of the financial banks and investment banks in the country. Going in there were six major banks that had something like 60 percent of the market. Now there are four that have like 70 percent of the market. So in fact, all of this regulation, all of this government-supported intervention to fix things, led to a high concentration in this market.
MW: You can’t keep monopolies anymore unless you give consumers what they want, or if your [market control is] set in stone by the government. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking we’re going to be under the thumb of corporations with a capital C, but those corporations are desperate to sell you crap. And you don’t like it, or you suddenly have choice, that’s it, they’re screwed.
Stephen Metcalf recently published an article in Slate arguing that libertarianism essentially excuses and enables selfishness. What’s your response to that?
NG: I mean, I don’t think you’re going to walk away from this interview and think, “God, those motherfuckers only think about getting more for themselves.” I’m a libertarian because I believe that a free enterprise system and the political system that goes along with that opens up opportunities. And if you look at the actual rules that are in place that are supposedly socially progressive, most of the time they don’t help poor people. Things even like minimum wage laws — the rate of unemployment among teenage black males has only gone up since the minimum wage laws were jacked up in the late ’50s and was indexed for inflation, because the more people come into the market with fewer skills, the [more the] deck is stacked against them, and you get priced out at the beginning … Maybe I’m wrong, but I know precisely why I’m a libertarian, and it’s precisely because it promotes social and economic mobility.
MW: I’m greatly influenced by living in Central Europe between ages 22 to 29 in the early ’90s, beginning less than a year before communism collapsed. And for me, free trade and immigration are the quickest way I can think of for poor people to get rich … It’s not some weird accident that in China and India in the past two decades we’ve seen more than half a billion people pulled out of poverty. And it is because they went in directions of market reforms … The opportunities just got better for everybody, and that’s what jazzes me up in the morning. And if a rich asshole makes a mistake, he should go bankrupt. My motivation is exactly the opposite of what Steven Metcalf thinks. To the extent that he thinks.
Teresa Cotsirilos is an editorial fellow at Salon. More: Teresa Cotsirilos
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11th July 2011 at 9:10 am
StuckInNJ says:
Now …. regarding the responses to the Q&A that Novista posted ….
America is DEEPLY divided politically.
The divide is PERMANENT.
There is a HUGE percentage of Free Shitters — government employees at every level (local, state, and federal), plus Unions, plus the Free Shit Army itself — who will NEVER vote for smaller government, fiscal responsibility, or even personnal responsibility. The have the police, SWAT, and eventually the military on their side to enforce their laws.
There is NO political leaders on the horizon that can bridge the gap.
ONLY a Total Collapse … an economic FukYouShima type meltdown … will dispose of these fuckwads … and allow the rest of us to start over and get it right.
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11th July 2011 at 9:21 am
RT says:
amen STuck
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11th July 2011 at 9:30 am
StuckInNJ says:
and peace be upon you, RT
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11th July 2011 at 10:22 am
Buckhed says:
Stuck…this is why when I hear folks talking about taking back the government etc. I laugh. The only way to take back things is to start over. I learned a long while ago that attending County Council meetings,City Council meetings etc was a waste of time because everyone was more concerned about their share of the pie at the meetings instead of worrying about the pie being gone completely. When the governor of S.C. was telling everyone back in 2003 that we needed to save for a rainy day,quit growing government at a break neck pace and to end pork barrel spending;he was laughed at.South Carolina now is looking a huge deficit and I bet Sanford is laughing his ass off now ( and loving on that South American hottie girlfriend too..LMAO) .
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11th July 2011 at 12:58 pm
flash says:
Ignorant fools always reap what they sow and I for one am thoroughly going to enjoy the giant flush when this massive pile of shit posing as a government turns runny.
How can anyone still believe the maleducated maggots who are running this country have any other purpose other than serving themselves. Public servant my big hairy ass.
Oh, those bad libertarians want to take away our bah bah… Yeah , sours coming bitchez,.
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11th July 2011 at 1:05 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Overall, most of those observations about Libertarians are fairly accurate, although very broad generalizations.
RE
Hot debate. What do you think?
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11th July 2011 at 1:16 pm
flash says:
For RE the only two choices are fascism or communism.
Yeah ,hope that works out fer ya’
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11th July 2011 at 1:21 pm
Muck About says:
@Stucky: You should have posted that comment as an article. It would have gotten more attention and stayed on the board longer!
Don’t be afraid! Steal and publish – Admin does it all the time.. The more the better. With credits, of course..
@Admin: I personally thing it would be great if you s-t-r-e-c-t-h out the list of current “Latest Posts” so it expands to include more posts so it takes longer before a post falls off into Archive Hell.
MA
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11th July 2011 at 1:38 pm
AwholeDr says:
This article blew me away. Fully 20% of income is coming from the government.
“Economy Faces a Jolt as Benefit Checks Run Out”
NYT article
“An extraordinary amount of personal income is coming directly from the government.
Close to $2 of every $10 that went into Americans’ wallets last year were payments like jobless benefits, food stamps, Social Security and disability, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics. In states hit hard by the downturn, like Arizona, Florida, Michigan and Ohio, residents derived even more of their income from the government.
By the end of this year, however, many of those dollars are going to disappear, with the expiration of extended benefits intended to help people cope with the lingering effects of the recession. Moody’s Analytics estimates $37 billion will be drained from the nation’s pocketbooks this year.
In terms of economic impact, that is slightly less than the spending cuts Congress enacted to keep the government financed through September, averting a shutdown.
Unless hiring picks up sharply to compensate, economists fear that the lost income will further crimp consumer spending and act as a drag on a recovery that is still quite fragile. Among the other supports that are slipping away are federal aid to the states, the Federal Reserve’s program to pump money into the economy and the payroll tax cut, scheduled to expire at the end of the year.
“If we don’t get more job growth and gains in wages and salaries, then consumers just aren’t going to have the firepower to spend, and the economy is going to weaken,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, a macroeconomic consulting firm.
Job growth has remained elusive. There are 4.6 unemployed workers for every opening, according to the Labor Department, and Friday’s unemployment report showed that employers added an anemic 18,000 jobs in June.
In Arizona, where there are 10 job seekers for every opening, 45,000 people could lose benefits by the end of the year, according to estimates from the state Department of Economic Security. Yet employers in the state have added just 4,000 jobs over the last 12 months.
Some other states will also feel a disproportionate loss of income unless hiring revives. In Florida, where nearly 476,000 people are collecting unemployment benefits, employers have added only 11,200 jobs in the last year. In Michigan, employers have added about 40,000 jobs since May 2010, but about 267,000 people are claiming jobless benefits.
Throughout the recession and its aftermath, government benefits have helped keep money in people’s wallets and, in turn, circulating among businesses. Total government payments rose to $2.3 trillion in 2010, from $1.7 trillion in 2007, an increase of about 35 percent.
While some of that growth was in Social Security and disability benefits as the population aged, the majority resulted from payments to people continuing to suffer from the recession, said Mr. Zandi. Unemployment benefits, including emergency and extended benefits, are more than three times their prerecession level, he said. The nearly 20 percent of personal income now provided by the government is close to a record high.”
Government payments have increased by 35% since Obama took office. Good luck cutting the deficit/spending.
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11th July 2011 at 2:57 pm
Administrator says:
Muck
WordPress allows a maximum of 15 posts showing.
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11th July 2011 at 2:59 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
@Flash
I never said it was going to work out well.
RE
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11th July 2011 at 3:35 pm
Muck About says:
@Admin: Figures………
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11th July 2011 at 3:42 pm
Surly1 says:
On this board it would appear, per Stuck that free Shitters = Union Members, who actually work (because heaven forbid that people who work for a living actually be able to organize and negotiate their compensation and conditions– ANATHEMA!!)= deserving of “a Total Collapse … an economic FukYouShima type meltdown … (to)dispose of these fuckwads.”
I think this fairly sums up the mindset here.
Although I must say I find it amusing that you think that the hundreds of militarized SWAT teams will be enforcing laws on behalf of the FSA. The FSA (plus peace activists, leftists, labor leaders, and probably some libertarians) will be the first on the rail cars destined for some of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton-built FEMA camps.
I must say that “shills for rich right wingers” strikes the precisely right note. I guess we are supposed to ignore Koch money and Dick Armey’s Freedom Works. A lot of TP-ers think they are supporting a returtn to constitutional government, when they are actually the ground troops for crony capitalists. The end game is goverment by economic warlord, and if that does not sound like Somalia to you, you are in denial.
The phony left-right dialectic is a Punch-and-Judy show maintained by the MSM propaganda wing to keep us at one another’s throats. The point, friends, is that there is ONE party, wholly in thrall to the money crowd. And guess what? You ain’t in it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q
Be careful what you wish for: you might get it.
First they came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
~ Martin Niemoller
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11th July 2011 at 3:56 pm
StuckInNJ says:
“On this board it would appear, per Stuck that free Shitters = Union Members, who …work for a living actually be able to organize and negotiate their compensation and conditions– ANATHEMA” ——Surly1
That’s not what I said. And you are a jackass for suggesting I did.
If unions simply did what they claim they are there for —- “to organize and negotiate their compensation and conditions” —- then that would be just fine.
But they don’t. Unions are a political organization. The fuckwad AFL/CIO guy was just on TV today calling the Repub candidates “The Seven Dwarfs” … and saying that if a Rebublican is elected in 2012 it will lead to a Great Depression.
That may or may not be true. But that’s totally beside the point.
The Unions are a political arm of the Democratic party. They would vote for Stalin if he was a democrat. Unions turn people in Sheep. America will NEVER get a “do-over” if unions had their way.
That’s why I don’t like unions.
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11th July 2011 at 6:32 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
“Unions are a political organization”-Stuck
And Corporations aren’t Political Organizations? The Koch Brothers don’t back Tea Party Candidates?
EVERY group is a Political organization Stuck, and every group tries to get Pols into office who will support their agenda. That is how the system works buddy. Get a clue.
RE
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11th July 2011 at 6:59 pm
StuckInNJ says:
I do have a clue. I’m fairly sure I know how the system works. Thanks for your concern “buddy”.
The brief discussion was about unions … and misinformation by Surly how I feel about them.
Corporations do not FORCE employees to contribute to a particular party. Union members have zero say in whom the union supports.
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11th July 2011 at 7:04 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Corporate Emplloyees have ZERO say in who the corporation supports, and they make their contributions in the form of the profits the corp takes out of their paychecks. There is no difference Stuck. Get a clue, buddy.
RE
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11th July 2011 at 7:30 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Hey Stuck, I have a great idea! You should change your handle from StuckinNJ to CluelessinNJ. Or maybe CluelesslyStuckinNJ or StuckCluelesslyinNJ.
RE the one trick pony hypocrite
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11th July 2011 at 7:46 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
One Trick Pony has returned!
RE
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11th July 2011 at 8:03 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Now deleting posts as well, eh Herr Goebbels? What happenned to TBPs “Free Speech”? Hypocrite.
RE
Hot debate. What do you think?
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11th July 2011 at 12:59 am
Wyoming Mike says:
Tipping the hard cider tonight RE? You are clueless on the real world and how employees negotiate real jobs. Educate yourself, it may be painful at first, like that old Star Trek with the brain thingie attached to Spock’s head, but if you pull through you’ll be all the better for it.
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11th July 2011 at 1:15 am
llpoh says:
Mike – RE has gone feral since he crapped once too often on the site and its members. He thought that his many followers would demand he return. Umm, didn’t happen. He knows nothing of commerce or of employee/employer relations. All business should shut forthwith as far as he is concerned.
Wyoming – home to the homeliest women in America. I am sure your missus lifted the standards considerably, but whoa, there are some heifers running around out there. Please feel free to update my view on this as it is a few years old now.
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11th July 2011 at 1:24 am
Surly1 says:
Re RE post at 8:03
Free speech is as dead on TBP as it in in the FSA.
Party discipline at its best. Cue the hyenas.
Ye shall know them by their fruits: Do men gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles?
Matthew 7:16
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11th July 2011 at 6:36 am
Novista says:
Surly1
You don’t know shit about the mindset here. Aggregates suck in GDP and other rubbery numbers. And so do you.
I’ve been a worker, a supervisor and a boss. I’ve been a union member, a steward, wrote a local newsletter, advised a senior steward on how to cope with the company suits. I’ve been screwed by companies — and by unions. More than once from each.
Once I took a tech job, had been there for five months, was actually working as ‘acting section manager’ while my boss was away. Sitting at the desk, I became aware of some Incredible Hulk standing in the doorway. Eh? “You gots to join the union.”
This would have been interesting, imagine some union complaint, I’d be on both sides of the fence. I quickly stomped into the state manager’s office and said, “WTF?” And was told, “Oh, yes, well … we have a closed shop.” Riight. So to keep the job that the union never got me nor knew I was there for months, I joined the union. When the competition poached me for a technical sales position (and no union hangups) I phoned the union that I was leaving present employment and to this other position. Oh, OK. Later, they sued me for back dues. Fugem.
If you think a union is there these days for the worker, you are in cloud cuckoo land. Once upon a time, it was different. Not now.
And maybe not for some time. When we moved north back in ’53, my dad had to join the teamsters. His first experience with the help of unions. Yeah, sure. The funny thing was, 400K teamsters could bring the nation to a halt then — but 800K CWA workers, fractionated by differing contracts around the country — aided and abetted by the union in conjunction with Ma Bell, had bupkis power.
At least you can take comfort that you and RE are on the same page.
RE, it’s not only corporations, unless you consider the army one. I rembmer in 1961 being ordered to buy U.S. savings bonds. Another married buy was cashing them as soon as they arrived in the company mail — until the company commander found out and began vetting the mail and withholding said items (for safe keeping). Also the United Appeal. This was 1961.
When I got out in 1962 and got back to work at ma bell, TPTB decided the company would have 100% particilation. I didn’t sign up (gave at the army, see?) and was called into the section manager’s office. I said they could donate on my behalf to keep the % right. He wasn’t amused.
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11th July 2011 at 7:10 am
Administrator says:
Poor RE is being tweated unfairly. Poor doomster pussy. Go fuck yourself and jerk off on your own two bit piece of shit site. I’ve had enough of your shitting on my site. Hit the road dickhead.
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11th July 2011 at 8:13 am
Administrator says:
Surly1
Amen
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11th July 2011 at 8:14 am
Surly1 says:
“Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”
~H.L. Mencken
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11th July 2011 at 8:48 am
Surly1 says:
Novista
Eat shit.
I have been lurking and posting here long enough to take the measure of this board an many of the posters. Am still sort of amazed at the rant AWD put up yesterday about the obses. He owes everyboduy on this board a $75 co pay for a therapy session.
Like you I have been a worker, a union member (in my youth) and a boss. Still am a boss, plus run my own small company. So I’ve earned the right to my opinion, which holds, as you correctly observe, that the workplace is a rigged game in favor of the owners. IN this regard I agree with RE. I would not go so far as to say every owner is a Pigman, because I hope that I am not, but the essence of the employee-employer relationship is leverage, always wildly skewed in favor of the owner. Why employ people if they can’t make you money?
On the other hand, I am reminded of the apocrphal saying, “I ain’t never had a poor man write me a paycheck.”
Reality is always more complicated than internet tough guys want to portray.
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11th July 2011 at 9:08 am
Administrator says:
The internet is free to everyone. Owning means nothing.
“If you shit all over my site, be prepared to get some smeared on yourself.” – Jim Quinn
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11th July 2011 at 9:15 am
llpoh says:
Admin – I am glad I revisited this post. You made me laugh for the first time today. Nice quote from the Admin!
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11th July 2011 at 7:15 pm
Administrator says:
llpoh
I do my best.
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11th July 2011 at 8:11 pm