You do realize that the shareholder had to exchange dollars that he worked for in order to receive shares of Walmart stock?
I feel like it might be buried somewhere in the 1000+ pages of Atlas Shrugged.
- With regard to the first interpretation: I wonder what OP would make of someone who starts a business from scratch and, after much hard work and toil, reaches the point where they can afford to hire subordinate employees to do their work for them. Is such a person no longer entitled to the wealth his business generates? What about someone who retires after many years of work, or does work that allows them to collect royalties (writing a novel, for example)? It takes an up-front investment of time and effort but continues to produce rewards even when the person is no longer personally involved. Is this person a thief? And if so, at what point in the process does he go from being a productive worker to a thief?
2a) With regard to the second interpretation: Our society is already highly stratified and welfare plays an important role in reducing hunger and homelessness. It also pays dividends to society, because it lets people remain (relatively) safe and at least gives them the chance to return to self-sufficiency. As has been pointed out, welfare is still poverty… no one is getting rich off it. If you want a world without welfare “thieves” go watch a movie about Victorian London and check out the squalor, crime, and suffering that ensues without a social safety net.
2b) Regardless, the worker who gives his money to fund welfare is hardly having his money “stolen.” Taxation and its uses are levied upon him through the functions of a democratically elected representative government. By participating in this system, he consents to the decisions of those representatives. If he no longer wishes to participate, he may exit any time he pleases and find a new place to live (he may quickly find that most nice places to live have much more severe “theft” than America).
So what? He obviously was paid quite well in order to have enough money to buy shares of Walmart. Does that give him the right to demand that others get paid poverty level wages?
I’m pretty sure it does. If I want you to do a task for me, I offer what I am willing to pay in exchange for your labor. If you are unhappy with my offer, you are free to seek new employment elsewhere.
No it doesn’t. The business knows that the labor market is such that they can get workers at low wages. The employee often has a choice only between working for a low wage or not working at all. The option to seek employment elsewhere only comes into play if there is employment available elsewhere. The stockholder is acting immorally in exploiting the labor market in order to better the return on his investment.
So perhaps we should attack the social conditions that limit the employee’s choices (lack of education, social stratification, lack of employment options) rather than saying a business owner is a thief and/or abusive monster.
Don’t get me wrong; I’d love to live in a world where business owners were kinder to their employees. But it doesn’t change the fact that the owner / employee relationship is a voluntary one and the owner is not a thief just because they administrate the business rather than perform the labor.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
Are you denying that some companies make money by doing immoral things? Nevertheless, someone making money by not “working” for it is irrelevant.
[/QUOTE]
I think it was more along the line of mocking your attitude there than anything. I agree that it’s irrelevant, especially since obviously definition of what ‘working’ is or means is highly variable in this thread.
There would still be stockholders, Voyager…the only difference is the stock would be private, not public. And if there were no stocks (either public or private) then there would be no capital investment. No capital investment means adios muchachos…don’t forget to write (to mix my paraphrases from Aliens and the Dark Tower)
Why you are disputing this point is unclear to me, since you have to know that without capital investment there never would have BEEN a Wal-Mart for that poor, down trodden worker to be exploited at, and without continued investment the entire thing would fold up in a fairly short time. The stockholders have as much of a vital role in keeping that poor little worker employed as anyone in the system, contrary to the ridiculous meme about getting paid for nothing while sponging off of the good workers and peasants. While I have no doubt that the OP believes this with the fervency of 10,000 suns, I know that YOU know how things really work in the real world.
We can do both. If we wave a wand and give everyone in the US a Master’s degree, we’d still need people to work in Walmarts. Sure, we should do more to subsidize post-secondary education, but we can’t blame the employees for being stuck in situations where they have to work in slave wages for immoral greedy corporations.
I agree that being stuck in a situation without options is not entirely the employee’s fault (there are too many other factors that play into poverty).
But to return to the question about having the right to demand others get paid slave wages: If I am the business owner, why do I not have the right to offer my employees whatever I like? It’s my money, and I am in control of my business, so how do I not have the right to control how I spend my money?
You’re not only controlling how you spend your money, you’re spending society’s money. By not paying employees a fair wage, that means the rest of us are subsidizing their health care, the rest of us are buying them food stamps, the rest of us are paying for school lunches for their children. Those who want to reduce welfare costs would do well to push for increases to the minimum wage.
I’ll buy that.
You’ll have to define how you are using the term “work” here. It seems that you are heavily discounting the value of investment, both in capital and time. I suspect that your definition would make your sentiments a truism.
And the argument can be made that it’s actually a benefit to society to keep those cats on the disability payments/welfare checks they scam for.
As you say disability checks, unemployment benefits and welfare represent, quite literally, a pittance. As in, barely enough money to eat off of and not live in a dumpster.
The scammers (all three of them) deploy their modest ingenuity and utter lack of ambition to collect that pittance, run through any number of hoops to do so, all in order not to have to work “for real”. Maybe they’re just lazy, maybe they like the thrill of playing the system or feeling smarter than The Man, maybe they simply cannot hold a stable job for reasons X or Y that nevertheless would not entitle them to social support from the State. A shitty personality, the social stigma of a diagnosed mental illness or time served in custody, an untreated substance addiction would all be examples.
Were these people “rooted out” of the welfare system, without fixing the underlying causes of their issues naturally, they would likely deploy their ingenuity in other ways, ways that could very well be more directly harmful to the public - theft, burglary, assault, cooking meth… simple vagrancy… ; this would in turn require police attention to redress ($$$ and possible danger to the cops) before probably landing them in jail - where housing them would cost more than the food stamps they secure dishonestly. And where they would learn more antisocial ways, both from the institution itself and from fellow inmates.
So in a very real sense, letting the scammers scam for chump change is a net benefit to society and to the taxpayers. In the grand scheme of things, who gives a good fuck ?
The real question here is, what does it actually mean to “not work for your money”? It’s easy to say, for isntance, that wellfare recipients don’t work for the money, and I suppose that’s a legitimate description, but I also think that all but the most capitalist amongst us would agree that wellfare is necessary. Sure, I think just about everyone would admit that it’s not perfect, and it could use reform–good luck getting concensus on what the reform should be. But I don’t feel like it’s legitimate to compare wellfare to work because it is, in essence, government sponsored charity. I don’t feel robbed when I donate money to charity, I do feel robbed when I find out a charity misspent the donations they received, but it’d also be silly to argue that one should never donate to charity because there’s corrupt ones out there.
Other than that, I think it’s unfair to say that bankers, stockholders, investors aren’t working. The best example on this end would be looking at a pawn shop. A lot of people might feel ripped off trying to sell items at a pawn shop realizing they won’t get retail value for their item, but the pawn shop offers a valuable service of making a guaranteed offer. They make their money by taking the risk that they won’t get what they think it’s worth, and they’ll have to invest time, money, energy, and space to maintain and eventually sell that item for a profit. They aren’t working in the sense of doing manual labor, writing code, teaching, or whatever, but essentially in buying and mitigating risk. Stockholders do much the same thing, yes, as long as a company is doing well, they make money, but there’s inherent risk in their investments and they’re making money by taking that risk where others are unable or unwilling to do so.
Now, that said, there could be arguments about how beneficial that work is and whether it is appropriately compensated. There’s often arguments that athletes, actors, musicians, etc. are overpaid, but yet millions of people still have no issue paying to go to athletic events, movies, and concerts, buying BluRays, CDs, merchandise, etc. As an individual we may feel that many of us work harder and make less money, and that’s unfair. But at the same time, I make considerable more money now after getting my degrees than I did in previous jobs, and yet I worked much harder before.
The difference is, the work I do now people are willing to pay me more precisely because it has greater economic value, and fewer people are able to do what I do. How many people can honestly say they can perform at the most elite level of athletes, actors, musicians? Similarly, how many people can honestly say they have the resources and the will to invest in stocks and such? Without people being willing to invest, there’s fewer jobs.
And that’s where this whole thing goes full circle. It makes sense to reward the people who have the skills and resources that are most desirable to use them, otherwise they may use other skills and other resources that will reward them better but ultimately creates less value for everyone. But if we’re upset, as a society, that we think they’re being over-compensated, and that it leaves the poor behind, that’s exactly why we need the social safety net. We can argue about whether or not there is an economic motivation for helping the poor, though I think there often is, but there certainly is a moral one.
I’ve met and actually know people who cheat various systems of government assistance. As has been pointed out, none of them are living the high life on government money, and I think you make a valid point about these sorts of people. The main reason they do it is mostly because they’re ultimately unmotivated to work. When they do work, they’re often terrible employees, they work half-ass, and ultimately probably cost the companies almost as much money as they might be generating for them, possibly more when you include training, management, benefits, and high turnover costs.
In short, these aren’t the sort of people who are looking to have a 65" flat screen surround sound system paid for by the government, these are people who have the ability to work and earn more but are happy to rent a room or live in a crappy subsidized apartment, watching TV off of a friend’s Netflix account off their neighbor’s WiFi on a tablet they “borrowed” from their parents, eating food out of a box.
Now, sure, some people aren’t motivated by material possessions, and maybe they’re willing to live like that while they’re going to school or because they’re investing money in trying to start a business, or they’re only working part time because they’re starting a band or writing a novel. But for these sorts of people who cheat the system, they’re doing it precisely because they don’t have greater motivations, they don’t have the drive to live a better life, pursue an education or some artistic endeavor, they’re happy just to exist.
And I think there’s a valid point to saying we may be better off with them cheating the system than not. Because then maybe we’ll just see them all become those awful employees that drift from job to job because they wear out their welcome and might as well just be getting paid to go away. Or they just mooch off of friends and family until they wear out their welomce and become homeless. Or they result to crime. Regardless, they end up costing society money in some way, and it’s quite possible that it’s cheapest to just let the people who have no interest beyond just existing to do exactly that.
I see this argument a lot, and there is a break down between “your money” and “the company’s money.” I have run several businesses in my life, and both entities are handled separately, even when I’m running the business as a sole proprietorship. What’s best for *me *is not always what’s best for the business.
Now, to the employees themselves, “offering them whatever you like” is a poor method in determining if you are paying a good wage to the employees. As I’ve said before, employees are assets with needs just like any other asset.
You don’t, for instance, rent a building or vehicle for operations and then assume that nothing will ever need maintenance. Thus, when you go to hire an employee you need to factor in “maintenance” such as training, institutional knowledge, job satisfaction, medical care, and everything else relating to a person. A lot of companies try to divorce this maintenance and take a position of “I’m only paying for their labor. I don’t need to care about them” but that is a lot more costly than a few extra dollars per hour over the long run. Retraining for most jobs usually causes issues, not just in production but in efficiency.
I’m speaking in generalities, but this is true in almost every job you will ever see. Look to the newest employees. What would happen if you got rid of them? What about the medium-time employees? Long-time employees? You’ll notice that the loss to the company as a whole gets progressively worse the longer that someone has been there. There are, of course, jobs that are low-skill, low-training and these jobs will tend to be at or near the minimum wage. But, in general, people try to grow beyond these jobs even if they aren’t getting paid more.
The big problem in business overall (and exemplified by employee relations) is that “I’m right to pay the bare minimum I can get away with because free market!” is a very short term, owner-cash-flow friendly view and is detrimental to the long-term operational success of a company.
Of course, this is a small and medium business view. Once you become publicly traded, you are loved until you don’t post a profit for a few quarters. Then activists come in to “turn you around” and you start seeing all of these policies that are short-term and shareholder-friendly getting implemented. Costco, as a previously brought up example to counter WalMart, is asked regularly at investor calls why they pay so much more than Sam’s Club. The President/CEO always tells them to stuff it. Should CostCo fall on a hard year or two, this turn around process is exactly what will happen. The long time employees see their benefits cut, the new employees are hired in at lower wages, and morale goes through the floor, basement, sub-basement, and water table. Even if your company comes back around, it’s credited to these “turn around” efforts (even if it was an economic collapse causing the general revenue issues) and nothing lost comes back to the employees. All of the additional revenues and resources go to the share holders and executive staff.
But I look at this sort of “cost savings” like a building or vehicle asset management scenario. You can stretch the maintenance to your vehicles or buildings for a year or two and pay less because you are in a tight purse-string scenario. But, after a little while, you have to spend more than you would have originally to maintain those buildings or vehicles. This same thing happens by the loss of your most valuable workers. They are, after all, the first to burn out in these circumstances. They are not only the first to “buckle down” in hard times and work harder, but they also remember the rose-tinted good ol’ days. If the company gets better, they are the first to feel like they sacrificed for nothing and gtfo…but not before passing on their low morale to everyone around them. If the company gets worse, they’ll be the first poached by other companies. In either case, you pay more by in the long term by losing their institutional knowledge and the stuff they just handled without anyone really thinking it was an issue. Even in the short term, you pay the immediate costs of retraining, along with any mishaps that arise from that, such as production delays, mispriced product, and so forth.
The choice is not just between high and low wages, the choice is between high, low, and no wages. Someone mentioned Costco earlier as a good employer. It has a different business model and so pays a higher wage but employs many fewer workers. Their revenue is about one quarter of Walmarts and their workflorce is about 1/15th the size. If Walmart employed the same number of employees per revenue as Costco they would have to fire 900,000 workers in America.
So Walmart could have 1.4 million american workers and pay them like Walmart workers or 500,000 workers paid like Costco workers and 900,000 unemployed workers. By choosing the former they are providing health care, food, and shelter for almost a million poor people instead of asking the rest of society to take care of these people.
Anyone who wants to see people get all their money from welfare would do well to push for increases to the minimum wage.
A better comparison would be to compare Costco to Sam’s Club. Warehouse clubs tend to have higher sales per worker.
Walmart is not providing health care for their employees, they’re depending on the rest of us to do that by minimizing the number of employees that qualify for full time status and their benefits.
The Walmart apologists tend to embrace the fallacy of the excluded middle. It isn’t either pay them slave wages or lay them off. The third choice is to pay a living wage and either raising prices and/or living with a smaller profit.
Actually there’s no income requirement on buying stock. Even someone on minimum wage could save up the $75 or whatever it costs to by a Wal-Mart share.
Not to mention there are teachers who earned middle income their entire lives and own shares of companies like Wal-Mart through TIAA-CREF etc etc. Anyway, the whole concept of the OP and ancillary posts like yours are noting new. Just juvenile and simplistic criticisms of capitalism. Marx beat you to it but at least made a coherent argument.
I’m quite aware that there is no income requirement for buying stock. Sure, a guy on minimum wage could save up $75 over the course of maybe a year. Or he could spend it on food and rent. The rest of your post deserves no response.