But how is your anecdote more probative of personal awareness than Shodan’s? Surely the fact that someone owned a small business and became a millionaire as a result is not all that abstract. Why, I know of one such person myself…several actually…but this case is much along the same line. I know a woman who supervises nine or ten McDonald’s restaurants. She came here legally from Mexico and is employed by a person much like the one in Shodan’s anecdote. In this case, the ‘guy’ came here legally as a young man and went to work washing dishes for McDonald’s. He is now in his sixties, owns around thirty McDonald’s restaurants, and is a millionaire several times over. He came to own these restaurants by virtue of a commitment to running his stores cleanly, properly and with an eye toward his customers having a good experience. Now, whenever McDonald’s has a restaurant in this area whose franchisee can’t seem to hack it and run his store properly, my friend’s boss is who they call to offer the store to.
So here we have another ‘guy’ who, by dint of hard work and discipline and a willingness to invest in himself, became a millionaire as well. And to repeat Shodan’s question to Brain Glutton, how exactly has he become wealthy by exploiting others? And what unfair advantage did he use to exploit them?
The simple fact of the matter is that some people are willing to work harder than others to get ahead. Often times it happens that they do just that. In fact, it has happened over and over again in this country to the tune of hundreds of thousands of times (so again, the notion isn’t all that abstract). Then, people like Brain Glutton and gonzomax and devilsknew look at the fact that these people have more than the average non-striving bear and find this somehow ‘unfair’. They think of the country’s cumulative wealth as rightly belonging to everybody and that everybody should share more or less equally in it. So they lobby and agitate and vote for the government to take wealth from those people who have worked hard for it and spread it around to everyone else (everyone else being the non-strivers in this case) and they attempt to justify this blatantly unfair and wrongheaded stance by claiming that individual wealth is created only through exploitation of some sort and/or through some kind of unfair advantage. The one thing they never talk about for some reason is that most people who don’t have much, haven’t done much to try to get it.
The fact of the matter is that most people don’t want to do the type of things that it takes to own, operate and build a business. They don’t want to deal with bankers and regulators and quarterly tax payments and health insurance and retirement plans and advances in technology and how to compete effectively with their company’s competitors. No, they want to clock in, do their eight hours, and then go home to play with the kids, drink beer and watch TV, go shopping, etc.
So fine. That’s their choice. But then they (or their self-appointed guardians on the left) have no legitimate standing to complain or sling insults and accusations of selfishness when the people who have opted to work hard and take on all these challenges resist efforts to take from them what they’ve earned and give it to the non-strivers. The fact that they do not have this standing in no way keeps them from doing just that however, and so here we are, with one side saying “Hey, I earned this and I have every right to it” and another side saying “No, you capitalist pig, you stole it by unfairly exploiting your workers”.
So I leave it to you, luci, to explain just how it is that the 9-to-5 crowd deserves to profit just as much its employers, who often have their own hard-earned money at risk and often work twice as hard?