“How did the Rich get their Wealth? By stealing the Labor and Wealth of the Poor.”
I’ve repeatedly noted that Richard Branson, billionaire owner of Virgin Airlines, would have nothing if not for the pilots, mechanics, flight attendants, and myriad other people who actually make the planes fly. So why is he the billionaire and they are not, when every single dime made by Virgin Airlines is due to the labor of these pilots, mechanics, flight attendants and so forth? Well that’s simple. He’s a billionaire because he has laws that say he can take the product of their labor for himself and leave them pennies. And if they object and take for themselves the wealth that they’re currently producing for Mr. Branson, he can call out government guns to enforce his edicts at gunpoint and put them in prison for theft of “his” property — even though he created not a single bit of it with his own two hands.
Capitalism is, at its core, legalized theft of the product of the labor of the workers who actually creates wealth. Steve Jobs did not create a single iPhone. He instead took ownership of the designs created by other people inside Apple and reaped the profits for himself, meaning he died a billionaire while most of Apple’s engineers can’t even afford to buy a house (I estimate that over 75% of Apple’s engineers do not make the median income needed to afford a home here in the Silicon Valley).
Does this mean that I’m a Communist? No. Communism has its own issues, in particular it is very inefficient in matching supply and demand (that and the word “communism” got a bad rap because of the tyrants who used the word to seize absolute power for themselves, but that’s a different issue). What it *does* mean is that I have little patience for those who say that the government (a.k.a. We The People) should not be involved in redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. The government is already involved in redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich — using government guns to enforce little pieces of paper claiming ownership by the rich of the wealth produced by workers– so why *not* balance that out by using those same government guns to move money the opposite way also?
But hey, that makes Ayn Rand’s Corpse cry, so it’s bad. Because stealing wealth is only okay if it’s the rich stealing from workers. If it’s workers getting back some of the wealth they created… why, how horrible! Why do eeevil lie-berals wanna make Baby Jesus cry by mentioning such a thing?!
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Celebrity Chef Mario Batali agreed to pay out $5.25 million to his former employees to settle a class-action lawsuit.
According to the article, Batali and the other owners of the eateries unlawfully skimmed four to five percent of the staff’s wine or alcoholic beverage sales from the tip pool, taking an unlawful “tip credit,” paying staff members less than the minimum wage, and failing to provide “spread-of-hours” pay — that is, extra pay when a double shift extends over a certain number of hours in the day.
The lawsuit encompasses staff members who worked at the restaurants from July 22, 2004 to February 14, 2012 — a group that numbers approximately 1,100.
Thanks for stoppign by Badtux.
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If there’s too much socialism, then there’s no incentive for the masses to strive because they’lll be taken care of in any case. If there’s too much capitalism then again there’s no incentive for the masses to strive because they’ll be screwed in any case. Therefore an advancing society must not be either.
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