Entitlement

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Uh, genius, *that's exactly his point*.

It's a SHE, sliqua. I know quite a few people who started their own businesses after the dot com boom ended(Startups mind you) and surprise surprise, all of them failed except one. Since you're NT, I'm sure you have the social skills and the networking ability to make it work. Some of us, like me for example, do not have that. I have no desire to start my own business because I am extremely bad at dealing with people and I find it very stressful to do so.




And furthermore, my point is that successful people are NOT entitled to special privileges because they were fortunate! Business is not a meritocracy, despite all the capitalist propaganda disseminated in our culture claiming that it is. The closest thing in America to a true meritocracy is the Military; where advancement is based directly on performance and as a reward for following orders rather than on opportunity and social networking.

My apologies.



Most businesses fail, period - ours came close to failing too many times to count.

I may not be AS - but that doesn't mean I'm naturally amazing at networking either. deltafunction's point was that workers who feel entitled to a share of the profits should "throw some skin in the game". The spoils go to those who took the risk to start the business.

And my point is that employees in the private sector also take a very large risk by working for a company that might go under or lay them off and this could result in them having no means of supporting themselves. The people who are bearing the brunt of the recession are mainly employees who lost EVERYTHING. I know of people whose companies filed for bankruptcy and they still have the means of supporting themselves(since they own property).

The reason why the spoils go to those who OWN the business, regardless of whether or not they started it, is because they have more power and not because they're more deserving.

If you go work for a company, and it goes under - you've lost your wage, but you can find another job and still keep all of your posessions - you haven't really lost anything. People who start a business that fails lose whatever they put into it. Many times that's a house - at the very least their credit is destroyed. Most business owners end up putting their own cash into the business too, so they lose that.

The people who own a business threw in the cash that the business needed to survive - or they put in sweat equity and work for essentially nothing to get the business going. Employees sacrifice if the business fails - entrepreneurs have already sacrificed if the business succeeds.

Guess what? In my region many businesses have gone under. Some former entrepreneurs are now employees and many have started new businesses by partnering with folks who still have venture capital. Lemme tell ya, the percentage of people who started businesses that are homeless and/or on welfare is well below 5%. What happened is that the people who got laid off have not been able to find new jobs soon enough and their unemployment benefits are quickly running out so now they must either apply for welfare or rely on charities that are already stretched thin. The federal government has spent tax dollars to bail out failed businesses in the belief that this will create new jobs and stimulate the economy while former employees of those companies basically are struggling to make ends meet.

Now if I(an employee with no property or access to captial) were to do what you did right now and try to take out a loan for say, $20,000 to start a business all by myself with no investors guess what would happen? I'd get REJECTED.

I really have no patience for people who took out loans to start their businesses before the financial crisis of 2008. Because before this happened such loans were far easier to obtain. If there is an economic bubble and you start a business in a booming industry, your loan applications are more likely to be approved. Former employees living on unemployment benefits are not going to be approved for business loans unless someone else WITH money can cosign because they clearly don't have the money and banks aren't willing to take risks during a recession.

Don't call me princess.



My dad was a self-proclaimed hermit who started his own animation company and ran it when animation was being outsourced to China. His business was successful until he was a victim of fraud by his client. After that, he could not pay his employees wages, he lost his business and spent whatever leftover money he had on a lawsuit that still has not been resolved a decade later. His one marketable skill that he had been practicing for over a decade was no longer needed, so he had to figure out how to feed a family of six off of minimum wage. His employees just moved on to another job (some ended up working for his fraudulent client). He never did animation again.

So until you go out and try to run a business, fail a few times, and see the risk that these owners take - not just excess money, but life savings, and the well-being of their family, then don't go telling me that owners owe you something. No one owes you anything. If you want to go to a place where sharing resources is emphasized and everyone is treated equally, then go to China.

In the end its all about power play. They want to infuse moral arguments into why the rich deserve all the land and resources, but in the end, I'm going to side with the majority and the little guy having a social safety net. Its really self interest on my part. They can live in their gated communities with their armed mercenaries protecting them from outside threats. I, on the other hand, have to live amongst other working class people, and I don't have that luxury. So if s**t hits the fan and people around me starving, I'm the one who's going to have to live in the hot seat of violence and rioting. I can't hire guards to keep people from breaking into my house and stealing my s**t and possibly murdering me like they can, so I side with using taxes to make food stamps and low income housing available so that this isn't as much of an issue.

China isn't like that at all. That's primarily propaganda, as they have a divide between very rich oligarchs, and very poor wage slaves. Really, that's how it was, even before the Deng reforms, and I find it very ironic, and proving of my point, that a lot of the modern oligarchs in the former communist world are all former party officials. In the old days, the majority would slave away in the rice fields while party heads would sit in their headquarters making impersonal decisions that affected everyone elses lives, just like these modern mega-corporations.

As well, there's a huge difference between how small businesses operate and how large corporations function. I work for a small businessman and don't really expect benefits or anything, because the owner can't afford it. Now, large industry, on the other hand, that's pulling in 10 or 11 figures, they can afford to pay their workers more. Apple, for example, can pay their employees in China more so they don't have to live in cramped tenements and so they can actually afford one of the iPad's they build. They could at least invest in their workers a bit more than just setting up physical nets above their factories to keep them from killing their selves.

There's a big lie being stitched together to deceive the public into thinking that Exon-Mobile and Manhattan-Chase are on the same level as a mom and pop store and represent the same type of American enterprise. Its really not the case.

I don't want some BS Utopian promise of a classless society that's no more than just a ploy to give absolute power to a few elites. This current rallying cry of far right media, that anyone who believes that using public funds for social safety netting is a communist, is all about deceiving and using ignorant people for the purpose of achieving the same type of power grab that Communism achieved. If all the political and economic power defaults to a few private corporations, there really isn't a lot of difference from the politburo, the communist party, the KGB, etc (a few entities with no democratic check or balance) running everything.

The major difference between small business and large business is you get an automated help hotline and a telephone representative if you want to discuss something with Walmart. In a small business, employees and customers can speak face to face with the owner, who often works alongside everyone else and isn't sitting up somewhere in an air conditioned high rise building at a board meeting, impersonally making decisions that affect thousands of people. Small business and multi-national corporations are not the same, and people really need to get this out of their heads.

Last edited by JNathanK on 19 Sep 2012, 5:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It may be a bit of a stretch, but the foundations of the business are the same - there are shareholders who own the company and they are investing in it to make a profit. They still invest in the company, making a sacrifice - if the business tanks, they still are the ones who pay for it.

Public companies actually make it possible for anyone to profit from other peoples work while making less of a risk - you can invest as much or as little as you want when buying shares of public companies. So really, I'd think that public companies are doing regular workers a favour - you could invest for as little as $1000, and make a profit without being some amazing entrepreneur, if you do it smartly.

As for unfair labour, companies do it because they can. If workers stood up and unionized, or individuals refused to work for such a low wage and threatened to leave and take up a better paying job, then that company would have to reconsider how much they are paying those workers. Seriously, they would have no other alternatives.

As for the China metaphor, I meant a socialist economy as opposed to a capitalist one. Sorry if that is actually not the case in China.

But my main point is that those big companies had to start somewhere, with some entrepreneurs risking big money to fulfill their dream careers. Some people happened to be more successful than others, and expand and go public. But why should the successful be punished when they initially took that risk of losing so much, and work hard to maintain their productivity allowing not only the business to pay its shareholders, but also to keep so many people employed. If you think that's a lie, I'm sorry.

If I work for the owners of a business, then yes, they do owe me something: A SALARY. And FYI many of my family members are in business as was my late grandfather. But what I came to realize is yes he worked hard, but so do millions of other people, but not only was he smart he was in the right place at the right time. So how did your father start a business while earning minimum wage? Where did he get the money from?

I don't claim to be owed anything, but YOU seem to think that those who take risks are owed some kind or reward for their "bravery"; they're not. I remember when Obama's speech was taken out of context by republicans who cherry picked a statement and put a spin on it which was "you didn't build that". When in fact, he pointed out that nobody is truly self-sufficient and that those who call themselves self-made are using things that were built before them by other people.

I have a strange feeling that I am being singled out for no apparent reason.

These ideals you guys have, where is all this money supposed to come from? Are you saying people should get paid more? How much more? Give me a number. How much is enough for you? Do you expect every single worker to be living the high life while the owner is living in poverty? How will that work in a company as big as Walmart? Where does this money come from? Tell me more.

Does the government regulate this? If so, that must be some kind of socialist regime where equality is emphasized but productivity is not. So what incentive do people have to be more productive? Will we as a society be motivated to be at our most productive when we would get just as much for sitting on our a**es doing nothing?

Last edited by deltafunction on 19 Sep 2012, 5:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You forgot the fourth factor, hereditary privelege. In which case THE ONLY FACTOR is luck. The likes of Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian or the queen of England have neither talent nor the willingness to seize anything. All they did was crawl out of the right vagina.

The major difference between small business and large business is it isn't as impersonal. The owners, workers, and customers are naturally going to interact with each other more. At one time, Walmart was like this, but its not the same store it used to be. When Sam Walton was alive, he only bought American made goods and had a sense of social responsibility, as he'd stuggled hard to climb the rungs of society. The heirs of the Walmart legacy, on the other hand, grew up in privilege and didn't have the working class background as a reference that their father had. As soon as he died, they started buying Chinese goods and used their immense capital to undercut the small entrepreneur in every way that they could. One of their tactics was to initially bite the cost on goods until competitors went out of business and then hike the prices. I see this as a very cannibalistic practice, from Walmart's end, and the mindless consumer who only cares about low, immediate cost, and nothing else.

Yah, maybe I could buy a few stocks for some of these large industries on my computer, but its still all very impersonal, even from my end. I'm not taking the needs and work environment of coffee growers in Bolivia or assembly line workers in Indonesia or auto workers in Detroit into account, because its a very bad combination of depersonalization and culturally encouraged selfishness.

I hardly think anyone wants to see business owners reduced to poverty - but neither should workers. I don't think it's unreasonable for workers to ask for a wage on which they can not only exist on, but actually live comfortably on. That way, workers can purchase more numerous and expensive products, thereby keeping the economy growing. Paying a good wage to workers is a long term investment.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

In the case of small businesses, you have to realize that they pay workers what they are able to afford paying.

There are also a lot of expenses that people generally aren't aware of.

1. Rent (many small businesses do not own the building or the property), if they do own the property they have to pay property taxes
2. Electricity
3. Cost of goods/raw materials to make goods etc. These are affected by gasoline prices.
4. liability insurance
5. phone bill
6. credit processing fees
7. inventory taxes (not all states have this tax)
8. shrinkage (through internal or external theft, paperwork errors etc.)
9. worker's paychecks and benefits (if they have benefits)
10. advertising

That's just to name 10 expenses, there are a lot more than simply those.