Category: Capitalism

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Hucksters learn faster than any other people how to manipulate new technology to finagle people out of their money. The volume of junk mail, email, and texts I receive as opposed to actual communication from people I know and welcome is amazing. Almost every email I receive is junk — very rarely do I get a legitimate piece of email. Phone and texts are a bit better. I would say about half of what I receive there is legitimate. This is still a lot of junk.

What irritates me about this junk is that I thought laws were passed several years back to help the average citizen stop unwanted communication in what ever form — be it phone, text, letterbox or email. Report the offenders and these nuisances would stop.

But it has not stopped and the junk communications just keep coming. I realize it is complicated. A lot of the problems is the huckster operate outside the national borders so American laws are ineffective. Basically there is nothing we can do. The laws are pointless so the junk will continue to flow. So what if they are trying to sell viagra to lesbians. All they have to do is ignore the message, nobody is hurt.

I disagree. The best case scenario here is that I have to wade through hundreds of unnecessary emails and texts in order to find the ones that I actually need. This takes time. Every day precious minutes are stolen from me as I try to find what really matters to me amongst all this junk. This may be a small problem, but it is a problem. I don’t like it one bit and apparently there is nothing I can do about it because we couldn’t possibly stop hucksters from pursuing their businesses.

Never mind that these businesses are quite often engaged in ways to steal money from naive people. See the huckster has rights. It is the individual’s responsibility to stop the huckster.

It is so ingrained in our belief system of right and wrong that when we hear stories about someone getting bilked out of money, the gut reaction is why were the victims so stupid to fall for the huckster. The victim needs to smarten up because there is nothing wrong with parting a fool from his money. Unfortunately, the fool is in a dog eat dog world and apparently that is the way we like it.

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It always irritates me when I read articles like Barton Swaim in the Wall Street Journal (paywall though you can get a free article if you get a log in). Swaim thinks that the adherence to the Protestant Work Ethic is in decline and he pins this decline on Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and every other helpful thing ever done for poor people since then because the poor have no reason to work hard when they can get so much free shit from the government. The USA has just made it too easy for poor people to goof off instead of work.

Those retched poor people are just too God damn powerful and greedy as opposed to those put upon rich people who everybody keeps picking on. Swaim’s thinking is that we need to make the poor more miserable than they already are. They will never understand the value of hard work because they are given too much. His search for a villain in this story stops directly where his prejudices end — the poor.

Where to begin? First, we have to take him at his word that people would rather not work. It is mostly word of mouth drivel about adult men living with their parents, COVID subsidies and Somali refugees. Some of these may be problems but Swaim doesn’t really give much insight on how these unrelated problems have undermined the Protestant Work Ethic or how they are related to Johnson’s War on Poverty. He is flinging them out like a mad ape throwing shit at patrons at a zoo. He is hoping one of them will hit the target. They don’t. Adult men living off their parents, I am afraid to say, are living off their parents and not the government. COVID subsidies are long gone and no longer an issue. Which leaves the Somali refugee scandal which may or may not be a problem (it is still under investigation) but hardly a reason to eliminate a whole system. You wouldn’t call for the end of Corporate Capitalism based on the bad behavior of Bernie Madoff or Enron now would you? Why apply a different standard to government assistance.

Swaim also mythologizes life in pre-War on Poverty America. It was not sweetness and light. It was grinding poverty for most Americans — with estimated poverty rates between 40 to 60 % of the American people. And I am not talking the Great Depression either because even before the Great Depression an awful lot of Americans lived in poverty. It was only after Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that this rate came down to about 20% in 1960. After Johnson’s War on Poverty, the poverty rate now hovers around 11%. So government services lifted many poor Americans out of poverty.

Next lets look at those patriotic Capitalists who, in order to avoid paying higher American wages, brought to you, thank you very much by unions, fled the country in order to pay lower wages to workers outside the country. These “good” Americans pulled the rug out from under high wage workers in order to make more money with absolutely no concern for how this affected their now out-of-work employees. Nobody, by the way, stopped them. They were free to undermine union workers wages and unions themselves with nary a complaint from anyone.

This left getting a good education which has turned out to be bit of a trap for some. Many took out loans for educations that turned out to have very little benefit in the job market. People came out of college owing a bundle of money with little chance of recouping on their investment. So much for a home and a family.

Now AI is whittling away at the functions in the better jobs so that workers even in medicine, law and engineering are being threatened. What type of jobs does Swaim have to offer these young people with the advent of AI? Even a $15 minimum wage is insufficient to pay the rent in most states. The lowest possible wage can’t provide a meaningful income for survival. Some companies like Walmart and McDonald’s encourage their workers to use government benefits to supplement the low wages they pay their employees.. People actually are working full time jobs while receiving government assistance. Then these same assholes are trying to take away these benefits from full time workers because it discourages them from hard work.

Fuck them. Talking about how government benefits discourages people from fully engaging in the Protestant Work Ethic is just bull shit. People can see their reality. Hard work without a pay off is a meaningless exercise. I am surprised that so many low wage workers are still punching a time clock.

If only the poor worked harder, the world would be a better place. Maybe for the rich but there is little evidence that it would help the poor. The corollary to this rule is that rich people need even more money or else they will stop working so hard. Do you see the problem here? Rich people need more money are they won’t work while poor people need less money are they won’t work. Genius.

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One of the most remarkable accomplishments of modern marketing is the one the Rich have pulled on the American Middle Class. They have managed to make Americans more afraid of taxing wealthy people in the unlikely event that these members of the Middle Class become billionaires than the much more likely event that they will need, at some point in their life, available social services that will help them weather a financial storm.

It is peculiarly American trait which turns its full power against the Poor for being poor and fuels fear in the Middle Class that if they tax too much the whole money machine we have come to depend upon will come crashing down around them and, then, everybody will be poor. Is that what you want? Everyone being poor. How this message continues to attract believers is beyond me but lets face it, it somehow continues to hold a large segment of the American population in it’s thrall.

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The Trump Administration began raising tariffs back in April. Since then some have been lowered and some have been raised mostly based on the feelings Trump has towards the particular countries involved. In a remarkable display of peevishness, he raised tariffs on Canada based solely on the behavior of one Canadian citizen who deigned to remind Trump of Ronald Reagan’s Free Market philosophy. One Canadian playfully reminds Trump of one of the base tenants of market capitalism and all of Canada must suffer.

There is no explaining Trump at this point so I won’t even try but it is interesting how business people and libertarians continue to support Trump when his actions are contrary to their philosophy. Trump clearly believes that government can be used to interfere in the market and help individual players he likes. This isn’t laissez faire capitalism.

Raise tariffs to protect American businesses. Lower tariffs because Americans need cheaper beef. Raise tariffs because someone was mean to me. How are businesses supposed to rationally price their products in a global economy based on the capricious actions of one man is beyond me. But then, and this is the real lesson here, American Business has never been a big supporter of laissez faire capitalism. No matter what they say.

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When describing a good salesman people often refer to the adage that this guy is so good that he could sell refrigerators/air conditioning to the Eskimos. Which is generally considered a complement to the salesman’s ability. But why? Is it really a talent to brag about — convincing people to buy something that they didn’t want, don’t need and can’t use. Why would you brag about being a conman? But people do. They in fact admire it.

What is forgotten is that there is another person involved in this story — the Eskimo. He, however, is a chump. The mark, the person who it is all right to take advantage of because they should be smarter and more careful when talking to a fast talking salesman. Someone who deserves to get taken. The salesman, on the other hand, is the hero of the story. He is clever, a smooth talker, someone who gets what he wants, someone who doesn’t let a little thing as selling something unnecessary to a gullible customer get in his way. The salesman has the abilities people want. Who wants to be the chump.

It is sad that the whole salesman relationship is based on the notion that all he wants from you is your money and doesn’t care about whether you need or want what he is selling. The salesman is perfectly within his rights to sell whatever useless item he has to any gullible buyer willing to buy. It’s not the con man’s fault if the Eskimo is so gullible and bought the refrigerator. Buyer beware and all that crap but it isn’t an honest transaction.

Aren’t we suppose to value honesty above good salesman ship. Would it be so wrong for the salesman to tell the Eskimo that he doesn’t really need refrigeration? I am afraid there are an awful lot of people who would say yes. Why pass up an opportunity to separate a fool from his money. Someone is going to do it, right. And it is all perfectly legal which this tells you everything you need to know — we prefer the conman to the chump.

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Three 16 year old boys died in the past 5 weeks while working with big machinery.

One company explained that “the child ‘should not have been hired’ and that his age and identity were misrepresented on his hiring paperwork with an outside staffing company.” You don’t say. How innocent the company is acting? We were lied to and this poor unfortunate 16 year shouldn’t have been hired, we wouldn’t have hired him if only we had known his correct age.

For some reason I don’t believe it. Every employee has to provide proper documentation in order to work. The company has a responsibility to examine this documentation for validity. This is standard practice in place for some years. I used to do it in the 1980’s. HR departments should have this down. But OK, mistakes happen, perhaps a 16 year old was able to get a hold of a convincing fake document but a quick glance at the prospective employee might have set off some alarms. Somehow these boys with peach fuzz as beards were able to pass themselves off as older. Even if you accept that they are telling the truth, there is a frightening level of incompetence within the management of the company.

But I think this more than just an accident. One of the more illuminating giveaways that this is something more nefarious, is that it happened 3 teenagers at different companies and in different parts of the company met the same fate. This also might explain why Republican governors and legislatures, those champions of the working class, are loosening child labor laws. Companies are complaining that they are having trouble filling their open positions. Something must be done, so teenage labor is the solution to their problem.

Unfortunately, teenagers are banned from hazardous labor. No problem. These companies did a risk assessment about hiring underage employees. They figured out how much potential fines would be and then compared this to the price of raising wages and decided that paying the fines was the better deal. Higher wages are a sure thing while fines need only be paid if they get caught. Now that is a risk worth taking. They would probably have gotten away with it if nothing had gone wrong. This suggests that fines are too low. Fines should discourage companies from breaking the law, not be a factor in whether they are going to break the law or not.

But, saying that they can’t attract workers is misleading. These companies are having problems filling positions at the wage they want to pay. The wage isn’t enough to attract adults to perform an obviously hazardous job. When labor is scarce and the job is hazardous, the company needs to pay wages that attract the best workers. It is basic capitalism. They can’t just expect workers to risk life and limb for nothing. But, of course, these companies do.

What I find particularly irksome here is that these so called Capitalists only like Capitalism when it is to their advantage. When it isn’t, they moan to government for help — make the laws easier so we can hire people who will take the jobs at the rate we want to pay. Let in qualified immigrants who will take the lower wage. Hire teenagers who will take the lower wage. Boo hoo. Whatever they are, they aren’t good Capitalists.

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Our refrigerator, after 23 years of faithful service, died the other day.

Needing a replacement, Bob immediately found a new one. It’s a complicated and boring story but the crux of the matter is we can’t install the new one until we can detach our old one from the water system. A plumber has to do this and he needs a part. The installer said he can return when we know a date when this is completed. Bob has confirmed a date for the plumber.

All we need now is for the delivery people to come hook up the water for the new refrigerator and take the old one. The delivery man gave us a phone number and email address where we could contact them. Bob tried via email. No response. Bob then tried to call customer service. The recorded message informed him that he would wait an hour a customer service agent would answer. Thinking it had something to do with customer service being short staffed due to the 4th of July Holiday, he decided to wait until after the holiday. He called today very early in the day, and, received the same hour wait for an agent message. Customer Service doesn’t have enough agents when you start the day an hour behind. Given that we have heard nothing via email, I am willing to bet that no one is responding to emails and that our best bet is to wait an hour to speak with someone.

I recently had a similar experience while renting a car. We had to wait an hour and half in a line of more than 30 people to see a rental agent. There were two at the desk. Once we got our contract we went into another line to get our car. This desk had one person. We waited for 30 minutes in that line. At first, I thought a bunch of planes must have landed thus causing the long lines, but the line never got smaller, it had, in fact, got larger.

Of course, it isn’t the company’s fault. There aren’t enough good employees to do the job. They claim to be trying, but really are they? Management is always blaming labor for the lack of good employees. I invite you to look at this in a different way. Companies’ can’t find workers who are will do the job at the wage you are offering. They might have better luck if they paid more money.

Indeed, this is the way the market is supposed to operate. If something becomes more expansive to deliver, say oil for the sake of argument, then the market price goes up. So, when there is war in the Middle East or hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico preventing the refining of oil, everyone accepts that prices of oil will go up. This is what we are told anyway.

Then doesn’t the same theory applies to wages. If it is difficult to find employees at a certain wage, then you need to raise the wage until you can acquire the number and quality of employees where you can deliver the product or service you are selling. American business is, for some reason, resistant to learning this simple straightforward lesson of Capitalism. If forced to choose between higher wages or delivering bad service, they will choose bad service every time in hopes that if they hold out long enough, the labor market will change in their favor.

In the mind of Business Managers, Labor is the whipping boy for all the failures of American Capitalism. If there are problems, it was bad employees. If budget cuts are necessary, where do you think they cut first. Cut the number of staff while trying to maintain the same workload. Cut benefits, raise deductibles on health insurance, do away with sick days. They brag about profits, they brag about price shares but rarely, if ever, do you hear them brag about paying the best wages in the industry. Which is odd because a customer might infer that by paying the best wages, your company also has the best people.

I can’t tell you how many Rah Rah end of the year speeches I’ve listened to where the corporate heads are blathering on about all the successes the company experienced — profits are up, share prices are up, efficiency is up, automation is up. They claim how they are the best in the industry for this and that. Then some brave employee broaches the subject of wages. The talking head has a ready answer. The company pays wages that are in line with the labor market. This sounds like collaboration to me. If they all know the standard wage, they can gauge their salaries appropriately. I thought this was illegal but never mind. For some reason this stops all conversation about wages.

Employees buy it. Until recently, I always did. I thought well what can I say to that — the company pays what is in line with every other company in the industry. But, wait, doesn’t the company want to be best at everything? Why wouldn’t the company want to have the best wages as well? In almost 40 years of working, I have never heard a company head brag that they offer the best wages in their industry. They may say a lot of wonderful things about their employees, they may even believe what they say but they rarely brag about the wages. they are paying. Curious that, don’t you think?

Which brings me back to the extra refrigerator clogging up our kitchen. This effects customer service. Because lower paid employees are the most likely staff to work with actual customers, this lack of good employees has a detrimental effect on a customer’s experience. If you can’t afford to pay good employees you are also ensuring that, at least some of your customers, will have a bad experience. Companies are hoping that most of this will be handled through better automation, the problem is that if any hiccups occur and a human needs to get involved, the company almost guaranteeing a bad experience. Let me tell you if I have to wait an hour when I call a customer service department, I have already had a bad experience. I have had to wait an unreasonable amount of time. By the time the poor customer service agent answers, I am fuming and ready to quarrel. So, the underpaid sap might begin to think — I don’t get paid enough to this crap.

And around and around she goes.

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When hearing stories about swindlers and marks, Americans have a peculiar tendency to be angry at the mark instead of the swindler. The mark is almost as guilty as the swindler for being so gullible. If there weren’t so many dumb marks, swindlers would all be out of business.

This odd belief has created a rather interesting way of looking at business transactions. The basic assumption in business is that the other guy is somehow trying to screw you and you need to be extremely vigilant in order to avoid being taken. People expect salesman to overpromise, overcharge, and avoid talking about problems with the product. Since swindling is a part of the salesperson job description, people aren’t much bothered when they learn that the salesperson they are dealing with is a swindler.

Swindling is part of the American DNA. Swindlers began arriving on these shores pretty much the start. I remember Sister Mira telling the story of the Dutch buying Manhattan from the Indians. It amused her to no end how stupid the Indians were when they sold the island for $24. How could they sell such prime real estate for such a low price? Couldn’t they see that New York would soon become one of the most important cities in the world? The Dutch, on the other hand, were smart businesspeople. Doing what businesspeople do screwing over people to get a better price. The Dutch were smart, the Indians weren’t. There was no shame in underpaying the Indians.

Of course, Manhattan was not the great city it became when the Dutch settled, so the $24 might have been a fair price at the time. That, however, isn’t the story the Sister Mira was telling. She was telling a story about how the Dutch outsmarted the Indians and it was perfectly acceptable business practices to do so. Yes, children, at a Catholic school no less, learning that it is perfectly all right to screw people over in a business transaction. Being fair is not a part of capitalism. If the Indians wanted a fair price it was their responsibility to bone up on Manhattan land values and not for the Dutch to offer a fair price. Deception is just a part of business.

When I moved to California, I learned that my car would not meet California pollution standards. It was an older car. I decided it would be easier to buy a new one in California and sell my old car in Kansas rather than driving an old car half way across the country and upgrading. Since I never sold a car before, I asked for advice from a guy who I knew had experience in buying and selling car. He immediately offered to buy my car, giving me the impression, that, oh shucks, I know you are in hurry to leave, I don’t need the damn thing but let me just take this off your hands so you can leave without worrying about selling your car. I took him up on the deal. Once the title and the check changed hands, he couldn’t wait to tell me how he just screwed me over. The car was worth at least a thousand dollars more than he paid.

I should have known, right? Absolutely I should have known that was why I asked him in the first place. I wasn’t trying to sell him the car, I was trying to learn how. Instead of telling me how, he, knowing I didn’t know what I was doing, offered to buy the car. Then, after the sale, he gives me the lesson that I wanted in the first place. He took advantage of me and felt absolutely no guilt about it. To add salt to the wound, nobody felt the least bit sorry for me. I should have known better.

These stories litter the American Business history. Antique dealers going to garage sales and finding a treasure. They buy the treasure for a song and then earn a fortune on the resell. The antique dealer is admired for his business savvy while the seller is a chump. If the seller doesn’t know what he has that is his own damn fault. The seller got the price he was asking for. There are no moral qualms about it that is just the way Capitalism operates.

Getting a fair price is different from getting a good price. One is laying all your cards on the table and the other is just deceiving someone. Shamelessly deceiving at that. This is particularly annoying when many pro-Capitalist apologists try to argue that Capitalism is the only moral system. I am uncertain what lesson Sister Mira was trying to impart to her class. What I learned, though, was that you don’t have to be fair when working in business. Do whatever you need to do to get the deal done. Be the swindler and not the mark. How this jibes with making me a good Catholic, which I mistakenly believed was Sister Mira’s primary responsibility, is beyond me.

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During the 2009 banking crisis, I had a conversation with a prosperous real estate man. He wasn’t the least bit fazed by all the individuals losing their homes because they could no longer afford the monthly mortgage payments. He said it was a good lesson for these people who will now make better decisions regarding their future home purchases. When I pointed out that banks should learn this same difficult lesson so they too will learn their lesson about risky behavior. He was quiet for a moment as he absorbed my point.

Once he got his footing, he argued that this was different. The collapse of banks could lead to a much bigger collapse of the whole economic system, devastating everyone. The country can’t takes such a terrible risk because we don’t know where an economic collapse would take us. Of course, he is right. However, he also adamant that the ordinary person still needed to learn the lessons of the free market even if the too big to fail companies are spared this lesson. He understood the unfairness of it all, understood that it wasn’t quite the perfect capitalist system he talked about. But we, and I include myself in this, choose to live with this imperfect version of Capitalism because nobody wants an economic catastrophe that might occur if we let the rich go under.

This disconnect from theory and practice for the rich while maintaining the importance of market principles for the poor is a distinctly American position. Almost every other Western Economy offers a greater social safety net for its ordinary citizens while regulating companies too big to fail and taxing the rich who benefit from this protection of their businesses. Americans, on the other hand, protect the rich while letting the poor fall prey to the mercies of the market. So the game is rigged and everybody knows it but can’t admit it because socialism is bad. This misunderstanding of the government safety net is so out of whack with actual reality that I have met people who believe Medicare isn’t socialized medicine when it actually epitomizes how socialized medicine should work. But I can choose my own doctors with Medicare, it isn’t socialized medicine if I can choose my own doctors. I beat my head against the wall.

Instead we continue to push the facade that the market rules, the market decides and nothing is personal. If a person makes good decisions, they prosper. If a person make bad decisions, the person grows poor. Except this isn’t exactly how the system works. The people with a lot of money can make bad decisions and absolutely nothing happens to them because if they do go down the drain they can take the rest of us with them. Too big to fail is not market capitalism. Yet, we cling to this schizophrenic version of a market economy.

Once we see things differently, maybe, we could get the rich to take more responsibility for their protected enterprises. Greater regulation of business and higher taxes seems like a fair trade for this protection and, if you are thinking soberly about the continuation of capitalism, it is the only way to bring an element of fairness back into our version of a market system. It might even save capitalism from its very worst instincts.

Yet, as Robert Reich pointed out, these paragons of pure capitalism, are complaining about any effort to rein them in. They helpfully remind us that regulation and higher taxes are not how a free market works best. Right. Thanks. But if you are talking about how capitalism is supposed to work then, in a free market failing businesses are allowed to fail, aren’t they? Failing businesses would stop handing out bonus checks to their upper management if they knew the government wasn’t going to bail them out because they would need the money to save the business. So when this begins to happen, I will happy to listen to talk about how free markets are supposed to work. Until then you need to explain what concessions you are willing to make for the too big to fail guarantee that the taxpayers are giving your companies and it better be good too.

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Wall Street Journal believes that trying to attain diversity sidetracked the management of the Silicon Valley Bank to focus on diversity as opposed to managing the assets of the bank. What really happened is that WSJ didn’t want to place the blame on bad management working in a banking system that is lightly regulated. And what better villain in this little disaster drama than diversity. Not bad investments. Not bad management decisions. Not that nobody is really looking at them despite the fact that they will be backed up by the Federal Government. No bad business practices couldn’t possibly be the problem here. It makes much more sense to say that management was too focused on diversity goals to do their real jobs.

It also gives them a chance to take a dig at one of their favorite bugaboo — diversity. If only the company wasn’t so woke, this would have never happened. Being woke caused the management to worry more about diversity than making money. It is also a subtle dig at minorities and women who, of course, make up a portion of the management team. Women and minorities are, as you all know, more concerned about diversity than making money. If only the bank had been run by old white men, who only care about making money, this wouldn’t be a problem.

There is no way to prove them wrong. It is impossible to measure. And nobody would ever admit to it, at least, no one who wants to continue in banking. And, don’t cry for these managers because I bet these managers will find future employment in banking. Which is a shame. Nobody with real power will get punished because banks will always be rescued. The people who run banks know that. So taking risks won’t be punished because the government will bail out the banks because, well, if they didn’t, the whole economy would go down the tubes. So why not bet the house on number 7? What’s there to lose?

The irony is that WSJ reported the real reasons the bank collapsed in their article which is actually quite easy to understand. The bank invested too much money in Federal Bonds. This means they could be affected badly if interest rates rose. The Fed has been signaling for months that they were going to raise interest rates. The bank management didn’t make any changes in their investments that might have protected their assets. The Fed raised the rates. Somebody publicly pointed out their weak position and a bank run ensued.

But, no, upon reflection, diversity goals are so distracting to management teams. How could they focus on their investments when they needed to hire a diverse work force? That is far better explanation. It’s in the Wall Street Journal after all.