So yesterday, as I was minding my own business in Star Trek Online, the idiots started again with their rhetoric against government, taxes, Social Security,unions, teachers, the poor, inner city kids (Inner City is just code for black people) and a whole host of other things that they bitched about while hanging themselves. But one commenter went on about minimum wage laws.
"A kid who worked for me made 18 dollars an hour without realizing it. He asked me why I couldn't pay him more and I told him to take it up with the gubmint. He went from being a LIBERAL to being a CONSERVATIVE and volunteered for a Republican against a long standing Democrat."
The above quote is a paraphrase, but I'm sure it doesn't take a genius to see how stupid it is. Especially the sentence in bold. Most conservatives who run 'small' businesses do so for the sake of making a quick buck. They don't want to have to do all the work that is involved with keeping a business going or running smoothly. They just expect whatever shitty service they offer to pay for itself so they won't be a temporarily embarrassed billionaire anymore.
Besides, smaller businesses all over the country pay higher wages and they do just fine. And states with a higher than the federal minimum are able to better stimulate their economies because people have more to spend. And that usually means smaller businesses will see MORE business. Not less. And as far as I'm concerned, if you aren't willing to invest in your workers so they have enough to live on AND be able to buy the products they produce, then that isn't business. That's slavery.
But you have to remember who I'm talking to here. These are people who think we should just take what we can get and shut the fuck up because people in the Philippines are happy to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for shit wages because of overpopulation problems. No, I'm not making this up. And yes, it does get worse.
There are some people out there who think sending high school dropouts and people who couldn't go past an 8th grade education to 'work in the fields' will solve illegal immigration when enough research will tell them just how complicated the problem is.
They want teachers unions gone because they couldn't get one bad teacher fired. They want more right to work laws. They want women to be nothing more than breeders. They want to give even more of our tax dollars to multi-billion dollar corporations without any thought of tying those dollars to wages, hiring and retention.
These are also the same people who believe the Koch Brothers spend money on 'research'. I suppose they're right if they consider climate denial for the sake of profit research.
This is what we have to deal with: Vindictive people who have no clue what it's like to go without and don't realize that one disaster could put them in the same sinking boat as the rest of us. They tell us 'A rising tide lifts all boats' but do absolutely nothing to raise that tide unless they can keep their yachts afloat while drowning the rest of us.
They don't give a fuck, and they prove it every time they speak, type, blog or use any other medium that wouldn't exist without the very government, unions, teachers, workers, poor or homeless they so readily shit on. I sure wish George Carlin were here.
See you around,
Homer