Example: Libertarian economist Peter Schiff is leading the propaganda charge against the movement to raise wages for Walmart workers. Here's his shtick:
Protests at Walmart are filling the airwaves as workers demand to be paid $15 per hour. While everyone seems to say they support workers being paid more, I wanted to find out if Walmart shoppers were willing to help out.The answer is in his video.
Posing as a representative of "15 for 15" -- a make-believe organization advocating Walmart raise prices by 15 percent to enable workers receive at least $15 per hour wages, I first asked shoppers if they supported Walmart workers earning more. Almost all agreed.
Once a shopper signaled his or her support, I asked if they would be willing to donate 15 percent of whatever they spent -- to help support the cause.
How many agreed to do their part to help Walmart workers earn more?
But Schiff's whole premise is a lie. If Walmart workers were given a living wage, prices wouldn't go up 15 percent. Prices would go up ONE percent.
And even that rise would be mitigated if Walmart curbed executive compensation. During this country's most prosperous period -- the three decades following WWII -- the executive class earned a lot less and workers took home a much larger share of the economic pie.
Nobody is asking for complete income equality. But history proves that a stable, lasting prosperity is much more easily secured when inequality isn't so outrageous, because capitalism hums along nicely only when the vast majority of workers have money and leisure time. The "Gilded Age" was actually a rotten time for most Americans: Six-day work weeks, ten-hour work days, company towns, dictatorial bosses and ridiculously unsafe working conditions. Even the Wall Streeters had to deal with terrifying cycles of boom and bust.
Those are the conditions that assholes like Schiff want to bring back.
2 comments:
I find it hard to believe there aren't people smart enough in the conservative trade, to understand it is MUCH cheaper, in the long run (I realize the short-sellers rule currently) to give people enough to live on without creating undue hardship. Unrest is verrrry expensive. Unfortunately we have LBJ in Blackface sitting in the OA. He's like carbon-monoxide to make believe progressives. They're in his spell; captivated by his historic role..pheh.
Ben
Hmmm...Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Medicare,..., we'd be a lot better off if the OA actually were occupied by "LBJ in Blackface" [sic] rather than Bush III as it currently is.
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