Stu: I don't think Barry will ever know the level of committment and the amount of work that goes into every successful business - its as if they grow on trees. The shear volume of successful small and large businesses testifies to the provision of capitalism and its motivational power, not only for me and my ilk but for every employee as well. It is a direct insult to me to hear my committment and the manifested results of my studiously applied values as they are exercised in this capitalistic system downplayed for the sake of promoting a fading economic theory that has yet to prove its tenets through a successful implementaion of its principles. The day the concept of the value of hard work is removed from a culture, that culture is doomed. Show me otherwise and I'll concede there is a better way than this one.Qx: Sounds like self-aggrandizement and doomsaying rolled into one. Claiming that "the sheer volume of small and large businesses testifies to the provision of capitalism and its motivational power" is to show onle one side of the story. Doug Henwood showed how this trick was revealed back in 1994.
Besides, what do your workers produce? Propellers for ultralight airplanes? Are they really necessary for people to have? That includes ultralights themselves. They are simply luxury items and since you have a niche in the market then that's OK but how many people really need ultralights much less the propellers out of the entire planet's human population?
In order to sell such things you need to advertize and if people don't need them in order to live then that need has to be manufactured. The persuading (i.e., advertizing) is an adventure unto itself. In the USA advertizers have been successful at persuading many to idolize the pursuit of pleasure. Flying a ultralight is as much a pleasure of the flesh as midnight shopping around the back roads of Sea-Tac airport. There's some danger involved and in the case of flying an ultralight gravity is the bitch.
Stu rants some more : Barry is never going leave the irrationality he has embraced as manifested in his standard fallback; the capitalist threat of starvation to those who won't work for him. What comic nonsense it is to suggest that workers who don't want to work for me are subject to stavation. What an insult to intelligence and character! This whole mindset presumes that food is a right to those who won't work, that interesting work is a basic right, and that every person who interviewed for a job at my establishment and didn't accept it went out and died.
Qx: It looks like you're making a mockery of yourself here Stu. What Barry and many of us assert and provide evidence of is the fact that corporatist (false capitalist) society needs conformity in order to keep on going. I'm even going to bring feminist sociological theory into this thread because it deserves some attention. After all, your biblically induced nostrums have proven to be nothing more than a social reproduction of co-opting the heart for mammon.
Stu: Well, they didn't, (Barry). They just went down the road and found another place to work that suited them better. If they looked and looked and couldn't find a better job, perhaps their expectations of life were raised too high by someone. Funny, I just had an interview today with a guy who said exactly this, "I'm not looking for a lot of money because my wife works at the casino. I just want to find a good job." He also told me he had been looking for 3 months. I thought of Barry just then and realized this situation was a microcosm of our conflict. The guy was sucking off his wife's provision in order to pursue his own selfish interests. His application went into the can.
Qx: Sounds like a real Christian here. It'll be great to see other people reading this and knowing that working at Powerfin Inc. is rather a gamble in itself. Breath by Stu's whims and look over your shoulder.
Stu: Stuart (the ever hardening) Gort
Qx: Hmmmmm......Patriarchy and God's Penis all over again.
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