: Explain something to me, Barry. Payroll at my company is about $5000 a week - net. Every month I also pay an additional $5000 in taxes I am forced to manage for my employees. Additional taxes are levied upon me for having them which I also pay out of that sum...Essentially, the problem with your business is its smallness.
Percentage of workers who receive health benefits from their employer: 67% for companies with over 1000 workers, only 27% for companies with 25 workers or less (Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996, table 670, p. 430).
Now, I'm going to presume that a business man such as yourself knows what RATIONALIZATION is---and how it reduces overhead expenses. Add to rationalization the INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY (read: cheaper production costs per aliquot commodity) of large-scale industry and you must agree that human needs are better met by centralized, large-scale production (more goods per labor-time expended).
The peasant and the small proprietor, according to Marxist theory, is a superannuated, atavistic form of production that must be swept aside in order to make room for the fully rationalized, high-productiveness that socialism needs in order to satisfy all human needs.
That's why I call you a petty-bourgeois proprietor; it's not an insult, Stuart, it's a specific type of capitalist. The type of capitalist that capitalism itself puts out of business with regularity---because small production lacks efficiency (in most cases). And socialism---born FROM capitalism---requires efficiency.
Your struggles to keep your business afloat (mentioned above) only make my point.
