What do you pay?

[Arab Nights (imported)]

I ran across a point when hunting for a new furnace that I thought was kind of interesting. We all rag on a certain large retailer for low pay. I know from bitter personal experience that the local construction business makes them look like saints. When shopping to get a new furnace installed, the point came up of what the contractor pays his help. It is an interesting point. I wish more would ask that instead of just what it will cost.

[sduyck_2000 (imported)]

i had a oil furnace

i replaced it with a grain stove 10 years ago and use wheat to heat the house

and never purchased oil again

i grow the wheat on 1 acre of ground....... the wheat i use to heat the house...it costs me 150$ a year to heat the house

it would cost 1800$ for oil

2000$ for electricity

[jacques0 (imported)]

That's interesting. Where do you live?

[bobover3 (imported)]

Arab Nights, it's politics. Big companies have power by virtue of being big. Some people resent anyone's having power except the government. They see big companies as rivals. Opposition to big companies is a pretext for expansion of government power. We're told that the government must become more powerful to counter the supposedly malign influence of big companies. The joke is that the government is already vastly more powerful than the companies.

The companies do in fact rival the government, and that's a good thing, because otherwise the people would stand naked and helpless. It helps protect freedom to have many competing centers of power. Checks and balances.

If you review the political history of the last 40 years, you'll find an automatic hostility toward any non-governmental enterprise that has succeeded and become large. There's a political class that will brook no rival.

[Mac (imported)]

Arab Nights, it's politics. Big companies have power by virtue of being big. Some people resent anyone's having power except the government. They see big companies as rivals. Opposition to big companies is a pretext for expansion of government power. We're told that the government must become more powerful to counter the supposedly malign influence of big companies. The joke is that the government is already vastly more powerful than the companies. ..................

Big companies have been a big influence in making this country great. Big government has had just the opposit effect.

[transward (imported)]

Big companies have been a big influence in making this country great. Big government has had just the opposit effect.

That is an extreme overstatement. Big companies have varied in their effect on the US, some positive, some very negative. Big business is in the business of making big money. Sometimes that coincides with the interests of the people of the US, other times they have raped the environment, driven large portions on the population into poverty, brutally assaulted their workers and otherwise behaved as thugs.

And without Big Government, Pearl Harbor would be speaking Japanese, and we would be doing Heil Hitlers in schools. We would have no interstate highway system, no great public universities, and the vast majority of us would be serfs to Big Business.

"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."

Transward

[Dave (imported)]

Big companies have been a big influence in making this country great. Big government has had just the opposit

e effect.

Well what would you call the Eisenhower Highway System which is, of course, the Federal highway system that was built under the two terms of President Eisenhower -- remember he was a Republican and the highway system created untold of wealth in this country. So big government is no good. Let's close the highways and run the trucks over the back roads.

How about the Air Traffic Control system. We should just step aside and let all those bankrupt airlines pay the Air Traffic Controllers.

Or that bastion of BIG GOVERNMENT, the FBI -- let's just stick with local law enforcement. Wouldn't that be just Dandy?

[Mac (imported)]

Ok some big government is also good.

[bobover3 (imported)]

Government unarguably has accomplished good things. That's why people have governments - because some important goals can best be reached by collective effort. But we must take care to distinguish between doing things for the people, and doing things to the people. In the United States, government is supposed to be the people's servant - expediting, facilitating, organizing, as needed to carry out the people's wishes and meet the people's needs. When government exceeds this role, and seeks to make the people conform to the wishes of the government, no matter how well-intentioned, it becomes a threat.

For example, the interstate highway system is an unquestionable good. It meets a critical need to move people and goods quickly and efficiently. But that's the point - it meets a perceived critical need. Almost everyone understood its use and benefit, and that no one business would have done it. This was government serving the people.

But suppose the government had gone a step further. Suppose the government had decreed that using interstate highways was such a good thing that, to take full advantage, every American family would be required to buy a car (or pay an annual fine) and to drive a minimum number of miles on the interstates. Suppose that certain political interest groups or states had been made exempt from these requirements. Suppose that, because not everyone could afford the required car, some people's cars would be purchased for them by the government (taxpayers), and those who couldn't drive would have chauffeurs provided. Suppose that this program was accompanied by angry denunciations of auto makers, who wouldn't be allowed to make "windfall" profits from the government mandate, and requirements that the price of cars could not exceed a level set by the government, regardless of the costs incurred in their manufacture. Suppose that the government stood ready with a "public option" of cars to be manufactured by the government and sold at a price below cost (subsidized by tax payers), and that this was described as healthy competition which could have no long term ill effects on the auto makers or on the people's ability to choose among cars. Suppose that all of this was justified by the usefulness of interstate highways.

Surely we all see the difference between what the government actually did (respond to a clearly understood need) and what it might have done (impose a scheme without heeding the people's wishes or needs, because a few in government thought it was an exciting vision).

As the first words of the Constitution say, "We the People ..."

[Lesley (imported)]

This thread has deep meaning for the economy for our society (Western) as it gets to the core of weather you consider people surfs or fellow citizens.

For every business man and/or corporation that wants to pay as little as possible, I say this! If you want an expanding, stable and thriving market you have to have a populace who can afford your goods/services.

Pay people peanuts and all you will be able to sell is peanuts!

Pay people a decent living wage and then you can see markets expand!

At the rate things are going with the withering away of worker's rights here in Australia and the USA, we are heading for a new society of surfs and masters. That trend was halted for a while here in Australia with the election of a labour government and hopefully in the USA with the election of Obama.

But the big corporate overlords still have not got it! That there capacity to sell goods depends on people’s ability to pay.

If they were conscious of this fact, then the mortgage sub-prime crises would not have happened.