So, thousands of fast-food workers are out on strike against the national burger chains, demanding that their wages be doubled to $15 per hour. But the national chains don’t control employee wages; how much to pay their people is in the hands of local franchise owners,
Therefore, if you are one of the concerned, caring, and vastly indignant activists behind this strike, I’m here to tell you that your social-justice problem has a simple solution. Take out a loan (or put together the money from your like-minded activist friends), buy a franchise from one of the chains, and hire workers at $15 an hour.
There, that was simple, wasn’t it? You’ll make money hand over fist and demonstrate to all those eeevil corporations that they can too pay a “just wage”; they just don’t want to because they’re greedy.
[via David Thompson].
We have a vast subset of people in this country — a coalition of liberals, the shiftless, the lazy, the ignorant, the undergraduate (I’m sure I repeated myself a few times in there) — who feel that the first, last, and only solution to any problem is to complain in public. The idea that they themselves might contribute to the fix in some meaningful fashion is simply beyond them.
I hereby vow to ask any kid who complains of this or that problem, “ok, junior, what are you, personally, gonna do about it?”
That should at least shut ’em up, and get ’em off my lawn.
Well, if I was a progressive, as I am not, I would simply argue that without every business being forced to play by the same rules mine would be too expensive to compete. So all this method does is to force progressives to ‘fess up the coercive intent.
This is very interesting actually. There are two kinds of activism. One kind can only rest on coercion, like this one. There are other kinds that can also work on the voluntary basis: there are charities helping the poor, there are charities buying up the rainforest and so on. It’s not even expensive. http://www.worldlandtrust.org/projects/buy-acre so actually asking for example the environmentalist progressives on your lawn whether they contribute to such projects can be more powerful an argument.
I guess someone could create a charity that supplements the wages of first-worlder fast food workers by 50% or 100, the only problem is that in the light of those charities who focus on real poverty like starving Haitians it would come accross as preposterous and frivolous. Which fact is, in a way, a lesson on its own.
Which fact is, in a way, a lesson on its own.
Ain’t it, though?
Talk about First World problems. Especially because anyone who works as a burger flipper these days is a fool anyway — it’s much more lucrative to not work and get on government bennies.
I don’t know about that. The Progs will get their cut. Getting those “bennies” requires a lot of crawling through mud. Better pay, yes, but If I can make enough “flipping burgers”, that might be the rational choice. It’s not like they will let you save the better pay, they check for that sort of thing, which is why you hear stories about people on welfare getting mugged to the tune of hundreds of dollars. The whole of the system is designed to keep you in comfortable poverty, and they don’t like escapees…..