“If they ran it into the ground, it was their business, not mine, even though I would suffer their loss along with them. If they somehow were successful, then good for them and for me, since the better they were, the better they did, the better I did, as I worked more hours and got better raises.”
I’m glad that was your experience but in many corporate situations if the company does poorly the workers lose their jobs while the CEOs and other senior executives take the golden parachute out and retire in style. The old notion of a captain going down with his ship appears to be a foreign concept to them. Whereas if the company does well, that doesn’t always translate into better wages for the workers.
Put it this way: I may be in the driver’s seat and I may be the one who decides which fork in the road to take but I didn’t choose which road I started out on. Some people start off on well-paved roads, others start on potholed dirt roads. So while I can choose to choose wisely or unwisely at every fork in the road, I can’t get somewhere if there’s no road from where I am to where it is. Most conservatives say that an individual’s success or failure depends entirely on that individual’s merit and most liberals say that an individual’s success or failure depends entirely on luck or fate. I don’t believe the world is that black-and-white; I believe that the roots of an individual’s economic success are more complex than either side acknowledges, a middle ground that is based partially on merit and partially on chance.
One thing I have noticed about successful people is that their ideas are much more likely to come to fruition during economic booms than during recessions for obvious reasons. I’ve also noticed that most successful people are American, Canadian, or from a small handful of countries in Europe and Asia. This is not because the Sudanese and the Malaysians, to give a few examples, don’t also have brilliant ideas but because their governments are too unstable or too corrupt to allow those ideas to flourish into successful businesses. In a sense you and I have already won the lottery simply by being born in the US as opposed to a third world country. Which goes back to what I was saying about the complexity of individual success and failure: a Malaysian can be intelligent, thrifty, and hard working and yet reap much poorer fruits of his labors than if that same man had been born in the US. Similarly, if a rich American kid and poor American kid have the exact same intelligence, business acumen, ability level, work ethic, etc. the rich kid will generally do better than the poor kid because he/she has more opportunities to develop his/her gifts. The rich kid will go to a decent private school while the poor kid will go to an extremely low quality public school, the rich kid’s parents will use their connections to help him/her network while the poor kid will have to build his/her own network from scratch, the rich kid will have more time to study while the poor kid will have to work to supplement the family income, etc. I could go on but the bottom line is Same Merits + Different Circumstances= Different Results.
I don’t know if Paris Hilton is happy either but I do know that she is materially better off than many who actually work for a living, and that that violates every principle of the American dream.
No need to apologize for the length of your post, especially given the length of my own posts. You want to make sure you’re addressing all my concerns, and I respect that.
FReegards
She's not the best example, more of an exception to the rule or a likely by product of following it. But she's also yet another example of "the boss's kid" and they have always been around. In fact, if you see the company is structured around the Boss and Kid(s), you might not want to play there unless the family is committed to the ideals that made the business possible and made it grow.
Those boss's kids situations can be the worst possible when found in the corporate world and in my experience have been the worst offenders of the Golden Parachute escape plan when the kid(s) run it into the ground.
Anyway, I tend to agree with your post. I can only say that the last decade has been rougher than any before it. I do apologize for the length of my response. I think I wrote that to myself for my own re-motivation more than to you.
I'm trying to reinvent myself again for this new obamanation we find ourselves in and am frustrated and worried by how much more difficult things have become. We have the blueprint for a successful nation and we are determined not to use it again.
My objections are always against anything that goes against the underlying natural rules that govern the world and against things that favor one group over another for reasons other than merit, as most social systems often do. That is the beauty of the Constitution. It sets up a representative government in harmony with natural law and with built-in resistance to other social systems/influences that are counter to those laws.
Unfortunately, not one generation (Lincoln might be an exception) has been able to live up to our founding ideals, but have instead lived down to the lowest levels of human nature. The progressives and all their various supporting agencies are the worst offenders, starting with Teddy R. and especially with Wilson, and here we are, a floundering Great Society.
My fondest hope and prayer is that our generation be the generation who actually holds up those founding ideals so eloquently expressed in all of our founding documents once again and strives to live up to that high standard.
I want to live, work and play, succeed or fail, in that world!!! I want to believe we all do and am disappointed to see that isn't the case.