Posted on 01/12/2020 6:05:54 AM PST by ModernDayCato
Background: My family has an email list where we share articles and opinions. Someone recently circulated this opinion piece from the New York Times, and I am offering my response hoping for comments from my FRiends.
Who Killed the Knapp Family?
YAMHILL, Ore. — Chaos reigned daily on the No. 6 school bus, with working-class boys and girls flirting and gossiping and dreaming, brimming with mischief, bravado and optimism. Nick rode it every day in the 1970s with neighbors here in rural Oregon, neighbors like Farlan, Zealan, Rogena, Nathan and Keylan Knapp.
They were bright, rambunctious, upwardly mobile youngsters whose father had a good job installing pipes. The Knapps were thrilled to have just bought their own home, and everyone oohed and aahed when Farlan received a Ford Mustang for his 16th birthday.
Yet today about one-quarter of the children on that No. 6 bus are dead, mostly from drugs, suicide, alcohol or reckless accidents. Of the five Knapp kids who had once been so cheery, Farlan died of liver failure from drink and drugs, Zealan burned to death in a house fire while passed out drunk, Rogena died from hepatitis linked to drug use and Nathan blew himself up cooking meth. Keylan survived partly because he spent 13 years in a state penitentiary.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
But economics are not divorced from the larger culture: rule of law, equitable courts (bribery not required), functioning infrastructure, reliable electricity, sound money, honest bankers, and all that.
The facile explanation you give, ignores the contributions of all those factors to the success of the corporation to the first place; as well as national loyalty.
The other thing, is that corporations which to privatize the profits, while socializing the costs: e.g. welfare payments for those laid off and unable to get another job, social costs from breakdown of those families (drug use, petty crime, unwed pregnancy) and in the case of importing Central Americans, all the higher costs for dual languages in schools, emergency room usage for primary care, and the like.
It's utterly dishonest and craven.
And, at that, unspeakably selfish. Even the robber barons of old used to endow works for the great public of the US, such as libraries.
Whereas Bezos -- the wealthiest man in the history of the species -- will not even pay health care premiums for all of his own employees.
For an economic refutation of "comparative advantage" and the lie that is The Wealth of Nations, see for example Vox Day
https://voxday.blogspot.com/2019/12/nationalist-economics.html
You’re kidding right?
Or are you just a moron?
I stopped reading after dishonesty.
Go take your ad hominem anti-capitalism bullshit to DU where it belongs.
The great thing about America is that you could (if you had any taktbtbir intelligence) be a CEO yourself and screw everyone.
I think your mom is calling you.
Ok...I’m done laughing. I went back and read your meandering comments.
Between insults you’re setting up a straw man by essentially saying that Jeff Bezos and Amazon are the same, just as the “robber barons” and their industries are the same.
If you’re saying that Jeff Bezos has a responsibility to humankind just like we all do, I would agree.
When you say AMAZON has a responsibility to humankind is where we part company. Amazon is a collection of investors who have exchanged their money for a share of the profits of the company. Nothing more, nothing less.
What you’re saying is this: Business requires “virtue, which guides us in creating those organized human interactions we call institutions.”
Uh, you just provided the definition of Social Justice according to The Association for Business Communication.
I have a personal and moral responsibility to help people whenever I can (which I do). As a CEO (which I am), it is not appropriate for me to spend other people’s money on social issues, regardless of how worthwhile they are.
The Board of Directors of my company may decide to set up a foundation to give money to worthwhile causes, which means the shareholders’ representatives have approved the spending.
When the Target CEO decides that men can go into women’s bathrooms and causes a boycott, or the Dick’s CEO flushes millions down the toilet by stopping the sale of guns, they are abdicating their responsibility to the shareholders of the company, for which they should be removed.
So stop mixing up personal responsibility with corporate responsibility.
Set up your own foundation and put some of your PERSONAL money into it (I have). Put your money where your mouth is, or STFU.
As an aside, my company is not responsible for ensuring welfare payments, paying social costs or school costs for for emergency rooms. I think that falls under the “common welfare” which is political, not business-related — personal, not corporate.
I pay an ENORMOUS amount in taxes. According to you Social Justice Warriors, that goes toward the common welfare.
If you want to argue the concept, dig up Aristotle and Plato. Don’t bother me.
I noticed the article’s starting period was 2007-2008, when Daddy Knapp bought a house and the new Mustang for his 16 year old son with the income from his pipe fitting job, read plumbing job, right before the sudden massive collapse of the housing and building market.
What do you want to bet that Daddy Knapp lost his lucrative building trade job in the collapse of the building trades, a job which funded his mortgage and car payment for his son’s Mustangs in 2008-2009 and they lost the house which they bought on a Flex loan, and the car was repossessed? I saw way too many lower income people who bought McMansions they couldn’t afford because unscrupulous mortgage “bankers” illegally misrepresented their incomes to put them into houses they could never pay back on their real incomes when the flex loans readjusted to actual cost loans, to say nothing of those who could not survive a hiccough in their financial conditions.
That’s the real reason Daddy Knapp and his income was not mentioned again in this article.
Also, it does not mention the drugs that Daddy and Mommy Knapp (remember the bowl of Cocaine pictured in the background), of which both were obvious users, came across a southern US border which the Democrats kept resembling a broken sieve. . . And want to open even more now. That open border policy also brought in hordes of illegal workers who depressed wages that Daddy and Mommy Knapp could have earned, when sober, to better raise their family of children. . . But that Democrats wanted as a matter of policy to eventually vote illegally and later legally for Democrats, the Knapp’s survival could just go hang.
Further, the education that the Knapp children received that could have prepared them to succeed economically in the future was denied them by Democrat, progressive policies of progressive indoctrination rather than actual education for success. Valuable class time was not dedicated to learning skills useful in future employment, but instead spent wasting time being force fed useless social justice tripe, turning the children into little social justice automatons, who know how to put a condom on a banana, but not how to add or parse a sentence, or the history of their own country, or how their country’s government runs. This is NOT something we can blame Capitalism for, but rather for deliberate planning of the Democrat party, and the progressive Leftists who have taken it over.
Part of the problem are are all the unethical Masters of Business Administration being promoted into high positions in business and government.
MBAs are ignorantly educated to look only toward short term gains with the idea that short term gains will trickle up to long term gains. Often that is simply not true. Short term gain myopia always fails because of a failure to plan for Capital investment for future growth; if focuses on the quarterly and yearly bottom lines, but not the five and ten year goals, much less fifty year growth. Research and Development of future products are de-emphasized in preference to marketing current products and services being sold and/or ideas that can quickly be brought to the market, especially those that will redound to the credit of the MBA’s tenure, not to some future management team. One of the secrets to Apple’s repeated successes is their corporate policy of planning for at least five to ten years in the future. That keeps their profits at the highest in the industry.
MBAs are always looking for promotion or teleportation advancement to another position in another management position. To an MBA, management experience, knowledge, and especially loyalty is “fungible,” in their view, and is always transferable; it is not owed to the company they are currently working for. Choices are made always to gild the short term health of their current company because that benefits their CV, not build for the future of that company because they won’t be there. If it harms the employees, so what, the MBA’s résumé is that much better for his next step up the corporate ladder of his/her career building. Ethics does not enter the equation.
Too much economic determinism is a little Marxist.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I have zero sympathy for these losers. They chose their lifestyles and died enjoying their freedom.
That is the legal fiction.
You're emphasizing the legal.
You've forgotten the fiction part of it.
What you’re saying is this: Business requires “virtue, which guides us in creating those organized human interactions we call institutions.”
Uh, you just provided the definition of Social Justice according to The Association for Business Communication.
Nope. YOU just put words in my mouth, and then played with your own strawman.
I have a personal and moral responsibility to help people whenever I can (which I do). As a CEO (which I am), it is not appropriate for me to spend other people’s money on social issues, regardless of how worthwhile they are.
Uh huh. Tell that to the wokescolds who took over Chik-Fil-A.
(I do note that your response mentioned women's bathrooms at Target: on which we agree.)
As you said,
As an aside, my company is not responsible for ensuring welfare payments, paying social costs or school costs for for emergency rooms. I think that falls under the “common welfare” which is political, not business-related — personal, not corporate.
But that isn't accurately describing my point.
In fact, you're switching black and white. Since you're only used to dealing with other businessmen, who tend to be sociopathic herd creatures anyway, you think that by jumping up and down and spitting wooden nickels, you'll intimidate me.
What happens is, modern corporations have changed the rules of the social contract, in midstream. In multiple ways.
Most of them are complete parasites.
Look for example at the merger of Cabela's / Bass Pro shops. Done by corporate raiders who got (I think) at 10% stake in the voting stock, and forced the companies to merge, eliminating around 2000 jobs in a small town without any major employers.
I think the raider company arranging the merger walked off with $90 million.
But the people left behind -- their lives are in ruins.
They may need public assistance, social services, the gamut.
None of that would have been necessary, if the corporate raider hadn't found a way to make themselves rich with other peoples' money:
the companies were NOT failing, it was not "rescue of distressed assets"
Merely naked, inexcusable greed, from outside, unasked.
In other words, the company is not responsible for "paying" the social welfare costs.
But by their actions, they CREATED the social welfare costs, where there didn't used to be any.
The people were honestly, happily, productively working.
Until someone like you came along.
Notice how President Trump *created* jobs and prosperity, he didn't just suction OFF wealth, and blame the people robbed for deserving it?
That's why he's popular.
Yes. I'm not seeing how you are connecting that either to the article, or my comments, please?
The defecation of dogs in the street has more worth this article, the NY Slimes, or Nick Krystoff.
I understood both the article and the comments to be saying that a set of economic circumstances must necessarily have produced the outcome of people’s ending their lives prematurely in a variety of ways.
I agree wholeheartedly, MDCato. I too have been a CEO. I also think the CEOs of Target and Dicks should be cashiered for their Social Justice misuse of their positions that have lost value for their stockholders.
Grey_Whiskers, as a matter of fact, Amazon does provide health care for its employees starting on their first day of work include part-time employees, something easily discovered with a simple Duck, Duck, Go search, as do the VAST MAJORITY of major corporations in the US.
In fact, almost 60% of the population in the US is covered by private health insurance provided by their employers, that portion who are working. One company I managed until retirement, a small one with only 14-15 employees, which found the company provided health plan became completely unaffordable (the cost quintupled, and the co-pays and deductibles useless for their employees) when ObamaCare went into effect, now provides an additional stipend each month that covers the minimum cost of an Obamacare Health Insurance policy for each employee who is not covered by a spouses’ employee provided corporate insurance. As a small corporation, they also pay up to $5000, per employee, of each employee’s student loan payments who has one each year. So, to put it mildly, you don’t have a clue what you are talking about in this area.
Facts should not be played fast and loose to make political points. Bezos has enough bad ideas without blaming him for something he is not doing.
I am more concerned about when his Amazon retail Ponzi scheme business will finally come crashing down. Bezos essentially took the low markup business model of quick-turnover groceries which turnover generates profits and applied it to all retail products. His basic idea was that it would work so long as he can operate on the float of money flowing through it, generating very little profits from actual sales, but generate profits from money earned on the money itself as it passes through on the delay between receiving it from retail buyers and paying suppliers. Volume is king. Move enough money and that delay can generate lots of money, even at low interest rates, so long as interest is high. . . Or, alternately one is doing instant institutional trades on the stock exchange using very fast computerized algorithms which is very likely.
Although, I think I lately have noticed Amazon prices have slowly started being increased toward normal retail. That would essentially solve the problem, moving Amazon into a normal retail mode, taking it away from paying Peter what Paul paid, to keep the money flowing. . . and eventually moving Amazon into a normal business model.
I know, I know, you can argue he doesn't (business case) *owe* them this. But it is absurd to pretend he couldn't afford it.
Amazon's moat is *convenience*, and *product selection* not price.
On various other discussion boards, one can find people complaining that Amazon vastly overcharges for some items. This might be to glitches in their algorithms, or it might be a feature of certain "revenue optimization" algorithms: i.e. to maximize overall profit, tighten the price down on items with high elasticity, and charge through the nose for specific hard-to-find products. Case in point, I was looking for a shelf for my refrigerator recently, and I found it on other sites at prices between $95 - $110. Amazon wanted ~$240.
The other element is there are rumors that certain govt. agencies are helping funding Amazon behind the scenes for intelligence purposes -- matching buying patterns of certain items if you catch my drift.
And to your point of Amazon and how long it can last, two other points.
One is that they are facing severe competition from Wally World. Bricks and Mortar, but with the footprint of stores all over the country, and their emphasis on price and logistics for their own purposes, a number of people are saying they've found WalMart delivers more reliably than Amazon; and often has better prices.
And let's not forget postage from China being subsidized by the US Postal Service, which President Trump has spoken of putting a halt to.
Another example, in a different vein, might be Sears Holding Company. People wondered why Sears, with its catalog and ordering system, didn't head off Amazon at the pass years ago, just by putting their catalog online.
Eddie Lampert has been bleeding the company dry for years and years, selling off key brand names like Craftsman. I still haven't figured out what he gets out of it.
I agree, salesman or clerk at Sears, doesn't sound great for trying to support a family; but not everyone has a college degree or Master's. And people forget that back in the 1960s, it wasn't unheard of to have a husband as primary breadwinner, and supporting a family on one income. Due to a gazillion factors, that's now very difficult to do.
That being said, corporate raiders who suck all the life out of a company, for their own short term profit, are execrable.
There's a difference between redeploying the assets of a failing company (e.g. Maytag getting gobbled up by Whirlpool).
But forcing wholesale changes, to take advantage of arbitrage, while forcing others to bear the (unacknowledged) externalities, is both traitorous and (should be) criminal.
(*) Re-reading the article now, I see it only covers 1900 workers, which is far fewer than the commentaries on it let me to think. So he *is* doing it, but not enough for Amazon to be a dispositive example. (1900 is so small he could trivially afford it; but by the same token, 1900 is not enough that entire states are devastated by it.)
Not like law of gravity or anything.
but...how to say this delicately.
What about a person with an IQ of 90-95. He can do janitorial work, maybe with time and practice, home repair, some car repairs, that kind of thing; but bioinformatics is going to be out of his reach.
In addition, his ...self-confidence, his ability to execute, his flexibility...might not be up to moving across the country on a dime, when he didn't have $45,000 to his name, let alone in ready cash in a reserve fund.
I remember years ago, someone posted with this same kind of stuff, talking about how he got a stock tip in GE, and invested $100,000, and made $20k in a few weeks, something like that.
He seemed genuinely surprised that most people
a) didn't have $100, 000 free to invest in something as risky as the short-term move of a stock
b) Didn't have a set of rich relatives to give them investing advice, stock tips, or contacts;
c) Didn't even have a combined family gross income of $100,000, let alone $50,000.
Some of the elite class take too much for granted; and blame those who never had, for being unable to navigate new obstacles put in their way.
Which they didn't even know were coming.
Which they didn't even know *could* happen.
The offshoring / importing of Mexicans/H1-Bs took place in the blink of an eye, compared to the life of a community, or even one person's career and time to retrain.
And having people like Bill Kristol and that other guy from National Review crowing how they should "learn to code" (with H1-Bs, right!) or just move across the country, or just...die...
This is why President Trump is adored, and why NOTHING the left tries to separate him from his base, will ever work.
Philosophically, not comprehension-wise, you have completely lost me. But that’s okay, life is like that sometimes.
Best wishes for the week ahead.
Not everybody has the flexibility, foresight, and self-control of an upper middle class person with a Master's Degree, where everyone in the family went to college.
Nor the support network, nor the general sense of how to navigate in life.
What happens when people whose whole life was "working at the mill" and don't have savings, don't have any other skills, are told that "the Mill is closing, and it's your fault because you're deplorable": and all the other trade jobs they could transition too, are suddenly flooded with foreigners who work for less?
And there was no warning.
After a few years, yes, you'd lose hope.
That being said, there are communities and families which have been pretty dysfunctional even with blue-collar jobs; loss of the jobs is not an excuse. Think proverbial "Florida Man..."
Peace be with you and the (some all grown up now) tax-chickadees.
Short term gain myopia always fails because of a failure to plan for Capital investment for future growth; if focuses on the quarterly and yearly bottom lines, but not the five and ten year goals, much less fifty year growth. Research and Development of future products are de-emphasized in preference to marketing current products and services being sold and/or ideas that can quickly be brought to the market, especially those that will redound to the credit of the MBA’s tenure, not to some future management team. One of the secrets to Apple’s repeated successes is their corporate policy of planning for at least five to ten years in the future. That keeps their profits at the highest in the industry.
As for Apple, it seems to me they are still living off the imagination of Steve Jobs. Time will tell.
“The offshoring / importing of Mexicans/H1-Bs took place in the blink of an eye, compared to the life of a community, or even one person’s career and time to retrain”
TRUER words!!!
Let’s connect TC’s dots: working class people fell apart because they lost their religion and were overtaken by Iniquity which had been presaged for thousands of years and recorded in the Good Book.
The no holds barred, take it any way yuh can version of Capitalism pushed by the Bankster gangs and purist Libertarians had nothing to do with it, right? Open Borders and lowest cost of production outsourcing are part and parcel of Adam Smith’s received wisdom, and no one must question it.
The bodies left on the side of the road by the barreling train of Maximum Profit are just collateral damage, a regrettable but necessary part of the race to maximum prosperity for those who raced to the head of the pack. No need to worry about them. Just bury them and move on.
If it takes wholesale replacement of the populace to achieve theoretical max GDP, so be it. We’re here for the economy, not the other way around, right?
Get used to the relatives falling off the traincars, and learning to luv your new neighbors Srivastava and Miguel. They’re your betters now because they fit into the economic theory better then you or your silly 10th generation American relatives. They didn’t get the game! Silly them! Oh Well.
Sorry. I’ve lived the whole damn nightmare. Seen the West go from lilly white, placid, inexpensive, UNCROWDED, optimistic and happy to hyper crowded, multi-lingual, hyperexpensive and sinister with humans who have NO social connection to each other living uneasily next door to each other, waiting for the inevitable clash of “civilizations”. In quotes because referring to the troglodyte Third World cultures that are commonplace here now is to stretch the meaning of the word to say the least.
The people who lost out in these changes which were literally shoved down their throats - the death of the timber industry in Oregon, for example, by government fiat - were the Ignorables who are *gasp* white Deplorables and therefore expendable.
NO ONE in the government cares what happens to them and in fact they want them gone so they can concentrate on ministering to the needs of the new imports who they consider Victim Minorities and therefore Saintly, far more deserving.
If the pillbillies wanna kill themselves off, let’s not stand in the way - let’s accelerate it. Yay Kate Brown! Off to the Transgender Liberation Day celebration! Forget those losers, they live in trailers!
And that’s what’s happening, folks.
DJT is the finger in the dike. Apres Don, Le Deluge.
Maybe we can buy some time with one more term, but....
That was FAR too cogent and lucid.
Your kernel of absolute truth will be completely ignored as being far too sensible to pay any attention to.
I’ll refine your point and say prosperity brings destruction.
Capitalism brings prosperity.
Mankind is fallen. We take blessings and turn them into curses. When we prosper we tend to rein from God and have the time and money to indulge our pet sins.
Poverty or communism is not the answer. Poor people sin too just not in the hedonistic ways that rich ones do.
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