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"Jury Duty"

You can’t spell BREadlINE without BERNIE!

“The only folks morally entitled to opine, much less vote as to the value of a man’s labor, are that man and his would-be employer.”

It depends on how he defines employer. If by employer, he means the market, then yes, he is correct but if he simply means the person who gives you a job, he is wrong.

Put another way, the market determines value. If an employer is not doing something of value for someone else, i.e. the customer or employer, you will not employed long. Furthermore, the employee MUST create value beyond his cost (I don’t say salary because there are so many other things involved in employing someone, taxes, insurances, etc.). Profit is the REAl message of a business’ or an employee’s value. We vote everyday whether that good or service is needed. THE PURPOSE OF ANY BUSINESS IS TO CREATE PROFIT NOT TO EMPLOY. Profit tells us whether the good or action is needed.

“Stored labor”. Good phrase.

Progressives are chronically unable to comprehend the starting point for sustenance is literally dirt: all are welcome to elicit what they can from the earth, be it rocks or dirt/mud or plants. One alone can develop shelter & sustenance from there (see the Primitive Technology videos). From there, quickly becomes apparent that specialization & trade is beneficial in a group, with cost being painfully apparent and trade being very much “a thing is worth what another will give for it”; continuing from there becomes increasingly luxurious & abstract, confusing Leftists. $ represents work done; just because an ignorant third party doesn’t understand why work X is valued at $Y doesn’t mean X isn’t worth $Y, nor that the value of X can be unilaterally declared $Z by others.

My 22 yr old nephew, a ringer for rimless glasses John Lennon and a Bernie bro, is morally outraged at the idea that it isn’t governments job to meet the charitable needs of the people.

bkmk

I wrote this on another thread, hope you don't mind my posting it here:

This brings to mind the parable of the Dog Food Company:

Once upon a time a pet food company created a new variety of dog food and rolled out a massive marketing campaign to introduce the product. Despite hiring a first-rate advertising agency, initial sales were very disappointing. The agency was fired and a new agency and a new campaign was launched. Sales continued to disappoint. If anything, they fell even further. In desperation, the CEO called in all of the top executives for a brainstorming session to analyze what had gone wrong with the two campaigns and how a new campaign might revive sales.

The meeting went on for hours. Sophisticated statistical analysis was brought to bear on the problem. One VP argued that the mix of TV and print ads had been messed up. Another argued that the previous campaigns had been too subtle and had failed to feature the product with sufficient prominence. Another argued that the TV ad campaign had focused too much on spots during sporting events and not enough on regular programming with a broader demographic. Another argued the opposite–not enough sports programming had been targeted. After the debate had raged for hours, the CEO felt they had accomplished very little. He asked if anyone else had any theories that might explain the failure of the new product. Finally, one newly hired employee raised his hand and was recognized.

Maybe the dogs don’t like it, he said.

I use this parable to illustrate the problem the Left has now:

They have all kinds of ideas about how things should be done, the way people should act, the foods we should eat (or not eat, like Bloomberg and his soda ban) the language we should use (or not use) and the list goes on and on. They have focus groups that analyze aspects of what a candidate should be all about, they are running commercials nauseatingly non-stop (which I believe will eventually have a negative impact) and overall, they think they are the smartest, most organized, most moral, most "woke", most environmentally conscious, most tolerant, most democratic, and most American group of people around.

Their problem is a fundamental one:

Their Ideas Suck.

They exist inside a Leftist echo chamber, and they have no understanding of that fact. They think that if they keep saying over and over again what they believe in, inundate America from all sides of the media with their ideas, spray those ideas at us with the firehoses of media and entertainment, scold us, yell at us, tell us how stupid we are not to see them for the geniuses that they are...well, they think that approach, like that of the marketing executives in the Dog Food Parable, that they can somehow fix their "product" composed of ideas.

They can't.

Their Ideas Suck.

And normal people who don't live in that Leftist Echo Chamber have (I hope) begun to see it, especially with the contrast between the eight years of Obama and his ilk, and less than four years of Trump.

And that reality, the simple fact that they on the Left with their sucky ideas can do nothing about it, that they cannot massage their message (because no matter how much you polish a dog turd, it is still a dog turd) is driving them out of their minds.

And so we get these "books" trying to show us the light, these podcasts of spitting, frothing, Leftists, these ex-DOJ officials and members of a judges union producing media releases talking about what a danger Donald Trump and his ideas are to the very fabric of this country.

And so we are subjected to the spectacle of these foam-mouthed Leftists, hermetically sealed inside their Leftist echo chambers engaging in their increasingly frenetic Leftist circle-jerks telling us how wrong we are and what danger our country is in, while Trump waves his non-existent magic wand, our unemployment rates go down and our wages go up.

It is driving them to both madness and violence, and they are helpless to do anything about it. Because fundamentally...

Their Ideas Suck.