With only one breadwinner in the family, it would be quite difficult to raise a family in southern California on $17.50 an hour; assuming full-time employment (and many grocery workers do not work full-time), that would come to only about $36 to $37,000 a year.
$17.50 for being a grocery clerk is insane. The job requires no talents and no knowledge, and most of the clerks don't bag your groceries either. Many stores are now moving to self-service checkout, which will be the end of most of these jobs anyway. Probably what the union is dreading.
As to cost of living in California, if you don't like your lifestyle choices - MOVE SOMEWHERE ELSE CHEAPER! Is there some "divine right" to live in expensive areas one cannot afford? California is so damn expensive because so many people want to move and live there. If you don't like, move to the country.
Adding medical benefits to that salary, without any employee contributions, would seem merely to approximate a just wage.
Medical insurance is going through the roof. My company has had to raise our contributions and copays twice this year because costs are increasing at a double digit rate. I really think I could get a better deal for myself if I could buy a plan tailored to my needs, like I can for auto insurance. For example, I don't need a big annual prescription benefit, since my family is healthy and my wife does not use birth control pills. I also could do without coverage on simple doctor visits for check-ups (rather like insurance for oil changes on a car, no???). My costs (and everyone else's) are high because I am subsidizing unhealthy people who eat too much, smoke, are sedentary, and refuse to become healthy. And then they insist on ingesting massive amounts of pharmaceuticals to mask the results, rather than treating the base causes. I resent that, since it is no different than stealing money right from my pocket to subsidize disgusting behavior.
So, getting in the group, you get it in a discount.
Why not employer paid auto insurance, housing insurance, travel insurance, etc.? Wouldn't employer organized vacations be cheaper too? How about employer organized cooperative mortgage origination? How about slavery - the employer can do everything for us?
The problem is that we Americans tend to think a wage should be gauged only according to what the employer thinks is the economic worth of a remunerated activity and that to gauge it otherwise would result in economic ruination.
That's not at all true. I think most Americans are (or were) sympathetic to the idea that familymen should earn more, and then men should earn more than woman. And in fact, those used to be common arrangements in offices before they were outlawed by the goverment. But let people do it freely. And if someone doesn't like where he works, let him go get a new job. The best employers will get the best workers, and the worst will go out of business. This all used to be taken care of by morality in America. Good employers felt an obligation to provide rightly for their employee family. The problem today is an absence of morality, not the capitalist marketplace.
This notion, said Storck, descends from the economic thought of Adam Smith, which, he said, "radically distorts what actually goes on in an economy.
I suppose he's never read Smith then or run a business.
they're a power in the economy and they have been able (especially in the past) to get higher wages for their people. This is how the economy works. It doesn't work by some kind of automatic law of supply and demand or principle of input/output.
Gosh, when I went for my latest job a few years ago, I solicited myself to several companies and let them compete for me. The outcome of the bidding of demand was a mutually satisfactory deal that let me move back to my hometown and receive the best pay and benefits pacakge too. The company I now work for actually offered me 10% more than the salary I had told them I would like. Seems like supply and demand to me. There are relatively few people with my skills and knowledge, which I spent much time and effort and money to develop in 20 determined years of my 29 year lifespan. Therefore, I can command a good salary. I don't need the government to give it to me.
I am mystified as to why I should be forced to help out people who fritter away their years of education and make themselves worthless to most employers. No one is forced to be dumb and lazy. If you want a good life, go out and take it! Don't expect me or others to hand it to you for nothing.
The capitalist economy doesn't really allow that; it never asks the question, 'what is the economy for?' It only asks, 'what do you, as an individual, want to do?
They just don't get it do they? The economy, and economic laws are not here to produce morality and goodness. They produce money and goods through labor and investment. The moral application of these things requires a pre-existing moral people. If the Church is complaining about the moral state of the people in relation to economic matters, it needs to look in the mirror. The Church is the minister to souls and ethics and morality. The economy just hums along and makes life possible. Its not the fault of economic laws that people are immoral.
Unions, for example, were able to raise wages and the companies didn't go bankrupt.
What ones? Steel companies? Textiles? Railroads? Mining? I notice the Automakers are really "prospering" under unionism. They are next.
Namely, companies should not be allowed to do what Wal-Mart is doing. The problem is not that the one company's stores are paying too high of wages; the problem is that companies like Wal-Mart shouldn't be allowed to come in and undercut them.
This is pure corporate socialism, i.e. the false notion that companies have some mystical "right" to their marketshare, no matter what happens. Wal-Mart started off as a little Mom-And-Pop place too. They just grew by looking for efficiencies that others did not, and opening stores where there were none. No one is "forced" to shop there, and they didn't cheat by breaking the law.
The so-called occupational groups, which Pius was recommending, are the organizations that ought to handle these questions, not the government directly.
And who organizes those? What if you don't want to be a member?
where you have a society characterized by the ownership of very small businesses
I'm all for small businesses that offer a real service, and I patronize those around me that do. However smallness for the sake of smallness if silly. Why must I be limited to a little hardware store that doesn't carry all the things I need, when something like a Home Depot can be created? Why should I have to waste my time making seperate visits to butcher, baker, grocer, dairy store, etc., when I can go to a supermarket? Doesn't my desire to spend my time as I wish have a moral value?
And in situations where you need large entities, because of the technology involved, they would preferably be owned by the workers.
This implies these concerns will be bearing a large debt burden, because they require enormous amounts of start-up capital which were provided by stock owned by the wealthy. If you forbid large-scale ownership, the workers will not be able to provide the capital necessary. This also ties the workers to the company, rather than letting them have the greater freedom of investing their savings as they wish. The Enron debacle should be a lesson in this, where people were wiped out from investing their retirements in something that turned out to be a fraud. Personally, I think the current 401K system is working just fine. My one caveat with it is allowing mutual fund managers to do the voting of shares, rather than fund owners.
Restoration of Property, Hilaire Belloc provides a blueprint of differential taxation
The good old graduated income tax or a wealth tax? One of the tne planks of Marxism.
Even Catholics don't think this way, and they ought to think this way.
Quite respectfully, the Church is outside of her competence in dictating economic organization of society beyond preaching the requirements of morality. Some of the foolish among us have this silly notion that the Church's primary mission is to teach people the way to heaven not to teach state's economics and reorganize society. This stuff is as silly as the Gregorian Papacy trying to run the world.
In our diocese we had to pay medical insurance for any employee who worked over 20 hrs a week. We have Cadillac coverage in a very poor area and it cost a bundle. Last year costs went through the roof and the costs really hit the Chancery and now their tune has changed quite a bit. Now the employees have to contribute to their own insurance and pay all the costs for their families. Our diocese insurance covers everything (like if you sneeze run right to the doctor and get a "free" prescription for some medicine that you don't need.)
In my own life I have catastrophic insurance that pays anything after the 1st $20,000 because I'm self-employed and that is all I can afford.