Business Basics

Unions and progressive rhetoric claims that business owners oppress and take advantage of poor workers, that working for somebody rich or a large organization is the equivalent of slavery.

But the fact of the matter is that there are two types of individuals involved in running any business enterprise. There are owners and there are workers. In some cases, these are the same people, but I will discuss those situations further in future articles.

Workers are individuals who choose to make one type of trade off, to accept a set wage for the reduced risk of not having a reduced income as long as the business stays afloat. Owners take a completely different trade off.  Where the employee can expect to receive a paycheck both when business is good AND slow, the owner risks losing cash, and therefore their income, and even their initial investment during slow times, in exchange for making higher profits in the good times.

Members of unions should recognize that if ownership of the business is so great, the best thing the union could do would be to put the member's dues toward purchasing the company, making the members owners of the company, then de-unionizing the company. The reason this doesn't happen isn't because it isn't good for the employees, but because it isn't good for the union's bosses.

Look at the UAW, which as soon as they were able, divested themselves of ownership of GM in order to cash in the gift the Obama administration made to the union, to prevent the union from appearing to be the antagonist to their usual anti-ownership message. The best thing the union could have done would have been to buy the rest of the company from the government, pay back the bond holders who were robbed of the company, and turned the company over to the workers. The workers would have then been able to share the profits or raise wages without having to fight with shareholders through the representation of the government.

Now, some union supporters claim that the executives that run the companies on behalf of the shareholders are overpaid. I completely agree. The US government should pass legislation that would allow the shareholders to vote on the amount of executive pay through their brokerage or retirement accounts. If we, the individuals that own a company think that tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of value reside in the leadership of a particular individual, then he should make that kind of money. On the other hand, if the owners want to see a much lower level of pay for the executive, supplementing positive performance with appropriate incentives, then the shareholders should have a more direct say in how much their employee, the executive makes.

To start

To start, I'm a father of 3 and a college graduate from Kansas State. I'm a socially and fiscally conservative Catholic. Economically, I'm for small business and against large business except when they are necessary for large projects such as for large manufacturing endeavors such as rockets and planes. As for government, all programs should be handled at the lowest level possible to maintain accountability and efficiency.

I look forward to laying out my thoughts, and hearing back what any readers might have to say.