"Industrialist", by Bill Kliban.
Another straw man.
To the other, you make the point why McDonald's needs to go away.
However, setting that distraction aside, there is also this bit of seeming naïveté:
Do you really think that's how the world works? Because we wouldn't need a minimum wage, or have rent crises, &c., if it did.
Furthermore, do the rest of us want coffee and fast food available to us? As a question of the business model, I'm probably just fine with getting rid of McDonald's. And Starbucks, sometimes praised for its barista compensation packages? Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Is your barista making fifty-six a year? Most likely, no, not even in Seattle.
Ducking out on pracitcal details, that you might hew to ill-considered political fallacies, isn't much for an argument.
Furthermore, in the context of the Trump presidency, how many people, at least since the time of Reagan, have pushed those fallacies, and those who attend history recognize the role of such outcomes in creating the very disparities so many complain of, today; and within that, yes, there are subsets, and not simply fringe elements without influence, who helped elect Trump because they blame everyone else for what they voted for and supported in the past.
Cycles like that remind me of an occasion, nigh on a quarter-century ago, in Oregon, when people were complaining about compensation packages for public employees. This was, largely, a self-defeating argument: The point was to complain about and discredit unions, but the effect was to argue that it was unfair that some workers didn't suffer as much as others such that the solution would be some manner of expecting all workers to suffer both equally and more. The difference always was the fact of having union representation to account for cost of living and changing workplace standards, or, precisely what many of the complaining voices had voted against in the past when supporting anti-union politicians and policies.
Those who are old enough can remember Clinton and Bush Sr., or other politicians, arguing about job creation, with the bitterly muttered punch line among workers being, yeah, sure, but these were insecure, low wage jobs; sure, the factories are gone, but, hey, at least they created a bunch of fast-food jobs by giving tax breaks to large corporations.
And these years later, we've expended a particular grace; part of what went awry is that we bled workers enough, as a society, that they could not afford, in their role as consumers, to consume enough and keep accruing debt in order to keep things afloat. And in that American tradition, the middling, equivocating path forward is to triple down while complaining about the results. It's a weird outcome by which a market option and concomitant demand exists, and consumers who demand everyone else get on board then complain that nobody succesfully performed some elitist stunt to override them.
Your pitch? It's a pretty consistent bit of folklore among the lower tiers of the capitalistic pyramid. And, honestly, I really don't understand why, incel or capitalist, society keeps coming back to Crowley jokes°.
Michael Moore once wrote a chapter called, "Horatio Alger Must Die", and, sure, we can describe much of what happeneed as bipartisan, such as it goes, but, as I've reminded others, before, the Blue Dogs weren't for a lark. That is to say, despite the complaints we heard in the '90s, and the first decade of this century, people kept voting for their own harm. And you might note, whenever the People, as such, get annoyed with the so-called liberal side for not being liberal enough despite the instructions of voters, the solution is rarely to leapfrog them leftward; no, if people didn't get the liberalization and progress they claimed to want but constantly voted to mitigate, disrupt, and oppose, they would prove their point by voting for conservatives.
When Moore wrote, "The system is rigged in favor of the few, and your name is not among them, not now and not ever" (145), this was easily deflected by invoking the very flag-drapiung mythopoeia he is denouncing: Those mean, elitist lib'rals are pickin' on 'Merica. When Donald Trump tells people the system is rigged, it gets him elected.
Or, the page before (144):
The system is rigged in favor of the few, and your name is not among them, not now and not ever. It's rigged so well that it dupes many otherwise decent, sensible, hard-working people into believing that it works for them, too. It holds the carrot so close to their faces that they can smell it. And by promising that one day they will be able to eat the carrot, the system drafts an army of consumers and taxpayers who gladly, passionately, fight for the rights of the rich, whether it means giving them billions in tax breaks while they send their own children into dilapidated schools, or whether it means sending those children off to die in wars to protect the rich man's oil. Yes, that's right: The workers/consumers will even sacrifice the lives of their own flesh and blood if it means keeping the rich fat and happy because the rich have promised them that some day they can join them at the table!
That was 2003; the difference 'twixt then and 2016 includes voters making hardline stands against liberal progress in society.
Your pitch, though, isn't so much hardline as roadworn.
And if we follow back from your
McDonald's inquiry↑, what we find is that you're asking for what is already
on the record↑ in a back and forth about a
word game↑ necessary for
pushing known fallacies↑ that we can track back
two months↑. To your defense, of course, the part you're asking for has only been on the record for
one month.
____________________
Notes:
Moore, Michael. Dude, Where's My Country? New York: Warner Books, 2003.
Perdurabo, Fr. "Onion Peelings". The Book of Lies. 1913. BibliotecaPleyades.net. 5 December 2019. http://bit.ly/2pWgPxe
