May Day

I never knew that May Day was a socialist holiday. Ok it's a much older holiday than that, like almost all holidays that people have fun at it goes back to an old Pagan holiday, those pagans must have really known how to throw a party. Now as someone with some socialist leaning that sounds interesting, unfortunately something that is so tied into socialism in this country is the Labor movement, now I'm all for power to the workers, yet I am unflinchingly anti-Union. This always sounds weird to people until I explain it, and actually my stance against unions comes from experience, and those same experiences are why I am socialist leaning and absolutely not a socialist. It has some great ideas but its not practical. And Unions are trying to be little socialist microcosms in a sea of capitalism which cannot work. I can't decide if I should go into another of my rants against unions.... hmmm...

Aw fuck it why not? It'll probably be relatively brief. So here we go again, why I am a super liberal semi-socialist that absolutely despises Unions. The most basic reason is the same reason why socialism will never work. People are greedy and lazy, not all obviously but over all most people fall into one of those categories, or both. So in a socialist society or a union you remove the punishment for being lazy, you basically cannot be fired, and you remove the reward for working harder, can't make more money than the lazy guy next to you. I want to bring people closer to equality but not absolute equality because, dammit we are NOT equal. Again some folks work hard, some don't why not allow those willing to work harder enjoy some advantages? Thats the idea of capitalism. But closer to equality in that every single person on earth should have at an absolute minimum, Food, Clean drinkable Water, Housing. Thats the absolute minimum, if that makes me a pinko because I think that since we have the ability to prevent children from starving to death, then we should do it, well then call me a commie and I'll call you a..... never mind. The next step would be education and medical care for everyone in the world. Ok so far I've talked about more equality from the view of raising up those at the very bottom of the bell curve, what about the other end? The super-rich. My question is, does anyone NEED a billion dollars? No. Does anyone deserve a billion dollars, now thats the real question. Does the CEO of Exxon Mobile really work a million times harder than the Malaysian person making sneakers for a dollar a day? I think not. If you work twice as hard sure, you should get twice as much, if your job is particularly critical to the welfare of the community, like a doctor, you should get more. Especially in the case of a doctor because not only are they saving lives but it takes a large amount of skill to be proficient at it. So yes some people deserve more. But would it be so wrong if the world minimum wage was say 10 bucks an hour, and the richest people made $250,000 a year? We are still talking about more than ten times the money, thats not bad. I know I know, how can you create a maximum wage without severely infringing on rights? I don't know. You obviously can't in a pure capitalist society, but then again generally those at the very top, the multi-millionaires, the billionaires, they don't work under true capitalism anyway. Every corporation with money to pay their top people like that are also pay many politicians, they are subsidized by the government in many different ways, so the biggest corporations are somewhat socialist. Kinda ironic that the peak of capitalism becomes socialist.

I don't have time to get into the part of unions that really pisses me off. Huge corporations, with politicians in tow have no trouble keeping the unions, which are just corporations in their own right anyway, out of their way. But the unions need to hang on so they are forced to go after the smaller business. Now you have a very large well financed corporation, the union, taking on a small struggling company and puts them out of business. If the union is a pride of lions roaming the safari then small businesses are gazelle, and the big ones are elephants. The lions don't stand a chance against a strong elephant so they don't bother. They take keep taking down the gazelle's until theres nothing left but elephants, then they starve to death. Along with the rest of the animals that needed to eat. I should have thought that metaphor through better, I coulda come up with something better, but no time at the moment. You get the idea, unions are killing small businesses, like the one that put a roof over my head growing up, our family business was destroyed because the union didn't get their cut. We payed our workers better, they had better health care, they had more vacation, despite all those extra expenses we still were much cheaper than the union shop because we didn't have to pay protection money to the union, also because we only kept people who were willing to work, we worked harder (I say we because I was in the back pounding duct-work from the age of 16) we got payed more. But the organized crime, I mean organized labor didn't like that so they took us to court where you can be deprived of property without a jury and sued us because we didn't hire people that weren't looking for jobs and who were over qualified. We lost the business, the house the cars everything. My father is the single hardest working person I have ever met. He came from nothing and with pure determination he built a reputation as a worker, started a business and it thrived because of his blood sweat and tears. He would go to work before 7 am and came home somewhere between 6 and 8 o'clock most nights, never stopping for lunch. On a good week he'd take Sunday off to do yard work. This went on for years until things were fairly well established and he was eventually able to reap the benefits. Then it was stolen by a few lawyers and a single judge. There was no jury of our peers, it was all just taken away. Our workers had to take lower paying jobs at the union shops, after voting down the union many times at their former place of employment.

Fuck International Workers Day.