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Mitch Berg said: "Tell you what - if you want to fix that, join me in going to WalMart and taking the workers aside and asking if they'd mind us teaching them how to fix cars or build houses or process mortgage loans or program .NET applications. What sort of responses do you think we'll get? Seriously - why are these people there, if it's so bad?"
I say: If you could teach me how to make more money than I do now and you'd offer me suitable compensation while I learned, then you needn't bother going to Wal-Mart. I'll come to your house! I figure every person on this list who works for a living would beat a path to your door if you could would pay their current salary and provide no-cost training that would guarentee to increase their earnings. If you imagine that people are working at Wal-Mart because they thought that was their dream job, then you have a very odd notion of humanity. No kid says, 'when I grow up I want to work at a minimum wage or near minimum wage service sector job!' They don't say 'I want to work at Wal-Mart!'
Seriously Mitch - these people are there because it's better than starving or being on welfare. Their presence does not mean the situation is a good one.
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Pamela Ellison said: "If Capitalism and Democracy are synonymous, than where are the rights of the citizen in all of this? Do we have rights anymore?"
I say: We have no rights we can not enforce. This has been true throughout history. We have no right to a nice life, to happiness, to immortality, to fertility, to choose our own sexual partner, to choose our family or relatives, to choose the circumstances of our life. We have no right to not be invaded by another country and no right to not be forced by our country to invade somewhere else. That is, no rights except those we force others to yield to us - by protest, by force of arms, by persuasion, by bribery, or by intelligent discussion of mutual benefits.
If the Bill of Rights was so inalienable, we wouldn't need to have it as a legal document. It's a contract between the government and the people, established so we could bring suit against the goverment and members thereof for not holding up their side. It exists so we have a yardstick to know when we're being taken advantage of and when we should fight to enforce our rights.
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These issues are St. Paul issues. They are human issues. They affect all of us. We can not have an intelligent discussion of whither Wal-Mart unless we understand our right to protest, to vote with our dollars, to be employed at a fair wage. We can not talk about what a "fair wage" means without talking about things outside of St. Paul - things like the history of the labor movement, communism, capitalism, union formation, rights and how to get them for ourselves and our children. These are St. Paul issues.
Mary Baker, East Side
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