[SOC] Coffee in the Workplace, Pathological Mismanagement, Creating Value, the Road to Collapse and Ruin

Writing one of these posts can be a real pain in the rear. It takes discipline to write about what is exactly in your head at that very moment. The temptation is to go over to the Google news page to spark ideas from the current events, but I realize now that this is cheating. A good SOC post needs to be purely from the head at the moment of creation.

My mind is filled with thoughts about the workplace these days. I refrain from writing about those things for obvious reasons. But issues in the workplace influence what I write here tremendously. For instance, I have been a free market libertarian type for a long time now, but it has been issues in the workplace that have challenged my beliefs in those things more than anything I may come across in conversation or the internet. I will give an example.

I was talking to a person yesterday who works for another company. This particular outfit had a manager who decided that it would be a good idea to get rid of coffee for employees in the break room. Now, I don't think this guy is a Mormon trying to push his anti-coffee lifestyle on other people. But I gave considerable thought to the subject of coffee in the workplace. Coffee is a big deal for me, and I am fond of saying, "My purpose here is to turn caffeine into work." Coffee makes me a better worker because it ramps up my productivity, clears away the fog, and makes me a super happy person to work with. Coffee is pure win. Who would be so stupid as to mess with such an awesome thing? But where normal smart people would not dare to tread, you will find a manager.

Managers are not smart. This has been taught to me repeatedly over the years. This coffee incident is a case in point. This particular manager decided that it would be cost effective to save the 70 bucks on the coffee he was spending each month. Now, management is famous for blowing cash on consulting, company paid "retreats" which are merely vacations in disguise, endless meetings, glossy corporate communications, and the like. Stories abound of such corporate waste. So, why do the managers do it? Because they are spending it on themselves. Coffee is a different matter. This is spent for the sake of the working people. This cannot stand.

Management hates labor. They always have, and they always will. The true and real reason for taking coffee out of the break room for the employees is because the workers liked it. It was something they enjoyed, and if workers are happy, there must be something wrong with that. If this seems petty, shallow, and evil, you and I are on the same wavelength.

Deuteronomy 25:4 says, "Do not muzzle an ox that threshes your grain." I have always loved this verse. This is because it has a principle behind it which is that workers deserve their pay. The one thing I have learned over the years is that management hates labor not because they work but because they expect to be paid. We see this now as companies like Walmart look to chisel their workers out of every last penny. This is pathological because every one knows that the paid man works harder than the slave. But companies would rather have slaves than paid men even if it costs them more.

I often opt to not shop at Walmart because they won't put enough people on their registers, so I can check out in a reasonable amount of time. So, Walmart loses my business because they are too cheap to employ more people to work their registers. This is stupid, but there it is. It makes no sense to alienate customers in this way, but Walmart has gotten good at it. They are an evil outfit wedded to wickedness in all their dealings. It is not enough that they have won. Others must lose. In this case, this would be the workers and the customers.

Over the years, I have written about the Parasite Class, but I now see it more clearly as I have simply been reinventing a wheel that already exists. Basically, there are just two classes of people. You have the Working Class and the Parasite Class. The Working Class are those people who actually do labor and earn their living from that labor. The Parasite Class merely lives off the labor of those workers by taking as much as they can from them. I admit this sound Marxian, but I always thought Marx was too simplistic. Basically, people who work employ a positive sum strategy while those who are parasites employ a zero sum strategy. I will elaborate.

There are people who are employed but choose not to work. This would be the wage earner who clocks in and does nothing until he or she leaves for the day. This person is a parasite who steals from the company. Likewise, a manager who makes workers perform labor off the clock or secretly adjusts their hours down is also a parasite. It all comes down to a simple proposition. Do you work? Or, do you steal?

It is always theft when you take more than you give. People would claim that this is how profit is made, but this is not true. Profit is made from the addition of value. If you buy a chunk of wood for $5 and turn it into a birdhouse and sell it for $20, you have made a profit. But where did the profit come from? It came from taking a piece of wood and making it useful as a birdhouse. Value was added. Now, if you were to take that $5 piece of wood and did nothing and tried to sell it for $20 as a birdhouse, you would fail. But if you could trick someone into buying it, then you would have succeeded. But this cannot last. People catch on. Value is diminished over time. People have to work.

The problem these days is that people think that making money is automatically synonymous with creating value. This is why Wall Street speculators who create nothing of value stress their work ethics. Somehow, their millions have come from their "hard work" as if all hard work resulted in you becoming filthy rich. But this is not the case. This people become rich through luck and theft. They may work hard at their money getting, but they are not creating value. That is the difference.

There is a limit to the amount of value you can create. This is because we all only have so much time, money, and energy. This is why most people end up making the median income. To make more than the median income, you could work a bit harder, but you are not going to make millions in this manner. Ultimately, you either need luck which is unreliable or theft which is always reliable. This is why I tell people that the easy and sure money is in financial services.

This was brought home to me when a friend of mine complained that he had to pay an inactivity fee to his bank for not using his debit card. This is theft. When you pay for something, you should be getting something in return. But my friend received nothing in return. This is what large banks do now. They fleece their customers. They levy fees at every turn but provide nothing of value in return. This sort of thing does not happen at the credit union, but it does at the bank. This is the free market?

All of the economic evils in our present society come from one source. People want something for nothing. This is the essence of parasitism. We take without giving. This is why our nation is on the road to collapse and ruin. Everyone wants to live at the expense of someone else, and this sickness is at every level of society. At its fundamental core is a sin. It is the sin of laziness. People do not want to work. This is why students go to universities and stack up student loan debts they will never repay. They don't want to do real work. Likewise, this is why the financial entities lend money to these hapless souls because they don't want to work either. And there are all these managerial types who must manage all this make believe to make it all make sense. But there is no sense in something for nothing.

I await the reckoning for all this madness. It is coming. This will not last. It cannot last. To be averse to work is to be averse to the creation of value. When we stop creating value, you have nothing. Lives and lifestyles are diminished in the process. No nation can live from theft forever.

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