From: bud@mtek.com (Bud Hovell)
Subject: Re: who pays for USENET
Reply-To: bud@mtek.com
Organization: MTEK International, Inc.
Distribution: na
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 92 17:59:07 GMT

mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Marc Unangst) writes:

>However, money that a corporation spends on restrooms, or replacements
>for equipment broken by employees, or the cafeteria, or in fact
>anything except the employee's own salary, is money that the
>organization cannot use to pay employees. [balance deleted]

Excuse me, Marc, but you seem to be operating under some new-age
illusion that suggests employees have an inherent primacy in the
food-chain of organizational funding.

While people may be the most valuable asset of an organization, they 
have no ultimate claim on whatever expenditure may be disposed to other
requirements. And people don't even become a justifiable expense until
there is something to *do* which is valued by someone willing to pay
for it -- specifically, a *customer*. Paying the printer to produce
marketing literature may become a much higher priority than hiring
another person to write code. Or carry out the trash. Or prepare
the tax statement. Or teach a class which no one signs up for. Or
carry out obscure research which no-one but the researcher frankly cares
about *at all*. Customers are the first agenda to be met. Not paying
more employees -- or paying more to the existing ones simply because
they are extraordinarily nice folks.

This applies equally to profit-making and non-profit-making "businesses"
(which are different only in the arbitrary rules of taxation on their
revenue sources and specific missions).

In either case, however, employees "pay" for nothing. They are paid.
Along with the government, the rent, the telephone and electricity,
the suppliers, etc.

Please note that "etc." is a much larger obligation than would be
guessed by typical employees -- who remain blissfully clueless about
what's implied in operating a real business, and would be astonished
by that grim reality. (Please refer to the June Wall Street Journal
article by the esteemed [former-liberal] George McGovern so as to get
a flavor of what happens when one of the truly insulated encounters
the real world created largely by a Congress which casually passes
expropriatory laws upon the heads of its citizens -- then routinely
excludes itself from compliance to the same nonsense, while simul-
taneously creating special benefits for its own members which would
have been the envy of Karl Marx, and outright bribing a knowing
populace to keep them in office by ever-escalating "entitlements"
which seven future generations of Americans will never *ever* be able
to pay off except through a depressionary cycle of extreme inflation
or -- less likely -- extreme deflation. All after they, themselves,
are safely tucked away in their cynical little graves, of course.)

People on payroll may have a rightful entitlement to be paid *first*.
(Well, right after helpful, friendly government, of course). But they
have *no* entitlement to be paid *all*. Unless, of course, they wish
to collectively buy and manage the enterprise. (Which is just a *fine*
idea, in my book. :-)

To obtain the right to all residual revenues after *everone* and
*everything* else is paid, one must decide to become the source of
finding customers to feed an enterprise. And administer it. And
manage it. And not be concerned about how many hours a week one
may put in, or what duties may fall to him to perform -- including
sweeping the floors and cleaning out the urinals, if need be. All
in the hope that the day will come where the investment will allow
him the *earned* entitlement to a profit exceeding what he might
receive as an employee. Which profit will never come for many of
these folks -- so and they will again become employees.

No dishonor in that. At least they've tried. But they also typically
return to the ranks of hired labor with a *profoundly* different
attitude than the one you exhibited here, and which clearly has not
been subjected to a reality check.
-- 
________________________________________________________________
bud@mtek.com ... uunet!m2xenix!mtek!bud ... bud@rigel.cs.pdx.edu
MTEK International, Inc.             Throughput Technology Corp.
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