Capitalism Is Perfect Or Not?

[RC Patriot]

But wait, you're talking about govt colleges... aren't they regulated by definition?

[havok579257]

I don't doubt that you have all the best intentions. I am quite sure that you want to help people at all levels of income. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here waving the flag for higher minimum wages. While I extend that courtesy to you freely, I have not seen the same courtesy from you extended to "tea party people."

 

You seem to have this "binary thinking" where everything is either all good or all bad. You also assume that I have the same binary thinking. I don't. So, cut the croutons. We're both Catholic. I did a google search for "tea party are for cuts to the blind and handicapped in kansas." You know what comes up? An article from Huffington Post. This is not an unbiased news source. So you tell me, where is your information coming from? And have you seen the other side's opinion?

 

Now, let's get back to reality... you and I both agree that the government spends money on things that are against Church teaching. I never said you support those things. What I am saying is that the Tea Party might actually be on your side.

 

 

the source comes from the local kansas city newspaper and local news stations about the cuts.  i don't read the huffington post so i have no idea what it says.  i have seen the other side and heard from it.  it talks about government wasteful spending.  i am all for cutting wasteful spending.  although cutting essential money to the handicap to save money is not alright with me.  you want to make cuts to other areas of government spend that are not essential to people, go for it.  just dont cut from a small group of people who need the money but who's voice matters the least to politicians because they are such a small voting block, losing those votes won't effect the election outcome most of all in a red state like kansas.  

 

if say we are both catholic how come you go down the road of me supporting planned parenthood and condoms.  you said it not me.  i don't support things that go against church teachings and would never consider them essential.  

 

the tea party on some issues are on my side and the churches side.  some things its not.  same with the democratic party.  some things they are on my side and some things they are not.  i don't agree with either group for the majority of their platform.  i think both sides are ruining the country.  both don't want to comprimise with each other which means the country continues to get worse.  also and this is just a personal thing, but the tea party puts up some candidates who say the dumbest things and cost themselves elections.  i mean its really hard to show support for a candidate when they talk about how if a woman is legitimately raped she has ways of stopping pregnancy(todd akin vs claire mcaskall in missouri).  the genious had the race women before the campagin even started because of how bad mcaskill was but they he says something dumb like this and loses the election letting mcaskill, an obama cronny win re-election.  at the end of the day the democratic party and the republican party are bad for america. the tea party section of the republican party is acting dumb and giving liberals easy wins.  they are refusing to comprimise and entering no win situations(the debt ceiling fiasco).  so even if i could agree with most of what they say, i still can't support a group which puts so many people who do dumb things up as the face of the party.

[havok579257]

This is the pot calling the kettle black, havok.  All you've done is rant an ignore my very basic questions to you that began with the first reply to your post. 

 

 

now correct me if i am wrong but wasn't it you who asked what i would rather have instead of capitalism.  i would rather have distributism.  This is a better model I believe for society.  Here is a excerpt about the concept for wikipedia:

 

Distributism (also known as distributionism^[1] or distributivism^[2]) is an economic ideology that developed in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century based upon the principles of Catholic social teaching, especially the teachings of Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum and Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno.^[3]

According to distributists, property ownership is a fundamental right^[4] and the means of production should be spread as widely as possible rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism), individuals (plutocracy), or corporations (corporatocracy). Distributism therefore advocates a society marked by widespread property ownership^[5] and, according to co-operativeeconomist Race Mathews, maintains that such a system is key to bringing about a just social order.^[6]

Distributism has often been described in opposition to both socialism and capitalism,^[7][8] which distributists see as equally flawed and exploitative.^[9] Thomas Storck argues that "both socialism and capitalism are products of the European Enlightenment and are thus modernizing and anti-traditional forces. In contrast, distributism seeks to subordinate economic activity to human life as a whole, to our spiritual life, our intellectual life, our family life".^[10]

Some have seen it more as an aspiration, which has been successfully realised in the short term by commitment to the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity (these being built into financially independent local cooperatives and small family businesses), though proponents also cite such periods as the Middle Ages as examples of the historical long-term viability of distributism.^[11]Particularly influential in the development of distributist theory were Catholic authors G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc,^[9]the Chesterbelloc, two of distributism's earliest and strongest proponents.^[12][13]

More recently Pope Francis brings distributism back to the discussion, denouncing unfettered capitalism as tyranny in his 84-page apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism

Edited March 15, 2014 by havok579257

[CrossCuT]

But wait, you're talking about govt colleges... aren't they regulated by definition?

 

We are talking about loans

[NotreDame]

But wait, you're talking about govt colleges... aren't they regulated by definition?

 

To a certain extent, yes.  You have the government lending money to students in order to hand it over to universities (a large percentage of which are gov't run) and meanwhile you have people blaming it's problems on "capitalism" and saying it needs "regulation.

 

Sorry Crosscut, I made a real effort, I really did.  I showed you how the student loan industry is not just regulated, but essentially nationalized.  How numerous government agencies are in charge.  It is, by definition, regulated.  I'm not sure what else you are looking for. 

[NotreDame]

Wages are considered sticky, so it's unlikely many current employees would actually get a wage cut.  However, looking at it from a different angle, what you are likely to see over time is the following:

 

- Most entry-level positions will retain the same wage

- Some entry-level positions will lower the wage for new hires

- There will also be new entry-level positions created at these lower wages that did not exist before

 

Keep in mind that most workers stay at minimum wage for less than 6 months before they get a raise.  It's just a way for unskilled employees to get their foot in the door.  Lowering or eliminating the minimum wage is not dooming anyone to a lower wage for life.  In fact, in all likelihood it would mean increased opportunity for low-skilled workers via job creation.

 

OK, so let me follow this up with a little more detail. 

 

When you lower (or eliminate) the minimum wage, 3 things can happen:

 

- Some/none/all positions keep the same wage

- Some/none/all positions have wage lowered

- New jobs are created below the previous minimum wage

 

When you raise the minimum wage, two things can happen:

 

- some/none/all positions have the wage increased

- some/none/all positions are eliminated

 

I don't think any of this ^^^^ can be debated, but maybe I'm wrong.

 

Now what mix of responses occur after changing the minimum wage?  First off, nobody can know.  These are what I think they call "counter-factuals" which is a non-intuitive academic word that basically means you are talking about hypothetical situations.   Nonetheless, nobody can know what would happen for sure.

 

We can, however, use reason and economics to infer what would happen qualitatively.  Very quick summary of this follows....

 

In a high growth environment, raising the minimum wage would probably have little effect.  Even if the marginal cost/employee was raised past marginal revenue, in a growth environment most managers/owners would assume that marginal revenue would increase enough to outweigh the cost of employee turnover.

 

In low growth environment, raising the minimum wage would probably have the opposite effect for the same reasons (they aren't sure marginal revenue/employee will increase enough or at all.)

 

Again, I don't think most will debate this ^^^, but I could be wrong.

 

Now what's my personal opinion? 

 

Right now unemployment is high, underemployment is higher, and the labor participation rate is at something like 30-40 year lows.  Job growth is really, really lagging.  Real GDP growth is also lagging tremendously.  This would be a very bad environment in which to raise the minimum wage.  More jobs would get eliminated.

 

What about eliminating the minimum wage?  First off, the cuts have already been made.  Companies are lean right now, productivity is high... There are fewer employees at the margin right now then there normally would be.  So I don't think eliminating the minimum wage would result many folks having their wages lowered (outside of some specific verticals.)

 

However, I personally don't think wages are the biggest barrier to hiring right now.  I think uncertainty (both macro and regulatory) and lack of growth are the larger concerns....  So I wouldn't expect lowering the minimum wage to increase job growth in this environment, all else being equal.

 

Of course, I could be wrong.

[CrossCuT]

Sorry Crosscut, I made a real effort, I really did.  I showed you how the student loan industry is not just regulated, but essentially nationalized.  How numerous government agencies are in charge.  It is, by definition, regulated.  I'm not sure what else you are looking for. 

 

No you didnt. You said there are tons of regulations...too much regulation. Show me.

[NotreDame]

Crosscut, specifically, what exactly do you think "capitalism" does poorly?  What system other than "capitalism" would you propose to fix it?

 

If college education is your example, it's a very bad example of "capitalism" failing.  The US was one of the most free-market countries in the world during the 20th century (admittedly a low bar) and we quickly outpaced Europe (in part thanks to wwii, et al) in higher education. 

 

Education costs have greatly outpaced inflation increasingly over the last 25-30 years, but they have done so precisely because of the many byzantine loan and grant programs at both the state and local levels (programs which were all legislated and give the private lenders involved a nice guaranteed return, subsidized by the government in many cases.)

 

As I pointed out early when explaining CDO's and CDS's to you it's not lack of regulation that's causing these problems, it's actually the increased government involvement (increasingly being referred to as crony capitalism) that's giving birth to these excesses.

 

 

The US did indeed outpaced Europe in higher education after WWII, but it did this because higher education was NOT treated as a private investment. In the decades following WWII, state colleges were created and were fully (or almost fully in some cases) funded by the state and federal governments. Which means the reason we outpaced Europe was because higher education in America was essentially free.

 

Wow, there are lots of problems with this ^^^, but let's table it for the moment to focus on the following:

 

In the last 30-40 years (beginning around the Nixon era, and taken to a new extreme during the Regan years) education has become increasingly less affordable due to many factors (one such example is a lack of regulation on student loan interest rates, another is lack of regulation of tuition rates for state and federally funded educational institutions).

 

There is not any "lack of regulation on student loan interest rates."  It's exactly the opposite.  Student loans are incredibly regulated, subsidized, there are special rules carved out in bankruptcy law, etc., and almost all methods of paying tuition nowadays are programs that are the direct result of regulation and legislation. 

 

This is not a "lack of regulation", but an abundance of it.  It's also not "capitalism", in the free market sense.  You realize this right? 

 

 

No you didnt. You said there are tons of regulations...too much regulation. Show me.

 

Look at what I said above.  To that you said - and I quote - "I don't believe you."  I then proceeded to show you that the government itself, not "capitalism", is the primary student loan lender and originator - with 93% of all student loans in 2011 coming directly from the government.   

 

This isn't just the government regulating private industry, this is the government nationalizing the industry.  Since the loans come from government agencies they are, by definition, regulated.  I'm honestly not sure how to get ahold of their working regulations online (even if I could, I'm not sure I could read them), but you can read through the wikipedia article and google all the relevant legislation it references.  Here you can read up on bankruptcy law and student loans.

[RC Patriot]

the source comes from the local kansas city newspaper and local news stations about the cuts.  i don't read the huffington post so i have no idea what it says.  i have seen the other side and heard from it.  it talks about government wasteful spending.  i am all for cutting wasteful spending.  although cutting essential money to the handicap to save money is not alright with me.  you want to make cuts to other areas of government spend that are not essential to people, go for it.  just dont cut from a small group of people who need the money but who's voice matters the least to politicians because they are such a small voting block, losing those votes won't effect the election outcome most of all in a red state like kansas.

 

I believe that creating a strawman out of  a partial quote and spreading it to every voting person affects voting outcomes even more. I'm still skeptical that this was even said, and I'm having a hard time finding any mention of it outside of the generic Huffington Post article. Obviously, you know the details better than I do, and the burden of proof is on you as the accuser. Give me a link or something....

 

if say we are both catholic how come you go down the road of me supporting planned parenthood and condoms.  you said it not me.  i don't support things that go against church teachings and would never consider them essential.

 

I said the government supports Planned Parenthood and condoms through redistribution of income, which we call taxes. Don't you see that this is "essential services" to those in power? Ultimately, my point is that you're going to need to come up with a different excuse for taking other people's money than "essential services," because those words are being abused.

 

the tea party on some issues are on my side and the churches side.  some things its not.  same with the democratic party.  some things they are on my side and some things they are not.  i don't agree with either group for the majority of their platform.  i think both sides are ruining the country.  both don't want to comprimise with each other which means the country continues to get worse.  also and this is just a personal thing, but the tea party puts up some candidates who say the dumbest things and cost themselves elections.  i mean its really hard to show support for a candidate when they talk about how if a woman is legitimately raped she has ways of stopping pregnancy(todd akin vs claire mcaskall in missouri).  the genious had the race women before the campagin even started because of how bad mcaskill was but they he says something dumb like this and loses the election letting mcaskill, an obama cronny win re-election.  at the end of the day the democratic party and the republican party are bad for america. the tea party section of the republican party is acting dumb and giving liberals easy wins.  they are refusing to comprimise and entering no win situations(the debt ceiling fiasco).  so even if i could agree with most of what they say, i still can't support a group which puts so many people who do dumb things up as the face of the party.

 

I'd love to hear what your vision for the country is, if you think both parties are ruining the country. My thinking is that if you're going down the freeway in the wrong direction, you have to turn around. "Compromise" isn't going to get you anywhere. But seriously, look into your sources. It didn't take long for me to find these:

 

Sarah Steelman was the Tea Party chosen, not Todd Akin

http://news.yahoo.com/tea-party-express-endorses-sarah-steelman-u-senate-212100508.html

 

Democrats spent $1.5 MIllion to help Todd Akin win the primary... gee, I wonder why....

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Dems-Spent-1-5-Million-to-by-Rob-Kall-120821-873.html

 

I sucks when your own party doesn't support you, eh?

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/todd-akin-on-today-this-is-not-about-my-ego/

 

To his credit, he tried to take it back. "Apology not accepted," said the media which controls the mass of votes.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/08/todd-akin

 

Todd Akin, not exactly the "face of the party."

[4588686]

I'll go back to my question about working a low skill job.  The idea that lowing the minimum wage will help anyone get their foot n the door is silly.  Those jobs have almost no future.  Maybe if you stuck with it and did great you'd get a managerial position where you'd get guaranteed a little over (paid) 35 hours a week (while also being on call and actually working much more).  

 

 

[RC Patriot]

I'll go back to my question about working a low skill job. The idea that lowing the minimum wage will help anyone get their foot n the door is silly. Those jobs have almost no future. Maybe if you stuck with it and did great you'd get a managerial position where you'd get guaranteed a little over (paid) 35 hours a week (while also being on call and actually working much more).

Why is it silly?
They aren't the jobs that are meant to have a future. They're the jobs that are meant to build a work ethic, so when you want to go from sweeping the floor to cashier, you can show you're reliable. And when you show you can be trusted with money as a cashier, you go get a job somewhere else. Poverty is not static. The jobs are, but the people generally aren't.

[NotreDame]

Hasan,  are you generally interested or just being argumentative? 

[arfink]

So, I've ignored the past 6 or so pages at this point, so please just smack me if this has been asked already:

 

What about distributism? I am not a Chesterton expert nor a brilliant economist, but why wouldn't that be superior to both capitalism and socialism?

 

Rather than allow the state or corporations to own capital like equipment, only individuals would own capital. If it was something that an individual could not own, it would be owned collectively by those who operated it. So companies that owned capital equipment would be owned by their employees.

 

It would seem to me that this would reduce the dual socialist and capitalist problem of workers having no economic power or control due to having no access to capital.

 

EDIT: I said subsidiatiry when I meant to say distributism. My bad.

Edited March 15, 2014 by arfink

[NotreDame]

What's the distributism theory on the business cycle?

[arfink]

What's the distributism theory on the business cycle?

 

You're gonna need to help me out here and define that a little for me. Like I said, not an economics guy.

[4588686]

Why is it silly?
They aren't the jobs that are meant to have a future. They're the jobs that are meant to build a work ethic, so when you want to go from sweeping the floor to cashier, you can show you're reliable. And when you show you can be trusted with money as a cashier, you go get a job somewhere else. Poverty is not static. The jobs are, but the people generally aren't.

 

 

Lol, so I'm guessing you haven't worked a lot of those low skilled jobs recently either?  FYI in a place like that 'floor sweeper' isn't a job.  Employees like the cashiers perform basic janitorial tasks plus usually they contract out the heavier duty cleaning.  I haven't seen lot of jobs that are looking for somebody who has proven that they can be trusted with money via their years of experience working at Burger King.  

[4588686]

So, I've ignored the past 6 or so pages at this point, so please just smack me if this has been asked already:

 

What about distributism? I am not a Chesterton expert nor a brilliant economist, but why wouldn't that be superior to both capitalism and socialism?

 

Rather than allow the state or corporations to own capital like equipment, only individuals would own capital. If it was something that an individual could not own, it would be owned collectively by those who operated it. So companies that owned capital equipment would be owned by their employees.

 

It would seem to me that this would reduce the dual socialist and capitalist problem of workers having no economic power or control due to having no access to capital.

 

EDIT: I said subsidiatiry when I meant to say distributism. My bad.

 

http://www.amazon.com/review/R353KJO6WNGME0

 

"Theodore Burczak is Professor of Economics at Denison University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, where rigorous training in traditional economic theory and econometrics was linked to an equally rigorous training in "political economy," by which was meant the analysis of the politico-economic dynamics of social systems. I was privileged to teach in this department at the time Burczak was there, and indeed in the acknowledgements, Burczak says that I "showed how to transform traditional economics into political economy." So the reader is warned---I am not an unbiased reader of this book.

Many reasonable people believe that capitalism, for all its myriad of weaknesses, is the best possible economic system. This is a highly defensible position, given the abject failure of all attempts to create viable alternatives over the past two centuries, and especially after the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union, the failure of European socialism, and the bitter extinction of Third World Socialism. Personally, I believe capitalism is the best system we know of, but it is very important to have some smart and committed people around who spend all their time and energy in devising workable alternatives. Burczak lies squarely in this tradition, and Socialism after Hayek is a very creative and thoughtful work that deserves to be widely read and evaluated.

The most salient fact about Burczak's defense of socialism is his wedding a model of market socialism with democratically run, worker-owned firms (Lange, Lerner, although Burczak uses arguments from the contemporary Austrian school, which fits well with Hayek) with a welfare analysis based on human flourishing (Aristotle, Sen), and perhaps most uniquely, a defense of markets inspired by the extremely right-wing, Nobel prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek. This potent mixture of ideas is a welcome alternative to the usual contemporary defense of socialism, which is based either on know-nothing populist sloganeering or reliance on the ancient German philosophers of socialism of the Nineteenth Century---especially Marx and his brainy intellectual followers, whose obvious Hegelianism reverberates nil with the modern mind (Marx said that he was "Hegel turned on his head." What he forgot was that an upside down Hegel is still Hegel, just upside-down, just as an upside-down chicken is just a chicken, upside down).

In Burczak's Lange-Sen-Hayek trinity, traditional economic theory is used to defend market socialism and democratic worker ownership (Samuel Bowles, John Roemer, Pranab Bardhan and I were working in this area when Burczak was working on his doctorate at the University of Massachusetts), to defend egalitarianism on the basis of Sen's notion that human welfare depends on developing capabilities, not on simply getting material things, and to defend a Postmodern philosophical position on the basis of Hayek's theory of knowledge.

Burczak's treatment is highly sophisticated, but I am afraid I am not persuaded. The absolutely central and bottom-line problem is that an economy consisting of worker-owned and democratically controlled firms would impose a significant static efficiency loss on the economy and would severely retard scientific and entrepreneurial innovate. I say this with pain and regret, because I and my colleagues work for almost ten year to devise a workable market socialism, but my final conclusion (I'll let the others speak for themselves) is that our models are more applicable to promoting self-employment of poor farmers in developing countries (see Pranab Bardhan, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, "Wealth Inequality, Credit Constraints, and Economic Performance", in Anthony Atkinson and Francois Bourguignon (Eds.) Handbook of Income Distribution (Dortrecht: North-Holland, 2000):541-603).

The main problem facing democratic worker control of firms is that the workers must be residual claimants on the profits and losses incurred by the firm, or the workers will have no reason to adopt efficient technology and work practices. Lenders will not willingly lend to worker-controlled firms because they cannot maintain sufficient influence over the firm's policies in this case (Herbert Gintis, "Financial Markets and the Political Structure of the Enterprise", Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 1 (1989):311-322). John Roemer and Pranab Bardhan (Pranab Bardhan and John Roemer, "Market Socialism: A Case for Rejuvenation", Journal of Economic Perspectives 6,3 [Summer] (1992):101-116) worked out a sort-of "pari-mutual" betting plan that would direct public funds to the most promising firms, but it is implausible that such a plan, were it workable, would not succumb to political forces in a way to which private capital markets, based on the inviolability of private property, are virtually immune. Moreover, firms based completely on outside finance are extremely overleveraged and would inevitably collapse when even small threats to their viability arose.

The conclusion is that democratic firms must be almost wholly worker-owned, meaning that virtually all of the firm's capital stock is owned by the workers. However, there are severe problems with worker ownership. Most important, the capital per worker in the average firm is greater than the total wealth of the average worker in that firm. If the worker were given a share in the firm outright, he would prefer to sell it to diversify his asset holdings. Indeed, all the workers would prefer to sell out to a capitalist enterprise so they would become less vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the market. Indeed, there are several cases in which land redistribution to the peasants failed because the peasants sold the land right back to their previous landlords! Of course, this could be prevented by law, but the economic inefficiency of having a workforce of highly exposed individuals would be extreme. Moreover, if the workers own the firm, they will not want to expand employment in the firm, because the new workers would get a share of the value of the firm. Of course, new workers could be forced to buy a share in the firm, but few would willingly do so. Finally, the idea of worker ownership might be feasible for some highly stable and technologically developed sectors, but a vibrant economy is based on entrepreneurial innovation, and this is incompatible with workplace democracy.

If the contribution of workplace democracy to social welfare were sufficiently great, perhaps some of these severe problems could be overcome. But in fact, workplace democracy and popular ownership of capital are not fundamental values, but rather are instrumental values. Of course, in the minds of truly committed socialists they become ends in themselves, but I do not think such an idea can be sustained, even using Sen's notion of capacities. Socialists talk of "wage-slavery," but working for a boss is not slavery by a long shot. There are good and bad bosses, good and bad workplaces, but there are also good and bad teachers, and this does not imply that all authoritarianism should be abandoned in the educational process. Market socialists like to compare workplaces to communities, asking why we should have democratic communities but not democratic workplaces. This is a good question, but the fact is that our democratic communities work because we have a traditional market economy to draw upon. Moreover, while it is clear that a liberal democratic national constitution is a must, it is not clear that there would be something completely unacceptable about having corporations run communities, as they now run some schools and prisons.

I think the most creative insight in this book is the relationship between Hayek and Postmodernism. I love Hayek and I am deeply put off by Postmodernism, so I am certain that the melding of the two must be carefully executed to maintain continuity with Hayek's thought. But it is interesting food for thought, one of many Burczak offers us in Socialism After Hayek.

[NotreDame]

Lol, so I'm guessing you haven't worked a lot of those low skilled jobs recently either?  FYI in a place like that 'floor sweeper' isn't a job.  Employees like the cashiers perform basic janitorial tasks plus usually they contract out the heavier duty cleaning.  I haven't seen lot of jobs that are looking for somebody who has proven that they can be trusted with money via their years of experience working at Burger King.  

 

I asked if you were serious because the value and dignity in work should be self-evident.  Also, as someone that is current unemployed, simply having a job greatly improves one's employability.  And apparently, there's a big need for low-skill jobs at the moment:

 

 

There's really no need to get personal on this like you are doing ("have you worked those jobs?") either.  Also, please don't turn this into one of your tangents where you pick three words from someones post and rathole on it for 5 pages. 

[NotreDame]

http://www.amazon.com/review/R353KJO6WNGME0

 

Thanks for that.  In case you are wondering, it appears that this whole "distributism" concept was born out of Belloc's "The Servile State":

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Servile_State

[4588686]

I asked if you were serious because the value and dignity in work should be self-evident.  Also, as someone that is current unemployed, simply having a job greatly improves one's employability.  And apparently, there's a big need for low-skill jobs at the moment:

 

 

There's really no need to get personal on this like you are doing ("have you worked those jobs?") either.  Also, please don't turn this into one of your tangents where you pick three words from someones post and rathole on it for 5 pages. 

 

 

 

It's a completely legitimate question when you and RE Patriot are providing a defense of these jobs based on some postings that bear little or no resemblance to what actually occurs in that portion of the labor market.  If you say 'hey, here's what's ok with these jobs, because this can happen!' and your hypothetical shows a complete disconnect between what occurs in that sector of the labor market then it is completely legitimate to point that out.  

 

Work can get bring you dignity.  Not all work does, however.  I worked with a woman who worked for Wal-Mart for 19 years before they fired her with no notice and nothing to show for her time there.  She was working on the unloading docks with us however she clearly wasn't able to handle to strenuousness of the job.  When I left they were pushing her out by cutting down her hours.  There isn't a lot of dignity in that situation.