Tom & Larry,

You both zeroed in on independent contractors/self-employed as if my not including them in the definition of "working man" somehow invalidates the definition. It doesn't, and it wasn't an oversight on my part.

ICs are members of a different category: Entrepreneurs, subset small business. They're people who have voluntarily accepted the risks inherent in that lifestyle.

I'd hardly overlook ICs, because I was an independent contractor from 1988 until the high-tech market crashed and burned (the date's indefinite, since it didn't go away at a specific moment in time; I lived for a year on the savings I'd prudently built up). Now I shuffle papers for a mortgage broker (Pssst! Hey! Mister! Wanna refi?).

The Democrats focus on "working people" exactly as I've defined them, because those people, who make up by far the largest sector of the population, could be called "dependent contractors". They too have an implied contractual relationship, but it's entirely one-sided: employment is at-will, and can be terminated at the whim of the employer. Unlike entrepreneurs, their fate is not entirely in their own hands, and that's why the government (at least, when motivated by Democratic policy) intervenes in the employment marketplace to mitigate the worst excesses of employment at-will. Left to their own devices, employers would stripmine their human resources the way natural resource companies exploit material resources. Government employment policies, in an ideal world, manage human resource use for sustainability and the general welfare.

In all this, my definitions are functional. I don't think that definitions based on income are all that useful. While it may be true that a working man with a high income is in a better position to survive the external uncertainties of the marketplace than somebody with a low income, the uncertainties and potential for exploitation are the same. Working people benefit from having the 900 pound gorilla of government on their side as a counterbalance to the 1800 pound gorilla of business.

And if that cuts into profits, well, waaaaahhhhhh. I put humans before money, unlike Rightists. I make no apologies for that.

--Robert