They work longer hours than their employees, so they get more. OK, that's fine. I'm more than willing to say that people dedicated to their business work very hard. I work 50-55 hours a week and I don't even own the business, so I know how that feels.

Does that make what their employees do less worthy of a decent pension? Of not eating cat food in their old age? Does it give an entrepreneur the right to look down on an employee for taking money from the government when he's hurt or ill or old?

Can entrepreneurs do it alone? Can they do it well with people who only come in and punch a clock and then leave? Does it occur to you that business success might have something to do with the value placed on the employees in a company, and with their will to make a good thing last?

Look at the behavior of the people in charge at Enron and so forth, and tell me that business practice itself hasn't given business a black eye. How to know who to trust? Government isn't perfect, but I can still vote them in and out of office. In the corporate world, he who has the most shares has the most votes, so all the pals can stick together and hang their employees and their small investors out to dry if they want to. Some of them have demonstrated a willingness, even eagerness, to do this.

I know this much about business: when people create a work environment in which human beings are interchangeable, employees become people who just clock in and out. That kind of worker has no interest in whether the business fails, except in the very self-centered sense of not wanting to lose the paycheck. Not even the job: the paycheck. These employees will not stay the extra few minutes to give a good turnover to the next guy, will not mentor a new worker who is nothing but a rival, and will not be looking for a way to improve the business that he observes with his own two eyes because a) he's just a thrall and b) nobody wants his opinion anyway. You don't think of employees this way? Oh, but you do: that's how you describe them in your post.

So I do see what you mean. Why should people like that get the benefit of a secure old age? They didn't earn it. They didn't work hard enough for people who think they're just along for the ride. You know what? If you treat people that way, they won't disappoint you.

And incidentally, non-profits are businesses too. I'm too young to have been in on the start-up, but I've been in on the expansion, which changed the organization and its relationship to the public in a big way. It's been a rough trip, business-wise, not least because an entrepreneur, a subcontractor, screwed us over so badly that we had to have the entire building rewired. The maker of the junction boxes replaced them for free so they could keep them for testing. They were very impressed by the abuse the boxes had sustained. One of them expressed amazement that the building hadn't caught on fire. And why didn't it? Because we have a group of employees who didn't know about electricity, but who knew something was wrong and spent considerable personal time documenting odd occurrences and, when a board member would ask how things were going, would take the initiative and tell them, repeatedly. And that's because they are told, every day, that they are important and unique, and that they are trusted to make the right choices.

I do something that you apparently don't do much: I work with the public. Every day. So I hear their questions, I listen to their worries, I try to help them with their concerns. Every one of them is important, and I take them as they come, not based on whether they are entrepreneurs or professionals or wage slaves.

That's why I will argue this until my dying day: because every human being has equal dignity, no matter what he owns. Every human being deserves to be treated that way. If that means that some of us who have more advantages give up a little of what we have because of the labor of others, for their benefit, so be it.

Fish don't need to know how to smelt metal. They have to know how to swim together. There are sharks out there.