Ah yes, the poor abused entrepreneur, constantly beset by thieves, his hard-earned assests fought over by the greedy mob like hyenas harassing a noble lion. The problem is that earning usually means that someone was hired to do the earning. You don't get rich by working your ass off, you get rich by getting some poor bastard to work his ass off for you. The employer does not only compete against other businessmen, he competes against his workers too; and as long as it is easier to hire a new worker than it is to get a new job, the advantage will always be with the employer. There is no free market between the two. The relationship between boss and worker is more often a predatory one, if not completely parasitic.

This relationship has been this way for thousands of years, everywhere and ever since slavery, serfdom and indentured servitude were replaced by wage labor. But for the last century or so, the recognition has dawned on those who do the work that competition can work both ways, once the playing field is leveled a bit. The twentieth century began a difficult, and at times, brutal campaign as labor slowly fought for rights and fair treatment, always against vicious and brutal opposition by capital. The relatively humane and civilized relations between labor and management we have come to accept as the norm today were not provided by the bosses out of the goodness of their hearts, they are anything but normal. They were resisted with violence, with pet judges and legislators, with law and propaganda and politics, in short, with every means at their disposal, including company cops and hired goons and overpaid scabs, all over and above the economic stranglehold they held over workingmen's families.

The irony is that with worker's rights, social welfare legislation and consumer and job safety protections came prosperity for everyone, labor and management. Workers came to realize that they had a future, that their kids had a promise of a better life, that they had a stake in corporate success too. And with money in their pockets, they could buy the products of business and indirectly benefit themselves as well as the companies they worked for. But this progress did not evolve naturally and it was never planned by business, it was paid for with blood and fear, and by brave men and women getting the crap beat out of them on picket lines, and yes, by a few progressive businessmen who had the vision and courage to see the obvious.

But times are changing, and the good old days of the satanic mills of turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh and Birmingham are starting to look mighty nostalgic to the souless corporate functionaries that pass themselves off as businessmen and entrepreneurs these days. I don't have to go through the list for you, outsourcing, downsizing, internationalization, mergers, the entire litany of techniques designed to do one thing and one thing only, to convert man's most sacred and noble right, the right to work and earn his living at a useful and noble task, into a meaningless commodity that can be done by a repetitive machine or unskilled subhuman automatons. To the new bosses, only THEIR jobs represent any skill or creativity or nobility. The rest of us are just low-life interchangeable production units, to be discarded like a perfectly good but slightly obsolete computer component when they can be replaced by a more efficient model. In return we are given jobs in the service industry, jobs that produce nothing of value, that just keep the goods rolling and the money flowing. Jobs that require no skill and offer no future, so they can be kept cheap and their workers docile and terrified. And they are desperately trying to put the politcal infrastructure in place to carry this out, and to make sure it stays that way forever.