Hate the wealthy? Try earning an income without them!

For those of you who may wonder why I haven't posted in almost three weeks, October is an insanely busy month for me. The start of the holiday season brings longer hours, increased paperwork, crazy pressure, and sometimes sore muscles. It is the first of three months where the individuals whom I supervise will make a signficantly higher amount of income than myself. Sound like a job you might want? Well you can't have mine, I enjoy the challenge too much.



I work for Southern Wine and Spirits of America which is a very large privately-owned distribution company. In fact, it is the largest wine/spirit distributor in the country. SWS employs over 10,300 employees nationwide and ranks 33rd on the Forbe's list for private companies. The company has annual revenues in excess of $8 billion a year. As one might expect, the owners of this company are quite wealthy. In 2006 Harvey Chaplin and family ranked 645th on the Forbe's list of the world's richest people.



The Chaplin's are all about increasing revenues. However, they are even more interested in profitability. This means that they are fanatical about controlling costs. Product costs, energy costs, and most importantly labor costs are all monitored with an eagle eye. I applaud them for their zeal to make money. They are the reason I,as well as the other 10,299 employees of SWS, have a means to provide for my family. I hope the Chaplin's make a trillion!



Which bring me to today's point (somewhere on the horizon). It really irritates me when people such as the one below say ignorant things. This is a reader comment that was posted at the end of a story about the enormous amount of wealth that was lost by America's billionaires over the past year.



"I don't feel sorry for any of them. My income dropped 50%. I just got done paying my bills and have only $7.00 left in my checking acct. and I have to wait another week for my next paycheck. Now I have to figure out how to buy groceries on $7.00. I bet they don't have that problem. And they are rich because they don't pay their employees decent salaries. I know, I work for a rich person. And he doesn't offer insurance, or benefits. No sick pay, no vacation pay nothing."



I have several issues with this individual's train of thought:

1. You don't have to wait for your next paycheck. Use all of your knowledge, skill, and entrepeneurial spirit to start your own business.


2. Do your bills include: a cadillac cable tv package, an enormous car payment, cigarettes, booze(I hope so for the sake of my children's tuition fund), restaurant tabs, Netflix, a souped up cell phone plan, gym membership, lottery tickets, other consumer credit card debt? If so, then quit whining about your friggin' bills.


3. Is this so-called rich person chaining you to your workspace? The last time I checked you can quit and look for a different job (or refer back to #1).


4. Who the hell are you to say what amount makes up a "decent" salary? Compensation is a mutually agreed upon arrangement. If the salaries are so bad, how is it that this "rich" person has any employees at all? By the way, the federal government has been giving out unfair and unethical raises over the past several years in the form of minimum wage increases.


5. No benefits, no nothing. That is because they don't owe you any of that. If these things are so important to you, why did you not have them as a requirement to take the job?

I could go on, but I think the point is made. We should be concerned when the wealthy suffer. Very concerned. Collectivists love to bemoan the fact that the wealthy have gotten that way by exploiting their employees. I would argue that the employees have prospered off of the intellectual property and self-determination of the industrialists and the entrepeneurs.

The only organization that truly prospers by direct exploitation of the working class is the federal government.

AA