The company town (and another call for a fifty-dollar minimum wage)
The company town! That grand experiment in corporate feudalism, now reincarnated in the unholy trinity of penal labor, affordable housing, and the modern workplace. Let us embark on a journey through this cesspool of misguided benevolence and thinly veiled exploitation, shall we?
From the textile mills of Lowell to the coal mines of Appalachia, company towns stand as monuments to the insidious specters of fiscal chicanery that have plagued this great nation. These bastions of corporate paternalism, where one could live, work, and accrue debt to the company store all in one convenient location, were nothing more than workhouses with a fresh coat of paint and a side of bureaucratic meddling.
Fast forward to our modern era, where the United States has perfected the art of penal labor under the guise of law and order. It’s as if we’ve taken the company town model and slapped a coat of stars and stripes on it! But at least we have the decency to call it what it is – punishment. Unlike affordable housing schemes and modern workplaces, which are nothing more than company towns for the 21st century, complete with an army of meddling social engineers – clipboard-wielding busybodies and self-appointed saviors of the downtrodden, each burdened with enough personal neuroses and existential crises to keep a battalion of therapists employed for millennia, and yet they have the unmitigated gall to assess and “fix” the lives of others. One wonders how they find the time to poke their noses into others’ affairs when their own psyches are as fragile as a house of cards in a hurricane.
But fear not, for I have the solution to this Gordian knot of social ills – a $50 minimum wage! Yes, you heard correctly. Fifty dollars per hour and not a nickel less. Only by forcing these misguided philanthropists, penny-pinching bureaucrats, and corporate overlords to pay a wage that would make even the most hardened capitalist twitch can we hope to exorcise the pernicious phantoms of economic folly from our modern society.
Imagine, if you will, a world where even the lowest paid employee could purchase a home in two years instead of facing a lifetime of perpetual rent and economic servitude! No more need for company towns or affordable housing schemes when every citizen can build genuine wealth and security!
In conclusion, let us cast aside these insidious schemes of corporate control and government dependency. It’s time to embrace the only true path to prosperity – a minimum wage so high that its mere announcement causes heart palpitations. Anything less is not just folly – it’s an abdication of our responsibility to future generations and a betrayal of the very principles upon which this great nation was founded!
