Papa John's and Obamacare

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It’s not capitalism that elevates the poor, it’s efficiency…. It’s technology that allows us to produce in cheap abundance.

Capitalism is just a tool, like fire. Fire in my furnace, can heat my home. Fire outside my furnace can burn my home down.

Capitalism when controlled and directed properly can efficiently allocate labor, resources, goods and services.

When it is not controlled, we get booms, crashes, huge income disparity, violence and societal collapse.

Capitalism is what leads to efficiency through its division of labor, and by extrapolation, technology.

Capitalism works best when not controlled. Controlling Capitalism necessary introduces inefficiencies. As for booms and crashes, small booms and crashes are quite normal as the markets adjust when necessary. The more efficient the markets, the fewer the booms and crashes. Great booms and crashes are the result of major adjustments as a result of government interference in the market for their own purposes.

I see America as going in the direction away from Capitalism toward Government control. Their inefficient and ineffective control is the real culprit in a great many of our problems today.

I simply do not see any evidence for that. We have been de-regulating the economy and outsourcing our industry for 40 years now. Capitalists decided to forgo wage maintenance and instead propped up our economy with easy credit and asset bubbles. Expanding credit and building more and more debt is a pretty ingenious method to continue to extract profit out of workers and consumers even as real wages for the vast majority of Americans stagnate or fall. The chickens finally came home to roost in 2008 when the giant collective ponzi-scheme that started with the internet bubble then transformed into the housing bubble finally collapsed. If we refuse to learn from our mistakes and continue to cling to an old ideology that keeps failing us we are truly doomed. It will be our undoing. Like the Easter Islanders who went extinct when they cut down the last tree.

Utter BS.

Go back and read some of those old school libertarians like Locke or Burke.
Here's my favorite Burke quote: (I quote it a lot)

The problem is modern capitalist have no moral restraint. Lack of moral restraint led to the last crash--loan officers selling bad loans ON COMMISSION!

The problem is modern capitalist have no moral restraint; therefore we must restraint them for the good of society.

I think it is pretty interesting that with as many people as there are arguing for Papa John's side, nobody has had the balls to vote that "pizza pushers don't deserve health care".... And yet, by defending these business practices, that is exactly the attitude you're supporting.

No morals and no balls.

If you really want to fix the health care crisis without making the poor capitalists spend money, we are going to have to start rationing care on the basis of who can and cannot pay. If you can't pay, you die.

Is that the system you want?

If it is man up to the fact that innocent people will die.


When I took my first economics class I was floored when the professor announced, "There are no moral considerations in economics." It's a science, you see... It's just models and numbers and game theory...

Except that those numbers and models and games affect people's lives--whether they live or die--and THERE ARE MORAL CONSIDERATIONS GODDAMMIT!

Until we start producing a better class of capitalist, and I don't see that happening anytime soon, we will need plenty of control, laws, regulations, and maybe the occasional noose.

Your professor lied. The foundations of modern economic thought are still rooted in moral philosophies of the past. That's why economics consists of several disparate warring cliques that generally don't even publish in the same journals. You have the utilitarian moralists (conservative neoclassical economists), the natural rights moralists (Austrians like Murry Rothbard and Ludwig Von Mises), and the egalitarian Marxian Economists. For the first group the purpose of economic theory is to prove that taxes and price controls are theft since they generate "deadweight loss", for the second group the purpose of their theory is to prove that fractional reserve banking and fiat money printed by central banks enable theft through inflation, the third group invented the "labor theory of value" in order to prove that profit is theft.

They all seem to get part of the picture but ignore certain parts that don't go along with their ideology. The old-school neoclassical economists are the most skilled in hiding their ideological intentions behind math equations. The Marxists and Austrians are at least open about their ideological slants and don't claim to "have no moral considerations".

For what it's worth, the Housing Bubble was not a failure of Capitalism. Like the Dot Com Bubble, it was a creation by the government, specifically by the Federal Reserve as they manipulated the economy for the benefit of their wealthy and influential friends on Wall Street.

When you create massive amounts of money out of thin air, one of two things are going to happen -- you are going to see a generalized inflation if the money is spread around widely or you are going to see the creation of a bubble if the money is shoveled into the pockets of a homogenous group. Activities like that have nothing to do with Capitalism even if many people are under the great misunderstanding that anything involving money is, by definition, Capitalism.

How $8 million is going to cover healthcare for such a large company, I don't know that would probably only cover about a thousand employees. They have about 16,000. Even if they get a cheaper $6000 a year policy, that will still cost them around $100million, which would be around double the corporation's annual profits. 14 cents doesn't add up. Did anyone omit additional data to help spin a populist agenda on the issue?

The CEO founded the company and he EARNED that money. It is HIS, and a net worth of $240 million is not the same as having $240 million in the bank. He made a deal with the people who work for him and he kept his end of it. If the government does something to make his company unprofitable, he is free to make certain changes to be able to stay in business- among those restructuring moves is to cut labor costs by reduced pay and benefits, or layoffs.

"They are rich, let's use their money" is a sure way to reduce a country to poverty and a third world economy. It is a political doctrine born of jealousy, and it is no way to create enough wealth to improve everyone's lives.

I always see Burke as much more of a Conservative than a Libertarian.



Blame that on the government, not on Capitalism. The Housing Bubble was the creation of the government. As for selling bad loans, there was a lot of fraud involved there all over the place. Fraud is not Capitalism.



One of the real problems is that Medical Care in the United States is anything but a Free Market. It is a government granted monopoly in the hands of the medical community.

What irks me about medical insurance is that for those who have it provided for at work, the costs are deductions to the employer. If the employer paid the costs of that medical insurance to the employees and the employees provided their own health care, it would be much more expensive because it would no longer be fully deductible.

Like you, I didn't think it added up. I searched for more information and found that the 14 cents or so per pizza was not to provide health insurance to employees, but to cover the costs and penalties involved under Obamacare for not providing health insurance to employees. If they were to provide health insurance, the costs would be roughly 8 times higher.



This.

Also, most of that $240 million is probably in investments, much of it probably in his own company. If the company fails, he would surely end up seeing a massive decrease in net worth.

I worked at a Papa Johns for about a week when I was going to school in Denver, I got a better offer from another restaurant and quit. They are douchey, but not for the reasons stated in this thread. My biggest problem with them is the way that they take advantage of tip credit laws to pay their drivers less than minimum wage, and then cross train drivers to do everything in the store so they don't have to pay counter people full wage and can lower their labor costs through a loophole in the law. The minimum tipped wage hasn't been raised since 1991 or so, and IIRC is still at $2.13/hr, which means that many service workers actually get negative paychecks as the taxes on their tips actually eclipse their wages. Now waiters, bartenders, casino dealers, etc often make money far in excess of comparable non-tipped occupations and don't really need the wage, drivers usually use their own cars and their own gas and pay their own maintenance, so I think subjecting them to reduced wages is at the very least unethical. It very well may be illegal, but every case that's been brought has been settled out of court before precedent can be established. As for healthcare, mention it around a restaurant worker and be prepared to get laughed out of the room, it's just never been a part of that industry, the margins are just too thin and the work too transient.

Unfortunately, fraud is what passes for capitalism these days, and that is wholly due to lack of moral restraint.

The whole system has been distorted by over emphasis on short term profits, hedging schemes and stock manipulation.

Loan Officers are supposed to look out for the long term interests of their banks. Government did not force banks to put their loan officers, their guardians, on commission and set up a situation in which they were taking money OUT of their own pockets every time they denied a loan. Government did not force them to invent wild, irresponsible, and faulty derivative hedging schemes either.

The only way to fault government here is if you blame them for LETTING the banks to this stuff via deregulation. I do.

The bottom line on the banking disaster is that government and a few corrupt politicians might have enabled the banks, but they sure as hell did not force them to do anything. The banking crisis was ultimately the product of capitalism's own destructive impulses--stupidity fueled by greed.

As far as medical care goes... The free market is not what it needs. When you are ailing you do not look for the best deal, you look for THE BEST CARE at any price.

I'm not sure what you mean by "government granted monopoly in the hands of the medical community" unless you're talking about licenses and certifications... that's just silly.

I'm also not sure why you want it to be more expensive....

Here's the thing. We have already had universal healthcare for a long time we just never set up a way to actually pay for it.

Now we have to pay for it. We have to pay for it, or we have to decide, as a society, that it is acceptable to deny care to the poor, to let them die if they cannot pay their own way.

As for health insurance being deductible, well, that's government providing business with a little added incentive to do the right thing (for society) and encourage a free market solution to the problem.

The problem is, as I've already pointed out, that market solutions really don't work for healthcare because people are not willing to put a price cap on their health. That is why we need a public solution. We have plenty of surplus resources to pay for the solution. We just need to draw it out of the "wealth sinks" at the top of the economy.

....or we can just let the poor people die. Easy peasy!

So, it is okay for the public to subsidize that industry?

Because if a restaurant worker gets sick or injured and they show up in an emergency room they will be treated regardless of their ability to pay.... and if they don't/can't pay ALL of SOCIETY gets to pay, one way or another.

Are you really okay with that?

or

Should we just put these people out on the street to die if they cannot pass a credit check prior to treatment?

Yeah, this guy was a neoclassical economist with a good dose of Randianism to boot. Plus , he was a grumpy old fart who did not like to be challenged.

I like what Bill Buckley said about Rand, Atlas Shrugged, and her impact on economics...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KmPLkiqnO8[/youtube]

"I've never read a book so bereft of goodness..."

I have absolutely no sympathy for the banks. They are responsible for denying loans to those who are unlikely to repay the loans. It is their money at stake -- if they want to throw it away, they should expect to lose it and not to be compensated for it from everyone else.



No.

The government created the bubble, not the banks. They created enormous amounts of money and handed it out to the big banks in great quantities. The big banks naturally looked around for where they could put it to draw high returns and the vast majority of it ended up chasing mortgages.

The big Wall Street banks are a very homogenous group. Each bank is likely to see things pretty much like any other bank. So whatever promises a good return is going to look good to all of them and their prices are going to rise as a result. It's simple economics. The more money you shove at an investment, the more costly that investment is going to become.



Nope. It was simple economics.

If all that money had been directed to a very wide, non-homogenous group, for example if it had been given out in the same total quantities to the citizens of the country as a whole, we would have seen a general inflation because different people would have used the money differently. Some would have bought houses. Some would have bought cars. Some would have paid for their educations. Some would have bought race horses. Some would have bought ranches. Some would have bought drugs. Some would have bought hookers. The available money would have driven up the prices of everyone by roughly he same amounts.

But the money went to one homogenous group. They started to put it into an investment that looked good. And that pushed the price of the investment up. So that drew more investment which pushed it up higher. Instead of general inflation, we saw a bubble in the investment that they were pushing higher and higher with the money being given to them by the Federal Reserve.

If you want to read an excellent explanation of this, check out http://mises.org/journals/scholar/Thornton13.pdf, The Economics of Housing Bubbles.



Quite the contrary. A Free Market would create competition and push the prices down.

For example, suppose you have a simple cold. Do you really need a doctor to tell you what medicine to take? Right now, you do -- not for the doctor's expertise, but because the doctor has a monopoly and you are not permitted to go to someone else for medical treatment.

What does economics tell you happens when a product is scarce? The product becomes much more expensive. Do you think that gold is expensive because it is such a pretty yellow color? Of course not -- gold is expensive because it is relatively scarce. It is hard to find. If gold was as common as aluminum, it would have prices similar to aluminum. If there were millions of paintings by Vincent van Gogh, you could probably buy one for a few dollars, but since there are such limited numbers of paintings by Vincent van Gogh and because they are in such high demand, the prices are sky high.

The same goes for medical care. There aren't that many doctors and so their prices go up. The medicines are in limited supply and so their prices go up. Prescription medicines are higher still because of their limited availability.

Take away that monopoly and prices would go down.



Making it deductible for everyone who buys their own would not reduce the incentive one little bit.



We need a Free Market in health care to bring prices down.

I detest Ayn Rand.

And we don't need Ayn Rand at all. Through Liberalism (real Liberalism, not the Progressivism and Socialism that people call Liberalism today) we arrive at substantially the same place without all her nonsense.

If you want to learn about Liberalism, read Ludwig von Mises's book, Liberalism. You can read it on-line at http://mises.org/liberal.asp.