The one is intended to produce the other. If there is no benefit to greater size because your greater profits are all taxed away anyway, there will be no incentive to be that sort of big corporation.
I think we fundamentally disagree on the human nature of people who own things and run things and employ people. Big corporations are bad because the people who run them are greedy and motivated by self interest. Small business owners are largely the same, because people are people.
And relying on the community to police them canāt possibly work. What power does the community have?
My impression is that most of those in favor of a progressive tax would want it to be set to keep the firm profitable but paying, so that revenue is maximized to pay for government services. If it became more successful, greatāmore revenue! Other regulations would be used to keep the business behaving properly. I on the other hand just want to cripple and kill it!
Yeah, we disagree. Thereās a virtue in building something that provides services and livelihoods for our neighbors, and that can appeal to and satisfy a lot of people. They may not always be the same people who get into the entrepreneurial life currently, but weāve culturally distorted the meaning of business with libertarian profiteering ideals. And then just like how weāre more likely to be rhetorically unrelenting in the anonymity of the internet in ways we wouldnāt be face-to-face with others, most of us are more likely to treat those we know personally more fairly, to give our neighbors more latitude, and are less likely to pollute places we have visited. The disconnection and abstraction that is inescapable with extremely big businesses is a big part of what permits misbehavior. If there is no human connection we donāt act humanely.
Which is not to say there arenāt plain bad actors. But ownership doesnāt make you one.
Shame and social opprobrium! Doesnāt work on Bobby Kotick, but much more likely to work on your local grocer when he fires your cousin for being pregnant!
Cue debt ceiling / government shutdown crisis in 3ā¦2ā¦1ā¦
Houngan
5807
Filthy rich communities can avoid the big box invasion simply because there arenāt enough poor people in a dense enough area to support them. Of the ones you named, what are the mean incomes of households?
Dunno but they are all pretty upscale I would imagine.
Kyrios
5809
As with all things that do (or donāt) get done at the local level, itās all about land use (zoning and permits). If an area has the demographics to support big box retail - which the Berkshires do easily, because the tourism is multi-seasonal and high income - then itās mostly a matter of which town is going to permit building strip center(s). Developers will start with where they most want to be in terms of where the consumers are, and work from there to find somewhere they can do it. In the Berkshires thatās Pittsfield, for a bunch of reasons. (I think Great Barrington has a couple of big boxes, canāt think of any others, maybe up at the north end.)
In the more general case, a lot of āquaintā areas donāt end up with big-box retail because the demand is only there for one season (small beach or ski town), and there are always the local political dynamics that surround any land use decisions (rationally, whether the town is better of with or without the development, whether it will just happen in the next town anyways, etc; cynically, pro-development vs. NIMBY positions that donāt care about the rational arguments).
Note that Wal-Mart is its own specific thing, both in terms of where they want to be (often places that do not have the demographics to profitably support more traditional big-box retail) as well as their own unique politics around one moving in.
Lee/Lenox has an entire outlet mall. Pittsfield is horribly depressed. The mall is gone, and the downtown is in bad shape. There are strip malls nearby, though, and a BJās.
Kyrios
5811
Thatās a good point actually, the Lee Outlets are a thing. Thatās similar in the mechanics but a bit different in the execution: those are all more traditional mall type stores at <5K square feet, and in a lot of ways itās a substitute for that old Pittsfield mall. With the location off the Pike itās also aimed a lot more at passers-by.
The two strip centers on the northeast side of Pittsfield are all of the regional big-box, with the 15-20k sq ft retailers (TJX, Staples, Michaels, Ulta, etc etc) aside the anchors. All of those do quite well, above-average locations for their respective chains despite being in the relative middle of nowhere. Not sure if the BJās developed that parcel themselves or if they lease, but itās separate from the adjoining strip centers.
I remember what a big deal it was when the Berkshire Mall opened back in '88 or soā¦
Alstein
5813
A silent achievement of Biden- 90% reduction in drone strikes.
Iām ok with keeping the tool in the toolbox, but it was overused.
I imagine advertising a big reduction in drone strikes would be a double-edged sword. Why isnāt Joe Biden protecting us? Is he soft on terrorism?
Matt_W
5815
Now that weāve left Afghanistan what major conflicts are we involved in that drones could be used in?
Thrag
5817
Serious answer: Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, a few here and there in Pakistan for good measure.
Non-serious answer:
Letās not forget, Ethiopia, Eritera, South Sudan, Niger, Nigeria, Libya, and the horn of Africa. I think they are on-going operation in Colombia, Bolivia and other places in Central America.
We have troops in 150 countries, I bet most all of them have drone operations.
CraigM
5819
Damn you @Thrag I immediately read this post in Yakkoās voice.
That seems like a bonus, not something to damn anyone over.
Also, Rob Paulsen appreciates you.
