Kari (over at BlueOregon) – all that you are demanding is the lame inclusion of less than effective minimum wages into the serfdom legalization bill? The Republicans are not advancing any Capitalist principal, in their bankruptcy proposal, that I have been exposed to; it is just an attack on liberty and fair dealing.

Demand a change in labor law so that any group or class that gets lumped together for purposes of class definitions by either federal law or state law should be automatically accorded recognition as a legitimate bargaining unit, or at least demand that employers would be estopped from claiming that it was not an appropriate bargaining unit.

The debt-based economy to which Alan Greenspan has exacerbated through his irrational exuberance at his own analytical and forecasting prowess has left labor in the dust. The CPI is a joke. Imagine if as a stimulus plan Alan gave every US citizen roughly 20,000 dollars, directly, rather than indirectly through below cost bank loans for the purpose of making reckless loans, to indirectly stimulate spending.

The mix of spending and investment from a 20,000 per person gift would, I suppose, have destroyed any controls on inflation, or at least inflation of the few things we now consider in calculating CPI for the working class. But like a squishy clown balloon the gift to banks of that amount, aggregated into very large chucks, caused inflation of asset valuations and the illusion of wealth.

If you go back in time you will note that Keynes, the economist, had opponents to the ideas now embodied in the laughable Laffer ideas of trickle down. See for example Veblen. All things are relative. Forget the absolute price and look toward relative wealth and relative price. Look at what labor can buy . . . without Alan Greenspan loans. The minimum wage might be enough to coax one panhandler off his favorite street corner to move over to another with slimmer pickin's (as a second job), but not afford shelter food heat medical care and a phone.

The appropriate class distinction here, in the bankruptcy context, is every individual in their dealings with corporate entities that retain limited exposure of their capital and the ever-present right to abandon their business. That is, every worker in America, as a group, should be able to form one bargaining unit and call a general strike; just to maintain some semblance of parity in bargaining. The corollary would be to deny the owners of any and all corporate entities from limiting the personal liability of the individual owners to the amount of money they voluntarily risk to obtain a claim of ownership in a company. Yes, that would mean effectively banning the “limited liability” component of all corporate forms of ownership. If personal liability, forever, is the key here, let's apply it uniformly irrespective of legal jargon about non personal entities.

You had better study a bit more economics and history so that you can gage the extreme of the bankruptcy bill properly; in this case legalizing serfdom, and likewise the lameness of the so-called poison pill of a ridiculously low adjustment in minimum wage.

It is the formation of a limited liability company that is the “privilege,” and only for a valid public purpose (including for-profit activity), and it is the liberty interest of the individual that is inalianable (notwithstanding anything Congress says), here the right to be free from oppressive transactions with the local franchise outlet of the company store.

Perhaps capital-free individuals should be able to pledge only a limited about of future earnings, a parallel concept to that of the right of someone to voluntarily risk only a fixed amount of capital toward a limited liability corporate entity, and set at a maximum, for the individual on uncollateralized debt, of say ten years; or maybe five years or even four years. This is far closer to the mutuality that is needed for the economy to function for the benefit of all.