The Line Between Working and Bumming
Web Entrepreneur Banks on 'Bum-vertising' - Homeless Advocates Say He's Exploiting the Poor:
A budding Seattle entrepreneur looking for a low-cost marketing campaign says he's found an inexpensive and highly visible tool to publicize his Web site — he calls it "bum-vertizing."Be sure to read, Make Yourself Useful.
Ben Rogovy, a 22-year-old University of Washington graduate, says the homeless and panhandlers are an untapped labor force, and he's putting them to work.
"It dawned on me this could be inexpensive and effective," he said. And he believes it's a campaign that benefits both him and the homeless people he's hired to hold signs advertizing his Web site. He said he's giving panhandlers a job and getting advertising on the cheap.
[...]
Rogovy said that they are adults and they can make up their own minds. But Macri argues because the panhandlers are poor, homeless and begging, "they've lost their free choice" and have no choice but to agree to Rogovy's request.
"It really reinforces stigmas about people who are homeless — that they're not humans, that they're just signposts," Macri said.
Comments (15)
Amazing, this brilliant entrepreneur has come up with a great idea, which greatly benefits both him and the poor advertising for him, and this leftist dimwit is going to smash him for it. This allows these people more options than they had before. It isn't "exploiting" them, what utter nonsense.
Published: August 12, 2005 7:16 AM
"they've lost their free choice" and have no choice but to agree to Rogovy's request.
That is, they have no choice but to agree to Rogovy's request or anybody else who makes them an offer. Take that away, and then they really have no choice but to take whatever the government offers in the form of welfare.
Published: August 12, 2005 9:14 AM
This is the same mentality that permeates through the minds of those that claim to "protect" workers around the world by demanding "living" wages and "safe" work environments. These people fail to realize that all they are doing is taking away choices. Instead of a 12 year old boy working for Nike at $5 dollars a day he might be left with choices like heavy farm labor for less money or maybe work as a prostitute. These people think they can just legislate an incease in the standard of living without adding any value.
Published: August 12, 2005 9:54 AM
These people think they can just legislate an incease in the standard of living without adding any value.
The makings of a good quote!
Published: August 12, 2005 10:00 AM
It is a common idea in a welfare state that minimum wages help everybody. Sadly it is not true. I know from my experience, a special needs adults' day program operated piecework as part of their effort. They gave people with no skills and limited mental comprehension work to do - boxing puzzles for sale and such. The workers were able to gain a sense of accomplishment and a boost in self-esteem, as well as earn a little money. The program was stopped by the unions because they felt that it was exploitation not paying them minimum wage but paying them minimum wage would have bankrupted the program. So, instead they simply stopped the work aspect of the program and now they are simply babysat, touring malls and going on walks. It has become essentially a storing house for special needs people instead of a program to give them the closest approcimation to contributing to society and improving oneself.
Having said that, I am not sure of the wisdom of doing away with all wage controls. It seems to me that business owners could lowball employees fairly simply, taking advantage of the system to maximize profits. I still see the main problem of freeing a market of government control as requiring a strong moral code in both workers and owners. If there is no moral code holding back exploitation, then the whole thing collapses as one or the other group becomes disadvantaged.
Published: August 12, 2005 10:25 AM
The only "moral" code that holds back exploitation is a free market. Any form of wage control is simply going to destroy wealth and help certain individuals at the expense of others. Business owners are in no position to lowball employees in an open market, if I am not getting what I feel is a fair wage at my current employer, then I will simply go work for someone else. Individuals acting as business owners maximize their investment returns. This is no different from individuals acting as labourers maximizing their returns, which in this case is wages. Any state intervention simply reduces the choices available to individuals and distorts market behavior, a truly immoral act.
Published: August 12, 2005 11:14 AM
I'm at a loss to understand how someone having one more choice can be made worse off. If a homeless person has x choices before this job offer, he has x+1 after it.
Chris
http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/
Published: August 12, 2005 11:24 AM
For the last year or so, I've noticed the same trend in Southeastern Michigan. Every store that has a going-out-of-business sale, or a moving-so-we-must-liquidate-inventory sale has employed this tactic.
Now, I live in an upper-middle-class suburb (leeching off my parents for the time being) so I'm not quite sure where the homeless people come from. But they've certainly agreed to be there, standing on the road, holding up the "everything must go!" signs all day long. It's better than bumming quarters from passers-by, isn't it?
Published: August 12, 2005 11:44 AM
I'm at a loss to understand how someone having one more choice can be made worse off. If a homeless person has x choices before this job offer, he has x+1 after it.
You have *no idea* how many socialists can't understand even this simple principle.
~G
Published: August 12, 2005 1:47 PM
On the news where I live there was an incident where a 'slum landlord' was renting out a garage (and I think divided up the house and rented it out to alot of people), and the neighbors in a self-righteous huff managed to get the whole thing shutdown over 'the appalling living conditions' and all the people evicted.
And of course these people are absolutely convinced that they are 'doing good', even though they just created 10-20 homeless people (the lady in the garage stayed right up until the police came, and then left on foot).
I've see this kind of thing enough to come to the conclusion that these people aren't just misguided (with good intentions), but are actually evil, and only appear 'good' because they have the approval of enough like minded people to convince themselves that they really are 'good' (much like all significant evils perpetuated in the history of the world).
Published: August 12, 2005 2:15 PM
Wage controls are an evil - and they can work both ways like during the Inflation under Nixon or during WW2.
The problem is more when contract or custom is broken during a deflation. Normally an employer will want to keep the same person (there is cost involved in swapping workers, so the difference normally has to be large).
Say there are two plants in a given town, and one is closed down so the unemployment rate goes up and they might be willing to take substantially less money. The remaining plant (now a monopsony) can try to lower the wages of its existing workers or throw them out and hire the most desperate.
The difficulty is that people are not a commodity (though I don't doubt many here might try to treat them as such). The "right" thing to do might not be the most efficient from a market perspective. This is not to say government has any business in trying to force either labor or employers to do things (one outcome might be to order the hours halved and the payroll doubled, so the existing workers are made poor, yet there would be many more jobs - but I don't think anyone would like this so it would probably be the one a government agency would decide on).
Published: August 12, 2005 2:20 PM
The two plant example: I think the market efficient thing, significantly cutting wages while at the same time hiring as much of the 'desperate' for as cheap as possible (to increase productivity), is more 'morally right' than continuing to pay the current employees their old salaries (assuming no contract) while letting the other desperate half starve.
I think much of the arguements like this come from seen evils vs. unseen evils. People aren't commodities, but their labor is, almost a kind of 0th order product (or infinity order, depending on how you look at it, 0th since everything is eventually consumed by peoiple, and infinity since everything at some level is created by people). I think that's a mistake Marxists, etc.. make when they fundamentally seperate workers from employers. Everyone's buying and selling something. Self-employed consultants is where it really breaks down. If workers thought of themselves as consultants (and their employers less paternalistically) then the whole job security/stability thing wouldn't matter so much (because there would be no illusion of security to sacrifice freedom for) and countries like Germany wouldn't sacrifice so much over it.
Published: August 12, 2005 2:51 PM
Nev of Neville's Financial Blog did something like this, but he got the bum to actually do work.
http://www.nevblog.com/2005/04/bottled-water-experiment.html
Published: August 13, 2005 12:43 PM
Would it shut up the naysayers if the "employers" declared the compensation to have a market value of whatever minimum wage would be? This is exactly how the IRS tabulates in-kind transfers.
Published: August 15, 2005 7:50 PM
I am often shocked to find how prevalent within the American public the thought processes of Macri are. So if the homeless are not offerred pay for carrying the signs- then how are their options increased?
Published: August 17, 2005 11:58 AM