In a recent column for The Wall Street Journal, Cypress Semiconductor President and CEO T.J. Rodgers tried to defend capitalists and in the process, showed that he really doesn't understand how markets work at all.
Rodgers' editorial was pretty much your standard right-wing talking point piece about how important so-called "job-creators" are to the economy. Without rich people like him, he argued, there would be no investors, no businesses, and no jobs. Therefore, he argued, raising taxes on rich people like him is counterproductive because it sucks away capital from the people who can best use it....
As long as our economy is based on some sort of free market system, businesses will succeed or fail based on market demand for their services. That's why T.J. Rodgers' argument that wealthy people are responsible for the jobs their businesses create is so wrong.
Even if the government did tax him so highly that he couldn't use his own money to finance his restaurant, he still could have taken out a line of credit, like I did when I started my travel agency – like most small business do – and his restaurant still would have generated the jobs he brags about in his Wall Street Journal column. And it would have generated those jobs because it met a demand niche in the Oshkosh, Wisconsin marketplace.
The big secret right-wingers like T.J. Rodgers don't want you to know is that you don't even need a wealthy entrepreneur like him to make a business successful. Workers cooperatives work just as well.Truthout
A couple of years ago, I visited the town of Madragon in the Basque Country of Spain, home of the great Mondragon Cooperative. The cooperative employs more than 90,000 people, includes more than 250 companies, and generates a yearly revenue of around $25 billion.
Here's a Capitalist Who Doesn't Understand Capitalism
The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed
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