This is the first blog I created but I rarely post here. When I first decided to write a blog all I could think of was sitting out in the middle of the woods on a log and contemplating about what ever flowed into my thoughts. Everything and anything.
Then I started writing about our business and writing about politics and I thought each should be kept separate but they aren't really separate and so they eventually flowed together and merged into one stream on this blog- Sitting On A Log.
But there is also another stream which is more personal. To day as I sit here three weeks since my father died. it is time to post a Sitting On A Log post that its all its own. This seems to be the moment when everyone starts asking what is going on and I feel like saying "Why do you want to know ?" Are you friend or foe?
On the morning of my father's death I was working on casting an order for April delivery of 100 frogs. A extra mold or two was not forth coming so I had to work through 12 hours of the day to produce the quantity needed. That day, after my father died, I told my sisters to their surprise that I had to continue casting the frogs.
A neighbor stopped by the other day and gave us some free advice as people like to do. I said no, we need to develop a network of independent slip casters in Maine to produce our line. Your thinking awfully big, Susan , she said and I said it's a big line.
My goal is the same as it was before - as I have been writing about for years now-
The Great American Ceramic Designer Craftsmen Network. My father was-is- my biggest supporter.
I see the ceramic slip casting network as a potential boost to the economy of Maine's low income high unemployment areas. My vision is of an economy with robust opportunity for growth at all levels. I see the function of government as distinct from the function of a private corporation. The function of government is to serve the
common welfare, which includes protecting opportunities throughout the various sectors of the economy.
My vision conflicts with that of the corporate state which is aiming for population displacement of the inhabitants of low income communities-
as put forth by Steve Woods and potentially achieved through Lepage's plan to eliminate municipal revenue sharing, causing property taxes to soar. The justification for such social engineering by Maine's political class goes like this- there exist poor people in the state and there for the state has to subsidize them, as if the state were not subsidizing jobs it is creating for the upper crust. While the state devises program after program for tax payer subsidized employee training in their own targeted sector, there is another movement to transform the minimum wage into a living wage .
Minimum wage, in its original form as an opportunity wage, makes training affordable to businesses operating outside of Maine' State Inc's grid. Transforming the minimum wage into a living wage, from the perspective of many businesses, is equitable to transforming it into a welfare wage, with the cost of welfare shifted from the state to the private sector The reasoning goes like this as found in an online comment :
stealmymoney Mackenziella • 5 days ago
I agree that the minimum wage should not be the living wage. However, the minimum wage needs to increase. Every non-seasonal job created by a small business that pays minimum wage is creating a job that requires state assistance for basic needs. The state cannot create jobs that do not add to the economy. Minimum wage jobs do not add to the economy. They allow employers, large and small, to have the tax payer subsidize their help. Minimum wage needs to be $12/hr and indexed to inflation.
Bangor Daily News
Following through on this logic, the way for the business person to fix his dependency of taxpayer subsidization of his help is to hire only employees who are already trained in the skills he needs. If minimum wage is to be fundamentally transformed
from an opportunity wage to a living wage, it makes little sense for employees to do anything else unless the skilled employees are impossible to find.
The logic employed by stealmymoney occludes productivity as the true source of wealth. A ceramic slip cast production business underscores the foundational importance of productivity to wealth creation. The logic is that employees need to have their living needs met- it occludes that employers need to satisfy certain levels of productivity to justify an investment in an employee.
The minimum wage by previous definitions is an
opportunity wage- allowing for those businesses whose employee training is
not being subsidized by the states many training programs designed for the state's agenda, to afford to train an employee on the job. While state created jobs have up to 80% of their corporate payroll taxes subsidized by the general tax payer via Pine Tree Zone tax incentives, the businesses existing outside the state's corporate grid have to pay their own payroll taxes and also their "fair share" of the subsidizing states targeted sector payroll taxes and assorted gifts.
And yet there is a growing movement to transform Maine's minimum wage into a "living wage"- which by the logic found in the above reasoning transfers the burden of general welfare onto the private sector employer. In a free enterprise system a wage is an exchange of value between the employer and the employee. An unskilled employee has limited value to an employer but if the employer can hire an employee at the rate of his skill value to the employer and train that employee to become a more highly skilled employee, that is a win-win deal for both sides of the equation. The employee and employer can then negotiate based on the change of status of the employee. That is what a
opportunity wage offers to the economy.
Stealmymoney sees the employment of a worker at minimum wage - but fails to see that it includes benefits- with the benefits being the opportunity for the employee to increase his skill level. While the corporate state mandates benefits in its negotiations with capital for its targeted sector worker in the form of unemployment compensation, health care and pensions, the corporate state does not recognize that an employer who trains a worker on the job in skills that he will have for the rest of his life is also providing a benefit. How does the saying go- give a man a fish and he has food in his stomach but teach a man to fish and he will be fed for a lifetime. All stealmymoney sees is that in his own assumptions the minimum wage worker will need public assistance. The assumption at work is that if the state does not provide, there will be no provision. Long before the state became the primary provider for all, society found ways to provide through family, churches and community. Those on the upper crust feel entitled to make self serving assumptions about people living on the edge but they are not based in knowledge of how the rest of society lives. People of lesser means are creative in ways they find to make ends meet. They are not dependent on the singular option that stealmymoney asserts to be the only one.
As found in stealmymoney's rational. the inhabitants of the state must serve the state's profit making interests and not the other way around. The state' in its new found identity of a government economic development corporation, cannot afford to develop jobs for the middle and bottom of the economy for the simple reason that the payoff to the corporations revenue stream of developing the bottom half of the economy cannot compete with the payoff produced by income tax on high end jobs with benefits. That is why the numbers of people on general assistance keeps on multiplying. Opportunities are only for the upper crust- rations for the rest. And now the responsibility for funding the rations for the bottom of the economy is being rhetorically shifted to the private employees operating within that sector- and ironically the argument is designed to eliminate one of the few avenues of opportunity still open in the underserved parts of the economy.
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back to the story line !
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At the small first reception we had for my father's remembrance, all of our extended family showed up except for Dad's grand daughter who never visited him- or us, during Dad's life time. Elizabeth is the one who suffers the greatest loss, not having known the great person who her grandfather was.
Once I friended my niece on FaceBook but shortly there after I found her engaged in a conversation with her friends who were mocking other young people who are Christians. This bothered me and I entered the conversation. I can't really remember how the conversation went except that her friends seemed to consider me very strange because I challenged their thinking. It appeared they had never encountered such a phenomena before and they soon became quite hostile. My niece fell silent. Soon her father joined to become the ring leader of the hostilities.
Elizabeth's boy friend challenged me as if to imply that I was not actually who I said I was since he had never heard of me before. He told me that Elizabeth's father had told him that our family is evil, that my parents had done really bad things to Elizabeth's father and that he believed that I was evil as well. Barack Obama entered the conversation and my niece's boyfriend said that some people say Obama is evil and was trying to get me to weigh in on that opinion. I didn't say. The atmosphere had rapidly become quite hostile and so I told my niece I was going to unfriend her. I did so but I could still see the conversation when Elizabeth's father told Elizabeth's friends how proud he was of how they had behaved.
When my parents grew tired of traveling back and forth from Boothbay to Portland and decided to close that facility down, my sister and her husband entered into an agreement with my parents in which they would build a barn on their property for the production and my parents would provide the equipment. My sister's husband built the barn but not the floor and so the production had a dirt floor but the upstairs office had a beautiful wooden floor. The building which lacked a proper foundation and thus a floor for the production facility was symbolic of the level of commitment that the builder was willing to give to his wife's family business.
I had been living in New York during the days when the production facility was in Portland. When I returned to Maine and became involved in the business there was a back and forth in which my sister and her husband were always saying they could not make enough money and my father would ask to see the books but the books were never forth coming. So one day just at the start of the Christmas season my sister and her husband announced that they were quitting . There had been no terms of agreement created between our two businesses providing for accommodating both parties if one should decide to quit and so we were left high and dry with no where to move the equipment and the entire operation fell on what was intended to be our studio design space. Eventually my sister divorced her husband and started working with the family business again.
At the reception, I was surprised to see an artist who had once worked for us. He started telling me stories of how he was a very large young man and my mother was very flirtatious. I do not doubt it but found it quite an odd but open line of conversation. Then the time when my parents wanted to build across the street on the property they owned came up. It was a big local controversy with some being for us and some against."You know what was going on there!?! " he said." All of the husbands whose wives worked for your father were opposing it !". I think he was trying to say that the work environment was sexually charged, a completely new angle for me. I accept that my mother was a flirt but not my father but Dad inspired a lot of people and that is sexually attractive to women. I doubt he knew that though. he was just very deeply into the process and communicated the meaningfulness of it without artifice.
The people who were against our building won and so my parents located the production facility in Portland. I think it was an emotional reaction, which I can fully understand but I consider that moving the production facility to such a great distance away was the first big mistake my family made. If it had been located locally we would probably still have it.
Another sister. Gerda, who is still married to her husband was also there. Here is Gerda's husband with my father in this picture.
He is the artist David Dupree. He a very supportive brother in law- a great guy and also a great painter. Buy his work ! In my vision of the Great American Ceramic Artists Designer Craftsmen Network , there is a string of various sized production studios running across rural maine. The production studios have a retail gallery attached which can also accommodate paintings by artists such as David Dupree hanging on the walls. The retail spaces being an unusual activity are destination shopping- which is what our own retail studio has always been. Many have come through the door over the years to say that our studio is the first place they have to go when they come to Maine.
If the production facilities are located in low income areas, it is possible to have a large space to accommodate a retail gallery with the production facility initially being the money making operation. That means a retail focus can be established in an area in which it might not other wise occur. If the retail destination succeeds, other retail businesses will cluster around it.
My vision is a contrasting paradigm to that of Maine State inc in which taxpayer money is used to refund up to 60% of the owner of the mean's of production's capital investment- this is part of the trade made by the Maine state legislature for "job creation". In that paradigm labor refund's the owners investment while the owner or capitalist keeps the profits.
In the Expanded and Improved Seed Capital Tax Credit passed unanimously by the Maine Legislature in 2013, changes were made in ownership qualifications which once required a hands on involvement of ownership and now allows ownership to have a remote relationship to operations- note that the interpretation of "substantial" is undefined in the act of legislation.
4. The requirement that the operation of the business must be the full-time activity of the owner has been changed to a substantial professional activity of at least one of the principal owners, as determined by the authority
9.Changes the requirement that the operation of the business must be the full-time activity of the principal owner to substantial professional activity of one or more individuals who are not managers of the private venture capital fund, as determined by the authority.
The China Connection
My vision needs an organization that will help to make financing possible for the production studios which will be owned independently most likely by the people who are working production. If we were a thriving "conscious capitalism" business owner such as John Mackey pf Whole Foods, who has loan programs for small farmers, then we would help to finance the production studios but we are not in that situation today- so we need to partner with another organization who can help us to bring this about. Our line of classic and marketable designs can provide a basis for business operations of ceramic slip casting productions. The tradition that we have started of designing functional forms and wild life sculpture has an a age old and eternal attraction for ever renewing creativity.
