Ed Huntress wrote:

That's life. You do the best you can for your workers. But you'll
never be able to compete in a manufacturing field that responds to
technical productivity improvements and still keep them employed,
without a high rate of growth for your business, because it would
require an ever-declining wage rate -- until they couldn't live on
it at all.

This is one of the enigmas of mixing micro- and macroeconomics, Lower wages would
keep more people employed -- for a while. But the consequences of driving
down wages would be a running down of the entire clock mechanism that is our
economy.
You won't solve our problems with competition, or even of a slumping
economy, by starting a race to the bottom.


It would be interesting to study a group as close to communism as one
could get- our girls in the slammer.
Federal Prison Industries pays about fifty cents an hour. The living
expenses of the inmates are paid for from another account, so to speak.
The prices are hard to beat, and the quality is good.
(Metalworking Content)
The fellows at work that deal with FPI tell me that clusters of machine
shops, started and staffed by ex-cons, have sprung up around the
prisons, to supply the manufacturing inside. I have been told that the
redivicisim rate among ex FPI employees is very low.

Kevin Gallimore