1892 Homestead Strike

While watching the History Channel’s Men Who Built America, I became intrigued with the Homestead strike of 1892, where 10 men were killed, three of which were Pinkerton agents. History sometimes portrays this as some kind of atrocity. In a sense it was, but who was really at fault? We could blame Carnegie Steel’s, Frick, but that is too easy.

Working conditions were hard, but that was life in America in those days. Those people worked twelve hours a day in torturous heat. Those men were steel workers who were known for their toughness.

Enter the union, who told the men they needed more money, which was fair. The unions took things too far. They convinced those workers that the steel mill belonged to them. They were the ones who built it. Unions and the left are telling people the same things today. They tell people that those who built the industry couldn’t have done it without the worker, which is true, in some sense. It’s this kind of thinking that leads many of us to say that unions and the Democratic Party are communistic. They overlook the fact they were given much needed jobs in which to feed their families.

Corporate taxes at the Debate

In the debate Obama said that the USA was paying corporations to move out of the country. Romney responded correctly that he had never heard of such a thing. The truth is Obama and the Democratic tax policies are in part running corporations out of the country.

We all know this is a global market. Any successful major corporation is doing business out of the country. In all except the USA a corporation pays corporate taxes only on the money earned in that country. If a Japanese corporation operating in the USA moves those earnings after US taxes into a Japanese bank, there are no additional taxes.