Cypress Semiconductor President and CEO T.J. Rodgers. (Photo: PRxDigital / Flickr)
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.
To prove his point, Rodgers brought up an example from his own life. He wrote:
"A couple of years ago, I decided to invest in my hometown of Oshkosh, Wis., by building a $1.2 million lakefront restaurant. That restaurant now permanently employs 65 people at an investment of $18,000 per job, a figure consistent with U.S. small businesses. If progressive taxation in the name of 'fairness' had taken my "extra" $1.2 million and spent it on a government stimulus program, would 65 jobs have been created?"
What Rodgers is saying is that he is responsible for the jobs created by his restaurant and that any attempt to raise taxes on wealthy individuals like him would take away the resources necessary to create more jobs.
This sort of argument has become so common, so ingrained in the right-wing meme machine in the 32 years since Reagan took office that it's easy to forget how flawed it is.
Contrary to what Rodgers claims in his Wall Street Journal piece, business-owners don't create successful businesses or the jobs they generate: consumers do.
Contrary to what Rodgers claims in his Wall Street Journal piece, business-owners don't create successful businesses or the jobs they generate: consumers do.
Despite what you may hear from the talking heads on "Fox So-Called News" and CNBC, economies are driven from the ground up. They're run on demand, by how much consumers actually want to buy goods or services. If a business doesn't meet an existing demand in the marketplace, or create demand through innovation, it won't succeed. It's as simple as that.
I know this from firsthand experience. Back in the 1980s, my wife and I started a travel small agency down in Atlanta. I had very little money at the time and I used my $15,000 line of credit from American Express as our start-up capital. Like every entrepreneur, I took a risk. But what made that risk turn into a $6 million dollar a year business within a matter of years and gave our travel agency an edge over its competitors is the same thing that gave T.J. Rodgers' business an edge over its competitors: we met a demand in the marketplace. ...
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