You, Bill Bartlett, wrote:

>Provided we are speaking the same language. That is not the case here,
>according to my dictionary "shill" is not a word.

Really? That's interesting. Here's the definition from the American Heritage dictionary:

shill

shill (shîl) Slang. noun
One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.

verb
shilled, shilling, shills verb, intransitive
To act as a shill.

verb, transitive
1.      To act as a shill for (a deceitful enterprise).
2.      To lure (a person) into a swindle.

 [Perhaps short for shillaber.]

I like Galbraith becuase, like his spiritual ancestor Thorstein Veblen, he so trenchantly skewers the pieties of the free market panjandrums, focussing on what really goes on in industrial society, rather than on what's supposed to.

>>Paying lower wages and overworking your employees may be the only
>>feasible short-term strategy for competing with larger businesses, but
>>it's hardly efficient, any more than is redlining your 4-cylinder car to
>>outrace a V-8.
>
>Denends who's paying for the motors? You are right in the wider sense, but
>the capitalist is not, cannot be concerned with the wider social costs,
>only the bottom line.

Maybe we're talking two different things here. "Efficiency" has a pretty widely understood, objective meaning, which I would characterize as the most output for the least input. Labor being the most burdensome input from a business point of view (because it has to constantly be replenished, cannot work 24 hours a day, goes on strike, etc.) it is the biggest drag on efficiency. (That it might also be, per Marx, the source of a product's value is a different question.) That's why all businesses automate if they can, to reduce the unit cost of labor. Big businesses can cost justify the kinds of up-front, one-time investments in machinery that smaller businesses can't, which means that small business has to find other ways to compete. That doesn't change the basic problem for them, which is that the larger businesses are generally more efficient.



________________
Tresy Kilbourne
Seattle WA
"The most stupid boast in the history of present-day journalism is that of the writer who says, `I have never been given orders; I am free to do as I like.'"  --George Seldes