



Hi friends. I’m going to experiment with taking a more casual attitude towards the Worst-Case Scenario for a while. This means that the blog posts will not be as in-depth or researched as usual, and will mostly contain comments on the world as I think them up. However, the positive side to this is that, hopefully, I’ll be able to post more often, perhaps even as much as once a day. To kick off that theme, I’d like to tell you a story about a very terrifying event I witnessed yesterday. A gang of shameless anarchists disrupted the social order and broke a number of very important and long-established laws, including committing multiple severe felonies, without the slightest regard for the damage they were doing to their community. Here’s how it happened.

I was walking back to my house from Golden Isles Coins and Collectibles after purchasing a Krugerrand when I spotted the first anarchist. He was a small Latino boy of between five and seven years, sitting at the end of his driveway under a sign defiantly declaring, “Lemonade 50C” [sic]. The stand did not display any health and safety rating, so I was forced to conclude the local health inspector was unaware of the foodstuffs being sold. What’s more, the child clearly was not old enough to be working even a part-time job under child labor laws. Now, this is not necessarily damning. After all, he may not have been technically employed, since he was personally running all of the trade. Yet that in itself raises another question – where was this young man’s business license? Clearly, he wasn’t filing any 1099 forms or reporting any of his gross income to the Internal Revenue Service. Finally, he had no understanding of the need to tax prepared foodstuffs at a rate higher than the state-wide sales tax, as is the law in North Carolina. Indeed, and the crime was widespread: A few feet away I saw another person, an older Latina woman who was no doubt complicit in the illicit business being advertised. She was chatting absent-mindedly with a neighbor in Spanish as a deliberate affront to American values.

This experience was disturbing enough, but what I saw about fifteen minutes later was much worse. As I drew near to my house, I spotted a young black man of at least eighteen standing on the sidewalk, with no intention of using it for its appropriate public purpose, and waving a cardboard sign that said, “Car Wash $5.” I couldn’t believe my eyes – two blatantly illegal business operations in one walk from the gold store. I stared across the street to where the man was pointing, and sure enough there was a full gang of laborers washing a car in a parking lot. There was no one present above college age, and they did not appear to be reporting to any manager or supervisor. A single individual among them collected the payment from cars that drove in, but as far as I could tell she was not in a position of authority so much as in a flimsy trusteeship with the rest of the laborers. Essentially, it was mayhem.

As far as what laws these hooligans were breaking, it’s hard to even know where to begin. As I said, they weren’t funneling their money through any particular business head, so there was no accounting and no clear legal personality should their company be sued for poor service. Worse than that, though, was the complete absence of any government guarantee of good service in the first place. They lacked the required North Carolina car wash license which is used to ensure that gullible car owners aren’t victimized by devious car washing services such as this one. I seriously doubt that they even had a North Carolina business license, what with no manager and all. Of course, just like with the lemonade black market, none of this income was being reported, and the sales of the services were not taxed. But that’s not even the worst part. No, I didn’t see the true horror of all this anti-social behavior until I had observed their process for some time.

After much consideration, I found the utterly horrifying bottom line is that, from my best estimates based on the number of participants and the rate of five dollars per car, these laborers were not even making the federal minimum wage. The repercussions of this kind of exploitation are extraordinary. If they had a business owner, he would lose his business license and possibly go to jail for his heartless exploitation of them. Unfortunately the business had no owner since it was just an impromptu anarchist cartel, so I’m not sure whom I ought to excoriate, revile, and despise for the fact that these laborers were being savagely exploited. I think I will try blaming the customers for giving money to the poor slaves without educating them on the damage that is done by sub-minimum wage work. I may even have to send an email to the local car wash workers’ union, who will hopefully be able to help them by requiring them not to sell their services anymore. It takes a lot of activism and effort to effect positive social change, but rest assured, loyal readers, I will do whatever it takes to ensure that these oppressed laborers are empowered and their seditious violation of social order is corrected.

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