You know you are paying people “unconscionably” and yet you do it anyway because otherwise you would “cease being competitive”.

You’re telling us that you are in a business sector that universally exploits its workers and public assistance. But that doesn’t make it right: “everyone else does it” has never had the slightest moral or ethical weight.

And there are always other options.

You can always refuse to participate. Never forget this.

Or you could have figured out how to innovate and streamline so you could employ fewer, more skilled people and you could afford to pay a living wage. Isn’t that what capitalism is supposed to be about, and not grinding your workforce to the limit possible?

Your business plan was so terrible that you could not even manage to pay your workers a living wage! Why should I, the taxpayer, be forced to pony up to prevent your employees from literally starving just because you’re such a wretched businessman that you can’t even pay enough to keep them alive?

And you “could have paid them more”. In other words, you deliberately decided to withhold this money as profit for yourself!

What does “competitive” really mean then? Not what economists or your average guy mean by it! You would be no less “competitive” if you just took a smaller margin so your workers were paid better — indeed, you would likely gain competitiveness if you had a workforce that could focus on the work instead of whether they were going to make the rent this month.

Again — why should your workers and we the taxpayers be subsidizing your economically infeasible and morally indefensible business? (Your “plant” — if your industry’s labor practices were so shoddy, I shudder to think of what its safety and environmental record must have been like.)

And again, you always have the option not to participate. No one’s forcing you to be a sweatshop owner! Go into some other business!

You’re probably richer than 99% of the humans in the world if you own a business in the United States. If you can’t figure out a way to make whatever obscene income you consider your just share of the world’s goods and services without exploiting the people working for you, exactly the people who should be your natural friends and allies, and if you can’t make buck without exploiting the compassion of the rest of us, who have decided that we as a society should pay to keep people alive when their own employers will not — if you can’t be as rich as you want to be without diminishing almost everyone other than yourself, than perhaps you should live modestly for a while, take some time off and think about what brought you to this point.

I’m sure no matter how much you cut back, you’d never be as poor as your employees were.