If you didn’t know, I have extensive experience with how razor-thin the margins are in the restaurant business. While the closure of this communitarian cafe is unfortunate, it serves as a reminder of the business risks involved in running a café.
If you’re planning to embark on a similar venture in the Empire States, considering an LLC New York structure may provide a layer of protection for your personal assets.
Food, equipment, people – thin lines – and many years making it work and showing a profit. I’ve run a business, a few of them.
I’ve been out of that business for a few decades, but when I hear stories about Marxists thinking they can make another manifestation of the communitarian cafe work, it catches my attention.
We’ve seen a few of them come and go from workplaces that start folks at double the prevailing wage to the show up when you want schedules to this “anti-capitalist, anti-colonial cafe, shop, and radical community space on stolen land.”
The stupid, it burns.
A Toronto cafe for anti-capitalists, “The Anarchist,” is permanently shuttering after just 12 months in business after following a “pay-when-you-can” business model.
Communists and anarchists often fall into the same trap. Their version of a thing that has never worked will overcome human nature. It’ll be fantastic. It never is.
With Marxism, the destruction of everything is a requirement, but in practice, the only things ruined are those that keep the select few from absolute power and anything that attempts to challenge it once they have it. Ruin follows along with misery, and it stays that way except for the Party leaders who hand out favors, but no one is ever safe, and the police state required to sustain that model is unpredictable and ever-present.
With anarchy, destruction happens because there is nothing to prevent it. We become the zombie apocalypse until a select few scrape a bit of order out of the chaos. An order you are not encouraged to challenge, which becomes a police state little different from other Fascist/Marxist forms of rule.
The two are sketched on opposite sides of someone’s political spectrum, but they are fraternal twins without a difference, doomed to similar ends. Despotism.
Gabriel Sims-Fewer, the former owner of the no longer (if it ever were) viable Anarchist cafe, thought he could run an entire business as the have-a-penny-give-a-penny, need-a-penny-take-a-penny dish on the counter at your local gas station or convenience mart.
Mr. “F*ck the rich. F*ck the police. Fuck the state” somehow managed to keep the thing above water for a year, so props for that, but it appears to be the life cycle of these misguided communitarian concerns. They last for about a year, ignoring that if you let people steal from you without consequence, they will.
And I’m not sure why they can’t see what is at the core of their outrage. People are why the rich, the police, or the state sucks – if that’s your schtick. Why, then, would you believe they’d be any different absent the money, the uniform, or the office? We know it’s not true. Especially under the umbrella of the secular humanist pantheon of empty space that dominates cults of personality upon which the proprietors of these establishments are metaphorical card-carrying members.
Without any THING greater than themselves to rein them in (real or imagined), people can be complete and utter bastards, and you can’t expect to keep a business open with them as your customer base. They will take until there is nothing left, and unlike Congress, you can’t pass the cost or consequences down to other people’s grandchildren.
And yes, plenty of people who believe in something greater than themselves will use that to be complete and utter bastards because they are people.
Hate faith or government all you like, but there are things about human nature you can’t deny. First, everyone has a godless vacuum. Filling it with crap doesn’t mean it’s not there. Second, free-market capitalism based on the founding American Experiment isn’t perfect because neither are we, but it is better than all the other economic systems. It offers us – with a few guardrails and a bit of morally managed expectation of human decency – proof that, given the opportunity, people can and will lift themselves out of poverty. They will decide what that means and define their success.
We know it works, but people being people are doing everything they can to ruin it with their own anarchist/communitarian system for inevitable failure. The US Federal Government is operating a pay-when-you-can system on steroids. It is spending trillions on things that won’t be when the people (not yet born) who will have to pay for it and the interest get the bill.
Much like the Anarchist cafe’ it too will go out of business, but not before putting a lot of other people (who tried to do it right) out of business to feed that beast.
HT | NewsWars
