Dan Price, Gravity Payment Founder
There are times when Dan Price feels as if he stumbled into the middle of the street with a flag and found himself at the head of a parade.
Three months ago, Mr. Price, 31, announced he was setting a new minimum salary of $70,000 at his Seattle credit card processing firm, Gravity Payments, and slashing his own million-dollar pay package to do it. He wasn’t thinking about the current political clamor over low wages or the growing gap between rich and poor, he said. He was just thinking of the 120 people who worked for him and, let’s be honest, a bit of free publicity. The idea struck him when a friend shared her worries about paying both her rent and student loans on a $40,000 salary. He realized a lot of his own employees earned that or less.
Yet almost overnight, a decision by one small-business man in the northwestern corner of the country […]
Many people misinterpret the definition of socialism. In my dictionary the first definition is: 1.a. Asocial system in which the means of producing and distributing goods are owned collectively and POLITICAL POWER IS EXERCIZED BY THE WHOLE COMMUNITY; this sounds like equality to me. Why is it that the definition most people refer to is the second definition which states: 2. socialism is the building of the material base communism under the dictatorship of the proletariat in Marxist-Leninist theory? The first definition is usually the best definition of a word and I would say in this case it fits a real democracy much better than the second. Why can’t Americans read and understand their dictionary better? Oh, yeah, the school system, which almost never seems to defend equality.