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Philosophy and the
Value of Trade Associations
© 2002 Stuart Daw
What is the main value of trade
associations? Is it education in vending technology? Is it the fraternal
pleasure of national convention get-togethers? Is it surveys on industry status?
Is it promotion of vending to a seemingly unappreciative public? Surely it is
all of these things. But is there something more, some core philosophic
principle upon which all other purposes depend?
In regular 7:45 AM meetings of the Toastmasters group to which I belong, at
the end of each meeting I try to give a little Ziploc baggy of gourmet coffee to
the "Philosopher of the Day." This is an extraordinary group of highly
intelligent, mostly young people, an eclectic mix of five lawyers and one or
more of each of the following categories: banker, computer consultant,
architect, teacher, mall operator, land developer, golf driving range owner,
financial advisor, politician, sales manager, professional sales trainer, sales
person, and assorted other entrepreneurial types (including one old coffee man).
They are all there with but one mission: to improve their communicative skills.
As you may know, in each meeting, in addition to the President and the weekly
Toastmaster there are planned speeches, evaluations of those speeches,
extemporaneous speeches given from topics thrown at nervous members by a Table
Topics Master, an Ah Counter, a Joker, a Timer, and an Inspirer. All this gives
many members a chance to say something at each meeting, working toward various
Toastmasters International degrees. Ribbons are handed out in the three main
categories of Speaker, Evaluator, and Table Topics.
But there is a winner of the modest Bag-of-Coffee award in only around half the
meetings. I strain in every such gathering to search for something
philosophical, some guiding principle under which points are made in the various
speeches or presentations. And while being philosophical is not the main purpose
of anyone becoming a member, I sense that there is an effort in some speeches to
win that stuff that fills the room with such a pleasant aroma. And sometimes
winners of the coffee are startled, not realizing they had inadvertently hit
upon a principle.
One of the problems in today’s culture, not just for Toastmasters, but for the
media, politicians, business people, and ordinary citizens alike, is the
inability to think in principles, to recognize that concrete ideas and concepts
must be supported by higher-level abstractions under which those concepts are
subsumed. To grasp something, to hold a true idea in one’s mind is a good
thing, but it helps to know why that idea is true, and to be ready to explain
what general principle it falls under.
What about trade organizations?
What has all this got to do with trade associations? At the 2002 NAMA Spring
Expo in Las Vegas, Dan Matthews, senior vice-president and chief operating
officer, chaired a "fireside chat" format in the opening session, an
inter-active affair involving the audience in which industry problems, plans,
and progress were discussed. Dan and the other panelists, Anthony J. Gagliardi
and Richard Geerdes, deserve more than a baggy of coffee for their presentation,
which ran the gamut of industry problems and opportunities.
Although left to the very end, they did get to the heart of vending’s
problems, the "raison d’être" for NAMA’s and CAMA’s very being,
the one principle that, if not attended to, would render any other purpose an
academic exercise. The ruling principle here is justice, and it involves
protecting the rights of vending operators against the power of the state.
To understand the true mission of a vending association, the cause of its
existence and the value it represents today, one need only look back to its
beginning in the primitive era of vending. In those early days, venders realized
that there were many things such as public health issues that automated food and
drink machines would raise. CAMA took the lead in coordinating government health
and sanitation people with academic and industry experts to develop standards on
which all could agree before too many problems arose. A lot of people have
forgotten just how successful programs like those have been.
At the time, the industry was falling victim to the voracious appetite for tax
revenues at every level of government, from municipal to state to federal. And
the vending industry surely had to be a tax man’s dream; cold, impersonal
machines with humans rarely in sight except for coming once in a while to grab
the money. "Surely there will be no outcry if we raise the tax another
notch, for the public is never aware of a tax on vending anyhow" the
"public servant" would say. True, and if the sales tax on a 50 cent
item was raised by 1%, that usually meant the selling price stayed the same but
the gross profit dropped by half a cent.
The pragmatic business person jumps into the sacrificial furnace
I am reminded of a breakfast meeting at the Tampa Chamber of Commerce a few
years ago when we were in coffee service, vending, and honor snacks. After we
listened to an address from the national Chamber headquarters in Washington, the
chairman brought up the current local question of raising the sales tax from 6%
to 7%. To my astonishment the majority of the members spoke in favor of it. When
I asked what the purpose of the tax might be, almost in unison the answer was
roughly, "well, there’s lots we can do for the community with the money
it will raise, and besides down here the tourists will get nailed for much of it
anyway."
And then there was the weird case of paying sales tax in Maryland on items
categorized as candy but not on food, while across the border in Pennsylvania we
had to pay tax on food but not on candy (a baggy of coffee to the first one who
can guess what state Hershey is in). Yet few voices are raised against this
irrationality.
Thus was revealed the twin problems of government greed and the peoples’
pragmatic acceptance of it as being quite proper and ordinary. For the battle
since time immemorial has been for individual rights against the power of the
state, which is an insatiable beast when it comes to taxes. And the people,
morally disarmed through decades of bombardment in a social system that promotes
sacrifice instead of achievement, seem to have lost sight of the need for a
clearly limited government.
Most business people don’t think of themselves as being sacrificed to the
state, because they know a strong government is important, and that good people
want to support it in as fair a way as possible. But the issue rarely discussed
is: exactly what is the proper role of government in a free society? The
Founders in the US had the right idea, carefully interpreting it as protecting
the rights of the citizens, including protection from violation by their own
government. That meant a police force to protect rights within the country, an
armed force to protect from without, and a judiciary to settle disputes and
enforce contracts. And that was pretty well it! But since then the whole
Judeo/Christian ethic has gradually induced the business person to feel guilty
for being successful, for trying to make money. What you do for yourself is the
bad, what you do for others is the good, became the mantra. This enabled
politicians and bureaucrats, like locusts, to swarm into the field of economics,
where they had no practical or moral right to be (only the "legal"
right they conferred upon themselves).
CAMA to the rescue
As business people, our timidity is understandable. After all, the government
has a legal monopoly on the use of force. If a burglar enters your house
brandishing a gun, as an unarmed occupant you are very careful not to use
offensive language. So it is with the haggard business person who staggers
along, bearing the burdens of licenses, taxes, regulations, and other forms of
harassment, while dealing with faceless bureaucrats demanding more sacrifices.
So we should beware. When some "crisis," real or imagined arises, the
Taxman will cometh. It is important that this industry be ready.
We only have to observe the growth of the bureaucracy and the public reaction to
dishonesty in the Boardroom, the Enron-type scandals. The real winners in all of
this are not the perpetrators who will wind up in the hoosegow for having
"stolen" millions. It’s certainly not the employees and shareholders
who got hosed in the collapse of the businesses. Surely it is the government
which collected millions in income taxes, first from the bogus profits of the
corporations involved, then from the cheaters and their personal incomes. Yet do
we hear anyone calling for the government, which received the "stolen
goods," to return it to the citizens who were defrauded? Hardly. It’s the
big, bad businessman that gets vilified.
Beyond that is the scary aspect
of what one act of terror aimed directly at the US did to a nervous, high-strung
economy such as theirs and ours. One can imagine the result of the next, and the
next such attack (assuming we do not take strong, preemptive action against the
fomenters and end the terror quickly). Governments’ revenue will fall. They
will be starved for tax money, and will land heavily on those industries, like
vending, which are most vulnerable to the other kind of terror — the terror of
the tax man.
It is best to be direct and strong when dealing with such people, especially
while realizing one is arguing from the high moral ground — that a person has
a right to his or her own life, free from the coercive power of anyone,
including the government. One must believe sincerely in the concept that all
commercial transactions should be a case of people dealing with one another
voluntarily and for mutual benefit.
This is why we need trade organizations like CAMA, which begin and live on the
need to protect the rights of its members. OCS escaped much scrutiny in the past
because it was simply too small to be noticed by governments. Now that it is
aligned with vending it may be more exposed, but it also has the protection of
people of integrity as industry leaders. My plea here is that those leaders
recognize the true nature of the enemy, and be steadfast in defending the rights
of the vending/OCS operator.
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