﻿Supplying Arms And a Matter of Business Ethics 
By T-BONE SLIM 

I think I have natural talent for business. Even in early youth I was not much good at fighting but I was real good at carrying sticks and stones and other ammunition for the other boys. Isn’t that just like a business man? 
 Business men never get into the trenches but when it comes to carrying ammunition they can’t be beat. Not satisfied with carrying ammunition to their own soldiers, they help the enemy also. For a price, of course. 
That’s where we differ. When I carried ammunition for the other boys I did it as a work of love, patriotism. Solidarity without price. That’s point No. 1. Now point No. 2: I would not carry ammunition for the other side at all, for love or money.  
Either my business talents were undeveloped or business ethics are degenerated. For, can we concede that business men are internationalists and that they love the whole world so much that they are willing to carry arms to all nations so that they, in turn, can exterminate their neighbors and by them be exterminated? 

Courts have put a new law on the books––”forcible detainer.” A Berks County jury (Pa.) found sitdowners guilty. The presumption there is: courts are guardians of property and the inference is: the capitalist system of free and unlimited exploitation of labor is endorsed by the Constitution of the United States.  
Needless to say no such rights are given but are assumed, and consequently no such property can exist, nor can any such ownership be proved. 
The whole proceding was illegal because no rightful owner was present in court. Courts assuming, exploiters assuming, is a damned flimsy flight of fancy upon which to convict righteous protestors and defendants; so rescognized, but in reality they are complainants––the offended party. 
Our law-enforcement bodies seem to be unfamiliar with their own book of rules and their pay exceeds all reasonable justification for the amount of intelligence they possess. 
Here again the murderer got away but the law captured the corpse. 

An offended man puts more heart into the battle; a chiseler confesses early. The offended man also has better staying powers––”till hell freezes over”; the chiseler is on the spot from word “go.” 
The working class is the offended party; insult added to injury. The other class isn’t worth counting. 
Wise men of the past have held that “abstention from work is the secret of intelligence.” They were not wholly crazy but their wisdom was mediocre and incomplete. When they formed their opinion they were appraising unintelligent work and not the natural, sensible performance. 
A grave error to condemn all work because some work is off-color. I myself, admit highballing is highly destructive of the finer brain fibers or tissues and when the boss hollers “hurry up” he is trying to drive us crazy, arrest the development of our intelligence or kill the rosy thought of the moment. Workmanship is ruined, better way of doing it prevented. How they hate to advance! 
The remedy is not (as the wise men of the past declaimed), “stop working.” 
The remedy is, Stop the boss. 
You can’t have boss and brains at the same time. Get rid of one of them! 
You’re the boss! Or are you! 
How can there be progress, which depends on harassed thought, when the boss is hollering like a lunatic! Progress does break through, however, but it limps, is badly mangled and is a cripple the rest of its life. 
Let us organize so that progress can be born unsick, unscratched, and unadulterated. Let us take the same care over fecond nature that we’d over booded stock––and keep the knaves out of the wardrobe. 
Worker can half-murder himself on the job without any help whatsoever from the boss “hollering in his ear.”