PT109 · S3 · Q17 In a business whose owners

This is guilty of a Relative vs. Absolute blind spot. It doesn't matter whether businesses that pay their employees high wages are profitable; it only matters if they're more profitable / as profitable / less profitable, compared to family businesses. The advantage we heard was that family businesses, by paying less for labor, would have higher profits. The author was never denying that non-family businesses are also often profitable.

The author hasn't committed herself to such an extreme assumption. She seems to just be pointing out an obvious truism, that if you can pay less for something a similar business would also have to pay for, then your operating expenses will be lower and thus your profits would be higher, all other things being equal. But this answer is saying that the author assumes that the businesses that pay the actual lowest wages have the lowest expenses and the highest profits. That is way too extreme and specific an idea to pin on the author. If the business that paid the lowest wages only had the 2nd lowest general operating expenses, that wouldn't hurt the author's argument, no negating this assumption is not an objection.

The author doesn't need to assume that family members are willing to work for pennies because they believe it will help their family. If we negated this and said, "That's not why they're willing to work for low wages. It's because of reason X." That wouldn't change anything. To the author, however it is they're willing, the fact that they're willing means lower operating expenses, which means "surest road to prosperity".

The author never makes an absolute assumption that "if you don't have low operating expenses, you can never succeed". She makes a relative argument that "if you can have lower operating expenses, you can have higher profits."