The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania owns a number of clothing plants. Prisoners are used in the sweatshops as slave labor. The garments which are produced are shoddy and ugly. Even with the slave labor, because of the extremely poor management and antique machinery, the clothes are expensive. Nobody will buy the junk.
To solve the problem, the State forces prisoners to buy the clothes. If a Pennsylvania prisoner wants sweat clothes, or shorts or a bathrobe, for example, he is forbidden to buy it except from the prison sweatshop.
Name brand sweat shorts would cost the prisoner less than $5. He is required to buy them from the state monopoly for $12.09! He earns 18 cents an hour. All other prices are similarly exorbitant. In order to keep the prisoners ignorant of competitive prices of brand name goods in the private sector, the prisoners are forbidden to receive store catalogs. Catalogs and all advertising are seized from the incoming mail.
Legitimate stores and manufacturers are deprived of sales and profits. Private labor is deprived of jobs. Federal, state and local governments are deprived of taxes. The system perpetuates the bumbling mismanagement of the State's Communist system.
The State owns a number of other kinds of plants. They too are operated by prisoner slave labor. They too deprive private industry of income and governments of taxes.
Even the Communists of Russia knew better than the Republican Socialists of Pennsylvania. But, then, the Communists weren't doddering, money grubbing fanatics. The Russians closed their state monopolies. The Ridge Reich is expanding Pennsylvania's. Our advice is to take your business someplace else. West Virginia is a nice state. Don't do business in Pennsylvania.
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