We go to a great deal of time and trouble to live together. We sacrifice a lot to the common good. The hope is that we can cooperate to make things safer, to build communities and together to create better lives and greater possibilities for everyone.
To do this, we have to give up some absolute freedoms. You're not free to dump your sewage in the public waterways, store explosives in your apartment, or do any number of other things that might endanger or inconvenience your neighbors. There are rules, that exist so that we can build and maintain a society.
But what if I propose a different idea – that society doesn't exist for the good of everyone? What if it exists only to enrich a few far beyond what they could ever need or reasonably use, at the expense of the vast majority of the citizens who give their time and labor to the society? What if I told you that some people say that the only thing that matters is how much a very few people have, and that everyone else should be willing to suffer, even die so that the already rich could gather personal wealth beyond any horde of any emperor in all of history?
On the face of it, you'd say that the idea that society exists only for the benefit of a few at the expense of almost everyone else is bonkers on the face of it. Why would the majority agree to live that way? Why would those who are already insanely bloated with wealth want more than they could ever possibly spend?
But that's how we live. And most of us think that's just the way it should be.
Somehow, and I'm not entirely clear on how, as a culture we adopted the idea that acts done in pursuit of money are entitled to some sort of moral exception. "It's just business" is an absurd idea on the face of it. If someone decided to ruin the lives of a group of people just out of spite, to get them fired from their jobs, or to steal their businesses, we'd think that person was a sociopath.
But if they do the exact same thing to gain a nickle on their stock price, or to pay the owners a totally unearned bonus, we call that person a financial genius.
If you schemed to cheat someone out of their home out of personal malice we'd think that you were a monster. But if you exploit some loophole in a lease so that you can make money on the deal, well, that's just "good business."
There is an idea that the law is the only limitation on what one can do to others in business, regardless of the imbalance of power between a consumer, or a worker and a billion dollar corporation with a staff of lawyers, a herd of lobbyists to shape the laws to their liking, and a very inconsistent standard of enforcement of the laws we do have.
It's absurd to argue that an act done for financial gain – plundering the public treasury through lobbying for tax advantages, or moving an already profitable company to move it somewhere that workers can be routinely exploited, or buying the company and burdening it with an insupportable amount of debt and selling off the assets for a quick buck is somehow less morally culpable than other sorts of robbery.
Some part of the blame for this can be blamed on the rise of "shareholder capitalism," the idea that a business exists only to pay its stockholders (and executives) as much as possible as quickly as possible. The company's role in the community, and the impact its behavior makes on society is simply not their concern. They publicly state this as a moral maxim – as if the maximization of their profits, regardless of the social cost is a moral duty.
If a company refuses to pay its employees a living wage, and they are forced to collect public assistance, we pay for that. We are forced to subsidize their greed. If they close a factory because they can maximize profit elsewhere, the sudden wave of unemployment, the loss of jobs, not just at the factory, but at the businesses peripheral to that factory, create massive social disruption. And we suffer for it. The loss of tax revenue impacts public services, education, infrastructure and the entire civic life of that community.
The results of this unsupportable model of public behavior are plain to anyone who has visited vast stretches of the American Midwest, impoverished and economically devastated by businesses playing off municipalities, states and even nations against each other for tax breaks, subsidies and decreasing protections for workers and communities.
The rise of automation and globalization has depressed wages, while profits have skyrocketed. And the risks of these innovations, and the entire burden of adapting to them has been placed on the worker. It is you who must retrain, usually at your own expense, beginning at the bottom of the ladder again, and hoping that the job you are retraining for doesn't become obsolete as soon as you've finished retraining for it.
A company that takes the corporate form, which allows the individual owners to avoid liability for their actions, asks for a charter from the government to do so. It is a privilege, and with that privilege should come a degree of social responsibility.
A company that goes public, offering shares on a public market also takes certain privileges for granted – we regulate and support that market, and spend public money to do so.
The infrastructure – the roads, the rails, fire and police protection, even the printing and regulation of the money they so covet is done at public expense. And these concerns constantly agitate for lower and lower taxes, holding communities hostage, threatening the jobs that are the lifeblood of the community if they aren't subsidized with even more public funds.
Of course, most of us remember 2008, where the financial industry's gambling, treating the futures market like a gigantic casino, ruined the financial future of a generation of workers. Then, those same firms were bailed out with hundreds of billions of dollars of public funds, while those who lost their jobs, their homes, and their hopes were assisted not at all.
It has become common practice for corporations to break their pension obligations by simply declaring bankruptcy, and reforming, often with the exact same corporate structure, while leaving the old company drained of all assets, and forced to default. Again, these impoverished retirees, with nothing but empty promises to show for their years of labor, become our problem to support.
I submit that a public corporation is properly held responsible for its actions, and the effect those actions have on the community. But our political and regulatory systems are captive to them, addicted to campaign money.
I want to emphasize that this essay is not an attack on capitalism, per se. It is an indictment of irresponsible, sociopathic capitalism. The cure is not public ownership of the means of production, it is using the public licensing – the corporate form, to hold these multibillion dollar firms responsible for the damage they do, and to restrain them from doing it with such impunity.
Those who profit from this exploitation consistently try to present us with a vicious false dichotomy. The only choices, they'd have us believe, are unrestrained, cutthroat corporate capitalism or communist, authoritarian collectivism. This is, and always was, a false choice. It is perfectly possible to restrain the power of what a great American once called "malefactors of great wealth," without confiscation or economic repression.
The key, I think, lies in giving stakeholders real power within the corporate structure. A public company that distributes stock should be required to give their workers a significant portion of the voting shares. Seats on the corporate board should be allocated to, and elected by the workers. In addition, the communities in which these corporations operate should be able to sue corporations for predatory behavior, such as threatening to relocate or cut jobs if they do not receive subsidies or tax breaks. There is an implied contract, by every standard of equity, between a community that has provided a company with infrastructure, educated its workforce at public expense, and protected its property. If you want to move to what you think are greener pastures, fine. But you should have to pay that community, and those workers for the harm you do in pursuit of ever greater profit.
Likewise, if you lay off workers, it should be your responsibility to relocate or train them for new positions.
But before any significant reform can be done, we will have to break the power of money over our politics. No one should be allowed to contribute to a campaign outside their electoral residence, all contributions must be publicly made by individuals, and strictly limited to curb the power of wealth. Due to the capture of our court system by corporate money, we will have to make fundamental changes to our basic legal structure.
But first, we must change the way that we, as citizens, think about how business is done. We do not exist as a society for the sake of the billionaires. We have to stop thinking of the pursuit of ever greater profits as some sort of moral exception.
Unlimited growth and consumption regardless of the health of the body as a whole is the "morality" of a malignant tumor. It has poisoned our economic lives for a generation. It's time to put a stop to it. Or we will continue to see our economic and social lives relentlessly degraded.
We are on a road to serfdom. Not the one envisioned by Austrian economists, but one in which ever greater greed, power and wealth takes more and more from us until their whole short-sighted, selfish scheme collapses, as it has in the past. And every time, we, the workers, the retirees, and the young trying to find their footing on an ever-steeper slope are left holding the bag.
We must end the idea that if you're not "too big to fail," you're too small to matter.
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