Oh, so it’s not government that’s the problem, it’s Democrats. They killed Detroit, and if you don’t look out they’ll kill your town too! Got it.
And, until Republicans start running on a platform of shrinking military spending, it’s clear that the mantra “governments run things worse than corporations” is at best a qualified belief, and at worst an excuse to not engage with moral and social questions of governance.
Think about this post for a minute and it actually shows why in most areas, though not all, competing businesses serve much better than the government.
Corporations control my food? Far from it. I can go to the farmers market and buy food from dozens of local farmers. I can buy from local producers who produce their own specialties. I can buy from roadside stands. I can order from literally thousands of non-corporate producers online. I can eat only organic, GMO-free food if that’s what I choose to do. I can even plant crops in my own garden, and raise my own chickens if I want to. It is absolutely not the case that corporations control my food.
What corporations do is offer me choices. Because the supermarket and restaurant sectors are in corporate hands, there’s lots of competition and thus lots of choices. Within a few miles of my home, I can eat from McDonalds or Burger King or Taco Bell or Taco John’s or Subway. Or I can eat from small Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Lebanese, Italian, or Greek restaurants. Or I can eat from none of those, if I choose to. I have similar choice in food stores. And so does everyone else.
Would this multiplicity of choice be there if the government ran the food distribution system? Certainly not. I visited East Germany back when it existed, and though I was a child at the time, I still remember the bare shelves and small amounts of tasteless, often moldy food.
Information? Well look you can complain about the recording industry giving us Justin Bieber and Beyoncé and crap like that. But the good news is that if you don’t like Justin Bieber and Beyoncé, then you can go to Amazon or YouTube or Spotify and you have literally millions of choices at your fingertips. That’s what I do, and I’ve discovered all kinds of great music that I would never have heard elsewhere.
Yeah! Let’s let the companies run the towns!
As a Liberal, I’m sympathetic to your post. But instead of being systematic exploitation and abuse, I think modern American Conservatism is a muddle of nostalgia and bad policy prescriptions… which lead for the most part to exploitation and abuse. I think that few who believe in it actually want that kind of result, but that’s what ends up happening.
A lot of the posts haven’t really addressed the issue but have veered into a reciting of the Libertarian catechism. I certainly don’t agree with Libertarianism, and there isn’t even a country that has implemented it to serve as proof of concept. But okay…
The government is supposed to rein in corporations, but voters are supposed to rein in the government (in a country such as America). In what way are corporations a counterweight to government? If anything, corporate donors and influencers compromise government.
How does one avoid the credit rating agencies in the US? How does one avoid the near monopolies like the cable companies? I don’t universally hate corporations. Modern life would be impossible without them. But the notion that they are “avoidable” sounds like something out of Libertarian Sunday school.
Why is that? Guess what, unless you’re living off the grid at a cabin in the woods and doing everything for yourself, you’re not self-sustaining. And if you think corporations are a good thing at all, then you’re contradicting yourself: corporations are all about people cooperating.
Minimizing what?
Meaning?
It sounds like survivalist Libertarianism and not Conservatism per se.
I respect the Libertarian philosophy more than Conservative philosophy inasmuch as it is at least a philosophy. But it is also supremely impractical and, in fact, not practiced anywhere. But I do respect its consistency.
But it’s been failing at least since the early 1990s.
You won’t get an argument from me that governments by their nature are competent and laudable. But the reason the school system is part of the government and not a corporation is because the profit motive has nothing to do with educating people. You can’t subject a school system to market forces even if you want to, as it is a cost center and not a profit center. It seems to profit society over the long term to offer universal education, but it doesn’t profit the entity that runs the schools. Thus, the comparison is specious.
That isn’t to say that the incentive systems pertinent to government aren’t highly problematic; they are.
Personally, I think eliminating the federal Department of Education is a good idea. I am all for eliminating government idiocy, and there’s a lot to eliminate.
Similarly, if had permission to peer into even an excellent company like Google or Apple, you’d find similar boondoggles in abundance, guaranteed. In any large organization, it’s inevitable.
This seems to be a poor example to justify your politics. How, exactly, did Detroit fail? It seems to me that Capitalism was not exactly worried about its capital–as is often the case.
This. If I own shares in a corporation and the directors screw up, I can vote them out, and change will occur (for the most part).
If I vote out a congresscritter and vote in a new one, no changes occur. It’s still corruption as usual.
hilarious
Three words: United Fruit Company.
Huh, what? You’ve heard of proxy statements, right? You can’t vote execs out. They control the vote and think of their own interests first. Only a proxy war with a lot of money behind it can clear them out. (Now, sometimes internal forces can get rid of somebody, but it’s not the average shareholder who has this power.)
OK, so do you actually support our system of government, then?
Proxy fights are more of a big, publicly traded C corporation phenomenon IME. Recall that most corporations are S corporations and must have fewer than 100 shareholders. And in either case, even if I’m the lone disgruntled shareholder, I can cash out and buy in elsewhere.
Even if education can not be a profit center, it could still be competitive. If a private monopoly ran the school system it would probably still be just as bad. The point is not that one type of organization is inherently better but that corporations compete in a way that governments don’t. For the most part inherently governmental functions are difficult to make a competition. So in one type of organization is the possibility of competition and bad companies failing, and in the other type of organization there is no competition and no failing. Over time this will inevitably mean one type of organization achieves better results than the other.
I think the Department of Education should be eliminated as well, there is no evidence that it has improved education at all. However, I fully expect the Department of Education to exist as in a hundred years. There is not one corporation I would make that same prediction for.
Detroit has bad public safety, bad schools, and bad roads. The Detroit government has failed.
Let’s say we had a fully competitive set of school systems. Which of these would teach the expensive kids - ones with physical or mental or behavioral problems? They all would rush to teach the cream of the crop - kids with rich parents who pass the exams.
Who will pay for this? Would you support government paying the low performing schools (thanks to their student base) far more than the high performing ones? How do you think that would go down with the politicians getting most of their money from the elite?
Some kids don’t have parents who read to them, who buy them books, who enrich them with lots of experiences? Do you want to throw away these kids? It’s bad now, but with your ideal super competitive system it would be ten time worse.
BTW, the failure of Detroit which suffered a massive change to its environment, no more says government fails than AOL declining, say, says anything about capitalism failing.
How many shares are owned by who is what’s important. If the founders and the management team own over 50% (which is likely) angry shareholders can whistle.
Yeah, you can sell your shares. But if the company is in bad enough shape that you might want to kick out management, you’d probably take a bath.
Double hilarious. You’re saying big corporations are democracies? Why don’t you go on down to Cuba or over to China to extol their super democracies.
Ever look at a slate of directors up for election? Assuming there is no buy out, how many candidates for each post?
It’s still easy enough to vote with my feet. Except in rare circumstances I can do business with someone else or own shares in a different company.
Corporations do not produce what people want. They produce what they can persuade people to buy, which is childishly easy to do.
Corporations haven’t proven anything about their methods. That is the only method that has ever been tried, except for a brief period in a small corner of the world, where an alternative was cowed and crushed at gunpoint by a cartel of corporate-controlled armies. The so-called success of the corporate system is far from proven, especially in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, and the other 80% of the barefoot world. Whose labor and resources are systematically stolen by the corporations.
First of all, the issue is not which is “better”, government or corporations. These are two separate types of entities that serve two distinct purposes in society.
Government exists to establish and enforce laws, oversee the building and maintaining of national, state and local infrastructure and provide for the common defense.
Corporations (really “businesses”…“corporation” is a specific type of business) exist as private entities that provide goods and services for the purpose of generating a profit for their owners.
So we aren’t arguing over which is “better” or whether one could even exist without the other.
Secondly, yes, you have the ability to not do business with the corporations I mentioned (or any other). However you (presumably) do not live by yourself on an island and many of those corporations have had a negative impact on a significant number of people who do not do business with them.
Millions of people who never did business with BP were impacted by the Deepwater Horizon spill.
People who did not work with AIG, Bear Stearns, or Lehman Brothers were affected by the near collapse of the economy in 2008.
I’m pretty sure Monsanto has some influence on your food whether you realize it or not.
No reasonable person is saying we should eliminate corporations or big business. However, corporations by their nature are amoral and without legislative oversight and regulation, the will due whatever is in their best interest to make money, regardless of the ethical or moral implications.
The reason why “conservatives think government is worse than corporations” is because wealthy corporate leaders like getting wealthier and regulation often causes companies to internalize costs they previously externalized to society. For example, costs associated with the safe disposal of industrial waste instead of just tossing it in the nearest river for free. They pay millions into propaganda machines like FoxNews to convince regular people that progressive policies and regulation are “socialism” designed to take money they earned through their hard work and give it to undeserving minorities and immigrants.
Also, a lot of conservatives are just jerks. I work with a lot of Wall Street firms. They have plenty of entitled dumbasses whose attitude is “fuck poor people” and only care about trading and doing coke.
Google “rest and vest”.
Throughout history, at times when there was not govt protections, private companies did have their own private security forces, and did have their own monopoly on violence.
The govt put a stop to that.
There are some corporations that that is not necessarily true. Try not liking Windows sometime, or don’t be a big fan of your one or two choices of broadband providers. See how much choice you have.
Sure, for luxuries, like what kind of icecream you are going to have after dinner, you have lots of choice. But for many of the necessities, like healthcare, you have fewer.
And, in the end, you have the govt to thank for not allowing companies to become monopolies.
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And why is that possible? Do you think that those farmers markets would be wolvent without agricultural subsidies? If it were not for the govt propping up all these small farms on your behalf, you’d have the choice between monsanto and agricorp.
The small things in life, you get to choose which ethnicity of food you want to eat. And that is the only concern you have. You don’t have to worry about whether or not it is safe to eat there. Why is that? Because the govt monitors and protects our food supply, from ground to table.
Do you think that corporations would be as diligent about protecting the food supply as the govt is? Especially since it requires the resources of the govt to track down sources of contamination, so many corporations could easily lower their standards and allow contamination in the food supply, and without the govt to track it down, nothing would be done.
There is no move to make the govt in charge of disturbing food. (Well, except the trump administration’s desire to replace SNAP with distributed food.)
But, the govt does both subsidize and oversee the food distribution system, and that, IMHO is a good thing.
Thank the govt for inventing the internet, and providing it as a public service, then, or you would be stuck listening to what clearchannel pipes into your radio.
So, as an owner, you have control over a corporation (a tiny, tiny amount), but as a customer or an employee, you don’t.
One nice thing about govt is that everyone gets the same voice at the ballot box, compared to corporations, where the more money you have, the more voice you have.
The local school system is the closest form of democracy there is. You get to vote directly for the board of education, and it is one of the votes where your vote has the most power. If you aren’t happy with your local schools, vote, you will get a better result than if you bought shares in Schools, Inc., and tried to vote on a board of directors.