“THIS is why laissez-faire, libertarian, free-market capitalism does not and cannot work over the long term. The corporate entity will do anything — anything — to gain an advantage of its competitors. Borders, culture, civilization itself — all are grist for the corporate mill. Unregulated, the capitalist knows no loyalty except to the bottom line.”
I don’t agree. The individuals making these decisions are not doing what is best for their company. They are doing what is best for themselves. Everything in the public sector is about next quarters numbers. These individuals will do anything to improve those numbers which will then improve their bonus. Its greed.
Free-market capitalism does work but what we have is not a free market. The govt of India is subsidizing their companies to come here and take our business and jobs back to India. Those companies would not have had the capital otherwise. Further OSHA, EPA, Unions, oppressive govt regulations make it much more expensive and difficult to do business in the USA.
I agree with what you posted. It’s individual greed definitely.
For instance, if any of you ever worked or knew someone who worked in retail, you know that they’ve all made it the sales clerks job to push store and credit cards on customers or magazines or service plans (Best Buy, etc) and that they are judged VERY harshly on this aspect of their job. They often do not inform people of this beforehand and spring it on them afterwards.
In any case, the ‘rewards’ the associates get are meager. A chance to COMPETE in a raffle for a piddling discount or free item or gift card somewhere. Meanwhile, the managers who do NOT do ANY of the sales work in getting customers to sign up for these credit cards or service plans collect fat bonuses based on how hard they drive the underlings to get results.
One of the things that people think is great about publicly-traded companies is that you or I can own a piece of an institution, an emerging business, whatever. The problem is that publicly-traded companies have far less accountability than a privately-owned company. It’s that example people brought up of Milton Hershey refusing to use too much machinery building a plant during the Depression because he wanted to hire more people. Or that guy who had the factory in New England that burned down and continued to pay people salaries and rebuilt the thing.
An individual can drive a company culture all by himself and be an exemplar of those principles elucidated in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.
With the structure of the corporation, the management set up conflicts of interest among employees (such as I mentioned—why wouldn’t the people actually DOING the great sales jobs get rewarded MORE than the people who act like a-holes and drive others to do it from fear?) and to play shell games and numbers games with stockholders.
It’s all about stock price but half the time the numbers being presented at these meetings are illusory. I see it in my job all the time. Decisions and strategies that are actually DAMAGING (I’m in property management) to the company’s reputation, loses it customers (First rule of business, I thought—keep your customers) and cost it money are done for the sake of throwing some numbers in the faces of the stockholders so they can get that price up, get their own bonuses and set themselves up for their inevitable departure to another corporation to repeat the process.
I’m not saying corporations are evil or to ban them or that there are no disreputable or grasping privately-owned businesses, it’s just that the structure of the corporation and how it defines its successes and failures and how competing agendas within the structure of ‘the team’ will lead to certain results.