In Defense of Corporations

Belgian schoolteacher gets
30 years for sabotaging
love rival’s parachute.

What is all the fuss and concern about outsourcing jobs overseas? I am not a student of economics, indeed, I believe economics is truly a dismal “science” (probably more akin to witchcraft than anything else), but what corporations are doing by shipping our jobs overseas is precisely what they should be doing. If you wish to live in a capitalistic society with a free-market economy, labor has to be considered a commodity just like everything else. If labor is simply a commodity, and if you have as your sole goal the creation of profit, it follows that you go where labor is the cheapest. To argue that capitalism is the best economic system there is, and at the same time argue that outsourcing is wrong, is hypocritical (or at least stupid) in the extreme. The sad fact is, labor is just another form of human behavior, one that is not easily separated from other forms of human life and behavior. To expect people just to labor for wages, disregarding how that affects the rest of their existence is dehumanizing them, and reducing them to little more than nuts and bolts. It also implies that people are of no importance to society or culture outside of their role as laborers. Thus there is a fundamental conflict between the need for a society to be concerned with the welfare of its citizens (if any given society actually believes in such needs) and the desire of corporations to seek cheap labor and profit. If all people can depend on are low wages, (also preferably with no other benefits such as a limited work week, health care, retirement, vacations, and so on), society is not doing its job of looking out for the well-being of the populace. So grudgingly, over the years, mostly in response to union and basic humanitarian demands, workers won the 40 hour work week, the 8 hour day, holidays and days off, unemployment insurance, retirement benefits, health care, and etc., all those things that business complains about being “socialistic,” “communistic,” or harmful to their business (profits).

Capitalism leads inevitably to the situation we now find ourselves in, most of the wealth concentrated in the hands of very few, huge unemployment rates (there is a surplus of labor), low wages, many without benefits such as health insurance or retirement, and little or no desire to help people who are “non-productive” and do not produce any profit. Basically, the only way profit can be achieved is through the exploitation of labor or the environment, so a for-profit system, from the point of community, is extremely dysfunctional. It seems to me the current Republican Party, not content to merely refuse to help the middle class with unemployment insurance or health care, would like to even take away the hard-earned benefits fought for in the past, like Social Security, Medicare, and even Public Education. This battle between business and labor has raged from long before I was born and now throughout my entire lifetime. From my point of view corporations are greedy, insatiable, evil monsters, preying upon citizens being rendered more and more helpless. If corporations are “persons,” as our unconscionable Supreme Court has ruled, they are those on the very lowest rungs of humanity, sadly lacking in those traits we value as the most desirable human qualities: empathy, compassion, understanding, altruism, fairness, fellowship, kindness, conscience, and the sense of community. The Supreme Court has used the concept of “person” is a purely sociological sense, merely as a unit in a society, and as distinguished from the “individual”, thereby ignoring anything about social relationships or human nature. I think the historian, Edward Hyam said it well: “Capitalism turns men into economic cannibals, and having done so, mistakes economic cannibalism for human nature.”

The current political season is so completely ridiculous it is unworthy of any further attention. Let us hope November 2nd will come soon and help put us out of our misery, or perhaps put us into even more misery. Sigh!

LKBIQ:
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
Laurence J. Peter

TILT:
The European magpie is one of the few species known to be able to recognize itself in a mirror.