rather rambling thoughts on conservatism
Apr. 27th, 2007 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cb_backupAs far as I can determine, conservatism has two main supporters - religious conservatives and those that are against so-called big government (I say so-called because government spending has grown considerably during the Bush administration, and yet as far as I can tell these conservatives still support the administration and the party). What’s not readily apparent at first glance, however, is that the trade-off being supported is of the private versus the public sector, of corporations making their own rules and the governments accomodating them.
Conservatives say that governments are too inefficient and wasteful, and point to corporations as models of efficiency. I agree with them on the problem - our government, today, is inefficient and wasteful - but disagree with how to fix it. Governments are only as good as the people they govern, and together we can fire corrupt and morally bankrupt politicians simply by refusing to re-elect them. I think that the citizens of this country should be made more aware so that they can elect good representatives. Conservatives, on the other hand, seem to prefer getting rid of the government altogether, or squeezing it into as small a shape as possible. But, as I said before, I don’t think the trade-off here is of government control versus freedom, but rather of the rule of the majority, which is what governments are supposed to represent (I say supposed to because the recent administration so obviously doesn’t, always putting corporate interests above those of the public) versus the rule of the rich, which is the class that rules corporations.
When the Bush administration cuts taxes that corporations have to pay and supports those tax cuts with cuts in public sector programs such as those that support health care and education, it promotes the growth of corporations at the expense of the public sector, a move that bears all the hallmarks of Reaganomics. And it’s surprising to me that people still think of Reagonomics as a viable economic theory, when any rational look at the data, and just plain common sense, would indicate that wealth does not trickle down but tends to accumulate at the top. Money is spent by the poor; by the rich it is horded.
There’s the sense - mainly among conservatives but also, I think, among some ordinary Americans - that corporations are what’s responsible for the progress that our country has made. But this ignores the fact that corporations are a relatively new phenomenon (they arose after the Civil War, and they made up a relatively small part of the economy until after WWII) and also that today, what corporations are about isn’t making things as much as branding things. This is why labels are so ubiquitous, why advertising contracts run to millions of dollars. The major retail corporations don’t even make their own clothes, outsourcing that to contractors who hire the poorest in third-world countries to work in often-abominable conditions. Increasingly, what corporations are about is selling an image, an idea, that often runs contrary to reality. For the most part, they are becoming nothing more than glorified PR machines. Also, at times it would seem that they would do everything they can to halt progress. Witness the lobbying that automobile companies do, as just one example. Almost everyone agrees that in the future we will need to drive more fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly cars. Yet the automotive industry of this country has done very little to make these cars, despite the demand for them as witnessed by the popularity of Japanese hybrids (and once when they did make an electric car they wasted no time pulling the plug, and oil companies bought the patents for electric batteries so they could never be used again), and has instead done all it could to make sure that it will never have to change its practices to be more environmentally friendly. Corporations do not seem to stand for progress but against it, to stand instead for maintaining the status quo.
I can’t count the number of plugs I’ve heard for corporations by the news anchors on channels such as CNBC and CNN (for obvious reasons, I tend to avoid Fox). They claim that pro-corporation policies are essential because they promote economic growth. (It used to be promote employment growth, but they obviously can’t use that slogan anymore after all the layoffs.) And I don’t see the evidence for this. The stock market is rising, but so is the cost of living, so is the price of gas and food, rent, college educations, all the while our currency is falling against that of every other country’s. There is such a huge disconnect between what I hear and what I see, and increasingly I’ve come to think that what’s good for corporations is terrible for the country, for the poor and middle class that live here, that the rising profits are coming at their expense - they are the ones that were laid off, that are being made to work longer hours for less pay. There are now 37 million people living below the poverty line, 5 million more than when Bush came into power, and they have fewer chances of getting themselves out of poverty than in years before, with declining standards of health care and education. And there are also the increasingly lax environmental regulations - properly regulating our food and air and water so that public health is not harmed might hurt a corporation’s profits, and so the Bush administration doesn’t.
As to corporations being models of efficiency, I think a better characterization for them would be that of externalizing machines. Externalities are whenever two parties carry out a transaction and a third uninvolved party has to bear some of its cost. The taxpayers are this third uninvolved party - we’re the ones that pay for the troops to secure Iraq’s oil fields, we’re the ones that bear the costs of pollution. And we have so little say in a corporation’s practices. We can’t fire the retail company CEOs that use sweatshop labor, or the oil company CEOs that are responsible for environmentally destructive practices, or that prop up repressive governments, as in the case of the Shell company (eight environmentalists that protested the activities of the Shell Company in Nigeria were hanged).
Instead of being held accountable and punished for these actions, CEOs that do these things are instead rewarded, with increasingly ludicruous pay packages granted by the boards of directors. It is not the ordinary shareholder that is benefitting from increased corporate profits as much as it is the people already in power - they would prefer to keep the money to themselves, thank you very much. Also, there was an article I read recently that said that CEO pay can be correlated to the number of layoffs performed - the more layoffs the higher the pay. So how is it, exactly, that what’s good for corporations is good for this country as a whole?
Corporations aren’t moral and cannot be held easily accountable for the public good, and it’s surprising to me how much people don’t get this. They exist for one reason, to maximize profits, and they will do this at the expense of anything. In the corporate mindset everything comes down to a cost/benefit analysis in which even things like a person’s health and life have a price, and that is the main reason why I find using corporations as the ideal governing model so laughably absurd, and why I disagree with conservatives who point to corporations as everything that’s right in our society.
.
Conservatives say that governments are too inefficient and wasteful, and point to corporations as models of efficiency. I agree with them on the problem - our government, today, is inefficient and wasteful - but disagree with how to fix it. Governments are only as good as the people they govern, and together we can fire corrupt and morally bankrupt politicians simply by refusing to re-elect them. I think that the citizens of this country should be made more aware so that they can elect good representatives. Conservatives, on the other hand, seem to prefer getting rid of the government altogether, or squeezing it into as small a shape as possible. But, as I said before, I don’t think the trade-off here is of government control versus freedom, but rather of the rule of the majority, which is what governments are supposed to represent (I say supposed to because the recent administration so obviously doesn’t, always putting corporate interests above those of the public) versus the rule of the rich, which is the class that rules corporations.
When the Bush administration cuts taxes that corporations have to pay and supports those tax cuts with cuts in public sector programs such as those that support health care and education, it promotes the growth of corporations at the expense of the public sector, a move that bears all the hallmarks of Reaganomics. And it’s surprising to me that people still think of Reagonomics as a viable economic theory, when any rational look at the data, and just plain common sense, would indicate that wealth does not trickle down but tends to accumulate at the top. Money is spent by the poor; by the rich it is horded.
There’s the sense - mainly among conservatives but also, I think, among some ordinary Americans - that corporations are what’s responsible for the progress that our country has made. But this ignores the fact that corporations are a relatively new phenomenon (they arose after the Civil War, and they made up a relatively small part of the economy until after WWII) and also that today, what corporations are about isn’t making things as much as branding things. This is why labels are so ubiquitous, why advertising contracts run to millions of dollars. The major retail corporations don’t even make their own clothes, outsourcing that to contractors who hire the poorest in third-world countries to work in often-abominable conditions. Increasingly, what corporations are about is selling an image, an idea, that often runs contrary to reality. For the most part, they are becoming nothing more than glorified PR machines. Also, at times it would seem that they would do everything they can to halt progress. Witness the lobbying that automobile companies do, as just one example. Almost everyone agrees that in the future we will need to drive more fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly cars. Yet the automotive industry of this country has done very little to make these cars, despite the demand for them as witnessed by the popularity of Japanese hybrids (and once when they did make an electric car they wasted no time pulling the plug, and oil companies bought the patents for electric batteries so they could never be used again), and has instead done all it could to make sure that it will never have to change its practices to be more environmentally friendly. Corporations do not seem to stand for progress but against it, to stand instead for maintaining the status quo.
I can’t count the number of plugs I’ve heard for corporations by the news anchors on channels such as CNBC and CNN (for obvious reasons, I tend to avoid Fox). They claim that pro-corporation policies are essential because they promote economic growth. (It used to be promote employment growth, but they obviously can’t use that slogan anymore after all the layoffs.) And I don’t see the evidence for this. The stock market is rising, but so is the cost of living, so is the price of gas and food, rent, college educations, all the while our currency is falling against that of every other country’s. There is such a huge disconnect between what I hear and what I see, and increasingly I’ve come to think that what’s good for corporations is terrible for the country, for the poor and middle class that live here, that the rising profits are coming at their expense - they are the ones that were laid off, that are being made to work longer hours for less pay. There are now 37 million people living below the poverty line, 5 million more than when Bush came into power, and they have fewer chances of getting themselves out of poverty than in years before, with declining standards of health care and education. And there are also the increasingly lax environmental regulations - properly regulating our food and air and water so that public health is not harmed might hurt a corporation’s profits, and so the Bush administration doesn’t.
As to corporations being models of efficiency, I think a better characterization for them would be that of externalizing machines. Externalities are whenever two parties carry out a transaction and a third uninvolved party has to bear some of its cost. The taxpayers are this third uninvolved party - we’re the ones that pay for the troops to secure Iraq’s oil fields, we’re the ones that bear the costs of pollution. And we have so little say in a corporation’s practices. We can’t fire the retail company CEOs that use sweatshop labor, or the oil company CEOs that are responsible for environmentally destructive practices, or that prop up repressive governments, as in the case of the Shell company (eight environmentalists that protested the activities of the Shell Company in Nigeria were hanged).
Instead of being held accountable and punished for these actions, CEOs that do these things are instead rewarded, with increasingly ludicruous pay packages granted by the boards of directors. It is not the ordinary shareholder that is benefitting from increased corporate profits as much as it is the people already in power - they would prefer to keep the money to themselves, thank you very much. Also, there was an article I read recently that said that CEO pay can be correlated to the number of layoffs performed - the more layoffs the higher the pay. So how is it, exactly, that what’s good for corporations is good for this country as a whole?
Corporations aren’t moral and cannot be held easily accountable for the public good, and it’s surprising to me how much people don’t get this. They exist for one reason, to maximize profits, and they will do this at the expense of anything. In the corporate mindset everything comes down to a cost/benefit analysis in which even things like a person’s health and life have a price, and that is the main reason why I find using corporations as the ideal governing model so laughably absurd, and why I disagree with conservatives who point to corporations as everything that’s right in our society.
.
