Corporations

[Greg Peisert <gpeisert@jamesgregory.com>]

Ed and Bert;

  If we look at it in the abstract, I don't see corporations any 
differently than government or any other large, powerful entity controlled 
by humans. They all exhibit the same characteristics. I don't think one 
could sustain the claim from any factual evidence that corporations have 
enslaved more people or resulted in more wars or deaths than, say, 
totalitarian or fascist regimes. If you combine just four: Stalin, Hitler, 
Pol Pot and Idi Amin, you've got a pretty good number of enslaved people 
and dead bodies. Indeed, I don't see that corporations at their very worst 
are responsible for that kind of enslavement and carnage.

  Nor do I think the argument can be factually sustained that claims that 
corporations achieve their wealth at the expense of their workers. That is 
certainly not supportable in the sense that they take away the workers' 
material wealth and thereby gain their own. Nor is it true in the sense 
that if the workers went off and did other things, they would in some way 
create an equivalent quantity of wealth, of value for which others 
(customers) willingly exchange value. Within the context of the 
corporation, the efforts of workers are organized (in modern corporations, 
often largely organized by the workers themselves) in such a way that they 
create products or services that are of value to customers. When they stop 
doing that, they go into decline, and if they persist in their failure to 
produce products at a price that customers are ultimately willing to pay, 
they will go out of business.

  It seems to me that we can point to a host of examples of very large, 
publicly traded corporations, that no longer exist. They were not able to 
stay in business by force, by coercion, by subterfuge. When they failed to 
produce products for which the market would trade, they crumbled and fell. 
I suggest that the evidence indicates that large corporations are actually 
far more vulnerable to attack from competitors than most people realize. 
They either keep adding value by creating new and better products for which 
they can trade, or they go out of business. The only exceptions are 
monopolies, and monopolies can only be sustained by government fiat and 
intervention. Even though, for example, I think the DOJ has done some good 
in tempering the arrogance at Microsoft, I do believe that given time (and 
not that much time...perhaps three or four years), Microsoft would have 
found itself slipping rapidly in the face of new competitors, had it 
persisted in its arrogance. We have seen it again and again. People point 
to antitrust actions as bringing down IBM, or at least humbling them. 
Nothing could be further from the truth. What crippled IBM in the 1980's 
was their inability to respond effectively to the burgeoning desktop and 
server market. For corporations, no matter how bad the management or how 
much they may try to maintain themselves by means other than competition in 
the market, in the end, if they don't deliver the products, they will die. 
The only exception is if they are propped up by government support, 
something that should _never_ be done.

  That seems to me to be VERY different from governments, such as many 
African states, which can persist for decades while they wreak havoc on 
their people and misery and poverty reign.

  What I would be interested in knowing is, if we were to ban public 
corporations, just what would happen? What would keep us from sliding into 
decay and becoming another third world country? What would keep us from 
reverting to man's "natural" state of hunger, disease and poverty?

-- Greg