phonon
Posts: 396
Joined: Nov. 2006
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| Quote ("Rev Dr" Lenny Flank @ May 21 2007,07:10) | | Quote (phonon @ May 20 2007,21:52) | I guess the question I keep trying to ask is where do you draw the line?
When does someone go from "hard working entrepreneur" to "corporado aristocrat?" When does he have to relinquish control of his company? |
And the answer I keep giving is that it's not ME who draws the line, it's EVERYONE.
What I want, is simply to place the entire economy under democratic control, just like the political system. |
When you say everyone, you really mean the majority. 51%
| Quote | | The business owners -- all of them -- are unelected, unchecked, and answerable to no one. |
They are answerable to shareholders and ultimately the customer/consumer.
When the "corporados" infiltrate our elected government, that's when there is much less response to the customer and shareholder because they use the power given to politicians by voters, the 51%
| Quote | | I find that intolerable in any democracy, particularly when a corporation like General Motors or Exxon-Mobil has more resources than many governments in the world, and its decisions effect a larger population than the United States of America. |
The oil industry is powerful, it's true, but to attack this problem, you'd change the whole system? The reason they were so powerful is because they buy politicians. If you could cut that out without changing the whole system, would that be acceptable?
| Quote | | So if you have some good reasons why business leaders or owners, alone of all social authority figures, should have the inherent right to make unilateral decisions affecting others without being answerable or responsible to anyone, I'd sure like to hear them . . . . I doubt any of them differ in any significant way from the very same arguments made by the French royal aristocracy to defend THEIR right to make unilateral decisions that effected others without being answerable to anyone. |
The French aristocracy's reason was their "birthright" to lord over other people. The reason that a business owner should be able to make unilateral decisions regarding HIS business is because he OWNS it. He doesn't own the people working for him. They don't have to work for him. And you can make him directly answerable and responsible to his workers through worker organization (unions). The reason you shouldn't be forced to landscape your yard some certain way or paint your house a certain color just because a majority of people in your jurisdiction want your house to be a certain color is the same reason you should wrest control of a business from someone who started it.
| Quote | | As for "relinquishing control of his company", I've already shown that the corporados already did that, long ago. The "owners" of a corporation (the tiny minority of the population that owns most of the stock) don't ned to actually control anything -- they make no decisions and introduce no new ideas. Instead, they simply hire the ability of others to do that for them. If all the stockholders of the world were to be kidnapped by aliens tomorrow, the corporations would all go on without them with barely any change at all. |
Well, you know, except that the investment capital would be gone.
| Quote | And as for the small businesses like "Joe's Pizza", they are also already steadily losing "control of their businesses", at an alarming rate, because of the capitalists themselves. After all, any small business lives solely on the crumbs left behind by the Big Boys -- they live only because the Big Boys haven't yet decided to either buy them out or drive them under. Indeed, the vast majority of small businesses [i]can't[i/] find enough crumbs to live on, and die within a few years.
The entire history of corporate America is the history of one corporation in each industry growing steadily to dominate that industry and drive everyone else into oblivion (or forced cooperation). If the "small businesses" are to have any chance at all of survival against such an onslaught, they must consolidate their resources together under a joint management until they are large enough to compete (i.e., they must give up "control of their business" and in essence become corporados themselves).
So all I want to do is continue and complete the task that the corporados themselves are already doing quite efficiently. It is the corporados who have already eliminated virtually all private business ownership, and replaced it with social ownership overseen by elected managers. I simply want to consolidate those who haven't yet been consolidated, and then elect those managers with a larger electorate, which includes everyone rather than just the tiny minority of stockholders.
The economic structure that you (and all "free-market" apologists" want to defend --- an Adam Smithian large network of small individual shopkeepers --- no longer exists. The corporados destroyed it long ago, and replaced it with socialized property ownership. |
First of all, I'm just debating a point with you and my position here may not actually have anything to do with my actual opinions.
And I agree that unfettered capitalism and laissez-faire economics leads eventually to monopoly. There should certainly be checks on corporate power. But, to say that 51% of the population knows what's best, economically, for the other 49% is not what I'd call an improvement.
The problems that you aim to address by ("I simply want to consolidate those who haven't yet been consolidated, and then elect those managers with a larger electorate, which includes everyone rather than just the tiny minority of stockholders.") would still be there unless the people/voters were educated to the problem and care about it. Well, under our system you could still enact certain controls over large corporations through elected officials, but to do that you'd have to have a majority of people who are educated enough on the subject and care enough about it to vote in representatives that would actually fight for them in this way. There is no magic system. What it takes is overcoming human nature. Overcoming greed and corruption as well as ignorance and intellectual laziness.
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With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another. - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation. - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
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