C4SS.ORG

Verizon Wireless Secretly Passed AP Reporters’ Phone Records to Feds

The Poverty of Nations

Wal-Mart Efficiency and The Destitution of America

Standardization

Firms crave predictability. The modern corporation applies Taylorist, reductionist and mechanistic methods to the production process. Where a craftsperson would produce every item uniquely, massive bureaucracies like Wal-Mart, Standard Oil, McDonalds and Monsanto needed every product to be identical. Firms seek to minimize risk, and the dual bedfellows of risk are uncertainty and variability.

“It is essential that most of the basic factors in the social environment of the corporation be stable enough to be predictable into the future—factors such as the value of the dollar, the fiscal and regulatory policies of the government, the law under which they do business. This stability is a prerequisite to a second need for corporate enterprise—the ability to plan and affect the future. […] Freedom of action—discretionary power—minimizes external interference with its decision making process. Potential sources of intrusion are owners and creditors, workers, consumers, and the government.” [1]

In their quest for hegemony, dominant companies have reaped great reward from standardization. Monsanto has standardized cotton quality and maturation time, and every MacDonald’s Big Mac is the same. [2] Rockefeller was known for his dependable Standard(-ized) brand kerosene, which were easily identified by his branded blue tin barrels …

Hostess wins OK to give execs up to $1.75 million in bonuses

A bankruptcy judge approves Hostess’ plan to offer bonuses as an incentive for managers to oversee its liquidation. Hostess is talking with 110 potential bidders.

Bitter CEOs fire employees over Obama victory

It turns out the coterie of CEOs who spent October warning their employees to vote for Romney weren’t just making idle threats; now that the election is over, and Obama remains president, some of those CEOs have started laying off workers. …

The Myth of Deregulation

… Corporations nest in regulation. Corporations cultivate regulation for their own purposes. The corporations that are responsible for our current problems are not the products of Industrial Revolution-era laissez-faire policies; they are very much the product of modern controlled capitalism. It is certainly not a case of a few maverick operators breaking the rules. Our current predicament has come about by the corporate majority obeying the rules. …

Financiers and Sex Trafficking

… That mystery is solved. The owners turn out to include private equityfinanciers, including Goldman Sachswith a 16 percent stake.

Goldman Sachs was mortified when I began inquiring last week about its stake in America’s leading Web site for prostitution ads. It began working frantically to unload its shares, and on Friday afternoon it called to say that it had just signed an agreement to sell its stake to management.

“We had no influence over operations,” Andrea Raphael, a Goldman Sachs spokeswoman, told me.

Let’s back up for a moment. …

"Public" vs. "Private" Sector

The distinction between the state, or “public” sector, and the “private” sector economy, is universal in commentary and policy analysis. But in the case of the corporate economy, it’s almost meaningless. First of all, the large corporation cannot be called “private property” in any meaningful sense. And second, the relationship between the corporate economy and the state resembles nothing so much as an interlocking directorate. …

Big Government, Big Business — Conjoined Twins, part 2

… The idea of the “corporation” is just a codification of certain artificial state privileges into law — an effect, not a cause. Corporate power has certainly subsequently become the cause of, or at least compounded, many economic distortions itself, but in principle those distortions could have, and probably would have, been implemented through single proprietorships and limited partnerships if the corporation had never been invented. It’s the impulse (and the ability) to seek wealth and power through government privilege rather than through market competition which is the problem; the corporation just happens to be the best available tool for the job. …

Big Government, Big Business — Conjoined Twins

… Government is not and never has been a “counterbalance” to corporate power. In fact, it’s historically been the primary enabler, the symbiotic partner, and a significant beneficiary of that power. The idea that an institution whose employees keep a revolving door spinning between Capitol Hill and the K Street offices of the corporate lobbies, an institution afloat in a sea of corporate campaign donations, an institution groomed to the express task of transferring money from the taxpayer’s pocket to the corporate bottom line, can act as a “counterbalance” to corporate power is absurd on its face. …

The problem is that the state, by artificially reducing the costs of large size and restraining the competitive ill effects of calculation problems, promotes larger size than would be the case in a free market—and with it calculation problems to a pathological extent. The state promotes inefficiencies of large size and hierarchy past the point at which they cease to be worth it, from a standpoint of net social efficiency, because those receiving the benefits of large size are not the same parties who pay the costs of inefficiency.

The solution is to eliminate the state policies that have created the situation, and allow the market to punish inefficiency. To get there, though, some libertarians need to reexamine their unquestioned sympathies for big business as an “oppressed minority” and remember that they’re supposed to be defending free markets —not the winners under the current statist economy.