Keep your stinking business out of my government

[applegrove]

Keep your stinking business out of my government

by Mark Sumner at the Daily Kos

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/11/8/1442402/-Keep-your-stinking-business-out-of-my-government

"SNIP...............


The purpose of a business is to concentrate wealth. This is true of General Motors and it's equally true of little Sally's lemonade stand. The business collects value from its customers, and returns to them a service that costs less than the value it collected. It had better. Otherwise, it's not a business for long. We call that gathered wealth "profit," and it moves from control of the customers into control of the business. We may not often think of it that way, but that's what it is: A wealth concentration engine.

To maximize that wealth concentration power, the business attempts to deliver the minimum amount of service while expending the least amount of effort. They want to deliver less, and they want to do it for more. That's not evil. It's just business. Sure, a business may drop prices or increase quality, but they do so only when forced to by competition. Whenever possible, the goal of these non-optimal changes is simple: Remove competition. That way the business can go back to charging the maximum amount for minimum product.

Decisions for how all this happens are restricted to a very small group. In most cases, everyone in that group has a direct incentive to maximize the profit. This is closely related to how profit is distributed in the business, which is anything but evenly. In most cases it follows a steeply angled slope where vastly greater rewards are given to a few, while most involved in the business are treated as part of the cost—the things you want to minimize, avoid, eliminate.

Put it all together and a business is meant to extract the greatest possible funds, deliver the least possible service, and put the resulting wealth in the hands of the smallest number of people. I'd suggest that's few people's idea of an ideal government.

Oh, and business is meant to grow, right? No one is out there giving lectures on "shrinking your business" or "making Exxon small enough to drown in a bathtub." Your wealth-grabbing, service-minimizing, CEO-enriching government will definitely want to grow, and grow, and grow, all the while getting better at giving employees less of the wealth they help generate. We even have a nice, official term for it. It's called productivity.



................SNIP"

[annabanana]

1. Oh kikkety kick kick!

Succinct and to the point!

[love_katz]

2. Kicking.

[smirkymonkey]

3. +1000

[Beartracks]

4. Yep. Capitalism makes a lousy form of government. That's why...

... the Founding Fathers set us up as a Democracy instead.



===================

[raouldukelives]

5. K&R The main distinction between GM and Sally's Lemonade.

Is that Sally is a small business. And from what I have seen, small businesses generally care about the community they are in. They clean up in the store as well as outside the store. Not because they are paid to but because they have a vested interest in the health and well being of the community at large.

If Sally were to incorporate, that all goes out the window.

Our problem is that we don't live under Capitalism any more. Not that we ever truly really did, but at this juncture, there can be no argument that the rules have been warped and subverted and changed so much over the last 100 years to render any resemblance to Adam Smith Capitalism as an irreparable flaw.

Monopolies and corporations, don't care about anything but the bottom line. Not the health of any community they are in and not the future of anyone but those vested in them. It is why our communities look like war zones. It is why our friends and neighbors are at each others throats. It is why the cod and crab are dying.

The deeper the hole is dug, the less chance of climbing back out. The more we lose Mom & Pop America, the more we lose ourselves.