When Elephants Stumble (Part II)
January 17, 2008
7:59 AM CST
I have written before about the dangers of allowing corporations to become government surrogates—a shining example being companies being responsible for “withholding” employees’ taxes, rather than having said employees actually write checks to the IRS each month. (I bet people would have a completely different attitude towards government spending if they had to do that, rather than having the painless transparency of automatic withholding.) In this way, not only does the corporation do the government’s job of tax collection, but, as the government ultimately has the power of life and death over the corporation, they do a better job of it than the government ever could.
But it’s not just taxes. Look at any corporate codes of behavior, and you’ll find policies which, in their breathtaking reach and intrusiveness, would make 1984‘s O’Brien nod his head approvingly. In many cases, the political correctness on display exceeds that of any government department—in no small part because office workers and middle management, unlike government workers, are not shielded from such excesses by an employees’ union.
Note too that corporations are often stooges of other corporations—corporations often spy on their employees, nominally for the employees’ “own good” (to see, for example, if they smoke and/or drink excessively over weekends), but in reality, the spying and “corrective action” which follows is done simply to keep medical insurance payments down.
Add the trial lawyer industry to the mix, and it’s a wonder that any corporation can survive when it is so weighed down with all this nonsense. And in fact, there is good evidence to suggest that the sclerotic performance of major U.S. corporations in recent times has in no small part been because of the stifling thickets of rules and regulations (imposed from both without and within) that they have to negotiate just to do the most rudimentary business.
There is abundant evidence that this trend of corporate intrusiveness and busybodied-ness is not diminishing, but increasing:
Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.
The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure.
In Part I, I talked about corporations getting too big for their britches, and this is a classic example.
The more worrying aspect of this kind of development is that once collected, such data would prove irresistible to others—and by others, I mean health insurance companies and ultimately, government.
A corporation might resist calls for the information from an insurance company (although don’t bet on it—all the insurance company need offer the company is a 10% reduction in premiums costs, and your data would be on their servers as fast as a T1 line could carry it).
A corporation could not resist a demand from the government that they transmit to data to, oh, OSHA or Health & Human Services, to name just two. And why wouldn’t the corporation do that? After all, they already ship your money to the government; biometric data is just another series of bits and bytes.
All this is done, of course, under the fig leaf of “private property”—the idea that a property owner (the corporation) has a right to determine the terms and conditions of behavior on its property, just as a homeowner has the right to do so with guests on his. A moment’s thought will reveal the speciousness of this argument. Guests in a man’s home do not depend on him for money to feed themselves and their families. Corporations, on the other hand, are contracting for a person’s time and labor—but that does not give them an excuse to regulate a person’s behavior excessively—which, given the opportunity, they will do. Of course, the argument is that the employee is free to refuse the terms and conditions of employment, and seek compensation elsewhere. Except that choices are always limited, especially when all the corporations and business entities in the area have similar, equally-intrusive regulations.
Which brings me, finally, to the point of this series.
I note with extreme displeasure the two strains of anti-corporatism running through our body politic at the moment. The first is unsurprising: socialists (like Obama and Clinton) loathe corporations purely because their Marxist doctrine states that they should. The second strain is a populist one (such as espoused by people like Huey Long and Mike Huckabee): the theory that “the big guy” is out to screw “the little guy”.
Populists couch their hatred of corporations in terms of money (which is why, generally speaking, populists are stupid people—they become the unwitting accomplices of the socialists, who are truly feral creatures), and socialists couch their hatred in terms of control—because, as we all know, socialists are leery of sharing power with any entity, believing as they do that all power should lie exclusively with the State. Ultimately, of course, as the man said: when politicians converse, no matter what the topic, they’re talking about money. Your money (or in the case of socialists, their money, because they hold that all capital, however earned, is the property of the State).
Both populists and socialists are dangerous, because both would weaken and destroy businesses (which I don’t much care about, anymore) and the nation’s economy (which I do care about) through their utterly useless and failed philosophies.
The problem is that corporations, in my opinion, are rapidly losing the right to any degree of sympathy from voters. When a company fires an employee for keeping a gun in his car in the company parking lot, a gun which he may need for self-defense on his way to and from his job at the company, why should we not support legislation which strips that piece of “private property rights” away from the company? When a company fires an employee for writing a memo which is not written in bland corporate-speak, but is written instead in plain (not profane) language, why should they not be fined (or sued) for such arbitrary behavior?
So while I don’t support the likes of either populist Mike Huckabee or socialist Hillary Clinton. let me tell you: I’m not a huge fan of CitiBank, AT&T or Sears either. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, the two sides can battle it out until both are bloody: corporations litigated almost out of existence by a feral Clintonite Justice Department (e.g.. as was tried with Microsoft in the late 1990s), or government bankrupted by Wall Street’s bond traders (ditto the Clintons in the early 1990s).
The only problem is that when elephants stumble, the beings most affected are the ants underfoot. And we are the ants, harassed, crippled and eventually destroyed by stupid policies made by giant, unfeeling, faceless corporate and governmental entities.
A plague on both their houses.
