Thought Crime Pt. 2 - Electric Bugaloo

I am accused of the crime of negative thinking. But my thinking isn't really traditional negative thinking as an actual psychologist would define it - it's rational thinking.

***

I often wonder about the opportunity costs of giant corporations. How many more small, independently owned businesses would there be if they were not crowded out by impossibly titanic competitors. It was once assumed that global-mega corps provided more jobs. But when we consider our job market today, doesn't it seem like all they do is consolidate everything so that overall they have less jobs, but they are all concentrated in one area? When I worked at the Pork Plant in Hoosierville-A, we had our own accountants, our own collections guy, our own telesales manager, and a few other things. When the wiener factory moved in, they eliminated those jobs entirely, because they had accountants, collections guys and telesales managers in Indianapolis. Not moved - eliminated. The people they already had in Indy were simply saddled with more work. 84,000 customers worth of more work, I guess.

So now we have less businesses. Never mind the less competition aspect of it, we have a relatively few number of companies, and they're dominant all over the country, if not the world, and they have consolidated their workforce and put a giant-mega office in this community or that community, and they outsource a large percentage of their work to India and China and sometimes Mexico - but could it be that overall they are generating less money for the economy?

We have these gigantic corporations, headed by executives who magically profit personally, even when the businesses they run fail. They are beyond overpaid, and the justification for their pay scale and their golden parachutes is that they need to feel free to take risks and "think outside the box" in order to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. Somehow the need to take risks is so great that the last thing we want to do is financially ruin some executive who ran the business into the ground via a shortsighted and failed attempt at innovation. Instead we must all line up and say "yes!" and engage in "positive" thinking (as narrowly defined by corporate needs), so that no one can declare a non-viable solution or business plan as a "bad idea." So they execute it and it fails. Miserably. All of a sudden an entire workforce is held hostage to layoffs because rational thinking and long-term thinking have been narrowly redefined as "negative thinking."

Would it not be better to have more small companies hiring more people overall, with more offices and factories across the country and a higher standard of living for more Americans? Would it not be better to have owners, instead of executives, whose personal finances failed just as much as their comapany's finances failed, who would also be in the same boat as their laid off employees? Would it also not be better to allow one business to fail amongst a myriad of companies so that there is no giant that's "too big to fail?"

If the argument for capitalism is that it is "natural," there is nothing "natural" about the current state of affairs. We do not have capitalism, we do not have socialism, we instead have "corporatism." Corporatism is not capitalism, but it is totalitarian. And like all totalitarianism, it too must die.