09-24-2019, 06:39 AM
(09-23-2019, 10:27 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: Doesn't this sound a lot like the Sears saga?
Yes. A company lives on its reputation while gutting its assets.
It may also be that the era of managerial elites taking advantage of economies of scale in advertising, a flat income tax that taxes corporate income just the same whether it is a mom-and-pop outfit or Exxon-Mobil, and getting away with overworking and underpaying people by limiting opportunities for advancement from within is over.
Our business executives have become a privileged class analogous to the Soviet nomenklatura, an administrative elite that takes on characteristics of a landed aristocracy in the supposedly 'classless' society. Except -- America has become about as blatant a 'class society', complete with big rural landowners and owners of urban real estate, the latter profiteering from the concentration of certain economic activity in certain places. Small business that cannot afford a bloated bureaucracy gets squeezed out, so opportunity that used to exist for innovative and flexible people disappears.
The Soviet nomenkatura brought a rottenness that eventually made the system untenable in less than four-score years. The vestiges of free and competitive enterprise in America along with a bare-bones welfare system has kept America from going intenably rotten as quickly. In the end, what passes as conservatism in America has become the support for preservation of rot. Such conservatism is proving absurd, as rot of anything steadily destroys what it corrupts.
One of the great myths of business is the blunder of believing that size cures everything. It does not. Structural weakness in a business grow with the enterprise. Growth cannot solve the problems of failure to invest in employees and the weakness of accounting controls. Growth cannot mitigate corruption within an old-boy network. Maybe Big Business can reshape the political orderto give it all the advantages, but that simply allows the rot to grow.
One does not solve gangrene by overeating.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.