The other day a friend irritated me. He used a buzzword, “corporate greed.”
That one’s been bothering me for a while and I really wasn’t sure why. After all, I’m not fond of corporations much myself. I’ve worked for a few in my time and I was always happiest when I was an independent contractor rather than an employee, and when I was one I was happiest when I was furthest from corporate HQ.
I don’t dispute their right to exist, I just prefer a different work arrangement than a Dilbert cubicle.
But I have friends who loathe the very idea of corporations, some with much more experience working for them than I do.
Sometimes I want to tell them, “So don’t drive a car, or use a cell phone, and find out who owns that newspaper you read.”
Corporations it seems, get no love. And greed must be the worst thing in the world from the way people talk about it.
Hollywood, you may have noticed, is very down on corporations and “corporate greed.”
From what you see in movies about noble Davids fighting corporate Goliaths you’d think films were made by humble craftsmen working in cottage industries. Never mind those cautionary tales about how Hollywood accountants can make the biggest hit of the decade into the biggest money-loser on paper to explain to investors why the movie that made the actors and producers rich isn’t going to repay their investment.
Corporations are particularly loathed on the left end of the political spectrum where people who are terrified of multi-billion dollar corporations are perfectly fine with multi-trillion dollar government.
And that’s why I get irritated with that buzzword “corporate greed.”
A corporation isn’t a person in anything but the legal sense. It can’t feel greedy, it can’t feel anything the people who make it up don’t feel.
It’s a form of organization, a way of getting people together to accomplish things they couldn’t working alone. Humanity came up with the legal and organizational structure of the corporation starting only a few hundred years ago. Now considering how many of the essentials and luxuries we enjoy are manufactured and transported by corporations you’d think we’d appreciate them like we do that corporate product sliced bread.
So why don’t we?
Well for one, it does take a certain temperament to work in a large impersonal environment – and I know that’s a stereotype, they’re not all like that. But enough are and some of us find it distasteful, like some really don’t enjoy being in the military. With which it has a lot in common.
For another, we all know large corporations have an influence on government we rightly suspect is not at all good for our country. Because if a corporation cannot feel greed, neither can it feel patriotism.
But is that the fault of the organization, or the fault of the government? If corporations can buy influence, surely it is because governments have influence to sell.
As to the charge of greed, that’s a loaded term. Is greed wanting more than you have? Some folks call that ambition.
Is greed wanting something at somebody else’s expense? That is reprehensible, but it’s not how markets are supposed to work. In a free market people exchange labor, goods, and services in ways that benefit both parties. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t do it.
Of course we know in daily life it doesn’t always work that way. Government can force us to deal with corporations. Corporations can lobby government to skew the playing field in their favor.
But this is a feature of all large scale organizations, including labor unions, NGOs, and professional associations.
Special interests’ influence on government may be the central problem of democracy. One for which there has yet been no solution found. There may not be one.