The CEO as a Hero
The glorification of the businessman is a cult as old as social darwinism and the modern corporation. From the time of the robber barons, those predisposed to view society on the most superficial basis possible have sang the praises of those noble souls who built empires of commerce and reaped the overwhelming financial rewards. Embracing the status quo myth of the free market and uninhibited entrepenuerial competition, they built whole systems based on the superiority of economies of scale and big business.
Since it is always necessarily in mythologies to have a character to represent the forces of righteousness, the CEO was often singled out as a hero. By using his own superior intellect, charm, and intuitive capabilities to direct a massively sprawling and complex corporate organization through the waters of competition, marketing, and morale building, the CEO deserved all the credit and pay he got. He is also typically praised for being the one driving force behind a corporate hierarchy and a larger market that creates jobs and wealth for society at large. Even amid the crises of confidence in the modern corporate capitalist economy such as the Chrysler bailout, the S&L scandal, Enron, and WorldCom, the CEO is almost always lauded as the personality behind the successes and failures of businesses - and often whole economic sectors.
In a world of neverending corporate consolidation and market hegemony, it's important to have a human face to what is otherwise a cold, impersonal, and inhuman conglomerate. When we project the qualities of entrepeneurialism onto such giant, mechansitic entities, it's important to have a person to whom we can assign credit or blame. As humans dealing in a complex environment, we just need it somehow. We're unable to really grasp the accumulation of capital that these corporations control, and knowing that a human is still calling the shots gives us some relief, I suppose. Indeed, the charisma of the CEO's cult of personality is that he can, in fact, juggle these economies of scale in his head, and deliver an efficient market through some inner strength or gift he possesses.
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I don't have cable TV and have been taking a break from mainstream media, apparently at the wrong (or, depending on your cynicism, right) time. I understand the basic political dynamics here, but does anybody have any certainty about what's actually going on here? Behind the scenes, from our state's perspective, from the Arab perspective, from the Israeli perspective? How do the standard libertarian critiques of U.S. foreign policy apply here? For non-libertarians: how do these critiques get it wrong?
Sam, a knowledgable and obviously adept Austrian economist, and I compare and contrast mutualism and the Austrian school on some key points in a recent posts' comment thread. We discuss the Labor Theory of Value vs. the subjectivists in the context of Kevin Carson's seminal work on mutualist political economy. And Kevin shows up to comment on our discussion! Good reading if you're wondering why I'm so ga-ga over mutualism.
I've read this essay several times, and you should make sure you read it at least once. As horrifying and infuriating as Gatto's entirely spot-on description of our public education system is, the last few sentences never fail to choke me up:
After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
Amen. It's all about central management: by states, by corporations, by established interests and their institutions. Check out this interview with Gatto where he ties public education philosophy to social darwinism. He also contends - to my amazement - that the term "social darwinism" refers directly to Charles Darwin himself! He was a Calvinist who extended beliefs on predestination to the mandate for the "chosen" to protect the evolutionary breeding stock of humanity. I'm going to have to look into that more.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE: This essay was originally written for the now defunct blog "Wrong Thinking Girl".
It seems appropriate somehow to christen this blog with a broad analysis of RightThinkingGirl's philosophy. This should set the tone for the blog, and give a good insight into why we started it. RTG has gotten people thinking, and that's a good thing - what we want to do here is highlight that thinking, or at least that which occurs on the other end of the spectrum.
To the extent that RTG delves into politics, we need to start with her primary biases and assumptions. Politics, even at its worst, results from a particular understanding of sociology, psychology, and the general attitudes one holds towards the human animal. Defining the scope of acceptable behavior and deincentivizing antisocial behavior takes place within the context of what one should expect from one's fellow man. To the extent that people are motivated to realize their vision of society via politics, this axiomatic understanding of human nature is primary. After all, if you're going to engineer people, you gotta have an ideal towards which to aspire.
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To her credit, RTG makes a great case for going easier on people who make mistakes in their personal lives:
What really bothers me is the fact that hypocrisy has become the primary device to discredit the other side. When Rush Limbaugh admitted on the air that he was battling drug addiction, Liberals nearly fainted with pleasure. It was a great a-ha moment but it was lacking in real substance - just like Pelosi's relationship with unions. Rush's problem with prescribed medication for back pain was, in my view, different than a heroin addict knocking over a Stop N Go for cash, and in any case - his drug addiction doesn't make his views wrong or illegal or in any way suspect. It was character assasination.
It makes me hope that, finally, RTG is getting it: humans are fallable, they make mistakes, and we should have compassion for them instead of expecting them to conform to some social straightjacket at gunpoint.
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In a recent post, RTG endorses the Republican dismissal of any hope to raise the national minimum wage:
The fact is: Americans who make $5.15 an hour are in high school and college. These are not 30 year old people who can only make minimum wage.
This is the kind of anti-factual polemic that caused me to establish this blog. Say what you will about the minimum wage, but back it up. Here's the facts I've found - and I'm open to questioning them, but at least it's somewhere to start:
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Over at Catallarchy, Sean Lynch critiques a recent study by the International Center for Technology Assessment focusing on hidden externalities in the automotive fuel market. The study makes a startling claim:
The report divides the external costs of gasoline usage into five primary areas: (1) Tax Subsidization of the Oil Industry; (2) Government Program Subsidies; (3) Protection Costs Involved in Oil Shipment and Motor Vehicle Services; (4) Environmental, Health, and Social Costs of Gasoline Usage; and (5) Other Important Externalities of Motor Vehicle Use. Together, these external costs total $558.7 billion to $1.69 trillion per year, which, when added to the retail price of gasoline, results in a per gallon price of $5.60 to $15.14.
A swing of almost $10 per gallon is quite a bit of uncertainty, I'll admit. But the entire point of the study (at least, the one I took away) is that these hidden costs that the State assumes make calculating the real price of gasoline completely impossible. Therefore, consumers cannot adjust their consumption - or demand for an alternative - with any degree of reliable market information. Merely by distorting prices to cover up true calculation, the gasoline market is helped simple by being the "stable", established product.
Of course, libertarians (and mutualists in particular) have always argued that, without a market free of state manipulation, it's impossible to arrive at a price that reflects the true input and external costs. As I've written earlier, corporations thrive in an environment where the state apparatus allows them to offset these costs onto the public at large - but they do so at our collective expense, to say nothing of the efficiencies we're missing out on because of opportunity costs. Indeed, state-sponsored handouts to American corporations may in fact dwarf their actual profits by a factor of five!
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In her latest, RTG laments the preference the New York Times gives al Qaeda "secrets":
Over the weekend when newspapers were clamoring to publish details of the terror banking plan, not a single one posted the website name where the new bin Laden tape was allegedly published. Quick research shows that no website has ever been named when bin Laden or other al Qaeda thugs decide to go to the Webs. Is this a quaint hold over of ‘privacy'? Are the websites a secret? Like the kind that we had before the NYT began publishing them all? Why not leak one of the enemy's secrets?
Yet I'm confused. The terror banking plan was a secret the government was trying to keep in order to better accomplish their surveillance goals. By contrast, the new bin Laden tap is designed to be diseminated - it's propaganda. What, pray tell, is the point of having secret propaganda? Maybe this is a new PsyOps term with which I'm unfamiliar.
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I apologize to anybody who was offended by the site. I take full responsibility for it, even though I didn't anticipate the response. I will be moving all the posts to this blog and redirecting WTG.com to RTG.com.
However, I was sorely disappointed by the response from RTG and her minions, and just about all the people who I respect on the site saw things my way (I can accept a difference of opinion on the part of Russ and Gon). I thought her reaction was juvenile and gave me zero credit for being a loyal reader, participant, and friend. She apparently thinks us readers owe her everything and she owes us nothing in return - including response to critiques of her writing in her comments, which is the reason I started the WTG.com blog in the first place.
I made an error, but at least I can admit it, since I am NOT "mean spirited". I can't say the same for RTG. I made a peace overture and it was ignored, so at this point I'm convinced that she's no longer worth my time. So much for "internet friends" - at least I made some good ones while I was there.
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I've had the socialplex.com domain for some time and hadn't done anything with it, so I've set up a forum there. Please feel free to stop by and chat if you want to. This space is for all my "internet friends" who want a neutral space to hang out and discuss stuff.
Pursuant to the problems I've had for a while with my writing on others' blogs being lost to me (yes, cut and paste is too hard) I am working on a web application that will sort of combine forums and blogs. I'm currently calling it "ThreadSpinner". While I don't want to get into too much detail, the idea is to create a community oriented site that allows people to easily converse and, simultaneously, "spin off" their conversations into original writing. I will be writing it in Ruby on Rails, and if anybody's interested in collaborating I'm setting up a Subversion repository.
Via WendyMcElroy.com comes this story:
The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.
The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation's largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.
"The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,'' plaintiff's lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. "This undermines that assertion.''
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Recently I've been challenged in political conversations to stop bitching about the problems in other people's ideologies and propose something better (here and here). This puts me in an interesting quandry as an anarchist, since one of the problems I have with politics - especially statism - is the need to achieve certain outcomes deemed desirable. Once you've landed on the model you insist society must fit, it's no big leap to go from wishing for your ideal to advocating conformity to that ideal, by force if necessary.
As an anarchist, I believe that distributed systems of decision making like the market are the best ways for processing information and organizing society. Central planning doesn't work, and my ideology seeks to better understand the way humans relate rather than making them turn into something they're not. Therefore, since I don't wish to impose a plan on anybody, I really have none to offer - just ideas, reflections, and some theories. This often cripples me rhetorically, though - people don't seem to understand why I can't just "give them a plan" for how anarchism would work. It just goes to show you how deeply ingrained politics and central, top-down managerialism really is in our society.
Robert Anton Wilson laid out some concise definitions that highlight the political spectrum in ways that speak succinctly to this issue of why statists and anarchists have a hard time finding common ground:
- FREE MARKET: That condition of society in which all economic transactions result from voluntary choice without coercion.
- THE STATE: That institution which interferes with the Free Market through the direct exercise of coercion or the granting of privileges (backed by coercion).
- POLITICAL CAPITALISM: That organization of society, incorporating elements of tax, usury, landlordism, and tariff, which thus denies the Free Market while pretending to exemplify it.
- CONSERVATISM: That school of capitalist philosophy which claims allegiance to the Free Market while actually supporting usury, landlordism, tariff, and sometimes taxation.
- LIBERALISM: That school of capitalist philosophy which attempts to correct the injustices of capitalism by adding new laws to existing laws. Each time conservatives pass a law creating privilege, liberals pass another law modifying privilege, leading conservatives to pass a more subtle law recreating privilege, etc., until "everything not forbidden is compulsory" and "everything not compulsory is forbidden."
- SOCIALISM: The attempted abolition of all privilege by restoring power entirely to the coercive agent behind privilege, the State, thereby converting capitalist oligarchy into Statist monopoly. Whitewashing a wall by painting it black.
- ANARCHISM: That organization of society in which the Free Market operates freely, without taxes, usury, landlordism, tariffs, or other forms of coercion or privilege.
- RIGHT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to compete more often than to cooperate.
- LEFT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to cooperate more often than to compete.
See the difference? Statists - whether minarchist or totalitarian - define their politics in terms of what people should be. Anarchists define their ideology by how we think people actually are in their natural, uncoerced state.
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According to the Huffington Post, R.A. Wilson - author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy and other science fiction works - is dying. Reading the trilogy was a life changing experience for me - easily the most challenging literary experience I've ever had (and I've read Goethe's Faust in the original German!). It was his writing and the way he framed issues in a cynical but curious manner that finally pushed me over the edge into anarchism. I will always be grateful that he spoke his thoughts and beliefs so plainly, and I will always resent that he wasn't more widely read.
Here's a great quote from a recent interview in which he addresses his mortality:
"I know I'm going to die sometime soon: five weeks, five months, five years," says Wilson. "I don't know, maybe 50 years if stem cell research moves along. But I don't know and I don't care. And I can't take it seriously anymore. If George Bush is president of the free world, who can take anything seriously?"
Via the always fascinating Kevin Carson, I found a great argument for viewing the state grant of limited liability for corporations as a subsidy. While Vinay Gupta gets a few things technically wrong, he starts a debate we as a society sorely need to have.
It surprises me that I can't find an analysis of how large this subsidy to investors is!
Possibly, if this question was analyzed, we would discover that limited liability protection is the largest goverment programme there is, perhaps even larger than the military. Plausible? Well, consider the total size of the stock market - the market capitalization of the entire economy. Now imagine insuring that. Limited liability moves a lot of wealth from creditors to investors in any given year, through bankruptcy proceedings - how much wealth is transferred in a given year?
This may explain why limited liability creates wealth so fast: by taking an intangible like "risk" and providing an equally intangible "protection from risk" goverments subsidied real, tangible spending with a vast, intangible subsidy.
Well said! Markets are fair only to the extent that liability is conserved inside every activity. People act responsibly because there are consequences for irresponsibility. Adam Smith pointed out the productive power of markets when he said, "It is not the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." In the same sense, we don't rely on their benevolence to protect us from the harms they might visit on us through corner-cutting, pollution, etc.
If we start unbalancing the picture by taking away the need for some actors to fully account for the costs of their actions, it's not hard to see that you've provided an incentive for them to rack up costs - benevolent though they may seem. There is a vast array of "intangible" interests that the market moderates - but it can only effectively account for them if they are actually worked into the decision making process of economic actors. The market makes these intangible interests tangible through the calculation of costs in the production of goods and services.
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