Watching two intellectually challenged Ken dolls with “executive-style hair” — Mitt Romney and Rick Perry — preparing to fight it out reminds me how much I miss Dan Quayle.
Oddly enough, just before I heard about Romney’s latest blooper, I was reading about a study by psychologist Dacher Keltner. The life experience of the rich, he says, makes them less empathetic and more selfish than ordinary people. Part of this is willful obtuseness; legitimizing ideologies not only inure the exploited to getting the shaft, but enable the expoiters to sleep at night by reassuring themselves that the poor really deserve it.
The rich justify their relations with other social classes with the help of the Americanist ideology, whereby they exaggerate their own perceived rugged individualism and see their wealth as the result of character: “They think that economic success and political outcomes, and personal outcomes, have to do with individual behavior, a good work ethic …”
In other words, fake “free market” ideology — as opposed to the real thing — is the opiate of the elites. It frees them from guilt over their privilege and makes their existence bearable. The neoliberal ideology — as it appears on the CNBC talking head shows, the WSJ editorial page, and puff pieces from FreedomWorks — defends the existing model of corporate capitalism and its great concentrations of wealth as if they resulted from superior virtue in a competitive market (“that’s how our free market system works”). It deliberately obscures the central role of government intervention — artificial scarcities, artificial property rights, subsidies — in the current distribution of wealth and economic power.
Back to Romney: In response to a heckler, he quipped that “Corporations are people. … Everything that corporations earn also goes to people.” Faced with audience laughter, he asked “Where do you think it goes?” “Into their pockets!” replied the heckler. “Whose pockets?” Romney came back. “People’s pockets! Human beings, my friend.”
That’s technically true, of course. The money a corporation makes at the expense of consumers and workers through state-enforced unequal exchange is all distributed to people.
But so what? Unless David Icke’s right and we’re secretly ruled by alien lizard invaders, every system of class exploitation in human history has served the interests of some group of human beings. In every society in history, no matter how brutally exploitative, of course the ill-gotten gain was consumed by “people.” Roman patricians who lived off the sweat of slaves were people, and so were feudal landlords who gouged rents from the peasantry. I suspect it was “people” — evil people — who profited from the gold teeth extracted at Auschwitz.
The question is, which people? To whom does the wealth of monopoly corporations disproportionately flow? To the same people the profits of slave labor and the rents of feudalism went to, the people described by Adam Smith: “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
Fortunately for them, the masters have the mythology of “people’s capitalism” — in which corporate profits all go to 401k’s and pension funds and the economy’s owned by regular folks day-trading on the Internet — to reassure themselves they’re really not overgrown tapeworms at all. All that talk about injustice and unearned wealth is just “class warfare,” the “politics of envy.” Or as Romney sniffed, “There was a time in this country when we didn’t attack people based on their success.”
Romney’s own success bears some looking into. He’s running as the former CEO who — unlike Obama — understands “how the economy works.” See, he knows firsthand about the needs of the heroic businessmen who “create jobs.”
But in reality, Romney did everything by the same MBA playbook as Chainsaw Al and Bob Nardelli: Gut human capital, strip assets, hollow out long-term productive capacity to goose this quarter’s numbers and jack up share prices, then game your own executive compensation and dump the hollowed-out shell on some other scavenger. Romney, as an executive, was to downsizing what Typhoid Mary was to typhoid.
It’s natural that Romney should clutch at any pretext to see himself as something besides just another upper class twit who was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. Thanks to the gospel of Success, Achievement and Prosperity, the vile masters of mankind can keep telling themselves they’re not parasites after all; they’re just getting their due.
Translations for this article:
- Portuguese, Corporações São Pessoas? Hitler Também Era.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, Corporations are people?, University of Iowa Daily Iowan, 08/19/11
- Kevin Carson, Don’t pick on the rich. They worked hard for it, North Florida Herald, 08/18/11
- Max Anderson, Over the top, or par for the course?, Rochester, NY Democrat and Chronicle, 08/17/11
- Kevin Carson, Corporations are People? So was Hitler, Counterpunch, 08/16/11
Given you concede in Organisation Theory that corporations could probably arise under a genuine free market (all that would have to happen is for somebody to create a legally recognised procedure that would be widely copied) I assume you believe that the money in these corporations would be more likely to go to the workers?
Well written and to the point. Charges of “class warfare” and the “politics of envy” are alternative and effective means of controlling the behavior of the exploited without resorting to the high costs of sustained violence. The Randroids have mastered a similar violence free and low cost control technique through their emphasis on “natural rights” while ignoring the necessary connection to correlative “duties.”
Kevin, you swatted it out of the park, once again. But citing Hitler in the title just invites people to invoke Godwin.
Excellent rhetoric, wow; love it.
Genius. Anybody whose lived under the yoke of wage slavery will see the truth in this post. Fuck the pigs that think they 'earned it'.
Richard wrote:-
And all you need for a perpetual motion machine is some physical process that gives out more energy than it takes in. Are you sure Kevin Carson conceded that they could probably arise, with him assuming that that was a minor precondition, as opposed to that being a huge barrier with no great difficulty after that? My own view is that it takes a state framework to maintain the coherence of corporations that don’t have an internal dynamic of their own, i.e. that apart from special cases like monasteries, things that got called corporations would sooner or later be taken over (or apart) by the natural persons in charge, leaving only those natural persons.
PM Lawrence -Carson says the following:
"I can see nothing inherently nonsensical or repugnant in the
idea of a number of private individuals contracting to create a permanent corporate entity
separate from any or all of themselves as individuals, or of local free juries choosing to recognize
the standing of such entities under the body of libertarian law"
and follows it with: "The fact that the state makes establishing entity status
and all its accidents so much easier, by providing a ready-made and automatic venue for incorporation,
surely results in a considerable distortion of the market."
However, I don't see how private incorporation couldn't be easy and automatic once a legally recognised procedure became widely known. Other corporations would simply copy the first successfully created corporation.
Richard: Stipulating that the corporate form — a collection of individuals organized into a separate entity capable of acting as a legal person to form contracts and take legal action — would be prevalent in a stateless society, I think that with all forms of monopoly rent removed the sources of their income would be vastly different.
Steve: Sometimes a guy's just gotta dare 'em to invoke Godwin's Law.
Richard, you misunderstand my point. It is not that structures could not be formed and get called corporations, but that – without a state structure surrounding them – only those few with an internal dynamic of their own would hold together indefinitely (I mentioned monasteries as ones that could). I suspect that most would vanish quite quickly, as soon as their assets and resources could be taken over by natural persons in a position to do that; that’s what happened to the Teutonic Order of Knights as soon as the Reformation destroyed its raison d’etre.
That’s the “entity” side of things. I do not believe that any contract or mutual arrangement could confer limited liability on a whole structure anyway, vis a vis outside, non-contracting parties. The nearest I have been able to work out is a partnership structure in which some partners lie low and interact with the firm via anonymous, transferrable bearer shares; however, these would only be able to do that while they kept that anonymity, so active and managing partners would remain accessible – and, without those, the firm would fail.
Wow. What a weak take on the episode.
First off, Carson, you understand neither the heckler nor Romney's point. Nobody was arguing whether corporations are good or bad overall (although, undoubtedly, Romney thinks they're good while the heckler thinks they're bad), the "debate" is over whether they're people, and as such, have the same rights as people. So your reference to Hitler misses the point entirely. Yes, everybody thinks Hitler was a bad guy. But he was also a person, and as such, he had the same rights as all other people, up until the point he chose to violate the rights of others.
As an aside, this brings me to Bolo's pathetic comment: "The Randroids have mastered a similar violence free and low cost control technique through their emphasis on "natural rights" while ignoring the necessary connection to correlative 'duties."
– Nonsense! "Randroids" don't ignore anything. If somebody has a natural right to life, liberty and property, then the correlate duty is that they can't infringe on another's life, liberty or property. Nobody argues otherwise.
Anyway, Romney's point was that corporations are people because the money in them belongs to real people, and those people should then hold all the property rights as people who's money is held in non-corporate entities (including…donating it to a political campaign…which is what this is all about, really).
What you lefties should be focusing on is limited liability, which is a perversion of the market. Any property owner has to be responsible for what he does with his or her property. No exceptions. And yet, limited liability isn't even mentioned in this piece. Instead, all you do is stroke the fires of class envy. Why? Why take that route when you have an incredibly strong rational argument against the current corporate structure? One which somebody like Romney would find near impossible to worm his way out of without appealing to utilitarianism (it just works better! – an argument which can be defeated).
The only reason I can figure is because you don't really care about limited liability, you just have a problem with large accumulations of wealth in general, even when it's earned legitimately through voluntary association. If that's the way you feel, and I believe it is, then so be it. But if so, you're no "Mutualist" under any definition of the term. Which is ironic (and sad), given that your whole blog is devoted to accusing others of misrepresenting themselves.
KPres, please provide some examples of people (corporate or otherwise) who have “large accumulations of wealth” that they “earned legitimately through voluntary association”.
If possible, also indicate what percentage of the super-wealthy have earned their wealth this way.
Or, if that’s too much trouble, just consider this: has anyone in recent years accumulated enough money to be considered a part of the “economic elite” without significant state support? Is such a thing even possible?
Carson, you breathe. Do you know who used to breathe too? Hitler!!!