I believe that one of the government’s greatest responsibilities is to protect its citizens, the People that the Government is for, from the inhuman entities that rule most of society’s financial life. I speak, of course, of corporations.
On the whole, I support the principle of corporations. A corporation provides a means for a group of people to create and develop goods and services that can’t be done by individuals, even individuals trying to work together as a group. But they need to be watched closely, monitored and reined in at all times. Unfortunately, it appears that the group mentality needed to make a corp work overrides a lot of the individual cares and concerns that the government should be concerned with. There is plenty of historical precedent with the manufacturing industries, the rail industries, the mining industries, the shipping industries, the banking industries the insurance industries, the petroleum industries, the agriculture industries, the textile industries… Are there any industries that haven’t abused the group power of corporation?
At the simplest level, I think it starts when the person who hires an individual isn’t the one who pays the individual. The hirer is an agent for someone else and may have the power to hire/fire/promote/ individuals, even say how much they will be paid, but the wages come from somewhere else. This is the beginning of a corporation. At this point the worker starts to lose the ability to negotiate face to face with the persons ultimately in charge since the they are distant or a distributed group.
At this point, the government should be providing some oversight, ensuring basic employee rights and minimum wages.
Once a corporation is selling stock for public ownership the government should be monitoring these public companies to make sure they are not lying to the public and that they are following generally accepted accounting principles. As someone who worked for WorldCom, I really, really would have liked to see a little more oversight of public companies.
There are plenty of historical incidents that demonstrate that corporations do not act in the best long-term, or short-term, interests of the citizenry. And that Corporations will use their money to buy social and political influence to weaken whatever monitoring is in place.
Once the People have been badly burned and have put strait-jackets on corporations to prevent them from repeating the sins of the past, everyone starts to game the system and tries to come up with a strait-jacket work-around. What’s even more mind boggling is that these are individual citizens that are working to screw the rest of the country. Part of the game is to avoid taking responsibility for the negative impacts that the gaming will produce.
to be continued