Aaron Regunberg: Reform the Business Sector in 2012
Friday, December 23, 2011
Earlier this week I had a conversation with a friend about whether Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital, a venture capitalist firm that—under Romney’s leadership—engaged in a series of corporate buyouts that resulted in massive employee layoffs, would be a major liability for him in the 2012 presidential campaign. I insisted that making a profit by eliminating hardworking Americans’ jobs is disgusting, and that voters would punish Romney for it. My friend disagreed, arguing that people would accept these actions because, in his words, “business is business.” We didn’t reach an agreement, but that line—business is business—really stuck with me. In fact, over the last few days I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.
What I find so troubling about this idea is that when we say things like “business is business,” or one of the dozens of other phrases we have in this country that conveys similar logic, what we are essentially saying is that people should apply a different set of morals to the business world than they do to the non-business world—that it’s okay for folks to do things that are really wrong, as long as they’re doing them in order to increase profits. How else can we explain the fact that Mitt Romney, who destroyed the livelihoods of countless American families, can get a pass for those decisions simply by saying—as he did at the most recent Republican debate—that that’s just how the market works?
Because here’s the truth (and it’s a truth that we do a great job of obscuring with our “business is business” talk): the market is just a metaphor. It’s not an all-knowing entity, it’s not a giant unseen hand, and it’s not—despite the parallel ways we often talk about it—god. It’s simply a convenient shorthand for a series of decisions that people make regarding production, consumption, and exchange. To repeat, that’s decisions that people make. People, not the “market.” To update an old cliché, the market doesn’t hurt people, people hurt people.
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But we’ve been led to lose sight of this, and it’s been incredibly destructive to our society. It’s meant that folks like Mitt Romney can make decisions that cause incredible suffering and harm to others in order to make money for themselves, and not get blamed for those decisions! It’s meant that people can do terrible things and then cast all responsibility for those terrible things on a conveniently made-up, five-fingered metaphor. It’s meant, in short, that businessmen can get away with murder.
And they have been. What else can you say when health insurance companies—prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act—refused to cover people with preexisting conditions, leading to their deaths; when automobile manufacturers knowingly produce cars with safety defects; when factories emit poisonous gases that cause asthma and mercury poisoning in children; when banks evict people from their homes to freeze in the streets; I could go on for a while, but you get the point. People in business make decisions every day that go against all of our society’s most fundamental moral principles—to the point of literal murder—and yet they are almost never held accountable. Somehow, we have developed a two-tiered value system with one set of ethics for most of America and one set of “business ethics” for corporate America. We’ve created a society in which businesspeople are expected to behave morally in the mornings, evenings, and weekends, but are completely free to do sickening things to their fellow human beings as soon as they step into their offices.
This double standard doesn’t make any sense. To dispel it, we need to do two things. First of all, we need to denaturalize the “free” market. When we talk about the market we sound like ancient Greeks talking about Zeus or Poseidon, or, more appropriately, like the Aztecs talking about their gods. Our society doesn’t have the giant temples or the bloody sacrificial knives, but the logic is essentially the same: if the market demands human sacrifice—in the form of layoffs, wage depression, environmental degradation, etc.—well by gosh we must deliver, and don’t blame the corporate decision-makers (our modern-day Aztec priests). They’re just appeasing the neoliberal behemoth. It’s the market that demands efficiency, they say, not us.
We need to see this for what it is—self-interested hypocrisy. Markets are not god-like natural systems; they are man-made creations shaped by specific legal and social rules that are designed to advantage some and disadvantage others. They are not open bazaars in which people meet as equals to hash out economically rational exchanges, because all of the political, cultural, and economic power relations that exist between different actors in the rest of society also exist in the supposedly “free” market.
Intolerable Business People
Which brings us to our second necessary task: we have to stop thinking of economic actions as existing separately from every other aspect of our society. We have to dispel this concept of distinct business ethics, and throw out all of the distorted ways of looking at the world that allow corporate decision-makers to obscure their own culpability in the harmful decisions they make. For example, take the concept of the “negative externality,” which, as everyone who has ever taken an introductory economics course knows, refers to the “extra social costs of economic actions that are incurred by a party who did not agree to the action causing the cost.”That doesn’t sound all that bad, but put it into normal words and it just means, “We’re going to dump this poison into your drinking water because it’s the easiest way for us to make the most money.” If you get mugged, we don’t say you incurred a negative externality as the result of another economic actor making a strong profit—we say “That guy just mugged you!” and then we chase the thief down and try to get him arrested. We need to stop using euphemisms like “negative externalities” that make the destruction reaped by business people seem more tolerable.
Instead, it’s time for us to start recognizing these kinds of actions for what they are: morally unacceptable. Just because Verizon can slash the wages of its already-struggling workers doesn’t mean it’s an okay thing to do; just because bank CEOs can kick veterans out of their homes while giving themselves fat bonuses doesn’t mean we shouldn’t blame them for it just as much as we’d blame a non-corporate villain for engaging in such blatantly selfish and destructive behavior. This holiday season, as we think about what values we believe in and where we want to see our nation go in the next year, let’s make a commitment to hold the people who control our economy to at least the same moral standards we subscribe to in our own lives.
Let’s pledge to see one world in which everyone has to play by the same rules.
Because that will be a far better world than the one we have created for ourselves now.
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