Free market chaos from mom and pop markets? The free market chaos I see are all from big corporations who disrupt entire cities as they layoff and move offshore, or who disrupt traffic and neighborhoods by their placement of stores or plants, or who wield their power to lobby for pollution or other benefits for themselves against the good of the people.
> for big cities rather
> than small podunk towns (and their insular mentalities),
So some perception of yours about prejudice or less worldliness of small town people offsets the benefits of localized production?
> government
> planning, balance of power, due process and protection of unpopular
> minority rights rather than populist mobilization. I am with John
> Kenneth Galbraith who viewed big corporations more favorably than
> small market players, and, for that matter, Karl Marx who saw
> "capitalism" (i.e. industrialization and institutions it created)
> as a great universalizing force overcoming the vestiges of
> feudalism, backwardness and the idiocy of the rural and small town
> life.
This surprises me coming from someone living in Baltimore. I used to work at JHU and have friends in the city, one who was mugged. You can live in the good neighborhoods, but they are targets of crime. The gangs are getting bad. This sort of thing rarely happens in the less crowded regions and small towns, where people know each other and look out for each other (and each other's kids), where the inequities of the large cities aren't so pronounced. I much prefer our "backwardness."
> Like Marx, I do not want to destroy capitalism and replace it
> with a populist podunk utopia of one sort or another - I just want
> that its benefits are extended to as many people as possible,
> rather than to a narrow elite.
But that is what "free market" is. Whatever the market will bear, be it the stock market, the consumer market, or the labor market. If the employer who offers poor pay and lousy benefits still has people beating down his doors wanting to become his employees, why should he raise salaries or benefits? When the demand for jobs is higher than the supply of jobs, the employers call all the shots.
If you started a business and started hiring employees, would you offer them more than whatever it took to get them to work for you? Would you want to be forced to pay a higher minimum wage to them? Would you want to be forced to pay higher taxes from your business's productivity to fund "deadbeats?" We must see both sides of the issue here.
One real answer is to start shifting the quantity of employees over to becoming employers. Make more employees into employers. There are too many employees and not enough employers. Incentives to small business is critical here. The size that corporations should be allowed to become before they can no longer merge with one another is another possible consideration. Break apart large corporations into functional units to allow smaller business to compete more readily. Quit favoring large corporation with accounting and tax loopholes and lobby power not available to small business. Even the playing field. It will take political action that will be opposed by big corporations, but it can succeed because it is obviously better for all the people.
On Friday 15 April 2005 11:30 am, Doug Henwood wrote:
>Such a business will have to compete with capitalist enterprises, so
>all the pretty intentions of the founders of your enterprise will be
>under enormous pressure to shape up. Marx says somewhere that
>competition is like the drumbeat that says, "March! March!" I'm not
>one to get scriptural with Old Whiskers, but he had a point there.
Yes, and it is worse because there are so few incentives provided to small business and so many to large business. But the numbers of small business is climbing nonetheless, as are the numbers of co-ops. Co-ops have some tax advantages I believe, and seeing how they are increasingly successful, there is a real opportunity here. Small business employs more than half the people in the US.
As for employee owned business, It has been shown that when employees have more financial stake in the operation beyond just salary, there is better, more honest worker desire to succeed that is not seen in traditional capitalist employer relationships. The carrot always motivates better than the stick and the business product quality and worker morale is generally superior as a result.
On Friday 15 April 2005 06:08 pm, John Adams wrote:
> I've got a good friend back home in Arkansas, David, who makes tofu.
>When he first moved to Arkansas, back in the early seventies, he
> began the first of many attempts to form a co-op to own and run the
> business. Tofu was only a part of it at that time--they did baked
> goods, trail mixes, preserves and jellies, even opened a cafe in
> the local co-op warehouse. Thirty years later, he's still making
> tofu, all by himself and whatever spot labor he needs to hire from
> time to time. Despite the fact that he's got a salable product and
> the fact that he's a really good guy to work with, he's never been
> able to get the business running as a co-op (or the auto repair
> self-help thing he abandoned earlier).
He's still one less employee in the ranks and is responsible for occasional employing. It is hard to expand and many failures happen to be sure. My brother is running a vacuum pump repair business and has built up quite a few private and gov't contracts in the last 5 years of running his own business. He pays his son-lin-law to answer the phones, do all the computer stuff and paperwork, preparing invoicing, etc., while he's running around in the van and personally doing all the actual repair work. He needs help in turning wrenches so that he can spend more time in sales, but he doesn't trust people enough to turn them loose and he feels his operation is too tight now to take the risk. He tells me how he often feels like the weight of the world is on his shoulders and how sometimes it would be real nice to just go back to the safe 9-5 world of working as a wage slave with so few headaches. I can so easily understand how he feels.
>It was the theory of the late seventies and early eighties that we'd
> be able to build the new society within the shell of the old, blah
> blah blah, by building co-ops. Turned out people liked their
> organically certified food more than they liked their democracy and
> their worker-controlled businesses.
It was the theory of us hippies in the 60s and 70s that a self sufficient lifestyle on the land would help contribute to peace and social equality in the world. These theories are right. Our approach to it was lacking. We homesteaders found out that it was too hard for small families to make it on the land. But there were larger communities that did succeed and are succeeding like Twin Oaks in Virginia and other communities around the country and the world. What I see as neccessary is for all of us who have tried these alternatives of various forms to get together, discuss what we found to work and what didn't work and come up with new approaches. I can only imagine what the amazing and diverse talent I see on this list could come up with if we tried...
--tully