Corporations- A Large-Scale Evil?-Dispatches from Outland pointed to an interesting Christianity Today piece that gave a too-glowing review of an agrarian conference at Georgetown College in Kentucky and the movement's leader, Wendell Berry. While the idea of moving to a smaller, more community-oriented economy has its appeal, the agrarians neglect the advantages of large-scale economic endeavors.
I just got back from lunch at a fairly authentic local Mexican restaurant, who delivers better quality food than Chi-Chis at roughly half the price. I type this from a small, human sized college campus, looking out on the commons building and a quad where cheerleading campers are practicing their routines. By that token, I am living the kind of life that the agrians would largely approve of.
However, I'm typing this on a computer that has a CPU made in California, a hard drive that was likely made in Malaysia and memory chips that are likely of Taiwanese origin while adjusting my watch made in the Philippines. A company in California is in charge of running Blogger, making this post possible. If we adopted an agrarian ethic worldwide, such technological advances would slow to a crawl, as it takes large organizations to develop and distribute such technologies.
If the agrarians are simply interested in setting up semi-communes, small towns where only small-scale commerce and farming is allowed, then they pose as much threat as the Amish. They can go off to their small town utopia and come out for the occasional hospital visit. However, if they want to force all of us to adopt their lifestyle,. then they are a threat to our economic well being, since we would likely stagnate at best on a technological basis and possible devolve back to a early-20th-century level if large non-governmental organizations were not allowed to exist.
Small-scale products aren't necessarily safer and of better quality. Modern quality control has produced better products, while safety procedures are often easier to implement in larger plants than in smaller facilities. True, a safety breech at a large plant effects thousands, but smaller safety breeches at smaller producers will case an equivalent about of damage overall but will be less newsworthy.
Large corporate landscapes do take away from neighborliness. However, what we lose in community, we gain in freedom. The forced independence of having to master a number of crafts in the agrarian model is replaced by a odd combination of economic independence and interdependence. We are interdependent on each other specialties, as I'm not a good auto mechanic or butcher, but the auto mechanic can't teach economics too well and the butcher doesn't have a Ph.D. in Finance. However, that interdependence allows us greater independence, as I can specialize, getting expertise in areas that I both enjoy and am good at.
Corporations are a vital part of a large-scale economy, for a small set of individuals will be hard-pressed to raise the capital needed to run a large-scale enterprise at a partnership level. One downside of large corporations is that responsibility becomes diluted. A company's primary interest is to maximize long-term profits, losing out on any moral advantages that a sole proprietorship or partnership would have. You can shame a single proprietor into changing policy easier than you can a big corporation, who is looking out after the stockholders' financial well-being, not their moral well-being.
People will look at corporate misdeeds and bellow "There oughta be a law!!" With good intentions to improve things, reformers will pass regulations that are designed to give corporations an artificial conscience. Frequently, the rigid structure of these artificial consciences makes it more bother than it is worth. The constrictive nature of the regulations will slow the economy, causing more pain than the behavior changes alleviate.
Yes, corporations are a bit more “evil” than proprietorships in and of themselves. However, the economic and technological gains that large-scale enterprises allow for far overwhelms the lack of moral accountability created by the corporation. These gains are unlikely to be duplicated in the public sector, as communist countries found out the hard way. People of the left should stop worrying and learn to love the corporation.
Recent Comments