Big Government

Big business wants you to fear and despise big government.

Big business has spent at least forty years sponsoring relentless, big-budget campaigning on behalf of this idea.

The goal is to get voters to support stripping every every last smidgen of consumer protection from government, either through changing the laws or killing the budget for enforcement--preferably both.

A second goal is to get government to outsource as much as possible to for-profit enterprises.

The philosophical goal is to get people to believe that the highest motivation for human behavior is the desire for profit.

What big business doesn't want you notice is that the goal of big business is to replace free market capitalism with monopoly/crony capitalism.

And people believe the myth of business efficiency in face of so much evidence to the contrary.

For example: General Motors built the NUMMI plant in Fremont California as a collaboration with Toyota, so GM could learn to build cars the Toyota way. And GM did learn. The problem is that it took GM thirty years to learn, at which point it was bankrupt.

Another small example: at one large corporation I worked for, buying PCs was the responsibility of one department; using and maintaining them was the responsibility of another. So of course the depart in charge of buying them bought crap computers that couldn't do the job and weren't reliable. Pervasive bureacratic illogic like this reduced company profits and competitiveness in many areas.

And the profit motive is often false anyway. Corporate compensation experts will tell you that executives demand gigantic salaries not because they can even spend that much money--but because they're competing with other CEOs to see whose male organ is the biggest, and it's measured by the size of their salaries. This is less profit-seeking than it is hubris.