
The Folly of Corporate Capitalism
No one stands in line for long when others strong-arming their way forward are grabbing all there is. A free-for-all breaks out. Soon everyone is grabbing, not what he needs, but all he can.
In colonial North America, that was no problem. A free-for-all was just what was wanted. An entire continent had to be cleared of its indigenous tribes. After that came the continent itself with its endless resources to be plundered. Land for those who wanted it stretched to the horizon. Any competition was with the elements. Each contestant faced an existential test to muster the stamina, strength, and courage required to carve a life for self and family out of a wilderness that stretched forever.
According to 17th century thinker John Locke, that was just how it was meant to be. God had given the world’s bounty to all men1 in common, endowing them with the intelligence “to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience.”2 Clearly, this directed each savage to help himself. Now, God didn’t expect everyone to help himself to everything at once. That would be a free-for-all on steroids. Instead, each savage was to pluck from the common good that portion he required to survive. Withdrawing that portion from the common good required his labor. That investment of labor made the object his to do with as he saw fit. Considering the Earth’s bounty, the paucity of savages, and their modest appetite, there was enough to go around. No free-for-all was dreamed of.
A grievous flaw in Locke’s concept of private property sprang from the narrow understanding of the world European philosophers had at that time. The common good God gave man included, in Locke’s eyes, all the Earth contained. Locke thus breezily extended legitimate human acquisition from items clearly required for subsistence to a sphere that embraced Earth’s “inferior creatures,” flora, rock, and resources. Up for grabs, Locke believed, were turtle populations, buffalo herds, estuaries, rivers, the seas themselves, as well as mineral deposits whose reach beneath the Earth could not be guessed.
The single, critical constraint Locke imposed on man’s rightful conquest of the Earth’s riches was personal necessity. Acquisition of property was to include only what the savage required for comfort, convenience, survival. Anyone who gathered more acorns than he could put to use Locke censured. Removing from the common good what a man then let rot, Locke stated, was wrong.
Locke’s notion of need was nincompoopery. A savage might be content with subsistence, but that would satisfy no modern man.
Around Locke’s time, capitalism emerged to expose the foolishness of the eminent English philosopher’s assumptions. To begin with, Locke’s notion of need was nincompoopery.3 A savage might be content with subsistence, but that would satisfy no modern man. What roused the mind from its primitive lethargy was the prospect of gain. The strongest, quickest, and brightest among us shake off the sloth of centuries when given leeway to grab, not the paltry amount his finite person might digest, but more than one could imagine to stoke an enterprise. Limits, the ethos warned, stultify human incentive. It is opportunity that heats the blood and quickens the pulse of entrepreneurs.
Capitalism also instructed that indulging self-interest was when humans focus their energy most effectively. Allow them to keep the fruits of their commerce, and human ambition will accomplish the unimaginable. And finally, limits to growth itself must be eliminated. The prospect of personal gain is key to human incentive, and gain by definition exceeds yesterday’s capture. To ensure incentive did not dry up, growth was to be hard-coded into the capitalistic enterprise. Though such a mandate might strain the common good, civilizations would flourish as a result, and had.
As necessary as the incentive of perpetual gain may be to inspire human enterprise, it presents problems. First, the “common good” human enterprise taps into to achieve endless gain is itself finite. Licensed to scorn limits, the modern agro-business depletes the groundwater of entire river basins. Mono Lake nearly disappeared to flush toilets in the City of Los Angeles. Mining companies dynamite peaks off mountains to get the coal inside. Glistening fish bodies trawled from thinning seas remain heaped unwanted in windows of upscale fish shops at day’s end.
Besides drawing from a pool of limited resources, industry’s customers are of finite capacity. America can’t smoke enough to swell Big Tobacco’s sales year over year. The food industry is losing its addicts to heart disease, diabetes, obesity. Pharmaceuticals’ most fervent customers are dying from opioid overdoses. Residents dwelling near petrochemical refineries contract cancer at three times the national rate. In the face of casualty and distress, be they ever so great, industry must maintain its iron-clad commitment to growth. But how?
As the number of smokers decreased due to heightened awareness of smoking’s dangers, Big Tobacco injected its cigarettes with a chemical cocktail that made them more addictive.
The tobacco industry blazed the way with a stunning solution. Lie, beguile, and kill. As word circulated that its products might be carcinogenic, it launched a decades-long campaign denying what its own research had determined: a link between smoking and cancer. To secure its future, the industry kicked off a robust marketing initiative to hook schoolboys. The younger they started, its research found, the more likely they would become lifelong smokers, the length of that life apparently irrelevant. As the number of smokers decreased due to heightened awareness of smoking’s dangers, the industry injected its cigarettes with a chemical cocktail that made them more addictive. While the sheer numbers of smokers declined, the rate of death increased.4 We can only assume Big Tobacco’s focus on growth gave it no other choice but to launch such initiatives.
Finding itself up the same creek, the fossil fuel industry is using the same paddle: spilling its bloated wealth into opposition research, phony think tanks, “expert” climate change deniers,5 bogus studies, and slick propaganda to keep us supporting, suffering, and dying in a kettle on the simmer due unabated greenhouse gas emissions. As with Big Tobacco, Shell has no choice. One higher-up explained that Shell knew better than anyone how to transform the industry to benefit the public and should retain control in order to do so, thus reassuring the trustful who waited while Shell attended to nothing other than pursuing its growth objectives by continuing undeterred to drill, frack, refine, and combust the fossil dregs it flushed out of the Earth’s exhausted innards. Agro-industry follows suit, maintaining its projected rate of growth while downplaying the rising numbers of morbidly obese. As opioid overdoses continue, pharmaceuticals explore other potent marketing avenues.
Undaunted by the passage of life, corporations need not assume blame for human mortality. How could they? Corporations are not, to contradict what our courts would have us believe, people. But we always knew that. They have no lifespan, no identity, no consciousness, no memory; feel no pain; have no moral compass or sense of remorse; cannot choose, vote, or stand trial for murder; have no appetite and therefore cannot be sated. They can be neither daunted nor shamed. They are complex, sterile processes, conceived by entrepreneurs; composed by engineers and economists; animated by marketeers and laborers to grow off the sole substrate available: the Earth and its populations. Without deterrent, lacking inhibition, these processes rake the Earth’s crust, its bowels, its seabeds to siphon off the grist, living and dead, from which wealth is threshed out for the industrialists who enter the yield into their balance sheets as merely the measure to exceed in the coming year.
In guiding their respective corporations to success and garnering inconceivable riches for themselves, the names of these moguls have become synonymous with greed, excess, cruelty, waste, and indifference. The pollution from their refineries is not theirs to clean up. The incidence of black lung among West Virginia coal miners has nothing to do with them. Post-acute care patients are dropped from health coverage by the insurer’s AI. The wealth captured from their delinquencies, however, is all theirs and with it, the coveted aggregation of power.
The solution is simple enough: set limits on corporate intake, output, revenue, profit, and hence power. A democratic government representing the welfare of the people has the authority to do that. As the constituents of that democracy, we need only make known our disapproval of the misguided political support for this deadly presence among us and demand it end. What could possibly interfere with so clear a directive from we the people? Surely not corporate propaganda.
- Yes, men. Locke did not say women or people or humans or citizens. ↩︎
- The Two Treatises of Civil Government, “On Civil Government,” Book II, Chapter V: Of Property, §. 26, John Locke, 1689. ↩︎
- Origin of nincompoop unknown. First known use, 1673, when John Locke was a strapping man of 41. Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, s.v. “nincompoop,” accessed December 23, 2024, https://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/unabridged/nincompoop. ↩︎
- https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/harmful-effects-tobacco/how-big-tobacco-made-cigarettes-more-addictive ↩︎
- Indeed, they are very expert at denying climate change. ↩︎