The other day I caught a few seconds of one of the priapic prate-fests on the PBS “News Hour,” about what form the stimulus package for our slip-sliding economy should take. One of the gurus was saying something like, “If you give tax breaks to companies that were going to do the investments anyway, the extra money is just going to go into the corporate coffers.”
Which would be a bad thing because—don’t know, turned him off. Heard it all before.
I’m not a social planner, not a social engineer. I don’t view the question of whether persons should be allowed to keep more of their own money from the perspective of alleged omniscience about what they would do with their own honestly earned money if allowed to retain some greater proportion of it. Nor do I pretend they have a moral duty to spend any newly vouchsafed increment of that money in Peaceful Way X but not Peaceful Ways Y or Z.
I do know that the more of his own resources an individual is permitted to keep, the more of his own resources he then has and can then devote to his own purposes and priorities as opposed to those of planners and politicians giving orders based on what some idiots on PBS say.
We can go even further; for if one individual who is allowed to keep more of his own resources necessarily possesses more of said resources as a result of being thus allowed to keep them, it follows also that the more individuals get to keep more of their own resources, the more individuals get to keep more of their own resources. To achieve the same conclusion here that I did, all you need to do is you take the singular and make it plural, by combining units into a collection of more than one.
Since the group of all individual economic actors is nothing more than the aggregate of them—a combination of these counted individuals, as it were—it follows that if each money-earning individual in the collation is allowed to be better off vis-a-vis the keeping more of his own money for his own purposes and priorities type thing, then the sum total of these money-earning individuals would also be better off vis-a-vis the keeping of their money for their own purposes and priorities type thing. Indeed, suppose nobody at all were ever robbed. Then nobody at all would ever be robbed.
Now let us stipulate that the whole array of interdependent production and consumption of these money-grubbing economic actors constitutes what we call “the economy.” So if you want to “help the economy,” what you really want to do—especially if you regard “the economy” as being created by and consisting of individuals going about their cooperative economic pursuits as best they can, rather than as being nothing but a gigantic blob of stats to be chivvied and cajoled by idiots on PBS—what you really want to do is, you want to leave everybody alone.
That’s it. Leave the good persons alone who make the money and stuff and whatnot that make the economy go and who have every reason to secure and enhance their own individual economic health. And, goodness gracious, if you’re too addicted to obstruction and robbery to stop altogether, at least, you know, reduce the level and pace. At least tone it down a little.
Acknowledge that a group consists of individuals, and that mature adults are generally capable of independent, autonomous action, i.e., of working for a living; capable even of politely asking for help from family, friends and neighbors if they run into trouble instead of extorting it from them at the point of a gun. Acknowledge that market processes enable wealth and enjoyment of life and create the springboards to even greater wealth and enjoyment of life down the road, all of which the socialistic programs proposed by idiots on PBS would hamper if not destroy. Acknowledge that freedom and capitalistic profit-seeking do really “work,” whereas destruction of these does not “work” except from the perspective of scavengers painfully uninterested in what their actions will have spawned come the day after tomorrow.
Acknowledge that if you want the benefits of the economic freedom, you must actually safeguard the economic freedom. Acknowledge that if you want the benefits of the individual rights, you must actually respect the individual rights, including the rights of those who contribute to and manage “corporate coffers.”
What’s a “corporate coffer”? Why, it is nothing else but a morally suspect and tainted bank account of a morally suspect and tainted firm that has organized itself in a morally suspect and tainted legal format for morally suspect and tainted tax and legal purposes that the owners and managers believe are most conducive to certain productive purposes from which they can make money by selling things to persons who want those things. That’s right; instead of saying “To heck with life and all my hopes and aspirations” and shooting themselves in the head, the participants in the enterprise are cooperating to pursue productive ends with a view to benefiting themselves and others.
To be sure, some persons of some organizations, including some corporations, and maybe even some LLCs and sole proprietorships, do sometimes act badly, even criminally. Some individuals sometimes act badly, even criminally, even without the knowledge or support of an organization. Chronic error can happen as well. Sometimes, for example, persons pursue their plans within the confines of inertially coagulated cooperative structures that have become severely non-optimal with regard to the achievement of legitimate purposes, and so foster failure rather than success. Perhaps, in light of such considerations, in light of the possibilities of both viciousness and drift as well as goodness and excellence in the enterprises of mankind, it would be a good idea to retain both sanctions against criminality and respect for individual rights? Perhaps, in light of these possibilities, it’s not so good an idea to let idiots on PBS decide how one must allocate one’s own money in the pursuit of one’s own productive and consumptive goals? Perhaps one should not, after all, let the blackjack-wielding jackasses of the world tell one what to do?
In the moral parlance of those who have never recovered from the fact that economic freedom is productive and that there is no substitute for property rights and profit-seeking as a means of fostering individual and general economic well-being, the adjective “corporate” is a moral shorthand for “‘big and hence bad’ profit-seeker.” Sure, it has been proved a trillion times over that the working-for-a-living way of life is better than the bank-robbing or sitting-at-home-sucking-your-thumb way of life. But this immovable object lesson conflicts with the irresistible farcical notion that there is something morally suspicious per se in honest and intelligent pursuit of one’s own actual interests. It is presumed to be morally incongruent, not to say metaphysically tedious, that in order to survive, one must act to survive; i.e., that one must be selfish enough to employ relevant means in the service of one’s ends.
Well, okay, then, granted: one does have to survive, and one must perhaps make some genuine gestures on one’s own behalf to do that. But don’t go overboard, eh! Survive just a little, flourish just a little, and that is, perhaps, forgivable; one needn’t even be a fanatical Randian to concede that much. But, you know, have a little trouble paying the bills! Don’t be one of those fat cats!
On the other hand—to flourish fantastically, to do really, really well…to be a huge success? Why, that’s just wrong. Gotta be. Especially if large-scale capitalistic accumulation and expenditure are what’s most cardinally entailed rather than your standard-issue profoundly artistic splotches or certifiably sanctimonious PBS articulations. The world and human aspiration can be accommodated only so far; then the moral lever flips from Neutral to Evil, even if humanity in its billions could not exist without that “Evil.”
Sans such assumptions the pejoratives make no sense. Sans such assumptions, one could only wag one’s finger at the particular wayward actions of particular individuals or businesses, but not at corporate doing as such and even the very receptacles into which are deposited the revenue. Nor, sans such assumptions, would the implication be even semi-plausible that persons who abstain from creating businesses and jobs have not got anything to gain—like their very livelihoods, for example—from crediting and welcoming the self-interested actions of those who do.
