Free Market Corporate Hypocrisy #
Sometimes I’m just kinda minding my own business and then I happen to read something and I have an epiphany. OK, not an epiphany. Call it a . . . crystallization of a thought. Something I’ve been pondering/thinking of/wondering about, and then it suddenly forms in my mind, the description of what’s been nagging at me. This time, unlike usual1, it was reading a Wired article about Intel setting up a Fab in Ohio2 that triggered the crystallization. As part of the article, it talks about the CHIPS act. “The CHIPS act,” you say, “what about it? Did it work? What is it? Wha…?”.
I don’t normally quote other sources, but this is the bit I read that stopped me and made me think:
Whatever happens at Intel, there likely will be talk of a CHIPS Act 2. Congress of course will ask whether CHIPS Act 1 worked, says Chris Miller, author of the book Chip Wars. “But I think also Congress is going to look at the international environment,” he says: China is already at the equivalent of CHIPS Act 5 or 6—with an estimated $150 billion in subsidies so far, and it’s probably much more than that.
And there you have it. There is no “Free Market”. Period. We’re done.
Yeah yeah, I hear you. But here’s what this tells me:
- Corporations are not left alone to do what the “Market Decides”3.
- Corporations want laissez faire policies toward anything that might interfere with what that corporation wants to do6.
- Corporations scream “foul play”, “unfair”, “there oughta be a law!” any time they see themselves harmed7.
It’s also pretty easy to see something similar going on in Politics. I don’t want to single out a political party, but the recent decree that H1B VISAs are REQUIRED because ‘Murica doesn’t have the edumacated masses needed to fill all the high-tech jobs’ comes to mind. Apparently8, while they hire “first-generation engineers over ’native’ Americans " it “isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit”. Good to know. See this slashdot article for other juicy quotes, including “you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country”. Apparently, the rapists and murderers flowing across our borders can just go to college and get a green card. I love it9.
So what’s going on? Well, clearly Corporations are duplicitous and hypocritical. “Don’t meddle in our business” is quickly followed up with “why aren’t you making the playing field level?” To be sure, “making the playing field level” here means “meddle in our business, but in our favor”, since no business would ever want a “level playing field” if they had an advantage.
Corporations have, and always will have, a need for regulation. Otherwise, you end up with child labor, wage theft, monopolies, price gouging/fixing, collusion, dead customers/innocent bystanders and other “bad” things10. “Bad,” in this case, is clearly in the eye of the beholder. What’s a few thousand dead people in India11 if you can sell more gallons of pesticide, or make it cheaper to produce?
The flip side to regulation is government funding (or, to use the more PC terms, “stimulus” or “investment”). That’s what the CHIPS act is. And I don’t think it’s wrong. I think nations can (and many should) do things to spur corporations into doing things in a certain way.
What I don’t believe in is nothing but carrots. You need the occasional stick, too.
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Usually it’s in the shower. Shower thoughts, doncha know. ↩︎
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I don’t generally read Wired online, so that link took a while to find. :-) Also, you probably can’t read it. ↩︎
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Or whatever term you want to use here. ↩︎
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Think bajillionaires. ↩︎
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Unless you think one entity meddling in another entity’s business is part of the “Free Market”. ↩︎
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Up to and including allowing them to shoot themselves in the foot. ↩︎
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Unharmed, period. Doesn’t matter what or why they were harmed. If they can think of a thing that would have prevented the harm, they want it. Except “Don’t hire dumb-ass CEOs”. That’ll never be banned. Instead, when the dumb-ass CEO screws up, they’ll expect a bail out. ↩︎
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OK, I had this in a footnote, but it got too long. ↩︎
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OK, to be clear, I DO NOT think people are “flowing” across our borders, I don’t think those that do are rapists and murderers, and, actually, I DO think, given the opportunity, damn near everyone coming into this country would love to go to college. But I’m a bleeding heart liberal. So says my friend. ↩︎
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To be clear, you still get these things even with regulations_. The only real differences is hopefully you can do something to corporations to either make them stop, or limit what they do, or make restitution in some other way. ↩︎