Reading some of the corporate horror stories here should remind us that “manager” is not synonymous with “entrepreneur” as conservative activists and libertarians would have us believe. An owner/entrepreneur runs his company for long term viability and robust operation. He has pride in his work and his company. He seeks to keep his firm healthy and manageable, and growth is under control and carefully planned, not encouraged to explode in an undisciplined fashion.

A manager is a hired gun, a samurai, an employee. He is more concerned with his career than with operating a long-term profitable business. He wants a short-term profit to make himself look good and is always looking to jump to another job or another firm.

As business is collectivized, or transformed from owner-operated companies to publicly owned corporate outfits, what we are seeing looks and acts a lot more more like socialist bureaucracy than free enterprise.
People don’t own companies, stockholders own companies, and they normally don’t care what those companies do or how they work as long as they are profitable. When they cease being profitable, they take their money somewhere else.

To compound the problem, most stockholders aren’t people either, they are other companies, whose stock holders are still other companies, or funds. The whole concept of the corner business run by a citizen-entrepreneur is bogus, a quaint nineteenth century relic that is quickly disappearing, and usually only trotted out when required to justify the latest corporate piracy.

I’m amazed that more political conservatives have not made this observation. The problem with American capitalism is that it is no longer owner-driven, it is run by corporate commissars, dominated by mercenaries and loners who see companies as simply machines for generating profit, machines which they don’t feel any obligation to operate responsibly or to maintain properly. So they redline them till they seize up or burn out.

Since governments generally do what business wants, the laws and tax structure are lobbied into a configuration that makes this form of organization easier and even more profitable, so things just get worse. In an environment like this, nobody gives a fig for the individual worker. He’s just another piece of equipment to be run until he wears out, then discarded or replaced. Developing his skills or his value to the company doesn’t matter, it is easier to just replace him when his maintenance costs get too high, or even better, to modify the business model so the worker is not needed at all. And when the massive megacorporation eventually does succumb to market forces, it takes down whole communities and industries with it.

The traditional owner/entrepreneur cannot compete with these ruthlessly efficient bureaucracies, so he is shoved into marginal sub-markets and specialty businesses more and more removed from the market place that provides us with most of what we really need. We may meet our friends on Facebook but we go shopping at WalMart.
We’re on our own, folks. Things are not going to get any better.