Inefficiencies

“Business Is More Efficient Than Government”

Do you want to make my blood boil?  Just say to me business is more efficient than government.

What can “business'” do more efficiently than government?  Certainly business can be very efficient at producing waste.  Unrestrained by government they ravage the environment both by attempting to control the process of attaining resources in which unrestrained they leave littered  with dead bodies whose efforts are organized not efficiently to get the most efficient long-term effort from workers but to overuse, underpay and scatter lives to the wind as easily as they leave the environment bared for future use.

—That is if left totally unrestrained.  Only when government, and in this sense the climate for restraint does seem to improve with more democratically participatory governments, that actually force rules and regulations upon business do they reluctantly comply with any efficiency of less destructive waste.  Unmanaged waste is not only not inefficient, it is vilely harmful and demands in its own inefficiency even more waste and even less efficient use of its resources, either the resources it needs for production, or the resources it needs to do the labor business itself.---

This has not exactly always been true.  I speak quite a bit about kings.  We tend, from our perspective of living within kingdoms, to view all past leaders as having a king, a chief, or a dominator of the community.  So let me try to define a crucially misinterpreted difference.

A leader works in conjunction with the community and is extremely  concerned about efficient use of the labor of the community and the resources necessary for surviving within the community and ensuring the stability of both.

A king sets himself apart from the community, and the bottom line is wasting the people and the resources so he can be above both in his apartness.  Survival of neither the resources nor the people are primacy.  Let’s quit talking about fascist government and talk about kingish government.  Of course , in our modern society, there are varying levels of kingishness. And kings in modern society may not necessarily have an “official” seat at the table of government.  A king can be a business C.E.O just as easily as a titled leader.  An “elected” leader can rule as a king, after all no matter what we may call Putin, he is (even if corruptly) the elected president of Russia. 

But, okay, so what?,  could the kings of business succeed better, given their inefficiency, absent all government control, accomplish things somehow better, absent all-government interference actually accomplish more.  First, how is “accomplish more” to be defined? If it means producing ten blankets instead of one blanket, of course.  But in doing so are the ten blankets going to fray and wear out before the one?  If so then the one blanket was more efficiently  and better made.  Are the resources for ten blankets simply gathered to make the blanket that are not needed cast aside as waste?  Then it is less efficient  and less good because resources are wasted.  And were the ten blankets made by participation of the business leader or the command of the business leader?  If by command, then it is inefficient and less good because to profit without participation is, quite frankly, inefficient.  What role does the commandant of a business by commanding others to make the blanket have in the efficient creation of the blanket.  Would ten blankets not have been made without his command anyway, so exactly why does his non-participatory role become efficient? 

Here is what a free market means to me.  If there is a need or desire for blankets then that need is fulfilled by the blanket maker (alone) without the inefficient need of a commandant.  The commandant of the business does not make a plan to create exactly the number of blankets needed, he makes a plan to create more blankets than are needed and a plan to create a desire for more blankets by trying to convince others they need more than they actually might need. One way to do that is simply make them less durable and so people will continually need another blanket to replace the inefficiently made blanket.  The other method is to create what anthropologist David Greaber calls “bullshit jobs” whose prime role is not creating blankets, but supporting the commandant’s commands.  But bullshit jobs include even more.  An inefficient and unnecessary quadrant of those to promote the idea need to create a bullshit need for more blankets.  Of course this is inefficient.  Another entire bullshit job is those that contract blanket makers because their only bullshit position is to make the efficient blanket maker’s ability to freely sell his more efficiently made blanket more difficult and so he either has to sell to the commandant or sell for a much higher price than the commandant who now very inefficiently needs to create the merchant intermediary to sell the blankets who needs to inefficiently create a store because it becomes increasingly more difficult to find and then afford to purchase directly from the blanket maker because all the affordable blankets are sold in stores, and only the commandant and his most prized (highly paid) bullshitters have the means to directly buy from the blanket maker who creates the most efficiently made blankets. (And in all likelihood better blankets.) And now the middleman with the store controls the dispersal of the blankets and needs to exploit others by hiring them to manage his stores and then create another exploited workforce to man these stores who might have been able to make their own blanket or been able to directly contact the blanket maker nearby for the blanket needed.  And so the entire system of business is frankly bullshit because of its total inefficiency at every step along the way.

Now I don’t want to suggest that there are no bullshit jobs in government.  In fact, it consists almost entirely of bullshit jobs.  Food stamps, for instance, would be unnecessary if the farmer fed the blanket maker and the blanket maker warmed the farmer.  That would be the height of efficiency and it is the inefficiency of business that creates the need for the bureaucratic bullshit of the government.  But let us explore how business itself is created by government, could not exist without government, and is only created by governing classes that have separated themselves from any role in producing the needs of the community.  (An addendum at this point might be to suggest that all governing officials must continue to produce within the community and not govern apart from the community, that the governors be those who support the community’s survival from within their work in the community and not those who need to be “paid” by having a career beyond the community.  Certainly Red Cloud could not have led his community if he said “you guys go hunt the  buffalo and bring it back and feed me”).

Business, what was to become business, became such by kings who wanted bigger houses, cooks to produce savory and opulent meals, fancy silver (or some such) to consume the food and clothes of greater finery to set them apart from the community.  In order to create all of this for himself, he needed to find those who could control the laborers who really would have no incentive to build the king’s house without the overlords who were needed to be installed above them.  On the other hand, there were the craftsmen needed to be plucked from the community to design and make the finery the king wanted to illustrate his uniqueness.  But to establish this uniqueness, craftsmen were needed to control the flow of these crafts to the king and away from the masses and craft guilds developed.

And out of all of this did all modern business develop; the captains of business today are not just remnants but the direct and continued result of a few being allowed to control labor and directly profit by becoming controllers.  So providing for the necessary sustenance of the laboring community needed to be done with little concern over providing the proper sustenance and simply replacing the overworked and underfed workforce with even more overworked and underfed workers.  There is the illusion we sometimes have of the big strong Samson or John Henry laborer.  Not true.  Although little care was taken towards preserving remains of the laborers when they are found in mass graves we find emaciated, broken (but untortured) weakened skeleton remains and no evidence that any, even in Roman graves of several thousand peasant remains, that they lived longer than thirty years. No matter how hard one may have to work, bodies don’t go strong if they don’t have food.  

At the same time, these first captains of industry had no interest in preserving or finding other uses for the discards of their direct needs and excess was simply discarded instead of efficiently refashioned for other needs, as anyone who actually knows how to efficiently manage their resources comprehends.  That’s why a street might use a piece of cardboard for his blanket or dig in the garbage can for scraps.

So let’s take government completely out of business.  NO GOVERNMENT INVOLVEMENT.  This does not mean just no regulation.  This means no use of any knowledge that is gleaned from government supported projects like NASA, CRISPR, or in any government research lab.  No contracts from the government to business to make things like weapons or build bridges or highways.  No business contracts to build buildings on government supported universities.  The government bypassing all business and itself directly hiring all labor, etc.  And the government itself profiting from any invention or patent or toll that might have initially developed out of any of its sponsored programs.

Let’s go one step further, let’s say we get rid of regulation.  Just one example, no government regulation of the market. Let’s see. Who has continually asked the government to do so?. Who pushed for the regulations of the market?  The businesses.  Who wanted the first national bank?  It wasn’t some singular absurdity that drifted into Alexander Hamilton’s dreams one night.  It was his connections with the business world that had not been able to dig itself out of the hole separation from England had created, and wanted the new government to aid them.  As far as that goes, the states were competing with each other, and people were up in arms from and beginning to rebel against the states and the one purpose that was of all things most needed and understood by all of the delegates at the constitutional convention  was to get control and regulate interstate commerce.  Similarly who wanted slavery enshrined into the constitution if not those in the business of not just having slaves, but in transporting and selling them.  The business of slavery extended well beyond the mere use of them as labor.  Who begged the government to establish the FED if not business, principally J.P. Morgan, who felt he’d had to personally save the market after past crashes.  Who wanted the government to step in again after the economic shambles of the civil war?  Who complained to John Sherman of Ohio to do something about some businesses controlling entire markets that led to his introducing the first anti-trust legislation? And more recently, it certainly was not the people who lost their homes that wanted the massive bail-out of the banks and investors after the collapse in ‘08. 
Business always looks to government to help it recover from its own inefficiency which leads to it being unable to sustain its own inefficient waste; but not when it tries to make it efficient in terms of use of the resources or labor. 

Of course business is not more efficient than government, nor is it better than government, nor do businesses even exist separate from the government.Without any government support there would be no business as we know it, I would simply sell my blanket to you for my dinner.  And of course if you look at how much the government actually supports business via contracts and regulations that help business and how much tax business actually pays, the balance would be…the national debt.