Mentally I feel like I'm swimming in cement that's about 80% set. It's so much easier to come up with cogent thoughts when you don't have all of this mental taxation going on...
Last night we got together and watched Roger & Me. Ebert did a nice review of it a couple years back that you can find here.
The general sentiment of the movie is that big corporations owe their employees something. Being a good heartless capitalist and a supporter of the mindset of a heartless company, I tend to take a bit of issue with that sentiment, and the train of thought goes a bit something like this:
1) Corporations exist solely to make money (if you disagree with this, one wonders why else a corporation would exist)
2) Employees are resources to this end
2a) Happier employees are generally more productive employees and thus better assets
3) When employees are grossly more costly than their counterparts in another nation who will do the same work for 50% less, it behooves you to do something about this
3a) Go into this knowing this action will make the current employees that you keep unhappy
3b) Even so, this will probably be an acceptable cost against the benefits gained
4) A corporation should exist in a near-virtual moral vacuum: in the end, the only thing that matters is making money
4a) if you disagree with this, cease spending money on said company and divest yourself of its stock... if enough people agree, the company will change the position... again, to make money
5) In the end, the corporation should always bow to the almighty dollar: the reason for its being
Entities that should resist unchecked capitalism to care for the people: government, church
The fact of the matter is that while I generally don't like the government's interference in these matter, the simple truth is that the government ought to be ensuring the safety of its citizens to stay employed rather than be layed off and replaced by citizens of other countries. I'm not sure how much action this will take and where it plays into the balancing act, the fact of the matter is that a company shouldn't be taking a loss or losing out on profits just to make people feel good about themselves. If they're doing that, they're not really a capitalist corporation after all... they're selling themselves and their stockholders short.
And now... because the concrete needs a bit of loosening...
Disturbed Link of the Day: Dave's World
Posted by Vengeful Cynic at November 3, 2003 04:43 AM