Sometimes rhetoric makes no sense, and when it makes no sense it seems no one questions it. The proclamation that “the free market will correct the problem” is spewed out any time there’s a suggestion to improve work conditions and make the work place more safe for employees of corporations. But nobody ever seems to ask why the market hasn’t yet corrected that particular problem.
Generally, conservatives use this line of bullshi…I mean rhetoric to say that government should not put any type of mandate or regulation on corporations. The corporations know best how to run things. But the larger the corporation, the less valuable each of its workers are to them, therefore the less harm they would incur if they lost one of their workers for any reason. The worker may just quit, or the worker may get injured or killed. So improving safety or any general conditions for their workers does not fall into their priorities when they’re “running things”.
In contrast, small businesses value each of their workers because they have fewer of them. Very small businesses often have employees that are invaluable to them. I am one of these small business owners. Although it’s harder for me to afford to treat my one main employee well, I do it anyway — partially because it would be even harder to afford replacing him. I also do it because I’m a human being. But still, as far as it being in the best interest of my small business, the better I treat him, the more loyal he is to us. He takes pride in our company and goes over the top in performance. He feels some ownership.
I mentioned that a large corporation would not incur much harm if they lost one of their many employees even because of injury or death. You may have thought, ‘No, they would prevent the DEATH of one of their employees’. That’s because you’re a human being and assume they are too. You’re mostly correct in thinking so. But even as recently as a few years ago you would not have been. In some cases there has been neglect in worker safety that has caused death.
The first formations of workers’ unions was in reaction to corporations’ complete disregard for workers’ safety even when that lack of safety was causing many deaths. Corporations had to be forced to prevent workers’ deaths. The free market place had no interest in correcting those problems. Because making working conditions safe would cost them money.
Doing things like pulling oil, precious metals, or coal from the depths of the earth are daunting and dangerous tasks. Blowing tunnels through mountains to build railways across the entire country, building massive dams to block and hold millions of tons of water, and building canals are daunting and dangerous tasks. And the stories of the deaths of the desperate workers who signed on to work for the large corporations who managed those feats are so grim that most people would not even believe them today.
But the free market did not raise those standards on their own. The free market was pulled kicking and screaming into doing so by the outcry of the workers, who unionized and put pressure on the United States Federal Government to do so by means of regulation. This is a prime example of President Lincoln’s proclamation that the U.S. Federal Government is of, for, and by the people — in this case those people being the workers of America.
Lincoln was the first president to heavily advocate for a nationwide infrastructure, and he knew such a thing would not be possible without growing the size of each individual community. At first, each small town pooled their efforts to help build a larger and more prosperous community. They worked together in Boston for instance, in agreeing that when there was a fire that many bells around the town would ring, everyone would gather water however they could, find the fire and help put it out. They would extinguish the fire together, because a fire could hurt more than just the home or business that was on fire — it could spread across the whole town.
There were also agreements between marketplace business owners to pool their resources to plan the main thoroughfare, and to figure out how to prevent the water from making people sick which lead to the first sewage plans. This lead to regulation…That’s right — REGULATION of the local businesses. When they figured out how to make a stove chimney safer, they would mandate…that’s right– MANDATE that businesses comply to this new fireproof standard.
Standards such as these became commonplace throughout the self-governed colonies, which turned into states, and by the time Lincoln was president it was apparent that commerce would greatly benefit from federal standards and funding. He created the first federal income tax in order to pay for the federal military to afford the civil war. But this tax would also allow the building of interstate roads and transcontinental railroads.
Lincoln was hated for creating the federal income tax by the conservative southerners who were prospering because of their slave labor. He, along with his secretary of state, William Seward, who many thought would be the first Republican President instead of Lincoln were known as liberals because they believed in assistance from the federal level of government in order to improve the country’s standard of living and national commerce.
Although Lincoln was killed before his policies could really gain a foothold, his liberal notion of pooling together resources from the whole country is what lead to government land subsidies to railroad companies, and other government support in the form of labor and funding in order to do so.
In Lincoln’s time, corporations supported the liberal Republicans because they needed those government subsidies. The mostly southern conservative Democrats of the time despised him because they wanted the smallest possible form of government – state government, or even smaller. They despised being regulated by the federal government to discontinue the use of slave labor.
This is how the Republican party got hitched to large corporations. By the time the workers stood up and demanded their rights to not die on the job, the Republicans had to stick with the corporations because by then the corporations were supporting their campaigns. The Republican politicians were forced to become conservatives, meaning not wanting any change and sticking to the status quo, because by that time the corporations had become financially self-sufficient. They got what they needed so now they no longer wanted the government to step in.
In what would become a many-decades shift, because of corporate influence the liberals shifted from one party to the other and the conservatives did the same. The corporations needed help from a liberal federal government until they were self sustaining. After that, they wanted the federal government to shut the hell up. No change…conservative.
The Republican Party, although well intentioned and perhaps because their first strong leader was snuffed out too soon, became too indebted to outside interests. And some of those outside interests have remained the same powerful ones to this day. The conservatives are currently being held hostage by the NRA, and the NRA is being held hostage by gun and ammo manufacturers, aka large corporations.
It’s reasonable to think that large corporations would observe the value of human life. But you’re incorrect in assuming that they actually do. The free marketplace only holds humanity as a priority in relation to the size of the marketplace entity. The larger the corporation, the less regard.
Still think the free market will correct the problem? They haven’t yet, and obviously the problems are still here while the free market has had ample time to correct them.
