Your observations give me

moat — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 22:55:26 +0000

In reply to Agreed that Friedman and his

Your observations give me cause to start reading Marjorie Kelly.

I think some of the lack of current debate about the role of government comes from it being taken for granted by both those who promote it as the necessary agent of public interest and those who would drown it in a bathtub.

The first group (which I belong to) wants people doing certain work principally because it is establishes the idea that progress comes from people being responsible for why things turn out the way they are. The second group thinks that such people will still do all that without a structure to support their work or the power to influence results.

That is why I prefer Libertarians straight with no chaser. If society doesn't exist, then no need to apologize to anyone.

Agreed that Friedman and his

AmericanDreamer — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 17:49:11 +0000

In reply to The article misrepresents the

Agreed that Friedman and his views are not the issue here.

Lynn Stout forcefully challenges what appears to be a widespread view (very much reflective of my experiences, where this is taken as a given) that corporate decision makers have a fiduciary legal duty to maximize shareholder value in The Shareholder Value Myth.

Jeffrey Clements in Corporations Are Not People: Reclaiming Democracy From Big Money and Global Corporations, like Stout, also notes that corporations were initially conceived as being subservient to the (much smaller and less powerful then) governments that approved their charters, and were obliged to pursue public purposes. Wow how that has flipped almost completely to where corporations are viewed now as people entitled to constitutionally protected free speech rights, and organized groups of large corporations, in Senator Durbin's words about Big Finance and its relationship to the US Senate in our day, "run the place". So that pendulum has to swing back in the other direction.

Historically when there has been a widespread perception of overweening corporate power operating in ways contrary to the broad public interest, the debates have tended to be about whether to break up corporate entities viewed as too large and too powerful (in Big Finance this might be understood to correspond roughly to those enterprises viewed as "systemically important"), or regulate them and enforce vigorously with a governmental entity with enough power and capacity to do so effectively (with strong consumer protection, environmental, public and worker health and safety, and labor laws making it realistically possible for workers to form unions envisioned as reducing inequality extremes and addressing workplace-specific issues, as some examples)

In the twentieth century Louis Brandeis was more in the former camp. Theodore Roosevelt, although he also had a reputation (exaggerated, Mr. Wolraich has informed us) as something of a trust-buster, was mostly in the latter camp. The former camp tends to believe in "going small"--smaller enterprises so no actors or sectors are too powerful, and a government with just enough power to prevent too large concentrations of power and wealth, but not necessarily much more than that. The latter camp tends to believe that the answer to huge corporations with too much power and doing too much damage is to have a federal government large or any rate powerful enough to reign in their excesses through strong regulations, vigorously enforced, to protect the stakeholders who are being damaged by corporate excesses.

I might have missed them. But in our day we seem to be so far away from a concept of a federal government operating more in the broad public interest than not, not completely captured by dominant corporate interests, that these sorts of broad gauge discussions such as occurred in the first half of the twentieth century seem rarely even to occur. Where is the Brandeis vs. TR debate in our day, which might well also invoke different options from those debated in their day?

Marjorie Kelly's works emphasizes the dysfunctionality of shareholder capitalism, its frequent inattention or negative attention to the interests of other stakeholders and interests which need to be accommodated in order for reasonably well-functioning and sustainable human communities to exist--such as the environment, workers, consumers, families, communities, and future generations.

Kelly distinguishes between generative vs. extractive enterprises. The former are enterprises that seek to balance the interests of the broad range of impacted stakeholders. The latter are those which function in ways which tend to ignore or give inadequate attention to those other interests in the course of giving predominant attention to the interests of shareholders.

Kelly has done a lot of legwork investigating, reporting on, and providing assistance to different types of real-world enterprises which have come much closer to striking the sort of balance she views as necessary among all of the relevant stakeholders. She favors a bottom-up, build small approach, based on figuring out what works, gradually putting in place supportive public policy to expand or scale up those efforts. She used to work in the area of corporate philanthropy.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment, moat.

The article misrepresents the

moat — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 22:25:27 +0000

In reply to Davos Man is Nervous. He Should Be.

The article misrepresents the Milton Friedman factor. Enterprises were maximizing shareholder value before Milton showed up and will continue doing so after we all die. Friedman claimed that all this self interested profit seeking did serve a social end if nobody was excluded from capital markets and the free exchange of goods that they depend upon. That the system has lead to growing inequality of wealth and a shrinking number of people with control of resources suggests to me that the problem is not something enterprises can fix on their own. Not only because of their devotion to the production of profits but because it is not their job.

One could say that governments are the ones to develop desirable environments and maintain boundaries to restrain the power of corporations. Governments serve many masters, however. They extend the power of corporations at the same time they restrain them. The Communitarian argument that only local forms of sovereignty can counterbalance the excesses of Capital has merit. They at least directly consider the extreme disproportion of power between the parties involved.

dagblog - Comments for "Davos Man is Nervous. He Should Be."

Your observations give me

Agreed that Friedman and his

The article misrepresents the