I Love Corporations
Here's something I don't understand. It looks to me as if there is quite a lot of distrust and hostility toward corporations, especially large corporations, compared to other people and organizations. I put "compared to..." in there, because I could understand it if people were just distrustful in general (maybe that's an evolutionary adaptation, whatever). But it seems as if people are much more distrustful of corporations than they are of (a) the government, (b) people they know in their personal lives.
It seems that way to me, from comments that students periodically make, comments I see on the internet, etc. You hear conspiracy theories about the corporate elite running things, vague complaints about how the "system" is "rigged"; you see corporate villains in TV shows and movies, in which the heroes are usually government agents (cops, government spies, etc.) Of course, libertarians are way more distrustful of the government, but libertarians are a small fraction of society. The rest of society, with non-libertarian political views, is more distrustful of corporations.
This is weird to me, because of the three groups, (a) government, (b) individuals in ordinary life, and (c) corporations, (c) appears to me to be by far the best behaved, the most beneficial, the smallest threat -- and in ways that should be readily apparent to us.
There must be a lot of people who will be incredulous that I could possibly say such a thing. So let me explain what I mean.
Personal Experience
I would initially expect most people's attitudes to be pretty closely tied to their personal experience, more so than their book learning or what they hear on the internet. Now, I have had personal experience with individuals, corporations, and government. All three are, of course, sometimes unsatisfactory. But my experience with large corporations is way better than my experience with either individuals or government -- better from the standpoint of my ending up feeling satisfied, or being made better off by interacting with them.
It looks to me as if there are a good number of asshole individuals out there -- a lot of people are just very self-centered, not good at and not interested in seeing anyone else's perspective, not particularly interested in being fair, rational, or moral. Anyway, there are few people from whom one can gain much value. Now, those same people are of course in corporations, including management positions. So you might anticipate that they would cause corporations to act like assholes too. But, as far as I have been able to directly observe, the situation is quite the reverse.
The customer experience
Customers of big corporations are often unreasonable and disagreeable, and the company puts up with it and bends over backwards to make the customers happy. Example: I buy a product at a big chain store, take it home, cut off the packaging, then decide, for no particular reason, that I don't like it anymore. I take it back to the store to return it. Dialogue: "Is there anything wrong with it?" "Nope, I just don't want it anymore." "We're very sorry, sir." Then they give me my money back. That's the sort of interaction that I typically have with big corporations and their representatives. (In case this isn't obvious: in that story, I'm the one who's being a jerk.)
That is to say nothing of the enormous benefits that I directly reap, every day, from interacting with all these corporations, especially the big ones. For example, I'm typing this on a computer made by a big corporation; I would have no bloody idea how to make a computer, and would probably take a million years to do it without the help of any big corporations. At the same time, I'm sitting on furniture and wearing clothes made by big corporations. They're high quality and amazingly affordable. If I tried to make my own clothes, I have no doubt, it would come out terrible, and it would take nearly forever. Even if I went to a tailor -- but he had to make the clothes without the help of any supplies from big corporations -- it would still come out pretty crappy, and it would be many times more expensive.
Basically, if it weren't for the big corporations, I think we'd have the standard of living of primitive tribes. You don't have to be overflowing with gratitude all the time (it's normal to take for granted the great goods in your life, so okay) -- but it's very strange to me if someone, in a position similar to mine, is filled with resentment and distrust at the organizations that regularly provide enormous benefits to them for a fraction of their reservation price.
Now, I understand that these corporations aren't doing all this out of the goodness of their hearts. They're in it for the profit. I don't care; I'm just glad that they're producing enormous benefits for me and society. And I can hardly complain about the profit motive, since I don't work for free either. If the university doesn't pay me, I don't show up to work!
The employee experience
What about our experiences in the employee-employer relationship? I suppose we might be resentful because we never feel we're getting paid enough. Whatever your job is, you probably think you deserve more. Or maybe you just look at the low-income manual laborers, and think they deserve more.
Would you act differently if you ran a corporation? Let's say Amazon offers you the CEO position tomorrow. It comes with a $10 million annual salary. (I'm making that up -- I don't know how much the actual salary is. But that's realistic for a big corporation.) You have the option of reducing your salary and giving the remaining money to your employees. You could cut your salary by, say, $9.9 million (who needs more than 100k a year?), distribute that money to the employees, and in doing this, raise each of their annual salaries by $13. (Amazon has 750,000 employees; 9,900,000/750,000 = 13.) Would you do that?
I would not, and neither would most people. Maybe a few very unusual people would. But we can hardly be resentful and distrustful of someone for just behaving the way the vast majority of normal people would behave.*
*By the way, if you're an altruist, you most definitely should not do that. Because you could instead give that $9.9 million to the most effective charities, and thereby probably save around 5,000 lives every year. Which, by the way, is the sort of thing that some of these rich capitalists in fact do. E.g., Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have literally saved millions of lives through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. How many lives have you saved?
The citizen experience
I don't know about you, but my experiences with government are much less satisfactory. They don't have a customer service number. They don't have any employees whose job is to try to resolve complaints and keep you happy. They don't take returns under any circumstances.
They demand money for services that you never asked for, don't want, and in some cases did not even receive. They issue orders and threaten you with physical violence if you don't follow their orders or hand over the money they want. Sometimes, they demand that you do free labor for them ("jury duty"), again under threat of violence.
Now, I understand the arguments that this institution is necessary. I understand how someone could think that. But I don't really understand how a person could feel happy about their interactions with the state, yet feel dissatisfied and resentful about their interactions with corporations.
The saying in the business world is "the customer is always right." The attitude in government is "the government is always right (even when it's wrong)." Thus, if a company makes a mistake (gives you a defective product, or whatever), they will generally apologize profusely and pay for their mistake. If the government makes a mistake (e.g., the police fail to respond to your call for help while your house is being broken into, or they bust down the wrong door in one of their no-knock raids and shoot your dog), their attitude will be, "oh well, sucks for you."
The attitude conveyed by most businesses is "You're the boss." "Welcome!" "We're so happy to see you!" "Thank you, and have a nice day." "Let us know if anything about your experience is not to your liking." Etc. Sure, the employees are not really sincere in these expressions of emotion. But at least the business thinks they should act like they care about you.
The government has no such idea. The attitude conveyed in everything they do is "We're the boss," and they have no interest in pretending to care about you. Do what we say, give us your money, then get out. If there's anything about your experience that is not to your liking, you can go fuck yourself. (Note: Not actual quotations.)
Sometimes, you see an irate and unreasonable customer loudly berating an employee of some business over the business' perceived failure. The employee generally listens patiently and tries to fix the problem. Try doing that to one of the government agents who are there to "serve and protect" you. You'll probably wind up in jail, if not in the hospital.
Am I idiosyncratic? Is this not the experience of other people? How does it come about that people have more positive feelings about government than business? Or is that not really the case?
History
Maybe we shouldn't rely on personal experience so much. Look at history. Look at the experiences of people around the country, and around the world.
There are periodic stories about crimes committed by corporations -- defrauding customers, polluting the environment, insider trading, etc. But btw, before you get indignant about the harm to the environment, think about your own role. If you're buying all the products that cause that environmental damage, it's hard for you to get indignant at the people who are making them for you. People are making plastic goods, gasoline-powered vehicles, and meat products because ordinary people want them, because we (most of us, anyway) won't buy alternative products. So maybe we should save our biggest resentment for ourselves, the average consumers.
Anyway, there are also stories about the crimes committed by governments. They make the crimes of corporations look cute. When governments misbehave, they do stuff like murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians. Or kidnapping millions of people and holding them prisoner for years. And I don't mean in some indirect or speculative way -- I mean literally sending employees with guns to go shoot people. And in case you think I'm just talking about other governments, bear in mind that the U.S. government killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Iraq war. In Vietnam, they probably killed a million. If there were a corporation that did shit like that, people on all sides of the political spectrum would condemn it as the most evil corporation ever.
With most of my readers, who are libertarian-leaning, this is preaching to the choir. But the observations above aren't controversial or recherche libertarian ideas. They're all well-known. Everyone knows how businesses and governments behave; that's why you never see someone trying to chew out a cop for poor service. Everyone knows at least something about the great war crimes of the past, and we know they were done by governments. Everyone also knows about the value of the things that we get from corporations all the time -- that's why we keep buying them.
Hypotheses
I have thought of three psychological explanations.
1: Power worship. People hold more affection for government for the same reason that the government behaves worse: Because they have power. Ordinary human beings do not admire those who treat them well. Ordinary human beings admire power.
2: Ressentiment. People resent the rich, but only the rich who might be thought to have earned their money. For example, people don't resent the British royal family, or lottery winners, because those rich people have so obviously not done anything to earn their wealth. Therefore, they don't make us feel inferior. Rich business people, though . . . Grr. Who do they think they are?
3: Democratic Ideology. Maybe people are very generous in our attitudes toward the government because we identify with the government. We buy into the democratic ideology which teaches us that in a democracy, "the people rule". So whatever the government does, it's really us doing it. We can't be mad at ourselves. It's kind of like how you let your family members get away with crap that you wouldn't tolerate with strangers -- you might even make excuses and pretend that your criminal family member is really a good guy at heart, despite those few people that he murdered. (They probably had it coming. And what about all the people that he didn't murder? Most murderers are much worse!)