Corporate greed feeds a world in need

In the 1967 film The Flim-Flam Man, George C. Scott plays a 19th-century traveling rural swindler.  Near the beginning, he utters a memorable phrase: “Greed and ignorance will never let you down.”

In the aftermath of the 2009 recession, a friend blamed the event on the “greed” of the mortgage lenders.  I told her that greed was a normal human approach to self-preservation.  I asked her, “Have you ever gone into a store and used a coupon so you could pay less for a product?”  “That’s not greed.  That’s saving money” was her answer.

The point is that greed is a reliable human attitude.  Altruism, however, is often used by tyrants to disguise their evil intentions.  Wanting more has, over time, led to the production of vastly more useful stuff.  Pursuit of profit is analogous to an ecological imperative — successful survival amidst various competitors and changing environmental conditions.

Perhaps the epitome of slandering the quest for profit has been the Bidenoids’ rant that higher prices are not caused by inflation, but rather greedy corporations lining their pockets by exploiting hapless consumers.  What props this up is profound and widespread economic illiteracy.  Another example involves the stock market.  News sources reflexively claim that the Dow 30 and other indexes are in record territory.  However, market indexes are expressed in dollars.  Using the Inflation Calculator, the cumulative effect of the devaluing dollar over the past six years is 23.75%.  Today’s Dow, that was recently at 39,807, when expressed in 2018 dollars would be 30,353 — a drop of 9,454 points.

During America’s golden age of free enterprise (if there ever was one), corporations were largely unpolluted by ideology.  In today’s world, however, such goofy fads as DIE are infecting boardrooms hither and yon — hence such endeavors as Bud Light and its inevitable consequences.  Fortunately, Darwinian forces are still at play, at least as long as consumers continue to exercise their sovereignty and vote with their wallets.

Most important is the concept of competition.  If GM wants too much money for a Chevy, there’s always Ford, Toyota, and a slew of other possibilities.  Competing businesses, secretly agreeing not to engage in undercutting one another’s prices, has long been illegal.  And the sovereignty of the consumer still remains paramount, in spite of vacuous politicians trying to pander to the less (ahem) advantaged.

Competition is also valuable in the political arena — one-party states are not all that much fun to live in.  Today’s Democrats may actually be circling the drain due to their unprecedented lurch to the left and their palpable lack of serious talent.  Such happened to the Whigs of the mid-nineteenth century, and the Republicans took their place. 

Ignoring the reality of our economic environment is the totally stupid idea of government-imposed minimum wages.  Calyfornia is showing the world how dumb this idea is, as fast-food providers are dumping their menials in favor of (ahem) robots after the state enacted a $20 minimum wage specifically for their type of business.  My outgoing Congress-thing, Babs Lee, recently tried to rally her troops during her failed Senate nomination campaign by advocating a $50 minimum wage.  Were this ever to be a workable concept, then we’d all be driving Cadillacs and having swimming pools in our spacious backyards.  One really has to put in a major effort to be this stupid.

Perhaps the current epitome of government screwing with the consumer has to do with the electric vehicle (E.V.) fad.  Just recently, E.V. manufacturers have been running a TV ad blitz.  They have a veritable plethora of unsold inventory.  Meanwhile, their gas-powered products are selling well.  That’s consumers, again, exercising their sovereignty.  Being falsely described as “Emission Free” is a futile attempt at concealing the annoying fact that the energy used to move these beasts around comes 60% from coal and natural gas — plus another 20% from nuclear fission.

Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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Image: pasja1000 via Pixabay, Pixabay License.