Corporations decry socialism, but use it when it suits

Corporations decry socialism, but turn to it immediately the rigours of capitalism fail to boost bank balances and collapse threatens.
Examples of this apparent guilt-free switching of allegiances proliferate seemingly excavating the true meaning of the free market – profit in any way you can, for as long as you can and when it goes sour, turn to an enrich yourself from the public purse using nebulous arguments. Although iniquitous, those arguments have a powerful emotional pull in that they appeal to human values that are rooted, mistakenly, in the belief that the broad well-being of society is inextricably linked to the success of the at-risk corporation.


Henry Ford

Interestingly, that very corporation that has championed capitalistic behaviour and subsequently become rich beyond imagination sees its saviour in socialism and shows no embarrassment as it reaches out it hand asking for money.
The corporation’s hand does not shake, nor does it show any sign of discomfit or the slightest humiliation as it asks for government aid, conveniently forgetting that it stood among critics of government interference, frequently damning it for humane policies designed to protect its prime resource, its people. 

The world-wide car industry, and of direct concern, that of Australia, has long stood at the front of the queue seeking government handouts, endlessly arguing that health of the country’s economy is inherently related to that of the motor industry.

The industry has repeatedly returned to the public trough over the last decade it has gobbled down some $12 billion and now it is back for more. That payout, notably, is bigger than that of any other individual industry.

The world-wide car industry, and of direct concern, that of Australia, has long stood at the front of the queue seeking government handouts, endlessly arguing that health of the country’s economy is inherently related to that of the motor industry.

The industry has repeatedly returned to the public trough over the last decade gobbling down some $12 billion and now it is back for more. That payout, notably, is bigger than that of any other individual industry.

Running a business becomes easy once you understand, and can implement the idea that you first must privatise the profits and socialize the costs, just as our motor industry has been doing for years, and then create a felicitous and imaginary situation in which you are too big and too important to fail.

Rather than investing endlessly in a fundamentally fragile industry that does nothing but deplete the world’s finite resources and fill up earth’s natural sinks with its wastes, we should be using that cash and those finite resources to build a way of living in which the emphasis is on the permanency of people rather than the fleeting pleasure of machines.

It was in 1945 that Henry Ford finally wilted under the pressure of marketeers and stopped building cars with few refinements and as cheap as he could to follow Chevrolet as it introduced fashion and frivolous fineries through a new model every year.

Car makers apparently abhor socialism, but after successfully socialising the costs, it is now attempting to protect those privatised profits with a “world car”, a homogenised product that has that sense of communism about it.

Banks profit as fools and their money are parted

Banks are implicated in the adage that a fool and his money are soon parted.

A cursory look at the present success of Australia’s banks suggests this country is populated by fools as those same banks sell nothing and yet they profit by exploiting a paradigm we endorse.
The banking industry is a human construct pre-dating the invention of money with initial deposits being grain, livestock and various goods.
Temples, being safe, was where gold and early coins were first stored and so the priests and monks were the first to empower traders by lending that resource.
Today’s banking benchmarks might seem sophisticated compared to that ancient trading, but stripped of its finery little has changed – there was, is and has always been a lender and borrower, with those providing the advance mostly enjoying the profit.
Evolution is more than just dinosaurs and apes, rather, it is a social dynamic happening right now to impact on both you and I and if watched closely can trace measurable inter-generational changes.
The banking business is not free of such changes and although its fundamentals are intact, its behavior has evolved, and along with societal addiction to economics, to the status of virus.
Most everything in the developed world is judged good or bad through the prism if economics and although they have evolved to dominate modern life, that is not an indication of their worthiness.
Evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University, Professor David Sloan Wilson (above), has said evolution is not about niceness, rather helping us understand the good, the bad and the inconvenient.
Your place on the ledger probably determines your opinion of Australia’s banking system, which is now entangled, wrongly, in the world’s commercial milieu from which it should stand apart.
This is not a lament for socialism or its ilk, instead a plea for the breakout of good sense – banks are little more than a reservoir for public money and so human ingenuity should be applied not to making profits for a few, but the enrichment of all.
Banks pitch their public persona to suggest the earlier mentioned adage doesn’t apply, but record profits argue its truth.