The Parable of the Corporation

My guest blogger today goes by the pen name of Muon.  The explanation is that a muon is a tiny, seemingly insignificant part of an atom, yet is unstable enough to shake things up now and then.  Muon manages to live very happily on an income below the "poverty line."  
The Parable of the Corporation
by Muon

Let's pretend that you and I and all our neighbors are
shareholders of a mega-corporation.  Instead of money, they pay us in free products and services.  Since they give us these dividends even when they don't make a profit, we agree to the deal.

Like most shareholder/company relationship, we don't get all that involved in the details of how the business is run.  We assume the employees, from the CEO down to the peons,  know what they're doing.  Once in a while, we insist on replacing the CEO and top management, but for the most part, the system works.

Lately, however, the corporation has stopped being  profitable. For one thing, the Purchasing Department has been making sweetheart deals with vendors, giving contracts not to a low bidder, but to the same expensive companies over and over.  Management hasn't done anything about it because most of them have personal monetary interests in these companies.  The Receivables Department is lackadaisical about their work because they think the shareholders' investments are enough to keep the company going.  The Sales Department figures, if everyone else is slacking off, why should they look for new business?  The Manufacturing Department figures, if no one's selling the product, why make it?  But everyone wants to keep their jobs, so no one rocks the boat by changing things.

The reason everyone wants to keep their jobs?  The  employees set their own salaries, which is currently at least three times the income of your average shareholder.

The corporation is nearly bankrupt, but management has sworn to the shareholders that they'll balance this year's budget.  They decide to do this not by decreasing waste, finding new revenue sources, putting a halt to bad business practices, downsizing, or even by taking a paycut themselves.  No, they intend to balance the budget by cutting the products and services given to the very people who are footing the bill, the shareholders.  A small but loud percentage of the shareholders are even cheering top management on.

Is this parable far-fetched?  Not at all.  This is the way our government is run.  We let Congress have all the power over our tax money, including the power to funnel more of it to themselves by setting their salaries and setting policy which benefits the big businesses who contribute to their campaign funds.  All they care about is keeping that power by getting reelected.  Their idea of balancing the budget is to cut all the programs that directly benefit the people paying their  salaries--taxpayers.  They refuse to cut waste.  They refuse to look for new sources of revenue.  They refuse to encourage the startup of new American businesses which would then provide more tax income.  In fact, they want to cut business taxes and put more of the financial burden on the taxpayers, whose median household income this year is only about $50,000.

And Congress certainly never intends to give themselves a paycut.  If the minimum congressional salary were lowered to twice the national average household income, we could save 40 million a year.  Congressmen, like Senator Duffy, for instance, say they can't live on less than what they're making.

Frankly, if a Congressperson can't figure out how to live on $100,000 a year, he/she shouldn't be in charge of managing  the nation's money.

muon