Less Recovery, No Morals
Amid the media clamor about outsourcing and downsizing, offshoring, and the “jobless recovery” lurks an ugly little reality that all sides are either blind to or too afraid to point out: the reason American companies aren’t hiring anyone anymore is because they don’t want to. That’s not an arbitrary judgement, rather it boils down to a basic flaw in the free market system. A system predicated on the bottom line views human beings and their aspirations, desires, and needs as merely secondary effects. Humans may or may not drive particular markets at particular times, but that’s neither here nor there as far as the corporation is concerned. People cost money to employ, and if the company can avoid hiring them, it will. It’s not personal – it’s not even humane – it’s just business. And business, as we all know, isn’t charity.
Under laissez faire capitalism, businesses have no responsibility whatsoever to actually employ people or better their lives. It’s often argued that they accidentally will, since they always accidentally have. But when they no longer have to, through automation or outsourcing or increased efficiency or whatever, they won’t. Businesses are, essentially, immune to social ethics. We rely on them to be the engines that drive our economies but ask nothing in return in terms of safety or reliability. We’ve built a fine, powerful car, but omitted the steering wheel and the brakes, not to mention the doors, seats and safety belts.
Market amorality is nothing new, of course. Marx recognized it, as did Jesus. The “jobless recovery” therefore should surprise no one – when, that is, the market is looked at from the perspective of social justice.
Our blindness from that angle stems as much from our adherence to tradition and the influence of Madison Avenue or our economics professors at college or that it’s hard to see what’s going on from inside the system as anything else. Like other cultural norms it takes on the form of a religion after awhile: the market is “self-correcting,” ever-wise, democratic. Even democracy is not inherently moral, though it seems inherently fair. Democracy is subject to the tyranny of the majority, which is why we have the Bill of Rights: it protects us from the unfettered market of The People.
The view that the free market is sacred is not only inherently sacrilegious and theoretically specious, it’s ahistorical. Current anti-trust legislation is a direct result of the ill-effects of 19th century free market monopolies that tyrannized the public and small businesses alike. Indeed, monopolies are perfect examples of the free market run amok, of the free market, in fact, acting in a way that is antithetical to competition, in the same way that democracy was abused by segregationists in the post-Civil War south. And segregation was eventually brought down by court order, not by legislation.
As long as we continue to consider the free market sacrosanct and allow businesses to be utterly free from responsibility to the societies in which they operate, don’t expect hiring to improve or the cyclical nature of employment to even out. And we’ll probably always consider it so: to do anything else would be un-American. The only real hope we have is that businesses still need the power of the consumer in the long run. That the free market tends to discourage long-term planning in favor of profits in the next quarter is problematic, however.
How bad can it get for the American worker? Ask the Irish, who are only now recovering from the depredations and disasters of the 18th and 19th centuries, problems caused or exacerbated by an amoral, irresponsible overclass utterly unwilling to change.