CALL AND RESPONSE
July 2002
by Barry Stagg
Commodification is just a synonym for service. Shareholder value is a concept that, if re-emphasized, would eliminate many of the ills of the service dominated western economies. Enron is an example of new capitalism gone into fiscal meltdown: management became the core of Enron and it was nothing else, just a mirage.
What passes for socially progressive in Canada: Indulgence, undisciplined help, charity as a publicly paid virtue where funding sources of need is vital to social progressive production of paid good works. Is it charity managed on the public purse? "Management trash" is the pejorative to throw back at the corporate-communal elitists who smear working class people as trailer trash-white trash. Management trash are the overpopulated class of regulators and paper shufflers who use the mass communication reality of our world to justify their existence as regulators. They equate the existence of mass communication as a condition that requires expert micro- management by them. Their essence is shuffling at the expense of efficiency, focus and production of usable goods. Shuffling is paramount. The equity (stock) markets are co-opted by the management trash mentality. Promotion leading to insider profits has displaced the essence of stock markets: raising money to launch and develop productive businesses. Enron, Brex, the 80's junk bond crimes, the high tech collapse, all exemplify process-dominated commerce that benefits the managers of various stripes who promote, regulate and maintain the empty-shelled equity industry. Management is a process,as is regulation and when these processes displace productive tasks, they corrupt the economy. At the nether reaches of the economy--Newfoundland for example-- management: social, political and commercia,l are the main industries illustrating an economic oxymoron.
The standard Canadian Liberal attitude of anti-Americanism is illustrative of the Canadian stance of accepting U.S. military protection and being oblivious to its own connotation of mercenary behaviour by Canada. Canada's left apparently embrace a de facto Canadian mercenary component. In essence, the U.S. military are our mercenaries in the sense that Canada gives the U.S. its resources and the U.S. military protects us. That is the standard definition of a mercenary army. How convenient for the Maud Barlow style nationalists who preach anti-Americanism while being busy spending and living off the fat of the land made so by Canada's virtual border town trading status with the U.S.A.
A deeper analysis shows that the Canadian leftist elite is mainly a collection of managers, government, institutional and private, who embrace management as a means to prosperity. When a choice has to be made in government between funding management or security/ military, management wins in self-dealing fashion. Canadians' fashionable neutralism is a profitable European import--perhaps Trudeau's republic and legacy-- where hostility to U.S. military and commercial hegemony disguises the reality that Canada's deliberate reliance on the U.S. for military protection enables Canada to abdicate proper military spending and investment in industry in favour of investing the funding of its management elites. In short, because the U.S. military is our de facto mercenary army, we can pour as much money as possible into non-productive management work which enriches the managers and impoverishes the rest of Canada's citizens.
Politics: local self interest is inevitable and unavoidable and must be factored into democracy. In fact, this is what makes democracy such a messy business in that local self interest is permitted in contrast to the banning of such advocacy in a tyrannical or dictatorial system.
Marketing: Government should not be marketed. This should be a fundamental conservative principal. There should be no promotion budget.
Organizational dilettantism: This is the core weakness of corporate and statists over-management. Managers hire each other at higher and higher salaries. They are not owners or as owner/ shareholders they hold at preferred terms that conflict with the ordinary interests of shareholding.
The Kyoto Accord dispute in Canada is indicative of the practice in Canada of preferring a management plan now, however incomplete and wasteful, to a delay to do proper homework. This is the process that prefers management and management employment to production and productive jobs.
A cross border cousin to Canadian Kyoto compulsion is American regulatory exclusion of hydro dam power as green or environmentally preferred. This is a perverse form of commercial tollgating or rent-seeking. To distort environmentalism to exclude hydro power as being environmentally sound is to pander to mascot tollgaters. Regulatory super-citizens are thusly fabricated: aboriginal groups, environmental utopians, etc. Is it not better to stop the trawler rape of the seabeds then to indulge in such regulatory semantics.
When the management ethos dominates society, inefficiency is inherently created because management is the first priority instead of productive efficiency. In plain words, the elite look for jobs for as many chiefs as possible bossing around as few Indians doing unproven tasks in the service of management perpetuity.
Kyoto is a good idea to Toronto's management priests--the statists clergy like environmentalist city counsellor, Jack Layton. Layton and others can and do use Toronto as a model because they are driving industry out of Toronto in favour of 100% management industries. This curbs pollution but in sophistic fashion ignores the fact that production elsewhere is needed to funds Toronto, the management ghetto.
Canada is a comfort society exemplified by ecologically correct hockey moms sipping Tim Horton's cappuccino. Orthopaedically correct car seats are more important than thrift. The good life is the only life. The sincerely self-absorbed: a variant of narcissism that is very marketable. It distils down to a smug wanton consumerism. This ties in with the regulatory economy's tendency to implement supposed innovation, ie: the Kyoto protocol, bilingualism, Indian self government without proper research or development. A new policy becomes a management regulatory cash cow for careerists. Its premature or incorrect implementation is in itself a management positive for it maximizes management salaries. It is important to note that what we characterize as management salaries are really management profits at the cost of efficiency. A salary paid unnecessarily to a managerial person is pure profit for that person at the cost of overall efficiency.
When conservatives abhor a liberalized society, how often are they railing against the lack of thrift and the presence of excessive government spending. If the ideological dispute is set aside, is this not really a legitimate opposition to collectivist mis-management? Why waste time in defending conservative attacks against waste as ideological? Just concentrate on exposing waste.
The management model and management priority causes corporate inefficiency in the private sector just as it does in government. The chief executive officer rules and thusly management rules. The core of western economic inefficiency can be expressed as corporate management over owners and government management over citizens.
It is one of the conceits of a dominant generation ie: the baby boomers, that change is progress authored by them rather than a cyclical routine of trial and error and repetition thereof.
In a managed market people get used to obtaining advantage by primary use of finesse and etiquette: smarminess and shmoozing as market tools. Much contemporary liberal thought amounts to nothing more than self-serving etiquette and fashion justification for an inefficient system that feeds them. It can be characterized as a colossus and its dependent minions--the state and its statists.