Lee Ballard

EDITOR’S NOTE: Lee Ballard lives in Mars Hall.
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This is not a rant against capitalism.  Capitalism works.  This is a rant against IMMORAL capitalism — and politicians who enable it.

Capitalism came directly out of the Protestant Reformation, which taught that work has benefits for the individual and for society as a whole.

Success is good.  And Jesus didn’t condemn business, either; his parables assume business.  What Jesus slams is the person/business that (Luke 12:21) “stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”  Being rich toward God is what we can call “moral capitalism.”  John Calvin’s guiding principle was, “Care for your fellow man.”

It’s easy to see how one person who owns a business can be rich toward God — generosity and being fair to workers.  But should large corporations, with 50th-floor offices and thousands of employees, be held accountable as being moral or immoral?  Yes, they should.

If we stand off and look, there’s one thing that underlies almost all immoral corporate actions:  excessive greed.  Businesses can make moral or immoral choices.  If financial institutions, for example, take huge risks, putting us all in jeopardy, that’s immoral.

Likewise if they send jobs overseas, showing no loyalty to faithful workers, that’s immoral.  When Hanes closed a factory in North Carolina and moved it to Vietnam, the spokesman said they had to do it to be “competitive.”

Bull. They did it for more profit, for more wealth for the company.  They had the choice to be good capitalists or bad capitalists and chose the dark side.  They could have become the “good guy underwear people,” but they didn’t.

A historic parallel took place in the South in the 19th century.  With the cotton boom in the 1790s, it didn’t make a lot of sense to industrialize like the rest of the world.  But they didn’t have to do it with slaves.  Growing cotton meant vast new land use and thousands more workers.  

They could have used paid labor by free people.  Why didn’t they?  Because slavery brought MORE WEALTH.  They could have been wealthy, but they wanted great wealth.  So they imported more and more slaves until the 1808 ban and then bought from non-cotton-growing states.    

Sociologist Max Weber, who wrote “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” over 100 years ago, said that Protestant capitalism was not simply the accumulation of capital and the love for wealth, but capitalism was “a rationalist capitalistic organizing of free labor.”  Organizing labor efficiently.  Yes!  Unfortunately, this spiritual component of capitalism, where business is “rich toward God,” is all but lost today.

For one thing, Weber says capitalism from its beginnings needed and got stable rules of operation.  Rules!  Yes!  But today in America, we hear every day that regulation of big business is itself wrong.
Corporations don’t want any restraint on their activity.  If they can make a bunch of money doing something, they want to be able to do it, no matter if it’s in the best interests of their employees and society or not.

When one corporate CEO was asked by CNBC’s Jim Cramer where he wanted changes made, the CEO said the National Labor Relations Board — the independent body that investigates claims of unfair labor practices — and the Environmental Protection Agency.

I ask:  Is this the country we want, where big corporations are free to do as they wish with their employees and pollute as they wish?  No, it’s not.  It must not be.  This is immoral capitalism.  Excessive greed must be held in check, and this is an appropriate role for government.  .

Think about it.  General Electric made $14 billion in profits last year–$5 billion in the U.S. – and paid ZERO TAXES.  So what do they do?  Last summer they announced they will move their x-ray business from Waukesha, Wisconsin, where it has been for 115 years, to Beijing, China.  .

Businesses should be held accountable to the “triple bottom line” (see Wikipedia article) of Profit, People, Planet.  In this concept a business is responsible not just to shareholders for profit but to STAKEHOLDERS — that is, anyone who is influenced by the actions of the business.  This includes employees, society as a whole and future generations who will inherit the planet.  Someday society will rise up and demand this.

I say we should note any politician who says he or she wants to get government out of the way so corporations can “create jobs.” Pure-bred bull. I say: Show me some morality, some loyalty, some patriotism, and then we make it easy for you.