Business—My Take

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‘Business’ has meant to me—and will continue to mean—simply the old idea of trade taken to a more sophisticated level.  A trader obtains goods that he or she thinks will sell well in some other locality, transports them there, and sells it at a profit.  The service is mostly that of transporting the goods to where they will be more useful.  (In some languages, ‘cooper’, ‘carter’ and ‘merchant’ all mean the same thing.)

In more recent times, when cities grew large enough so that everyone did not know everyone else, to buy what they needed directly from the supplier, the storekeeper would obtain goods that someone could supply—usually in bulk—and sell it to someone else, who knew to look for the good in the Store.  The service here was that of warehousing the goods, hence the word Store.

Today, a business is either a manufacturing business, or one that provides a service, or one that combines the services of transporting and warehousing, and possibly dressing the goods up (packaging), and profits today are, of course, an order of magnitude higher than they were in the good old days of the tradesman.

America was built on farming, to begin with.  But soon tradesmen began to acquire political power, and the myth was born that America was built by business.  Because the life of a storekeeper is a lot easier than that of a farmer, over the centuries businessmen have had the leisure to dream up many more shady schemes than those in other occupations, in order to acquire still more economic power, and America has certainly been the place where economic power buys a great deal of political power.  Americans love to despise the political power that Chinese businessmen have been able to acquire, but of course it was American Business that showed the world how economic power could be profitably abused.

Today, business is worshiped so much in the US (and to some extent, everywhere else) that when there is an economic slump here, people are called upon to go out and spend, to “help The Economy recover.”  Consumption, and consumer spending is considered a sort of economic panacea, because (encouraged by Business) US economic theory is based on consumption.

I, for one, do not believe in this myth.  Consumer spending helps business.  Business does not help anything except business itself.  Business has discovered the futility of helping the community, the arts, or education.  The only thing on which Business would consider spending any loose change that lies around, is marketing, which is simply a particularly evil brand of the old advertising.  So our towns and cities are simply covered with enormous, ugly billboards that advertise everything from cigarettes to alcohol to no-good crooked politicians.  Business is not a charity that needs our support.

Now that Business has learned the benefits of offshoring any sort of unpleasant material or activity, and now that banks in other countries have learned the benefits of providing a home to US funds, any money that Business has left over is shipped straight offshore to the welcoming arms of foreign banks, and do not help the so-called US economy at all.

Ironically, small businesses, which simply do not have the resources to rip-off the population as efficiently as Big Business, do identify with Big Business!  This is funny, and it is even funnier when small businesses wail and complain about the woes of Big Business, even if the complaints are completely inapplicable to them.  Small businesses are unlikely to offshore their needs, and certainly not their bank accounts, though they may aspire to do that someday.  Neither do they have to pay the sorts of taxes that Big Business should be paying.  And most laughable of all is how much individuals who are actually unemployed defend the rights of Big Business to pay very little tax.  “Some day,” an unemployed person can be heard to say, “I anticipate being extremely wealthy, and I do not want to have to pay taxes on that day.”  This can only be caused explained by their education having been distorted so as not to explain that people with higher incomes are required to pay taxes at a higher rate.  Some things in the USA simply defy reason.  Hello, y'all!  Raising the taxes of Exxon does not mean that small businesses have to pay higher taxes!  You got that?

We also used to have laws forbidding petroleum giants like Exxon from swallowing up other competing businesses.  But now, behold: Exxon has swallowed up Mobil.  So Exxon can spread fear that gas prices will rise if their taxes are raised.  If there was a suitable degree of competition among these oil companies, in theory, smaller companies would sell gasoline at lower prices, and Exxon would have to sell at the lower prices, just to stay in business.  But if Exxon is the only game in town (and I wonder which administration is to blame for having allowed Exxon to acquire Mobil, and do we honestly think that it was to the public benefit that the merger was to take place?) then certainly they can raise the price of gasoline, and certainly in towns where there are only Exxon gas stations.  How has the population been made to think that monopolies are good?  And Americans don’t like to be called stupid.

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