Central Control
I see around me two "opposing" forces, which are both trapped by the same concepts. On one side are the proponents of big government, on the other are the proponents of big business. Both suffer from the same flaws.
There are plenty of go green, shop local, eat local, down with Walmart/Home Depot/etc people, but almost all of these that I know seem to also be in favor of large government oversight, state sponsored welfare, federal (as opposed to state) law, and see no problem achieving in the courts what they can not achieve in the polls.
Likewise, many people I know want less government oversight of business, less government welfare (for people if not for companies), lower or flat taxes, state rights, less legislation across the board, but have little problem shopping at Walmart, eating at McDonnald's, etc, and see companies like Ford, Chevy, BofA, etc as pillars of all good things. Many of these people (amongst the ones I know) are union, for whatever that is or is not worth.
I propose that my problem with both of these is that central control requires levels of abstraction. As your management chain gets longer, the game of telephone gets worse, and the time it takes to shift resources to vital parts of your infrastructure gets worse.
As such, it doesn't matter if a central controlling structure is elected by popular vote, put in place through military coup, or comes about through business supremacy. Eventually these creations will fall due to their own inability to adapt.
When we saw the (federal) government bailing out big business, what we saw, was the proponents of the large, centralized ideal bailing out another manifestation of itself.
Were big auto to crash, what would the effect on startups like Tesla be?
The advantage of central control comes in the form of increased buying power, theoretical lower per-unit overhead, and in some cases the ability to do things which smaller entities just could not do.
However, when management gets too abstracted from the actual process of what the company does, be it banking, making cars, or supplying power to an area, many of these advantages are going to disappear. Increased buying power will be eaten up with payoffs or lazy purchasers, per unit overhead goes into bonuses, etc. The only thing which remains is the ability to do things which smaller entities just couldn't do, yet this is only very rarely a role these larger organizations, be they large governments, or large companies fill.
When dealing with items smaller, local, in touch companies could do, the advantage big business has, it has primarily due to it's ability to browbeat big government into playing to it's favor. The people in power in big government get there, in part, due to the financial backing of big business.
Government doesn't suffer as poorly. The police, fire, medical are mostly handled locally, and dwp is often on the smallest scale appropriate to the type of task they're attacking, but this type of thing seems to be changing. The reaction to the Katrina disaster is commonly regarded as strictly a federal failure, not a local one, and looking at the health care debacle, the only solutions I've seen proposed have been placed squarely in the lap of federal agencies.
I'm curious what would happen if health care were moved to greater government oversight, but done on a city or county level, where they knew what the state of the various hospitals in the area was, where they could deal directly on the ground with people involved, and the highest level management in the situation could walk into each and every hospital in his jurisdiction in a single day, and deal directly with the people involved?
Business deals in the currency of money. Government deals in the currency of popularity. Both try to get as much as they can from as many people as they can, and both are run by people who realize it is in their own self-interest to keep the vehicle which supports them in power for as long as possible, unless they can get more from crashing it. The larger either are, the less vulnerable they are to the demands of small groups they have crushed to get where they are. As we move local in either area, we empower the people they serve to alter or overthrow them as they see necessary. Our democratic government has within it the seeds of revolution, if the people can consent, but the larger it is, the easier it becomes to control the masses and crush dissent. Large companies do not even have that one, faltering safeguard.
May I humbly suggest, keep it small, keep it local, whatever "It" may be.
-- James
There are plenty of go green, shop local, eat local, down with Walmart/Home Depot/etc people, but almost all of these that I know seem to also be in favor of large government oversight, state sponsored welfare, federal (as opposed to state) law, and see no problem achieving in the courts what they can not achieve in the polls.
Likewise, many people I know want less government oversight of business, less government welfare (for people if not for companies), lower or flat taxes, state rights, less legislation across the board, but have little problem shopping at Walmart, eating at McDonnald's, etc, and see companies like Ford, Chevy, BofA, etc as pillars of all good things. Many of these people (amongst the ones I know) are union, for whatever that is or is not worth.
I propose that my problem with both of these is that central control requires levels of abstraction. As your management chain gets longer, the game of telephone gets worse, and the time it takes to shift resources to vital parts of your infrastructure gets worse.
As such, it doesn't matter if a central controlling structure is elected by popular vote, put in place through military coup, or comes about through business supremacy. Eventually these creations will fall due to their own inability to adapt.
When we saw the (federal) government bailing out big business, what we saw, was the proponents of the large, centralized ideal bailing out another manifestation of itself.
Were big auto to crash, what would the effect on startups like Tesla be?
The advantage of central control comes in the form of increased buying power, theoretical lower per-unit overhead, and in some cases the ability to do things which smaller entities just could not do.
However, when management gets too abstracted from the actual process of what the company does, be it banking, making cars, or supplying power to an area, many of these advantages are going to disappear. Increased buying power will be eaten up with payoffs or lazy purchasers, per unit overhead goes into bonuses, etc. The only thing which remains is the ability to do things which smaller entities just couldn't do, yet this is only very rarely a role these larger organizations, be they large governments, or large companies fill.
When dealing with items smaller, local, in touch companies could do, the advantage big business has, it has primarily due to it's ability to browbeat big government into playing to it's favor. The people in power in big government get there, in part, due to the financial backing of big business.
Government doesn't suffer as poorly. The police, fire, medical are mostly handled locally, and dwp is often on the smallest scale appropriate to the type of task they're attacking, but this type of thing seems to be changing. The reaction to the Katrina disaster is commonly regarded as strictly a federal failure, not a local one, and looking at the health care debacle, the only solutions I've seen proposed have been placed squarely in the lap of federal agencies.
I'm curious what would happen if health care were moved to greater government oversight, but done on a city or county level, where they knew what the state of the various hospitals in the area was, where they could deal directly on the ground with people involved, and the highest level management in the situation could walk into each and every hospital in his jurisdiction in a single day, and deal directly with the people involved?
Business deals in the currency of money. Government deals in the currency of popularity. Both try to get as much as they can from as many people as they can, and both are run by people who realize it is in their own self-interest to keep the vehicle which supports them in power for as long as possible, unless they can get more from crashing it. The larger either are, the less vulnerable they are to the demands of small groups they have crushed to get where they are. As we move local in either area, we empower the people they serve to alter or overthrow them as they see necessary. Our democratic government has within it the seeds of revolution, if the people can consent, but the larger it is, the easier it becomes to control the masses and crush dissent. Large companies do not even have that one, faltering safeguard.
May I humbly suggest, keep it small, keep it local, whatever "It" may be.
-- James