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An
Essay by Michael Putegnat
In spite of what it may at first seem, curbing the power of the oil
companies IS capitalism.
There is a dynamic tension
between two polar imperatives that mark out one axis that runs through the
American philosophy. On one
end is a reliance upon the marketplace as the arbiter between needs and
wants, where supply and demand battle it out in search of price.
On the other end is a belief in the duty to care for one another
individually and to contribute to and preserve the social good of our
society as a whole.
While
these are not antonyms, they can in application become antithetical.
A business executive can accurately say that his duty is to his
stockholders and so an oil company executive can feel perfectly
comfortable in ignoring the hardships placed upon ordinary citizens by
skyrocketing gasoline prices, so long as they continue to buy and his
company’s profits soar. In
the survival of the fittest principles of the marketplace, the fittest are
proved by their survival and the less fit perish.
Yet,
as willing neighbors of the same capitalist nation, we intuitively know
that it disturbs our national conscience for some of our neighbors to
suffer unduly for the comfort of a few.
For some, it may seem a simple choice between capitalism and
socialism. But there is a vast
universe between these two extremes. Capital
markets require cooperation from the citizenry to flourish.
In fact, it is society’s willingness to allow, protect, and
nurture capitalism that provides the essential medium to do business.
We do this because history has shown that the economy of a nation,
and the world, has been best advanced in an environment of capitalistic
trade.
It
is the nature of human endeavors that we blunder through experiments to
find the happy medium, among the choices, that works.
In the last century or so, we learned, for example, that the
concentration of economic
power in the hands of a few companies actually restricted markets, so we
outlawed monopolies. We
figured out that companies that colluded to fix prices actually stacked
the free market against us, and so we outlawed price fixing. Later, we
realized that companies that dumped production wastes into public
waterways were actually exploiting the public assets to avoid their own
expenses, and we instituted fines to discourage that.
The point is that healthy capitalism flourishes only when it is not
hijacked by a few at the disadvantage of the many.
When a company or a group of them distorts the entire economy, that
is not capitalism. It is
exploitation.
What
is common in all the above cases of where market rules were modified to
protect the public, is that in each case the companies, representing the
actual actors in the persons of the managers and the stockholders, acted
against the public interest and solely in their own, while at the same
time using the market that the public provides.
And this is the nexus of the conflicting views of how America ought
to work.
While
it may seem at first that this is a natural conflict that helps to define
the limits of a practical capitalism, it in fact is a demonstration of two
kinds of thinking that seem to be in persistent opposition: Doing what’s
good for me, versus, doing what’s good for everyone.
The reality is that capitalism cannot work without taking into
account what’s good for “me” AND everyone. The reason is simple. In
America the permission to do anything derives from the will of the people.
What the oil companies are missing
in their simple-minded profiteering is that their manipulations are
tolerated only to a point. The
public can withdraw its cooperation in this and when pushed to the limit,
will. They will do this
because it actually preserves capitalism by denying its unruly extremes
that would destroy all support for it.
Curbing the power of the oil companies is capitalism. |