Instruments Of Death

During the contest for the Republican nomination for president this campaign season, putative nominee Mitt Romney at one point said that he liked "being able to fire people." For an American business executive, this is a noncontroversial position, yet the other contenders for the nomination did their best to use it against Romney. I don't recall any great outcry by other business executives in Romney's support.

That, Gentle Reader, was most unfortunate. Nothing is more important to the profitable functioning of a business than absolute freedom to hire and fire according to need. However, that's a privilege American businesses no longer possess.

***

Two days ago, in the course of a conversation with a colleague, we touched upon the subject of quotas. Few things irritate me quite as much as the recent politically correct harping on "diversity," which involves the de facto imposition of quotas on employers according to the dictates of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Those dictates provide members of certain "protected groups" with a tailwind in hiring decisions and considerable protection from being fired.

Quotas are noxious and anti-American, just in case you wouldn't already have guessed that opinion from my other writings. But, just in case you think I hold this opinion because I'm a racist (which, by the Left's criteria, I am), or a sexist (similarly), or an "able-ist" (yup), or any other sort of "ist" you might have in mind (place your bets), allow me to expand:

Any sort of quota, regardless of the criterion it applies, is incurably noxious to the purposes of business.

The purposes of a business, in case you're in any doubt, are:

• To make money;
• To make money;
• And to make money.

An unincorporated business exists for the sole purpose of returning a profit to its owners. An incorporated business exists for the sole purpose of returning a profit to its shareholders. The owners of the former, being private parties not obligated to anyone else, may at their discretion perform acts of charity, nepotism, or other sorts of outright foolery; the managers of the latter, being persons with fiduciary responsibilities to the shareholders, are morally barred from doing any such things (never mind that such things happen every day). In either case, to hire or fire for any but a sound business reason is madness. Quotas directly contradict this maxim.

I'm in a business that's afflicted with more quotas than just the ones prescribed upon us by the EEOC. This is because our one and only customer is the Defense Department of the Federal government of the United States. When you have one customer and can never have another, that customer dictates your business practices, whether you like it or not. Consequently, when we submit a proposal of any sort to the Pentagon, the procurement bureaucracy will frequently respond that we don't have enough employees of certain kinds. For example, the response might dictate that to be considered for the job, we must hire more software engineers than we think we need. That's obviously a business decision…but such is the power of an irreplaceable customer that we often have no choice but to comply, with unpleasant consequences for our profitability.

This has gone on for so long that a form of Stockholm Syndrome has set in: our management has persuaded itself that "diversity" is a business virtue. Furthermore, capitulation to quota demands of other sorts has become reflexive…even in those cases where the effect on the profitability of the job in question will be devastating.

This has been forced to the front of my consciousness by recent events, in witness whereof please allow me a rather unusual digression.

***

"Listen, Dandelion. You're fond of stories, aren't you? I'll tell you one--yes, one for El-ahrairah to cry at. Once there was a fine warren on the edge of a wood, overlooking the meadows of a farm. It was big, full of rabbits. Then one day the white blindness came and the rabbits fell sick and died. But a few survived, as they always do. The warren became almost empty. One day the farmer thought, 'I could increase those rabbits, make them part of my farm--their meat, their skins. Why should I bother to keep rabbits in hutches? They'll do very well where they are.' He began to shoot all elil--lendri, homba, stoat, owl. He put out food for the rabbits, but not too near the warren. For his purpose they had to become accustomed to going about in the fields and the wood. And then he snared them--not too many: as many as he wanted and not as many as would frighten them all away or destroy the warren. They grew big and strong and healthy, for he saw to it that they had all of the best, particularly in winter, and nothing to fear--except the running knot in the hedge gap and the wood path. So they lived as he wanted them to live and all the time there were a few who disappeared. The rabbits became strange in many ways, different from other rabbits. They knew well enough what was happening. But even to themselves they pretended that all was well, for the food was good, they were protected, they had nothing to fear but the one fear; and that struck here and there, never enough at a time to drive them away. They forgot the ways of wild rabbits. They forgot El-ahrairah, for what use had they for tricks and cunning, living in the enemy's warren and paying his price? They found other marvelous arts to take the place of tricks and old stories. They danced in ceremonious greeting. They sang songs like the birds and made shapes on the walls; and those these could help them not at all, yet they passed the time and enabled them to tell themselves that they were splendid Fellows, the very flower of Rabbitry, cleverer than magpies. They had no Chief Rabbit--no, how could they?--for a Chief Rabbit must be El-ahrairah to his warren and keep them from death: and here there was no death but one, and what Chief Rabbit could have an answer to that? Instead, Frith sent them strange singers, beautiful and sick like oak apples, like robins' pincushions on the wild rose. And since they could not bear the truth, these singers, who might in some other place have been wise, were squeezed under the terrible weight of the warren's secret until they gulped out fine folly--about dignity and acquiescence, and anything else that could make believe that the rabbits loved the shining wire. But one strict rule they had; oh yes, the strictest. No one must ever ask where another rabbit was and anyone who asked 'Where?'--except in a song or a poem--must be silenced. To say 'Where?' was bad enough, but to speak openly of the wires--that was intolerable. For that they would scratch and kill."

[Richard Adams, Watership Down]

I'm not a politically correct sort, which should be obvious by now to any regular reader of Liberty's Torch. I speak my mind as I please and where and when I please; I have reasons for my convictions and will give them to anyone who wants them. And I have noted, no matter the context nor the occasion, that to speak against "diversity" or quotas invariably elicits one unvarying response: flight. (Fortunately, I'm too valuable to my company to suffer for my openness about my off-axis beliefs. But others who have dared similarly have suffered, sometimes to the extent of being blacklisted from their careers.)

We are being taught to love the instruments of death for American enterprise. The process isn't yet complete, but it's easy to see the terminus from here.

***

This is only one of the knives in the arsenal of the hyper-regulatory state. It has many others. If not thoroughly disarmed, and very soon at that, it will reduce American enterprise to the condition of the late Soviet Union, where all businesses were an extension of the state bureaucracy: regulation pervasive, compliance mandatory and complete, profit irrelevant.

Many Republicans in high office will tell you that we are over-regulated. In the next sentence they'll tell you that they don't object to "reasonable regulation"…a phrase of such elasticity that it can be stretched to cover anything at all.

Barring a Constitutional amendment, there will be no cure.

[Dictated using Windows 7 Speech Recognition]