Seductive Questions

     Certain questions have a terrible power about them. They can stop the mind of him who confronts them. That derives in part from the questions themselves, but in equal or greater measure from the context in which they’re posed. Not all questions are proper in all contexts.

     Here’s a Wall Street Journal article that creates a context for such questions:

     The leaders of some of America’s biggest companies are chipping away at the long-held notion that corporate decision-making should revolve around what is best for shareholders.

     The Business Roundtable on Monday changed its statement of “the purpose of a corporation.” No longer should decisions be based solely on whether they will yield higher profits for shareholders, the group said. Rather, corporate leaders should take into account “all stakeholders”—that is, employees, customers and society writ large.

     It is a major philosophical shift for the association, which counts the chief executives of dozens of the biggest U.S. companies as its members. The group, led by JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO James Dimon, is a powerful voice in Washington for U.S. business interests. It represents a broad swath of American industry, counting among its members the leaders of technology giants and manufacturing companies, airlines and institutional investors, to name a few.

     The Business Roundtable’s old statement of purpose espoused economist Milton Friedman’s decades-old theory that companies’ only obligation is to maximize value for shareholders.

     “Each of our stakeholders is essential,” the new statement says. “We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.”

     It all sounds quite noble, doesn’t it? Though it approaches hubris to differ with Milton Friedman, one of the Twentieth Century’s few genuine geniuses. But here come the unpleasant questions:

• Who identifies those “stakeholders” and by what criteria?
• Who determines the priority order of those “stakeholders?”
• Who determines when some “stakeholder’s” claims have been adequately addressed?
• Is that prioritization absolutely rigid – i.e., the higher must be fully satisfied before the lower may be addressed at all – or flexible?
• What effect on the answers to the above questions might arise from the passage of time?

     He who must answer those questions swiftly realizes – or reveals – what the proposed shift from stockholders to “stakeholders” is really about: power.

     Think about that for a moment while I fetch more coffee.

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     Allow me, yet again, to quote the great Herbert Spencer:

     A blade which is designed both to shave and to carve, will certainly not shave so well as a razor or carve so well as a carving-knife. An academy of painting, which should also be a bank, would in all probability exhibit very bad pictures and discount very bad bills. A gas company, which should also be an infant-school society, would, we apprehend, light the streets ill and teach the children ill. [From Spencer’s essay “Over-Legislation”]

     Brilliant and perfectly apposite. The more “purposes” one attempts to assign to a “living machine” such as a corporation, the less well it will serve any of them. It will be riven by internal conflicts over resources, the roles of critical personnel, trade-offs that arise among the contending priorities, and other factors that will arise as time passes. You can’t find one single analyst who would dispute the inevitability of that dynamic, even among those such as Dimon who argue for the dilution of corporate priorities. So what’s the real point?

     Well, in a hierarchical organization, which is the inevitable structure of a for-profit corporation, someone, or some entity, must have the authority to resolve those conflicts. And of course, that same entity would necessarily decree the answers to the five questions posed in the previous segment. Any attempt to separate those authorities would result in the emergence of a still higher authority empowered to settle the conflicts among them. Yes, really.

     Power, both inside and outside the corporation, is the whole point. The corporate form was devised to make it possible to pursue a single objective: material gain for the stockholders. As long as that remains the case, the performance of the corporation’s hierarchy can be accurately judged by the Board of Directors, which has that as its sole responsibility. But with the defocusing suggested in the WSJ article comes a diminution of the Board’s authority, and therefore a transfer of the ultimate authority from the stockholders to other persons...persons unlikely to have the stockholders’ interests at heart.

     So how does that noble-sounding shift from stockholders to “stakeholders” sound now?

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     At this point a range of objections intended to confuse the issue erupts from the “social-justice warriors.” The more rhetorically skilled among them ask seductive questions that begin with “But aren’t there” or “But don’t you think.” The objective is to lure the businessman into making statements about “other priorities,” at which point the SJW will declaim that “important institutions” (i.e., corporations) have a “responsibility” to attend to them. The more aggressive ones await the replies, then immediately and viciously denounce anyone who dares to deviate from the SJW gospel. And of course, now and then there’ll be disruptions and violence.

     The questions have a single, all-embracing answer:

“No.”

     A for-profit corporation has no responsibility other than to its owners. It must remain within the law, but apart from that it need only satisfy those who own it: its stockholders. Their representatives on the Board of Directors periodically judge the corporation’s performance and adjust its management accordingly. The stockholders’ decisions to buy or sell their stock constitute their verdict on the corporation’s future.

     That valuable movie Other People’s Money provides a glimpse at a more extended rejoinder:

     Other organizations exist to pursue priorities other than material gain. There are plenty of them. Persons more concerned with those other priorities should put their attention, their efforts, and their money elsewhere. That, of course, runs counter to the Left’s overriding objective, which is the politicization of everything.

     Dismiss the seductive questions. Insist upon the corporation's one original, wholly moral, easily understood purpose. Don’t let the Left pervert corporate America. You wouldn’t care for the consequences, especially if you’re a stockholder!

Corporatism And The American Future Part 2

     As I mentioned in the previous segment, the largest 3000 corporations in the United States employ approximately half of all working Americans. It’s possible that some Gentle Readers (not you, of course!) failed to grasp the import of that fact: both what a departure it is from earlier times and what it implies for the power corporations have over the lives of Americans.

     The corporation concept is about three centuries old. It emerged from the old “joint-stock companies” of imperial England. It acquired its American form in the Nineteenth Century, as enterprises were formed that required amounts of capital and labor larger than what a family or clan could provide. Before embarking, the organizers of such a venture had to have a means by which to apportion its benefits to its investors and its workers. The essential features of corporate life and operation arose from that need.

     Thus, we can view the corporation as a kind of technology that applies to organization for a commercial purpose. As such, it’s morally and ethically neutral. That doesn’t mean it can’t be exploited for good or bad ends.

---

     It has been observed many times that those who crave power over others will seek to destroy, neutralize, or invalidate alternate sources of authority. Religion, family, customs, traditions, and community life are all non-governmental sources of authority, though the particular kinds vary. Those sources have many thousands of years of history. The corporation, which is far younger, competes with both those older sources and with governments.

     The American workforce’s trek from the farms to the fleshpots became significant after the Civil War. The migration was propelled by the emergence of power technology – the steam engine – that made many new things possible. The critical development was probably the growth of the railroad network. Before that, an enterprise that produced its wares in large quantities would have had no way to market them to a sufficiently large customer space. With the railroads in place, goods could be moved at relatively high speeds and low costs from one coast to the other. It changed the outlook for American entrepreneurs as radically as the development of the ocean-going sailing ship did for our English forebears.

     Corporations could become large. Their workforces swelled, as did the populations of the zones where conditions were suitable for their operation. The cities perched upon the major railroad networks and navigable waters grew great.

     They who sought power over other Americans were watching.

     Persons ambitious for political elevation gravitated toward the cities just as did the American workforce. Urban population densities militated toward the centralization of many essential services: water, sewer services, schools, some transportation methods, street construction and maintenance, firefighting, garbage collection and disposal, eventually electrical power. Centralization begets monopoly. Monopoly begets municipalization: government takeover. New ways of exerting power over Americans and their enterprises had emerged.

     For the power-hungry, this was not enough. Nothing ever is.

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     The corporation, as I observed earlier, could provide a source of authority that competes with other sources. In family-run commercial enterprises this effect is missing, owing to the primacy of family relations and the traditional allocation of authority to the family’s older members. But the corporation has no such prior structure. Its only motive is commercial success. Within the constraints of the law, its authority will be exerted toward that end.

     For a while, ambitious politicians saw the corporations as competitors. It was not until the last decades of the Nineteenth Century that they discovered how to subordinate the corporations to their aims. The key discovery was a phrase with ominous undertones: “regulation in the public interest.”

     The earliest thrust was against “trusts.” That term, originally of very narrow meaning, was expanded to include many commercial agreements and arrangements. The eerie phrase “combinations in restraint of trade,” made famous by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, gave governments essentially unlimited power to harass corporations for perfectly ordinary behavior that harmed no one. Quoth Isabel Paterson in The God of the Machine, “As freak legislation, the antitrust laws stand alone. Nobody knows what it is they forbid.” Consider also this observation from “John Galt’s” Dreams Come Due:

     For corporations that do not have twenty years and $20 million to fight an antitrust action, here are some guidelines for product pricing:

1. High prices are considered to be monopolistic price gouging that exploit the public (who voluntarily choose to pay the prices).
2. Low prices (which benefit consumers) are considered to be cutthroat and predatory because they attempt to destroy your competition.
3. Prices that are the same as those of other competitors (because production costs are basically the same) are obviously collusive and indicative of a ploy to fix prices.

     Good Luck!

     The politicians used the antitrust laws, and later, the emergence of non-legislative “regulatory authority,” to bend the corporations to their will.

     Note that when enterprise was family-founded, notions such as “combinations in restraint of trade” and “regulation in the public interest” were ludicrous. They could not be sensibly applied to businesses confined within such limits. Also, families would successfully resist such intrusions, at least in earlier times. Only with the rise of large corporations that lacked familial bases did it become possible for politicians to cultivate the notion that such entities could behave immorally or irresponsibly, and therefore that they should be subject to political control.

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     The politicians had another method for gaining ascendancy over the corporations: the lure of corruption. “Access,” then as now, amounted to a way to bias legislation and regulation toward favored clients. A large corporation with access could use it to press for laws and regulations that would hobble its competitors. This began at the city level but swiftly spread to the states and Washington.

     Indeed, when Congress began to act on more localized corruption, the overall effect was to centralize it: to pull the authority upward, into the federal government, regardless of what the Constitution might say on the matter. The overwhelmingly greater part of federal regulation pertains to corporate activities, even those parts that don’t explicitly mention the corporate form. That immense mass of regulations acts as a barrier to entry to most existing industries and many emergent ones. A competitor larger than a few dozen persons must be able to support a Legal department, an Accounting department, and a Human Resources department simply to cope with federal regulations.

     As the legal and regulatory tangles grew, so did the costs of compliance. Smaller corporations foundered under the weight. The ultimate effect was to concentrate commerce in a shrinking group of corporations.

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     If I may quote one of my fictional characters:

     “Now, we know from historical data that predators of all sorts will concentrate where the prey is fattest. The State, which is merely an organized band of predators with a veneer of legitimacy derived either from tradition or from a manufactured appearance of the consent of its subjects, took a huge fraction of its subjects’ annual production from them in taxes. A typical State would increase its exactions on its subjects faster than those subjects could increase their own fortunes. That compelled wage earners to strive ever harder just to run in place, with obvious consequences for production and marketing.” [From Which Art In Hope.]

     In any collusion, when one partner has the money and the other has the guns, sooner or later the one with the guns will have all the money. The existence of a predatory hierarchy makes this automatic. Predators compete ruthlessly for supremacy. Competition improves and refines skills. Thus, ever more effective predators will emerge over time. Only the collapse of the predators’ habitat can prevent it.

     Our governmental predators rule us largely through the shackles they’ve placed upon our sources of income. For at least half of us, that source is a Fortune 3000 corporation. As the exactions of the Leviathan State increase, so will the effects upon those who work for them. Even worse, the squeeze placed upon smaller firms will thin their ranks further, which will further concentrate the American workforce into a smaller group of employers.

     Every industry has been affected. New ones will be targeted as they arise.

     More anon.

Death By Diversity

     Let’s imagine for a moment that you own and operate a business. Perhaps it has a few hundred employees. Perhaps it has a black-ink balance sheet: steady revenues, positive profitability, ample cash reserves, and good credit. And perhaps its product line is a leading-edge technology that required quite a bit of scientific and engineering knowledge to develop, and requires almost as much to maintain and advance.

     Would you hire illiterates, or persons without proven scientific or engineering expertise, or persons without mathematical skills, or persons whose physical handicaps severely retard their productivity, or persons who actively detest “unbelievers” to work in your company?

     A silly question, isn’t it? Of course you would! If you were to refrain from doing so, the Diversitocrats^TM would be all over you like a cheap suit. You see, what matters isn’t that the product you make improves the lives of its customers. What matters isn’t that you employ several hundred people, enabling them and their families to live independently of the Omnibenevolent State. What matters isn’t your property rights over what you and you alone have built.

     What matters is that you bow to the Diversitocrats.^TM They cannot abide a dissenter.

     Actually, it’s worse than that. If your company is all white, and its scientists and engineers are overwhelmingly male, the Diversitocrats^TM actively want to see it – and you – crash and burn. You are a bleeding canker upon their vision of Social Justice. You must be destroyed before you can mislead others into thinking that there’s an objective reality whose laws can’t be repealed, modified, reinterpreted, or otherwise finessed.

     Never imagine for a moment that the Diversitocrats^TM are genuinely interested in diversity. They merely hate whites, men, the able-bodied, and Christians. They conceal that ravening hatred behind a facade of concern for nonwhites, women, the handicapped, and anything but Christians. They’re certainly not interested in diversity of thought or opinion. If you differ with them, you’re a target. Only if you agree with them – by which I mean wholeheartedly and without a scintilla of divergence on any point however small – will you be allowed to exist. Under their continuous scrutiny, of course.

     Their hatred is best evidenced by their enthusiastic support for the Islamic invasion currently overrunning Europe, with America soon to follow.

---

     A recent piece at Atlantic Centurion illuminates one of the most significant symptoms of the Diversitocrats’^TM ascendancy:

     According to business-news themed clickbait site Inc.com:

     The spotlight and the magnifying glass have been on tech companies’ dismal diversity numbers for the past year. Hiring diverse candidates shouldn’t have to be a struggle. Yet, the latest numbers from companies like Facebook and Intel show that the needle is barely moving. As a result, there’s a new position in fashion within tech company c-suites: say hello to the head of diversity. Recently spotted job listings show tech companies are making diversity an executive level position.

     Ding ding ding. Diversity!^TM No explanation—just keep drumming it in. We need more of it! Companies are basically hiring “Chief Diversity Officers,” if they didn’t already have them. We can’t all be cutting-edge progressives from the get-go; some organizations need an extra push. Whether this is due to media campaigns from leftist journalists, internal initiatives or both is hard to generalize, but the fact of the matter is that the Diversity is Our Greatest Strength^® meme has taken root among the business elite. They nominally believe that a diverse workforce, whatever that means, is better than, say, meritocracy or standardization.

     But that’s just where it starts. The “Chief Diversity Officer” will of course have a department beneath him. In hiring for that department, he will select disproportionately for non-whites, for women, for the disabled, for the scientifically and technologically illiterate, and of course for non-Christians. There are three reasons for this:

1. It’s the way he swings;
2. It will tug the company’s “diversity quotient” (DQ) in the right direction;
3. His subordinates will become his evangelists and enforcers to the rest of the company.

     And of course, when the Gospel of Diversity^TM has done its fell work upon the firm – when revenues slide, profitability craters, and the scientific / technological component of the workforce is rendered inert by Diversity-induced friction, the “Chief Diversity Officer” will scream that it’s because the company culture is racist, sexist, ableist, Christianist, etc. He will claim that these problems can only be fixed by more Diversity.^TM

     If you work in a company with more than a few dozen employees, this is all but certainly already a part of your world. If your company is currently too small a fish for the Diversitocrats^TM to care about, beware as it moves upward in revenues and general visibility. The Diversitocrats’^TM crosshairs will settle on your company sooner or later.

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     I retired from my job in defense engineering earlier this year. I didn’t do so because of Diversity,^TM but because my commute was taxing me physically and, at any rate, after nearly five decades in real-time software research and development, I’d had enough. But in the last few months before my retirement, I noticed that corporate was pressing our department in particular to hire more women, more non-whites, and more disabled persons.

     Mind you, a defense engineering company needs scientists and engineers. It needs persons strong in the sciences, mathematics, and the associated skills of unbiased examination and rational thought. Its natural preference will be for college graduates in the STEM fields. There is no conceivable reason for such a company to seek out other sorts of employees. Yet that is exactly what corporate was doing, even as the company was shedding revenues, contracts, and divisions.

     The corridor walls grew ever more thickly festooned with “Diversity is our strength” propaganda. One promotional poster, which seemed to be everywhere, set my teeth to grinding:

Put Us On The Fast Track:
Hire People With Disabilities!

     If that makes the least shred of sense to any Gentle Reader, please explain it to me.

---

     Imposed Diversity^TM is bigotry enforced at gunpoint. It claims to combat a long list of evils, but in reality it promotes one of the greatest evils of all: the privileging of some on the basis of characteristics that are irrelevant to whatever real value they may have to offer to others. It is racism. It is sexism. It is religious bigotry, and many things as bad or worse.

     Do you think it a coincidence that the Diversitocrats^TM are all hard-left “liberals?” Oh, excuse me, “progressives?” Do you think it a coincidence that the “minorities” they champion – apropos of which, women outnumber men in these United States and have outnumbered us since the World Wars at the very least – all share their politics by an overwhelming margin?

     At this time – but by no means is this guaranteed for the future – the Diversitocrats^TM have not descended to fasten their grip on companies that rely on nontraditional employees: i.e., job-shoppers and self-employed contractors. Neither will they attempt to shackle a company of fewer than about 100 employees; the quotas by which they impose their will upon a company don’t yield adequate numbers to be worth their time. But ultimately, the Floyd Ferris Principle will prevail:

     "Since the deadline for the signing of the national Gift Certificates expires tonight at midnight," said Dr. Ferris, in the tone of a salesman extending a special courtesy to a customer, "I have come to obtain your signature, Mr. Rearden."
     He paused, with an air of suggesting that the formula now called for an answer.
     "Go on," said Rearden. "I am listening."
     "Yes, I suppose I should explain," said Dr. Ferris, "that we wish to get your signature early in the day in order to announce the fact on a national news broadcast. Although the gift program has gone through quite smoothly, there are still a few stubborn individualists left, who have failed to sign-small fry, really, whose patents are of no crucial value, but we cannot let them remain unbound, as a matter of principle, you understand.”

     [Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged. Emphasis added by FWP.]

     Heed this warning and prepare.

The Vacuum Part 2: Benign Or Malign?

"When all the errors are in the bank's favor, you can be forgiven for thinking there's more than sloppy arithmetic at work." -- Me.

I didn't originally intend a follow-up to the previous piece, but some of the comments have been priceless, and the "private" email that invariably outweighs them has urged me to continue. Why, you'd think I might have accidentally illuminated some heretofore undiscovered truth about human nature or something!

Charles Murray pointed this out in his classic Losing Ground:

"People respond to incentives and disincentives. Sticks and carrots work."

When America's foremost social analyst says something that pithy, people should pay attention -- especially as it crosscuts the "received wisdom" of our political class. And they did, Gentle Reader, they did. But when that unsurpassed fount of wisdom Fran Porretto follows with something like this:

"An agreement to sell one's labor is the same as an agreement to sell anything else: the good to be delivered and the payment for it must both be well defined."

...the sky trembles, the Earth moves, the angels weep...and the horde determined to differ with me rushes forward to quarrel, quibble, and declare all manner of exceptions.

I don't mind disagreement, as long as everyone respects the rules of polite argument. Some of my emailers didn't, as you can probably imagine, and as Liberty's Torch is a family-friendly website...well, most of the time, anyway...I shall refrain from elucidating further. But one particular thread that ran through quite a lot of the emails was the assertion that anyone hostile to making working arrangements more flexible must hate business or lack a decent work ethic. With that, I must take serious exception -- serious enough to merit another essay.

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The joint-stock corporation was originally conceived as a way of amassing capital for a new venture. In that regard it was quite successful. However, that mission was quickly encrusted with others that were, to be gentle about it, less constructive. Today I'm uncertain that the "traditional" corporation, with its paired command and control structures of a managerial hierarchy and a Board of Directors, will survive more than a few decades longer.

The most controversial of all the accretions to the corporate idea was and remains that of limited liability. Stripped to essentials, limited liability treats the corporation as a person in its own right, whose responsibilities may not be offloaded onto uninvolved others. This concept protects individual shareholders from being held liable for damages caused by employees and agents of the corporation. Only the assets of the corporation may be garnished to pay for such damages.

The idea seemed quite reasonable at first. After all, a shareholder typically stands at some remove from corporate operations, interested only in getting a return on his money. He might not have the faintest idea what agents of the corporation are doing. However, the Law of Unintended Consequences was bound to have its say.

The first obviously negative consequences -- the use of limited liability to shield a wrongdoer from the consequences of his deeds -- are difficult to place in time. However, they evoked sharp legal responses: corporate officers, plus persons whose service to the corporation involves fiduciary responsibilities (e.g., lawyers and accountants) were excluded from the limited-liability shield. The change in incentives elicited a swelling of middle management's ranks, to bury ever more decision making below the corporate-officer level so that shenanigans could be plausibly denied. "Shell corporations" and "interlocking directorates" further complicated the picture. As litigiousness by and toward corporations increased, legislatures anxious for clear legal targets enacted "whistleblower laws" intended to protect non-officer employees from retaliation for having reported wrongdoing by their superiors.

But laws can only have such consequences as people's knowledge of the law and faith in its enforcement will sustain. A law that's generally unknown, that's obscure of import, that cannot be invoked for contextual reasons, or that's enforceable only at the discretion of an indifferent or biased authority, will fail of its purpose at best or be turned against its devisers' intentions at worst. This is especially the case as regards enactments intended to elicit candid testimony about wrongdoing behind a corporate facade.

Worse yet is the impact of the SNAFU Principle:

Shea and Wilson [Illuminatus!, 1975] defined an illuminating notion called the SNAFU Principle, which they stated as “communication is only possible among equals.” The basic idea is simple: when two people do not perceive one another as equals, they will slant their communications — unconsciously and without any particular volition — to protect themselves in that disparate relationship....

Wilson and Shea were both writers, and basically literary people; their summary is literate and verbal. But, being a computer scientist and at least somewhat literate in signal theory and information theory, it struck me that the SNAFU Principle wasn’t sufficiently precisely stated. It should be restated as followed:

“In any social hierarchy, the noise added to a communication between individuals in that hierarchy is directly proportional to the distance between them, and the factor of proportionality will be proportional to the perceived risk to them.”

In a corporate-employment setting, the SNAFU Principle functions bidirectionally. Not only will lower-level employees shade the truth when reporting to their superiors; those superiors will condition what they tell lower-level employees out of consciousness of possible hazards to themselves. This effect arises directly from the recognition that inside a corporate hierarchy, power is a two-way street. Yes, the superior has overt power over his subordinate, usually through assignment of responsibilities, salary reviews, and the power to fire. But corporation law as it stands today gives the subordinate power over his superior as well: through the "whistleblower laws," and through the effects of imputation upon corporate well-being.

The result is a systematic bias -- a degradation -- of communication, command, and control that often suits upper corporate management very, very well. It drives the relocation of as much responsibility for decision making as possible to levels in the hierarchy where power-deadlocks can effectively silence all parties concerned.

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One of the functions of a Board of Directors -- in many analysts' view, the central one -- is protecting the stockholders against the effects of wrongdoing by the officers and agents of the corporation. The most obvious hazard is, of course, stockholders' potential loss of their invested principal. However, as enactments multiply that allow the penetration of stockholders' limited-liability shield, the protection of stockholders' private, uninvested assets becomes ever more important.

The powers of a Board of Directors will be set forth in the company's by-laws. Some such boards will have very narrow powers, limited to decreeing dividends and appointing or removing the chief executive officer. Others will have broader scope. But except for those made up of corporate officers themselves -- a dubious and highly dispreferred arrangement -- all boards have limited knowledge of the internal workings of the corporation, usually conveyed by monthly or quarterly reports. Here again, the SNAFU Principle comes into play.

Chief executive officers are anxious to perpetuate their tenures. Those who report to them are fully aware of the CEO's incentive structure, and will seek to propitiate him by serving it. To the extent possible, bad news traveling "up" the hierarchy will be filtered out, diluted, or qualified to reduce the probability that those required to report it will be made to suffer for it. The CEO will qualify or suppress whatever remains to the extent required to keep his Board of Directors from summarily replacing him. However, at every stop along the way, he who receives bad news will make it known to those who reported it that "you should never report a problem without having a solution already in hand." No one likes to be forced to deceive those who hold his fortunes in their hands; the risk of being found out is never zero and the consequences can be dire.

This creates an incentive that drives management to push the perceived responsibility for decisions that embed a degree of risk -- essentially all decisions of consequence -- ever downward toward persons whose positions effectively prevent them from being identified or interrogated. The more layers of management stand between the CEO and the line workers, the easier and more effective this is. However, perceived responsibility is not necessarily authentic responsibility. Authentic responsibility must be mated to authentic authority over the decisions for which one will be held responsible -- and managers are always reluctant to surrender authority.

How much duplicity occurs in the corporate environment will depend on the ethical soundness of those who populate it. That, of course, will be conditioned by the ethical soundness of the population from which corporate employment is drawn. Time was, the American people being the most ethical of all the peoples of the world, we could count on that soundness being very sound, and therefore on deceit being rare and generally easy to remedy.

Time was.

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The enslaved Hebrews in Egypt, “their lives made bitter with hard bondage,” were a bickering, back-biting lot. Moses had to give them a promised land before he could join them together. -- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

Sad as it is to accept, people under pressure will more often serve their personal material interests than obey their moral-ethical conditioning. Contemporary corporate employment places the employee under a kind and degree of pressure unknown to previous generations of Americans. This pressure is exacerbated by those political trends -- e.g., rising taxation; rampant inflation of the currency; regulatory authorities that obey no limits and recognize no regions of personal property or privacy -- that endanger the material well-being of Americans generally.

Long ago, as part of a story, I wrote:

    Everyone who ever works for a sizable company eventually faces an ethical dilemma. Ethical dilemmas are created by middle managers; a company whose top bosses were in direct contact with the peones and knew what they were doing could never have one.

    There’s really only one ethical dilemma for an employee: a middle manager tempts you to suppress something you know you ought to broadcast. He’s invariably trying to advance at the expense of his equals in the organization. Deny him, and he’ll vow revenge. Accede to him, and he’ll own your soul.

    The middle manager is indispensable to the dilemma because you can’t tempt yourself. If you have ethics, then you’ll know what’s right and what’s wrong. If you don’t, then you’re not a man; you’re vermin, and you ought to be crushed.

The protagonist of that story was an unusually clear-eyed young woman. Yet in retrospect, her view fails to account for the general deterioration of ethical conduct in our era of secularism and moral relativism. These days, managers at any level can and will impose ethical dilemmas directly on their subordinates whenever it suits their interests. He whose livelihood depends on corporate employment is vulnerable at every instant of his working life.

Combine that with the "progressive" trend toward "flexible working arrangements" in which one can never be sure when one is "off the clock" -- author and occasional commenter Joseph P. Martino captured this as "Am I working at home or living at the office?" -- and the picture becomes too muddy for the typical working stiff to be certain of anything.

There are still corporations whose mamagements' conduct consistently conforms to Judeo-Christian ethical constraints, but fewer than before. As relativistic moral-ethical rot progresses through our society -- and really, Gentle Reader, what influences are poised to halt it? -- these will dwindle still further. The implications for traditional wage employment are grave.

Food for thought.

The Extinction Of Conviction

I know that the Enemy [God] disapproves many of these causes. But that is where He is so unfair. He often makes prizes of humans who have given their lives for causes He thinks bad on the monstrously sophistical ground that the humans thought them good and were following the best they knew. [C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters]

There are subjects it pains me terribly to write about. This is one of them.

Read this article very closely:

"We were flat out wrong."

That’s the message Cracker Barrel is sending to enraged customers after the restaurant chain removed Duck Dynasty items from its stores over fears it might offend people.

"Our intent was to avoid offending but that’s just what we've done," Cracker Barrel said in a statement posted on its Facebook page. "You told us we made a mistake. And, you weren't shy about it. You wrote, you called and you took to social media to express your thoughts and feelings."

Is it gratifying that Cracker Barrel has reversed its decision? Moderately so, I suppose. But what about the reasons for both the original removal and the reversal? How would you assess them? As statements of conviction, or as commercial minimaxery that eschews all such notions?

Imagine for just a moment that the GLAAD assault on Phil Robertson, which triggered A&E’s decision to "indefinitely suspend" the Duck Dynasty patriarch, had expressed the sentiments of a majority of Americans. Isn't it fairly easy to see what course Cracker Barrel would have followed? Would that have expressed a sincere conviction of any sort?

How I long for the sight of a Thomas Watson Sr. or a George Pullman: men whose convictions defied considerations of majority sentiment, and who operated their companies as they damned well pleased. These days, the last line of the quarterly report seems to possess ultra-hypnotic powers. At any rate, no corporate executive or Board of Directors seems willing to stand on principle...regardless of the principle in question or its soundness by any criteria.

Yes, yes, Gentle Reader. Fran's being an old fossil again. A dinosaur who just can't "get with it." What's all this nonsense about convictions? What relevance do they have to American enterprise in this scrambling-for-the-shekels / open twenty-four-seven /always on-always hot / fiber-optically-connected / happenin' age?

You might want to give it some thought.

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Just now, what Phil Robertson said, which I accept as an expression of his sincere convictions, strikes me as less important than the vectors of reaction to it.

GLAAD did what homosexual mouthpiece groups always do: it went on the attack. It's succeeded in getting its way with that tactic many times to date. Perhaps this time it won't, but we shall see. There are more cards to be played -- and you can bet the rent money that every significant corporation in these United States will be watching closely until the table is bare of chips.

First question: Should the tide of popular sentiment remain overwhelmingly in Phil Robertson's favor, will GLAAD retract or modify its condemnation?

A&E did what a left-leaning media outlet might be expected to do. It's possible that the network's executives sincerely believe that Robertson expressed hateful, unacceptable sentiments, but I severely doubt it. They know their viewer demographic. It's pained them from the first that Duck Dynasty, a show with the same sort of intentions behind it as National Geographic's Preppers, should have elicited so much actual affection for its stars. Indeed, there's a strong possibility that they arranged for the GQ interview precisely to give them a reason to put the vice grips to this unacceptably Christian show.

Second question: Had there been no GLAAD reaction to Phil Robertson's statements, do you think A&E would have refrained from doing what it did?

The aftermath is well known to anyone who hasn't slept through the contretemps. Cracker Barrel isn't the only company that's been influenced by developments; it's just the first to reverse itself. But its statements are painfully poignant: to avoid giving offense, they took Duck Dynasty products out of their shops, and to avoid giving offense, they're putting them back! Clearly, all that matters is the preponderance of sentiment. Where the corporation's guiding lights actually stand is a matter for speculation alone.

Third and final question: Do you respect for Cracker Barrel for its original actions, for its reversal, or for both? Why and / or why not? Would you have more respect for its leaders had they stood fast on their initial decision? Please remember that respect is not the same as agreement or approbation.

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Time was, we understood the concept of an "honorable enemy:" one who opposes you out of sincere conviction. We respected such enemies even as we fought them. We might have tried mightily to show them the error of their ways -- a course, if available, that's always preferable to outright combat -- but we fought them all the while...because we fought from sincere conviction as well.

Perhaps the professionally managed joint-stock corporation falls outside that paradigm. As Isabel Paterson has noted, "A corporation has neither a soul to be damned nor a body to be kicked." It's a purely appetite-driven machine with little or no ability to inhibit itself on moral grounds. All that matters to it is reward and punishment as expressed in dollars and cents. In that regard it falls below canis familiaris on the moral spectrum.

Today, most working Americans are employed by such a firm. Their well-being depends critically on the health of their company's balance sheet. Inevitably, they learn to "root" for whatever turn of events will fatten the bottom line...as long as it doesn't include automation or layoffs, of course.

There's no room for conviction in any of that. Convictions about right and wrong are orthogonal to the quest for ever larger profits. Worse, they can get in the way -- and the more dominated by greed and fear are a company's masters, the larger will that prospect loom in their nightmares. Were it otherwise, do you think the 3% of Americans who are homosexual could successfully threaten a boycott that any company would take seriously?

Thus doth commerce make cowards of us all.