Liberals & Progressives in Business - Not mutually Exclusive

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by apocalipstic

For me they can co-exist.

I can be socially very liberal and pro-business in a fair sense.

I somehow think that businesses can be fair and still make a profit. That businesses do not have to take advantage of and grind its workers into the dirt to be viable.

Now what should a business be for example? Should it be a for profit Healthcare Industry? No.

I would go even farther than that. To the degree that we are talking about a small business that produces something or provides a direct service I think that, on the whole, Adam Smith is more right than wrong that largely the market will handle things without government intervention. So the local green grocer, the local butcher, the local beauty shop should, within reason, be left alone to run their business as they see fit as long as they comply with basic health and safety laws. It is when businesses either become very large (employing hundreds of people instead of 4 or 5) and/or their products become very abstracted (here I'm thinking financial services, insurance, etc.) that they should increasingly come under regulation. Financial services should be regulated not because I hate high finance but because the 'products' are so abstracted, the amount of damage that can be done so vast, that the risk-to-benefit ratio tilts toward regulating them.

The reason for this is pretty straightforward; if your stylist messes up your hair, you can walk into the shop and make a fuss causing the other patrons to lose faith in the place. Your friends, family and coworkers may ask about your haircut (or you may tell them) and they will not go to that shop. The green grocer who sells rotten fruit will lose business. If it were the case that large multinational banks would lose customers because of their bad business practices Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank, the whole rogues gallery would have been out of business years ago. With very large business the Adam Smith, 'invisible hand' idea breaks down. Want proof? I give you Microsoft.

Microsoft puts out two products that are worth a damn--Office and the Xbox 360 and Office is bloated beyond belief. Windows is a manifestly inferior operating system. It has been inferior for years now--since at *least* Windows 98. Windows is slower, more bloated, less secure than *either* Mac OS X or Linux. Yet, Windows has the lion share of the market. Because it's better? No. Because Microsoft spent the 90s being absolutely ruthless and Apple made some rather stupid decisions. Yet, in both the consumer and business markets Microsoft is the 800 lb gorilla. How bad is it? Of the dozens of programmers, database admins, system admins or other technical professionals I know the overwhelming majority of us use either Mac or Linux as our operating system. I bring in my personal laptop and use it at work, using my company provided Windows machine for the two pieces of software I have to use for my job that only run on Windows. Every other useful thing I do at work is done on my Mac. Is that inconvenient? Yes. Do I prefer that than using a computer that would send my blood pressure toward the upper-atmosphere? Yes. The daily screams of frustration around me vindicate my decision.

Now, if what the free market fundamentalists said was true then Microsoft would have been punished by the market a long time ago. Microsoft may, in the fullness of time, pay a price for some of their mistakes (cough, Zune, cough) but their behavior has been monopolistic for most of the last two decades and their products have been bloated (at best) and horrendous (cough, Windows ME, cough) at worst for a large part of that time. Why have they not paid a price? Because this idea that free markets always come up with the Panglossian solution is not even wrong.

Cheers
Aj