The Wonders of the Modern Corporation

"The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles."
Ayn Rand

There are many who praise the modern corporation as incredibly efficient. And it is. It acquires resources, works those resources, and produces and distributes final products. Certainly there is bloat in many modern organizations (although very little at present, all things considered), but the corporation has revolutionized the way we get things done.

There is another kind of efficiency the modern corporation offers--moral efficiency. Morality often gets in the way of the most efficient way of doing things. A personal example from the running of my house. I have two dogs, which I walk several times a day. The most efficient thing I can do as a person is to let their crap lay where it falls. After all, so long as it's outside and I know where it is, I'm likely to avoid it. But that is not the moral thing to do--so I add in extra inefficiencys, like carrying a scoop, and eliminating the crap afterwords. Inefficient. But Moral.

Now here's where the modern corporation comes in. At some point I have to face myself, and realize that i'm the sort of selfish jerk who lets other people stop on his dog's dog-doo. But with the modern corporation nobody has to face that. Each individual in a chain makes a moral decision, but it's always a small decision. Do I fill out this paperwork that i've been assigned? Do I transport these containers to our other facility? I'm sure if burying these containers was dangerous, someone would tell me. And so on. And so forth.

Everybody has someone else to blame for any immoral actions that happen. The worker blames his supervisor. The Supervisor blames company policy. The Company leaders place responsibility either on the stockholders (for demanding profits) or the workers. Nobody blames themselves. And the morality of any action, spread among so many different people, vanishes in the ether.

Rush says all the time, "Do you think Corporate heads really want dirty air or dirty water? Why would they want that? Why wouldn't they fight to ensure clean air and clean water for their children?" Well there are two answers to that question. First, nobody deciding to pollute lives in the town where the pollution is going to happen. They live in clean safe areas a long way away. The exception is probably Texas--but only because Texas is so aggresively anti-environment. Second, the morality of the decision to not change filters for example dissappears when its spread out over so many people.