Conflicted Priorities...

...from an interview with Noam Chomsky

There was a famous case called “Dodge v. Ford.” Some of the stockholders of
the Ford motor company, the Dodge brothers, brought Henry Ford to court,
claiming that by paying the workers a higher wage, and by making cars better
than they had to be made, he was depriving them of their profits – because it’s
true: dividends would be lower. They went to the courts, and they won.

The courts decided that the management of the corporation has the legal
responsibility to maximize the yield of the profit to its stockholders, that’s
its job. The corporations had already been granted the right of persons, and
this basically says they have to be a certain type of pathological person, a
person that does nothing except try to maximize his own gain – that’s the legal
requirement on a corporation, and that’s a core principle of Anglo-American
corporate law. So when, say, Milton Friedman points out that corporations just
have to have one interest in life, maximizing profit and market share, he is
legally correct, that is what the law says. The reason the Dodge brothers wanted
it was because they wanted to start their own car company, and that ended up
being Dodge, Chrysler, Daimler-Chrysler and so on. And that remains a core
principle of corporate law.

The United States happens to be pretty much at the extreme of keeping to
the principle that the corporate system must be pathological, and that the
government is allowed to and glad to intervene to uphold that principle.

Like during the New Deal period in the United States and during the 1960s,
the United States veered somewhat towards a social market system. That’s why the
Bush administration, who are of extreme reactionary sort, are trying to
dismantle the few elements where the social market exists. Why are they trying
to destroy social security, for example? I mean, there’s no serious economic
problem, it’s all fraud. It’s in as good fiscal health as it’s ever been in its
history, but it is a system which benefits the general population. It is of no
use at all to the wealthy. Like, I get social security when I retire, but I’ve
been a professor at MIT for fifty years, so I got a big pension and so on and so
forth, I wouldn’t even notice if I didn’t get social security. But a very large
part of the population, maybe 60% or something like that, actually survive on
it. So therefore it’s a system that obviously has to be destroyed. It’s useless
for the wealthy, it’s useless for privilege, it contributes nothing to profit.
It has other bad features, like it’s based on the principle that you should care
about somebody else, like you should care whether a disabled widow has food to
eat. And that’s hopelessly immoral by the moral principles of power and
privilege, so you’ve got to knock that idea out of people’s heads, and therefore
you want to get rid of the system.