For the past week, I've been on a lovely vacation in gorgeous Aspen, Colorado. One of my best friends comes from an incredibly wealthy family and they definitely know how to roll out the red carpet for their guests.
My friend and I are very close and over the years I've gotten close to his family as well. Despite their teeming wealth, none of their five children act spoiled in the least bit and I honestly do not know if I have ever come across a more compassionate and friendly family in my life.
My friend and I are fervent progressives and so are his parents on many social issues. In most families (my own in particular), politics is rightfully viewed as a taboo topic of discussion that does nothing but instigate unhealthy conflict. In this wonderful family, however, healthy disagreement is welcomed and I engaged in plenty of it with my friend's economically conservative father.
In my high school, all juniors are required to complete a comprehensive, semester long research project on an American literary work of our choice. I chose to research two plays by Arthur Miller, one of which was All My Sons. In All My Sons, Miller condemns material greed through the suicide of his main character, Joe Keller. A successful manager in the aviation industry, Keller knowingly sells deficient airplane parts to the military, which leads to the death of his own son and countless other air force pilots.
All the while, however, Mr. Keller presents a fun-loving personality and even amidst Miller's constant foreshadowing about his dark past, Keller appears to be an all around good guy. Underneath his friendly demeanor, however, lies Keller's irrefutably immoral financial transactions.
I'm not about to equate my friend's father to someone like Joe Keller. Both of them, however, fall under a large umbrella of compassionate and charitable wealthy Americans who simultaneously believe that the unfettered free market is infallible. The dangerous effects of their neo-liberal tendancies more than outweigh any admirable sense of charity.
The charity reflected in private donations does demonstrate a certain degree of social responsibility that my friend's father holds. America, however, should hold even the most charitable corporate executives to a much higher standard. In the name of socio-economic fairness, we must expect the wealthiest amongst us to politically align themselves against their own financial interests. If we fail to do so, the twenty first century will become nothing more than a corporate oligarchy that will continue to squeeze working families out of the middle class.
Executives like my friend's dad assume that a company's profit margins will trickle down to the entire company. During our amiable debate, my friend's dad expressed an obsessive contempt for unions that I would expect from any self-interested CEO. To gauge whether his attitude towards unions had to do with a fundamental opposition to the workforce's right to collectively bargain, I asked him how he would feel if every single union in America was busted ASAP. He said he would support such a move arguing that it would be good for business.
What does a CEO really mean when he or she throws around vague phrases like "good for business." A genuinely compassionate human being, my friend's dad tried to put a more altruistic face on the harsh neo-liberal policies he advocated. According to him, the money business saves from not having to deal with unions simultaneously stuffs his fat wallet while also raising wages for workers all the way down at the bottom of the company's totem poll. The problem is that the profitablilty of a company must be shared and that is where unions must come into the picture.
I bring up unions as a specific example of this CEO's resistance to any interference on the unfettered free market. During our discussion, he proclaimed that the free market is infallable and interfering with it will have an overall negative effect on society.
The only net loss from effective unionization without overreach, however, lies in the wallets of corporate executive. Despite all the respect I've showered upon my friend's father, I believe that he malevolently refuses to recognize this reality for the sake of his company's competitiveness. Furthermore, charitable donations, no matter how large, do not adequately repent for supporting an economic worldview that enslaves millions of Americans in poverty.
The late Milton Friedman used to warn us of the dangerous consequences of an economy in which corporate executives assume social responsibilites that divert them from increasing their profit margins as much as possible. According to Friedman, making a solid profit was the one and only responsibility of a CEO such as my friend's father. I could not disagree more strongly. Nevertheless, I support a strong, competitive, capitalist society in which companies are free to profit. But the freedom to profit must always be equalized with a social responsibility to the less fortunate in society.
As our nation's middle class continues to dissipate, corporate executives have hit a fork in the road. One direction is paved with a set of responsiblites to the less fortunate in society that extend beyond the realm of philanthropy and into the support of public policy that would raid their wallets. The other direction is a dark road that Joe Keller took in All My Sons. As Arthur Miller so poignantly displays through Keller's journey, an ego-centric sense of material greed is in no one's interests. If corporate America's eternally wealthy members do not muster up the resolve to fight against their economic interests, our middle class will end up just like Joe Keller: dead.