Perhaps my favorite quote from Team America: World Police is courtesy of "Tim Robbins":
Anyway, last night I was talking to a grad student about jobs and she mentioned a desire to take a job that involves foreign travel. I mentioned working for a multinational corporation as the way to go, noting that many people I talk to who work for MNCs travel all around the world for their jobs.
With a look that was equal parts horror and disgust she declared that she would never work for an MNC. When I asked what she thought about plain old domestic corporations she said that she had her own issues with them but that MNCs were particularly vile. Naturally I asked why. She said that MNCs "exploit people and steal a country's resources." I don't really know what that means. If people felt that they were being exploited they would probably never agree to work for a company and resources don't do anybody much good just sitting in the ground.
I posed to her the following hypothetical: My corporation invests sets up a factory in some third world country where we offer 11 year olds employment at 50 cents per hour for 14 hours per day. She said that a more realistic offer would be 50 cents per day. Fine. Assuming workers applied for these jobs, doesn't that mean that it would be the best job available to them by definition, since if they had better offers they wouldn't apply? Wouldn't the realistic alternative be something even worse such as toiling in a rice patty for 25 cents per day?
She conceded that this was probably true but that the corporations should still pay the workers more. How much more, or what the "fair" wage was she couldn't say. Of course this doesn't take into account that pay has to be related to certain economic realities such as profitability and cost pressures exerted by your competitors. Unsurprisingly she conceded that she didn't have a good understanding of economics -- even though this in no way prevented her from having deep convictions on such matters.
Companies have been investing in China for years in a bid to secure cheap productive labor. The result? Wages are increasing and labor is now scarce. So much for the race to the bottom.
How people can consider corporations one of the great menaces of our time is difficult for me to grasp.
Let me explain to you how this works: you see, the corporations finance Team America, and then Team America goes out... and the corporations sit there in their... in their corporation buildings, and... and, and see, they're all corporation-y... and they make money.That pretty much sums up how many of the left feel about corporations. Personally I don't really get the outrage. To me corporations are just entities that make products or provide services in exchange for money. When I survey the biggest problems facing the world today I just don't see how corporations fit into the picture. Rather it seems to me that the biggest culprits tend to be a lack of freedom and too much government. And to the extent that corporations do exert a malevolent influence it's usually through influencing the government to do their bidding for them -- a great reason for reducing the power of government (this is related to the public choice school of economic thought).
Anyway, last night I was talking to a grad student about jobs and she mentioned a desire to take a job that involves foreign travel. I mentioned working for a multinational corporation as the way to go, noting that many people I talk to who work for MNCs travel all around the world for their jobs.
With a look that was equal parts horror and disgust she declared that she would never work for an MNC. When I asked what she thought about plain old domestic corporations she said that she had her own issues with them but that MNCs were particularly vile. Naturally I asked why. She said that MNCs "exploit people and steal a country's resources." I don't really know what that means. If people felt that they were being exploited they would probably never agree to work for a company and resources don't do anybody much good just sitting in the ground.
I posed to her the following hypothetical: My corporation invests sets up a factory in some third world country where we offer 11 year olds employment at 50 cents per hour for 14 hours per day. She said that a more realistic offer would be 50 cents per day. Fine. Assuming workers applied for these jobs, doesn't that mean that it would be the best job available to them by definition, since if they had better offers they wouldn't apply? Wouldn't the realistic alternative be something even worse such as toiling in a rice patty for 25 cents per day?
She conceded that this was probably true but that the corporations should still pay the workers more. How much more, or what the "fair" wage was she couldn't say. Of course this doesn't take into account that pay has to be related to certain economic realities such as profitability and cost pressures exerted by your competitors. Unsurprisingly she conceded that she didn't have a good understanding of economics -- even though this in no way prevented her from having deep convictions on such matters.
Companies have been investing in China for years in a bid to secure cheap productive labor. The result? Wages are increasing and labor is now scarce. So much for the race to the bottom.
How people can consider corporations one of the great menaces of our time is difficult for me to grasp.
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