Fetters

Greed beats altruism every time -- Pug Mahoney

"Greed is good." -- Gordon Gekko, lead character in the movie, "Wall Street" (1987).

   The government is cutting out many restrictions on Big Business in the name of Making America Great Again.
   But the inevitable consequence of unfettered corporate operations is a wildly swinging economy, bouncing from rapid growth to sudden crashes.
   Somewhere between the two extremes of a fully controlled, tightly managed economy and the unfettered freedom of corporations to do whatever they want in the name of profits for shareholders lies a workable combination of ambition and concern that will benefit all of society.
   Freedom, of course, is a wonderful thing, but reality has a way of intruding on the lives of a nation's people and their politicians.
   Recent reports about the actions of the federal government show a preference for minimal control of what corporate America does in the name of profit. Here are a few:

-- Scott Pruitt, chief of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), wants to remove limits on automobile emissions.
-- The White House has suggested it wants to shut down the EPA entirely.
-- The president talks of "clean coal" as he moves to liberate coal-fired power plants from pollution controls.
-- The Department of Education under Betsy DeVos favors private schools over public schools operated by local governments.
-- The Federal Reserve Board wants to free big banks from lending rules intended to protect them from over-extending their exposure to risky loans.

   These and other actions favoring free market capitalism and corporate America will enable companies to race ahead to soaring profits as sales boom and international competition is limited.
   And, of course, all the profits that big companies reap will trickle down to workers as higher wages, and to consumers as lower prices.
   Eventually. In the long run. As time goes by. Sometime in the future, after management and shareholders get the lion's share.
   But here's something to consider about that metaphor.
   Lions don't share.

   All this is led by the belief that corporate generosity and management concern for the well being of others will ensure that  all things will be for the best in this best of all possible worlds, as Voltaire had one of his characters say in the satirical novel, "Candide."
   Meanwhile, the American economy continues to do well, as the nation added 223,000 jobs in May and the unemployment rate dipped again to an 18-year low of 3.8 percent.
   Economists, however, point out that a better overall measure of a nation's health is the labor force participation rate, which measures the percent of workers actually able to find and hold jobs. That figure, currently at 62.7 percent, has not moved significantly in many years. Likewise the employment-population ratio, now at 60.4 percent.
   
   Freedom is a wonderful thing, but reality has a way of intruding on wishful thinking.
   Conservative politicians and business leaders may prefer minimal regulations over what happens, but without some efforts to rein in over-optimistic stallions in the corporate race to profits, economic disaster can trip up the fastest, most enthusiastic jockeys.
   At the other extreme are those who would put stiff controls on what business folk do, and this can easily stifle ambition and innovation.
   Somewhere in the middle, between the extremes of full control and total lack of control lies a healthy, growing and rewarding economic system for everyone, both capital and labor.
   Moreover, building a tariff wall to keep out goods and services from other countries in the name of stimulating U.S. production, is short sighted. The U.S. economy is already doing well, but to cut off neighbors and friends is not only politically but economically foolish.
   Nobody wins a tariff war.