Creating an Environment for Job Creation, Water

I'm kind of sick and tired of the endless tirades of Republicans suggesting that government cannot create jobs, or that regulations are stifling growth.  I'm tired of hearing about business not being able to be certain of the taxes they'll pay or the rules they have to abide by.

And then it struck me.  If capitalism is a growing beast that moves in different directions based on market expectations and the ability of consumers to consume, they why are the Republicans offering nothing but stagnation?

Well, stagnation in terms that all that has been will continue to grow in direct relationship to its history.  Vast corporations will not only continue to be vast corporations, but small businesses may get larger, but they actually won't be making any more money.

They will fail based on the stagnation the Republicans offer as the next great thing, which wasn't all that great of a thing when they offered it the first 15 times.

For instance, let us take something as simple as water.  Well, besides water being the basis for life, it is also a major factor in a company's products, particularly in manufacturing.  Now let's just assume that there were no rules and regulations on any company's ability to use water and return what was left to the watershed.  Ignoring the obvious impact upon the population, what would really happen.

Downstream small businesses would be left to try to manufacture quality products with polluted water.  It might be that product-destroying heavy metals would be incorporated into the downstream products, causing a loss of market share because of inferior quality.  That is a loss of money that the smaller business has to overcome to remain solvent.  But without rules and regulations, they have no recourse in terms of law to allow them to use clean fresh water for their product. They would either go down the tubes or they would have to spend exorbitant amounts of money to filter their water intake to get a clean enough product to sell, automatically driving their cost up in doing business and prices to the consumer.

Now the upstream company doesn't care about any downstream company, so this would be the methodology to continue to use water for the creation of product.  Whilst the first downstream company would filter for the pollutants of the upstream company, every subsequent downstream company would have to expend more and more money to filter out pollutants from each and every one of the upstream companies.

In fact, if there were competition between and upstream and downstream company, the upstream company could sabotage the downstream company with numerous effluents that would cost a fortune to filter out.

The possibilities are endless, without rules and regulations.

Or, using the same example, the upstream company not only uses the water but they, in turn, build a system whereby their use of clean water takes in more than they need, and they turn around and sell it to downstream companies via their own system of water pipes.  Ah, that sounds like capitalism, now doesn't it?

But what sounds like capitalism becomes a monopoly, and the output of the water, when demand increases downstream, becomes tainted with pollutants because the upstream company cannot supply the demand and maintain the cleanliness of the water.

And what happens when the upstream company becomes a downstream company of the newest upstream company, which you know will happen.  The basic principle of capitalism is advantage.  First to market, best product, and cheapest costs are all advantages you hear about, but without rules and regulations we're talking about the Wild West of capitalism.

Billy the Kid became an outlaw because there were too many competing law enforcement agencies and no rules or regulations which described the exact law they were able to enforce, nor where they might apply that enforcement.  The bad guys became the good guys at a meeting of a couple "citizens".  Even Wyatt Earp was a Town Sheriff who had problems with a County Sheriff and so had the federal government make him a US Marshall.

There were so many bad guys in good guy clothes that no one knew who was in charge, and the railroads owners and cattle barons even had the Pinkertons.
The Pinkertons were later used to try to quell a worker uprising at a Carnegie mine where both sides lost lives.

Mongolia is in the Wild West of gold mining, where corporations without rules and regulations are using clean water with abandon and polluting the entire ecosystem of the Mongolian steps.  The population has dropped, both in the attrition of the extremely long-lived Mongolians, but also via the drop in child bearing.  An entire culture is being wiped out as you read this.

Water.  What a wonderful thing.  You can go for a month without food, but you can't go without water for much more than a week, if that.  We spend the first nine months of our existence in water before we are born.  We are use to water.  We thrive with water.  We excel at many methods of finding water, from the tribes of the Kalahari to the dowsing of new wells to dig.

And the cool thing is, for all practical purposes, our water is limitless as long as the planet doesn't get to 900 degrees.  Our planet recycles water at a tremendous rate, and yet somehow we are finding ways to out-pollute our planet's recycling of salt to fresh water in leaps and bounds.

Even with six billion people on the planet we couldn't out use the abundance of clean water on the planet if it wasn't for companies taking massive quantities to make the products they sell.

Now don't get me wrong.  One of the concepts of being a human is to become a better human, which means the development of groups, tribes, city-states, nations, and yes, even companies.

But none of these things have come about without rules and regulations.  Without laws, rules or regulations, there is no certain expectation for a civilized society to operate within.  The expectation is that one will not use resources to their advantage without taking others into consideration.

And here is where the divergence of intelligent thought has moved into the nether world.  Capitalism advocates, nay, requires that the only good the company needs to do is to the benefit of the limited few; the shareholders.  Those whom are not shareholders are of no benefit nor concern.  In the past one hundred or so years, this divergence has become an operational problem for most of the world.

Companies, now vast corporations, exceed the bounds of single countries, use their ability to hide in the country of their incorporation whilst they wreck havoc on other countries and their populations across the world.

Capitalism has become a cancer on humankind; nay life on earth, just as cancer now attacks humans in every part of the world.  I make the wild hair assumption that cancer will become so prevalent in the future that humans will ultimately adapt to live with it or expunge it from their systems.  But in the mean time, we could help eliminate it if we continued to provide more rules and regulations on how to proceed with the concept of doing business.

And to my way of thinking, this cancer causing agent which we may or may not survive is the constant demand that rules and regulations limit corporations from the certainty of their profits.

Now that I've gone around the world and back in time, let me just say this.

No one guarantees you anything in this world.  If you arrange to get a guarantee, you are stuck with the arrangement of that guarantee and can look no further.  Less rules and regulations on the side of corporations guarantees that the work force they desire will ultimately become sick from the lack of rules and regulations, and not only will the corporations not be able to create their products, they will have no one to sell them too.

We are already seeing this.  America has become a nation that does not consume, and it has only taken 4 years to do so, which is why corporations won't hire because they don't have a market.  So they are shooting for developing a market in China, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa.  They can train the workers, give them some money in their pockets (not too much), and then sell them things.

I will even go so far as to predict, under current Republican strategy, that the iPad 2 will be the last BIG thing here in the United States.

We have no space.  I can't buy something else without having to move something out.  My parents (I'm 60) still want to buy me Christmas gifts and I keep moving the family into making donations for the poor, which has actually been pretty successful.

I can buy what I want if I can justify it to myself, but I'm not rich, nor even employed.

Corporations killed this country.  The Supreme Court helped.  Now they can elect anyone they want with enough money spent, and we, the People, are at a serious disadvantage.

And hence the rise in the call for less rules and regulations, because they promise us jobs that will never materialize.  Why should they?  We aren't buying anything.

At this point I'd say don't even buy that "extended warranty" because you either won't get to use it, or they won't honor it in the first place.

I just had that same experience myself after the earthquake that hit the Northeast, and then Hurricane Irene.

Power fluctuated so much that only one half of my house lost power.  Literally.  One side of my breaker box had no power, the other side did.  The strangest electrical situation I've ever run into.

It screwed up my 2002 purchased range, being digital, and when I called the company supplying the extended warranty, they took the information, but immediately started telling me about what circumstances applied where they wouldn't honor the warranty.

Now call me stupid, and I'm not, but I already knew that they would make disclaimers right off the bat.  They don't support the customers, they support the industry, just as associations do.  They aren't there to fix your problem, they are there to take your money and then you still have to go buy a new product.

This is what defines capitalism today.  Just as I said.  If you aren't a shareholder, you are sheep to be fleeced but because they didn't kill you, you can be fleeced again next year.

Rules and regulations make a difference.  They keep you from being fleeced as much as the corporations would like to do the fleecing.

Comments

[Neotocquevillian]

Hi RW,

Indeed, unregulated capitalism has become a carcinogen poisoning the silent majority of our society. And just like the tobacco industry, corporations would rather lie and obfuscate rather than admit the fact that they are slowly but surely killing Americans.

I would also go one step further and say that it's not only warranties that aren't being honored by corporations. The social contract between American workers and employers have been utterly obliterated. What we now have in terms of a social contract is little more than indentured servitude, sharecropping and feudal serfdom.

[Roger W. Norman]

I hate the reply formatting, so I'll make this short. As in my Wealth is Inequality, I have plans to continue making direct comparisons of how the rules and regulations will have an impact across the board. Water was a simple one that most people could understand. The others are going to be more complex and involve more history. After all, we can't know why we're at this point in time if we don't pay attention to what has gone before.

The conflicts of upstream water rights have been fought for thousands of years.