b. Economic coercion is so pervasive and subtle that it is probably far worse than most coercion by physical violence. If you threaten me with assault or murder in case I disobey your desires, I can at least see that you are my enemy, know what you are going to do to coerce me, and prepare some kind of counter-attack against you if I wish to do so. Even if you rule my entire community by threat of physical force, I may eventually incite a rebellion against you, or get enough citizens to fight your fire with fire and to use enough violence to subdue you and your hired thugs.
But if you gain great economic power in my community, you can more subtly rule me and the other members of the community in a variety of ways that I shall probably never quite understand and combat. Thus, you can directly and indirectly buy political votes. You can bribe me directly with money or indirectly bribe me by inviting me to your social affairs and other functions. You can coerce me by lording it over me economically and making me seem foolish in front of others unless I go along with you on various issues. You can see that I do not get or keep the kind of job I want until I do your socio-political bidding. You can encourage others to ostracize me by the economic power that you wield over them. You can direct your own or other privately owned media to praise your efforts and condemn the support for your candidates and denigrate mine. You can even make the content of "entertainment" shows subtly convince people that your way is right and good while mine is silly and bad. You can get me to think your way, and really to believe that I naturally think the way you do, by exerting socio-economic pressure on me to conform to your ways of thinking and behaving. You can use many other social, religious, political, media, and economic influences to get me to do what you want me to do. Advertising is merely propaganda for business.
All this, ostensibly, is not coercion, since you do not overtly threaten to maim or kill me if I won't do your bidding. But if I believe that real force and coercion are not involved in your assault on my wishes, I am being exceptionally na????ve. And, in that way, I am being brainwashed by you, the media, and by the social situation.
c. When physical constraint does occur these days, and you force me to do your bidding because I will be physically hurt or killed if I don't, it is generally economic power, which starts and makes possible the physical coercion. Thus, if you are a gangster and threaten to kill me if I don't run my business the way you want me to run it, or pay you off every week for letting me run it my way; the main reason you can get away with it is that you are using some of your ill-gotten gains to bribe the police force, to pay immoral lawyers, to buy out businesses that might unfairly compete with mine, to win social influence so that I and my family may be socially ostracized in our community, and so on.
Or if you are a police chief or the mayor of my town and you physically coerce me into paying off your henchmen or voting for you at election time, the main reason you keep your position is usually that you have economic ties with industry, with gangsters, or with other individuals that enable you to gain and keep political power. So behind your physical constraint lie very pervasive and strong economic interests.
For reasons such as these--and you can easily find similar ones if you think about this matter of physical coercion--it should be obvious that Ayn Rand takes a highly unrealistic attitude about coercion and victimization and blindly, stubbornly believes that the free market would prevent this kind of thing in the face of the overwhelming evidence that it will not.
Ironically enough, if the free market or some reasonable facsimile of it does at first exist, some bright or miserly individuals tend to save enough capital, which others have not, creating an oligopoly in capital. That oligopoly of capital begets an oligopoly of businesses. Larger enterprises need even larger amounts of capital. So capitalism always begets limited monopolies, which then become full-blown monopolies. Sooner or later, they exert distinct political-social-religious power and, through their businesses, engage in all kinds of coercion. The Republican Party under born-again Christian George W. Bush and anti-government US Representative Tom Delay in 2005, are recent examples of this. Capitalism, almost by its very nature, leads to concentrated economic power, which often encourages one person to push around others.
18. Rand and her objectivist devotees maintain the myth that capitalism, by its nature, must lead to honest dealings by businessmen and to their turning out a quality product. Says Alan Greenspan in this respect: "What collectivists refuse to recognize is that it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product. Since the market value of a going business is measured by its moneymaking potential, reputation or "good will' is as much an asset as its physical plant and equipment," (1966b). There are several major flaws in this kind of "description" capitalism:
a. Although it is in the self-interest of some businessmen to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product, it is hardly in the interest of every businessman to have this kind of reputation. (i) Today, the individual businessman is hardly known to the public, since he directs a large corporation; and his personal reputation is not much at stake if his corporation practices skullduggery. (ii) Nothing succeeds like success; and most people admire the successful person even when he is obviously dishonest. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., as several biographers have written, engaged in all kinds of dishonest and disreputable business methods; but even before his public relations men changed his image to that of a kindly old man who doled out dimes to golf caddies and other poor people, the public seems to have admired him despite knowledge of his dishonesty. (iii) If people make enough money by skullduggery, they can live quite happily in spite of their poor reputation. Surely enough crooks, gangsters, bribers, thieving politicians, bookies, and other individuals who gain a disreputable living exist; and many others who are dishonest know most of them. Yet, they somehow thrive despite their poor reputations. (iv) If capitalists totally control the media, as they would under pure capitalism and largely do today in the US, they can downplay, ignore, or outright lie about them with such a loud voice that it drowns out the cries against them, as they are doing today in the 21st century.
b. As I indicated previously in this chapter, thousands of capitalists turn out shoddy goods instead of quality products, and manage to keep in business. Many of them, in fact, only make huge profits because of the shoddy products they manufacture and sell, while many quality manufacturers, in similar lines of industry, go bankrupt, (consider Wal-Mart). Perhaps there is some significant correlation between an industrialist's producing quality products and her remaining in business and making money; but it would appear to be fairly low.
On the contrary, the existing capitalist system virtually forces some individuals to produce shoddy goods if they are to stay in business--partly because, in the "free" markets we actually have, the consuming public is so easily misled and short of money that they will choose almost any product that is cheap over a higher quality one that is more expensive. The capitalist culture of buying cheap is so perverting that even the very rich waste much of their time trying to "save" money -- an irrational thought since spending less on an item you do not need is not saving at all. Saving and acquiring money is an obsession to most successful capitalists. A common jibe at some of the rich: "He will spend 10 dollars in time to save 5 dollars in cash." Few capitalists view being wealthy as reason not to worry about money, and often buy shoddy goods themselves. An interesting example of this tendency of the public to purchase goods or services cheaply at almost any cost is shown in my own field. For years, I have noticed people who are in need of psychotherapy and who are able to afford the fees of private practitioners will do a great deal of shopping around for a cheaper practitioner or even go to a clinic--often at inconvenient hours of the day--to save money. Such individuals often will receive most of their psychotherapy from a psychotherapeutic trainee, who is inexperienced and often relatively incompetent, only because by doing so they can get to see her or him at a cheaper rate. They end up, in many instances, paying more money to relatively ineffectual therapists because they have to see them much longer than they would more effective therapists--and they remain in psychological pain a much greater period of time. But because they shortsightedly look at their pocketbooks instead of their pain and the therapist's ability to help them, they foolishly go for the wrong kind of help, wasting their time and money, and ultimately extending their pain.
Although, theoretically, this would not happen under ideal capitalism--where, by some magical process, both producers and consumers of goods and services would be fully informed and be completely rational, long-range hedonists seeking balanced, rational pleasure--the chances of such an ideal form of capitalism arising, particularly when present-day capitalists fight it tooth and nail, are virtually nil. First, we'd need to have radically different kinds of humans to populate it. Then we'd have to make certain that they stayed forever incorruptible. Neither of these possibilities seems worth betting on!
c. Greenspan is na????ve if he believes that the "good will" of a going business is based on its reputation or on the quality of the goods it produces. As he himself states, "the market value of a going business is measured by its moneymaking potential," and this potential is often related in a minor way to the reputation of its owner or to the quality of its product. Even if a management is dishonest and if the business turns out shoddy goods, as long as it makes big profits, its "good will" will be high. Thus, ironically, its "good will" often directly depends on its "bad will" toward its customers and toward the public! This does not mean that this is always true. For, as Greenspan later points out, a drug company may lose reputation and acquire very bad will if it turns out a shoddy or dangerous product. But another company may not!
19. Ayn Rand claims that, because people apply knowledge and effort, they have an absolute right to own the thing they apply it to. Thus, she says that all materials and resources that are useful and that require effort should be private property--by the rights of those who apply the required effort. Broadcasting frequencies should especially be private property, because they are produced by human action and do not exist without it. In nature, only the potential and the space through which those waves must travel exists. (1966b). This is pretty crummy thinking, for these reasons:
a. Virtually any material element or resource that requires the application of human knowledge and effort to make it useful not only requires an individual's but many people's application. Thus, although Marconi invented the wireless, many other inventors had to add to it before it became the modern radio and TV system; and many other inventors had to work at producing wires, condensers, coils, and TV tubes before their imaginings could be actualized. Even the knowledge that Marconi and other inventors of radio-TV systems employed to create their ideas and conceptions had to be worked on, refined, and taught to them by others. Isaac Newton acknowledged this when he accepted his famous appointment, stating: I stand here today only because I stand on the shoulders of so many great men who came before me.
Indeed, the whole concept of the self-made person is ludicrous. First, we are totally dependent on others as babies. Second, language, math, literature, organizational and management principals, laws, etc. that we all must use in our pursuits, were given to us. Moreover, living alone or in a small, independent society would dramatically impair ones ability to care, defend and fend for oneself. If one were truly a self-made and self-sustained person, one would have to do everything alone. That equates to poverty since one would be very busy surviving without time to produce or enjoy luxuries.
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