Dispatches from the Creation Wars

you might want to point out that is Australian rather than american dollars.

and that a good chunk of that is also his pension. not all of it earned while he was there i'm sure, but a large amount will have been accrued during his time there.

Actual cash is £1.1m (~$1.8m us?)

Posted by: symball | July 28, 2010 10:09 AM

Only $20 million? Gees, the poor guy should have gone into banking.

I'm not surprised at all. Frankly, most CEO contracts are written such that, even if you run the company into bankruptcy with your idiocy, you are owed 100s of millions of dollars.

And they ask why I'm a socialist.

Posted by: Rutee | July 28, 2010 10:22 AM

Raging Bee "Any libertards want to chime in about how private enterprise is SOOOO much better than government at rewarding success and punishing failure?"
You're just remembering the bad eighty days at the end. What about all the good years? What about all that time he spent not destroying the Gulf? Does he deserve nothing for that? Does he?!

Posted by: Modusoperandi | July 28, 2010 10:28 AM

Any libertards want to chime in about how private enterprise is SOOOO much better than government at rewarding success and punishing failure?

Wait? Government actually rewards success and punishes failure? Huh. I'll be damned. And here I thought GWB got off scot free for ruining an entire country.

Posted by: carlsonjok | July 28, 2010 10:34 AM

Raging Bee, I'll take your challenge.

--How did his government punish Stalin for engineering the deaths of over 50 million Russian subjects?

--How did Mao's government punish him for the deaths of 30-100 million Chinese subjects?

--How have Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld been punished for lying to the American public and leading us into a war that caused the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians?

--Who has the U.S. government punished for it's massive nuclear pollution at the Hanford site along the Columbia River?

--Who was ever punished for the Tuskegee experiments?

--How many Southern sheriffs/prosecutors/judges were punished for violating the due process rights of southern blacks?

--Who was punished for the Department of Ag's long-term discrimination against black farmers?

But, hey, none of that's nearly as bad as what BP did, eh? I'm as appalled about what happened in the Gulf as you are, but if somehow we were faced with a choice between the Gulf oil spill and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which would you choose? A choice between the oil spill and the Iraq war?

Heck, Raging Bee, quit tossing up softballs and give me a hard one next time.

Posted by: James Hanley | July 28, 2010 10:46 AM

@10 James Hanley

I don't think Raging Bee was claiming government is innocent, just that private enterprise is just as guilty. You would need examples of private enterprise actually punishing failure to meet his challenge.

Posted by: Jordan G | July 28, 2010 10:53 AM

When a libertarian reacts to criticism of business by talking about governments on the other side of the planet, you know they're on the defensive.

Posted by: Raging Bee | July 28, 2010 10:56 AM

When a libertarian reacts to criticism of business by talking about governments on the other side of the planet, you know they're on the defensive.

And what does it say about you when you pretend that the other 5 examples related to the US government weren't there?

Posted by: carlsonjok | July 28, 2010 11:06 AM

Raging Bee

A) Governments on the other side of the planet are still governments. You've provided no justification for distinguishing them.

B) 5 of my 7 examples were about our government. I'm going to classify your response as a flat-out lie. You ignore the 5/7ths of my response that is about our government, and mention only the 2/7ths that are about other governments. That's entirely disingenuous. If you had an ounce of integrity you wouldn't argue that way, Mr. Breitbart Bee.

Lynxreign--Raging Bee believes governments are more trustworthy than private enterprise. They're not. My point is not that governments are "no better," but that they actually do things that are far, far, worse. Even our own beloved democratically elected and accountable government.

And keep this in mind: BP's accident was not intentional. It resulted from carelessness and gross stupidity, to be sure, and I'm not excusing it. But the actions of government that I mentioned above (with the exception of Hanford), were intentional. If you have ever studied either moral theory or law, you'll know that we treat intentional crimes as far more serious than unintentional crimes.

And, to focus specifically on the issue of punishment: At least Hayward was forced to resign. The same cannot be said for any of the government officials involved in any of the cases I mentioned above.

Posted by: James Hanley | July 28, 2010 11:08 AM

@15: Oh, and in addition. I think any gov't official will tell you that private enterprise provides much greater rewards for success than gov't does

Well, duh. If the private sector provides greater monetary rewards for failure than governmnet does for success, and the private sector provides greater monetory rewards for success than it does for failure, then it logically follows that they must give greater rewards for success than government does.

But you're making a hidden assumption which is not necessarily right. Implied in your argument against government is the assumption that the government reward for success is below true market value and the private sector reward is correct market value. But it could very well be that government is too low and private is too high. Or government could be spot on and private too high. Or both could be too high. Or both could be too low. Until you come up with a metric of true market value independent of the outcome you want to assess (i.e. monetary reward), you are simply not warranted in concluding that private enterprise is any better than government at assessing the correct reward for a job. It would be circular to argue that government compensation is too low if you take as your premise that private compensation is by definition correct.

Posted by: eric | July 28, 2010 11:48 AM

James Henley: Can we also ask:

"Who punished the American electorate for re-electing George W. Buish despite the obvious truths that were coming out about the man and his policies?" I guess the impending bankruptcy of the American State and economy may be punishment enough, but....

I'm in the George Carlin school of political blamesmanship. "You notice I don't complain about the politicians...the politicians grew up in American families, went to American schools, etc. etc. Maybe it's not the politicians that suick. Maybe it's the people"

Posted by: Brian M | July 28, 2010 12:17 PM

Eric @20;

Nice try on perceiving my alleged assumptions, but pretty wildly wrong. In fact government bureaucrats earn less than private sector execs precisely because they are paid at market value.

Just kidding. But you took what was just a little joke and made it into a serious argument. Relax, man, have another cup of coffee, then read it again.

Posted by: James Hanley | July 28, 2010 12:34 PM

Raging Bee and his ilk focus on the worst of corporate behavior, then want to compare it to the best governments available. That's not legitimate. I prefer to compare the worst of corporate behavior to the worst of government behavior, because then we're treating them equally.

Posted by: Jordan G | July 28, 2010 1:00 PM

Jordan G,

You mean someone like me? Sure. But your solutions are where I believe you go off track. While it would be false to say the public never punishes corruption, the track record is not good. And with government there remains the ever-present danger that it will shift towards a more authoritarian approach in its response to those who would try to hold it accountable.

Meanwhile, you stop short of listing the available options in response to business, the most important of which is exit. Walk away and refuse to do business with them. That is one of the primary areas in which markets have an advantage over gov't--you can say, "Oh, fuck it, I'm not doing business with you anymore." (A great book on this is Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman.) That can be done with government, but it's usually much harder (and why didn't Alec Baldwin actually do it after the '04 election?).

Now a common response to that is, "yeah, but refusing to give them my business doesn't do any good if other people don't go along with me." There's a two-fold response to that. First, it would be unjust if you could single-handedly meet out serious punishment. Second, it's perfectly analogous to the problem of voting out corrupt politicians--"refusing to vote for Rangel doesn't do any good if other people don't go along with me."

But keep this in mind. Businesses do often go out of business, when they steal from and lie to their customers. How often do governments go out of business because they've effectively stolen from/lied to/otherwise mistreated their constituents? And, unfortunately but almost unavoidably, when they do it usually involves a lot of bloodshed. Merely shifting ones vote to another party may ameliorate things somewhat, but as we've seen with Obama's continuation of Bush's anti-due process policies, it's not a very certain method of gaining accountability at all. (And, to again analogize to the market, the two-party system is like a duopoly. It's not as bad as a monopoly, but economic and political theory establish that in neither government nor markets does a duopoly guarantee the type of competition that will provide effective checks.)

And finally I'd add this. I'm not wholly anti-government (I'm just a very devout skeptic), and government serves the purpose of providing an extra check on corporations beyond the checks provided by competition. But what check is there on the government? Yes, this is a bit of a conundrum. There has to be a final authority, so we can't simply say, "let's get rid of it." But whatever that final authority is, it will remain both a necessity and the greatest potential evil we face.

In other words, we're stuck with government. We have to have it. The task is to make use of its necessary features while resolutely minimizing the chances that it will achieve its potential as a great menace. But that means not getting complacent, and not assuming government is in its essence or structure more benevolent or trustworthy than private enterprise.

Posted by: James Hanley | July 28, 2010 1:23 PM

At the risk of thoroughly annoying everyone, let's also examine the origins of government and markets.

Markets came into existence because people found common advantage in making exchanges. I think it's amazing that in the pre-European contact era, shells from the East coast of North America were successively traded as far inland as the Rocky Mountains. Humans have traded across tribal groups throughout history at least as much as they've fought, and the former was, I think, better overall. (Of course trade can also lead to fighting, as with the Beaver Wars. Homo Sapiens isn't a wholly admirable species.)

Government seems to have mostly come into being through force. Until the advent of agriculture and food surpluses, we don't find formal government (which is not to say tribal groups lacked governance, or that there weren't forms of hierarchy; but they were less rigid and formal, and could be flouted with less retribution). And the primary purpose of those formalized governments that came into being was to control the food surpluses, and determine who got what. And who commandeered the food surpluses? Those who could exercise sheer power over others. (See Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel.) Government also was absolutely necessary for the purpose of successful warfare, as the more organized societies tended to be more successful militarily against their neighbors.

The great advance of the last few centuries, one could argue, was to turn government toward productive, rather than merely destructive purposes.

That's a bit brief and sketchy, of course, but at the original core of these structures was a very different purpose. Exchange was for the purpose of mutual advantage, while government was for the purpose of selective advantage. That's not the sum totality of either one today, of course, but the endless debate has to do with the degree to which each of those institutions fulfills each of those purposes.

Posted by: James Hanley | July 28, 2010 1:34 PM

But we can also say that "BP is not as bad as the U.S. Government," and it's equally valid.

Equally invalid. The two entities aren't comparable in that way.

At which point you've implicitly admitted that corporations are not as dangerous as governments. Because my ultimate point is that corporations can obviously do bad, but can't do as much bad as government. It doesn't really matter whether they are within the same category, if what we're focused on is the relative harm each poses us. If I said "Oranges aren't as dangerous as nuclear weapons," you wouldn't accuse me of a category error, you'd say, "well, duh."

It's true that given the nature of what governments are and what corporations are, governments will necessarily have powers that corporations don't. This is a trivial observation. It's sort of like saying, "electricity is more dangerous than hand cranks". It's true, but as an argument for preferring one over the other, it's a non sequitur.

Posted by: Steve Reuland | July 28, 2010 3:24 PM

Steve,

They are comparable. They both provide infrastructure. They both provide goods and services--they even compete for the privilege of providing those goods and services at times. They both function in a legal structure. They both have certain ways in which they are accountable to the public. They both create regulatory systems (although only the government's has the force of law, but often the private sector's is considered more trustworthy; e.g., ANSI, Snell).

You have several times claimed they can't be compared, but you haven't provided an argument for they can't. You've just made assertions.

And when the argument is about which one we should have more of--because that indeed is what's going at bottom here; more government regulation and less reliance on competitive pressures, or less government regulation and more reliance on competitive pressures--then we damn well can't avoid comparing them!

Posted by: James Hanley | July 28, 2010 3:32 PM

Rutee,

I never said corporations can't ruin lives. But you're going to have a hard row to hoe to prove that it was corporations, and not government (at least in conjunction with the corps) that caused "repeated horrid economic failure."

And even giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming that corporations have caused that, I still don't see how that even begins to approach the horror of, oh, let's say, waging war against Mexico just to take some tens of thousands of miles of desert. But that's just me, and maybe I'm crazy that way.

Please understand that I am not arguing that corporations are guiltless or do not ever do harm. It's just that governments do more harm.

And both institutions do good, as well. I think some of the folks here sometimes forget that corporations provide damn near everything that makes our lives better than our grandparents lives were. That's the free market working.

Posted by: James Hanley | July 28, 2010 3:49 PM

j.s.d.,

Trade may be a better word to use in this context. No, people don't trade for the purpose of helping make others better off. As Adam Smith said (paraphrased), "It's not through benevolence that the baker provides bread." But normally you can't engage in a trade, to make yourself better off, unless you make someone else better off, too. Yeah, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but for the most part you just can't continue a trade relationship with someone if you're constantly ripping them off. I had a friend who worked in the shipping industry, mating cargoes and ships. The job moved too fast for them to be able to draw up formal contracts with people. Yet attempts to cheat on others were exceedingly rare, because those who did would get shut out of the business. Not only would the person/company they cheated refuse to work with them again, but that person/company would spread the word.

But if you have the guns (spears, big sticks, whatever), you don't have to provide value in exchange for taking things. Good governments do, obviously, and that's part of the story of political liberalization. But it had to be fought for, as it wasn't inherent in the nature of the creation of government.*

As to agriculture, the answer is that it appears you can develop it without the organization provided by government. I won't claim to be an expert by any means, but the anthropological record shows that agriculture developed in bits and pieces. Nomadic groups would tend to certain plants that produced by clearing out ground around them and dropping their poop there, then move on to some other place for hunting and gathering, then return when the harvest, such as it was, was ready. At that point agriculture was just a supplement to the primary food acquisition methods of hunting and gathering. Over time, incremental increases in cultivation, each marginal enough to not require a formal governmental organization, led to more sedentary lifestyles. If the food surpluses gave the big incentive for formal governmental domination of the social structure, it's probably the sedentariness that made such formal organization possible. Even today governments struggle with exerting authority over nomadic peoples, most notably in some central and western Asia countries.

_____________________________
*That may be slightly overstated. Even in feudalism there was some degree of exchange for value, which was, "you work for me, and I'll organize the defense." Still, the peasants were not free to turn down the deal, or negotiate terms, as they would in a competitive market.

Posted by: James Hanley | July 28, 2010 4:19 PM

...apart, that is, from being the British head of a British-based multinational that's eating the lunch of the USAan oil industry in its own backyard - and was let down by its (USAan) contractors?

Posted by: Robin Levett | July 28, 2010 5:37 PM

What I want to know is, what exactly has Tony Hayward (or really any CEO of a sufficiently large company) done that couldn't be done just as well by a monkey with a dartboard?

Hell, I bet you the monkey would be more sympathetic on TV.

Posted by: Tacroy | July 28, 2010 6:36 PM

James Hanley @ 41:

But based on what I've read and heard, the real criticism seems to be that the "accident" was far from inevitable or unavoidable, but resulted from a long chain of corner-cutting and ignoring of safety procedures. (Michael Heath has written several detailed comments on that in past Dispatches posts.) So I think the thinking-person's critique is that he promoted, or at the very least ignored, a corporate culture of shortcutting safety.

I was actually criticizing BP culture of operational incompetence rather than merely safety, which resulted in all sorts of failures including ones that cost lives. I bring this up since I buy into the mission that companies have an obligation to maximize profit over the long-haul. Operational incompetence results in all sorts of unintended consequences though in this case the result seems inevitable. The level of incompetence we encounter in BP is way beyond anything I've ever encountered and I've either directly audited or had audited hundreds of different operations. If you made a fictional movie about a strawman immoral company wreaking havoc an audience of manufacturing professionals from world-class operations wouldn't buy the volume of wrong-doing BP actually did do preparing and executing this project. It'd instead be considered so over the top it reaches absurdity.

Posted by: Michael Heath | July 28, 2010 7:53 PM

Michel, Thanks for the clarification. My apologies for the inadvertent misrepresentation--perhaps I should say under-representation. I'm fully in agreement with you about long-term profits. Most economic theory is based on that assumption, which too often of late seems to have gone awry. I suspect it's an American cultural thing, but it certainly gives critics of markets what I think is legitimate ammunition.

j.s.d., Who are you talking to? ;)

I don't really have an answer to the question about large-scale agriculture. I can only say that surpluses and government developed before humans accomplished what we would call large-scale ag. Off the top of my head, I would say it's probably the case that a fair amount of social organization is necessary for large scale ag, because in the pre-technological era you'd need to organize a lot of manpower to work the fields, and in the technological era you need a lot of manpower to create the equipment that replaces the fieldworkers.

As to your last suggestion, I think you're certainly in the ballpark. Jared Diamond (and others, I believe) note that surpluses were necessary to support priestly and warrior classes--i.e., groups that did not engage in food acquisition themselves, whereas in hunting/gathering groups every able-bodied person participated. A major purpose of the warrior class was to protect the food surpluses, from both external theft and internal pilfering, and a major purpose of priestly classes--although this is pretty damned Marxist sounding--was to persuade people to accept the system, because if you can accomplish it, it's more efficient to get people to accept social organization on ideological grounds than making them accept it by force.

Posted by: James Hanley | July 28, 2010 8:13 PM

Michael,

That's very interesting. The conditions you specify for being able to make important changes without top-level executive support makes perfect sense analytically.

I think you'd probably enjoy the book I mentioned. It's not the usual pop-business book, but was written by a guy with a dedicated research team, and who, forced by the data, reached conclusions that were contrary to his expectations.

Posted by: James Hanley | July 28, 2010 8:58 PM

They are comparable. They both provide infrastructure. They both provide goods and services--they even compete for the privilege of providing those goods and services at times. They both function in a legal structure.They both create regulatory systems (although only the government's has the force of law, but often the private sector's is considered more trustworthy; e.g., ANSI, Snell).

You have several times claimed they can't be compared, but you haven't provided an argument for they can't. You've just made assertions.

This is becoming farcical. You just finished saying that governments were more dangerous because they had the power to wage war and imprison people, and corporations less dangerous because they don't have these powers. That, by definition, makes them incomparable. Indeed, your "examples" of government malfeasance consisted almost entirely of things that corporations cannot do, precisely because they're the exclusive purview of sovereign governments.

You can't have it both ways here. You can't say that governments and corporations are directly comparable, and then say that what makes governments more dangerous are precisely those things that corporations are unable to do. It should be self-evident that if corporations cannot wage war or imprison people within the limits of our political system, then you can't compare their track record on these issues against that of the government. If corporations had such powers it would be different, but thanks to the government, they don't. And there's a reason why giving corporations these powers horrifies almost everyone.

As I said way back when, if you want to compare the track record of governments vs. corporations, you have to limit yourself to those areas where their functions overlap. Instead you chose to play the Stalin card.

Posted by: Steve Reuland | July 29, 2010 12:41 AM

Steve Reuland,

Talk about farcical. You're claiming that because two entities differ on a couple factors they are incomparable. The differences are part of the comparison, and there'd be no point in comparing entities if they didn't differ because then they'd simply be the same thing.

Consider basketball and soccer. In basketball you can't kick the ball, while in soccer you can't touch the ball with your hands. In soccer you have a goaltender, but in basketball you don't and goaltending is a violation. Jeez, I guess they can't be compared! And yet they have great similarities: they're played by teams, can be played indoors our out, involve balls, scoring is done by getting the ball in the net, etc.

Now getting back to corporations, governments, and variables like warfare and imprisonment. It's better to say that corporations normally don't do these things, than to say they can't, and to say that when they do them, they probably* don't do them as well. If we normalized the power to make war, so that 0 means no ability to do so and 1 means perfect ability to do so, we'd simply find corporations closer to 0 and governments closer to 1 (compared to each other--I won't venture to be more precise about just what value each should have).

But this argument that they can't be compared because they differ on some variable suggests a serious misunderstanding of what it means to compare things. As well, you've ignored the things they do have in common that I mentioned previously.

________________________________
*I suppose that's open to debate.

Posted by: James Hanley | July 29, 2010 9:43 AM

You're trying to confuse the issue because you won't admit you're wrong

Go fuck yourself, Steve. You don't know jack about my internal beliefs, so don't play that shitty and dishonest game.

It's a shame that you still don't grasp the concept that distinguishing between how X and Y differ is an inherent and fundamental part of comparing things.

Try this:

1. Stalin executed subjects. BP has never done that because they can't.

2. Now, if you had to choose between either BP or Stalin to make decisions about running your city (either as a company town or as a Stalinist polity), which would you choose?

If your answer is, "But you can't compare them," then you're too fucking stupid to live.

But more than that, just fuck off you little piece of shit, for using that particularly disgusting little tactic of "I won and you know it, but you just won't admit it." Turn it around, pretend I said that to you, and you should be able to recognize just how absolutely meaningless and offensive it is.

Posted by: James Hanley | July 29, 2010 6:36 PM